16/11/07
9:20 AM
The Truro Centre
"Zaf?"
"Come in." Zaf called, sitting up. He could put weight on his hands now. It wasn't comfortable, but he could do it. Tia came through the door.
"Good morning."
"Morning Tia."
"You look bright."
"So do you."
She smiled. "This came for you." She held a plain brown envelope out to him. He took it. "Do you know who it's from?"
"No." He replied, truthfully. He tore the top, which was harder than it should have been, his hands weren't right. Inside was another envelope, addressed to Thames House and a piece of white A4 paper, torn in half. There were letters printed on the paper, grouped like words, but not recognisable words, so code of some sort. At the bottom was an illegible squiggle, but one he recognised, Jo's initials. So Jo had sent him a coded letter. Presumably, he was supposed to break the code. It had been a long times since he'd done this.
"FJ DLFKD QL YB CIXQ ERKQFKD PLLK, F GRPQ TXKQBA QL XPH: PELRIA F YB ILLHFKD CLO LKB OLLJ LO QLT." The letter frequencies were all wrong, so it was a cipher, not a scramble code, or possibly a cipher on top of a scramble code. Jo had obviously meant him to break this, so it she probably hadn't made it too hard, she'd left the word spaces in. And it would be written in English. L was a vowel, there was no four-letter word in English that had a double consonant in the middle. F was either I or A, or standing for something. He looked up. Tia was still standing there.
"Can you not read it?"
"It's code." He showed it to her. She pulled a face.
"That's an odd way to write to someone."
"If you give me pen and paper I can probably break it." Tia pulled a notepad and pen from her pocket and handed them over. "Thanks."
"I'll be back for those. Don't steal them."
"Well I couldn't get very far, could I?"
Zaf stuck with his assumption that the single letter word, F, was I or A and that L was a vowel. If this was only a Caesar shift, F was I. If F was A, L was G, and there were too many four letter words with a double G in the middle for that to be right. So let's say F was I.
"IM GOING TO BE FLAT HUNTING SOON, I JUST WANTED TO ASK: SHOULD I BE LOOKING FOR ONE ROOM OR TWO."
That was probably right. She must still be living in a safe house. He'd given the mercs their previous address, so they couldn't go back there. She'd given him an envelope to put a reply in.
Zaf sighed heavily. Perhaps Adam had put her up to this, to try and find out if Zaf was going to come back to work. Or maybe he hadn't. Maybe this was just Jo asking if he still wanted to live with her. He liked her company. She was easy to share space with. And when it went further than company and sharing space, he liked that too. Or he had done. He was still too sore in that area to think he could enjoy that at the moment. He'd… assumed he was going back to work as soon as he was able to stand and use his hands normally. Once they'd taken his pain meds down a bit, he'd realised HR probably wouldn't let him work until Tring had put him through a lot of psych stuff. Then some of the things his mother had said had started to eat at him. He risked his life several times every year, somehow he'd always made it out so far (this time it had been blind luck), but he couldn't count on that forever. The way he was going he'd be lucky to make it to forty. And what if he did? What if he survived for long enough to retire from the field? He didn't want to settle down and marry, he didn't think he was the type anyway, but as a Spook… He'd seen what losing Fi had done to Adam, and Adam was just about the strongest person he knew. He didn't want to risk that. And he knew that the job had put Adam's kid in danger before.
If he stayed, he'd grow old alone, or die before he grew old. He would be able to make a living as a real translator, Arabic was a language in demand and he didn't see that changing. At this point, he could still get out. Just walk away. Still gagged by the Official Secrets Act, but alive.
He picked up Tia's pen again and wrote a single figure on the inside of Jo's envelope. Two. It wouldn't mean much to anyone who didn't know what she'd asked him, but she'd know what he meant.
Yes, he could live his life in relative safety, hiding in the West, sheltering behind others who were willing to risk everything to protect everyone else and never take a word of thanks, but he couldn't imagine he'd ever be content like that. He'd watch the news and imagine what sort of groups might try bombs or gas or gunmen and wait for the blows to fall, without knowing anything, just hoping Adam and Jo and Ros were on top of it. He couldn't. Not now. Even if this life destroyed him, it was his life. He'd made his choice.