“I’ve never read that one. But I have seen the movie Die Hard a good dozen times,” I said with a little sarcasm, “and it strikes me that it might be more useful in my line of work.” I waved my hand for him to scram. “I appreciate your well meaning attempts to ingratiate yourself with me, but people who get close to me do so at their own risk. And, as mentioned, I do have a boyfriend. And he is…considerably older than you. No offense. So…yeah.” I smiled at him. “Thank you, Josh Harding.”
He shrugged like he didn’t care. “Don’t be a stranger, Sienna Nealon.” He walked away, and disappeared out the doors of the cafeteria. I hadn’t met a lot of adults who carried themselves with his level of swagger, let alone seen it in someone younger than myself.
I finished my coffee in two swallows and made my way out of the cafeteria a few minutes later, tracing a path across the grounds, ignoring the blustery wind that fought me the whole way. I entered the lobby of the headquarters building to find it quiet, the usual hum of workers absent. I stood by the elevator bank alone, and rode up in the car by myself. When the doors opened on the cubicle farm on the fourth floor, I saw no one; I half expected a lone tumbleweed to blow by as I stepped out. The overhead fluorescent lights weren’t even on.
I walked to Ariadne’s office, where the door stood open. I saw Ariadne through the viewing window, Eve standing just behind her, Kappler’s hands on her shoulders in a familiar way, pushing aside Ariadne’s red hair. Eve massaged her neck while Ariadne worked on the computer, her reading glasses perched on her nose.
“Hey, Sienna,” I heard a voice call from behind me. I turned to see J.J. cutting through the main aisle of cubicles, heading toward me.
“J.J.,” I said calmly. “What, are you too important to be allowed some shore leave?”
“Yeah. This is the problem with being the linchpin of the Directorate’s electronic intelligence efforts…no time off.”
“At least you’re fully appreciated for your efforts,” I said, trying to reassure him.
“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.”