food hall was vast. At dozens of outlets staff in ridiculous paper hats served hundreds of customers, night workers just off shift. The air was hot and street-food aromatic.
Baptiste spotted the plain-clothes cop as soon as he walked in – neat, serious, casually checking out the handful of westerners in the food hall. Including Baptiste. The cop glanced down at a palmtop screen, then immediately walked across the seating area towards him.
As he approached, Baptiste touched his phone and initiated emergency contact. His free hand felt instinctively for the fountain pen in the front pocket of his bag.
The cop flashed his ID and said something in Mandarin Chinese.
Instantly, Song Island relayed a translation back to an audio device embedded behind Baptiste’s ear. “He’s asking your name.”
“Jaan Baptiste.”
Baptiste. It had started as a nickname. Many religious scenes remained on the walls of the Kaparis seminary, a school for Tyros housed in an abandoned monastery high in the Carpathian Mountains, including an icon of John the Baptist. With greasy hair that dripped as far as his shoulders and a soft-as-silk teenage beard ‘Baptiste’ was a dead ringer for the dead saint. Aged between twelve and seventeen, the Tyros were the foot soldiers of Kaparis, secretly selected from care institutions across the world and brought to the Carpathians for training and NRPfn1 indoctrination.
“Passport?” the cop asked, in English now.
“At hotel.” Baptiste answered in a Bulgarian accent, mentally checking off the six ways he could kill the cop with his bare hands.
“Hotel name?”
“Tiger Star.”
“This just received by Shanghai Police Command …” Kaparis heard Li Jun report.
From her bank of screens at the edge of his operations chamber, Li Jun posted the image of Baptiste that the cop had just sent to his headquarters. She was an unassuming young Tyro who had became Kaparis’s chief technologist.
Kaparis seethed.
“Happy …” His brief moment of sentiment had been punished. By fate. The following moments would determine the outcome of the entire project.
What to do?
There was a fifty-fifty chance Baptiste would be exposed as his agent. Half the world’s security services were on the lookout for the Tyros and their telltale retinal scarring. Baptiste’s cover could be blown. But if they aborted the Vector operation now and started again they would waste months, years even, of careful planning and preparation.
How close were they? Never been closer. Fifty-one of the fifty-two bots were already in place. The last bot, the one full of executable fn2 data, was about to be released. The brain of the entire operation. The ace.
What to do?
You make your own luck, ‘they’ say, but fate, according to Kaparis, was different. Fate you have to assault, coerce. Kaparis prided himself on being its master. One of the very few. Like a god on Mount Olympus.
He felt a delicious shiver.
“Play the ace.”
“Have you visited this restaurant before?” the cop asked.
“I do not remember,” said Baptiste.
The cop pulled up a grainy CCTV image on his palmtop screen of Baptiste at the Kung Fu Noodle counter.
“This is you last week. Six times in the last month. Come with me,” the cop said, leading him out of the food hall and into the back seat of an unmarked police car. Baptiste reached instinctively into his bag. He was not yet under arrest. The cop got in the front and picked up the radio, waiting for his orders.
But Baptiste received his first.
“Release it. Complete Vector at all costs.”
Baptiste relaxed. The point of action had arrived. He took a luxury Mont Blanc pen out of his bag and flipped off the top, as if he were about to make a note.
The Prime Executable Bot woke.
XE.CUTE.BOT52:BORN
An order came in from Kaparis Command on Song Island.
KAPCOMM>>XE.CUTE TERMINATE LIFE FORM LOCATION COORDINATES: 4578377/46294769
XE.CUTE.BOT52:KILL
The cop finished his radio message and turned his head to speak to Baptiste, but before the first word made it out of his mouth –
Ttzxch.
The smallest sound as it entered his brain.
The tiniest entry wound at the temple.
His face went into spasm, then froze.
September 29 10:14 (GMT+1). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK.
The morning after the night before was 150 times more disappointing than any previous morning at nano-scale.
Finn, Delta, Kelly and Stubbs sat in silence at a tiny table that had been specially made for them and stared at nothing in particular for a good long while.
The Sons of Scarlatti (one technically a daughter) as they liked to call themselves, lived in an ‘apartment block’ fashioned from cellular seed trays that sat inside a biohazard bubble, which protected them from insects and other threats, inside Laboratory One. It was known as the nano-compound. First they were going to be there a week. Then they were told twelve days. Then three weeks “tops”.
So far, five months had passed.
On the upside, the longer they’d waited for the one thing they wanted most, the more they got of everything else. They could come and go as they pleased from the biosphere (as long as they followed elaborate safety procedures) and anything they wanted could be shrunk in the new accelerator array, so they enjoyed the finest foods, consumer goods and high-end leisure activities. Finn had his own private
