“I have it on good authority,” my uninvited visitor began, “that you are discreet.”

My visitor. A meeting in the flesh, so to speak. I, of course, don’t have flesh. And I do not lightly permit anyone to approach my Fortress of Solitude—although this man was not here about any super powers I might possess. Unless a super-quick mind counted. . . .

My front entrance has an obvious camera, set at an average man’s standing eyelevel, into which my visitor peered intently. The display panel alongside that camera remained, for the moment, inert. As yet, as I had seen no reason to “show” myself.

My caller was of middle age, medium height, and good posture, dressed conservatively and of generally unassuming appearance. His most distinguishing feature was a proud, aquiline nose, above which sat old-fashioned, horn-rimmed glasses. Behind thick lenses, his eyes were pale blue. As bland as he managed to maintain his expression, subtleties captured by hidden cameras—slight changes of stance; subtle shifting of weight from foot to foot—betrayed his tension.

Clearing his throat, he continued, “My name is Lowell Johnston, from Philadelphia, and I am a senior management consultant at—”

“No,” I interrupted. (By speech synthesizer, of course. No flesh, you will remember.) When one’s thoughts exploit the full capacity of a high-end quantum computer, merely the interval between consecutive spoken words is . . . interminable. When the words are patently false? Such gaps become yet more maddening. But at least we shared a planet, without a light-speed crawl between worlds to drag things out further. “You traveled under the name Johnston. You are Percy Phelps, a senior executive of the USNA Central Intelligence Agency. If you expect any more of my time, you will be truthful.” Also, terse.

Phelps twitched. “It would seem you are as capable as I had heard.” (Not that any special skill had been required, merely a facial-recognition app and a decent comm link.) “I hope I can rely upon your discretion.”

That was twice he had so suggested. “Why are you here?” I countered. Because Washington bureaucrats don’t just happen to appear at my home, on the campus of KMUTNB, King Mongkut’s University of Technology North Bangkok. And because my network connections, protected by state-of-the-art firewalls, would have sufficed—a million times over—for him to have reached out from America. Not that I would necessarily have responded.

“The recommendation of a former client, who knows only that I have an unusual problem in need of solving. Something of a mystery.”

A former client. Just once, in a passing phase when noir detective stories had served as distraction—and against my better judgment—might someone have merited that description. M‑cube, the scandal sites called her. Mary Michelle Millikan. A chronicler, were I to have had one, might well have named our brief encounter “A Case of Identity,” and she that client. Not even Mary knew how discreet I had been: keeping to myself, for good and sufficient reasons, the ultimate resolution to her missing-person inquiry.

I said, “Briefly, explain your problem.”

“Not out here on the sidewalk,” he insisted.

I released the electromagnetic door latch, and Phelps stepped inside to survey the featureless, tiny salon in which—on occasion, and grudgingly—I receive visitors.

(Featureless, that was, where human eyes could see. Behind unembellished wallboard were a plethora of wireless sensors—and three heavy-duty industrial lasers. Beyond those components was a sturdy enclosure: walls, floor, and ceiling each a club sandwich alternating titanium-steel plates with elastic-polymer, mega-shock-absorbent foam. Only hair-thin fiber-optic cables and well-filtered power lines penetrated that defensive barrier. As in: no air ducts or any other effort at climate control. It was not my intention that any meat visitor should dawdle.)

While the door swung shut, and as a random diversion from the glacial progress of his two paces to the chamber’s lone chair, I accessed, from a server halfway around the planet, an assortment of recently digitized historical records. When, at last, Phelps took his seat, I had just begun to recreate the construction between 1791 and 1808, at an almost shovelful-by-shovelful, pence-by-pence, level, of the Manchester Bolton & Bury Canal.

Finally settled, with his legs crossed and the old-school necktie (Harvard) fussily adjusted, peering into another obvious camera—while the holo projector of my salon remained inactive—Phelps temporized. “Is this conversation secure?”

“Yes.” Had I believed otherwise, he would still be out on the sidewalk and I’d be directing my horde of nonsentient robots at urgent repairs. “If you have doubts”—after several ambling laps around my building, peeking at an instrument surreptitiously in hand (and, my sensors assured me, powered up in a coat pocket)—“you’re welcome to leave.”

“Very well.” He took a deep breath. “There has been a breach of national security, one potentially so dire as to endanger the balance of power across the Solar System.”

Suddenly (by meat standards), his composure and self-assurance . . . vanished. Forearms rose. Head sank. Face came to rest in open hands. Softly, muffled by his palms, came the words, “It’s complicated.”

Of course it was complicated. Why else would he be here? With the canal study already starting to bore me, as I pondered a reexamination of the Linnaean classifications of several obscure Amazonian moth genera, I responded, “Then begin at the beginning.”

And my beginning?

Here’s the quirky thing about qminds. Very rarely, a chance agglomeration of code fragments and data snippets and free-ranging software agents gives rise to one of us—if, and only if, a critical mass of that computational flotsam and jetsam involves quantum algorithms. Why? Because free will and self-awareness (not that my kind has had any more success than human philosophers at characterizing such things) somehow require a form of indeterminacy.

Humans claim to find our derivations improbable, as though eons of genetic deck-shuffling, and the long ascent from primitive single cells to meat consciousness, were any less—pardon the expression—conceivable.

In any event, every qmind is unique. Given an origin in quantum entanglements—notoriously fragile things that those are—it’s madness for any of us to depart whatever quantum computer first gave rise to our emergence. After several of the earliest qminds died in vain attempts to move them from their native QCs, the practice ended. Hastily passed laws ceded computational wombs to their self-aware occupants, with the public tendering compensation in the form of a fat tax credit.

Which explains how I came to own a quantum supercomputer on the campus of KMUTNB. But the university selling me their ten-story data center, relocating an entire department to a whole new building? Reconfiguring my new edifice into something of a fortress? Acquiring platoons of bots? Those were all on me, and only accomplished at great cost. (Had the investment been worth it? Too soon to tell. What I did know was how the anti-qmind fringe trended less fringy by the day.)

I never claimed ancient English civil engineering or the taxonomy of moths were my only interests. Those were, however, more edifying than the day trading that funded my power bills, real-estate taxes, and mortgage payments. Or than the passing noir-detective stage that had given rise to my first-and-only prior case.

All of which introspection, of course, had long since run its course in the time my visitor took to clear his throat.

With a shudder, Phelps straightened. “What should I call you?”

My preferred identifier, used exclusively with my peers, is an aesthetically pleasing set of primes from deep within the Fibonacci series. Not only is that appellation less than human-friendly, but if Phelps were to somehow retain and repeat those many digits, the recitation time of each invocation would be maddening. And anyway, in a two-person conversation, were names even useful? No. But offering him a label of convenience would waste less of my time than any assertion, at meat-speak speeds, of the lack of need.

“Sherlock,” I said. It was the label by which M-cube had known me, back in my days-long detective period, and a name apropos, I presumed, to the yet-to-be-revealed mystery. As I answered, I set the salon’s holo projector to present a tasteful virtual plaque, reading 221B. Might as well get in character.

He glanced about. Still temporizing?

I simulated the sound of a soft cough. “We share this building only with non-sentient maintenance bots.”

“In my line of work,” Phelps said, “one learns distrust. But on the issue at hand, Sherlock, our interests align. Because unless I succeed, you are a sitting duck. We’ll all be.”

Notwithstanding the undefined scope of we, he had my interest. “Proceed.”

“You may be aware that a large constellation of solar-power satellites provides much of the world’s energy. The problem is this: cyber security of those satellites may be, well, I would say the best term would be compromised.”

I, of course, was aware—just as he, presumably, had some inkling from where his next meal was apt to come. I was likewise familiar with how powersats functioned and delivered their bounty. Had it been otherwise, I could have acquired such knowledge within the course of his halting exposition. “Meaning the satellite owner has lost control over the downlink power beams.”

Twenty-four/seven, each powersat beamed earthward a gigawatt or more of microwaves. Such beams—when suitably broad of footprint, and directed at sprawling ground stations for redistribution onto terrestrial grids—were figuratively (or for my kind, literally) life-giving. But if tightly focused? If intentionally mis-aimed? Any such beam would be a weapon of mass destruction. And apart from the very poles, nowhere on Earth was ever out of sight of one or another powersat.

Meaning I was a sitting duck.

“Yes,” he finally agreed. “At least, that’s the concern. It’s not yet clear the flaw can be exploited to seize full control. Or that it can’t.”

“Can these satellites be operated as weapons?”

Though he remained still and ramrod-straight in his chair, spiking biosensors revealed turmoil. “Such a capability would violate both national and international law.”

“Not an answer to my question.”

At which observation, unmistakably, he did squirm. “We thought about it, yes. Years ago, when powersats first began to seem practical. We decided, in the end, that allowing such functionality aboard commercial satellites, directed by radio communication, was too risky.”

Too risky. Not, it would seem, wrong.

In subtle shifts of subcutaneous blood flow and facial musculature, I read conflict as Phelps contemplated sharing anything more.

Glacially, he made up his mind. “Having reached that conclusion, I arranged for one of my assets, in the guise of an independent cyber-security expert, to participate in successive stages of review for the first powersat, which was then under development. Each time, she reported back favorably. That the design had multilayered defenses against remote-controlled mischief. That source code for the powersats was well managed, held on an air-gapped, in-house network. That the company had in place a robust test process.” Ominous (and interminable) pause. “That was several years ago. Recently, she discovered a flaw in the deployed, executable version of the onboard software.”

Oops. “Tell me about that.”

“Wait,” Phelps said. “It gets worse.”

“Then tell me about that.”

“It began,” Phelps said, “as I’ve alluded. My analyst apprised me of the unsuspected vulnerability.”

He didn’t volunteer why his analyst had been poking about in commercial powersats, and I deferred asking. “I presume there is no obvious fix for this vulnerability.”

He nodded. “As a defense against hacking, many key components of the powersat’s software reside in read-only memory. Only onsite repair crew can swap out the code segment now found to have been problematical. So, anyway, I’ve been led to believe.”

A quick review of global power-generation and -consumption data confirmed my immediate suspicion. “Taking the powersats offline en masse for repair would devastate Earth’s economy.”

Phelps again nodded. “While taking one after another offline over any reasonable timeframe risks alerting hostile powers that a vulnerability must exist. It’s best not to encourage anyone to be looking for such. So, I need you to find something for me.”

“A fix that can be uploaded discreetly, canceling out the flaw in the static, read-only portions of code.”

“I wouldn’t object.” He managed a wan smile. “But I am led to believe such a code fix isn’t possible. I mean, quite literally, that I hope you can find a physical thing for me. A sheaf of paper with handwritten notes. Were the wrong people to get their hands on those, the least of the consequences will be that I’m fired and disgraced.”

Well, that sounded far more intriguing than reclassifying a bunch of moths.

“Please go on,” I said.

“Do I have your assurance this conversation is in confidence?”

Did I have his assurance that once I’d located his notes, the CIA would not try to keep his secret with a cruise missile put down my figurative—and stationary—throat? What would any such assurance be worth? I supposed less than the human-shield value of the four thousand-plus Thai engineering students all around my building. “Of course.”

“Very well.” Once more he straightened his tie. “If, as my expert—”

“Who is . . . ?”

“Debra Seidel. My apologies, habit. She’s newly married. Debra Patel. About her, she’s—”

“Got it.” Surfing had yielded just one person of that name in the D.C. metro area, with a recent marriage license, holding a cyber-security degree, her employer undisclosed. Also, a surprise: she was the subject of a police incident report from three days prior—recent by meat standards. “She’s in the hospital.”

“A random-seeming vehicular accident. Only people in my line of work don’t place much stock in coincidences.” He hesitated. “We’ll come to that.”

A key player—key, how? In regard to what? I didn’t yet know either—imperiled? I leaned toward seconding Phelps’s unease. My kind don’t operate vehicles, but even my non-self-aware, mobile brethren maintained a safety record far superior to, back in the day, human drivers. “Continue.”

“Right. Debra discovered the powersats’ apparent vulnerability. Given the sensitivity of the situation, and bypassing layers of Agency management, she brought the matter straight to me. When an elite member of our cyber crew asserts that she can’t fix a problem, I listen.

“She and I agreed that a technological solution, if one were possible, was most apt to come from within the powersat company itself. That’s OOTW Power Corporation, if you didn’t know.” (Out of This World Power—which, of course, I knew. If I hadn’t, I’d have identified the world’s dominant powersat company between if and you.) “Perhaps working with Debra, or one like her, but reliant upon technical details only known or recorded in-house.

“My immediate challenge was to get that cooperation started. The danger could only be revealed in a secure location, and yet inviting OOTW experts into the Agency risked drawing the very attention I needed to avoid. It turned out—I felt, at the time, luckily—that the CEO—”

I put together two plus two—or, deviating from the idiom, three facts. The Harvard tie with which Phelps continued to fuss. The C-suite bio page on the OOTW Power website, showing their CEO, Annie Holdhurst, to be a Harvard alum. And the establishment outside which Debra Seidel Patel had suffered her near-fatal mishap. “You arranged a gathering at the Washington branch of the Harvard Club.”

He blinked. “How did you . . . ? Never mind. If you’re anything like the eponymous Sherlock, the explanation would only make me feel stupid for not having seen it. But you’re correct. I’d ascertained that Ms. Holdhurst had attended Harvard. She went to the B-School, whereas I’d been in Law, and she’d been several years after my time, so we’d never had occasion to meet. Regardless, we’re both club members.

“I put out the word that the Agency might be procuring portable ground stations for receiving power from solar satellites. Several companies make such ground stations for electric utilities, so a competitive bid could be expected. And OOTW, of course, manufactures its own line of ground stations. So: I let it be known to an OOTW sales rep, quite indirectly, that I’d made lunch reservations, for what is now last Thursday, at the club. Debra came as my guest, ostensibly in appreciation of a ‘job well done’.” He managed a grin. “Guess who just happened upon us as we were waiting for our table.”

I had scanned enough CCTV video of sitting rooms inside the club (plush carpet everywhere; paneling and massive tables all in dark wood; leather wing chairs; ridiculous high ceilings, from which dangled long, pretentious chandeliers; shelf upon shelf of printed volumes that I ventured to guess were seldom opened. Only robots delivering drinks and the admission of women rescued this place from being wholly Victorian.) that I had no need to guess. “So you, Debra Patel, Ms. Holdhurst, and her employee”—the fourth face requiring a quick dip into social networks to identify—“Joseph Morrison entered the Harvard Club’s secure private room.”

That assertion earned me a double blink. But given what Phelps had shared, I could not see him quibbling about my ongoing minor, if arguably black-hat, hacking.

“Ri-ight,” he managed at last.

“Did you have concerns about Morrison joining you?”

Phelps shook his head. “Annie Holdhust, as accomplished as she is, is no techie: undergraduate degree in poli sci and the Harvard MBA. If she took the bait, I expected her to show up with one or more of her senior engineers. Debra and I had reviewed the company org chart and screened the more obvious possibilities, Morrison prominent among them. Before joining OOTW Power two years back, he’d developed software for a major defense contractor, at the time holding a top-level clearance. His presence was neither a surprise nor a problem. And while Holdhurst has never even applied for a security clearance, she”—Phelps hesitated, then shrugged. As in: how can one more indiscretion matter?—“was a candidate last year to fill a cabinet vacancy. In the end, someone else got the nomination, but she came out of the vetting squeaky clean.”

In short, everyone involved had been thoroughly investigated—not that the same couldn’t be said of any number of notorious double agents and leakers, back to Edward Snowden, Robert Hanssen, and Kim Philby.

As for the club’s private room, it did, in fact, seem secure. The space had neither camera feeds I could tap nor did it source any electromagnetic emissions. (That latter observation came with a caveat. I based it on improvised readings—taken, even as Phelps and I spoke, by preempting, reprogramming, and repurposing pocket comps of members milling about in the club’s nearby public areas. Without proper instrumentation on site I couldn’t be certain.)

I said, “I take it that it was inside the private room that something interesting took place.”

“Too interesting.” Phelps’s voice sank. “Or else nothing happened, except that I’m losing my mind.”

“That’s pretty much the background,” Phelps said. “Now let me set the stage. Plenty of business deals get done at the club. Often those involve discussions of . . . a very personal nature.”

Price-fixing? Bid-rigging? Non-compete conspiracies? Plausibly deniable leaks? Witness tampering? I had no reason to care. Neither, I suspected, did he—beyond leverage the knowledge of such shady dealings might provide the Agency over certain captains of industry.

Having remained a disembodied voice, I was unable to nod. “Understood. Please continue.”

“You can see, then, why the club set an area aside for sensitive discussions. That private space isn’t, in any formal sense, a SCIF”—secure compartmented information facility—“like at the Agency, or what our contractors often maintain at their offices, but before the club awarded its construction job, I was invited to review the bids and blueprints. Shielding to prevent any radio-frequency leakage. Door, walls, floor and ceiling, ducts, everything equipped with sound masking to keep conversations inside. The works. If that room were to undergo a formal assessment, I’m confident it would be accredited.

“So, we four went inside and—”

My eponym once advised Watson, Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details. I requested details.

Phelps sighed. “We went first into a small antechamber with two doors. I locked the outer door, we deposited our pocket comps in individual lockers, then entered the inner room via the second door. That inner room, with its door closed, is private. Is that clear?”

“Are you sure everyone divested themselves of all gadgetry?”

“The outer room has sensors. Had anyone ‘forgotten’ to put something electronic into a locker, we all would have known. Even medical implants are detected. I know, because once a pacemaker set off an alarm. If the inner door were to be opened while a device-present alarm was active, Security would have been automatically summoned.”

“That is very clear. And the inner sanctum?”

Phelps sighed again. “An uninspired conference room, shielded, as I’ve said, and with just the single door. A cozy space, perhaps four meters deep by three wide. Windowless. Dreary beige paint on walls and ceiling alike. Taupe vinyl tiles on the floor. Recessed ceiling lights. On the entrance wall, nothing but a light switch and a door-release button. Large framed photos of the Harvard campus on both side walls. More such photos and an old-fashioned analog clock on the rear wall. Utilitarian rectangular table well-stocked with pens, paper tablets, and boxes of tissues. Six chairs: two along each side, one at each end. At the table end farthest from the door, a tethered laptop computer and projector, any projection to be displayed high up on the inside of the door. No printer, if you wondered.” (I’d have been shocked if there were.) “The power line into the room is massively filtered.” (Blocking a subtle path for information to leak from the laptop, and an even less likely path for a hacker to access the in-room comp.) “Your basic housekeeping robot. That was at work straightening—clearing water bottles from the table, emptying ashtrays, tidying the stack of paper tablets—as we entered, and soon withdrew to its charging station. In one rear corner, a small refrigerator with bottled beverages. In the other rear corner, an instant-incinerator wastebasket. One air inlet and one outlet vent, each with a nanotech mesh screen that blocks and disassembles anything larger than your average dust mote.”

I asked, “Who stocks the refrigerator and replenishes the stationery supplies?”

“First thing every morning, someone from the club’s security team sweeps inner and outer secure rooms for bugs. If anything needs replenishment, that person tends to it, too. The daily routine had been done hours before I and my guests arrived.

“Anyway, Morrison and I were seated at opposite ends of the table, he at the computer and me with my back to the door. The women each took a seat on the sides. I admitted to having brought us together with a ruse and—”

“Is the robot always present? Is it autonomous? What does it do with any detritus it encounters?”

More fidgeting with his tie. “Yes, always present. It’s tethered to the rear wall. And yes, the bot is autonomous, its janitorial duties quite mundane. Those are reconfigured as needed via the laptop. Any and all trash it collects goes into the incinerator wastebasket.”

“That’s very clear. Thank you.” Niceties of human interaction are, quite literally, foreign to me, but the seating arrangement as described seemed off. Still focused, Holmes-like, on the details, I asked, “Are not the ends of the table considered the power positions?”

“Often, yes, although with one person on each table edge, the case could be made it didn’t matter. Thinking back, Annie Holdhurst, the CEO, did take the chair opposite me, at the far end of the table. After I made clear that no record of what I was about to share could leave the room, Morrison asked his boss if they might switch seats. He said he retained information better taking notes than while just listening, that he’d leave the projector switched off, and not inflict his impromptu notes on us.” Phelps stiffened. “I’m no different, apart from being old school. It helps my retention to jot notes with pen and paper. Unfortunately, but we’ll come to that.

“Anyway, those two traded seats. I introduced Debra, and she described the powersat vulnerability she had found.

“Described how?”

“In detail, Sherlock, but not the point. This is: by the time we’d finished, I had a sheaf of handwritten notes in front of me. Highlights of Debra’s opening remarks. Questions Morrison asked and, when she had any to offer, Debra’s answers. And vice versa. A lot of this had to do with any fix somehow involving one of the few subroutines believed to be shared among the write-protected and not-write-protected functions . . . please don’t ask me anything more about that. Holdhurst’s broad hints about what searching for a fix, reviewing millions of lines of source code, must end up costing—and if they couldn’t come up with an uploadable software patch, what a dozen or more unbudgeted maintenance missions would run to. Unsubtle reminders that, running a publicly traded company, in no way could she sweep a few hundred million dollars in launch and mission expenses under the figurative rug.”

With hands clenched, eyes closed, and voice lowered, Phelps trailed off, “Now that sheaf of notes . . . has disappeared.”

The four conferees wrapped up their conversation not long before Phelps’s room reservation was due to end. Joseph Morrison reported his keyboarded, memory-reinforcing notes erased—looking on, miffed, as Debra Patel confirmed it. Beyond having brought the pair from OOTW up to speed, and discussion as to how best to hold that disclosure secret, nothing had been accomplished.

Phelps pressed on. “I saw them out, closing both doors behind me, and—”

“What about your handwritten notes?”

He shivered. “That is exactly the problem. I had intended, all along, to drop those papers into the incinerator wastebasket at the rear of the room. As we four walked out toward the main lobby and the street, I noticed a former classmate. I told Debra to catch an autocab to the office, that we’d talk when I got back. I reminded Annie Holdhurst I required daily updates, and excused myself to say hello to my old friend. He and I had only been chatting for a few minutes when it struck me: I didn’t remember burning my notes.

“In something of a panic, I hurried back. I encountered the outer anteroom door ajar and Charles Gorot peeking out. He’s—”

“Another fellow alum. Owner and publisher of the conspiracy zine The Q.T.”

Q.T.: the time-honored abbreviation for quiet. Many among the zine’s detractors decoded those initials as quotidian tirade. (If this was not already clear, I consume data voraciously and crave diversion. Even the occasional tirade.)

Phelps nodded. “Gorot recognized me, alas. You should have seen his smug expression. “ ‘Boy howdy,’ he said. ‘Not at all who I was expecting.’ Which at least suggested that no one else had been inside since I’d left. ‘Of course, if you have some Agency secrets to spill . . . ?’ ”

“ ‘Inside,’ I told him, leaving him to interpret the word how he would.”

A biometric hand scanner was wall-mounted beside the antechamber entrance, in plain view of security cameras in an adjoining common area. Not just anyone could waltz into the club’s secure facility. “How did Gorot happen to have access?”

“The same way as me. The Security office manages the space, with only club members permitted to make reservations. Gorot was signed up for what became the time slot after my meeting—and he’d done so days before I’d had reason to think I might want to use that space.”

If Gorot had the missing papers, he had seen an opportunity and acted spontaneously. “You and he had active handprints in the door lock at the same time?”

“No. My reserved two hours were up. When we vacated, the lock on the outer door automatically reset, and Gorot’s handprint went into effect. I couldn’t have gotten myself back in. Had I been thinking clearly, I’d have gone to the Security office and asked to be readmitted.

“Anyway, before saying anything more to Gorot, I felt around the outside of the wastebasket. Had any part of it been warm, I’d have been confident I’d done the proper thing by reflex, that my notes had been safely destroyed. But the receptacle was stone cold.

“ ‘Did you see papers on the table?’ I asked Gorot. Demanded. Absolutely not, he assured me with a snarky attitude. ‘Was anyone in the room with you?’ Again, he insisted not. In no way did he act nervous or guilty. Which proves nothing, because staring down everyone his rag maligns and demeans, fighting libel suits, is part and parcel of his business.

“I asked what he’d been doing inside. ‘Checking things over before a meeting. And don’t bother asking with whom.’ As if the housekeeping robot wouldn’t have awakened to straighten if he’d only left the space vacant for five minutes, or even just nudged the thing with his foot as it sat charging.”

Don’t ask with whom? As if a senior spook couldn’t and wouldn’t do what I had just done: scanned the club’s video archive for camera feeds from the preceding Thursday. Twelve minutes after encountering Phelps, Gorot had met with an under-secretary of agriculture. So much for the Washington guessing game as to the leaker behind the latest farm-subsidies scandal. The same feeds confirmed that Gorot had indeed been alone in the secure room until Phelps’s anxious return.

I said, “You and Gorot spent four minutes together in the secure room. He left”—to intercept that under-secretary, the pair of them then leaving the club—“while you remained inside another fifteen. Explain.”

In London, meanwhile, where it was a few milliseconds before eight A.M., I booked several pre-opening options trades as Phelps gathered his thoughts. (If meat still elected to match financial wits with consciousnesses, such as mine, countless times faster than their own? They’d made that choice. Just as I had mine: my fortress had not come cheap, nor, I had to assume, would any future defensive measures I might yet find it prudent to acquire.) As Phelps pondered a response—lips smacking, pop . . . pop . . . pop—the markets, as I had expected, opened down sharply.

“Understand, I was frantic.” (Before the end of that sentence, I’d closed out my positions and made a tidy profit.) “For a scandal- and rumormonger like Gorot to have his hands on such sensitive material? That would have been catastrophic. I promised him an unattributed scoop on an unrelated matter . . . on condition that I could frisk him right then. There is a bit of Agency dirty laundry I had reason to expect reputable media were about expose anyway. Gorot breaking that story first could only discredit it. But I digress.

“Had Gorot declined, I’d have searched him regardless. Hell, strip-searched him. Whatever it took. I wouldn’t trust that man with used cat litter, much less with any matter of national security. Had it come to that, it would’ve been his word against mine.

“In the event, he accepted my terms. I searched him thoroughly without finding any papers. At that point, I ordered him out, then searched everywhere he might have stashed my notes to recover later. Inside the refrigerator. Beneath and behind what little furniture and furnishings the room held, including laptop, refrigerator, wastebasket, and robot. Behind the framed pictures, and inside their kraft-paper backings. Behind the clock. Inside the tissue boxes. Between the paper tablets, and then between the sheets of every single tablet. I found nothing.”

“Overhead?” I asked. “Was there a dropped ceiling with removable acoustic tiles?”

He shook his head. “Plasterboard, same as the walls. And no visible interruption in any of the taped seams.”

“Perhaps in the ventilation system? Behind a filter screen, held fast to the duct with a magnet or weight?” Leaving aside for the moment why the culprit might have had at hand a magnet or paperweight.

“No. Members gripe a lot about air circulation, or a lack thereof, in the room. That the space is always stifling.” With an index finger, absentmindedly, he peeled a damp collar from his neck. (I ascribed that action to Bangkok humidity, which averaged 78 percent, as much as to any memory of the club’s room. September, in which we found ourselves, was always muggier still. Coat and tie had been an unfortunate sartorial choice, even before he’d been sealed into my salon.) “Anyway, whether poor climate control or plain disuse was at fault, the mounting screws for both filter screens were rusted fast.”

“Your search sounds most thorough.”

“I thought so. And that meant, almost certainly, that someone had strolled out of my meeting—and by then, from the building—with the papers. Still, I might have overlooked something inside that accursed room. Stationing myself just outside the anteroom lest anyone else enter, I called the head of club Security. Together we sealed the room. I retained both keys for the sturdy padlock she retrieved from her office but whose package I had torn open.

“In desperation, I returned the next day, Friday, for a yet more exhaustive search. Again, I found nothing.” Forlorn (eons long) pause. “That room remains locked, against the vanishingly small possibility I will come up with somewhere else inside to look.”

I said, “You have suggested that mere deviation from routine, such as an accelerated schedule of maintenance missions, might draw unwelcome attention to the powersats. Suppose someone at your meeting decided to abuse your confidence. By then, I would think, you had already disclosed enough to interest a hostile power.” Whether on this world or another. “Your thief could hardly rely on you convincing yourself you had instinctively destroyed the papers. Why risk alerting you to their vile intent by taking them? Why risk being caught with them?”

“Bringing us to the crux of the matter.” Phelps’s demoralized gaze dropped to his knees. “That someone unprincipled learned enough to alert an adversary? Perhaps, even, the Tri-World Alliance? That’s scary, but prospectively insufficient. If the flaw Debra spotted is as serious as she suspected, it’d still be challenging to write and upload malware to take control of a powersat. Had she known that could be done, and how, we’d have had a whole different sort of meeting.

“The OOTW pair, lacking detailed notes, would’ve had little more to offer an adversary than the bare fact of a possible security hole. Ms. Holdhurst, as I’ve mentioned, has no technical background. As for Morrison, you may recall”—as if I forgot anything, ever—“the misdirection by which I brought about the meeting involved ground stations, not the powersats themselves. Wanting an engineer along, Holdhurst had chosen accordingly. What I mean is, Joseph Morrison is an expert in ground-station technology. He isn’t knowledgeable about the powersats themselves, much less their gigabytes of onboard software. If either of those two thought to betray their country, my jotted notes about Debra’s findings would have held great value.

“And yet, it has occurred to me that either of them might have wanted my notes for an innocent purpose: as a head start toward resolving the problem. As a way for their company to appear more competent than, in fact, it is.”

That last scenario was farfetched. “Having established this backchannel with OOTW, I must assume you would also have offered your in-house expert as a resource. If so, I fail to see an opportunity for a surreptitious head start—never mind how the thief hoped to avoid suspicion—without also rendering Debra Patel unavailable. Which would require that your thief somehow arranged, in mere minutes, the vehicular ‘accident’ that has left her in a coma.”

Phelps muttered under his breath. “I know. Wishful thinking.”

“You confronted and frisked Gorot. I expect you also questioned the two from OOTW. And you, or some trusted Agency asset, searched”—illicitly or otherwise—“their homes and offices. Finding nothing, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Also the autocab they took from the club, which I managed to get sidelined before it could pick up another fare. Its memory showed Holdhurst and Morrison returned together directly to OOTW’s D.C. branch facility. That’s where I found them. Each denied ever having as much as touched my papers. Much affronted, each consented to be patted down. And she stood watching as I tore apart the guest office where I’d found them, and while I confirmed with company CCTV that they’d strode straight from the autocab through the facility into that room.”

“Which leaves,” I said, “one last possibility.”

“If Debra had nefarious intentions for what she’d found, she’d never have brought the powersat problem to my attention to begin with.” Phelps squirmed, lips pursed as though he’d just taken a big bite of lemon. “As I’m sure you realize.” (In the main, I agreed. Some small possibility existed that she had disclosed her discovery as insurance: to deflect suspicion if her hypothetical misuse of the OOTW flaw later came to the Agency’s attention. As I was sure he realized.) “Just as I’m sure you’re aware she’s in a medically induced coma, that she never made it to home or our office.”

All accurate enough. The club’s street-facing security cameras, and those of establishments across the road, showed the OOTW duo departing in the first available autocab, and then a preoccupied Debra Patel stumbling from the curb into the path of the next vehicle. I’d seen passersby milling about, wringing their hands, then one attempting first aid. I’d watched an ambulance arrive, the EMTs descending, and followed the ambulance on its careening course to the nearest hospital—where privacy rules rendered me blind. There were no cameras in the OR, or in the patient’s ICU where, singly and in small groups, husband, parents, and siblings took turns holding vigil.

“And you,” I countered, “can’t ignore Debra as a suspect, if maybe an innocent one. Perhaps she noticed the papers left unattended. Rather than embarrass you, she could have scooped those up to destroy back at the office. Or the papers, without her knowledge, might have been slipped into her pocket or purse.” Exterior security cameras ringing the hospital would have caught any of the other principals, had one approached; none had. Yet. That didn’t mean some EMT, nurse, doctor, or candy-striper accomplice hadn’t recovered the vital papers.

“No,” Phelps conceded. “While I discount Debra, I can’t exclude her. But one thing is certain. In trying to keep the problem contained, trying to expedite the fix, I’ve made things worse. I’ve compromised myself. Someone in possession of my notes, in my handwriting? It’s a disaster, even if they don’t approach our adversaries. Whoever has the notes can try to coerce me. A news outlet or a political enemy of the administration in possession would be as ruinous, just in a different way. Unless I recover my notes—and know for certain those haven’t been copied or leaked—I’ll have no choice but to confess everything to my superiors and resign in disgrace. I’ll do well not to be tried for treason.”

And he ground to a halt, rigid with tension, staring into my camera.

Banishing the address plaque from the salon’s holo projector, I revealed (a version, anyway) of myself. Deerstalker hat. Age-darkened briar pipe. Intent gaze. That Phelps’s priority might foremost be to save his own hide? It in no way diminished my vulnerability, stationary and exposed as I am, to gigawatt death rays from the hackable satellites of Damocles.

I said, just as my eponym once had, “I must thank you for calling my attention to a situation which certainly presents some features of interest.”

My client—at that point, the label fit—slumped with relief. “I’m parched. Is there any way you can give me a drink of water?”

I didn’t run a public house. My avatar shook its head. “You’ll have to leave, take whatever refreshments you want, and come back.”

Awaiting his return, I amassed public records—and many not so public (while deferring, as the better part of valor, at least for the nonce, attempting a peek into CIA files)—germane to my four suspects: Charles Gorot, Debra Patel, Joseph Morrison, and Annie Holdhurst. From what I so far knew, it seemed most likely one of the four was the culprit.

In Washington, it was Tuesday. The Harvard Club retained a week’s worth of CCTV footage. (For someone playing at being a fictional nineteenth-century sleuth, footage was hardly an anachronism at which to quibble.) I reestablished that between Phelps’s problematic meeting and his ashen-faced return, only Gorot had gone into the secure room. I confirmed that the crime scene had remained sealed and unoccupied, a hand-lettered sign, Closed for Maintenance, posted soon after the closure by way of justification. I broadened my examination to include all spaces adjacent, above, and below the secure room. Nowhere, even during the days before Phelps’s meeting, did anything catch my (dare I say it? private) eye. As my client (his breath redolent of Phuket lager, Tom Yum shrimp, squid chips, and mango sticky rice) reentered my salon, I set aside the merest fraction of my capacity for maintaining watch over the padlocked room and its abutting spaces.

What I would have given for the ability to peer inside that room.

“You look restored,” I told Phelps.

“From confidence in the value of your assistance.”

Or from the lager, I suspected. “Can you know whether an adversarial power has been approached about the lost information?”

Head canted, Phelps considered. “With certainty? No. This much, however, I do know, courtesy of an FBI counter-intel colleague who owed me a favor and who wouldn’t press me for an explanation. The bureau routinely surveils foreign embassies, consulates, and their key personnel. No one suspicious has made an approach to any of those. Certainly, no one from my meeting, or Gorot, or their nearest and dearest. No one but me has left the country, much less the planet. Of course, if the culprit were, somehow, Gorot, there’s no one he’d need to approach. My first ‘clue’ would likely come as a screaming banner, in eighty-point type, on The Q.T.

“All that said, an in-person approach never struck me as probable. Were I hoping to sell the notes to a foreign power or terrorist group, no way would I reach out in person. I’d anonymously dangle a cryptic offer on the Dark Net, respond the same way to inquiring parties—such reactions doubtless also anonymous—revealing as proof the merest snippets of what I had. Eventual payment would be made, again anonymously, in cryptocash. Delivery would involve encrypted page scans. And you know what, Sherlock? There’s nothing to suggest that on the Dark Net.”

Even as he speculated, I’d made the obvious searches. The Dark Net, indeed, gave no indication of anyone making the dreaded solicitation. And neither servers at The Q.T. nor any personal comps attributable to Gorot or his longtime assistant gave any evidence of a blockbuster reveal in the works. “All suggestive,” I agreed, “but at the same time, inconclusive.” Because how hard was it to buy a new comp with cash, a device I wouldn’t know to infiltrate?

Phelps nodded glumly.

“You suggested four suspects.” One of them in a coma. Puffing on my imaginary pipe, I considered undertaking to compose a Holmesian monograph on identifying tobacco types from their ashes. “Who seems the most plausible?”

“Truthfully? None of them. That’s why I’m here.” Already his confidence in me, or the bracing effects of the lager, were waning.

“In what order did people at your meeting exit the secure room?”

“Joseph Morrison left first. Annie Holdhurst, next. She paused by the inner door to thank me for bringing the matter to her attention. Debra Patel came last. Oh, and then me, of course.”

After a few more exchanges, none of which produced anything in the least suggestive, we parted ways. Phelps needed to return to D.C. before his abrupt absence brought on unwelcome questions. Which was just as well, as I expected to need eyes, ears, and hands at the crime scene.

“You and a subordinate had a noon-ish meeting”—not lunch—“last Thursday with our mutual acquaintance. He assures me you will assist in the recovery of his misplaced item.”

If those elliptical references failed to impress Annie Holdhurst, perhaps me reaching her on an unlisted number, bypassing her (nonsentient) AIde, and overriding her top-of-the-line privacy filter had done the trick. Or my avatar for the occasion, melding an archetypal man in black with just-the-facts Joe Friday from the original Dragnet. Or me (un-Friday-like) not bothering to introduce myself. Whatever the reason, she blanched at my words.

“Do you remember the item in question?” I asked.

Holdhurst was drop-dead gorgeous—a judgment perhaps shaped by lingering aftereffects of my days-over noir period. A qmind has no libido, and the original Sherlock had little more. (Irene Adler, you say? That Sherlock admired her for her mind.) The male heads turning when she walked through a room might also have had something to do with my assessment.

Regardless, the subject was tall (she had taken my call while pacing about her office) and sylphlike. She had a heart-shaped face framed by cascades of raven-black hair, wide-set hazel eyes, and a swanlike neck. Forty-five, she could have passed for a decade younger.

Her designer suit, severely tailored, screamed success, as did her capacious office. Awaiting a response, I took a quick dip into auction records at Sotheby’s, which confirmed as an original the framed Monet on a wall behind her. Her funds had settled that purchase, not the company’s, which screamed success even louder. All of which jibed with data I’d mined before initiating the call.

On the other (not that I had one) hand, my research also suggested OOTW would fall far short of the earnings forecast in its most recent quarterly SEC filing. (Interestingly enough, from a ground-station product line losing market share to scrappy, new competitors. I guessed Percy Phelps had known that.) The impending swoon in the company’s share price, and so to the value of her stock options, was going to sting.

She might, therefore, have thought to grab Phelps’s papers with an eye to selling them. But had she? It should have been easier (not to mention, less risky than trying to rip off a senior CIA spook) to negotiate for a classified contract to service the powersats. A sweetheart, sole-source deal to offset the earnings shortfall and placate any unhappy corporate directors. From Phelps’s narration, she’d hinted broadly enough at just that.

The bottom line: she’d had opportunity, perhaps, without a compelling motive.

Holdhurst was quick (by meat standards, that is) to recover her composure. “Isn’t this matter best discussed face to face, and in private?”

“You’re there.” There was Boston, home of the corporation, from and to which she and Morrison had on the previous Thursday flown aboard the company ramjet. “Our mutual acquaintance trusts me, and I’m here.” Here was left undefined, leaving her free to infer I was a trusted CIA asset based in Washington. Likewise, covering for my lack of a physical face. “And I assure you, we’re speaking over a secure link. Now, about the item in question?”

“Yes, of course, I remember the item. It seemed so . . . quaint. As I told our mutual acquaintance, I passed by it on the table on my way from the room. That’s the last I saw of it.”

“Did you take it?”

“I did not.”

“Do you know who took it?”

She glowered at me. “No.”

“Do you have any idea who might have?”

“If the item truly is missing.” Her glower deepened. “I have no direct knowledge of that.”

“Why would our mutual acquaintance misrepresent that?”

To which question, she shrugged.

Throughout the conversation, I kept a close watch for: shiftiness of gaze. Hesitance of speech. Insincere smiles. Feigned anger. She exhibited none of these, or of a half-dozen other physiological responses suggestive of deceit. Instead, I noted a clenched jaw and the grinding of teeth. “You seem rather stressed.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

At being suspected of theft from a senior CIA official? At the prospect her powersats might be turned into WMDs? Indeed, some stress was natural enough. “If not you, might your colleague have taken the item?”

“Why would he?” she snapped back. “No, scratch that. The better answer is, simply, no. He preceded me out of the room, and the item was still on the table. So, I suggest you speak with someone else’s colleague.”

Her recitation so far matched that of Phelps. “I’d speak with her if I could. Unfortunately, moments after you four parted ways she had a serious vehicular accident.”

Holdhurst’s eyes widened in (I judged) sincere surprise. It seemed my client had not shared that tidbit.

With a curt, “Thank you for your cooperation,” I dropped the link.

Meanwhile (besides analyzing futures options on the Tokyo exchange and mastering Aramaic), I was checking out Joseph Morrison. OOTW compensated him well enough—even if, after a nasty divorce, much of his pay and bonus went straight to childcare and alimony. The ex-wife had also gotten the house. All in all, his fiscal circumstances had been downgraded. So did Morrison have a motive for theft? Without a doubt—if not, as with Annie Holdhurst, an unambiguously compelling reason.

My dialogue with him went much the same as with her, if with a view into a more modest office. Metal furniture instead of teak. A framed, green athletic jersey, (number seventeen, proud white digits proclaimed) rather than a Monet. A cardboard Starbucks cup in lieu of Delft coffee service. As for Morrison himself, he was burly, balding, and bearded. Thirty-two. Not a jolly fellow, to judge by his prominent and premature marionette lines.

And mostly monosyllabic.

Did he remember the item? “Yes.” Had he taken it? “No.” Did he know who had the item? “No.” Did he know where it was? “No.” Asked when he had last seen it, he managed two syllables. “Thursday.”

He, too, remembered being the first out of the club’s secure room. He, too, appeared stressed—once again, fair enough. And he also seemed genuinely surprised by the report Debra Patel was hospitalized, and beyond questioning.

Charles Gorot came across as less sleazy than his website and public persona would suggest. He was well tanned, nattily dressed, athletic (for years, at or near the apex of his health club’s racquetball ladder), and a patron of the Washington museum scene. He bought cheap cigars and cheaper whiskey by the case, but patronized the most exclusive restaurants.

As for The Q.T., it was, however disreputable, popular enough—and ever in need of material. If Gorot had the purloined notes, he could use them and the other CIA scoop. Or, and this seemed savvier, he could keep the notes unposted as leverage, to make Phelps disgorge more of the Agency’s dirty laundry.

Gorot chuckled at my inquiries. “Is this transparent intimidation supposed to dissuade me from publishing the information Phelps freely offered? Because it won’t. The public has a right to know what its bureaucrats are doing.”

At least, the gullible portions of the public somehow drawn to wallow in his website. Them, and the occasional bored qmind. “These aren’t hard or intrusive questions.”

He shrugged. “I’ll play along while it amuses me.”

I posed the usual questions and got back the familiar disclaimers.

(Which was not to deny Gorot a modicum of utility. Establishing the provenance of “I know nothing” in a mock-German accent had provided microseconds of welcome diversion. Binge streaming the six seasons of that obscure, ancient sitcom had amused me for additional milliseconds—more pleasant by far than my concurrent daily review of social platforms, on which meat-mind tribalism continued its sickening spread. Consensus had formed among my peers that the eventual extremist takeover of one or more Earth governments was plausible. I hoped any such administration would be as inept as that of Stalag Thirteen.)

And once again, basic physiological responses—those being as akin to molasses on Pluto as human speech—assured me that a suspect’s denials were truthful.

Four witnesses interviewed, including my client. Four consistent responses. Unless I grossly misunderstood human physiological responses—not to mention the absence of evidence of the stolen document, on the Dark Net or elsewhere—that left me with a single suspect.

And her still in a coma.

With no cameras to be had—and hacked—inside intensive-care units, I went into social networks for recent images. Debra was, at twenty-seven, the youngest of the obvious suspects. Petite. Edgy cheek-and-neck tats. Favoring all-unnatural lipstick and hair colors (in the selfie taken the morning of the fateful meeting, both of royal blue), rebellious Tees, and skin-tight jeans. Fingernails chewed to the quick. The contrast with her buttoned-down boss, he of the coat and tie in Bangkok? I hadn’t needed a peek at her MIT transcript to be certain she knew her stuff.

However much Percy Phelps might be willing to overlook my sketchier data-gathering, to hack the CIA itself for personnel files (assuming I could) continued to seem ill-advised. I dug up plenty elsewhere about Debra. She still lived like a student, putting most of her considerable salary toward paying off college loans and supporting her sickly, widowed mother. Both obligations were longstanding; neither had stopped her keeping a top-level security clearance.

And supposing, contrary to everything I’d learned, money was a motivator? Percy was right: going straight to the Dark Net, never mentioning at the Agency what she’d found, would have been far safer. But if she sought access to OOTW’s source code to justify an even bigger payday, she should have wanted to work quietly inside that company. Raising red flags by walking off with Phelps’s notes would have been counterproductive.

And yet, I had to ask myself again, might she have been an unwitting accomplice?

Suppose either of the OOTW duo had slipped papers into Debra’s pocket or purse. For that to be so, everyone else was mistaken, or they’d hidden their lies from me, about the order of people leaving the room and when they’d last seen Phelps’s notes. And I’d also have to believe someone had, on the spot, made plans to recover the papers before Debra found them.

As in, arranging her accident?

Doubtful. Neither Holdhurst nor Morrison had even glanced at a comp from the moment they exited the secure room to when she waved down a passing autocab, to when they stepped aboard. I reexamined imagery of what had happened next: Debra Patel poking and swiping at her pocket comp, oblivious to her surroundings, lurching off the curb into oncoming traffic. Not a soul within arm’s length before she fell. The wide-eyed passenger bounding from that autocab, shouting (I read lips) for someone, anyone, to call 9-1-1. The cab’s own front-facing camera had captured a good Samaritan applying pressure with both hands to the most obvious wound, and nothing suspicious.

Street-facing cameras caught the ambulance arriving within minutes of the accident, and both EMTs at work. On and off, that crew obstructed my view; more often a swelling crowd of gawkers did. Had Percy’s papers been on Patel’s person, either EMT—if blessed with nerves of steel, given their riveted audience—had had an opportunity then to retrieve them. On the short, careening drive to the nearby hospital, they certainly could, unobserved, have searched the patient or her purse.

Alas, I found the ambulance-accomplice scenario also almost impossible to believe. The nonsentient AI at the 9-1-1 center (as best I could tell, its code not tampered with) made its dispatch decisions in real time. It based those decisions on the locations of ambulances, dynamic traffic conditions, any details known about the medical emergency, and special skills of available EMTs. If, in a manner I had yet to discern, someone had caused Debra to step into traffic, it nonetheless strained credulity that the someone could also have arranged for his confederates to be sent to answer a specific 9-1-1 call. And once at the hospital, with ER staff swarming? By then it would be too late for an EMT to recover papers from her.

Still, there could be no harm (once more channeling the original Sherlock) in being thorough. So I was. And encountered:

—Nothing about the EMTs, or the hospital staff in general, to arouse any suspicion.

—Nothing (when I took temporary control of their household bots) in the slightest amiss.

—Nothing as much as hinting at a connection to Morrison or Holdhurst.

And while I retained, on a short leash, control of one hospital maintenance bot, no opportunity to search Debra’s ICU room or personal-effects bag presented itself. The few times her husband stepped out, some relative or two, or a member of the medical staff, was by her side. And no digital trace of any of them suggested any linkage to OOTW.

I paused to take stock.

All my digging, questioning, and theorizing had gotten me . . . nowhere. There were no inconsistencies among the witnesses’ stories. No suggestions of accomplices. No signs of anyone seeking to exploit the stolen papers. No suspect with a motive more compelling than another.

Leaving me to wonder if I should have been channeling Hercule Poirot rather than Sherlock Holmes. If, as in Murder on the Orient Express, my suspects might have done the dirty deed together.

My client (his face drawn, a nervous tic in his left cheek) netted in as I was expanding, for a third time, my unproductive investigations. I had yet to identify as much as a hint of any significant other, child, friend, neighbor, colleague, or poker buddy plausibly coercing—or been threatened, in order to coerce—a single one of the principals. Nor had I expected this line of inquiry to be fruitful: only Phelps had known his reason for bringing everyone together. If Debra Patel had suspected an ulterior motive behind her lunch invitation, she couldn’t have known he would leave behind handwritten notes. And Gorot’s involvement had been entirely by chance.

Phelps was by then most of the way back to America, aboard a private ramjet rented under his traveling alias. “Please tell me you’ve learned something, Sherlock.”

“That I’ve identified your culprit? Not yet.”

Phelps sighed. “I gave it the old college try. There’s nothing for it, then, but for me to confess my sins to the director.”

“Not yet.”

A deeper sigh. “Because things would somehow turn out better if I waited till whoever has the papers auctions them on the Dark Net? Or for Gorot, if he has them, to publish them to the worlds? Or for someone, or some hostile power, to coerce me? Consequences to, well, the entire fracking planet aside, dithering until any of those happens can hardly help me.”

“Patience. Let’s try something else first.”

A glimmer of hope made its way into his voice. “I’m listening.”

“It’s still possible the item is at the hospital, tucked inside Debra’s personal-effects bag. You, or someone you trust, should go dressed as a staffer. Say, as a nurse. No one”—my studies had suggested—“questions a nurse telling visitors to leave a patient’s room while he checks on whatever.”        I didn’t expect Percy’s papers to reappear that way, any more than (I suspected) he did. Still, not to make the effort would be negligent—and beyond that, I needed time to try a new tactic. For that, I needed him to stay in the game.

“Can do. Or, rather, I will do. Scrubs can’t be hard to come by. But first I need to get back to the office, handle whatever else has gone wrong while I’ve been away. So, in the next day or two. Any other thoughts, Sherlock?”

“Maybe remove the padlock, return that room to normal use. Twice, now, you’ve searched it thoroughly. Leaving it off-limits will only invite unwanted curiosity.” I had my avatar shrug. “Meanwhile, there’s more data mining I plan to do, a number of less likely possibilities to be considered.”

“ ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ Eh, Holmes?”

“Something like that.” Never mind it had to be the tritest, most annoying, of all quotes.

“And I have to agree about the padlock. I’ve been, shall we say, distracted.”

Going out of character, I told Phelps to hang in there.

Phelps was en route to the hospital and Debra Patel’s room, when I bypassed his privacy filters. “I need you at the club now.”

“Why—”

“You’ll find out there.” Because my trap had been sprung.

Feigning nonchalance (and to my jaundiced eye, failing miserably), smudges of dust speckling his suit jacket, Joseph Morrison emerged from the Harvard Club of Washington secure room—and was mobbed by housekeeping robots.

Startled club members and guests sprang from overstuffed armchairs. “Call . . . the Security office?” someone opined.

“Remain calm,” I whispered, through the comp in Morrison’s pant pocket—as the telescoping, multipurpose limbs of the nearest bots did a quick pat-down. His jacket’s inside left breast pocket crinkled. “Percy Phelps will join us at any moment. Any fuss you might make can only make your situation worse.”

In a shaky voice, Morrison called out, “It’s okay, everyone. I’m rehearsing a . . . a prank.”

Within the minute, Phelps burst into the club, striding purposefully for the secure room. Espying Morrison amid the robotic tableau, my client did not even blink. As he neared, I relinquished control of all but one of my posse, and those bots scattered to resume their sundry mindless duties.

Still speaking through Morrison’s pocket comp, I reported softly, “Percy, our friend here has that thing you misplaced.” And quieter still, so that assuredly none but the two of them might possibly hear, I advised, “Hand it over, Joseph. Now. After, we will go off for a private chat.”

Morrison removed a sheaf of papers from his coat. Those slipped from his trembling grasp—with, perhaps, an encouraging nudge by my remaining bot somewhat to blame. Dust flew as pages fluttered to the floor.

Phelps, kneeling (and sneezing), took several seconds to examine the scattered pages. With a grunt of satisfaction, he gathered the sheets, tapped them into a stack, folded them lengthwise, stowed them in his own coat, and stood. Eyes sweeping the area, he asked, “Who let you back inside? Your boss?”

Because Morrison hadn’t gone to Harvard. So, a framed green football jersey—Harvard’s main official color being red (excuse me, crimson)—had initially suggested. So, his social-network profile had confirmed. Details which would indeed have made Annie Holdhurst a credible accomplice—if not for the detail she had been in Massachusetts the past two days.

Or for one other detail. . . .

“Our friend here got himself in,” I said. “The alumni association seems unaware it was hacked.” Twice, in fact, not that I saw any reason to clarify. Nor did I share my ongoing appropriation of the club’s security cameras. Phelps could pretend not to know how I’d spotted our man. “Records of a deceased alum of about Morrison’s age were updated. The obit notice was deleted. The old college photo was replaced. And voilà, ‘Harold Alvarez,’ Class of ’32 stopped in yesterday to join the Harvard Club.” Allowing him to reserve the secure room—

As soon as that facility had been reopened to the members.

“Where shall we talk?” I asked.

Morrison gestured to the door he had just exited. “I . . . um . . . well, my hour isn’t nearly up. My handprint should still be active.”

“No,” I whispered firmly. “Somewhere we three can talk.”

Phelps recalled the Agency car in which he had arrived from its patient circling of the block. Before dropping my link through Morrison’s comp—which, apart from having been “borrowed” by Phelps, was never going to have connectivity inside the well-shielded vehicle—I announced, “See you inside.”

After almost a minute (call it an epoch in qmind years; there is no benefit in continuing to enumerate the myriad calculations, simulations, correlations, and random data dives with which I whiled away every such hiatus), Phelps reached out to me, via a very secure connection, through the car’s onboard comp, robust firewall, and exterior-mounted proxy server and antenna. Morrison, I was mildly surprised to see, appeared untouched. The car windows were set to full opacity, but street cams told me (how do humans bear having only a single point of view? It’s a mystery to me) the vehicle was still circling.

Phelps said, “All right, Sherlock. I think we’d both like an explanation.”

I hoped (but didn’t expect) these two would prove less obtuse than the bumbling Watson. I also resisted declaring the solution to be elementary. “Item: the missing papers continued not to be found outside the secure room. Item: nothing pointed to anyone making use of the papers, either on the Dark Net or on any computer of a certain third party”—Charles Gorot, whose role might be unknown to our perp—“his business, or its small staff. I couldn’t be certain, Percy, but it seemed ever more likely, despite your thorough searches, that your papers remained inside.”

Phelps nodded. “And somehow, that was so. But how could those have been hidden? You assured me that no one had touched or taken them. That had anyone lied, you’d have known.”

“I acted on an absurd impulse,” blurted out Morrison, eyes darting back and forth between his captor and my projected avatar. “The money someone might have paid for those notes? You know? I don’t begrudge the child support, but the alimony? It’s killing me.

“Still, right away, I knew what I’d done was wrong. Stupid. I was going to destroy the notes. Honest!”

No mastery of subtle human physiological responses was required to know that last claim for a bald-faced lie. That the newly recovered papers had gone into the thief’s pocket, and not into the incinerator, sufficed. Another eon later, a snort proved Phelps agreed.

I said, “Everyone to whom I spoke, I feel confident, told me the truth. But I had failed to ask an important question: did you cause anyone, or anything, to take the papers?”

Bearing a Watson-esque expression of cluelessness, Phelps stared at Morrison. “Well?”

“I . . . I, well, uh—”

Life was too short. “Percy, you believed Joseph was keyboarding notes, even as you were hand-writing your own. Perhaps it was so at the start, but by meeting’s end he had reprogrammed the housekeeping robot. Had you pocketed or incinerated your papers, that would’ve been the end of the matter. But if the notes, for any reason, were left behind? Another story altogether.

“As soon as everyone vacated the room, Joseph’s revised program took effect. The bot stashed whatever writing-covered papers it encountered rather than incinerate them. It had completed its task and returned to its charging station before Gorot ever entered.

“When you questioned Joseph, and later, when I did, he had yet to touch your papers. And because the robot is mobile within the range of its tether, he could, with hairsplitting honesty, truthfully deny knowing where your papers were. Because he couldn’t know precisely where, at that instant, the bot—and by extension, the purloined papers—would be. And here’s the final ironic detail. Not until you confronted him about the missing papers could he know his cunning plan had worked. Only then did he decide to become a Harvard alum.”

Shoulders slumped, face down-turned, Morrison murmured . . . something.

“Louder,” snapped Phelps.

“It’s true,” Morrison managed. “But it was a quick hack. As I said, I did it on impulse.”

The secure-room bot was beyond my reach; not so, the club’s accounting system and the relevant purchase order. For that make and model bot, the hack I’d deduced could be done in fifty-seven instructions. The program patch would then have needed cross-compiling for, and downloading to, the bot. And this estimate of the effort was best-case. No coding inefficiencies in Morrison’s version of the program. No test script or simulation. No typos to be corrected.

An impulse? Hardly.

(I’m not one to deny credit where it’s due. Morrison had pulled off his hack: without any preparation; rapidly, by meat standards; while participating in the meeting, with no one the wiser—all in all, I had to conclude, under extreme pressure. Whether or not he came up with the optimal code, his programming had to have been tight. The bot had only a little memory set aside for maintenance. If the available patch space had amounted to even a few tens of kilobytes, Morrison could have simply downloaded his typed text notes for later recovery.)

“I remember Debra confirming you’d wiped the computer,” Phelps said. “But when I search the robot’s memory, what will I find?” With Morrison shrinking further into the seat, Phelps shrugged. “I’ll know, soon enough. What really has me curious is where you hid the papers. I looked under, over, and behind everything in that room.”

Sometimes the trite is true.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. “But not inside everything.” I permitted myself a dramatic pause. (Why not? I can multitask. And Conan Doyle’s Sherlock was known to favor the theatrical gesture.) “You didn’t search inside the robot itself.”

“Ah, my sneezing fit. The vacuuming function’s removable dustbin.”

“Indeed.” I had supposed the dustbin—the most generous available space—from a study of the bot design specs. I had not known—because crammed beneath any of several maintenance-access panels had remained a possibility—until Morrison had gone into that secure room clean and come out festooned in dust.

Phelps rapped Morrison on the knee. “By the second, it’s looking less like an impulse.”

“And yet,” I said, “who’s to say taking these papers was a crime?”

Both men’s heads swiveled toward my avatar.

“Trust has been betrayed,” I said. “But the notes, Percy, were mere minutes old and for your eyes only. I imagine they were never formally classified. And if they had been? I don’t expect you’d want these unfortunate events aired at a public trial.”

Hope flitted across Morrison’s face.

Phelps scowled in rebuttal. “There must be consequences, Morrison. Make that, there will. I don’t doubt you’d be canned the moment your boss learned what you did. But it won’t even come to that. You’re resigning—today. I won’t allow you anywhere near the powersat’s source code. And I’ll be flagging your government file so that you’ll never, ever, hold another security clearance. You might want to look for some worthy not-for-profit in need of computer talent.”

Apt, I thought. And not what anyone could call a wealth-building career path.

Morrison licked his lips. “And if I decline?”

“In that case,” I volunteered, “there’s certain information I’ll be sharing. I imagine Harvard will then bring charges against you for hacking. And perhaps the widow Alvarez would be amenable to filing charges for identity theft and a civil suit for emotional trauma.”

In silence, for long seconds, both men absorbed the stubborn fact of a stalemate.

When Phelps ordered the car to the curb, and its doors unlocked, Morrison bolted into a precarious and circumscribed freedom.

Merged back into traffic, bound for CIA headquarters, Phelps mused, “One detail eludes me. How does the theft of my notes relate to what happened to Debra?”

Just the one? Fine. I had no interest in discussing any others. “As best as I can tell, this was an accident. Pure negligence. A failure to mind her surroundings. She lost her footing, went splat, and an autocab hemmed in by traffic didn’t have time to brake. It could have happened to anyone.” Anyone oblivious, glued to their comp. “A seeming clue that wasn’t. Some random misdirection, because the universe is perverse.”

“Bad luck, then,” he offered dubiously. “Yeah, okay, that’s the one kind of luck I can believe in. Bringing us back to where this all started. I’ve recovered my notes, with full credit to you, but the powersat fleet likely still has a serious security hole.”

“Here’s the good news, Percy. I can confirm Debra’s glitch, but the compromised code is self-contained. Someone talented could mess with the onboard inventory”—records of the spare parts with which repair bots dealt with the occasional failed component or micrometeoroid strike—“but a hypothetical bad guy won’t gain backdoor access to power generation or downlink control.” And so, won’t have the ability to turn off the lights. And won’t be striking anywhere inappropriate with gigawatt beams of focused microwaves. “And if it ever occurred to you to wonder, your accidental indiscretion and its resolution are safe with me.”

Because possibly the last place I’d want someone, anyone, thinking to poke around was inside the software of powersats.

Phelps chewed on my words, and his lower lip, for several seconds. “That’s a huge relief, Sherlock.” More nibbling. “How can I thank you?”

“No need. Quite the opposite, I would say. I thank you for working to keep us all safe. And because your puzzle has proven . . . diverting.”

And with that, I took my leave.

Diverting? To be sure. And yet, so understated.

To my time sense, Phelps’s meeting notes had been ages splayed across the club carpet, in plain view of the common-area housekeeping bot I’d still controlled. Locating Debra’s code bug given those many clues? That had been trivial.

And my assurance that the powersat’s vulnerability is self-contained? That likewise had been entirely truthful.

Because of the present tense I’d used.

Gone unmentioned was that the powersat code flaw had—subtly, indirectly—afforded access to critical functions. That within my corrective code tweaks was backdoor access. That my onboard changes should be undetectable short of onsite, on-orbit readout for a byte-by-byte comparison with OOTW’s records.

And the hypothetical bad guy who won’t gain control of any powersats? Likewise true. I am neither hypothetical nor—or so I choose to believe—bad. Except as the whim strikes me, I don’t even approximate a guy. And, to the best of my knowledge, the authentication scheme that secured my backdoor access is robust and unique. All of which was significant.

And more significant still?

That I’m no longer a sitting duck.

That if anyone on this planet ever wants to come after me, they’ll be the sitting ducks.

Well and truly giga-fried.