Protocol 7 Read Free Page B

your fingertips: cell phone implants, tele-presence, holo-files, even five-level encryption that your buddies back at UNED couldn’t break.”
    Jonathan scowled. “Don’t count on that,” he said.
    “You know what I mean. And still, you hop a flight or a train or a camel from…wherever the hell you were…and come here to see me in person. So, what’s up?” He sipped at the scotch again and raised his eyebrows, waiting.
    Jonathan didn’t answer him directly. Instead he paused for a second and then raised his head to face one of the discretely mounted cameras in a dark corner of the room. “Fae,” he said, “do you remember that little trick I taught you last summer?”
    “I think I know what you’re referring to, Jonathan,” Fae said in her deeply mellow voice. Simon had programmed her to sound just like Diana Rigg at the age of thirty in her Avengers heyday. The resemblance was uncanny.
    “Procedure Kappa Alpha Poindexter, then,” Jonathan said.
    Simon heard the oddest sound: a pop and a hummm that came from no direction and all directions at once, then quickly cycled up the audible sound-spectrum until it seemed to fade away…or fill the room. “What the hell?” he heard himself say for the second time that night.
    “It’s an anti-eavesdropping widget I installed in Fae last time I was here,” Jonathan said. “Sends out a field of white noise that effectively kills every kind of bug, either live-feed or recording, within twenty meters. All they will hear is a muffled hiss until I tell it to go away.”
    “Are you saying my home is bugged?” Simon was astonished. “Someone is listening to me?”
    “Don’t be an idiot, Simon. Someone is always listening these days. You know that.”
    “It’s that serious?”
    Jonathan’s weariness showed through far more clearly now. He put the half-finished scotch on the end table and nodded. “Yeah. That serious.”
    He stood up and paced to the fireplace, thinking deeply.
    “I have a message for you,” he said.
    Simon frowned. “From whom?”
    “Your father.”
    A long, cold moment passed. Simon felt a gulf opening between them. “My father is dead,” he said shortly, surprised at the anger in his own voice.
    Jonathan, uncharacteristically hesitant, looked at a spot on the carpet midway between them. “Yes, that may be, but—”
    “May be, Jonathan? May?” He leaned forward, doing his best to hold in his rage. “Oxford told me he was dead. The British Diplomatic Corps told me he was dead. Even your own beloved UNED told me he was dead. None of them will give me one bit of detail—how he died, when he died, even where—but they all agree on that one bloody fact: Oliver Fitzpatrick is dead. Or is that a lie, too?”
    Jonathan wouldn’t say. Simon recognized the expression; he’d seen that same mulish, stubborn secretiveness in the man since they had both met in college. It was one of the characteristics that made Jonathan Weiss such an accomplished investigator and operative. And Simon hated his friend for it, if only a little.
    “Do you have a screen nearby?” Jonathan said abruptly. “Net ready?”
    “Of course,” Fae murmured. It was common for most households to have virtual screens that could appear at will available in nearly every room. Like the AIs, they’d become standard over the past few years.
    Bloody technology, Jonathan thought.
    A black strip appeared in the rich wood surface of the end table between them; it buzzed very faintly, and a ghostly rectangle opened in the air above it. A beat later it folded out into a box almost as big as the table itself: a holographic display, ready for data. A virtual keyboard glowed into existence in a flat space at the edge of the tabletop, and Jonathan moved to the chair in front of it. His fingers flew.
    Simon scowled at the entire display. “What, no secret microdot concealed in your shoe? No handwritten note scrawled on a bit of charred newsprint?”
    “Oh, shut up, man. Sometimes you