Eight months after that New Year’s Eve triumph, Alex’s taxi turned off the avenue into the tree-lined approach to the Zografou laboratory complex, and the late-afternoon sun glaring off the windscreen momentarily blinded him.
As the driver braked sharply, Alex leaned forward and saw a long tailback of stationary cars blocking the entrance to the university car park. Beyond the barrier, a crowd of lab technicians and students had gathered in the heat, craning their necks toward the main physics building. As the sun-glare cleared from Alex’s eyes, he made out four blue-and-white police patrol cars and an ambulance with its roof beacons flashing crimson against the concrete pillars.
‘Stop the cab here,’ Alex told the driver quickly. ‘I’ll walk the rest.’
Touching his Handy-Comm to the fare-reader on the dashboard, Alex slipped out of the passenger door and ducked between the dusty oleander shrubs bordering the perimeter fence. Keeping his head down and his pace brisk but unhurried, he circled round the back of the block toward the service yard used for canteen deliveries and refuse collection.
Slipping through the loading-bay door, Alex took the concrete fire-stairs two at a time up to the third floor.
Even before he reached the upper landing, he could hear raised, urgent voices echoing down the tiled corridor outside his laboratory. Peering cautiously through the wired-glass panel of the stairwell door, Alex saw half a dozen armed municipal police officers and university security staff clustered around the reinforced entrance to Lab 3B.
Standing tall in their midst, his silver-white hair unmistakable beneath the strip-lights, was Dr Nestor Drakos.
Two burly policemen were wedging the chisel end of a heavy steel crowbar into the seam of the laboratory door and heaving with all their weight. ‘It won’t budge a millimetre!’ grunted the senior officer, wiping sweat from his forehead.
Drakos turned calmly to the police inspector in charge. ‘As I explained, Inspector, that bulkhead is titanium-sheathed. And I am afraid Dr White has his personal Handy-Comm with him and is the only other person on campus cleared to release the interlock.’
Taking a deep breath to steady his nerves, Alex pushed open the stairwell door and walked down the corridor toward them.
‘Alex!’ Drakos called out sharply, striding forward to meet him. ‘Where on earth have you been? We have been trying to reach you for an hour! Why didn’t you answer your Handy?’
Alex’s Everyday Multipurpose Handheld Communicator—the slim slate that every citizen in 2042 used simultaneously as wallet, terminal, security pass, and telephone—was sitting in his trouser pocket switched to silent.
‘Sorry, Nestor—left it in my locker,’ Alex lied smoothly, looking toward the yellow crime-scene tape stretched across the corridor alcove. ‘What’s happened here?’
Drakos laid a heavy hand on Alex’s shoulder, his dark eyes sombre. ‘Somebody attempted to force entry into the laboratory about an hour ago, Alex. When the perimeter alarm triggered, the intruder shot the duty security guard on his rounds.’ Drakos paused, lowering his voice. ‘I know you were fond of Nikos. I’m afraid he died in the ambulance outside thirty minutes ago.’
Alex felt the blood drain from his face, remembering the jovial sixty- year-old guard who had shared late-night coffees with him for ten years. ‘God, no… Nikos? How did they even try to get past the outer door?’
‘Cloned Handy-Comm—yours, I’d wager,’ said the police inspector, stepping closer and fixing Alex with a suspicious stare.
‘A cloned Handy wouldn’t open that door in a million years,’ Alex replied flatly. ‘We don’t use standard university pass-codes here. We have a separate biometric interlock.’ The inspector glanced from Alex to Drakos, raising a sceptical eyebrow.
Earlier that spring, following a directive from the Office for Security and Intelligence at the Eastern European headquarters, Drakos had agreed to upgrade the containment wing with military-grade bio-readers. Opening the laboratory door required a live sample of either Dr Drakos’s or Dr White’s blood. To make forgery mathematically impossible, both scientists had received an intravenous nanobot injection that randomly spliced a synthetic base-pair sequence into their non- coding DNA—a living molecular key that only the door’s sequencer could read, paired simultaneously with the encrypted handshake of their Handy-Comms.
Stepping past the policeman with the crowbar, Alex drew his Handy- Comm from his pocket—ignoring Drakos’s fleeting frown at the device he had just claimed to have lost—held it flat against the induction plate, and thrust his right index finger into the narrow sampling aperture beside the door.
For three seconds the scanner whirred; then a tiny surgical lancet snapped upward inside the slot.
‘Ow! Damn it, I’ll never get used to that,’ Alex muttered, pulling his finger free and sucking a bead of bright red blood from the tip as the status light turned green and the heavy pneumatic bolts retracted with a deep clunk.
Ordering the municipal police to wait outside the threshold, Drakos followed Alex straight through the outer laboratory to the reinforced inner vault at the rear of the room.
Alex keyed his six-digit cipher into the keypad and stepped back.
The moment the heavy vault door swung open an inch, Alex’s heart stopped.
The shock-absorbent cradle in the centre of the steel table was empty. His portable New Year’s Eve tachyon retriever—along with its synthetic crystal core—was gone.
Alex looked at Drakos. Drakos looked back at Alex. Neither man spoke, because both of them knew the exact same cold, inescapable truth: no thief from the street could have opened that vault. Only two human beings on earth carried the nanobot-modified DNA sequence required to cycle the outer bulkhead and the inner safe. The botched break-in at the corridor door—and the cold-blooded murder of poor Nikos—had been staged as a theatrical distraction to cover a theft that had already occurred from the inside.
‘We can’t leave this with the municipal police,’ Alex said, his voice tight as he stepped back from the empty cradle. ‘I’m calling our liaison at the Bureau.’
Pulling out his Handy-Comm, Alex scrolled down his encrypted contacts list and stopped at the letter B.
Major Boro Grol.
Forty years old, six feet four inches of scarred Slavonic muscle, and an ex-commando with a razor for a brain. Grol had been invalided out of the military in 2032 at the age of thirty with a full major’s pension and a pair of completely shattered knees—both souvenirs of a roadside improvised explosive device during the North Korean stabilisation conflict of 2031.
During his decade in special operations, Grol had demonstrated a fluency in six European languages and an uncanny talent for breaking stubborn men—he was, as the service files delicately phrased it, good with people, in a bad way. While recovering in a military orthopaedic ward in Belgrade with titanium hinges bolted into both patellas, he had been recruited directly into the Eastern European Security and Intelligence Bureau (SIB) headquartered in Athens. Faced with the choice of civilian retirement or driving a desk in Belgrade, Grol had chosen the SIB.
Alex had always suspected that his mentor, Professor Nestor Drakos, kept dark secrets buried beneath his austere academic manner. As he pressed the call key and listened to the secure line ring at SIB headquarters, he had no idea just how deep—and how ancient—those secrets were.
