Steven Savile - Silver

And then there was Jude Lethe, the cuckoo in this nest of soldiers, the team’s tech wizard. He was a nerd, but more than that, he was their nerd. He looked painfully serious in his black Joe 90 glasses.

Together they were Ogmios, named after the Celtic hero who himself was fashioned after the legends of Hercules.

What should have been the sixth seat at the head of the table was left open for the old man’s wheelchair.

These were his people, and they made an unlikely-and dangerous-group.

“So glad you could join us, Mister Larkin,” the old man said from his place at the table.

Noah nodded and took the last seat.

“Now perhaps we can get started?”

“Don’t mind me,” Noah said.

“Thank you.”

The old man adjusted the position of his wheelchair. It was the paraplegic equivalent of arranging his papers. He reached out and tapped his finger on the empty touchscreen, bringing the computer beneath it to life. The image on the wall array brightened immediately. Another tap and it started playing.

“London is one of the most closely watched cities in the world. There isn’t a square meter that isn’t covered by some sort of CCTV or private surveillance camera. What you are seeing now happened in Trafalgar Square at three p.m. today. There are various angles but they all show the same thing.” There was no need for Sir Charles to elaborate; the picture was worth considerably more than a thousand words. Noah watched the woman burn. She held her arms wide and turned and turned, stumbling finally as though she had become dizzy. “A minute before she committed suicide the woman placed a call to the BBC news desk,” the old man continued. He stroked the touchscreen, minimizing the freeze-frame of the burning woman on her knees, and brought up the audio recording of her call.

She spoke to them with the voice of the dead: “There is a plague coming. For forty days and forty nights fear shall savage the streets. Those steeped in sin shall burn. The dying begins now.”

“Who is this? Who am I talking to?” a second voice asked.

“I don’t need to tell you my name. Before the day is through you will know everything there is to know about me apart from one important detail.”

“And what’s that?”

“Why I did it.”

Sir Charles played it again.

And again.

Her final sentence hung in the air.

“Do we know who she is?” Orla Nyren asked. She leaned forward in her chair. The woman had a habit of coming alive when things around her became interesting. Most people did, but it was her definition of interesting that set her apart from “most” people.

“Mister Lethe? Would you care to share your discovery?” Sir Charles inclined his head slightly.

Lethe noddded, and rather self-consciously fiddled with the black rim of his glasses. “We ran facial recognition software, looking for a cross-match for our Jane Doe in various databases. IDENT1 struck out. Likewise there was nothing on the Server in the Sky, so we’re not talking FBI’s Most Wanted here. That meant we had to look closer to home. We got hits from the DMV down in Swansea along with one from the IRIS system at Heathrow. Those helped us find out all the not-so-nitty-gritty details.

“Our fiery female is one Catherine Meadows, age 39, graduate of Newcastle University, with no romantic entanglements. Ms. Meadows was, at the time of her combustion, a relatively well regarded forensic archeologist. Most recently she had testified at the Radovan Karadzic war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Her resume reads like a Who’s Who-or Where’s Where, I guess-of archeology. But that’s it. That’s her life. She was obsessed with the past. She didn’t live in the here and now.

“Reading between the lines, she was a lonely woman more likely to end her day cuddling up with her cat, a cup of Horlicks and the latest episode of Eastenders, rather than locking lips with some gorgeous Lothario. There’s nothing here to suggest she might be typical terrorist material, or even atypical terrorist material,” he said with a shrug. “Indeed, right up to her going out in a blaze of glory I would have said Ms. Meadows was, for want of a better word, boring.”

“It’s amazing what you can find out with Google,” Noah joked.

“Actually, to be honest, half of this was out there in the public domain. Given her name and her picture, any one of you could have found it. She had a Facebook page that’s littered with pictures of her ginger tom, that links her up with the class of ’91 at Newcastle Uni, and had some rather unfortunate photographs dating back to her time as a Cure fan.” Lethe raised a wry eyebrow behind his glasses. “You would think an archeologist ought to have known that some things are best left in the past, wouldn’t you?” He chuckled at his own joke. “She’s written for a number of academic journals. The articles are likewise online for people with insomnia to peruse at their leisure.”

“So why burn herself like that? I mean, that’s a pretty extreme way to go,” Ronan Frost asked, his accent a soft burr now.

“In my country we would be looking for the invisible men,” Konstantin said, rather cryptically.

“Precisely,” the Irish man agreed with him. “Something about this stinks. A boring woman doesn’t just suddenly decide to set fire to herself on a whim. So who is hiding in the shadows? Who are the invisible men?”

“Sir Charles?” Lethe said, indicating the old man should pick up where he’d left off.

The single image on the plasma screens fractured into twelve seemingly identical ones. No, not identical, Noah realized, just remarkably-disturbingly-similar. The center of each screen was dominated by a burning figure. The time-stamp on each read 1500Z. But that was all they had in common.

Working his way around the screens he recognized Dam Square and the white stone pillar of the National Monument in Amsterdam, the glass pyramid of the Palais du Louvre in Paris’ first arrondissement, the red brick facade of Casa de la Panaderia in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, the towering majesty of the cathedral in Stephansplatz in Vienna, the obelisk in the heart of St. Peter’s Square in Rome, the Vatican hidden behind the flames, and the glass monstrosity of the Sony building in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. There were more cities and more monuments he didn’t recognize. Noah counted them, even though he knew full well there were twelve screens.

“Well now it is starting to get interesting,” Orla said. An errant strand of hair curled over her brow and across her left eye.

“Thirteen people set themselves alight in very public places all across Europe at exactly the same time? I’d say we’ve moved way beyond interesting,” Noah said. Interesting really wasn’t the word he would have chosen though. The whole thing had a fatalistic simplicity to it.

“Oh, it gets better than that, or worse, depending upon your perspective,” Jude Lethe told them.

“Don’t tell me, more of that Google-Fu?”

“Something like that,” Lethe said. He leaned forward and started rapidly manipulating the images on the screen, zooming each one in until the display was filled with their screaming faces. The detail and precision of the digital images was nothing short of horrific. The images were hideously sharp. Noah had seen enough death to last him a lifetime, but something about this, as Frost had said, was different. Wrong.

“Italy, France, Spain, Germany, England, Greece, Switzerland, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Russia,” Lethe reeled off the countries where thirteen martyrs had self-immolated. “You can’t really tell the ethnicity from the faces now, too much damage, but the facial recognition software picked up hits for all thirteen here in the UK.”