Cambridge, England | August 24, 2011 | 10:00
Three days in the house had produced a list and a problem.
The list was the data he had been assembling since he sat down at Jessica's desk on the morning of August 21st — everything he knew about Simmons, Neo-Umbrella, the C-Virus development timeline, the Tricell financial architecture. It was organized and cross-referenced and it was useless in the hands of a man who officially did not exist.
The problem was the passport.
John Michael Kane, the identity in the waterproof pouch, was a document Alen had built eight years ago with the tradecraft available to a Grayweather operative with quiet access to Section Q's identity construction resources. It was good work. Good enough for a border crossing in a blizzard, good enough for a commercial flight from Moscow to Heathrow. Not good enough for extended operational use against an opponent who had the NSA's systems available and who, once he decided Valkyrie was not simply dead but was a problem that had relocated, would start running queries against exactly the document profile that John Michael Kane represented.
He needed Kane to be real. Not cover-story real. Database real — the kind of existence that produces a trail when someone who knows how to look runs a thorough check.
He put on unremarkable civilian clothes and walked out of the estate's back door into the Cambridge morning.
* * *
He had known Damien Rogers since the virology labs in 2001. They had met over a methodology argument about retroviral latency models — Damien had been wrong, Alen had told him so, Damien had argued back effectively enough that Alen had revised his assessment, and the combination of intellectual honesty on both sides had produced something that passed for friendship in the world where Alen operated.
Damien had not gone to war. He had gone the other direction — stayed in the university world, built a reputation in bioinformatics, become the sort of respected academic administrator whose access to institutional systems was extensive and whose use of that access had, on certain occasions, been somewhat broader than his formal remit. Alen had known this and filed it, the way he filed everything.
He knocked at the Victorian townhouse with the rhythm Damien would recognize. Tap, tap-tap, tap.
The door opened a crack. Damien was older — they both were — and the tweed jacket and the chalk-smell were exactly what Alen would have predicted. The color that drained from his face when he recognized who was standing there was also exactly what Alen would have predicted.
"Bloody hell," Damien said.
He pulled him inside without asking questions, which was one of the qualities Alen had always respected about him.
The study was as it always had been — organized chaos, the kind that had internal logic invisible to anyone who hadn't maintained it. Books open beside things that had no obvious connection to the books. A half-eaten sandwich that had been there long enough to be architectural. Damien closed and locked the door and pressed his back against it.
"MI6 came three weeks ago," Damien said. "Two of them. They told me you died in a training accident. North Sea. They gave me your dog tags."
He walked to a shelf and came back with the tags. Standard issue, the kind the Agency used for plausible deniability — not Alen's actual tags, which were in the hole under the spruce tree in Siberia, but a close enough match that someone without reason to look closely wouldn't question them.
Alen took them. He set them on the desk.
"It wasn't an accident," Alen said. "I was betrayed. Left for dead in Siberia by the man I was reporting to."
Damien sat in his leather chair and said nothing for a moment. Then: "Why come here? If they're watching—"
"I lost any surveillance on the way over," Alen said. "Old habits. I need your help with something I can't build alone."
He explained what he needed. Not everything — not Simmons, not Neo-Umbrella, not the C-Virus. Just the operational requirement: John Michael Kane needed to exist in every system that mattered. University records in Ottawa and Cambridge. Citizenship registry. Biometric database integration. A research history that would survive scrutiny.
Damien rubbed his face. "That's not hacking, Alen. That's treason. Multiple governments. If we're caught—"
"I know the risk," Alen said. "I also know what I'm trying to stop."
Damien looked at him for a long time. He was reading him the way people who had known Alen when he was nineteen sometimes read him — looking for the person under the operational surface, checking if that person was still present.
"Put the money away," Damien said.
"Damien—"
"I said put it away." He was already turning to his computer. "You helped me through Organic Chemistry when I was failing it badly enough that my funding was at risk. Hacking the Canadian citizenship database sounds like a fair exchange."
It took two weeks. Damien was thorough, which Alen had expected, and occasionally brilliant, which he had also expected. When it was finished, John Michael Kane was a reclusive but documentably real researcher with a paper trail that went back twelve years and would hold under everything short of a personal interview with the registrar.
"Where are you going with this?" Damien asked, handing over the folder.
"I need to verify something," Alen said. "About the organization trying to clean up Umbrella's legacy."
He didn't say Blue Umbrella. He didn't say Simmons. He said goodbye at the door in the specific way of someone who was not certain they would be saying it again, and Damien hugged him with the specific tightness of someone who understood that.
"Don't die on me again, mate," Damien said.
"I won't," Alen said. "You're the only one who knows I'm alive. Let's keep it that way."
END OF CHAPTER FORTY
Chapter Forty-One follows...