Chapter 86

Roman finds Absalom Lieth on the eleventh day, and he is not dead.

"He is in a care facility outside Ghent," he says, on the phone, and Veira can hear that he has been running. "Registered under a Kin protective instrument. Advanced dementia, diagnosed 2013, admitted 2014. The death record was filed by his own office as a protective measure and never corrected."

"He's alive."

"He is alive, he is eighty-one, and he has not been lucid in eleven years." A pause. "Emre should hear this from you rather than from a document."

Emre hears it in Margaret Fraser's hallway and says nothing for a full thirty seconds.

"Eleven years," he says.

"Yes."

"I stood at a memorial in Lyon in 2014 and read something out."

"I know."

Emre puts one hand flat against the wall and leaves it there.

"I want to go," he says.

"I know."

"I want to go and I understand that we are eleven days into a rescue with seventeen missing children and a fourteen-year-old holding part of the Vein, and that a man who has not recognised anyone since 2014 is not a priority." He does not move his hand off the wall. "I am telling you what I want so that when I do the other thing you know it cost something."

"Emre."

"He is the only person alive who knows where the seventeen are," he says. "That is the priority. Not that he taught me. Not that I read something out at a memorial for a living man." He straightens. "He kept a register for twenty-two years. Registers get written down. If he was capable of hiding nineteen children he was capable of leaving a record, and I know how he worked, because he taught me how I work."

"Where would he put it."

"Not in an archive. Not with a solicitor." Emre's eyes have gone distant in the way Veira recognises from her own reflection when a pattern is resolving. "He used to say the only truly private place is one that is already open."

He looks up.

"The protective registry's second index has four columns," he says. "Date, jurisdiction, category, and a fourth that Roman said was administrative."

Veira is already reaching for the phone.

Roman answers in two rings. "The fourth column," she says.

"Reference numerals. Internal filing codes. They correspond to nothing in the Foundation's system I checked in 1974 and again this week."

"Read me the nineteen."

He reads them. Nineteen strings, six characters each, alphanumeric.

Emre writes them down. He looks at them for perhaps forty seconds.

Then he says, quietly: "They're not filing codes. They're the first six characters of a national health identifier. Different countries, different formats that's why they look like nothing. He's been filing the children's actual medical registration numbers in plain sight in a column nobody reads."

"That's traceable," Veira says.

"That is findable. In eleven jurisdictions, by anybody with the index." Emre puts the pen down. "He didn't hide it. He hid it the way I hid the thing I did to you, which is by putting it somewhere that requires one specific realisation and is otherwise invisible."

"Then we can find seventeen children."

"We can find seventeen children," Emre says. "And so can whoever else works this out. And Roman filed the index with the Assembly's review committee eight days ago."