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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 95: Kondor 287
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Slade 282
The unfamiliar driver took them to a Tudor two-story on the north side of London. Zeke met them there, and Merlin was escorted in where he was met by a bored but attentive guard who paused Coronation Street, which appeared at first look to be some sort of soap opera, and assured everyone that he had things well in hand before insistently inviting Merlin to ‘sit down and watch’. Merlin did, softly grumbling about how torture was outlawed in all civilized countries, and could they not watch some footy instead?
Zeke and Kondor, doubled up, rode back to pick up Kondor’s bike. That accomplished, they got a message to go back. Turning around they returned to the safehouse. There, Theodore, Cameron’s assistant, was waiting, munching on some fish and chips. He had bought enough for all of them.
Turning the television off, he took a seat in the living room. Looking over at Kondor, he tapped his skull. Kondor blinked. Oh, Theodore knew about the mind-reading.
Hey, Captain Kondor. Yoohoo? Scratch your right ear if you can hear me? Um, Captain--
Amused, Kondor did just that, and saw Theo’s eyes widen before his mental words changed.
Read ‘Merlin’ a.k.a. Jack Ramsay. Scratch the other ear if you’ve got him.
Kondor reached out for Merlin’s mind while dropping the connection to Theodore to make it easier. At first it didn’t catch, but then it did. Merlin’s mind had a light, quirky touch which did not fit with Kondor’s approach to things.
I hope I’m not in trouble. Oh well, death or glory.
Kondor gave the signal, and Theodore began the interrogation. It was polite, but thorough. Zeke and Kondor both paid attention to what was learned, and how it was done. Merlin was the techsmith for the Knights of Camelot. They had only five total members, none were King Arthur. Pranks, white- to gray-hat hacking, investigations into politically protected people, hidden camera videos of the rich and famous acting in atrocious ways, and occasional protection at obvious points of danger were all feats they had accomplished. A B-list Hollywood star visiting London had been forced to pay damages for claiming she had been insulted racially when it was her bodyguards who had started a fight about a guy getting a parking spot ahead of the star. A police lieutenant had been sacked due to stealing suits from an expensive store already robbed. A gang of groomers in another English city had been beaten up, and left for their home country. A corporation that was trying to weasel out of paying for the damage done to their employees at a factory found their websites consistently displaying video of their victims decrying their behavior despite the best the cybersecurity IT guys could do.
“How’d you manage that?” Kondor asked.
Merlin grinned.
“Their chief of IT is my brother-in-law. Not one of the Knights, but he told us about the misdeeds, and we cooperated. We’re not really top notch hackers although everyone thinks Sir Percival is world class.”
Some of what they had done was illegal, but Kondor could not fault them for their behavior. He rather strongly did not like to kill, but if faced with a groomer he might execute the deviant on the spot himself. Exiling them from England was a mercy he was not sure was warranted. Plus, he doubted if any of this was that interesting to C and the unnamed agency.
“What about Amanda?” Theodore asked.
“The ‘Saracen Sorceress’. We work with her. She’s not one of us, but she pays very well, and she has contacts.”
While interesting, this was going nowhere, Kondor thought rubbing his face.
“So, what part did you play in the, ah, Saracen Sorceress’ attempt a few days ago to get the thumb drive from the vase?”
What? What’s this guy talking about? We did it a month ago.
Kondor and Zeke both leaned forward at the same moment to a suddenly more perplexed look from Merlin.
“Please explain.”
“Explain what?” Merlin asked, and Kondor realized he had goofed.
“Explain,” he said, fumbling for how to handle it, “why you were surprised by that question. We’re trained to read micro-expressions,” he suggested, to cover the error. Apparently the explanation worked.
“O.K., um, almost a month ago, yeah, two days short, we sent a message through the channel with the comms I had rigged up. We instructed the agent to send us the info he had quickly. Emergency. Industrial espionage, but it wasn’t a British company, so I didn’t care.”
“Did he?”
“Oh yes. Amanda bought it for a hundred pounds, she said. She gave me the data, and I set up the first of the suggested projects. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you what it was about.”
“Room temperature superconductors and cold fusion,” Kondor said bleakly, rubbing his face again as Merlin protested at how he could possibly know. But something was still niggling at his brain. Why did the agent who had sent one emergency message, send another a month later? The word ‘gravity’ kept hopping about the edge of his brain, and he did not know why.
“Oh.”
The formulas popped into his brain.
“You got it running didn’t you?”
“Yes, but--”
“And you found, oh, an earthquake or--”
“The whole house shuddered for nearly a minute the first time we turned it on, but we learned how to get around that. What is going on?”
“When you kick off a cold fusion reaction, and you don’t do it just right, you cause an anti-gravition cascade, I guess you could call it. Such things are very useful if you have the right receptors. Theoretically massive datalink at interstellar range, although I did not, no, we did not know how to do that. But even if you don’t have the sort of fine tuning you’d need to transmit data, just a simple receptor for a gravity pulse effect, it’d be blown out by an anti-graviton wave front. Rather spectacular. And if you were good at math, and in order to do this you’d have to be, you could track down the source point.”
Theodore looked at him carefully.
“Are you sure?” Theodore asked.
“No, no, I’m not,” Kondor replied. “The thing is, it's either this or someone has a mole in your agency, or a comms leak.”
“Mole. Comms is unbreakable for the tightly held system,” Theodore insisted.
Merlin swore. “That is just classic British spies, going all the way back to Kim Philby.” He sneered.
“It's not that,” Theodore argued back.
“Why? Because as much as I like the sound of Running Man’s story, there are no anti-gravitions that we know of. A gravity receptor, my goodness. What utter rubbish.”
“A very crude one.” Kondor interjected. He was not sure if 21st Century tech could handle such. Maybe they could build one because they thought they were measuring something else?
“Whatever. Also not a thing.”
Zeke glared at Merlin for this dismissal but said nothing.
Kondor felt his brain almost flying apart as he tried to ride the instinct.
“Did you leave the building soon after the first success?”
“Ah yeah, we were worried the house might come down, so we moved it to somewhere more sturdy, and we made sure to keep everything fine-tuned precisely.”
Kondor nodded slowly and looked at Zeke who turned to Merlin.
“That saved your life.”
“What?”
“You started up this device,” Kondor said. “Sent a message. ‘Hi. We’re here.’ They heard it, and tracked you down. But you have this whole thing under a false identity because of course you did. Now they don’t know where to find you. But they’re nervous. Someone out there has their tech, and it works.” He thought for a moment. “Possibly they don’t know how to make it work,” he further speculated, and Zeke nodded.
“Right. But they spy a bit at their home base, and make our agent nervous so he sends another heads-up to HQ and a second vase. Amanda must have gotten him to think she was with C,” Theodore said.
“Amanda called a week back asking us if we had sent a message to her agent. We hadn’t and told her because why would we?” Merlin added reluctantly as the puzzle began to come together more, convincing him despite his wishes and disbelief in anti-gravitons.
“Amanda finds out about where the vase is going, we go in and get in the muddle of things,” Zeke said. “We give the drive to our friend, and thugs arrive.”
Kondor shook his head in frustration.
“Doctor Albert is being cagey. He managed to cause a cold fusion reaction and didn’t tell us, which sent another message to the corporation: ‘Come get me’.”
“If someone serious was after young Merlin here, they probably broke through his hides and tracked him. Which is why the four guys showed up at the party to kill or kidnap him.”
“But Amanda--”
Zeke was interrupted by a smirking Merlin.
“Has, as I said, lots of contacts. If someone was asking around, she could have heard of it. The paper she gave me at the party was a warning to get out of town, and a Swiss bank account number.”
“So somewhere out there is a mid level manager or low level exec who is not experienced but amoral, and he is hiring thugs to try to cover up the loss of a top secret project from his bosses,” Theodore said.
“Either that, or a mole in our agency,” Kondor said.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #531: Versers Roam. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
