Page 45 of 72 Hours

There was a sound of annoyance and the connection was broken at once.

NIALL CAME GRUMBLING into the kitchen. “Why the hell didn’t you wake me? Brad will be at the hospital by now, and we can contact Judith—”

“He’s already there,” I said rather smugly. “Joe just called. No Judith yet, though. But they’ll all be together soon, all the Team. Just us missing.”

“You called them?” He poured some coffee as he spoke, as if he were on automatic pilot. “Is Simon there too?”

“Ah... no, not yet,” I said. “Not that I know of.” I saw the tightening of his shoulders. There was a slight trail of water on the side of his neck where he’d obviously hurried through his morning wash. He was wearing his jeans and one of my undershirts, noticeable for its lack of ironing. The muted khaki colour suited him; it blended well with the dark flush of his skin. We used to do that a lot, borrow each other’s clothes when we stayed over. As I stared at him, words temporarily eluding me, he reached across me for a spoon and the fabric rode up on his torso.

The scar was still there, a shallow, shining red tramline across his side, slashed across his waist. I glanced away quickly, before he caught me looking, and moved a pile of papers from under the coffee pot with a growl of mock annoyance. “Be careful, will you? I didn’t want to wake you, so I laid some stuff out here to work for a while.”

He turned then, examining the sticky notes all over the counter and the doors of my cupboards. “What’s all this?”

“It’s the way I work,” I said, defensively. “Bit of brainstorming. Sketching. Word patterns....”

“I know that.” He shook his head, dismissing the explanation. He was used to the method. I’d moved into several colours of highlighter and three shades of sticky notes. It had exhausted my small supply of stationery. Niall stared at the tabulated numbers and the lines of letters ranged against them. Place looked like a small nuclear device had gone off in a paper mill. “The e-mail address?”

I nodded.

He moved back to the doorway, but stood there watching me. “Tell me about it,” he said. His voice was tight. The tension was still there. “Or do you want to get dressed first?”

I looked down at myself. When I woke properly after Joe’s call, I finally shucked off the grubby sweats and shirt I’d been wearing since I was shot, showered carefully, and changed into some more comfortable shorts. I’d just forgotten to put another shirt on. The thoughts had started to crowd my mind and I’d stumbled into the kitchen, grabbing for pen and paper to scribble down my first thoughts. Decency was the last thing on my mind.

“No,” I replied, my voice tripping over itself with eagerness. “No, I don’t want to get fucking dressed, I want to tell you about it first! That a problem?”

He smiled, and his eyes lifted from my bare chest. Nine months ago, I’d have recognised the look in his eyes as one of eagerness for some other kind of communication; three months ago, I’d have taken it for distaste and disapproval. This morning I didn’t have the faintest idea what it was, but I realised I didn’t want to spend time analysing it.

“Joe updated me while you were asleep.” I reached to peel my first sheet of notes out from under a couple of forks. The forks clattered into the sink, completely ignored. “He told me the materials used in both the poison attack and the bombing of your apartment were possibly Department issue. He said some of them only came into use since Mission Dove, as in relatively recently.” I ignored Niall’s raised brows and hurried on. “Also, Brad told us to check out his notes, didn’t he? I found them in amongst your stuff.” I looked across quickly, to check he was all right with me rifling through his papers while he slept. He nodded to me. “So I went through the whole pile. Most of the mail that was being diverted was only since we began Dove. Again, within a relatively recent time frame. A lot of it was to do with the raid on the club, right at the beginning—our plans, the attack on you, the subsequent investigation and recommendations—even though there was plenty of other stuff that might have been useful to an enemy. Brad puzzled over this apparently selective process for a while. I managed to decode his own brand of shorthand to read some of his initial thoughts. He just never spent the time on following them through.”

“Did he come to any conclusion?”

I grimaced. “Some. Notably that the hacking concentrated on the attack at the club and its aftermath, then on the subsequent movements of the Project Team members. You, especially.”

Niall frowned, absorbing this information. “What do you think, then? That it’s a personal vendetta? Why the attacks on everyone else, then?”

“No, not personal against you except to the extent that you were on the team that raided the club in the first place. There were several medical reports diverted, fairly boring except for information about your wounds and the weapon used and such. But there were other e-mails selected, full of anecdotal stuff about the rest of us, what our duties were during the rest of the mission, hints as to where our current homes were, what transport we were using.”

He raised an eyebrow. “No,” I said, anticipating the question. “Not a lot about Simon. Just the rest of us, including Judith as controller of the mission.”

“But if someone wanted to know what had happened, wouldn’t they have been better served by stealing a look at the Mission file itself? Everything was in there.”

I nodded. “But it’s only since I looked through Brad’s notes that I realised the file hasn’t been with the Team since then. After the attack on you, Judith’s bosses requisitioned it for the investigation, and everything we did since then had to be passed through them. I think she’s been on some kind of probation, even though the investigation found no one specifically to blame. Most of us knew what was going on throughout Dove because we were directly involved and kept in touch with each other. But it would have been difficult for anyone else to find a single comprehensive record of the mission in one place at any one time.”

“So we’re back with our original theories.” Niall narrowed his eyes and folded his arms as if to protect himself. He looked casual, leaning against the doorway, but I knew different. “It all has something to do with Mission Dove.”

“But not the peace talks, I reckon. The pattern of the intelligence is far more specific than that. It’s about the raid on the club—the attack on you—and the Project Team who carried out that raid. There’s no interest in the rest of the mission except as a means of tracking our whereabouts. No reference to governmental committees, the overseas ambassadors, or the needs of global peace, for God’s sake. It’s all about a seedy club with some abused kids and the team of agents who were in there mopping up the crap at the start of it all.”

Niall glanced up at the sticky notes again. “So did you crack the code?”

“Please,” I said, with exaggerated affront. “You insult me. It’s a nine-number matrix, like those number games that are so popular. You have to fill each box with one each of the numbers 1 to 9, never repeating on a line or in a box or on a diagonal—” Niall coughed, pointedly. I sighed. “I fitted the patterns to the alphabet, though I don’t know how long it’d have taken me if I hadn’t found a couple of messages that Brad intercepted that were also in the code. There was only one letter repeated in the e-mail address, but that helped me to—”

“What is it, Tanner?” There was a dangerous edge to Niall’s voice. Of course, he hadn’t had breakfast yet.

“Melting pot,” I said, simply. “That’s what the e-mail address is. Something that Joe said to me—or I said to him—about mixtures and patterns, made me think about the numbers again, made me consider this kind of encryption. Made me think about the phrase itself.”

“But....” Niall looked stricken. “But that’s what Simon calls the Team office, isn’t it? We’ve all heard him say it. And all your theories about no one having access to Mission Dove—isn’t Simon the one whose records would have been the most complete? He knew where we all were, where we were posted, what we were using, how we were resourced. Any gaps in his knowledge were things he could have discovered from us directly because we worked together on the mission. I know I was the one who brought him to mind yesterday, but I really hoped I was on the wrong track. Doesn’t all this lead straight back to him? Shit, Tanner, couldn’t you be wrong?”

“Chill.” I could see I was annoying the hell out of him in my refusal to get upset. “Yeah, Simon could have got all the information he wanted from us, Niall, you’ve put your finger on it there.”