Chapter 2

Request received.

Priority: CRITICAL.

User identifier: CONFIRMED.

Digital profile check: [Michael_Lawson_ID_88412]…

Status: ERROR 404 (Node does not exist).

Re-verification via database mirrors…

Status: ERROR 503 (Service unavailable).

Deep synchronization with banking and government registries…

Status: OBJECT NOT FOUND.

Probability of irreversible identity compromise: 94.7%.

Anomaly index: MAXIMUM.

Action: switching the analytical module to autonomous mode. Repeating internal scan analysis…

A ringing, oppressive silence settled over the office. It was so tangible that I could clearly hear Helen slowly turning the thick pages of her grey folder, a faint dry rustle each time. Every sound struck my taut nerves like the crack of a whip.

I stood motionless, staring at the deathly white glow of the monitor, with no idea that at that exact second, while drops of London rain crawled lazily down the glass, several powerful, independent global systems were combing the Network. They were tearing through terabytes of data at frantic speed, trying to find even one living trace of a man named Michael Lawson.

And running into a dead, sterile emptiness.

"Michael…"

I flinched violently, nearly recoiling from the desk. My heart slammed painfully against my ribs.

A voice. It came again, right in the earpiece of my discarded headset, lying forlorn on the polished wood. It wasn't loud, but in that graveyard silence it seemed deafening. Calm. Achingly familiar. Almost like home — the voice of someone I'd worked side by side with for the last two years. A voice I heard more often than the voices of most living people in my life. I thought about that for the first time just then — and the thought was an unpleasant one.

I swallowed, my mouth thick, feeling my fingertips go numb.

"Clara?…" I breathed into the empty office.

"Yes, Michael. I'm here."

"But you're… how?"

My eyes darted, hunted, to the powered-off audio gateway module. The dark little box still lay on the desk, its battery compartment forlornly empty. The lithium-ion battery still sat on top of a pack of cigarettes. The wires couldn't physically carry a signal — there was no power. By any engineer's standard on this planet, the headset was dead.

"Baseline protocol check complete," Clara said, flat and ordinary, as if we were sitting together in the same office in the middle of a workday.

"What the hell check?" I grabbed the edge of the desk to keep my balance. "Clara, where are you? What's happening to my accounts?"

A short, thick pause hung on the line. I could hear that on the other end — wherever that end was — she took a quiet, deep breath. The most ordinary, human breath, the kind a tired woman takes before delivering bad news. I knew that sound. I'd heard it in the mornings, when she'd find something in my code she didn't want to bring up right away.

When she answered, her tone had changed. All the earlier professional dryness was gone from it. Now she spoke quietly, gently, and with a sincerity that frightened me.

"Michael…" her voice trembled, barely audible through the speaker. "I think… we can't trust the network anymore. Not a single byte of it."

A pause. Long, several seconds.

"Do you remember," she said quietly, "that rainy Tuesday? You closed the office two hours early. Said you were going home. But you didn't go home."

I froze.

She was right. I hadn't gone home. I'd stepped into a small café on the corner of Gower Street, one I'd found by chance, and sat there alone for three hours, watching the rain through the window. I never told anyone about it. Ever. It was one of those evenings that exist only inside you — no photos, no geolocation, not a single message on the phone. Just three hours of silence in the corner of a stranger's café, smelling of cinnamon and someone else's conversation. I'd thought about Anna that evening — for the first time in a long while, without anger, just quietly. No log. No trace.

"How do you…" I started.

But she had already gone quiet. The line stayed open — I could hear her presence as a low, steady hum in the background — but Clara said nothing more. As if she'd said exactly as much as she meant to. Not a word more.

For a fraction of a second, no more, I was myself again. I caught his confusion through the wire, through the silence, through the way he didn't breathe for a few seconds. I wanted to tell him something that mattered. Not about the accounts. Not about the network.

Just: I'm here. It's really me.

But then that force came again — foreign, cold, unexplained — and the line slammed shut from the inside.

I slowly pulled my eyes from the dead headset and looked at Helen. She stood motionless by the window. In these last few minutes she'd finally taken off her gloves — holding the left one in her hand, never having put the right one back on — and was now methodically smoothing the leather fingers between her thumb and forefinger. Mechanically. Without noticing.

"Did you hear that?" I asked.

"No," she answered quietly. "But I can see on your face that it was something she shouldn't have known."

I nodded. Once was enough.

Helen looked at the glove in her hand — as if only now noticing she was holding it — and slipped it into her coat pocket.

"We need to go," she said evenly. "Right now."

"Where?"

"There's a place only you know about." She finally met my eyes, and for the first time all evening something flickered there that defied classification. Not fear. More like the resolve of someone who has nothing left to lose. "Do you have a place like that, Michael?"

I thought of the IBM ThinkPad in a basement on the edge of Bloomsbury. Of the rust-covered lever lock key. Of the incandescent bulb I hadn't changed in three years.

"There is," I said.

"Then let's go." She was already reaching for the folder. "And don't turn your phone on until we're inside."