You don’t have to think of alternate options, she thought, eyeing her bedroom door. Whatever this thing you heard, it isn’t your business. You could just go to sleep.
“Do your bit and no grousing,” she said aloud, and went for the telephone.
A moment later, Uncle Andrew’s familiar voice boomed sleepily into her ear. “Lily? It’s the middle of the night, m’dear, are you—”
“Everything’s fine, Uncle Andrew. Sorry to ring so late, but I’ve got a question for you. A legal question.”
“Lord, girl, come to York on your next day off and ask me then. I’ll treat you to a splendid tea at the Grand.”
“I’m afraid it can’t wait.” Lily squeezed against the wall, letting a Wren tramp past in her robe, making for the shared loo.
“Out with it, then.” She could hear her father’s brother getting interested despite himself, probably standing in his dressing gown in his study, yawning, potbellied, and shrewd.
Lily took a breath. “Is it possible to prepare something with a solicitor to be delivered at a certain date, to a certain person? A date in the future?”
“Certainly. Can’t think how many times I’ve been trusted to have documents couriered over in three weeks’ time, once the client has had a chance to get their own financials in order first.” A cynical chuckle. Uncle Andrew took a dim view of humanity.
“I’m going to need you to do that for me.” Lily let her breath out, plans tumbling in her head every which way. “I’ll be taking the train up tomorrow morning—I’ll bring something by the office, with instructions on when and where it’s to be delivered. I’ll pay for you to keep it till it needs to be couriered over.”
“No need for that, m’dear! Doesn’t cost me a thing to pop an envelope in a drawer for you for a few weeks. What’s the notion, eh? Dropping a letter to a beau, and you want it arriving the day before he ships out?”
“Not a beau, and it’s more than an envelope, and you’ll be holding on to it for more than just a few weeks.” Lily sifted mentally through her savings. This was going to just about finish them, she reckoned. “Please mark the delivery for ST1 Matthew Jackson, who will be checking into room 202 of the Grand Hotel in York.”
Lily heard Uncle Andrew scribbling on the other end of the line. “What day?”
She felt a last teetering moment’s disbelief, looking at the date she’d scribbled down disbelievingly as she heard it trickle through her headphones. Am I really doing this? Do I really believe this is real?
She exhaled a long breath. “The ninth of March, the year two thousand twenty-three.”
March 9, 2023
York
ST1 Matt Jackson was looking forward to being back at sea. Three years at a listening station in Yorkshire wasn’t a bad gig, but sitting in a boxy room staring at screens wasn’t the same when the floor wasn’t rocking under you with the swells of long rollers.
Matt hauled his bag over one shoulder and swung toward the hotel: a tall, loose-limbed Texan in old jeans and a blue jersey, sleeves pushed back over the two scrolled lines of poetry he’d had tattooed on the insides of his forearms when he’d become a signals technician:
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
The signal moon is zero in their voids.
“Ohhh, that’s deep,” an English girl had said to him in a bar, his first night in England, three years ago. Then he’d spent the next hour trying to convince her that no, just because he’d grown up in Texas didn’t mean he’d ever roped a steer or had an oil well in his backyard. Matt liked Britain, but he’d be glad not to have that conversation for a while.
Four days, he promised himself, thinking of the sea in all its moods. The flat glassy calm of Sea State Zero, the stiff chop of plowing through a good headwind, the pitching tilt of a deck on a blustery morning when the sea boiled with pods of dolphins riding the wake . . . Four days of leave in transit, then the new orders: ST1 on the USS Colin Powell out of Rota, setting out for operations in the North Atlantic.
Supposed to be some spooky shit going on out there, Matt mused, shifting his bag to his other shoulder as he sauntered through the hotel doors. Some kind of new tech, very hush-hush. Whatever it was, he’d be in the middle of it, locked behind two sets of cipher locks and security clearances: those tiny rooms alight with screens and signals, air-conditioned to arctic temps to keep the servers’ heat down, the rack of jackets you reached for the moment you stepped inside. Cold enclosed rooms set to eternal twilight; headphones; and secrecy—an ST’s world. It wasn’t exactly James Bond, but there wasn’t any way to explain to outsiders—people who didn’t live their lives hunting signals through headphones—that it was better than James Bond. A lot smarter, anyway.