Wheeler cleared his throat. ‘Do you know what happens to people in halo-confinement, Major?’
‘Not a lot. They while away their time in some kind of suspended animation, plugged into life support systems, in tubes stacked ten high.’
‘Hmm. Good summary,’ Wheeler said, pulling his knees up. ‘Ninety-eight percent of them die before the completion of their sentence and not even the great Gaia knows why. She doesn’t know when they’ll die or how. They are there one minute and poof, gone the next.’
‘Explains why the prison population is shrinking,’ Helix said, swirling the brandy around in his glass.
‘Indeed.’
‘And this is relevant how?’
‘The commuting of my sentence to banishment for life wasn’t born out of sentimentality on Ormandy’s part—’
‘Aww, sad.’ Sofi pouted. ‘Nobody loves poor Justin.’
‘Very amusing, Gabrielle.’
Helix put his hand on Sofi’s arm. ‘So, she didn’t want you dead.’ He finished his drink. ‘What happens if you die?’ He sat forward, elbows on his knees.
Wheeler tongued his busted lip. ‘Certain information is released into the public realm.’
Helix interlaced his fingers. ‘Information that Ormandy would rather remained private?’ He allowed the silence to bloom. ‘What is it?’
‘Come on, Major.’ Wheeler laughed. ‘I could tell you but without the evidence you have nothing other than hearsay.’
‘So show me the evidence.’
‘I can’t.’
Helix pulled one of his guns. ‘Can’t or won’t.’ He painted a targeting dot on Wheeler’s head.
‘Wait, Helix,’ Sofi said.
It was a nanosecond slower than Gabrielle would have reacted but he let it pass. ‘Well, which is it?’
‘I would, but alas, I can’t.’
‘Yawlander ordered the seizure and audit of all of your parliamentary and private data. All of your grubby little secrets have been rifled through by the best military analysts. Apart from confirming your dealings with Valerian Lytkin there was nothing else of note.’
Wheeler sniffed a laugh. ‘That’s because it’s not kept in some anonymous data centre or elsewhere in the ether, Helix. Even the great Gaia doesn’t know where it is. It doesn’t exist as stored qubits, bytes or bits.’
‘Paper,’ Sofi murmured.
‘Paper?’ Finch said.
‘Shut up, Finch,’ Helix said. ‘We know the only paper you’re familiar with is the stuff you wipe across your arse.’ He slid to the edge of his seat. ‘Spit it out, Wheeler. Where is it?’
‘It’s safe. As soon as my death is announced a number of processes I have established will verify the details and autogenerate a notification to my lawyers giving the whereabouts of the information.’
‘So there is information stored somewhere. The programme runs upon the announcement of your death. A stored message that is sent at the end of the process. And you think that Ormandy won’t be able to find all of that. Who set it up? I’m bloody sure it wasn’t you.’
‘General Yawlander.’
‘No way,’ Helix scoffed. ‘Yawlander was smart, but with all due respect he wasn’t that smart.’
‘He had help.’ Wheeler cleared his throat. ‘From your brother.’
Helix nailed him with a stare. ‘Does Ethan know what you have on Ormandy?’
‘No. Yawlander told him that the programme was for himself. He asked Ethan to set it up and then handover the administration functions. He passed those to me so I could set up the messages to be sent. That’s why it’s never been found.’
‘Because Ethan built it,’ Helix said. He pushed up from the armchair and helped himself to more of Wheeler’s brandy. Sofi waved away his offer of a refill. Ethan wouldn’t have said anything, given that Yawlander had said it was for his own use. He’d have built it and forgotten about it. Speculating if Yawlander knew about Ormandy or not was pointless. He was gone. ‘Do you believe him, Sofi?’
‘I’m scanning Ethan’s software repositories,’ the AI replied via his implant. ‘If it’s there, I’ll find it. But if he handed it off to Yawlander before it was configured, there’s not a lot we can do. It will have been like a virus, mutating periodically, otherwise I might be able to match the code but the chances—’
‘OK. I get it. Let’s move on.’ He turned from the drinks cabinet. ‘You said you could call Ormandy off. How do we make that happen?’ he said to Wheeler, handing him the glass.
Wheeler nodded his thanks. ‘Before we get to that I need you to help me with something.’ He took a sip of the drink. ‘The information is in London. That’s as close as I am prepared to go with the location.’
‘A mere 600 square miles, give or take,’ Finch said, slouching onto the floor.
Helix pointed the P226 at him. ‘Say one more word, Finch, and I swear it will be your last.’ He looked back at Wheeler. ‘Get on with it.’
‘Thanks to my untimely arrest, prosecution and subsequent banishment I didn’t have the opportunity to recover the information.’ He finished the brandy. ‘Get me into London without my head being blown off so that I can recover it and I’ll call Ormandy off.’
‘No. You call her off and then we go to London,’ Helix said getting to his feet. ‘Over to you, Sofi.’
Sofi put her glass on the small table next to the armchair. ‘Maybe I can remove them,’ she said moving towards Wheeler. ‘I need to see your neck, Justin.’ She crouched beside him. ‘But if you touch me, I will kick you in the balls. Understood?’ She acted out the routine that she and Helix had agreed. Having confirmed she couldn’t safely remove them, she recovered the device IDs and went to work on reconfiguring them to ensure that Wheeler wouldn’t be dead before he could be of any use.
‘OK. If we can’t remove them, there’s another option,’ Helix said, continuing the charade. ‘I’ve got a contact in Justice. Assuming she can reset the boundary parameter or deactivate them we should be good to go.’
Finch sniggered and mouthed ‘Boom!’ pinging his clenched fingers outwards to illustrate his point to Wheeler.
Wheeler swallowed. ‘And if you can’t?’
‘We should be
