Protocol 7

NORTH OXFORD

Ryan's Estate

Sabrina stood on the porch and waited for the rain to stop. She stared at her car, glistening in the downpour.

She wanted Ryan to come back. She wanted to confront him one last time. She wanted to know, to understand, why he was doing this—why he was disappearing with his friends without so much as a word of explanation.

It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t like Ryan at all.

And she knew deep down, there wasn’t a thing she could do to stop him.

But it was too late now. He was gone, disappeared into the night and the storm. He wasn’t even answering his mobile. He wasn’t—

—a hand snaked around from behind her and slapped something on the side of her neck.

Sabrina tried to scream, but the hand darted forward and clamped over her mouth, blocking her voice completely. She tried to struggle, but her attacker’s other arm slipped around her waist and lifted her off the ground before she could jump or kick.

She felt her body break as she was slammed against the side of the building. For one instant, she saw the face of her attacker quite clearly. She was beautiful. Very tall, very thin, wearing a camelhair coat, and absolutely without expression. So perfect she didn’t seem human at all…

“Why?” Sabrina whispered, choking on her own blood.

Her attacker did not answer.

The light was starting to drain away. The lamps were liquefying, the windows growing dim. Even the sound of the rain was moving farther away…and farther still.

The sound of the rain was the last thing Sabrina ever heard.





PART TWO:

THE MISSION

THE ISLAND OF CORSICA

Oliver's Estate

The frigid dusk breeze was sharp enough to sting as Simon drove a little too fast down the dark and secluded road to his father’s old hideaway. Three days had passed since the team had separated in London; since then, he and Samantha had made their slow and circuitous way across Europe, acting exactly like brother and sister on an extended holiday, even though they felt the weight of the world on their shoulders.

The farther they got from Oxford and its madness, the more Samantha acted like her old, tough, smart self. She had avoided talking about the future entirely; there were moments along the way, Simon thought, when she actually seemed to forget why they were traveling and where they were going.

But now they had arrived, and the darkness had returned. She had been very quiet ever since their small charter plane had landed on one of Corsica’s World War II-vintage airstrips.

Simon made a sharp turn as the road took another twist to the south, then an almost immediate twist to the north, winding between yet another set of steep, rocky peaks. The island seemed to be made of nothing but small mountains with the occasional pocket valley just large enough for a single cottage and a pasture.

Simon almost smiled as the SUV pushed on and the mountains unfolded around them. He vaguely remembered this approach to his father’s property. He knew they would be reaching the nearly hidden gate any moment now. Assuming I don’t miss it entirely, he told himself.

Simon hadn’t spoken to any of the team since Oxford. He didn’t dare—and didn’t need to. They each had their own route, their own set of tasks, and they all had the same destination on the same date: the cottage on Corsica, no later than sunset on May 22. It wasn’t written down anywhere; it didn’t need to be. They each knew it by heart.

Still, Simon couldn’t help but wonder if they were all still alive.

He gazed idly at the winding road, the ragged hillsides, the tiny, tidy cottages. Nothing’s changed, he thought as they sailed along the roughly paved road. He hadn’t driven to this cottage in twelve years, but the roads were etched in his mind as if he had driven through them yesterday.

And then there it was: the Gate, an overgrown alcove of trees at the side of the road that blocked the main entrance to the property. Anyone who was unfamiliar with the entrance would easily miss it in the deep blue shadows of the thick foliage; the fact that it was dusk made it even harder to decipher.

The cottage had always been a mystery to Simon. Ever since his childhood, conversations about the hideaway were discouraged. Oliver never liked to discuss it, and Simon himself had only been there twice—once as a child, and once when he was in college. The college trip had been terribly important, but for some reason his childhood memories were far more vivid. Like a dream, he thought. One of the few really good ones I had as a boy.

He looked into the rear-view mirror and saw that Samantha was sleeping soundly. Good, he thought. She needs it. He saw her stir and mumble something he couldn’t quite hear. He hoped it was a good dream. He could use a few of those himself, he thought.

As he drove up the rough dirt road, he realized that he needed to focus on why he had come. He reviewed the next stage of the plan one more time. It wasn’t going to be easy; the cottage’s remote location made it safe and secure, but it made the communication links that were crucial to the plan very difficult—almost impossible.

One night, he thought. If they were right about the location of the S.S. Munro and its precious cargo, they would have a single window of less than one hour, on this very night and no other, to make contact. Ryan had told them that he could scramble the satellites in their specific location for one hour before it raised suspicion. If they succeeded, they would all leave together—and stay together from now on, until the end. There was a chartered yacht moored in a small lagoon near town. It would wait until one hour past high tide for them to board and no longer. Or at least that was what Ryan was supposed to have arranged, he told himself.

“Timing,” he said aloud, but very softly. “It’s all about timing.”

As he passed through the final copse of trees, so dense it was black as coal, the rich smell of the pine in the cold mountain air brought a sacred memory back to him: three days with Oliver, here on Corsica, when he was no more than seven years old. He remembered everything they had done together that long summer weekend—making breakfast, fixing the porch steps, hunting for foxes with a shared compound bow in this same slice of wood he was passing right now. They were together every moment until the late evening of every day, when his father had disappeared into his upstairs study and closed the door behind him, locking it and leaving Simon alone.

The study, he thought. I need to get inside the study. There were secrets in there, he knew, enormous secrets his father had kept locked away for a generation.

He pictured the door to the study as if he had seen it yesterday. He was convinced—almost certain—that the key to Oliver’s predicament waited for him inside.

Ask Leon, the coded message had said. He knows. It was more than a decade since Simon had seen the groundskeeper. The dour old Corsican native had terrified him when he was a boy and made him bloody uncomfortable when he’d visited as a young man. Now, somehow, he was at the center of this mystery.

And Simon needed his help.

He remembered how scared he was when he’d first met Leon as a child. He was an unusual person to Simon—he would have been to any child—and Simon had been terrified by his stark, cold demeanor.

The groundskeeper never talked much. He was a tall, slender fellow with hair as black as obsidian and hands the size of shovels. He had dedicated his entire life to caring for the estate—and it really was an estate, Simon admitted to himself, not just some modest cottage in the Corsican hills. He and Leon had never been friends; they wouldn’t be friends now, he knew. But he needed to talk to the man, and he needed his help, if only for the next few hours.

Simon had sent him a message from Oxford and had received a one-word response: COME. They hadn’t exchanged another word since.

He maneuvered around the trees, then tapped his brakes, and slowed the car as they approached the massive iron gates that had been hidden from sight. They blocked the entrance to a winding road that led even further up the mountain. As the vehicle crawled forward, the gates started to open slowly. So he did get the message, Simon thought. Otherwise, he knew, that huge threshold would have remained silent and immobile. He’s expecting us.

The road beyond was narrow and covered deeply in gravel that was so coarse it was almost like cobblestone. The popping crunch of the tires pushing down onto the small stones unnerved him all the more; it was an all-too-familiar sound he hadn’t heard in years. Outside, the mountain was strangely quiet, almost expectant, as they slowly drove up toward the cottage.

Simon didn’t know why he felt so awkward as he drove the last quarter-mile to Oliver’s cottage. It was as if he was about to meet his elementary school principal again—a feeling of tacit anticipation he couldn’t shake off, even as an adult. Was it the caretaker himself who gave Simon this awkward, nervous feeling, or was it the prospect of all that had to happen once he’d arrived?

No, he told himself. It’s Leon. I’m ready for the task, the trip. But Leon is another story.

He was ominous, pure and simple. Sometimes it felt as if he knew more about Oliver than Simon and his mother ever did. As he navigated the last bend and the cottage itself veered into view, he recalled the phone call he had made to tell the caretaker about Oliver’s death, just weeks earlier. “All right, then,” Leon had said in response, and that was all. As if he had been expecting it for a long time. As if he expected Simon to say something more. But it was just, “All right, then.” They had disconnected with scarcely another word.

It was the last time Simon had communicated with the groundskeeper, save for the message that he had sent from Ryan’s estate.

Simon killed the engine and sat there, listening to the car ticking and popping in the high-altitude chill. He hadn’t realized how fast dusk could claim the day on this tiny, ancient Mediterranean isle. It was dark enough to require headlights, just to see the shadows of the overgrown trees at the edge of the clearing.

He turned and put a hand on Samantha’s hip. “Sam,” he said gently. “We’re here.”

She startled out of her sleep, surprised and frightened, if only for a moment. It was how she had awakened every time since their escape from England. Simon hated seeing the fear in her eyes; he was grateful that it faded so quickly these days. He was grateful it faded at all.

She looked around, through the windows on all sides, and a faint smile crept across her face. “Look at that,” she said. “It hasn’t changed a bit.” The smile was sweet and painful at once. She hasn’t forgotten, Simon thought. And neither have I.

“HEY!”

Something banged against the side of the car. Simon shouted involuntarily and spun around to confront a thin white face hovering outside the glass.

It was Andrew.

“HEY!” he said again, his voice muffled by the glass. “Welcome to bloody Corsica, you git! You’re late!”

Simon forced himself to take a deep breath, then opened the car door. “We are not,” he said. “We’re absolutely on time.”

He climbed out to see Ryan stepping carefully, down the wooden steps (the same ones Simon and his father had repaired, decades before); Hayden was behind him, leaning against the cottage itself, his arms were crossed and he was scowling as usual.

“Welcome,” Ryan said. “As you can see: you’re the last to arrive.”

“And about bloody time,” Hayden grumbled. “We thought maybe you two had lost your way.”

“You know,” Andrew said as he pulled Sam’s luggage from the vehicle’s boot, “you said this was your dad’s cottage. You never mentioned it was more like a castle.” The structure rose behind him like a Mediterranean fortress. Most of the lights in the building were off; only the window of the main room and the entrance itself glowed with a faint light.

Simon felt Oliver’s presence even though he knew he was far, far away. He looked up at the two-story building, and immediately picked out the narrow window that opened into his father’s study, centered above the entry. The curtains were drawn—as usual—and the room was pitch-black.

As always, he told himself. Just as he remembered it.

“Well?” Andrew asked, moving impatiently. “How do we get in?”

Simon started to answer—

—when he spotted Leon’s formidable silhouette standing at the end of the drive, waiting for them like an apparition.

Leon hadn’t changed since Simon had last seen him, almost ten years earlier. His hair had grayed slightly, but the life he lived in these mountains seemed to have preserved him. His weathered skin and strong features were a testament to his hard, steady, relentless way of life.

Simon approached him slowly, painfully aware of the crunch of the gravel pathway under his feet. He paused several feet away.

“Leon, thank—”

Leon’s hand went up and stopped him, as if to say “no thanks necessary.” His voice, carrying a hint of a French accent, rumbled from deep in his chest. “This way,” he said, and gestured toward the entrance.

The chill in the air was sharper than ever as they approached the ghostly cottage. “How long have you been here?” Simon asked Andrew as they followed the groundskeeper across the drive.

“About half an hour,” he said. “We haven’t gotten any farther than the front door. He wouldn’t hear of it, until you arrived.”

Simon nodded. For some reason, he felt Oliver’s presence here at the cottage far more profoundly than he had ever felt it in London, perhaps because this hideaway had always been his father’s place and no one else’s. Oliver had always felt more at home here than in London.

“I’m surprised Oliver never told me about this place,” Hayden mumbled, gently grazing an olive branch on his way in.

“Please,” said Leon as he stood next to the door, gesturing for everyone to step in.

The temperature inside the cottage didn’t seem too different than outside, but at least the rising wind was cut off as Leon slammed the door behind him, making Samantha stare like a wounded deer.

She couldn’t keep her eyes off Leon. She seemed both fascinated and terrified by him, just as she had been years earlier.

The foyer was almost bare; only three cabinets and hanging art served as showcases for relics from Oliver’s travels. The large staircase at the far end led directly upstairs to Oliver’s bedroom and his private study. Downstairs, the foyer opened into a wide, low-ceilinged sitting room—the great room, Simon suddenly remembered. That’s what his father and Leon had always called it. The floor was covered with Armenian rugs from Oliver’s travels to the Middle East; the river stone fireplace at the far end was already stoked and alight with a huge, crackling fire casting a warm glow through the room.

It was amazing to Simon how Leon had managed to keep the cottage exactly as he remembered it. After everyone had entered, Leon stumped across the great room and carefully added two more branches to the fire. It crackled, almost appreciatively.

Ryan grabbed a bottle of wine from the huge central table. It was already opened and sitting next to a half-filled glass. He turned it quizzically, squinting as he searched for the label.

“Don’t bother,” Samantha said with a hint of her old charm. “It’s local.”

There were a few pieces of cheese on a plate next to it. Apparently this had been Leon’s dinner prior to their arrival.

Samantha began to tour the walls in a long, slow circuit like a child in a museum. Hayden scanned the collection of old, often-moldering books scattered around the room. Simon, on the other hand, watched Leon, preparing himself for the conversation he had been anticipating for over a week.

Leon barely glanced at him as he left the room, apparently to retrieve something. Simon, startled, mumbled, “Excuse me for a moment,” and followed him down the hall, toward the stairway that led down into the basement kitchen.

“Leon!”

There was no response. He followed him down the steps and entered a remarkably well-appointed and excruciatingly clean kitchen, about as large as a master bedroom.

“Leon.”

The caretaker stopped by a glassed-in cabinet and turned to face him. He said nothing. His expression was guarded, carefully neutral.

“I never had a chance to explain everything to you,” Simon told him.

Leon nodded, just once, then turned to pull wine glasses out of the cupboard one by one. “Not necessary,” he said. “I understand.”

“You know we’re going to leave here in the morning?”

“I know.”

He turned back, glasses for all of them somehow held in his two massive hands. He looked directly at Simon, into Simon, for the first time.

Then he turned and started to climb the stairs.

Simon stopped him. “Leon, I need to access Dad’s study.” He braced himself for the response.

Leon’s head turned instantaneously, snapping back to Simon. “No one enters his study,” he said.

Simon squared his shoulders, as if he had to prove to the gruff caretaker that he was no longer the eight-year-old child he had terrified twenty years ago. “I’m not ‘anyone,’ Leon. I am Oliver’s son, and I need access to the study.”

The caretaker merely stared at him without speaking.

Simon cleared his throat, feeling as if he had somehow lost command of the conversation.

“And…there is much more that I need to share with you.”

Leon’s gaze did not waver. He simply stared without speaking a word, and in that moment Simon knew that the only way to enter his father’s study would be without Leon’s knowledge.

The caretaker turned away and left the kitchen, climbing the creaking stairs toward the great room.

It’s going to be a long night, Simon told himself.

* * *

Hayden was the first to approach Simon as he re-entered.

“We don’t have much time,” he said, looking more annoyed than usual.

“I know,” Simon replied. “Why don’t you guys start the process and let me take care of Dad’s study. I still—”

He stopped himself as Leon entered the room with the glasses on a tray and an additional bottle of local, unlabeled wine. He set it on the broad dining table and began to pour without asking or inviting.

Andrew looked at Ryan and shrugged. “Guess we better get the stuff out of the truck,” he said. Both of them slipped out the front door and moved to the battered panel truck parked around the side of the house—the vehicle they had somehow procured shortly after their arrival on the island.

Hayden was the first to the wine. He snatched up a glass with such enthusiasm he almost spilled it. “So, Leon,” he said with false joviality as he brought the glass up. “Where can we set up our equipment?”

Leon stopped short and lifted an eyebrow—a look of unbridled astonishment in his world, Simon knew. His eyes—only his eyes—glanced at the wide, long table that dominated the great room. “Here would be fine,” he said carefully. “I suppose.”

“Excellent!” Hayden said, clapping the caretaker on his narrow shoulder as if he was an old friend. Simon winced inwardly at the obviously unwanted contact, but Leon didn’t flinch—he didn’t even move. Hayden may as well have slapped a stone statue.

Once again, Simon began to prepare himself for the conversation he needed to have with his father’s retainer. He needed to know if there was anything that would give him a better lead on Oliver’s whereabouts, perhaps a document or a map of a specific rendezvous point in Antarctica that his father had left in Leon’s care before he had departed. Leon knows, the coded message had said. Leon knows. And now Simon needed to know as well.

Simon walked to the window to see what Andrew and Ryan were unloading, but the night had come on fast and little was visible in the feeble window-light of the estate. He noticed how hard the wind was blowing through the mountains; the ancient trees were twisting and writhing like dancers in pain, casting black shadows in the ice-blue moonlight.

Why was Leon being so difficult, he asked himself. As far as the caretaker knew, Oliver was dead, and Simon was his only heir. He should be more than willing to cooperate. Of course, the cottage and the grounds weren’t precisely or completely Oliver’s to begin with. Technically, he supposed, they belonged to Simon’s uncle, Peter.

Uncle Peter, Simon repeated to himself. He hadn’t thought of that mysterious family member in years.

Throughout his childhood, Oliver’s brother-in-law Peter was always somewhere else, always away on business or on an extended journey to far-off places. He was the one with the summer house in the Mediterranean; he was the one who gave Oliver and his family free use of it whenever they liked, without so much as a request or a word of permission. “Treat it as your own,” he had told Oliver—or at least, that was what Oliver had told Simon. The odd fact was that Simon had never actually met this uncle. Oliver rarely spoke of him at all, and when Simon brought up the subject of Peter—as he had on many occasions—the answers were always very short, and the subject was changed very quickly. By the time Simon was old enough to question Peter’s whereabouts, Simon’s mother passed away, and his only real source of information about his uncle had passed with her.

The shafts of light cutting through the leaves of the treetops cast an eerie glow on the mountaintop; their silvery dance was almost hypnotic. In the distance, Simon heard Ryan and Andrew struggling to carry their equipment from the truck to the house. He turned at the sound of their grunting and cursing, and saw Hayden clearing a large portion of the dining table, readying the space. This is going to be more elaborate than I thought, he thought as they staggered in, weighed down by huge armfuls of heavy equipment.

As they went back for a second and even a third trip, Andrew and Ryan told him breathlessly about their adventures in southern France and the boot of Italy, where they quietly acquired bits and pieces of the technology they knew they were going to need. “It’s amazing what you can still get for cold, hard cash,” Andrew said, “and it helps when you’re knobbing about with someone who has a great deal of it.” Most of the tech was ten years old—some of it far older—but it was in working order and would do the job.

Ryan agreed. “I just had to become accustomed to the concept of keyboards again,” confessing as he rested from his labors. “I’ve really rather adjusted to voice commands and holo-displays.”

Hayden was uninterested in the travelogue. “Time,” he said impatiently. “Time. Can’t a one of you read a damn chronometer?”

Samantha watched the entire affair from a huge armchair in the far corner of the great room, near the still-roaring fireplace. Simon glanced at her frequently, trying to gauge her state of mind, but she was nearly expressionless and quiet as a sphinx.

They set up a large flat screen at one end of the table and angled it so everyone could see. One small hollow base, no bigger than a dinner tray, was put at the other end, and the familiar black box of the display blossomed above it; another unit, cobbled together from half a dozen modules, had a physical keyboard and a flat monitor of its own—tech that looked more like something from the previous century. It was set off to one side as Andrew drew up a hard-backed chair in front of it.

“This is mad,” he said as he cabled and linked the last of the modules together. “Utterly mad.”

“Not as mad as this,” Ryan grumbled from the far end of the room, where he was trying to mount the curved dome of an ancient satellite disk on its pedestal.

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Hayden said as his last shred of patience disappeared. “What the hell is the matter with you?” He joined Ryan with a grumbled curse; five minutes later they had the unit assembled, squatting on the landing and pointing expectantly upward at the starry sky over the estate.

“Will that thing actually work?” Simon asked incredulously.

“All right, so it’s old,” Ryan said defensively. “But the laws of physics haven’t changed this century, you know. Will work just fine.” It sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as much as the others. “It’ll do the job.”

“Let’s get to it,” Hayden said, casting another look at the clock.

“All right then,” Ryan said, settling in front of the old-fashioned keyboard. “Here goes nothing!”

He hit the ON switch, and the linked modules all sprung to life at once.

“Huh,” Andrew said. “How about that.” He immediately hunched over the tiny holo-display, columns of figures and cones of wave front projections sliding past him in a mute, miniature parade.

Simon stood by the fireplace and watched the whole operation, focusing on Andrew’s every move. He didn’t say a word; he didn’t dare disturb him.

Samantha flinched as the servomotors in the satellite dish made a tense little grinding sound, and the hemisphere rotated, tipped, rotated again—and found its target. An instant later, the flat screen flickered to life, and a monochromatic, grainy image faded in, then faded out, then faded in again and stabilized.

It was the image of a fifty-year-old cargo ship, a large one, seen from a thousand feet or more in the air. The vessel was obviously under power, cutting through a moderately choppy sea at a considerable speed. White foam churned along its prow; a wake peeled off its stern in a long, narrow “V.”

“Behold,” Andrew said, barely glancing up from his display. “The S.S. Munro, cruising near the Southern Sea, under the command of one Dominic Donovan, carrying the Spector I to its unknown test site.”

“Unknown,” Simon muttered, “until now.”

“Right,” Andrew said. “Because now it’s ours.”

Hayden paced behind him nervously, trying to contain himself. “Not yet, it’s not,” Hayden said. “And it won’t be if you don’t move. Are you getting any juice to those modules yet?”

Andrew turned to him, his usual disposition buried in tension. “If we’re going to do this correctly,” he said between clenched teeth, “you’re going to have to give me a few minutes. I need a little time to catch the proper algorithms. You know better than I do that we’ve only got one chance…Professor.”

Hayden shook his head in disgust and turned away to pace the room again.

Simon moved closer to Samantha, who was watching them work with large unblinking eyes. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Is it working?”

“It comes in two steps,” he said very quietly, careful not to disturb them. “First: commandeer one or more satellites to locate the Munro. Find the ship, find its data stream. And Andrew’s already done that.” He nodded at the aerial shot of the ship as it surged through the water. “That image is coming from the STS-192, an environmental survey bird orbiting at twenty-seven thousand feet, now completely under Andrew’s control.”

“Not quite,” Andrew said. “Got the satellite, found the ship, but getting that datastream…still working on that.”

Samantha looked from the screen to Andrew to the screen again. “My god,” she said.

“Step two,” Simon continued, “is the hard part. Now that we have located the ship, Ryan has to decrypt the data it’s sending and receiving, match the algorithms it’s exchanging with the military, and replace it with our own datastream to take control of the ship.”

“Can he do that?”

“Theoretically, yes. He’s the world’s leading expert on this process; it’s called Remote Access Intervention.”

“But I’m not going to be able to do it at all,” Ryan said acidly, without looking up, “if the two of you don’t stop disturbing me.”

“Sorry.” Simon clamped his mouth shut, and Samantha shrank even deeper into the overstuffed chair.

After a moment, Simon put a hand out and touched her on the wrist. “Come on,” he whispered as quietly as he could. “Come help me in the kitchen.”

“All right.” She carefully placed her glass of wine on the side table and followed him toward the basement kitchen.

He didn’t really want to talk—not yet. He simply wanted to draw her away from the mounting tension in the great room and get a sense of how well she was holding up.

She seemed appreciative as they walked downstairs and entered the underground kitchen.

“Do you want to check the freezer for smoked fish?” he asked casually as he walked into the pantry. He already knew what the latter contained; it hadn’t changed a bit since his childhood days. Oliver had always had a deep love affair with French cheeses of every kind; he stocked them in abundance, along with everything else he thought might go well with them: smoked fish, fruits, fresh vegetables, and wine. None of it had appealed to him as a child, but now he was rather relieved to see all of that and more on the meticulously maintained shelves.

Searching through the pantry, he almost smiled at the thought of how age had changed him. Over the years, he had grown to appreciate what his father had loved, and he was pleased to see that Leon had continued to satisfy Oliver’s habits.

Beyond the pantry was a large room built specifically to house an extensive wine collection. It was also packed with shelves of preserves, some of which looked questionable. He randomly grabbed several items from the shelves as he heard Samantha’s voice: “You’ve got your pick.”

“Sounds good,” he said, walking out with several jars and a large block of cheese.

Samantha was peering into the walk-in freezer, looking curious. “What has he got in there?” he asked.

She pulled out a long, thin platter and showed him a beautifully filleted salmon, fresh and pink. Clearly Leon had been busy. “Let’s see what we can do with this,” she said.

As they started to assemble a quick dinner for the team, they heard Ryan’s voice from upstairs. “Synchronizing!” he shouted.

Turning to Samantha with a desperate look, Simon asked, “You’ve got this?”

“Sure. See what’s going on. I’ll take care of it.”

Before he had reached the steps to go upstairs, he heard Andrew’s response to Ryan. “Give me a couple of minutes. I’m almost there.”

Simon re-entered the great hall to find Hayden hovering over Ryan, more intense than ever. “You’ve got to make sure the algorithms are in sync,” he said. “Otherwise the communication will shut down.”

“I’ve got it,” Andrew said, carefully holding his finger above one of the little buttons, trying to synchronize the time to push the appropriate button on the device.

Andrew looked up at the flat screen, staring at the Munro as it cut through the open sea. “Almost there,” he said to himself, not daring to smile.

Simon’s gut sank, realizing they were about to hijack a secret multi-million-dollar government vehicle from the British military. There was no way to stop now, no way to turn back. They had gone too deep and were already in grave danger.

There would be no solace for the team. From this point forward they were committed. And once the British military found out, they would be on their tail without pause and forever.

All three men watched Andrew as his finger rested on the button of the small device he had rigged to the stolen modules. The room fell absolutely silent except for the crackling noise of the wood burning in the fireplace and the random clatter from the basement kitchen. They watched Andrew, anxiously waiting to see when he would connect to the vessel.

For the first time, he noticed a thick bar at the top of the flat screen display. Half of it was red; near the middle of the screen it turned blue. As he watched it, the red portion grew a bit, consuming a fraction more of the blue. It looked exactly like an old-fashioned download indicator, the kind he’d seen on the very first computer he’d ever owned.

Ryan risked a glance at him and saw what he was looking at. “That’s the turnover indicator,” he said. “I invented it myself. As soon as it’s all red, we’ll have fully synced the algorithms…and the ship will be ours to take.”

“Thirty seconds to completion,” Andrew said in a low voice.

Simon understood what they were saying. Once the algorithms were fully integrated, the information they would be sending could not be traced; the Munro would recognize Andrew’s instructions as if they were genuine commands sent by the military. They could turn the ship, stop it, send it to wherever they wanted, and no one on the vessel—not the navigator, not the Captain, not even the on-board AIs—would think to question the commands.

Four men, sitting in a cottage in Corsica, using twenty-year-old contraband equipment, were about to take control of a top-secret military operation without anyone’s knowledge.

The red bar grew longer and longer, and then the last of the blue blinked away.

The S.S. Munro—and the Spector I that slept in its hull—was theirs.

They all stood speechless for a second, trying to take in the reality of the moment. Simon finally broke the silence. “As my father used to say, ‘Dis-information is power.’”

Hayden looked at him with a serious expression and then slowly nodded as he frowned. “It’s the truth,” he said. “Back in the beginning, thirty years ago or more, we called this ‘The Information Age.’ But it’s not. Never was. We learned damn quickly that just having all that information didn’t mean a thing. We learned that it’s not what we know; it’s what we believe. Your dad was right: dis-information is power. Change the reality and you change the outcome. Controlling destiny.”

Ryan looked up at them with a new kind of horror and elation in his eyes—like a child who had just done something without understanding its consequence.

“Control your destiny,” he echoed.

“Wow,” said Andrew, taking a deep breath. He too was just beginning to realize what they had done.

The window of opportunity had been locked open.

They were on their way.

* * *

Simon cleared his throat abruptly. “Let it sit for a while,” he said. “Let’s make sure we’re a hundred percent.”

The others looked at each other, then looked back at him.

“It’ll be okay,” he said soothingly. “Let’s have dinner, then we can send the new coordinates to the ship.”

Ryan inhaled deeply and placed both hands behind his head. He looked pale and shaky, as if he hadn’t taken a breath in an hour.

“Good idea,” Andrew replied, wiping sweat from his forehead. He stood up as Samantha walked into the room, trying to balance several large platters of food.

“Let me help you there,” Simon said with a smile. “It’s been a while since you had to pull off the two-armed double truck.”

She almost laughed. Simon was teasing her about her short-lived job as a waitress—the only gig she could get back in college to pay for her tuition. It was a mandate of her parents that she learned the hard way, even though they could easily have helped her. It was a disaster and they both knew it. “You know,” she said, “the same bastard may have fired me three times, but at least I learned how to do this. It’s second nature to m—oops!”

Simon dove to catch one plate as it slid from her forearm. He got a hand under it just before it hit the Armenian rug. They all laughed—all of them, even Sam—and the tension that had filled the room for an hour suddenly burst like a bubble.

They were careful to put the food at the far end of the table, well away from the computer modules and the flat screen. And for the next twenty minutes, the old friends shared a meal and a bottle of wine and tried to forget that they had just changed their destiny.

* * *

Hayden didn’t talk very much during the brief meal, far less than the younger people at the table. He was in no mood for small talk. He finished quickly and excused himself with a grunt, then moved away from the table to the warmth of the fireplace at the far end of the room where he could gaze uninterrupted into the flames and just think.

Deep down inside, Hayden knew the truth. No matter how hard they tried, no matter how clever they were, they would eventually be discovered. And deep down inside, at least it didn’t matter—not to him.

His life was over.

Two decades of scientific research flashed before his eyes. Tonight, his career as a scientist had taken a turn that he hadn’t expected—one he thought never would, no matter what his mad dreams might have been. Whatever he had been before was finished now. The technology he needed, the funding necessary for his level of dedication…no one would ever give it to him, ever again.

He suddenly felt very old, and at the same time brand new.

There was a burst of laughter from the table behind him. He hunched his shoulders as it sent a chill down his spine. The others were famished from their traveling, relieved and exhilarated by their easy success. But the journey ahead would be extreme and challenging for all of them, and it was quite possible that they wouldn’t have another moment like this together in the coming weeks. He was glad they could have this, at least. He wished he could share it.

He stared into the fire. It had dwindled to a few pieces of glowing orange wood. I would have thought Leon would have kept a better eye on this, he thought absently. After all…

Hayden suddenly looked up, looked around, thought back.

“Simon,” he said, breaking through the easy conversation. “Where’s Leon?”

* * *

Something twisted in Simon’s stomach. He stood up from the table a little too fast and said, “You’re right. Where the hell is he?”

He turned and almost ran from the room. The others sat very quietly now, listening to Simon move swiftly from room to room, calling the caretaker’s name.

“Leon! Leon!”

There was no answer, and no halt to the search.

“Oh, that doesn’t sound good,” Andrew said. “Not good at all.”

Samantha heard a door slam, then saw a flash of movement beyond the great room’s windows. She stood up and peered out, into the night.

“Look,” she said. The others joined her at the window, just in time to see Simon disappear into the darkness, still calling Leon’s name, then reappear almost immediately, grim-faced as ever.

A moment later he was back in the great room. He turned to Hayden and said darkly, “I might be a while. Help them set the rendezvous coordinates for the Munro and then everyone— all of you—try to get some rest. We have to be down by the dock before five a.m.”

Ryan looked at his watch. It was half past one. He rushed over to the digital display and began to monitor the Munro’s activities halfway around the globe.

Simon left without another word. There was only one more place to look—the one place he had been thinking about and avoiding since the moment they’d set foot on Corsica.

Oliver’s private study.

He began to climb the stairs to the second floor as quickly as he could. Then, unaccountably, he found himself slowing, moving just as he had as a child, almost tip-toeing to the upper landing, creeping down the hall, and pausing before the study doors, his eyes locked on them, his heart pounding.

They were stout double doors made from oak, thick and lovingly crafted. The knobs were huge and ancient; the brass locking plate below polished and free of the slightest fingerprint.

An envelope was pinned to the center of both doors. Even from a distance, Simon could see what it displayed.

After ascending a few more steps closer to the door, eyes locked on the envelope, he recognized it. It was an unusual geometric symbol he had seen before. It looked like some sort of insignia.

He had not seen it in years. When he first noticed the geometric symbol at eight years of age, it was on Oliver’s briefcase. He had asked his father what it was, but had only gotten a vague response. For years it had remained in the vast pages of his childhood’s unresolved memories.

He felt something cold and hard sink in his stomach as he slowly approached the door. Each step felt like a dream as fear began to grip his body. Even his own legs seemed to weigh him down as he inched closer to the door. Simon, stop the paranoia, he told himself as he covered the last few steps. It’s time. It has to be time.

The wooden floor beneath his feet announced his approach with each new creak. For a moment—just for a moment!—he was absolutely positive his father was waiting on the other side of those doors, that he would open them and find Oliver Fitzpatrick sitting behind his massive oak desk, grinning and congratulating him on a job well done.

But that’s a lie, he told himself. He wanted it so badly to be true, but it wasn’t. His father was thousands of miles away, trapped in the loneliest continent on Earth. His father was waiting for him there, he knew—counting on him.

He stopped two feet from the double doors and gazed at the brass knobs…and saw, to his amazement, a small key inserted into the right lock—a key bearing the same insignia as the envelope he had not yet taken as his own. His heart started pounding. That key was never there before. That key granted him the access he needed. That key could open the doors to a secret fragment of his childhood that had haunted him for years.

He reached out and touched it, his stomach cramping with tension. He closed his eyes and knew the unknown world he longed to discover was only inches away.

Then, instantly as if controlled by some outside force, he opened his eyes and found himself staring at the note pinned in front of him, between both doors. He paused, staring, almost hypnotized.

Then he let go of the key and reached for the envelope, tearing it free of the two pins that had pushed it deep into the wood. He ripped open the envelope even as he heard Hayden’s voice from downstairs: “Rendezvous coordinates laid in. We’re good to go.”

The note was written with an unfamiliar hand and obviously in some haste. The work was messy; the lines a bit crooked. But none of that mattered. He read:

This door leads to more than you are ready to embrace. Oliver knew this and kept it from you. He knew you would enter when you were ready, but that time is not tonight.

Things reveal themselves to us when we are destined to see them, and not before. Inside those doors you will not find what you are looking for. If you must enter, then that is what fate has written for us all. But I will not be here to witness it.

I leave you with this choice, Simon. The key is in your hand.

Farewell,

Leon

Simon was speechless. He stood in front of the door to his father’s study and looked back at the tiny brass key inserted into the lock. He dropped his head and closed his eyes as he thought of Leon’s words.

Simon wanted more than anything to enter that room. More than anything. He touched the knob again, thinking with all his might, trying to understand his father and his fate as he never had before. He gripped the key, crushing it between his fingers.

Then, he released it and looked at the note one more time. He folded the note, and was ready to put it into his jacket when he caught a glimpse of something written on the back of the notepaper.

His heart raced. He held it up, turned it in the light, and saw three lines written in Leon’s hasty, crooked hand:

-73 degrees South

-82 degrees West

-10,022 feet

His eyes lit up. Coordinates, he knew. What we really need. Without another thought, he turned his back on the mysterious study and ran downstairs to join the others.

* * *

He found three of the team members huddled around Ryan’s display, waiting for the final course-alteration confirmation from the Munro. Samantha had curled up in the huge armchair and fallen asleep.

Simon stood waiting as Ryan entered the coordinates for where the team would rendezvous with the Munro. “Port Williams, Chile it is,” Ryan said as his fingers shook on the keyboard. “When we leave Corsica, that’s where we’ll reconvene. Donovan and the S.S. Munro will be waiting for us there.”

Simon walked closer to Ryan’s screen and said, “Check these other coordinates for me will you?” He recited the West and South numbers he had read on the note and memorized, but he kept the final line—the “-10,022 feet”—to himself.

Hayden raised an eyebrow. “So you found something?”

“I’m not sure,” he replied absently, then put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “Hurry.” He repeated the figures.

“Okay, okay.” Ryan’s fingers danced over the old-fashioned keyboard. He was almost used to the ancient tech by now.

After a moment, Ryan’s face grew pale. He looked like he had seen a ghost. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Look at that.”

The display was showing a specific location on the Antarctic continent—an outpost marked as “Station 35.” Simon froze for an instant and his heart began to race; this could be the coordinate of Oliver’s location.

“How did he know?” Simon whispered and then stopped himself. Leon’s note was carefully folded and stored in his jacket pocket. No one else needed to know about it quite yet, he decided.

He thought about Leon for a moment, and chills went down his spine. He leaned forward and peered at the monitor, double-checking the numbers he had recited. Ryan was right.

Hayden couldn’t keep curiosity to himself. “So?” he asked Simon. “You discover anything else up there?”

Simon thought about telling him the whole story, but only for a moment. Then he just shook his head and said, “Not really. Not much up there.”

Ryan didn’t seem to hear him. “These are still pretty coarse as locational coordinates go,” he said. “And the UNED maps don’t show any stations or outposts near that specific area.”

Simon knew why, and that was why he had kept the last part of the coordinates to himself. “Still,” he said, “This is where we need to go after we get the Spector—Station 35.” He tapped the digital map on the screen, and wished that Leon had given him more.

Hayden scowled at him, skeptical as always. “Are you sure?” he asked Simon. “Are you 100% positive?” For a brief second Simon thought to himself, how can I be sure? Leon must know something or he would have never given me the coordinates. It’s better than nothing. This must be why Dad wanted me to see Leon.

“I am,” he said, knowing deep down inside that Leon must have known all along.

Andrew shrugged. “All right then,” he said. “Let’s start packing up. We’ve got a boat to catch in a couple of hours.”

Simon got up, deep in thought, and walked to the window. He looked out at the moonlit landscape, still tortured by the night wind, and wondered if he would ever see Leon again. Or if he would ever have a chance to enter that study.

The image of the wooden door had permanently embedded itself in his mind. For an instant, he thought of throwing caution aside and running back upstairs, fast as he could, turning that key and throwing open those doors—

“Here.”

He turned in surprise. Andrew was standing there, a glass of scotch in his hand.

“Here you go, mate. Won’t have much time for this in the near future.”

Simon looked down at the fine crystal glass and then took it from his friend. He turned it in his hand, marveling at the rich, luminous color, thinking of his father. He looked back at Andrew and somehow managed to construct a smile. “Dad’s favorite,” he said. “Glenlivet 18.”

He took a slow sip, savoring the taste and the memory alike. The scotch blossomed like a lovely fire in his chest. He looked at Hayden, Andrew, Ryan, and Samantha and made himself smile. He was grateful to be here—with them, in this place, at this time.

He just didn’t know if they could endure the treacherous journey ahead. No one knew.

THE ISLAND OF CORSICA