Dr. Ghoti tilted her head at Ani, as if expecting a punch line, but when none came she turned to Joe. “I have a car outside; help me lift him.”
Joe grabbed Lennie’s shoulders, and Dr. Ghoti and Ani took the feet.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: ZUGZWANG
Back at their makeshift hideout at Gretchen’s house in Islington, and with Lennie sedated in an upstairs room, Joe sought out Abernathy. “I’m losing it. When Lennie went down, I just seized up. Ani had to get me back on track.”
Abernathy surveyed him coolly and Joe felt uncomfortable under the scrutiny. Then Abernathy said, “Pah!”
“Pah?” It certainly wasn’t what Joe had been expecting.
“Joe, a friend of yours went down and you froze for a few seconds. What happened to Andy raised its ugly head again and stopped you in your tracks. You’re human. You make connections. Some of those connections are positive, some aren’t. But you make them, that’s what’s important. Next time you’ll be okay.”
“I’m not sure I can deal with a next time.”
“Of course you can. Look, I can’t tell you that no one else is going to die on you in the field. I mean I could, but it would be completely dishonest of me. We play for high stakes. You know that. But the ends always justify the sacrifices we make. That’s why YETI exists. What we do is important enough to lay our lives on the line.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about. It’s the people I’m supposed to be looking out for. The people I’m supposed to be keeping safe.”
“That doesn’t cover the circumstances in Andy’s case or, for that matter, Lennie’s,” Abernathy reminded him. “Andy could look after himself—insisted upon it, remember? The mission just turned bad. They do that sometimes. Think of all the missions that have turned out well, though. Think of all the people who are walking around on this planet because you stopped bad people from doing bad things to them.
“Lennie is different: a casualty of circumstances that are outside your control. That were outside your control. Because we’re going to make sure that it ends with him. Stop second-guessing yourself, Joe. There is no one I want more on the front line for this.”
“There’s no one else to call,” Joe said jokingly.
“Ah, there’s that, too. Although I have just reached out to some … agencies that owe me some pretty colossal favors. I told them I’m cashing in. I think we’ll be back in YETI HQ pretty soon.”
“Why not just call the prime minister?” Joe asked. “I don’t think he has any love for Victor Palgrave. And if Palgrave was behind the attack on YETI, then he’s declared war on the justice system. He needs to be stopped.”
“Our gracious host showed me the party’s file on Victor Palgrave. Although there is plenty in it to provoke concern, we do not yet have the smoking gun that ties him to any of this. It’s going to take evidence to implicate him directly, otherwise the party will stand beside him. Rumor and conjecture are not enough to bring him down, and he is both powerful and an ally of some very powerful people. Politics is full of some very complex beasts, and many of them serve more than one master.”
“I thought politicians served the electorate… .”
“That’s really funny. I must remember that one. Anyway, I myself am subject to political pressures and duties—party and otherwise. Committees oversee us, committees oversee those committees, reports crisscross Whitehall and weakness reflects poorly on all of them. I lost YETI to an invading force, Joe. I’m keeping as quiet about it as I can.”
Suddenly, Joe realized that Abernathy was telling him the whole truth. That he was playing this exile through until he sorted it out himself, simply because he wanted the taking of YETI to remain secret from the people he should be turning to for help.
He wondered which agencies Abernathy had reached out to, and what Abernathy had on them to trust them to keep his own embarrassing secret.
The world was quite possibly in deadly peril, and Abernathy was holding out on calling in the big guns because of pride.
At least he’s human, Joe thought. It’s nice to be reminded of that occasionally.
Ani had a long talk with Gretchen, took a while to process the information she gathered from it, then called a meeting. A working class, fifteen-year-old kid from South Cambridge, calling a meeting of law enforcement personnel, analysts, a doctor, and Gretchen the human library—she felt both exhilarated and terrified.
They met up in the living room/library overflow: Ani, Gretchen, Joe, Abernathy, Dr. Ghoti, the Shuttleworths, and an analyst who introduced herself as Leeza Marsh.
No one seemed to think there was anything strange about taking time from their vital business to listen to Ani, and that encouraged her.
She’d fleshed out her suspicions with a lot of input from Gretchen, and had reached some pretty stark conclusions.
Conclusions that she was now ready to share.
“I’ve been baffled. There seem to be too many things going on here. We know they’re all connected, but the connections are so vague I haven’t been seeing them.
“Well, I’m starting to see a pattern now, and I need to say it out loud, just to hear your objections and take your input onboard.
“We begin with the science fiction part: an alien sound, brought down to Earth by a radio telescope. I’m absolutely certain that the message that Imogen Bell received that night was extraterrestrial in origin. But I’m pretty sure that what she recorded that night wasn’t a message from an alien being. I think it was an alien being.”
She saw how that idea struck the others from the surprised expressions on their faces: Abernathy’s surprise appeared laced with skepticism; Joe’s with amusement; Dr. Ghoti’s with thoughtfulness; Leeza Marsh’s with incomprehension; and the Shuttleworth brothers’ with excitement. Gretchen merely smiled back encouragingly.
“Explain,” Abernathy said.
Ani nodded, then continued. “We imagine alien creatures by combining elements of things we know. Whatever is out there in space must be, in some way, similar to us, or the other creatures on this planet. The alien from Alien, while terrifying in the context of the film, is humanoid; it has two legs and features that might be inspired by insects, but it’s basically a product of a human imagination. Alien life will follow no such rules, I’m sure of it.
“I was talking to Joe yesterday, trying to find a way into this, and I suddenly realized that an alien creature wouldn’t even necessarily be made up of the same stuff as us. It would depend on the start-up conditions of the planet it evolved on. Maybe it’s made of rock. Or liquid. Or electricity. Or gas. Or magnetism.”
She waited a few seconds. “Or sound.”
Abernathy raised an eyebrow and nodded. “Ingenious. Please continue.”
“Imagine it: a creature composed of sound, traveling through space, with no need for spaceships or warp drives. It could be its own vehicle.”
One of the Shuttleworths—the taller one—put up his hand. Ani ignored the humor of it, a scientist asking her permission to speak, and pointed to him.
“Sound can’t travel through space,” he said apologetically. “Space is a vacuum. Sound needs matter to vibrate against so it can carry on its journey. I mean it sounds good but, sorry …”
Ani nodded. The simple fact that sound needed molecules to travel through, and there were no such molecules in space, was something it had taken her quite a lot of thought to find a way around. Or, rather, it had taken Gretchen a lot of thought.
“No need to apologize for stating the truth. That’s why we’re here. And, yes, it’s true that sound as we know it cannot travel through a vacuum, but when I say that it’s a sound from outer space, I’m kind of using shorthand. Sound is sort of a stand-in for something stranger and more complex than just a sound. I’m not saying it’s like any sound we have here on Earth, or even that it has the same properties of sound as we understand it. Radio waves travel though space, carrying sounds wrapped up in electromagnetic radiation. And they travel at the speed
of light. Maybe our creature is more like a radio signal …”
The smaller Shuttleworth put up his hand, but Gretchen had coached her for just this interruption.
“… but unlike a radio signal it is free from the inverse-square law that says its power should degrade because it is a living organism. It maintains itself. It eats. It produces its own energy. It’s actually its own transmitter, too, but from there it all gets a little hard to wrap my head around. The point is that it doesn’t have to degrade.”
The Shuttleworth hand went down again.
“It is a living, thinking creature. It holds itself together, and maintains its systems like any biological organism maintains its body.
“Maybe we’ll find out its precise composition one day. But not from the creatures we brought down to Earth—Joe and I have only seen one of them with our own eyes. I don’t think that X-Core teens are infected with the creature that the Pabody/Reich telescope detected.”
There was the sound of multiple intakes of breath.
“Wait, what?” Joe asked. “I think even I might be getting lost here.”
Ani smiled. “I was lost, too. But I started thinking about the limits of human recording. About how when we record an orchestra, it’s not the orchestra itself—just the sounds it makes. We might capture those sounds in amazing detail, with a clarity that allows us to hear everything from the deepest roll on a kettledrum to the faintest trill of a piccolo, but what we don’t record are the actual people or their instruments—their physical forms.
“What if Imogen Bell recorded the sound of the creature she found out there in space? She captured some of its essence, if you like, but not really the creature itself. The creature is energy, radiation, information. To us it’s a sound, because it’s close to being a sound, and the human mind loves its analogies. So our flawed human recorders captured some of the creature: its sound. But that’s enough of the creature for the recording to copy some of its sentience, too. Its intelligence. Its thoughts. Imogen Bell basically made a terrestrial copy of the creature that lives in the medium of the recording, but it isn’t the creature. Just a reduced version of it.”
“The recording is alive?” Abernathy said. “Is that what X-Core is? A second-generation copy of a creature from space? Finding a home inside our children?”
Ani shook her head. “Sort of. Kind of. No. Look, it’s important to think about what happened next. The creature that Joe and I saw at Pabody/Reich was very different from the one we saw Lennie becoming. The thing Professor Klein was harboring … It was a copy of the alien. But Lennie? I think he was something different. Connected, but different.”
She took the tablet from her pocket and displayed the two waveforms side by side. “Compare and contrast. You can see, quite plainly, that they are different. The first one is the creature, as recorded by Imogen Bell. The second one has been altered.”
“You make it sound intentional,” Abernathy said.
“I know.” Ani pointed to the Lennie waveform. “But I’m convinced this is not a recording error. It could not have happened by accident. It’s as if terrestrial sounds have been incorporated into the creature’s shell, so it has properties like the original, but with a more specific purpose. I believe there is a human hand at work behind this.”
There was a long silence, and then Abernathy said: “Check everything Ani just said. I want proof one way or the other. What are you all still doing here? I want it yesterday.”
Then he came up to Ani, and slapped her on the shoulder. “Very nicely reasoned.”
Ani thought, I could really get used to this.
Baker Street was crowded with people, many of whom seemed determined to get in between Joe and his view of Ani. The street was uncharacteristically busy, and it made Joe nervous. Ani was waiting outside the Sherlock Holmes Museum, trying to blend in. Tourists took photos of the museum, and of the man who stood in the doorway of 221B dressed as a Victorian policeman. Ani always turned away or drifted out of shot by the time the shutter was pressed.
Joe nodded every time she did. It was good spycraft, made all the better by being natural, instinctual, untaught. A reflex to stay out of people’s photographs might be borne out of a hacker’s paranoia, but was a skill that perfectly transferred to being a YETI operative.
Joe was playing lookout: scanning the crowd and addresses nearby, watching for something out of place that could pose a threat. Buses and cars passed, people walked by either looking around or focused on their own thoughts—the perfect way to tell a tourist from a local—but there was nothing to get his investigative hackles up.
Except, of course, the time.
It was 2:10. Ani’s hacker friend was supposed to have shown up ten minutes ago. Maybe he was doing the same as Joe, scouting the area for signs of danger, his caution preventing him from approaching Ani until he was one hundred percent certain that she was alone.
Which, of course, she wasn’t. She had Joe. Maybe Jack had spotted him, but Joe doubted it. He was shifting position every few minutes, pretending to consult a map, and he was doing his best to look lost. He’d occasionally pick out passersby who looked like tourists and would have no idea of the area’s geography, and ask them for directions. If they didn’t know, the deception was intact. If they did, then he pretended they didn’t and carried on. Joe was actively drawing attention to himself, which was one of the very best ways to hide in a crowd.
It was a necessary precaution. Joe had nagging doubts about Jack’s motives for this meeting, based on the undeniable fact that he should have experienced some kind of reaction to the .wav file. Jack not warning Ani about the file’s danger made Joe suspicious. Maybe Jack was one of them.
Joe was about to approach some more tourists when he caught movement from the door of the museum. He studied his map, looking over the top of it to watch the person exiting the building. A bulky youth in a Halo T-shirt was looking around surreptitiously, and if he was trying to look inconspicuous he was failing, miserably. Joe could see the tension in his face and movements. Jack—it had to be him—spotted Ani, pretended he hadn’t, and made such an act of not looking at her that Joe felt a little embarrassed for him. Jack approached Ani, keeping her quite obviously in his peripheral vision, and Joe crossed the street on Jack’s blind side, taking up a position between Ani and the museum’s entrance.
Jack drew level with Ani and made awkward contact with her—he seemed to pretend to cough, maybe hiding her name in the noise. It was such a rookie move that Joe felt like squirming.
Ani nodded. Jack moved away and Ani followed him a few paces behind. Joe fell into step behind her.
They passed a realtor’s, and some other stores, before Jack crossed the road, led her another hundred or so feet, and then ducked left into an alleyway. Ani shook her head, and followed him. Joe got to the opening of the alley, but hung back and waited around the corner.
He hoped this was worth the time it was taking out of their day.
Ani thought she would have recognized Jack even without the half-baked attempt at saying her name while pretending to cough. It was a dumb thing that kids stopped doing around the age of eleven, but Jack seemed to think it entirely appropriate for a clandestine meeting.
Still, it was better than one of those contrived passwords you heard in spy movies like, The winters in Moscow make my grandmother grow irises.
But only just.
They rolled into an alley and Ani checked that Joe was just behind them before turning. Then she had her first face-to-face with the legendary hacker who she’d never thought she’d hook up with in meatspace.
“Were you followed?” Jack asked urgently, and the slight nasal tones, coupled with the subtle pink device in his ear, cleared up the mystery of why Jack had remained unaffected by the .wav file.
He was partially deaf.
“Were you?” Ani asked, dodging the inevitable lie until it was necessary.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”
&
nbsp; In the flesh, Jack “Black Hat” McVitie was either exactly as she expected, or not even close. He perfectly fit the stereotype of a kid who spent too long at his computer and not enough time exercising, but Ani had anticipated something different. He was such a legend, she kind of expected a Hollywood-style hacker, dashing good looks and a lightning-fast mind.
Instead he just seemed awkward and sweaty.
“I’ve been on the run since you sent me that file,” Ani said. “Men with guns. Chasing me. Where did you get it?”
Jack’s pudgy face made him look like he was about to cry. “Government server. Very hush-hush. I was looking for dirt, I found that.”
“It’s okay. I just need you to confirm something for me. Was there an account tied to the file? An identification code? Some way we can track it back to its owner?”
“I knew whose stuff I was poking around in. I mean, I wasn’t fishing an uncharted river. I’d heard some negative chatter about an up-and-coming politician and I wanted to confirm it before I launched a massive DDoS campaign against him.”
“His name?”
“Palgrave.” Jack wiped his nose with his sleeve. “You know, the one they’re tipping for PM someday.”
“Were tipping,” Ani corrected. “I think he blew that shot a while back. And you think it was him who sent men after you?”
“Who else? They were private goons—the kind his data says he’s been financing in Africa and South America—fighting his private wars for money and influence. I even traced a few of his shell accounts rerouting funds to groups who look like terrorists, to be honest, but then I found that stupid file and got distracted. I had to see what was in there. It was the highest-protected data on his system. I thought it had to be a record of his sketchiest deals, but it was a sound file that called home. The rest you know.”
“Do you have proof that it came from Palgrave?”
“Proof?” Jack’s features took on traces of suspicion and distrust. “Why would I need proof?”
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