The Rule of Knowledge

by Scott Baker

  David closed the briefcase and glanced at his watch. ‘We’ve got to go.’

  ‘Go?’ Shaun slid back into the present, his mind still reeling from what he had seen. ‘I just got here. Where do we have to go?’

  ‘The chicken is in Roma!’ David said with a smile, then was suddenly serious. ‘We have to go to Rome. I’m sorry, I know you must be totally exhausted, but there’s a man I have to meet there. The Italian that my contact mentioned before he died; and I know he will definitely want to meet you.’

  ‘What’s in the briefcase, sir?’ the security guard asked David.

  ‘It’s a DVD player. I always take it on board with me, don’t trust those guys in the luggage handling. You know, last year I went to Sweden and—’

  ‘Basta! Move along,’ the guard said, moving quickly to the next piece of luggage coming through the X-ray machine, clearly not wanting to engage in idle chitchat.

  David closed the case and moved forward with purpose. Shaun came into stride next to him.

  ‘So, the crazy zigzagging in the plaza? It disrupts a satellite?’ Shaun asked. It was the first thing he had said since they left the park. He had been going over and over what he had heard and seen, desperately trying to make sense of it all.

  ‘The zigzagging is a little something I devised to protect myself,’ David said proudly. ‘See, there’s this web-cam set up on the plaza. So, I hacked into the satellite coordination systems for all the birds that—’

  ‘You hacked into the satellite coordination systems?’ Shaun echoed with more than a hint of scepticism.

  ‘Yeah, well, actually it’s not so much the satellite itself as the feed monitored back to earth,’ he admitted, as if this made it easier to swallow. ‘I have my little terminal sitting in an attic near the Palace and it’s set to display the feed from the web-cam on the plaza. I have it programmed like a DVD menu, with hot spots on the screen. When the pixels on my screen turn from white to black at those hot spots in a certain order, and at a certain time, it starts running a program that disrupts the feed from the twelve satellites that pass over Madrid in any given year.’

  ‘What does that achieve exactly?’ Shaun asked, wondering if this guy was nuts.

  ‘Well, it means that they get some screwed-up vision from twelve of their birds. Those twelve can be anywhere in the world at any given time, but it means that the chance of them seeing me doing something important is next to none. I walk the pattern whenever I don’t want them to see what I’m doing. Somehow I don’t think they’d want me meeting you.’

  ‘Thank you. Seat 15B,’ the stewardess said as she took David’s boarding pass. The two men shuffled down the aisle to find their seats and Shaun again resigned himself to sitting still and cramped for another few hours.

  ‘You expect me to believe that? That you can hack into government satellite feeds?’

  ‘Are you crazy? Everyone does it! Every spy agency on the planet is stealing the feeds from every other government. Hell, it’s even relied upon these days, so they throw out misinformation through the feeds to screw up their counterpart agencies.’

  Shaun raised his eyebrows. Considering everything that had been going on, he felt he had no choice but to trust this guy. He clicked his seatbelt in and breathed deeply, then, he turned to David. ‘Okay, again. Who are “they”?’

  ‘Let me come back to that. There’s a chronology to this that I’m hoping you can help me with. I think I know who the players are here, but there are some gaps.’

  ‘Help you? I want the answers, here. It’s my wife they killed!’ Shaun struggled to stay calm.

  ‘I’m truly sorry to hear that,’ David began earnestly. He paused, then continued. ‘I fear there may be a lot more people in danger of being killed. Firstly, we need to talk about the disc. It made sense to you, yeah? I was sort of hoping you would know who the man was who said your name.’

  ‘No. No, I don’t know him. But I think I know what he was.’

  ‘What he was?’

  ‘He’s part of something called The Journalist Project. The whole Officer X11 thing. It’s a group who work to gather interviews of important historical figures. What I think you have there is an interview disc.’

  ‘Yeah, except with no interview,’ said David as he shuffled his feet. ‘After they shot up my house, I moved around a lot. I mean, a lot. I moved all over Europe, lived in Germany, France, Holland and settled about three months ago in Madrid. The whole time really I was searching for you. Searching for information on this Strickland guy. Funny, I started looking for historical references to the name in the time of Napoleon; I didn’t even think about the present. But then I had the idea of speaking to a modern-day descendant and asking them about their ancestors.’

  He drifted off, remembering his long search with a vague smile on his face. ‘I found a chicken farmer in Kentucky and he thought I was someone he’d met on an internet dating site, and a guy in France who said he was going to be a famous soccer player one day – he was sixty-four. But nothing else looked promising.’

  ‘So, how did you find me?’ Shaun asked.

  ‘Chance, really. I received an email about a month ago about an upcoming conference being held at Cambridge. You were advertised as a leading expert on the field of time travel.’

  ‘What?’ Shaun asked, exasperated. ‘I only found out about that conference three days ago! In fact, that’s what started this whole thing. That’s why we were heading to the airport when we hit that guy.’

  ‘What guy?’ David asked, and Shaun knew he had said too much. He squeezed the cloth bag in his hands tightly and felt the bulk of the diary through the material. His head began to pound. What if this guy was part of it all? But then why would he share the whole Napoleon thing?

  Because he wants information from you, his brain answered. Like the cop in the hospital. They want information from you.

  Shaun suddenly felt trapped. ‘Okay,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘I had been sending out papers for years, and I hadn’t heard back from anyone – not a single university, a single professor or a single journal. I figured no one was taking me seriously.’

  ‘I think if they had read your papers they would have. I called the university to find out about you, but of course they wouldn’t give out any contact information. I later got an email back from the university professor running the conference. He said that if I was interested in your work I should look at a particular site, which he sent me a link to. It was more an FTP site than a website, but it had loads of your papers. I read them and I knew you were the guy. More than just because of your name, but because that guy Alex had said you were a genius. It was a genius who wrote the papers I read.’

  Despite himself, Shaun felt the faintest pangs of pride at David’s comment, but he did not lower his guard. ‘Who’s Alex?’ he asked to keep him talking.

  ‘You really don’t know him?’ David replied. ‘Ah, Alex is the man with the American accent in the video you saw. The contact I met last year in Paris – Alberto, the one who gave me the disc – recognised him. It was right before his head exploded in front of me.’

  Shaun swallowed.

  ‘Who was this Alberto, then? Police?’

  ‘No,’ David Black looked serious. ‘He was a priest.’

  CHAPTER 36

  On a plane ninety minutes later Shaun downed a shot of much needed scotch and sucked on the ice left in the glass. It was cool on his tongue, and he wondered why he felt so thirsty. Their conversation came in spurts, each one giving a little information, then pausing as the other digested it and fit it into their own context of events. Then suddenly, Shaun had a thought. ‘Does the name Graeme Fontéyne mean anything to you?’

  David thought for a minute. ‘No it doesn’t, but give me a second. There was a Fontéyne on the disc. Might be a relative? But should it?’

  ‘Well, not if it doesn’t, if that makes sense.’

  David pulled out a credit card and swiped it through the panel of the seatbac
k in front of him. Shaun could not help but notice that it wasn’t the name David Black on the card.

  ‘What is he? A scientist? Politician?’ David asked, pushing the touch screen.

  ‘No, at least I don’t think so.’ Shaun remembered the diary: ‘While serving in Iraq, I was recruited into the project.’

  ‘Something military I think – not sure what else. I’m not up to that bit yet.’

  David stopped tapping. ‘You’re not up to that bit yet?’

  Shaun realised what he’d said.

  ‘Come on, man, what aren’t you telling me?’

  ‘I think that maybe if we find him, he might be able to help us,’ Shaun said, wondering why the thought hadn’t occurred to him sooner.

  David was again focused on the screen. ‘Ah, there’s going to be a bit of a problem with that, if he was military, that is.’ David leaned aside so Shaun could see the screen.

  Staring back at him was an online newspaper article dated 14 March 2003, and the headline read: ‘SPECIAL-FORCES HERO GIVES LIFE TO SAVE FAMILY’.

  The story described the premature death of a special-forces captain who single-handedly fought off two special guard units in Iraq to save a terrified Muslim family. The crack commando was gunned down by Iraqi forces as he tried to escape. This wasn’t what caught Shaun’s attention, though. What caught his attention was the smiling, dark-haired man who stared out from a full colour photo, right back into Shaun’s eyes. Shaun realised with a start that he was looking at the face of Graeme Fontéyne; the face of Saul the gladiator.

  CHAPTER 37

  My blood mixed with the water as it stung and cleaned my wounds all at once. I lay on my front in the small stream, Malbool and Mishca ahead of me. We pulled our bodies forward with our hands, feet floating behind us. The stream of the aqueduct’s water flowed gently. We drank heavily before climbing into the water, and our strength had been somewhat replenished. Now we moved slowly, but necessarily so, staying low so as not to alert anyone who happened to glance up. The aqueducts were an engineering marvel, and kept the people of Rome plentiful in the ancient world’s most precious resource: fresh water. The stonework consisted of arches upon arches. These tall structures, some of the highest in Rome, housed long, narrow, rivers that used gravity to transport the natural water supply from the mountains down through the city. It was through this network of open tunnels that we now escaped from the Empire’s capital.

  It had been an hour since we had seen the light of day, and our progress was painfully slow. Below I could hear the bustle of the city, and then the occasional gallop of horses as soldiers searched the streets for the defiant gladiators.

  We had moved in virtual silence the entire time. Stealth, rather than speed, was our weapon. Malbool led the way decisively, knowing that we had to head ever upwards, against the gentle flow of the running water. The gradient was slight, but it was present, and the effort of climbing upstream took its toll on our tired, damaged bodies.

  At intervals we came to filtering points, where the water stream was cleaned of impurities through small enclosed structures that blocked our progress, and we had to leap up and scamper over or around without being seen. The grille in front of me now forced just such an action. I poked my head up over the side of the aqueduct wall to look down on the streets of an outer suburb in Rome. It was mostly residential villas here, simple and small, but with enough pomp to justify their place in the capital. The streets were bare of soldiers. We climbed up and over the sandstone structure that housed both a filtering system and a major junction point. Within moments we were back in the long, straight duct.

  The mountains were not too far; at our current rate we could reach them in another hour or two, but I intended to leave the water system once we were out of the city and continue overland. I didn’t know this region in detail. It was not part of my assignment. I knew that the next major city south was Capua. I planned to head out of the district and get as far from the city as possible before turning south and heading for a port. We needed a boat to take us to Jerusalem. I had to complete my mission, and Mishca needed to return home.

  Time was short. I didn’t know how short, but if there were reports of a miracle man reaching Rome already, it meant that Jesus had started to teach. It was three years from the first sermon to death on a cross – there was a chance I was already too late.

  We continued the slow trek and I thought about another lifetime. I had no wife or children. I joined the Marines when I was seventeen, and learned the meaning of hell.

  The training we endured was on the boundary of human endurance, but it was nothing compared to the real thing. My first combat mission was reconnaissance in the first Gulf War. It showed me that no matter how well you plan and prepare for something, no matter what your technological advantage, a single bullet can kill a man. A single bullet can rob you of your friends, your decision-makers and your politics. War is hell.

  Then I died. The unfortunate part was not being able to tell my sister. Although we didn’t see each other much because she lived in Europe, we had the unbreakable bond of siblings who have shared the tragedy of losing their parents. I loved her dearly, and still do, and I hope that one day she will understand what I was trying to do when I was killed in Iraq.

  ‘Killed in Iraq?’ David commented as he turned the page.

  ‘Yeah, although it goes on to say that it was faked so he could be recruited to the program at The Facility,’ Shaun answered, leaning back in his seat. It was the first time he had relaxed in days, and he no longer had the strength to fight the urge to sleep. He had read ahead in the diary, and now let David catch up. He was amazed at how quickly that had happened, David obviously reading much faster than Shaun originally had.

  At first he was hesitant to let David see the diary, but he gave permission on the condition that David did not read any further than the last page Shaun had marked.

  Shaun lifted his complimentary sleeping mask and looked over at the computer engineer bent low over the book in his hands. David Black was not the sort of guy Shaun would have normally associated with. David was the guy who lived for gadgets, for pulling them apart and seeing how they worked, and then improving on them. But something was starting to feel right, like they were supposed to try to figure this out together. Their brains seemed to work with a certain synergy.

  David flipped pages faster than three a minute. Every so often he would comment on something he had just read, and make connections with other information he had not yet shared with Shaun.

  ‘Okay,’ he said finally, leaving the diary open on the page Shaun had marked. ‘I’m there.’

  ‘Well?’ he asked David.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Do you think it’s real?’

  ‘Real? Of course it’s real! You know it’s real too, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

  Was that true? Shaun thought about his motivation for getting on the plane to Rome. He could not decide if it was simply because he didn’t know what else to do, or because he really believed this might be his only lead to finding the people responsible for Lauren’s death. If he had not received the call from David, Shaun would have headed to his brother’s home in Washington DC, but now his path seemed set. Tim would wait.

  ‘What else can you remember about that cop?’ David asked then. ‘The woman who tried to hypnotise you?’

  ‘Ah, besides the fact that she got really pissed when I told her the diary was in English, not a lot. I wasn’t thinking too clearly just then.’

  ‘Did she mention why the diary was so important?’

  Shaun paused. There was something else she said. ‘Actually, yeah. She said something about a map. She asked me where the map was.’

  ‘The map?’

  ‘Yeah, she slapped me and said, “Where is the codex? Where is the map?”’

  ‘Do you know what she was talking about?’ David asked, his mind already starting to draw conclusions.

  Shaun’s eyebrows raised as one, and h
is lower lip jutted out in that upside-down smile that universally meant ‘I haven’t the foggiest idea!’

  ‘Did she say that the map was in the diary, or that they were different things? This is important, Shaun.’

  Suddenly, Shaun’s blood boiled. The words escaped his mouth before he had a chance to rein them in: ‘I know it’s fucking important. Don’t tell me what’s important, my wife is dead!’

  David sat still. A moment passed.

  ‘Sorry,’ Shaun said.

  ‘No, I’m sorry. I know, man, I know this sucks for you. I know it does. My house was shot up and I’ve been on the run for years. I guess I’m kinda used to it. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through already. I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner, before it all started.’

  Shaun shook his head. Before it all started? Those words gave him an awful sense of inevitability, like he did not have a choice. Up until this point he had been sure that if he had left that hobo on the road to die, Lauren would be with him now, and none of this would have happened. But then, was that really the case? David had been looking for him long before Lauren had hit the hobo, and that was something Shaun did not like at all. He had never believed in fate. He had never believed in destiny. But now, everything was different, and he was unsure of the new rules. Life before was simple. Science. Science made sense. Cause and effect. But with this, with the fact that this man next to him had seemingly known that all this was coming, the boundaries had shifted.

  ‘Okay, what’s this map?’ Shaun asked.

  ‘I don’t know, man. I really don’t. Maybe this is it?’ David motioned to the book now on his tray table.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has switched on the fasten-seatbelts sign and we have started our descent into Rome. Please make sure all seats are in the upright position and all tray tables are put away.’ This was said in Spanish, but Shaun got the idea when everyone else began to shuffle. David closed the diary and handed it to Shaun without a moment’s hesitation.