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an oddly guarded expression; one that said ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.
    “Just one thing,” Simon said, barely able to hear his own voice over the roar of the rain. “Where is Victoria Land?”
    Jonathan grinned in spite of himself and shook his head. “Geography never was your best subject, was it?” He focused his dark eyes on his oldest friend in the world. “Antarctica, Simon,” he said. “Next to the Ross Ice Shelf.”
    Then he got into his car and drove away.
    Simon stood in the storm for a long moment as the car drifted down the drive, taillights flaring as it turned and surged silently into the night. Then he turned and looked back at his apartment building.
    It was one of four flats in an odd little two-story building—pink stone, white cornices, and a circular turret at each end for his octagonal dining room, all windows and wood. Fae had left the porch light on; he could see the flickering fire of the study in the window far to one side and the warm glow in the dining room in the windows of the turret. There was a twisting blue light coming from a window on the far side as well: his neighbor, Mrs. Ellingsworth, was still watching her “telly” late into the night. The multi-colored glow of the display twinkled against her rain-spattered window.
    It should have been a comforting sight. He had come to love his digs; his apartment had become a true home for him—not an easy thing to accomplish for a childless, single man in his mid-thirties.
    But it didn’t matter to him. Not now. All he could see was the image of his father, smiling stiffly, hiding something horrible behind his eyes. Ha. Ha.
    He had to do something about it. He had to.

THE ROOM WITH NO WINDOWS
An Undisclosed Location

    The man who called himself “Blackburn” stood in the exact center of the room he had commandeered for his private communications. It was a perfectly cubical space; its walls were made of featureless, nearly translucent modules. It was absolutely silent in the room; this far below the surface, not even the movement of the air itself made a sound.
    He was staring at a frozen holo-display floating in the air in front of him—a single, motionless image, no bigger than a dinner plate, captured hours earlier by a mobile security cam roaming London. A slice of features belonging to the only human in the image was barely identifiable by facial recognition software that tagged the subject’s identity and forwarded the information to Blackburn, immediately and automatically.
    It was an image of one of the many people Blackburn kept tabs on at all times. The man in question was that important—and that dangerous.
    “Jonathan Weiss,” he said aloud.
    Mr. Weiss was a clever man. That cleverness had made him very useful to Blackburn for quite some time. But now…too clever by half. Too clever for his own good.
    The camera had caught him sprinting back to his anonymously rented car in the middle of a cloudburst, fleeing from an odd and lovely British apartment building, complete with red brick turrets and fire-lit windows. It was the home of one Simon Fitzpatrick—a man that Jonathan Weiss had been ordered to avoid at all costs. Another dangerous man—but dangerous in an entirely different way.
    Internal audio of their meeting was unavailable; thread interrogation had failed as well. But that didn’t matter to Blackburn. The image itself was enough, because Weiss wasn’t supposed to be in London. He wasn’t even supposed to be in that hemisphere. And his presence there—his meeting with Fitzpatrick, no matter the reason—was absolutely forbidden.
    Blackburn sighed bitterly. He hated to admit it, and it had taken an unusually long time by his exacting standards, but Jonathan Weiss had finally outlived his usefulness.
    Without moving from the exact center of his windowless room, Blackburn touched his right ear and initiated a call to one of the very few people who had direct contact with him. It took only