Steven Savile - Silver

“Let me try and wrap my head around this for a minute.” Noah looked up at the screens. The faces might have been replaced by the harsh reality of the Israeli landscape, but that didn’t matter. His head was filled with Catherine Meadows’ digital ghost falling to its knees, arms rising up in a desperate V. He rubbed his fingers against his temples. “You’re telling me we’re looking at a plot to assassinate the Pope, okay, I’ll buy that, but a plot dating back to a sect that committed mass suicide two thousand years ago? Now that’s… special. And not special in a good way, I might add”-he sucked in a disbelieving breath-“as if that wasn’t enough, not only has our whistleblower been dead for the best part of five hundred years, he just happened to be a fortuneteller who couldn’t spell Hitler and marked Saddam as the Antichrist. Does that about sum it up?” He looked around the table. “I mean, seriously, do you have any idea how bloody ridiculous that sounds?”

Lethe met his gaze full on and held it. He was the youngest of the group by a good decade, and right then he looked it. He touched the black frame of his glasses. “I’d say we’re merrily skipping down the yellow brick road into Looney Town,” Lethe agreed with a wry smile, “but what we’ve got here is a link. The modern world is all about links, degrees of separation and joining the dots. The only thing that makes any kind of sense is that something happened at Masada and these people burned themselves alive because of it. I’m not claiming it makes a good kind of sense.”

Noah didn’t know much about the kid. The old man had introduced him to the team as a researcher. Noah had always assumed that meant hacker. He was the archetypal nerd with his thick-framed glasses and tufts of beard that really didn’t seem all that keen to grow through. Lethe took his glasses off. Without them he looked another five years younger, if that was possible. Noah liked the kid, even if he spent too much time jacked into the neural net or whatever it was he did as a substitute for having a healthy sex life.

“I think that’s a bit of a leap of logic,” Orla Nyren interrupted his train of thought. Noah looked her way, worried for a moment that he might have said part of what was going on in his head. Thankfully, she wasn’t looking at him. Orla brushed that errant strand of hair away from her face again. She moved her cell phone so that it sat exactly perpendicular to her on the table. It was a tiny adjustment that smacked of an obsessive need for order that went beyond needing things around her to make sense. It was all about controlling her world and what happened in it. Noah could respect that so long as it didn’t involve turning widdershins three times and rolling up a trouser leg before opening a door.

“That it might be, but anything else would mean a second layer of coincidence, wouldn’t it?” Lethe reasoned. He pinched at his nose. It was obvious he’d been staring at computer screens for hours; his focus had that kind of glazed quality life online brought with it. “If it isn’t Masada that links these suicides, then it is either a totally random collusion of circumstance, a coincidence to the power of thirteen, if you like, or somewhere out there, there’s another singularity where these thirteen unfortunate souls come together. My money is on Masada though, not a black hole. Occam’s Razor and all that,” Lethe said.

“Look hard enough and you’ll start to see conspiracies everywhere,” Orla shrugged. “And forgive me, but I don’t exactly see how this falls under our remit. We aren’t bodyguards. If someone is out to kill the Pope, we should pass on what we know to the authorities and wash our hands of it.”

“Very Pontius Pilate of you, my dear,” Sir Charles said, settling back in the seat of his wheelchair. “However, our remit is whatever I say it is on any given day. You knew that when you took this particular king’s shilling. Now, given the links to Masada and the Sicarii, I believe we are in a unique position to investigate. Perhaps our martyrs did find something on their excavations. It isn’t out of the question. And when you consider the fact that Masada is a biblical site, anything they found would very definitely fall under our area of interest, or could be twisted until it did, wouldn’t you say?”

Orla Nyren stewed in silence for a full minute. She did not look remotely convinced. She moved her phone twice, once nudging it slightly out of true, and again to return it back to its perfect perpendicular. Finally she pursed her lips and shook her head. It was a short, decisive denial. “No, not buying it. Sorry, boss. Dress it up any way you like, this isn’t our business. This is MI6 and defense of the realm stuff. Suicide…”-she paused, catching herself mid-breath. Noah wondered if she had been about to say bombers; it was such a natural extension of her old life the two words would almost certainly have fused together in her mind-“… and terror threats,” she continued, her eyes drifting unconsciously toward the screens, “are way beyond the capabilities of five people. We can’t be the last bastions of democracy.”

“Nor should you be,” the old man agreed. He leaned forward in his chair. It was a subtle shift in his body language that implied complicity. “We will, of course, be feeding any information we discover up the line, and it will be for Control to decide how it is distributed. But there is a convergence of events here that we will investigate, and that’s my final word on the matter.”

Orla shook her head. The gesture was barely perceptible. “Why do I get the feeling you know more than you are letting on here?”

The old man smiled indulgently and spread his arms wide as if to show just how helpless he was. Noah knew it was all an act. Sir Charles had been paralyzed by an IRA bomb in the London Docklands over twenty years ago, and even in the hospital bed in the days immediately after the attack, he hadn’t been helpless.

The story was, he’d whispered into the right ear, and in turn the right ear had placed a call to a not-so-upstanding friend of an even less upright gent. And while that chain reaction played out, Sir Charles settled back into the starched pillows, content that his whisper had lit a very short fuse. The chemist suspected of being behind the bomb was involved in a not-so-tragic accident less than forty-eight hours later.

That was the kind of man he was.

He didn’t get angry.

He didn’t rail against the world.

He got even in his own very quiet, almost understated, way.

And right then the old man’s smile was a match for any the Russian had ever conjured. “Because, my dear, I am dreadfully predictable and you know me far too well. It’s the curse of spending too much time together. I will admit this much, I have my suspicions. I can only assure you that some very good reasons underpin those suspicions-but I am not ready to voice them just yet. As soon as I am sure, you will be the first to know. Until then, he who speaks first and thinks later has an idiot for a mouth. And contrary to what you may believe, I am not an idiot.” This time his smile was both self-deprecating and honest. It was a gentle deflection.

Noah half-expected her to challenge the old man again. She could be like a dog with a bone sometimes. She didn’t. Noah understood why. Thirteen burning faces told them all it was an argument for another day.

“Okay,” she said instead, “let’s think about this rationally. The one question that’s begging to be asked is: who else was involved in that dig? For all the conspiracy theory nonsense, the dig is the one thing we know for sure that the suicides have in common. Logically, anyone else who had been there is either in danger themselves, or more likely, is wrapped up in the whole thing somehow. Either way, we need to find them.”