dotwav

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “Is it significant?”

  “It’s the key to the code.” Ani was silent for a couple of minutes. Then she looked up and smiled. “Nerd.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Ani chuckled.

  “Jack’s a nerd. And I know that he’s obsessed with Sherlock Holmes. It’s something we have in common. Benedict is Benedict Cumberbatch. JM is Jim—James—Moriarty.”

  “So we just need to find out where Benedict Cumberbatch lives?”

  Ani shook her head.

  “Nothing that complicated. Benedict plays Sherlock. Sherlock lives at …?”

  Joe nodded. One of the most famous—if not the most famous—fictional addresses in the world. “Smart,” he said. “But I didn’t think 221B Baker Street was a real address.”

  “Well, when Conan Doyle wrote the original stories, Baker Street didn’t go up to 221, but the city expanded, and now it does. The Abbey National Building Society took up 219 to 229 for a long time, but the Sherlock Holmes Museum—even though it actually sits between 237 and 241—is now, officially, 221B.”

  “And you called Jack a nerd?”

  “I even know how many steps there are on the staircase to Sherlock’s rooms.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Seventeen.”

  Joe shook his head. “I don’t know how many steps there are on the staircase to my room.” A thought occurred to him. “Hacker Jack, he listened to the .wav file, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah. That’s how he knew it phoned home.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Joe sniffed. “So why didn’t the .wav file affect him?”

  Ani was silent for a while as she thought it through. He could almost hear the whirr.

  “You said that you listened to it at Lennie Palgrave’s place. Why didn’t it affect you? Maybe we’re talking about a sound quality, or volume thing. I’ve only listened to that sound through excellent equipment, and its effects were immediate. But why would there need to be more than one X-Core song? Maybe most people listen to it in MP3 form—compressed, less dangerous. Then it becomes a cumulative effect, getting people more and more into the sound until they go see a X-Core band live …”

  Joe nodded. “Makes sense. But Jack listened to the uncompressed .wav version. So I ask again, why wasn’t he affected?”

  Ani had no answer.

  They were coming to the end of the long journey back when Joe’s phone started trilling. He answered it through the SUV’s Bluetooth and was surprised to hear the clipped and careful voice of Victor Palgrave.

  “Joe,” Palgrave said with a practiced PR warmth that faded right after the first word. “I was just wondering how things were going. Are you making any progress in the hunt for my son?”

  “We haven’t found him yet, but we’re busy chasing down leads. You know how it is. You gotta put in the shoe leather. Have you heard from him?”

  There was a short silence.

  “No,” Palgrave replied. “And we are … that is Jenifer and I … are worried sick. Could I ask what kind of leads you have?”

  Joe knew the guy, liked his son a lot, and didn’t get calls from government ministers all that often, but he wasn’t about to give away operational details, even if it was to a rising political star. He tried to deflect the question by asking some of his own. It was like a reflex action.

  “I know this is probably going over old ground, but do you happen to know any of Lennie’s X-Core friends? A name, maybe? A place that he used to meet them? Any detail that can help us pin him down …”

  “I’m afraid not,” Palgrave said. “I haven’t paid as close attention to my boy as I should have. If I had listened …”

  He left a space for Joe to add some phony-baloney reassurance that it wasn’t Palgrave’s fault, but Joe was too wired and exhausted to play that kind of game. If Palgrave needed absolution, maybe he should try a priest.

  “Like I said, we’re doing the best we can. We’re just short on leads… .”

  “So he wasn’t involved with the whole Brixton debacle?” Palgrave shot back. The comment caught Joe off guard, but then he realized that a power player like Palgrave would have his fingertips on the pulse of every piece of news flowing through Whitehall’s circulatory system. Still, for some reason it got Joe’s back up.

  “I haven’t heard yet,” he said, his tone clipped. “Has Abernathy been keeping you briefed?”

  “I get reports.” Palgrave sounded like he didn’t think he received enough reports. “This is my son we’re talking about here. I need to know that he’s okay.”

  “I haven’t heard anything to make me think he’s not okay. Look, I’ll be back at HQ soon. How about I find out where we’re at as a team and then I’ll call you?”

  “Where are you now?” Palgrave asked, a little too eagerly.

  “Coming back from something that turned out to be a dead end,” Joe lied.

  There was another moment of silence.

  “Is that the dead end that has armed units converging on Shrewsbury as we speak?” There was a steely reproach in Palgrave’s voice that made Joe feel like a naughty schoolboy who’d just been caught vandalizing a desk.

  “I can’t discuss mission critical information without Abernathy’s say-so, Mr. Palgrave. We have a chain of command, just as I’m sure you do. If you want to find out what the weather’s like up top, ask the head, not the feet.”

  “I was hoping that ‘the feet’ would be more willing to give me a straight answer.”

  Ani was looking at Joe with an odd expression on her face. He raised an eyebrow and she mouthed “Victor Palgrave?” at him, silently stressing the first name. Joe nodded and Ani looked stunned. Joe just grinned back.

  “Just so there are no misunderstandings, I feel I should point out that Lennie is only part of the problem we’re looking into. He’s my friend, and that gives me an added incentive, but I can’t discuss an ongoing case with you, no matter how well we know each other or how high up in the government hierarchy you might be.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, and then Victor Palgrave let out a sigh. “I’m sorry, Joe. I didn’t mean to come across all heavy-handed, putting you in a difficult position. I’m just very, very worried.”

  “I understand. Give Abernathy a call. He’s got the big picture, while I can only see small details.”

  “Thank you, Joe.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Bye.”

  Joe switched off the speakerphone and looked at the road ahead. Something about that call just didn’t feel right to him. Sure, he was probably being paranoid, but he didn’t like the way that Palgrave had deliberately set him up to catch him in a lie. Nor did he like the way he’d seemed to know so much about the case.

  “You know Victor Palgrave?” Ani asked. “The MP? Personally?”

  “I went to school with his son,” Joe said. “Now he’s caught up in the X-Core scene. He’s probably hiding one of those … things inside him like Professor Klein was. How do I tell his father that?”

  “If you want my opinion, Palgrave didn’t call you for an update on the case. It sounded to me that he already knows everything that’s going on. Which makes me wonder what that call was really all about.” Ani got out the tablet and started tapping the screen.

  Joe thought it over. They were both probably right. Palgrave had come in to the conversation pretending to know nothing, but he’d known just about everything, which was an odd way to conduct a call.

  Which meant …?

  Which meant … what, exactly?

  Ani continued to play with the tablet and Joe wondered what she was up to. Probably checking her emails or hacking into the Pentagon’s mainframe. The hacker bit of her sort of made sense, but Joe wondered if it was truly about digital freedom, or if she just liked causing mischief. He thought it was probably the former, but to see someone so absorbed in technology made him feel a little uneasy.

  He could use computers but preferred not to let t
hem take over his life. To step into a world of trivial, unimportant, time-devouring nonsense, where people chatted to “friends” who weren’t really friends, and logged the minutiae of their lives on social networking sites as if the world really cared about where they were eating out, or how many kittens their cat had just had. Joe was deeply suspicious of people who spent too much time on the web, mainly because it took away time they could be spending doing real world things. An interaction over the net was dubious. It required you to believe that the identities of the people you were chatting with were, indeed, the identities outlined in their profiles. Joe liked face-to-face conversations where you could see that the girl you were talking to really wasn’t a fifty-year-old construction worker from Bolton. Or Baton Rouge.

  “Give me your number,” Ani said.

  “Huh?”

  “Your cell phone number.”

  Joe did and Ani input it into the tablet. Then she spent a few minutes in silence, scrolling through pages of something that looked highly technical. Finally she cursed.

  Joe turned to see her face was sculpted out of anger and indignation.

  “What?” Joe asked her.

  She shook her head. “So, I was thinking, what was the real purpose of that telephone call from Victor Palgrave? He got no new information, except perhaps that it was you who called for the team to secure the Pabody/Reich facility. But apart from that? Zilch. And he must have known that you wouldn’t give out information on the operation. So the question was nagging at me: Why did he make that call?”

  “And?”

  “And I hacked into the local cell towers, the ones that would have dealt with the call. Abernathy provided us with the software to hack pretty much anywhere, so we could steal Klein’s entire computer network, and I just needed to tweak a couple of parameters and add a few lines of my own code, and suddenly I’m seeing the cell traffic data for a few miles around. Bang in your number and I can suddenly see your phone. It’s still connected to Palgrave.”

  “It isn’t. I hung up.”

  But he checked the phone anyway to make sure.

  Nope.

  “I know,” Ani said. “But looking at the data log from the 4G connection I can see that you downloaded about 300K of data while talking to Palgrave.”

  “I don’t understand …”

  “I know, but don’t sweat it.” She swiped through another couple of pages of data. “Check your GPS.”

  Joe went to his home screen and checked for the compass icon that told him the global positioning satellite software was running.

  It was.

  “And that, Joe Dyson, is how Victor Palgrave is now tracking us. He sent you a piece of code that has forced your GPS to squeal on us, turned it into a digital informer. Right now, it’s shouting out our location, and I figure we have company mobilizing to head us off before we get back to YETI HQ.”

  Joe felt sick. It was just so unreal. What possible reason could Victor Palgrave have for doing such a thing? For betraying his trust so blatantly?

  “You hearing this, Abernathy?” Joe suddenly needed to hear his handler’s voice to reassure him, to tell him what they should do.

  But he just heard silence.

  Joe felt cold and alone and more terrified than he’d felt for a long, long time.

  Abernathy picked up the phone and barked, “Where are we with the kids from the Warhouse?”

  Dr. Emari Ghoti, the sharpest medical mind in the building, told him how little they’d figured out so far, and how they hadn’t had time to even begin investigating what was going on with them, and Abernathy was ruder and harsher than he meant to be before slamming the phone back into its cradle.

  He felt guilty immediately, but the frustration was becoming unbearable. He liked to be in control, to know exactly what was going on all the time. Having stray variables floating around just made him angry.

  The truth was, he didn’t like it.

  Any of it.

  Not one bit.

  He’d sent Joe and Ani out into who knows what at the radio telescope and he knew it was pretty much dumb luck that had gotten them out of there in one piece. Then they’d reported their findings and his whole worldview threatened to shatter like toffee under a hammer.

  Aliens?

  Really?

  Standard procedure for the outlandish claims they’d made meant he should be calling the pair of them in for psych evaluations. It sounded like a folie à deux—a shared madness transmitted from one person to another—but Abernathy knew Joe better than that. He was levelheaded and utterly dependable. Whatever Joe said, no matter how unlikely it might sound, had to be the truth.

  Except …

  Abernathy sighed.

  Except, Joe had been off active duty since Andy was shot, and he was now taking this whole case personally because Lennie Palgrave was involved. Had he misjudged Joe’s readiness for duty? Had he missed obvious warning signs in his desire to get Joe back into the field?

  Without corroboration, Joe’s claims certainly sounded like madness. Klein, an alien? Sound files from outer space?

  But what if he’s right? What if it’s all true?

  Abernathy struck his desk with his fist and then stood up, crossed the room, threw open his door, and yelled out into the control center, “Can anybody tell me anything?”

  The analysts jerked around like they’d had an electric current passed through their seats and they made assurances that as soon as they had more information he would be the first to know.

  He nodded curtly, and turned to go back to his desk.

  And stopped.

  The chip in his arm—the one that opened doors and monitored a few critical systems around YETI HQ—was vibrating.

  And Abernathy knew, all too well, what that meant.

  The piercing sound of the alarm that tore through the air confirmed it.

  YETI had been breached.

  Proximity sensors had detected the presence of unauthorized people entering the building. There was very little time.

  “Evacuation protocols!” Abernathy shouted above the squeal of the alarm. “Get out!”

  The procedure had been timed to perfection in drills that the YETI personnel had grudgingly performed, but this was the first time that it had been needed as a matter of urgency. Still, Abernathy was glad to see the speed and efficiency with which his staff grabbed laptops and hard drives and made for his office. Abernathy went to his desk, pushed the button he’d thought he’d never have to use outside of the emergency drills, and opened up the escape route in his back wall.

  As he ushered people into the stairwell that led down from the secret exit, which appeared on no plans or schematics of the building, he reflected that paranoia and being overcautious were really valid forms of self-preservation. He waited until the Shuttleworth brothers, carrying flight cases, made their way across the control center and into his office before activating the lockout protocol on his office door. As he input the last digit of the code into the console on his wall, he saw the first wave of intruders making it through into the control center.

  Four figures clad head to toe in assault outfits with gas masks and goggles and very big guns gazed around the empty room in bewilderment, their weapons following their lines of sight. Abernathy kept the door open a crack and saw another five men, all dressed the same, enter the room.

  He shut the door, heard the deadbolt fall into place, and made his way toward the exit.

  Taking the stairs three at a time, he quickly reached the bottom.

  Standing in a tunnel beneath Whitehall that had once been a part of the original Underground system, he took a quick head count, gestured for everyone to follow him, and led his staff into the darkness.

  Joe put his foot down on the accelerator and took in a long, deep breath. They were still about twenty minutes outside London and they had company—another SUV weaving through the dribs and drabs of traffic, lights on full beam, heading straight toward them.

  Ani had s
tripped Joe’s phone of the battery and SIM back when she’d worked out the true purpose of Palgrave’s call, but the guy must have gleaned enough information from it to have a pretty good idea of their route back, and had obviously sent someone to catch up with them before they made it back to YETI.

  Joe doubted it was to offer them help.

  “I’m an idiot,” he said, hitting the steering wheel with the flat of his hand.

  “You couldn’t have known—” Ani said, but he cut her off.

  No matter how many times he ran through the situation in his head, he couldn’t make sense of it all. What was Palgrave up to? What were they missing? How was he connected to the events that were unfolding? This seemed way past an overprotective father fearing for the well-being of his X-Core-obsessed son; this seemed much deeper and darker, and had some kind of twisted logic that Joe just couldn’t see.

  Then he thought of what the two men had left behind at Pabody/Reich and saw the truth.

  “That box in Klein’s office. Palgrave was listening in. That’s how we were followed. He’s always been one step ahead of us.”

  Ani was checking alternate routes on the tablet, trying to find an exit that would give them the opportunity to shake off their tail, but she was getting frustrated and Joe knew that the pressure was starting to take its toll on her. How could it not? In the past forty-eight hours her entire world had been upended. She’d been chased by mercenaries, had been subjected to that creepy .wav file three times, had been deputized as a member of a top secret teen spy ring, had seen Klein turn into something unspeakable, and now they were being chased by people sent by a politician for who knew what reason.

  Joe was feeling the weight of it all pressing down on him, and he’d been trained for this kind of stuff.

  “How’re you holding up?” he asked.

  “Okay. Sort of. Could you try Abernathy again?”

  Joe did, but got no more than he’d been getting since Abernathy first went dark: absolutely nothing. That scared him more than anything. If YETI HQ was offline, that meant a whole lot of nasty possibilities. It could, of course, be nothing more than a technical hiccup. The Joe 2.0 communications system could have just bugged out, leaving them high and dry. But he doubted it. The timing was too convenient. Which meant that the signal was cut off, was being jammed, or that YETI headquarters itself had been compromised.