around outside the hotel’s front doors.
“Listen, Lisa, can I ask you to do something for me? I have some faces I need scanned … Not even remotely legal, I’m sure … No, I’m not in trouble! Would I be on the phone to you if I were in trouble? Just—okay. I’m good for it. Here come the images.”
He relayed the feed from his glasses to Lisa in her flat in London.
“Who’re you talking to?” asked Ambrose.
“Old friend. She got me out of Chernobyl intact when I had a little problem with a dragon—Lisa? Got it? Great. Call me back when you’ve done the analysis.”
He pocketed the glasses and climbed back in the car. “Lisa has Interpol connections, and she’s a fantastic hacker. She’ll run facial recognition on it and hopefully tell us who those people are.”
Ambrose cringed back in his seat. “So what do we do in the meantime?”
“We have lunch. How ’bout that French restaurant we passed? The one with the little Eiffel Tower?”
Despite the clear curbs everywhere, Gennady parked the car at the shopping mall and walked the three blocks to the La France. He didn’t tell Ambrose why, but the American would figure it out: the Tata was traceable through its GPS. Luckily La France was open and they settled in for some decent crepes. Gennady had a nice view of a line of trees west of the town boundary. Occasionally a car drove past.
Lisa pinged him as they were settling up. “Gennady? I got some hits for you.”
“Really?” He hadn’t expected her to turn up anything. Gennady’s working assumption was that Ambrose was just being paranoid.
“Nothing off the cops; they must be local,” she said. “But one guy—the old man—well, it’s daft.”
He sighed in disappointment, and Ambrose shot him a look. “Go ahead.”
“His name is Alexei Egorov. He’s premier of a virtual nation called the Soviet Union Online. They started from this project to digitize all the existing paper records of the Soviet era. Once those were online, Egorov and his people started some deep data-mining to construct a virtual Soviet, and then they started inviting the last die-hard Stalinists—or their kids—to join. It’s a virtual country composed of bitter old men who’re nostalgic for the purges. Daft.”
“Thanks, Lisa. I’ll wire you the fee.”
He glowered at Ambrose. “Tell me about Soviet Union.”
“I’m not supposed to—”
“Oh, come on. Who said that? Whoever they are, they’re on the far side of the planet right now,
Ambrose’s lips thinned to a white line. He leaned forward. “It’s big,” he said.
“Can’t be bigger than my metastables. Tell me: what did you see on Mars?”
Ambrose hesitated. Then he blurted, “A pyramid.”
Silence.
“Really, a pyramid,” Ambrose insisted. “Big sucker, gray, I think most of it was buried in the permafrost. It was the only thing sticking up for miles. This was on the Northern plains, where there’s ice just under the surface. The whole area around it … well, it was like a frozen splash, if you know what I mean. Almost a crater.”
This was just getting more and more disappointing. “And why is Soviet Union Online after you?”
“Because the pyramid had Russian writing on it. Just four letters, in red: CCCP.”
The next silence went on for a while, and was punctuated only by the sound of other diners grumbling about local carbon prices.
“I leaked some photos before Google came after me with their non-disclosure agreements,” Ambrose explained. “I guess the Soviets have internet search-bots constantly searching for certain things, and they picked up on my posts before Google was able to take them down. I got a couple of threatening phone calls from men with thick Slavic accents. Then they tried to kidnap me.”
“No!”
Ambrose grimaced. “Well, they weren’t very good at it. It was four guys, all of them must have been in their eighties, they tried to bundle me into a black van. I ran away and they just stood there yelling curses at me in Russian. One of them threw his cane at me.” He rubbed his ankle.
“And you took them seriously?”
“I did when the FBI showed up and told me I had to pack up and go with them. That’s when I ran to the U.N. I didn’t believe that ‘witness protection’ crap the Feds tried to feed me. The U.N. people told me that the Soviets’ data mining is actually really good. They keep turning up embarrassing and incriminating information about what people and governments got up to back in the days of the Cold War. They use what they know to influence people.”
“That’s bizarre.” He thought about it. “Think they bought off the police here?”
“Or somebody. They want to know about the pyramid. But only Google, and the Feds, and I know where it is. And NASA’s already patched that part of the Mars panoramas with fake data.”
Disappointment had turned to a deep sense of surprise. For Gennady, being surprised usually meant that something awful was about to happen; so he said, “We need to get you out of town.”
Ambrose brightened. “I have an idea. Let’s go back to SNOPB. I looked up these Minus Three people: they’re eco-radicals, but at least they don’t seem to be lunatics.”
“Hmmph. You just think Kyzdygoi’s ‘hot.’ ”
Ambrose grinned and shrugged.
“Okay. But we’re not driving, because the car can be tracked.
Ambrose had evidently never taken a walk in the country before. After Gennady convinced him he would survive it, they parted outside La France, and Gennady watched him walk away, sneakers flapping. He shook his head and strolled back to the Tata.
Five men were waiting for him. Two were policemen, and three wore business attire. One of these was an old, bald man in a faded olive-green suit. He wore augmented reality glasses, and there was a discrete red pin on his lapel in the shape of the old Soviet flag.
Gennady made a show of pushing his own glasses back on his nose and walked forward, hand out. As the cops started to reach for their tasers, Gennady said, “Mr Egorov! Gennady Malianov, IAEA. You’ll forgive me if I record and upload this conversation to headquarters?” He tapped the frame of his glasses and turned to the other suits. “I didn’t catch your names?”
The suits frowned the policemen hesitated; Egorov, however, put out his hand and Gennady shook it firmly. He could feel the old man’s bones shift in his grip, but Egorov didn’t grimace. Instead he said, “Where’s your companion?”
“You mean that American? No idea. We shared a hotel room because it was cheaper, but then we parted ways this morning.”
Egorov took his hand back, and pressed his bruised knuckles against his hip. “You’ve no idea where he is?”
“None.”
“What’re
“Inspecting SNOPB,” he said. Gennady didn’t have to fake his confidence here; he felt well armoured by his affiliation to Frankl’s people. “My credentials are online, if there’s some sort of issue here?”
“No issue,” muttered Egorov. He turned away, and as he did a discrete icon lit up in the corner of Gennady’s heads-up display. Egorov had sent him a text message.
He hadn’t been massaging his hand on his flank; he’d been texting through his pants. Gennady had left the server in his glasses open, so it would have been easy for Egorov to ping it and find his address.
In among all the other odd occurrences of the past couple of days, this one didn’t stand out. But as Gennady watched Egorov and his policemen retreat, he realized that his assumption that Egorov had been in charge might be wrong. Who were those other two suits?
He waited for Egorov’s party to drive away, then got in the Tata and opened the email.
It said,
