by Edwin Dasso
“That’s the job,” Ludlum said, but there was something in her expression.
She believes me, Symon realized. She believes me when I say that Kayne is innocent.
Which, ultimately, was Symon’s biggest reason for taking the job with Historic Crimes in the first place.
If he had any shot at helping to clear Kayne’s name, it was going to be here, with this new agency. Kayne was still a fugitive, still radioactive as long as she was on the run with QuIEK under her control. But here, as part of Historic Crimes, Symon thought he could get the breathing room and resources he needed to clear her. To make things right for her for once.
He felt like it was the best shot Kayne had, and he was the only one who could do it.
If he didn’t have to arrest her first.
2
Alex Kayne was siting in a bistro in Los Lunas, New Mexico, watching as a young couple toyed with playing chess at one of the rounder cafe tables. Neither of them seemed to really understand the rules of the game, but they were moving pieces and smiling and laughing. Alex found it kind of nice. Good moments were her secret passion—she took them wherever and whenever she could find them.
There was music playing overhead, and the crowd, though light, was chatting and creating a nice ambience. Alex had a cup of coffee and a chicken salad sandwich in front of her, set askew from the laptop that was tapped into every security camera, mobile phone, smart tablet, and traffic cam within ten blocks of the place.
She was watching more than an amateur chess match.
QuIEK—pronounced “quake,” because Alex was clever and liked acronyms—was the reason Alex was hiding out, paranoid and on the run, rather than enjoying a view of the San Francisco Bay from her high-rise apartment. Or maybe playing faux chess with a partner of her own.
The Quantum Integrated Encryption Key was an AI of her own design, built to secure data at a level that no one on Earth could ever crack. Except it was also capable of bypassing any digital security system on the planet with astounding ease—which made it of keen interest to governments worldwide. Including the US government, which currently had Alex Kayne at the top of every most-wanted list imaginable, framed for treason and murder.
She was innocent. But try telling that to the US alphabet agencies.
Innocent or not, on the lam or not, Alex had never been able to stomach injustice—for herself, or for anyone else. Which was why she now traveled the country, using QuIEK to help bring justice for the disenfranchised and the forgotten. She spent her days—her whole life, really—peering into the cold case files of the FBI and other agencies, finding people who needed someone, anyone, who was willing and able to help them.
She did help. And she did bring justice to those who needed it most. But it meant that she could never put down roots, never call any place home for more than a quick layover. And never without putting herself in danger of being caught at any minute.
Sitting in this little bistro in New Mexico was a direct result of Alex’s drive to help people who needed her most. Though this time, it was less about helping the disenfranchised and more about doing Agent Eric Symon a favor.
She kind of owed him one. Maybe a dozen.
When Symon had reached out to her through their usual back channels, he’d given her the full run-down of what was happening in Los Lunas. A civilian agent of the Historic Crimes task force was missing, under some pretty weird circumstances, and the phrase “quantum encrypt” had rung bells all over the place. Bells that reminded everyone of Alex Kayne and QuIEK.
So, here she was, risking being caught and arrested once again, trying to piece out what the mysterious text message from Dr. Clara Rivers meant.
So far, it made no real sense.
Kyle, I need help! Still in Los Lunas. Found the Pit. Decalogue translations plus quantum encrypt totally worked. There’s a man with a face tattoo chasing me. He’s blocking every way out. No signal so I’m hoping you get this. SEND HELP!
All of this was out of context, and even the boyfriend—Kyle—wasn’t entirely sure what all of it meant. He knew that Clara had gone to Los Lunas, knew that she was hunting for something there, and he was able to tell them that Clara had sent him emails and text messages since she’d left. He shared all of this with Historic Crimes.
Clara had recently started looking into translations of the Decalogue stone, Kyle revealed, but he wasn’t sure why. Something about a conversation she’d had with a local.
He also wasn’t sure what she meant by “quantum encrypt.” He knew she “worked in computers,” and the phrase “quantum” was one he thought was familiar. Beyond that, however, Kyle showed a remarkably shallow insight into his girlfriend or her work.
So, there were a few answers, but a whole lot of questions.
The majority of information Alex had to work from was confined in the text itself. She’d just have to piece her way through it, a phrase a time, like brute-force hacking from the old days.
She’d never actually been a hacker, but QuIEK gave everyone the impression that she was. In reality, she’d just made some fairly brilliant intuitive leaps while creating her encryption software. Leaps that she hadn’t documented, which turned out to be a good thing. She was the sole living person who understood how QuIEK functioned. So as long as she could stay out of the hands of law enforcement, the world was a safer, more secure place.
It meant living a pretty lonely life. But given the alternative—a world where one government had unlimited power over all others—it was worth the sacrifice.
She had to believe that. She said it to herself as often as she could stand it.
She shook her head. Time to focus. One phrase at a time.
Los Lunas was easy enough. The town was small, only about 15,000 people. As small towns went it was… well… one of them. No one was going to mistake the place as a major metropolitan area anytime soon, but there were nice spots—little niches like this bistro, where she could hide out in plain sight. There were some hotels and few Airbnbs available. Not exactly five-star accommodations, but far from being hovels in the dirt.
So far, though, there wasn’t much to the town itself that might explain why Dr. Rivers had disappeared.
Thanks to some Googling and sniffing around in the Historic Crimes database, Decalogue translations now made more sense. According to Historic Crimes’ resident super-archaeologist, Dr. Dan Kotler, it was a stone with ancient writing on it, “possibly Phoenician or Cypriot Greek.” Though Dr. Kotler seemed to think it had a better chance of being Paleo-Hebrew.
Alex had Googled all of that, too, discovering that “Cypriot Greek” was a dialect of modern Greek, from Cyprus, and was likely the result of Cyprus being cut off from the rest of the Greek world from the 7th to 10th century. Basically, it was a variant of what would become modern Greek, complete with its own vocabulary, syntax, etc.
It was all Greek to Alex, either way. She couldn’t parse anything useful from the overview of the Decalogue stone. Maybe with time she’d start to see connections, but for now, she was willing to leave that particular mystery to Dr. Kotler.
The thing that had her intrigued and paying close attention to the text message, though, was the phrase “quantum encrypt.”
Alex, like Director Ludlum and everyone else, assumed this was shorthand for “quantum encryption.” And this had Alex running translations and algorithms on the Decalogue text in QuIEK, to see what might pop up.
So far, it was a big, fat nothing. But she let the program run. Maybe it would turn something up, eventually.
This part of Alex’s work could be done from literally anywhere on Earth, which would have negated the risk of being out in public in a small town where she knew for a fact there was a bunch of FBI and other US law enforcement folks turning over stones and peering into every crevice.
The risk of being here was high to the point of being nuts.
But Alex’s work also tended to include a bit of hands-on, with her doing everything from breaking an
d entering to masquerading as someone else, so she could pick up crucial information that might not be available in a digital database. Paper and word of mouth were QuIEK’s kryptonite. So it was sometimes up to Alex to sniff out non-digital details.
She could never be entirely sure when those hands-on skills would be needed, or when she’d need to dig through someone’s garbage or pilfer through their file cabinets. So, here she was, risking everything, just in case. It was what she did for her clients. Even clients she hadn’t actually met.
Although for once, her “client” was Agent Eric Symon.
He was the best there was at hunting fugitives. He’d tracked down some of the most elusive escape artists in recent history. And he’d almost gotten his hands on Alex Kayne as well. She’d just been more paranoid and prepared than he’d bargained for, at the time.
Being on the run is a lonely business, however. Alex had very few actual relationships these days. And so, like a lot of fugitives before her, she’d formed a bond with her pursuer.
Nothing too fancy, and certainly not romantic—just some text messages and the occasional nudge-nudge-wink-wink when it came to handing over criminals that Alex had helped to take down. For the most part, Alex would do all the heavy lifting of finding dirt on someone who was a real piece of pond scum, and then hand them over to Symon and the FBI, wrapped up neat and tidy with a bow on top.
She was good with Symon getting credit for her work. She knew Symon believed that she was innocent of the charges against her. She knew as well that Symon was actively looking for ways to clear her name. But she didn’t let any of this stuff fool her.
Symon would arrest her, first chance he got. He wouldn’t hold back. One slip, and she’d be in the hole.
That said, he was putting a lot on the line as well, just working with her, even if it was remotely. She was a fugitive, after all. Innocent or not, he was occasionally aiding and abetting.
So, in the rare event that he reached out asking for her help with one of his cases, she was fine with helping him. To a point. Actually, this was the first time he’d ever done so—how could she refuse?
Alex looked away from the chess match and scanned through lines of translation and on screen messages from QuIEK. The translations went fine—QuIEK had tapped into thousands of linguistic databases at universities and museums all over the world, and had compiled what would probably turn out to be the most thorough and accurate translation of the Decalogue on the planet. That was cool.
It just wasn’t useful.
There was something missing. This couldn’t be purely about translation—others had done that work before her, and they were at least experts on the archaeology of the whole thing. Using quantum encryption to do her own translation was really sort of overkill, to a nearly infinite degree.
But there was more here than this surface stuff. There had to be. And for nails like this, QuIEK was Alex’s hammer.
Alex ran through the text message again, noting each little piece and part, trying to make it work in some kind of context—of course, context was the one thing she was missing. But maybe there was something in this that would click. Some random connection she’d make, just by softening her focus and letting things shift around and gel in her subconscious mind.
There were just so many unanswered questions.
What did Clara mean by “a man with a face tattoo?” What about “the pit?” What was it, and why was she searching for it? How had the Decalogue Stone become mixed up in all of this?
Kyle hadn’t known the answers to any of these questions. No clue. He’d heard Clara mention “the pit,” but it was in passing, sort of a quick blur of enthusiasm she’d blurted out at dinner one evening.
When they found her, Alex was thinking she should recommend that Clara find a new boyfriend. Kyle didn’t seem to be the attentive type.
Actually, as Alex thought about it, the word “pit” had been capitalized, like a proper noun.
Not a pit… the Pit.
Was that a clue?
Alex opened a new window and started running a scan, using QuIEK to conduct a context trace between a variety of databases, public and otherwise. Being able to phase through even the most secure government databases like they were search results on Google had its advantages.
She was looking for anything in those databases that was called “the Pit,” with a connection to New Mexico, and Los Lunas in particular.
It took only seconds, and QuIEK returned results from an archival database on the US Army’s servers—highly classified stuff.
The records went back to the forties, but had been updated as recently as the late 90s, with notes and scientific documentation.
That got Alex’s interest.
The “Pit” had started as an off-books project in the 1940s that paralleled development of the Manhattan Project, which was being run just two hours away from Los Lunas, in Los Alamos. Unlike its more famous sibling, the Pit continued as an ongoing research project well after the end of the World War II, as a means of developing new technology spun from the findings and research of Robert Oppenheimer and his team, as well as from captured Nazi tech. The really weird, almost unbelievable Nazi tech that Alex had only heard of from shows like Ancient Aliens.
Some research was absurd—far-fetched ideas like interdimensional travel along “threads” woven throughout reality, or superhuman capabilities such as the transference of memories by touch. Other avenues were more practical, from a scientific standpoint, like faster-than-light travel facilitated by coherent beams of energy, or cryogenic stasis. This sort of tech was actually in development now.
Science fiction wasn’t as sci-fi as it used to be.
From the documents she was recovering, many of which were labeled “Classified,” it looked like the Pit had been active as a black operation for fifty years before it suddenly went dark in the 1990s. Over that time, tech recovered from Nazis subtly shifted to tech recovered from the Soviets, from China, from fringe science groups, and a few sources labeled simply “Classified Source.” Nothing alarming there.
Adding to the weirdness of inter-dimensional travel and trans-osmosis, the files started detailing such terrifying alt-science gems as human cloning, designer gene therapy, and super viruses. The term “technology” expanded to include not only circuits and wires but pixels and bits, and finally bio-enhancement and genetics. And out of the research and experiments conducted in the facility came references to some pretty chilling use-cases and applications for what they were finding.
It was like reading a wish list from Satan.
There was no indication as to why the Pit stopped operating in the 90s. Records just stopped. No follow-up, beyond a few inquiries from top brass in the military. And most of those seemed to be carefully worded versions of “is this thing dead yet?”
Essentially, from around 1996, it was radio silence. Nothing useful, no files to find. Nothing to see here.
Still, this seemed like a significant enough lead to Alex.
She dutifully sent everything she had to Agent Symon, then packed up her laptop and left the bistro behind. Most of what she’d just shared was classified information, but she’d taken precautions, using QuIEK to grant access to these files. Anyone who bothered to check would see that Historic Crimes suddenly had some pretty significant clearance.
Call it my gift to Erics’ new bosses, Alex thought.
So they should be covered. And for now, it was time to put some distance between her and this spot.
She’d been here too long as it was.
Being out in public like this wasn’t really necessary—she could do what she did from any place that had internet access. It was just that being a fugitive was a pretty rough and lonely life. Being able to sit in a cafe or bookshop, like a normal person, sipping coffee and eating a sandwich, just being there for an hour or two here and there… it was…
Necessary.
And dangerous, for sure. She’d been spotted and nearly captured be
fore, thanks to someone randomly recognizing her in public. But for her own sake, for her mental health, spending some time with the three-dimensional people—even if it was at arm’s length—it was a need and a must. It kept her grounded. Kept her sane. It was worth the risk.
Still, she did have escape routes mapped out in all directions, and backup plans for her backup plans. It was her way.
Paranoia—never leave home without it.
She was using one of those pre-planned escape routes now, catching a string of Ubers to help her bounce across the city in hops. This sort of circuitous route was time consuming, but essential. When she finally landed in the Airbnb across town—really only five blocks from where she’d been sitting, but more than an hour’s drive by her route—she’d accumulated about sixty miles of travel and swapped rides dozens of times. QuIEK kept all of this moving, kept traffic lights tuned for her passing, kept security and ATM cameras fritzed out as she passed. There would be no record of her. She was a ghost here.
It was paranoia evolved to an art form, for sure. But it was necessary. It kept her out of some deep, dark pit somewhere—maybe a place like the Pit—imprisoned until she agreed to hand over QuIEK. Maybe even beyond that.
She was a catch, after all. Brains, beauty, a penchant for thinking twenty steps ahead—the whole package.
By the time she reached “home,” however, she’d gotten a response from Agent Symon.
Someone wants to chat with you, if you’re up for it, the text message read.
You know how much I love meeting strangers, Alex replied.
The three little dots appeared.
Eric had been watching and waiting for her.
It made her smile, amused. Maybe even a little touched, though she knew it was more likely that Symon saw this as important for the case, rather than eagerly awaiting her response.
He’s practically family, now that you’re doing some work for Historic Crimes. It’s Dr. Dan Kotler. He’s with me here at the hotel. He read the stuff you sent over, and he thinks you’re on to something. He wants to discuss some ideas with you. Up to chat with him?
