by Scott Baker
Three seconds later, he landed hard on a pile of hospital bedding as it compressed under his falling body. He hit and rolled off the pile almost in one motion. The roll took most of the sting out of his fall – that, and the large laundry woman who had come over to investigate the sudden, unexpected laundry drop.
He jumped up straight away, thinking only about getting as far away from the hospital as possible. The rotund laundry woman was too stunned to complain when Shaun dashed out through the washing-room doors and into the hospital’s delivery bay. It was the most action she had seen in years.
He scanned the delivery bay.
Trucks. Three big trucks with no one around. One was a hospital truck. The next was painted with the picture of a cow and cartons of milk. The third was a DHL delivery truck – and the engine was running.
Shaun’s first thought was to jump in the DHL cabin and go. But then, a stolen vehicle as recognisable as this was bound to be reported all over the police scanners, so he reconsidered.
He ran over to the big yellow vehicle. The cabin was small, but the trailer attached was twenty feet long. For a few seconds he contemplated slipping away among all the postage, but there was too big a chance of getting trapped.
The sound of the truck’s driver returning broke his train of thought. He ducked down and waited, keeping out of sight of the pot-bellied man in company uniform. It was then that Shaun saw the bars and tray on the underside of the vehicle’s trailer. It was a maze of metal, but looked sturdy enough to support his weight.
Worming his way in, Shaun gritted his teeth against the pain in his shoulder as he slid his body between the tray and the support struts. He curled, twisting his limbs around the metal so no part was exposed. He had been there for no more than a second when the driver jumped up into his cabin and crunched the big delivery rig into gear. It jumped to life and started to move backwards, pulling out and around from the delivery dock.
Shaun curled up tighter, acutely aware of the throb in his shoulder. He touched it and winced. A gash of flesh had been taken out. With all his activity, the blood pumping through his body was now seeping through his jacket. He pulled the diary from his pants and put it back in his jacket’s large inner pocket. If they – whoever they were – had known they were within arm’s reach of it, would he still be alive? He doubted it.
He was now certain that this was all about the book with the strange symbol on the front. He knew that to someone, this diary was important enough to kill for – important enough to kill Lauren.
Lauren. Dear God. Lauren was gone. His brain didn’t accept it yet, but he had seen it with his own eyes. No doubt they had shot the hobo too and had disposed of both bodies. Shaun closed his eyes tight as tears started to well again at the thought of what they had done to his wife’s body. They would pay.
Shaun had always felt that he was a decent human. But now, with the only person who really mattered to him gone, the rules had changed. All he cared about was revenge. They had taken away the very thing Shaun had lived for, and now he filled the void with thoughts of retribution. If he could summon enough anger he might just be able to keep the heartache at bay.
Right now he had to find out who these people were, and why this book was so important to them. The young woman had been surprised when he told her he had read the book. It had rattled her to the point of breaking character when he had said it was written in English. What had she said? ‘You read Aramaic, do you, Max?’
Aramaic? Shaun thought back. The other pile of documents had been in all kinds of languages, none of which he had understood. He supposed some of them could have been Aramaic, but certainly not all. He knew enough about languages to recognise different ones, even if he didn’t understand them.
Aramaic, though? To the best of his knowledge, it was an ancient language from somewhere around the Middle East, but no longer spoken, certainly not in North Carolina.
He weighed up the idea that the hobo was a thief; that he had stolen the documents from a museum. But that didn’t feel right. Museums didn’t usually hire hit squads – at least he didn’t think they did – and the bundle had been sealed. Shaun remembered the hiss as Lauren punctured the wrapping, and the smell that had escaped. Old, musty time was concealed in the object. A museum wouldn’t have left something so ancient sealed; it would be preserved and out on display. Shaun adjusted his position and looked around in concern as he heard the truck’s brakes give off a high-pitched squeal. Then it hit him: they were stopping.
He looked out from his thigh-level vantage point. The night outside was dark, but the lights of the city reflected off every object, giving depth to the blackness. He heard voices.
‘Heard about the commotion that’s gone on here tonight?’ a deep voice spoke in an Italian accent.
‘I didn’t notice nothin’ strange till I got out here and saw you guys everywhere. Why are there so many police around?’
Police? Damn. Shaun didn’t trust the police right now.
‘We’ve got reason to believe the people who caused that pile-up on the freeway earlier are in and around the hospital. You don’t mind if we have a look at your truck, do you?’
‘I got nothing in here but mail,’ the driver said, ‘but sure, go ahead.’
Damn and double-damn. Real police or not, stealing away in the lower rigging of a courier truck might be classed as ‘suspicious behaviour’.
‘Thanks, we won’t keep you a moment.’ The officer’s boots crunched on the cold ground as he turned. Shaun froze. He saw the circle of a torch on the ground five feet away. It disappeared for a moment, then flashed again as the policeman walked the circumference of the large delivery trailer.
‘Mind popping open the back for me?’ he heard the accented voice call. Then, the front door opened and the driver’s feet landed on the ground.
‘No poppin’ nothing with DHL; we do it the old-fashioned way.’ He walked around and Shaun heard a lock, then the back roller door rattled up. Moments later the whole trailer dipped a little as it took the weight of the cop climbing up into it.
‘Hey, don’t you need a warrant or something to go in there?’ the driver asked. ‘I got a whole lotta deliveries to make tonight and gotta get out onto the road to be in New York by noon tomorrow.’
After a moment of shuffling packages, the trailer bounced back up as the man jumped down. The torch flashed around a little more. Then the light grew brighter as the torch was swung under the trailer, right to where Shaun was hiding.
Shaun’s heart hammered in his chest as he held his breath, listening to the slow footsteps barely two feet away. He tucked tightly behind a large axel block hanging down low behind him. The torch’s beam moved back and forth, like a snake tasting the air for its prey.
Then it was gone.
The truck heaved under the weight of the driver sitting in his seat again, and the door slammed with a jolt. The cop banged twice on the side of the trailer. Again Shaun heard the gears crunch and felt the lurch of the truck taking him out through the hospital gates. He released the breath he had been holding. He was safe.
CHAPTER 16
TWO YEARS AGO
David Black was not a stupid man. He was perhaps a little socially awkward, perhaps a little shabby in his grooming, but no one had ever accused him of being stupid. In fact, few minds could process data with the speed of David’s. David knew computers. He knew code. He knew the internet, and he knew everything there was to know about digital video. He was not stupid. It had been more than a year since the night his house had been shot up and his boss, Randy Bilis, had been killed in his own home in front of his wife and kids. No one saw who did it. The news blamed a sniper shot from across the street, but David knew better.
David’s home had been targeted, but it wasn’t just the house that was shot up. If there was an irony to all this, it was that someone was killed that night in his home. He could only assume it was a thief. The police said that it must have been a homeless man, because there were no
records with which to identify him. That was probably why it hadn’t made the news. David knew better. He knew that someone had been in his house searching for something that night and had been shot by mistake.
As a self-confessed geek, David believed stringently in back-up. All his data drives were mirrored RAIDs or: ‘Redundant Array of Independent Discs’.
He had doubles of everything. Everything. He had grown paranoid after he lost a short film he created during university due to a storm blackout. The film had taken him three days straight to make, and he lost it all. He had never made another film after that, saying that his first could never be topped. In truth, his technical skills far outweighed his artistic ones, but now, he was vigilant in backing up his data.
David had been on the run for a year, and he had spent the time carefully, working to learn as much as he could about the mysterious situation that had led to his attempted murder. He thought he knew who the game-players were, and he thought he knew who might be able to help. That was why he had agreed to meet this man so late on a Tuesday night, and why he clung so tightly to the small briefcase in his hand. Inside it was the only other unit in the world that could play the small penny-sized disc that had started all the trouble. He had made significant improvements to the unit since that fateful day a year ago when he had screened it to the disappointed Europeans, and they had taken the player as a prize.
He walked along the Paris street with purpose. The cafes were still open and the streets lively. He had deliberately chosen a public place. He felt safe only in the middle of a busy cafe, or holed up in his third-storey loft apartment. The latter had everything he needed: high-speed internet connection, no billing address and a clear view of the surrounding streets. David erred on the side of caution these days.
He approached the cafe, which sat not far from the beautiful Gare du Nord railway station. He was sure he would enjoy Paris if he ever left his apartment, which he was far too cautious to do. His world was built around consuming home-delivery food, collecting royalties from software he had sold, watching downloaded movies, and of course, continuing his research.
David scanned the scene as he approached. A couple of young lovers on the left; a small, elderly woman on the right; a group of late-night businessmen in the back. Then he spotted him, right there in the corner. Through the glass door David saw the man he knew only as Alberto sitting alone scanning the newspaper, which he had folded down horizontally as he read. That was the signal. Checking the area once more, he entered the cafe and ‘accidentally’ bumped into one of the waitresses, then came and sat in the corner directly across the table from the man reading the paper.
The man continued to read as he began to speak. His accent was Spanish, which made David edgy.
‘You have it with you?’
‘I do.’
‘We have somewhere that we can go. To watch it.’
‘We’re going nowhere. We watch it here or not at all.’ The man lowered his paper and looked at David. He paused. Assessing.
‘I see,’ he said finally. ‘I understand your mistrust, but if you have what you say you have, what I have to show you will convince you of my …’ He left it hanging a moment ‘My understanding of your work.’
‘First you tell me why this codec is so important.’
The man smiled at David. ‘You developed this codec. You must have had a disc to play on the device – and yet you ask me why?’ the man was half-surprised, half-amused.
‘The disc I had was blank. It just had some text on it,’ David said cautiously.
‘Blank. Yes, I suppose it would have been.’ The Spaniard’s eyebrows lifted. He had short black hair and David estimated him to be about fifty.
‘What did the text say?’ the man asked.
‘I don’t think I should tell you that.’
‘You shouldn’t, but you don’t have to. I can guess. It read something like: “IDENT: 0012. SUBJECT: Napoleon Bonaparte. OFFICER: X10,”’ the man quoted exactly.
David froze. He could not have known that. Not unless he was with the French and Italian men who had taken the first unit away with them.
‘How do you know that?’ he asked quickly, suspiciously.
‘I know,’ the older man began, ‘because of where the disc was found. It was dug up on an archaeological dig by a university summer student who was later tortured for his efforts. It was found with the skeleton of a fallen soldier from the Battle of Waterloo. I guessed what the disc said, because that is what it should have said. It was intended to have contained a lot more.’
‘Should have said?’ David asked.
‘Look, let me show you what we both came here to see.’ He produced a penny-sized disc that looked like the love child of a DVD and a button. ‘If we see on this disc what I think is on it, then many of your questions will be answered.’ His eyes darted around the cafe. ‘Still, I do not feel comfortable doing this here.’
‘Then I guess I should go.’ David motioned to leave.
‘No, no, no. Of course. If it must be here, then it must be. You have the player?’
David placed the small silver-and-black briefcase on the table. His wrist clanked as the handcuffs that connected him to the player contacted the hard table. The Spaniard smiled.
David fiddled with the combination lock on the front and the case popped its latches. Taking a breath, he lifted the lid and revealed a complex interface. On the lower panel a series of dials, lights and buttons were arranged seemingly randomly on the surface. The entire upper section of the lid was a dark rectangular screen.
Along the sides, two pairs of earphones sat in small compartments. David popped them out and handed one pair to Alberto. The older man took the small headphones, which looked like a long string of black cotton with a bulge at each end. There was nothing connecting them to the unit.
‘Like this,’ David instructed as he placed the earphones in his own ears. The older man did as he was shown.
‘Now, tell me when you can hear something.’ David began to play with a dial on the unit, then pressed several switches. ‘Each set of headphones works on a unique frequency that interacts with your eardrum’s naturally vibrating harmonics. It sends a signal, reads the response from your brainwaves and feeds back into the unit. So, once the headset is tuned into your ear, no one else will be able to hear what you are listening to. If anyone else put the headphones on, they would get nothing. At the moment they’re both calibrated for me.’
David continued to turn the dial slowly, looking carefully at Alberto. Eventually the older man creased his eyes and gave a curt nod. David set the calibration into memory.
He then pulled out a pair of what looked like sunglasses. Black, sleek and made of flexible material, they sat on Alberto’s face as if they were custom built.
‘Now,’ David continued, ‘look at the screen and tell me when you see an image.’
Again he explained the controls. ‘This works like the earphones, but calibrates to your unique optics. The lenses are a circular polarisation that screens out anyone from spying.’
‘I see something,’ Alberto said.
‘What?’
Alberto squinted as the image came into focus. ‘It says … “Fuck … you”.’
‘Yeah, that’s the default in case anyone tries to tamper with the unit. Keep looking.’ David adjusted the dial.
‘Yes! There! There, it says, “Hello, welcome to the love shack”.’
‘That’s the one,’ David smiled and put his glasses on. ‘Again, if anyone tries to record the image, or is looking over your shoulder, or has a set of glasses that aren’t calibrated specifically for them, all they’ll see is a black screen.’
‘Very impressive,’ the Spanish man said, blinking under the lenses.
Emphasising his point, David continued: ‘If anyone tries to steal this unit, they won’t be able to get it to work. I’m the only one who knows how to make it sing.’
‘Then let us hear its song, Mr Black.’ Alberto hel
d out the small shining disc on the end of his fingertip. David took it. He swiped a finger across a small panel in the case and a large tray slid out, about the size of a regular DVD. Sitting in the tray was a disc labelled Army of Darkness.
‘Hey, if I’m going to build this thing, I may as well be able to watch movies on it,’ he said a little defensively. He popped the Blu-Ray out and placed the small disc in the centre of the tray, and the unit sucked it in.
‘Hold your breath,’ David smiled, and then he hit play.
Black.
Nothing.
Text, white on black:
IDENT: 0011
SUBJECT: Napoleon Bonaparte
OFFICER: X9
Black. Image.
At first it wasn’t clear if they had seen something. Then, the orange spot came again. It was a light in the distance. It looked like an adjustment was made as the whole screen suddenly lit up.
The sound cut in just as suddenly. Slowly moving paddles splitting still water. Then, with the image brightening, both David and Alberto gasped as the picture came into focus. The experience was intense, unlike anything they were expecting. They were looking out from a small rowing boat as it approached a cliff face. On the very top of the cliff was an austere stone structure that resembled a barracks. As remarkable as the image itself was, it was nothing compared to the way they viewed it. Right there in the middle of a Paris cafe, the two men were immersed in another world. The picture seemed to protrude from the screen in the very best version of stereoscopic 3-D either of them had ever seen.
The image had an incomparable sense of depth and clarity, as if the cliff jutted out of the screen and the water could splash their faces at any moment.
Alberto Eduardo Florez reached forward with his fingers, convinced he could grab one of the oars from a man in the foreground. His fingers bumped the screen and the whole image jolted a little. He swore under his breath, then quickly made the sign of the cross. David didn’t notice; he was stunned by the intricacy of the picture, the realism, the detail. He had designed this player, he had reverse-engineered the codec, but he had no idea how this was happening.
