Armen Gharabegian - Protocol 7

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!”