Carter and Carter: How It All Began 2

Michael Carter had read forty-two press releases before lunch, and every single one of them had told him exactly nothing. A supermarket chain wanted credit for cutting the price of tinned peaches. A minor royal had opened a bridge. Somewhere in Surrey, a man had grown a marrow the size of a small child and wanted the world to know about it. This was the unglamorous truth of running a global news organisation: for every scandal that landed on his desk, there were a hundred stories about marrows.

He rubbed his eyes and reached for his coffee, which had gone cold enough to form a faint skin on top, when the television bolted to the wall opposite his desk cut from the mid-morning bulletin to a red breaking news strap that scrolled with the particular urgency reserved for dead celebrities and collapsed governments.

Former Formula One driver Milton Burrows presumed dead after boat explosion off the coast of Malta.

Michael set the coffee down without looking at it. He turned up the volume with the remote he kept clipped to the edge of his monitor, because a story about a boat explosion involving a name he actually recognised was rare enough to deserve his full attention. The reporter standing on a harbour wall in Valletta had the wind flattening her hair against one side of her face and was doing her best to sound solemn over what was clearly a spectacular view.

"Local authorities say the vessel, believed to be owned by Burrows, exploded shortly after ten o'clock this morning in Valletta harbour. Witnesses report a fireball visible from the Saluting Battery. Search and rescue teams have so far recovered no survivors, and police have confirmed they are treating the incident as a tragic accident, possibly linked to a fuel leak."

Michael sat very still. Milton Burrows. Milton Bloody Burrows, who had once talked his way out of three separate disciplinary hearings at university using nothing but charm and a fabricated story about a sick grandmother who did not exist. Milton, who used to sleep until noon and then complain that lectures started too early. Milton, who had gone on to drive Formula One cars at speeds that made Michael's stomach lurch just watching it on television, and who had, as far as Michael knew, retired quietly into commentary work after his accident.

He didn't move for a long moment. Then he picked up his desk phone and dialled Nicky's extension, two floors up, and didn't wait for a greeting.

"Turn on the news," he said. "Now."

"Which channel?"

"Any of them."

He heard her television click on in the background, heard the tinny voice of another reporter repeating more or less the same lines he'd just heard downstairs, and then Nicky's voice came back sharper, faster.

"That's Milton," she said. "Isn't that your Milton? From university?"

"That's my Milton."

"God, Michael. I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry yet," he said, and hung up before she could ask him why not.

He wasn't entirely sure why not, either. It was only a feeling, the kind of thing that had no business influencing a man who prided himself on logic over instinct, but something about the phrase believed to be owned by Burrows sat wrong in his chest, the way a badly tuned engine sits wrong in a car you know too well. Milton had crashed a Formula One car into a wall at two hundred miles an hour once and walked away with nothing worse than a limp for six months. It seemed a strange sort of universe in which a boat, of all things, finally got him.

He was still turning that thought over when the alert chimed on his terminal.

It wasn't the usual soft ping of an incoming email. It was the harsher, three-note tone reserved for flagged content, the kind of alert that fired only when one of Carter Global's automated filters caught something unusual buried in a data feed. Michael frowned at the screen and clicked through.

The subject line read: Malvern Racing — Telemetry Archive, Session 4, Malta Test.

It had come in through one of the dozens of open data channels Carter Global maintained with racing teams and broadcasters around the world, the sort of raw feed nobody ever looked at directly because it was nothing but numbers, tyre temperatures and throttle percentages and steering angles logged a hundred times a second. Michael had built the filter himself, years ago, mostly as an exercise, flagging any file that contained patterns inconsistent with genuine telemetry. It had never once triggered on anything real.

He opened the file.

Rows and rows of numbers filled the screen, exactly as expected, except that buried between columns of throttle position and brake pressure was a string that made no sense at all in the context of a racing car. It wasn't corrupted data. It was too clean for that, too deliberately placed, repeating at intervals that were too regular to be an accident.

Michael stared at it for a full ten seconds before something clicked into place at the back of his mind, some dusty corridor of memory he hadn't visited in years. He grabbed a pen and copied the string onto a pad of paper, then sat back and looked at it properly.

It was a cipher. Not a clever one, not the sort of thing GCHQ would lose sleep over, but a specific one, a shift-and-substitute code that he and three other students had cooked up in their second year at university as a joke, a way of passing notes in lectures that the lecturer couldn't read if he confiscated them. Michael hadn't used it since. He doubted anyone had, except possibly the one other person who might still remember the key by heart.

He decoded the first line by hand, checking his own working twice because he didn't trust himself to have got it right the first time. When the letters resolved into actual words, he read them three times before he let himself believe what they said.

MC — not dead. Someone wants me that way. Don't trust anyone official. Will find you. MB.

Michael sat back in his chair. Somewhere below the window, London traffic carried on exactly as it always did, indifferent to the fact that a dead man had apparently just sent him a text message from beyond the grave using a code invented for the sole purpose of avoiding a philosophy lecturer named Doctor Pemberton.

He picked up the desk phone again.

"Nicky. My office. Now, please, and bring nothing but yourself."

She arrived in under ninety seconds, which told him she'd probably run down two flights of stairs rather than wait for the lift, and she came through his door already talking.

"What's happened? You sounded strange on the phone. Stranger than usual, I mean."

"Sit down."

"I don't want to sit down, I want to know what—"

"Sit down, Nicky."

She sat, mostly because the tone he used was one she'd learned to recognise from childhood, the one that meant he'd found something and wanted to explain it properly rather than have the explanation dragged out of him in pieces. Michael turned his monitor so she could see it and slid the decoded pad of paper across the desk at the same time.

"This came in twenty minutes ago. It's a telemetry file from Malvern Racing, logged during a test session in Malta. Buried inside it is this."

He tapped the string of nonsense letters on the screen, then tapped the decoded message on the pad.

Nicky read it twice, the second time slower, her lips moving very slightly over the words the way she did when she was actually working something out rather than just skimming.

"This is the code from uni," she said, looking up. "The one you and Milton and the others used. You told me about it once, years ago, when you'd had too much wine at Christmas."

"You remember that?"

"I remember everything you tell me when you've had too much wine, it's usually far more interesting than what you tell me sober. Michael, this is real, isn't it. This isn't a hoax."

"Nobody outside four people knows that cipher, and two of them I haven't spoken to in a decade. It's real."

"So Milton's alive."

"Milton's alive, and somebody wants everyone to believe he isn't."

Nicky sat back in the chair, her spine straightening and her jaw tightening as the initial shock vanished from her eyes, replaced by a sharp, narrowed focus that Michael recognized instantly from his own thinking moments earlier.

"An assassination," she said. "Dressed up as a boat accident. That's not an easy thing to fake, Michael. You don't just blow up your own boat and vanish and hope nobody checks."

"No. Which means whoever's after him is either very confident or very careful, and either way, we haven't got time to sit here admiring the cleverness of it."

"You want to go to Malta."

"I want to go to Malta."

"Obviously I'm coming."

"I hadn't planned on leaving you behind," Michael said, and there was something almost like a smile in it, though it didn't survive long against the weight of what they were actually discussing. "He says he'll find us. That means he already has a plan, or the beginnings of one, and it means he trusts that message to reach me and nobody else."

"Which it did."

"Which it did, because the filter flagged it, and because I happened to still remember how to decode a joke from second year. If it had landed on anyone else's desk it would have sat there as an unread telemetry file until the end of time."

Nicky stood up, already moving with the brisk, decisive energy she brought to anything that promised to be more interesting than the newsroom's usual fare. "Then we'd better not waste the luck. How fast can we get to Luqa?"

"Fast enough, if Julie has anything to do with it. Go home and pack. I'll ring you the flight details before you've even got your case open."

"What do we tell people? The office, I mean. We can't just vanish for however long this takes without someone asking questions."

"We tell them we're following up a broadcasting opportunity," Michael said. "It's not even a lie. As far as anyone else is concerned, that's exactly what it is."

"We tell them we're following up a broadcasting opportunity," he said. "It's not even a lie. As far as anyone else is concerned, that's exactly what it is."

They left the office within the hour, Michael carrying nothing but his laptop bag and the decoded message folded into his jacket pocket, Nicky already on her phone to a friend cancelling something that had clearly been arranged for that evening. The taxi took them across town through the thick of the afternoon traffic, past the ordinary business of a city that had no idea one of its own had just received a message from a dead man, and pulled up outside the Carter family residence just as the light was beginning to soften toward evening.

Mrs. Benson had the door open before Michael had even finished paying the driver. She held two heavy wool travel coats draped over her left arm and gestured them inside with a nod toward the hallway. “The overnight bags are ready in the hall,” she said softly, taking Michael's briefcase before he could set it down.

"I've put the kettle on," she said, stepping back to let them through. "I don't imagine either of you has eaten anything sensible today, so there's a tray in the kitchen, and I've pressed your travel coats, Master Michael, though I dare say Malta won't want them, this time of year."

"How did you know it was Malta?" Nicky asked, already halfway up the stairs.

"I didn't, dear, until just now," Mrs. Benson said placidly. "I only knew it was somewhere warm enough not to need the coats and cold enough that you'd want them for the flight. You'll forgive an old woman her guesswork."

Michael followed his sister up the stairs two at a time, and behind him he heard Mrs. Benson moving toward the kitchen without any further comment, the particular quiet efficiency of a woman who had packed this family off on urgent, unexplained journeys more times than either of them could count, and had long since stopped expecting to be told why.

In his room, Michael packed with practiced speed, shoving clothes and his passport into a bag without a second thought. His focus remained pinned on the message—specifically the warning don't trust anyone official—and what it meant for a man who had faked his own death before all of Valletta.

He came back downstairs to find Nicky already at the kitchen table, a cup of tea in front of her that she hadn't touched, her own bag by the door.

"Julie?" she asked, as Michael sat opposite her and reached for the second cup Mrs. Benson had already poured.

"Ringing her now." He pulled out his phone and dialled, and Julie Pendleton answered on the second ring, exactly as she always did, as though she spent her entire life sitting with a hand hovering over the receiver waiting for one of the Carters to need something urgently.

"Mr. Carter."

"Julie, I need two seats on the next flight to Luqa Airport. Tonight, if there's anything running, first thing tomorrow if there isn't."

"I'll check now." He heard the soft clatter of her keyboard, quick and precise. "There's a flight at nine forty this evening, one change through Rome, or a direct charter I can arrange through the usual company if you'd rather not wait for the connection."

"The direct charter. And Julie, this doesn't go through the usual booking channel. I don't want Malta appearing on anyone's itinerary sheet, not the office, not the diary, nowhere. As far as anyone's concerned, my sister and I are unreachable for a few days on a broadcasting matter."

There was a brief pause on the line, the sort of pause Julie allowed herself only when she was recalibrating rather than questioning. "Understood. I'll book it under a holding company name and settle the account personally. Do you need a car to the airfield?"

"Half an hour, if you can manage it."

"I can manage it in twenty minutes, Mr. Carter."

“Then twenty minutes,” Michael said, letting out a long, slow breath as his shoulders dropped an inch. “And Julie. Nobody knows the destination. Not the driver, not the airfield staff if you can help it. Just us.”

"Nobody will know a thing," Julie said, and rang off to go and make it happen, because that was simply what Julie Pendleton did.

Mrs. Benson set a small tray of sandwiches on the table without being asked, cut into neat, sensible triangles, the crusts removed the way she'd been doing since before either of the Carter children could reach the table on their own.

"You'll want something in you before a flight," she said. "Whatever it is you're flying toward."

Nicky reached for one and ate it in two bites, already checking her watch, already halfway toward the door in her mind even as her body sat obediently at the table.

"We don't actually know what we're flying toward," she admitted, glancing at Michael. "Only that Milton's alive, somebody wants him dead, and he thinks we're the only people he can trust to help him prove it."

"That's rather a lot to be flying toward on an empty stomach," Mrs. Benson said, and pushed the tray an inch closer.

Michael ate without really tasting anything, his mind cycling through the practicalities that mattered now, the things he could actually control. Flights. Contacts on the ground. The Carter Global office in Malta, which he vaguely recalled existed above a shop somewhere and which he hadn't given a moment's thought to in years, mostly because nothing ever came out of it worth reading. That would need to change, and quickly, if they were going to find their footing on an island where neither of them knew a single useful soul.

"We'll need eyes on the ground the moment we land," he said, half to Nicky, half to himself. "Someone who knows Valletta, knows the harbour, knows who might have wanted a boat to explode with a Formula One driver aboard it."

"One thing at a time, Michael. Get us there first."

"I intend to."

A car horn sounded outside, low and discreet, exactly the sort of horn Julie Pendleton would have specifically requested rather than anything that might draw attention from the neighbours. Mrs. Benson was already at the door with their coats before either of them had finished standing, holding them out one at a time, her expression giving away nothing beyond the usual calm competence that had carried this family through every strange departure it had ever made.

"Be careful," she said, which from Mrs. Benson was as close to an outright warning as either of them had ever heard, and it landed heavier for its rarity.

"We will," Nicky said, and kissed her on the cheek on the way past.

Michael paused at the door only long enough to fold the decoded message once more and tuck it deep into his jacket pocket, the paper already soft at the creases from being handled too many times in too short a space of time.

Somewhere over the Mediterranean tonight, a man the whole world believed dead was waiting for exactly one thing: for the message to have reached the one person who could still read it. Michael intended to make sure it had.

He got into the car beside his sister, and the driver pulled away into the London evening, the house and Mrs. Benson's steady, watchful figure receding behind them, already smaller than the questions waiting on the other side of the flight.