A Rumor of Real Irish Tea (Annals of Altair Book 2)

by Kate Stradling

  “How did they get the accounting department’s number?” Quincy asked.

  He paused the video feed to explain. “The GCA had been sending low-level agents and techs to follow the Wests whenever they got a report of their whereabouts, so that Honey wouldn’t be able to extract any useful information from them when they were discovered. Even low-level agents and techs have the accounting department’s phone number programmed into their phones, though. Number-crunchers aren’t usually considered when the government looks to hide sensitive information. We assume that the Wests extracted the number from one of those cell phones, because they always confiscate the phones and wallets of anyone they find following them.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Emily muttered. She’d gotten her phone back in Flagstaff, but her wallet had disappeared completely. She’d had to beg the GCA to let her call her bank and put a freeze on her account before they tossed her into confinement.

  “The items usually turn up in a trash can somewhere,” said Ben sympathetically. “We’ve got a whole drawer full of them here.”

  “Shouldn’t you give them back to their owners?” asked Emily. She had assumed that if they ever found her wallet it would be returned to her.

  To her great dismay, though, he shook his head. “It’s evidence in an open investigation. So here the guard, under Honey’s influence, unlocks the door to let the Wests inside,” he said, directing their attention back to the active computer screen. “And there you see Honey requesting his stun gun, which Hummer is going to confiscate from her.”

  “Rightly so,” said Emily.

  “You might not think so after you’ve seen the rest of this,” said Ben with a wry glance. “There now: Hummer’s crossed behind the security desk to get a look at the layout of the building.”

  “Photographic memory,” said Oliver, annoyed. “Prometheus always underestimates the kid with the photographic memory.”

  “Yeah, as I understand it, once he’s seen something it’s stuck in his mind for good,” said Ben. “This next bit we can fast-forward. They take the elevator to the third floor, Honey makes a juvenile face at the camera… Here we are: the accounting department, busy working on their end-of-the-month reports. You have to give the Wests some credit for ingenuity—it was the perfect day to attack.”

  “What are they doing?” Alyson asked in a mystified voice. On screen, the accountants had abandoned their work stations to line up in a circle with the youngest West.

  “They’re playing duck-duck-goose,” said Ben. “We do have audio on these films, but every time they played it, whoever was watching ended up on the floor waiting for a tap on the head. I suppose with a pair of null-projectors here it would be safe enough to engage the sound, though.”

  He clicked a little icon at the bottom of the screen, and eager laughter met their ears. They watched in fascination as Honey commanded the supervisor to log into the main system on two separate terminals and then join the children’s game in process on the floor. The two older boys, Hawk and Hummer, sat down and began typing. The game on the other side of the room grew in frenzy.

  “I can’t hear what they’re saying,” Oliver complained. “Those idiots are too loud.”

  “Hawk tapped into the branch’s security system to watch for any signs that they’d been detected. Hummer stayed in the main system to enter a search term,” said Ben. “Incidentally, it was the term he used that triggered an alert that something was wrong.”

  “What was the term?” asked Quincy.

  Emily already knew the answer. Her stomach dropped when Ben said, “Altair.”

  “Like the star?” asked Alyson in confusion.

  “Like the star,” he said. “Just don’t mention its name unless you’re in the middle of an astronomy lecture. Now, there—they’ve copied their files and Honey starts a new game.”

  Her sweet voice rang out through the computer’s speakers: “Okay, people! New game! It’s time to trash the office! Whoever is able to get a computer through the window first gets ten extra bonus points! Go!”

  “They actually did get a computer through the window,” said Ben, “but it took several collaborated efforts.”

  “Are all those accountants being held in confinement now?” Emily asked.

  He smiled but didn’t favor her with an answer. “Here they are retreating down the stairwell. There goes one agent down via stun gun, courtesy of a fairly apathetic Hummer. And there goes number two… and three… and four. They get the car keys from number five, zap him, and escape through the parking garage out onto the street.”

  They watched the rest of the video play out in silence until Quincy suddenly asked, “Is that Revere?”

  “Hmm?” said Ben.

  “That raven—it must be Revere. Hawk just threw something to him.”

  “I didn’t realize the bird had a name,” said Ben. “Hawk threw him the drive they copied their stolen files onto, probably as insurance in case they got caught.”

  “If they’d been caught, it wouldn’t have done them much good for a bird to have the drive,” Oliver said scornfully.

  “We think they split up after they ditched the car,” Ben replied. “It would make sense, given all the other precautions they planned. So chances were in their favor for someone to get hold of the information they took so much risk to obtain.”

  “Was the information worth the risk?” Quincy asked with muted interest.

  A complicated expression flashed across his face, enigmatic in its brevity. “I guess that would depend on whether they knew what to do with it. Shall we have a look and see whether you can figure it out?”

  In the wake of silence that ensued, he brought up a small list on the screen.

  “And here it is,” he said. “A trio of memos, a bloated thirty-year-old law, and a curious little file entitled ‘Real Irish Tea.’ Although, that file’s not actually little either.”

  “Real Irish Tea?” Oliver repeated dubiously.

  Ben smiled, but he didn’t satisfy Oliver’s interest by elaborating. “Shall we have a look at the memos first?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he clicked open the first file.

  “‘The organization known as “Altair” must be seen as hostile to our goals and treated accordingly,’” Quincy read aloud. “‘It is to be classified among the subset of organizations described in Title III, Section 303(a) of the Federal Domestic Security Act of 2026, and treated according to (b) of that same section.’”

  “Is that Federal Domestic Security Act the same law that’s been included in this list of files they stole?” Oliver asked intuitively.

  “Oh, very good,” said Ben with a nice smile. “We can probably skip that one. It’s about two thousand pages long, for one thing, but it’s also just a procedural definition they were using to classify Altair back in the day. Here’s the second memo: it’s fairly short.”

  On screen, a couple lines of text appeared. Goosebumps crawled along Emily’s skin as she quietly read its contents: “Regarding the recent activity of subversive organizations, this office will no longer turn a blind eye. In particular, Altair must be wiped out of existence before it becomes a further menace to our goals.”

  This was not the controlled language one expected from a responsible government entity. It outright called for annihilation of Altair. From everything Emily had heard of that shadow organization, it was the epitome of evil. She couldn’t imagine what sort of crimes it had perpetrated to merit such a strong response.

  “Oh, my,” said Alyson faintly. “They must not be very nice people in Altair.”

  “The Wests are certainly playing with fire by seeking them out,” Ben agreed. “Here’s the final memo: ‘The current administration has determined that insurgent organizations such as Altair must be isolated and marginalized, so as to discourage any recruiting efforts. From this time forward, any mention of the name on GCA premises will be considered a violation of this decision, and the offending party shall be dismissed from service w
ithin the agency and subject to interrogation regarding their knowledge of the organization.’ And this would be the primary reason that you are never to discuss this subject in unauthorized situations.”

  Emily pressed one hand to her head, upset that she knew anything about Altair to begin with. She didn’t need Ben’s warning never to mention it again.

  Alyson took that moment to revise her previous statement. “They must be very bad people,” she said, her voice trembling with horror.

  “I don’t see what the big deal is,” said Oliver peevishly. “So Altair is a subversive organization and the GCA banned any mention of them. So what? That doesn’t tell us anything, and I don’t see how it could be of any use to Hawk or Hummer.”

  “What’s the last file,” Quincy asked, “the one about Real Irish Tea?”

  Ben looked like a child about to unwrap his birthday presents as he brought up the final file in the list. “You tell me,” he said.

  They all turned their attention to the computer screen once more, where four columns of words stood. Emily couldn’t find a page count noted anywhere on the document, but from the size of the scroll bar on the side, she surmised that it was extensive.

  “Heal rarities?” said Quincy as she squinted at the list.

  “Heartier sail?” said Oliver in disbelief.

  “Raise a Hitler?” said Alyson with complete horror.

  Ben fought back a laugh.

  “What is this?” Emily asked.

  “You tell me,” he said again. “Actually, I’d be interested to know whether Oliver and Quincy can figure it out. They’re roughly the same ages as the elder Wests, and I’ve given them the same information that Hawk and Hummer should have. So what do you two make of this?”

  “Real Irish Tea,” Quincy murmured as she contemplated the words on the screen.

  “Yes, that’s my favorite of the bunch,” said Ben. “I mean, right behind ‘raise a Hitler,’ of course,” he added with a wry glance toward the ashen-faced Alyson.

  “They’re all twelve letters long,” said Oliver.

  “They’re all the same twelve letters,” said Quincy almost immediately after.

  Emily took a second look at the list to discover that they were right. “So it’s a list of anagrams?” she asked, but Ben motioned for her to stay silent.

  “Can I have a piece of paper?” Quincy asked, and she opened a drawer beneath the second computer to look for the wanted object.

  Ben quickly pulled a folded sheet of paper and a pen from his pocket and set them both in front of her. “Have at it,” he said.

  “The file was tagged for dealing with Altair,” Quincy said to Oliver as she jotted down that word. Then, she wrote above it “real Irish tea” and crossed out the letters r, a, l, i, t, and a. “So,” she mused, “we’re left with e, r, i, s, h, and e.”

  “Altair is here,” said Oliver grimly. “It’s a system of code.”

  “Not a very good system,” said Emily. “Most of these are complete nonsense. They’d stick out like a sore thumb if someone tried to use them.”

  “Have you ever heard of steganography?” Ben asked.

  She hadn’t, of course. “What is that, like dinosaur writing?”

  Oliver scoffed.

  “What?” she said. “I have no clue what it is, so why don’t you tell me.”

  “I don’t know either,” he retorted, “but obviously it has nothing to do with dinosaurs.”

  “I know that,” Emily said through gritted teeth. “It was just the first thing that came to mind. Steganography, stegosaurus.”

  He shook his head in disgust. “You’re so dumb.”

  “Well, not quite,” said Ben thoughtfully. “They are both derived from Greek, and the root words are probably related, though they’re not the same. Steganography is a form of cipher-writing, from the Greek steganos, meaning covered.”

  “Covered writing,” said Quincy with growing impatience. “We get it, so get on with it, Birchard.”

  “Steganography is the process of hiding a code within another code. To be brief, this list comprises the dummy code. Someone who wanted to use this would select a few appropriate phrases and then mix their real coded message in with the dummy words. The recipient goes through line by line and marks out the dummy words in order to discover the intended meaning. Whichever lines have all of the words from one of these phrases are part of the code, and everything else can be discarded.”

  “That… sounds like a lot of work,” said Alyson.

  “Coding is always a lot of work, especially in the age of computers,” Ben replied. “The GCA discovered this little trick a long time ago. I don’t think Altair uses it anymore. It’s a shame, too—Real Irish Tea is a brand name, you know.”

  “My mother drinks it,” said Emily as an image of a green and orange label flashed into her mind.

  Ben nodded. “A lot of people drink it. It’s fairly popular on the coasts.”

  “Does it have anything to do with Altair?” Oliver asked.

  “No. That’s the beauty of it—or the irritation, depending on your point of view. They couldn’t very well go around arresting and interrogating anyone who mentioned a specific brand of teas, could they?”

  Oliver scowled. “So why didn’t they just put the brand out of business?”

  “It’s international,” said Ben. “Even in a global market we can’t go to another country and put someone out of business. Besides, that would’ve required them to admit that Altair was a serious threat, and by the time they realized this code, they were past that point.”

  “It had already become taboo,” said Quincy quietly. “So the code is defunct. There’s not really anything Hawk or Hummer can do with it. Is there?” she added with growing uncertainty. Ben seemed to know more than the rest of them put together.

  “What would you do with it?” he asked her curiously.

  Quincy bit her lower lip and looked away. She didn’t have an answer for him.

  “I’d throw in the towel and look for something new,” said Oliver. “This batch of files was a waste of their time. They risked being caught for a load of useless garbage.”

  “Maybe so,” said Ben, but he didn’t seem entirely convinced.

  It was a suspicious response from a suspicious individual. “What do you know that we don’t?” Oliver demanded.

  Ben stood up straight, his expression like the cat that caught the canary. “Oh, quite a lot of things, I’d imagine,” he said, and an amused smile played about his lips.

  XVII

  An Unanticipated Snag

  August 2, 10:53am mst, Phoenix, AZ

  The disappointment of their nearly fruitless ambush threw the four Wests into the doldrums. They all agreed to lie low for a couple days, but there was only so much they could do in an empty house with nothing but the packs they carried to keep them occupied. Outdoor activities, even in their back yard, were impossible thanks to the scorching heat and late-summer humidity.

  “I should’ve rented a house with a pool,” Honey complained.

  “Why, so the neighbors could hear children playing and wonder who moved in next door?” Hummer asked.

  Wary of drawing too much attention, they determined to move locations when their meager supplies dwindled, so that they would not be seen leaving and returning to the same place. Thus, on this hot, sunny morning, they ventured out into the open to replenish their food stores and move to the next safe house.

  “Does anything seem different to you guys?” Hummer asked as they walked down a residential street towards a nearby strip mall.

  “You mean like how every car that passes us slows down to take a look?” Honey sarcastically replied. She had her hair in pigtails and a pair of large sunglasses on her face so that she would bear as little resemblance as possible to the oft-broadcasted picture of Maddie North. Next to her, Happy had a baseball cap pulled low to shade his eyes from view. Four children walking down the side of the road on a Saturday shouldn’t have been too
much of a spectacle. Most kids were in school, certainly, but Saturdays were still technically a supplementary day rather than a mandatory one.

  Only a handful of cars had passed them in the last five minutes, but each in turn meandered by before speeding up to the next stop sign.

  “We should hurry,” said Hawk. “Let’s cut across that field and get indoors as quick as possible.”

  The field in question ran along the back fence of the strip mall. Overgrown, dried-out weeds choked its ground of any useful foliage, and spiked burrs caught at their socks and legs as they trekked across, but at least they were further from the road and the scrutiny of curious drivers.

  Revere glided over them with a throaty caw. He perched on the building’s roof and watched their progress with one beady eye. Together Hawk and Hummer hoisted Honey and Happy over the block fence, then pulled themselves up behind. On the other side ran a quiet driveway along a row of deserted loading docks. They kept close to the wall as they crossed through the nearest corridor to the main parking lot.

  Saturdays were a busy day for areas like this, and the Wests had every hope of blending into the crowds. As they walked down the main promenade toward the grocery store at the end, though, something upsetting caught Hummer’s eyes.

  He snagged Hawk’s sleeve, and the strangled noise in his throat caused Honey and Happy to halt. Their gazes followed his to the display window of an electronics store and the row of televisions that broadcasted NPNN for all passersby. Side-by-side rough sketches of Hawk and Hummer graced the screen.