Jeff glanced down and saw that Dan was wearing dress shoes, even less appropriate to the Rockies, at the tail end of winter.
‘Will you just let me in?’ Dan demanded, shoving his hands into his pockets and shivering. ‘It’s cold as hell out here.’
Jeff pressed the fingers of one hand into the corners of his eyes before stepping to one side, waving for Dan to come in.
Dan headed straight for the fire that Jeff had left smouldering overnight in the hearth. He leaned over it with his collar pulled up, still shivering, rubbing his hands vigorously before the naked heat. He glanced briefly at the dozen beer bottles piled up on a table next to the couch, but elected to say nothing.
‘I’ve got coffee on the go,’ Jeff mumbled, head still throbbing from his night of drinking and channel-surfing. ‘You want some?’
Dan glanced at him and nodded, before returning his attention to the hearth.
Jeff checked the filter had finished dripping the last of the Arabica into a pot, and nuked a packet of frozen waffles while he was at it. Given the long drive to the cabin, he guessed Dan probably hadn’t eaten any breakfast. He then grabbed a couple of mugs and put them on a tray, along with the coffee and waffles. By the time he returned to the living room, Dan had pulled a chair up next to the hearth, and sat there staring contemplatively into the flames.
They ate in silence at first, Jeff watching Dan plough his way through most of the waffles. He seemed twitchy as a bird, tension visible in the set of his jaw and the way he kept massaging his hands in the rare moments they weren’t holding either food or coffee.
‘How did you find me out here?’ Jeff finally asked. ‘I don’t remember telling anyone where I’d be.’
‘We did agree to stay in touch, right?’ said Dan.
‘Yes, but that’s not the same as telling each other where we’d be. Why didn’t you just get in touch the way we agreed, rather than actually hauling your ass all the way out here?’
‘Your ex-wife in Vermont told me where to find you,’ Dan replied. ‘She told me she thought you’d been acting strangely and that, if you’d gone anywhere at all, it was probably here.’
Jeff groaned and leaned back, closing his eyes for a moment. ‘How did you find her?’
‘I met her one time when she came down to Orlando to meet you, remember?’ Dan replied. ‘Right after you got back together with her, and you’d already mentioned she lived in Jacksonville. There’s only one Olivia Jury there. I told her I badly needed to get hold of you.’ He looked around the room. ‘So why did you decide to come all the way out here?’
‘I’ve been hiding in case someone figured out we’d hacked the Tau Ceti databases. I got tired of sleeping in motels and thought I might as well hole up here as anywhere else, at least until I heard from Farad.’
‘And you didn’t bring Olivia with you?’
‘I thought I’d be putting her in danger if I did.’
‘You haven’t told her anything?’
‘No.’ Jeff shook his head. ‘You still haven’t told me why you’re here.’
Dan chewed his food for several long seconds, as he gazed into the flames. ‘I came to tell you Lucy’s dead.’
Jeff stared at him, his hangover suddenly forgotten. He remembered the sight of her crouching by the pit next to Dan, in the moments before they found Mitchell.
‘Police found her in her car in a motel parking lot.’ Dan finally looked back up. ‘She’d been on her way to Miami.’ He took a sip of his coffee and finally met Jeff’s eye. ‘Officially it was a heart attack, but she’d called me the day before and told me she was certain she was being followed. She wanted to know if I’d noticed anything like that myself.’
‘That’s . . . that’s dreadful.’
‘Terrible,’ Dan agreed. ‘And particularly worrying since Lou Winston also appears to have vanished. First thing I did after hearing about Lucy was try to get hold of him. Turns out he has a place on one of those floating platforms just offshore from New Orleans, but his family reported him missing more than a day ago.’
Jeff felt like a cavity had been hollowed out inside his chest. ‘They know about the files, right? And now they’re coming after us.’
Dan shook his head, his expression bleak. ‘Don’t be so certain that’s the reason. I tried to get hold of people from the other sci-eval teams, people who’re supposed to be back home by now, and nobody knows where they are. My guess is Hanover or somebody higher up the food chain – Fowler, maybe, or Borusov – figured the civilian staff were too much of a security risk to be allowed to live.’
Jeff gaped at him. ‘You don’t seriously think they’re all dead?’
Dan shrugged. ‘As far as I’m concerned, we’re all that’s left of the sci-eval teams. If we’re lucky, they don’t even know about the files, but either way they’re still going to come looking for both of us.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
Dan took a sip of his coffee before replying. ‘Where I live in Orlando is right across the street from a hotel. After I heard about Lou, I hired a room there with a good view of the inside of my own apartment. I wasn’t there more than a couple of hours before I saw someone sneaking around inside my place. I grabbed my rucksack and left town as fast as I could.’
‘Maybe we should talk to the police.’
‘What could we tell them? The only thing that connects us to each other is our work on the Founder Network, and officially that doesn’t even exist. They’d have laughed us out of the station as soon as we started saying anything about Founders or ancient alien artefacts.’
Jeff nodded, feeling his heart sink. Everyone on the sci-eval teams based out at Tau Ceti knew that the catastrophe that would wipe out life on Earth was due some time during the next thirty years. They had lodged protests regarding the restriction on their access to the data recovered from the near-future, and it hadn’t helped that the time-stamps had been carefully removed from the few images and scraps of information they were granted access to. Something was being deliberately kept from them and, being scientists, it was only a matter of time before one of them took matters into their own hands.
Stealing a copy of the entire database had been Farad’s idea, and he’d first approached Lucy, since she was the one with the in-depth knowledge of the Tau Ceti station’s security protocols. With her help, and with Jeff and Dan’s more than willing support, they had found a way to hack into the station’s networks and copy the unaltered records recovered from the near future. Unfortunately, the files they had recovered proved to be protected by a particularly impenetrable form of encryption, one that Farad had assured them would take time and considerable skill to break.
The four of them had agreed to return to their respective homes at roughly the same time, Farad volunteering to try and find some way to reverse-engineer the protected files in the meantime. And then, once they had acquired the proof they needed, they would go public.
A sick chill wrapped itself around Jeff’s bones as he poured himself another coffee. He noticed his hands were shaking. ‘Then I guess we’re lucky we managed to stay alive this long.’
Dan shot him an exasperated look and pointed at the cabin’s wall-screen. ‘Don’t count your chickens just yet. Haven’t you seen the news?’
‘I didn’t come here to watch the news. The whole point of a place like this is to avothe outside world.’
‘Right.’ Dan stood and gestured towards the screen. It came to life and he quickly navigated to one of the main news-feeds, in which Jeff saw an aerial view of the ocean. The water was foaming for kilometres around, while a headline caption suggested they might be witnessing an undersea volcano. An inlaid satellite image revealed that the disturbance was taking place a few hundred kilometres north of the Mariana Islands, nearly halfway around the world.