GOVERNMENTS CONFIRMED. FIRST FORMAL INQUIRY ANNOUNCED WITHIN
THE HOUR. YOU SHOULD SLEEP.
Tav studied the message.
He looked at Alistair asleep beside him.
Then he typed back: WE'RE SLEEPING.
The response was almost instantaneous: YOU ARE NOT SLEEPING, YOU'RE STARING AT
YOUR PHONE IN THE BACK OF A VEHICLE AT DAWN.
He put the phone away.
At 10:30, Naomi sent a second message: THE PROTOCOL FILES ARE RUNNING.
SECONDARY COVERAGE BUT GROWING. PEOPLE ARE ANGRY. IT'S THE RIGHT
KIND OF ANGRY.
He showed it to Alistair, who had woken sometime in the last half hour and was sitting in the way someone who had slept and was now alert and present.
Alistair read it.
"The right kind of angry," he said.
"She means it's productive," Tav said. "Directed at institutions rather than at abstractions."
"People who read about the Protocol and understand what it means." He watched the window. "That two people were placed in a room and monitored and were going to be killed when the monitoring showed what it showed."
"Yes."
"And that it had happened before."
"Yes."
"Elias," Alistair said. The name had a different quality now from the way he'd said it weeks ago — not abstract, not a category. The name of a person he'd spent two days learning to know, through the
archive and through Lucien's careful recollections. Someone who had narrated his own surveillance operations under his breath. Someone who had found seven across.
"His name is in it," Tav said.
"Yes." He was quiet. "I want to call Lucien when we arrive."
"Of course."
"I want to tell him that the crossword was in the materials." He looked at his hands. "That Elias got seven across." Tav looked at him.
"Yes," he said.
Naomi's third message arrived at 11:00: FIRST INQUIRY ANNOUNCED. UK OVERSIGHT
BODY. TESTIMONY REQUIRED FROM BOTH OF YOU. TIMELINE TBD.
REST FIRST.
"We'll testify," Alistair said, reading over his shoulder.
