Robert Crane - Omega

“I think I’d rather have the time off.”

I shrugged. “Going to Ariadne’s office?”

“I am. I have news,” he said, nodding his head, but keeping an even keel, detached under those damned hipster glasses.

“Of the life-shaking and earth-quaking variety or just run-of-the-mill?”

“Maybe somewhere in between?” He held up his hands, either unknowing or uncaring, as we reached Ariadne’s office and he rapped his knuckles against the doorframe, causing Ariadne to jump in surprise and knock Eve’s hands off her shoulders.

“What can I do for you two?” Ariadne said, trying to casually shuffle papers on her desk, as though she needed some sort of cover for Eve giving her a shoulder rub. J.J. and I exchanged a look, mostly amused, while Eve seemed to glow with a sort of annoying superiority.

“He’s here with news of some variety,” I said. “I’m just here because I’m wandering aimlessly, not really sure what to do with myself while everyone else is battening down the hatches.”

“Oh?” She looked at me over her reading glasses. “You seem much more relaxed than yesterday. Different, somehow.”

I stiffened. “Um. No. Same me.”

“You sure?” She cocked her head at me, peering at me, squinting her eyes. “You seem different.”

“Nope.” I shook my head. Gulp.

She shook her head as though trying to clear it. “Okay. J.J.?”

“Got some minor discrepancies I found here,” he said, holding up his tablet computer.

“With the passports?” I asked, before Ariadne could.

“Yeah,” he said with a downer tone and looking at the tablet. “We tracked the three coming in, but there’s not really been any movement on the others in that batch from the UK. A few of them look like they’ve been used in the last six months, but not anywhere local. One in Mombasa two weeks ago, one in Kolkata three months ago, another in Shenzen about nine months ago…” He shrugged. “No pattern I can detect.”

“Shenzen is in China, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” J.J. said, looking up from the tablet. “Just across the harbor from Hong Kong, I think.”

“So it’s in China, nine months ago,” I said. “Wasn’t that when…?”

“When the compound, the meta compound—” Ariadne spoke up, “the one that was run by their government, got destroyed.”

“Right,” I said. “And Kolkata—err…sorry, the books I’ve read call it Calcutta—”

“And what fine ethnocentric volumes they must be,” J.J. said.

“Wasn’t India, three months ago, the site of another massacre?” I watched Eve turn to stone as Ariadne looked thoughtful. “Another few hundred metas killed?”

“Yeah,” J.J. murmured. “Hm. Weird pattern, then, huh? You think Omega had anything to do with…?”

“The Director says that extermination is not their game,” Ariadne said, a pen in her mouth.

“So why else would they be there at those times?” I asked. “Coincidence?”

“Weird coincidence,” J.J. said. “Timing is kinda off, since they don’t have anyone there any other times, just during the approximate time when the massacres occurred.”

“It could have been an investigator,” I said, wondering why I was defending Omega. “They could have been checking things out.”

“And I could have been born in Louisville, Kentucky, but strangely enough, I was born in Stuttgart.” Eve was all sarcasm. “If it seems unlikely, it probably is.”

“Let me see the passport photos,” I said to J.J. and he held up his tablet, revealing a face of an older man, in his sixties, grey-haired and with steel-rimmed glasses. He wore the look of a caring grandfather like an old blanket over the shoulders of a bum. “Janos Dichtmann.” I looked up at Ariadne and Eve. “Janos sounds awfully close to Janus.”

“You think someone decided to get cute with the passport office?” Ariadne looked at me. “Kind of an on-the-nose thing to do, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “But that doesn’t make it any less likely to be accurate.”

“If true,” Eve said, “and this is the Janus we’ve been told about, then he’s either not in the country or traveling under a different passport batch—since you said this passport hasn’t been cleared through U.S. customs?”

“No,” J.J. said, flipping back to the data. “This one went to Shenzen, and that’s it. I don’t even see a return trip, so theoretically he’s still in China.”

“I don’t take that as a positive sign, since he would have been there for about nine months now,” Ariadne said. “I think we can assume that he’s probably using multiple identities and has at least made it back to the UK by now, if that is in fact where their home base is.”

“Which means that your theory of tracking passports is not going to give us a complete picture,” I said.

J.J. froze, as though he were running the calculation in his head. “Okay, wait, I got it. We have facial recognition software, right? I’ll run it like this—everyone who’s gone through customs in the last twenty-four hours, then work backward to a week, then a month, looking for a match to this face.” He held up Janos Dichtmann’s passport photo. “If I can establish a match, then I’ve got his current passport, and can trace that; they may have gotten sloppy and done another batch, in which case we’ve got him, you know?”

“You think they’ll have done batches like this more than once?” Ariadne asked, skeptical.

“This isn’t the sort of thing most people are going to pick up on,” J.J. said. “The Department of Homeland Security doesn’t even have the resources to come up with this unless they knew specifically what they were looking for, and this is…it’s too good. These are legit passports, and they’ve probably got legit I.D. to go along with them. They’ve got people in the UK government getting them into the system the same way we have access to the U.S. systems, and because of it, they’re invisible to anyone who’s not looking specifically for them.”

“Which is pretty much us and no one else,” I said, feeling glum again.

“To work, J.J.,” Ariadne said with about as much enthusiasm as I had for it. “How long will this take?”

“Depends on how long he’s been in the country,” J.J. said. “If he’s entered in the last twenty-four hours, it’ll be fast. If he’s been in the country a week or less, I can have this done in a couple hours. Two weeks will take the rest of the day. Longer than a month…” He cringed. “Could be a while.”

Ariadne waved her hand. “Get to it.” She hesitated. “Can you set it to run and do your work from off-site?”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, nodding. “Our servers are pretty much set up for me to do just that, so I can push data wherever it needs to be. I usually use it to work late from the computer in my apartment. Why?”

“Because I want you to do this from the computer in your apartment,” Ariadne said, taking off her reading glasses. “Can you do that?”

“Yessum,” he said, mostly serious. “And you want me back here when?”

“I’ll let you know,” she said.

“Shore leave approved,” he whispered to me, then turned and vanished out the door. I watched him go and I didn’t feel bad about it at all. The campus was no place for humans right now. I felt the tension in my stomach pick up as I pondered that.

Ariadne leaned back in her chair, studiously ignoring Eve, and then looked back to me. “I’m glad you’re here. I had something to tell you, anyway.”

“Oh?” I said with exaggerated brightness. “You’re approving my vacation to Bora Bora, all expenses paid?”

“Hah,” she said with no mirth, head resting on the back of her chair as she tossed her glasses onto her desk. “I’d pay for your trip myself right now if I thought you’d go to Bora Bora. No, I wanted you to know I had Scott Byerly sent home.”