The Sins of the Fathers

Chapter Thirty-Three

The Rosen Estate

Sanibel Island

Florida

"Is it wise to shout at the German Chancellor?" Gideon Palmer asked quite innocently as he joined a visibly angry Sean Fletcher out on the porch, smiling sweetly as he accepted one of the President's cigarettes. Fletcher grunted and gave Palmer a light, before turning back to stare out across the water. "I take it that you are struggling to get our allies to stand firm against the British rebels?"

"Caris has asked me to moderate my language." Fletcher growled as Palmer inhaled, not noticing his friend's unusually good humour in his own fug. He was struggling to get anyone to agree to a counter offer, let alone work out what it should be.

"She has also asked you to stop smoking...the poor girl is fighting too many lost causes in trying to tame you, Norman?" Palmer said, standing beside Fletcher, as he had been doing for the last forty years, ever since he got Brianna back home.

"She actually wants me to live longer...but you're right, she is flogging a dead horse...now are you going to tell me why you are grinning like a cat who got the cream, or do I have to guess, Prof?"

"I don't think you would guess...because it was something I think that we had both rather given up on...but it is going to improve your mood..."

"Prof...my next call is in five minutes?"

"You'll probably want to rearrange it..."

"Prof?"

"Okay...humour me...Nick Symonds has seized the initiative again...what do you need to grab it back from the little bastard?" Palmer asked, blowing smoke up into the clear blue sky as he spoke.

"The same thing we've always wanted...definitive, damning evidence...they are still not really accepting any blame for delaying the release of the vaccine because we can't put a date on anything?"

"Precisely...we know that Drew Symonds worked with a crack team of experts...the best and the brightest Cambridge had produced...from twenty-nineteen onwards...and that quite a large number of those experts were women...in a lab in Meadvale. Those women all ended up in the Order at some stage before the vaccine release in twenty-twenty-four...and if we knew when they took their vows, we would know for sure that the vaccine was ready before they disappeared into the convents. Do you think that date would be definitive?"

"Well, it would be if we could talk to one of them, but they are all dead, Prof?"

"But the date would be indicative, if not definitive?" Palmer pressed, and Fletcher glared at him. "Okay...I am not trying to be irritating...this is important...having a date would allow us to accurately estimate how many people the British government let die?"

"Correct...are you telling me you've got that date?" Fletcher said, jumping ahead, eager to get to the point, if there was one.

"Yes."

"How?"

"Do you remember that old Order database we cloned from what Osborne was given to work with?"

"Yes...it was unsearchable...corrupted or whatever? We gave up on it?"

"Not quite...I gave it to a young man at MIT to play around with...oh, I need to arrange to pay him a million bucks by the way?"

"A million?"

"He's worth every penny, Norman."

"So...what did our MIT man do?"

"MIT boy really...he is only just fourteen...and he lost me in technical jargon quite early on...but essentially, he wrote some sort of application that allowed him to search the hidden data...and we have our date?" Palmer said, grinning again. Fletcher gave him a wide-eyed stare, his mind already running through how the other members of the UN Security Council would react to a proven date. "Fifteen women appeared in the system on the same day...and they are the same women we can prove were working for SHR in twenty-nineteen, and the same women Caris was forced to kill earlier this year, when we turned the heat up on Drew Symonds...and the date was the fifteenth of February twenty-twenty-one..."