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  “It’s good to see you, Joseph,” he said, and gestured toward the empty chair. “It’s been a long time.”

  Not good enough for you to remember my first name, Joe thought, although “Joseph” from “Joe” had been a pretty good guess.

  The two gorillas in suits stood behind Palgrave, looking at the walls, and generally pretending not to hear a thing.

  Strategy-wise, Joe decided that his real accent, Brooklyn diphthongs still not fully eroded by elocution lessons, would jangle more in Palgrave’s cultured ear.

  So it was the one he used.

  “I hear you’re doing pretty well for yourself these days, Mr. Palgrave,” Joe said, sitting down. “It’s good to see you, too.”

  Palgrave smiled, but the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. Could have been sadness. Could have been deceit. “Our mutual friend said you’re helping out on this. I have to say I was delighted that Abernathy chose you. I appreciate it. I really do.”

  “I’m just trying to get up to speed, maybe get an angle on all this. I can’t believe Lennie would get himself mixed up in anything …”

  “Unsavory?” Palgrave finished, waving a hand absently in the air. “I find it hard to believe it myself. Leonard has always been such a sensible boy. This X-Core nonsense has kind of come out of the blue. What are your impressions?”

  Joe shrugged. The truth was he had no impressions. X-Core seemed to be the key phrase, but since he’d only just heard of it, he had no idea why that should be. Still, it wouldn’t look good to be hopelessly uninformed. “I was just briefed,” he lied, “so it’s probably better if I ask you a few questions. Try to put things in some kind of context?”

  “Of course.” Palgrave sat back in his chair and linked the fingers of both hands in front of his stomach.

  Joe suddenly felt a little awkward, but such feelings would be counterproductive. He hid it immediately with a question. “Let’s begin with an easy one: when did all this start?”

  Palgrave shrugged. “I’ve been asking myself the same question,” he said after a moment. “I keep going over and over it. Trying to find a precise moment where I could have stepped in and … helped … said something … I don’t know.”

  He closed his eyes, unfolded his hands, and tried again.

  “I meant it when I said that Leonard has always been a sensible child. Jenifer and I have always been so proud of him. It sounds a little trite, I’m sure, but I have always thought that he was destined for exceptional things. That the advantages he has had would make him—I don’t know—somehow greater than the sum of his parents’ backgrounds.

  “I was a product of a state school. Jenny went to public school, but on a scholarship.” (Joe wondered again at the euphemism “public school,” and made a mental note to look up the etymology of the phrase sometime.) “We fought hard to climb upward through life. We thought that sending Leonard to the best schools in the country would give him a secure footing in the world. Allow him to scale even giddier heights than we ever managed …”

  “There’s a rumor that you’re on a path that leads you straight to prime minister in a couple of years,” Joe interrupted, mainly to get Palgrave back on track. “That’s not so shabby for a kid from a state school.”

  Palgrave laughed, but with a hint of bitterness.

  “I’m afraid that’s just a case of right place, right time. I have the policies that seem to fit with the general mood of the country, and the educational background to make me more agreeable to voters. I’m under no illusion that the party truly stands behind me. It’s just that they see me as a convenient lesser of assembled evils.”

  He sipped at his coffee, then thought better of it and knocked the last third of the cup back.

  “Leonard has no political aspirations,” he said. “Never had. I’m kind of glad. There’s something essentially self-serving about Westminster, and he seemed to see it for the ship of fools that I fear it is in my darker moments. He was acing his way through school; I mean, when he hardly tried he was better than most, but when he gave something his full attention … he excelled. And that’s not just a proud parent speaking… .”

  Speaking? Joe thought. Don’t you mean “droning on”?

  He wondered if all politicians had a natural flair for saying little in a lot of words, or if it was something they learned once deciding upon their career path.

  Or is he hiding something? Joe wondered, surprised at the thought.

  None of these thoughts changed his pleasant, professional demeanor, however. Training. Never show what goes on under the surface.

  “Oh, I remember,” Joe said, smiling. “No one could touch him.”

  He saw Palgrave grow an inch as he took the compliment-by-association.

  “And then something happened,” Joe prompted.

  Palgrave nodded.

  “I keep looking back, trying to spot danger signs. But I can’t find them. Every child rebels against his or her parents. It’s something you wait for—the moment when the perfect storm of hormones and new ideas present you with this new person who suddenly seems so angry and resentful. Maybe they read Camus or Marx or Chomsky and start to question things. The thing is, I always thought that the process would be gradual. But it’s like Leonard went through it all overnight.

  “My mother used to tell me fairy tales, not out of books, just ones she remembered hearing when she was a girl, and she probably embellished them. But I keep thinking about one in which a woman started to be afraid of her own baby, only to discover that it had been switched out with a goblin baby—a changeling.

  “Well, Leonard’s shift from teacher’s pet to obsessed X-Core fan was so swift, so total, that the story was the first thing I thought of.”

  Joe accessed his chipset and released a little encourage. “It’s like it’s no longer Lennie,” he said gently, gauging the tone to match the pheromone.

  Palgrave thought about the statement for a few seconds and Joe worried he’d gone too far, misreading the situation, but then Palgrave nodded gravely.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that he was no longer my son.” His face reflected the internal struggle it had taken to bring that thought to the surface. “I look into his eyes and I don’t see Leonard looking back at me. There’s something harder … crueler, perhaps, that has taken up residence inside his head.

  “I tried to get him some help …”

  “What kind of help?” Joe asked.

  “Counseling. Talks from people he used to respect. Tough love.”

  “And where did that get you?”

  “Nowhere. Every attempt to help him just made him more and more distant. The last try was a full-scale intervention …”

  Joe narrowed his eyes. “That thing where you get everyone in someone’s life assembled in one room and confront him with his problem?” Something about that idea jarred with Joe, and he wasn’t sure he fully believed it. It just didn’t feel like Palgrave’s style. Still, there was nothing to be gained in calling Palgrave out on it, and no reason he could find for him to be lying. Better to let him elaborate and see if there wasn’t something to grab on to. “I’m guessing that’s when he moved out?”

  “Yes.” There was a hint of something that could have been shame in Palgrave’s voice. “I mean, the weird thing is that he’s not some average teenager acting up and trying to assert himself in an adult world. He doesn’t swear or steal or disrespect us. It’s nothing solid. Nothing you can pin down. It’s more like a total change in attitude. He no longer seems to be interested in anything but that music of his.”

  “X-Core. When did he become interested in it?”

  Palgrave shook his head. “I stopped paying attention to the music he listened to a few years ago. It all sounds like noise to me. Back in the long-lost past, when he was buying CDs, he used to sometimes show them to me, but now he has his computer and iPod and whatnot—it’s become a very different world. It’s just data he downloads, and it’s not as easy to check what he’s list
ening to, what he’s watching, even who he’s talking to.”

  “And he took his computer with him, of course?”

  Palgrave nodded.

  “Shame. I would have liked to snoop through it.”

  “But our whole home network backs up onto a cloud server… .”

  Joe raised an eyebrow. “So there’s a chance that a lot of his data is still accessible?”

  “I believe so. Do you think it will be any help?”

  Joe was mystified why Palgrave wouldn’t think it would be useful. But he shrugged to downplay it. “It could be. If you could give Abernathy the details, and any passwords, one of our techs might be able to mine it for relevant information.”

  Palgrave suddenly seemed cheered up by the idea.

  “I’ll do that as soon as I get home. Is there anything else …?”

  Joe thought about it. It seemed like getting their hands on Lennie’s data might be a lead, though a weak one, but he wasn’t really sure what more help Palgrave could be.

  Sometimes gathering intelligence was just a matter of asking a whole bunch of questions and hoping that one of them opened up an avenue for further investigation. Usually it didn’t amount to much, but sometimes a small detail became a clue.

  It was obvious to Joe that Victor Palgrave had little insight into the circumstances that had led Lennie from “boy most likely to succeed” to “possible security risk.”

  Joe didn’t know when Palgrave had stopped listening to his son, but figured it was probably a long time before X-Core got its hooks into him.

  That’s the curse of modern technology, Joe thought. It isolated people from their families, providing them with a whole slew of virtual “friends” to talk to, rather than the people who would traditionally have been there for them.

  Sometimes it seemed like the price of progress was that people “talked” more to their online friends than they did to their own flesh and blood.

  “I guess we’ll see if we can find anything in Lennie’s backed-up files, and see if that gets us anywhere.”

  Palgrave’s face changed. It suddenly looked very earnest, grateful, and serious, and Joe realized that the man was pretty good at controlling his own micro-expressions. For the first time, Joe saw why people thought Palgrave was such a good politician: he could fake it along with the best of them.

  Joe wondered again just how honest Palgrave was being with him. He had a sneaking suspicion that the man was holding something back, or covering something up, but he couldn’t see a way through the politician’s formidable defenses, so he just filed the impression away in his things to think about file.

  “I appreciate everything you’re doing,” Palgrave said. “I really do.”

  Joe got up from the seat, smiled, and said, “I’ll let you know when I have anything to report.”

  Then, before Palgrave could come back with any more carefully controlled words or expressions, Joe turned and walked out of the room.

  Again, the first thing that Joe did once he was outside was call Abernathy.

  “I hear nothing from you for weeks, and suddenly I’m back on speed dial. How did your meeting with Victor Palgrave go?”

  “Tell me about X-Core.”

  “Ah, it’s time for that chat, is it?” Abernathy said. “Why don’t you drop by the office?”

  It took a half hour to reach Whitehall, where Joe stood outside the building and psyched himself up to enter.

  Just like he’d been psyching himself up the whole journey.

  It had only been a few weeks since he’d last been inside, but it seemed like a whole lot longer. Time was like that, telescoping out to make the bad times last for ages, while good times flew by on fast-forward.

  Since Andy died, time had done nothing but drag on. Bad days followed slowly on the heels of bad days—until today, when Joe’d set off for Lennie’s house, and time had started moving at normal speed again. He was no longer being dragged back by feelings of guilt, sorrow, and regret.

  Joe sighed, opened the double doors, and stepped inside.

  Into a large lobby with another set of doors at the other end.

  First up came the security desk, where Joe flashed his ID—a membership card for a snooker club on the Grays Inn Road, which was better than getting searched in the field and being found carrying an intelligence services ID—and waited while the rent-a-cop scrutinized the photo and Joe’s face as if playing Spot the Difference. When the guy was satisfied they were one and the same person, he let Joe through.

  On the other side of the doors, one could be forgiven for thinking that it was the office of a law firm or a corporate headquarters. People tapped away at keyboards and watched the fruits of their labors appear on widescreen LCD monitors. People shuffled papers and sat hunched over reports. People gossiped next to the watercooler. The air-conditioning was on and the air was cool and refreshing.

  Joe felt a pang of shame at his ratty clothing and messy hair, but walking through the open-plan area of the offices toward Abernathy’s inner sanctum, he was greeted and nodded at by a half-dozen people.

  They looked genuinely pleased to see him.

  Soon there was even the hint of a swagger creeping into his step.

  By the time Joe got to the door of Abernathy’s unit, he felt genuinely glad to be back. He swiped his ID and then he was walking into the control center of YETI, the Youth Enforcement Task Initiative.

  Okay, officially it was YETF, with the F standing for Force, but no one in the building called it by its unpronounceable acronym, referring to it instead by the humorous alternative. A much-derided memo had instructed operatives to think of the acronym as having a “silent vowel”—pronounce it “YETUF”—but it had achieved no noticeable effect. The name “YETI” even appeared on the few departmental signs around the place, but only because it was so easy to remove the horizontal stripes of a capital F with Wite-Out.

  Abernathy had told them a few months ago that a leading cabinet member had taken to calling them YETI, too, which had had the entire control room in stitches when he’d done an impromptu impression using exactly the same delivery that the minister used when he was interviewed for commentary on the news.

  The control room itself was a postmodern cube of vast displays and associated workstations. The people who operated it on a daily basis were all highly trained intelligence personnel, analysts with backgrounds in law enforcement, or the spying community.

  What made YETI different, however, was the age of its covert operatives.

  There wasn’t one of them over the age of eighteen.

  It was an utterly secret department, backed by the very highest authorities in the country, and answerable only to the home secretary and the prime minister. They remained out of public documents, and only once had a journalist gotten even a slight whiff of the organization, a “scoop” that had led—through the well-timed release of some incriminating evidence stored for just such an occasion—to the downfall of a leading Sunday tabloid.

  As Joe made his way across the room he received respectful, solemn nods from the analysts at work there, and he felt for the first time in a while that he really did belong.

  In the days following Andy’s death Joe had believed that this life was behind him now, that he no longer belonged here, that his inability to help his friend had closed these doors behind him. He had been angry, riddled with guilt, and scared, and instead of throwing himself back into operations—to carry on the important work that Andy had died for—Joe had closed himself off and shut himself down.

  Now he was beginning to see that reaction as a mistake, a knee jerk of shame and a snail-into-shell retreat from a lack of self-confidence.

  Abernathy was waiting for him by the briefing room at the far corner of the control room and they both went inside.

  The briefing room looked a lot like a classroom with desks lined up in front of a digital whiteboard. Joe sat down at a desk, and Abernathy moved to the front of the room and swiped the whiteboard w
ith his arm to turn it on. Abernathy’s ID was subcutaneous, implanted into his arm, and it also acted like a universal remote control for gadgets and doors.

  “Glad you could make it, Joe,” Abernathy said. The rare show of emotion made his voice sound less clipped and stern than it usually did.

  “Glad to be back. Now tell me everything you know.”

  Abernathy nodded, and it was obvious that he was pleased with Joe’s back-to-work attitude, because he gestured with his arm and the board suddenly displayed a high-resolution image of a group of teens, four boys and a girl.

  “The picture you’re looking at is a publicity photo of a band called Precision Image, the prime movers behind the whole X-Core scene.” He double-tapped on the boy at the center of the picture and the photo zoomed in on a sullen white face with only the bright blue eyes showing any kind of life. A shock of bleached-blond hair, gelled into spikes, served only to make the boy look angry.

  “I’ve seen him,” Joe said, and Abernathy looked surprised. “Well, I saw a photo of him that came out of Lennie’s room. Turns out he’s a personal friend of Lennie’s.”

  Abernathy lifted an eyebrow as he took that information onboard.

  “Curiouser and curiouser. Anyway, he calls himself Null-A,” Abernathy said, and Joe had a nagging impression that he had heard the name before. “Lead vocalist with Precision Image. Real name: Harry Brewster. Attended prep school in Dulwich; then a top school that boasts some of the best results—and wealthiest parents—in the United Kingdom. Straight As across the board. Son of James and Nora Brewster—he’s a dotcom millionaire, developer of an online office manager for small businesses; she writes chick lit and is successful enough at it to have spawned two films and a TV series.

  “Preliminary reports show that Harry’s interest in music was limited to classical—he’s a prodigiously skilled pianist—until about six months ago.”