They were deep underground. There was a sense of the subterranean about the place: no natural light, the air smelt old and there was an oppressive feeling of thousands of tonnes of rock suspended above your head. The walls were made from white stone blocks that were more than a metre square and formed hexagonal rooms over twenty metres in diameter. Each wall had a large arch leading to another similar space.
There were no maps or signs, only a Roman numeral above each arch. Josh assumed they were supposed to indicate the century the artefacts belonged to.
They wandered from one room to the next. Every so often Caitlin would stop and admire a piece of art or pick up a manuscript. Nothing here looked that ancient. Many items looked as if they were new — which made them look like replicas. Josh found it hard to believe that these three-thousand-year-old antiques could actually be in such pristine condition, but that was a linear way of looking at the world, and he knew he would have to learn to think differently about history.
They saw no one. Caitlin told him that unlike the Copernicans, who seemed to be everywhere, the Antiquarian was a solitary calling, and those who chose this vocation tended not to play well with others. There was probably only one supervisor assigned to this part of the collection. Josh thought back to the guard in the Louvre, who had seemed genial enough, but when he mentioned it to Caitlin she laughed.
‘Marfanor isn’t an Antiquarian. He’s probably been assigned guard duty as a punishment.’
‘Like a detention?’ Josh asked, his voice sounding lost in the volume of silence around them.
‘Kind of. He tends to get himself in trouble on a regular basis. Think of it more like a community-service order. There aren’t that may Antiquarians, for obvious reasons, and so the council use guard duty of the more accessible archives as punishment.’
‘What did he do?’
She screwed up her eyes as if thinking really hard. ‘I think the last time was stealing from the US government. He caused some kind of financial crisis back in 12.008.’
‘They put a thief in charge of valuable treasures?’
‘Yeah, it’s kind of ironic when you put it like that.’
They reached an arch with the numerals IXMVIICL carved into the stone.
‘This is our century. Now we need to find something from Antikythera.’
It took a few hours of searching before they found a some coins from the island. There were scarcely any other options, and Josh realised how difficult it must be for Draconians to find their way back into the forgotten periods in time. Once you went back further than the printing press it was like being a detective on a case without any clues, all you had to go on was money, art and the odd clay tablet. The trouble with knowledge was that unless you wrote it down on something that could last, there was a damn good chance it would get lost.
Clothes from that time were hanging on the usual set of rails next to a set of screened changing booths. These Antiquarians were methodical if nothing else, he thought, as he changed into a rough woollen toga.
When he reappeared, Caitlin was already waiting for him with an impatient look on her face.
‘What took you so long?’ she asked.
‘The bloody shoes,’ he said, pointing at the leather thonged sandals. ‘They’re like some evil puzzle dreamed up by a knot fetishist!’
Caitlin looked stunning. Her hair was coiled into ringlets and tied back behind her head. A necklace of small golden coins hung around her neck, and she wore a thin blue cotton dress that was slightly transparent. The memory of the way her body had felt against his came flooding back.
‘What? Is this too much?’ she asked, fiddling with the necklace.
‘No,’ he replied with a smile, ‘you look like a perfect little Greek princess.’
‘Γιατί σας ευχαριστώ είδος κύριε,’ she said with a mock curtsey. ‘How is your Hellenistic Greek?’
He pulled a face. ‘I’ve never been any good with languages.’
‘I take it the colonel never showed you how to intuit?’
Josh shook his head.
‘No,’ she frowned, ‘it would have been too early in your training.’
‘What does it do?’
She tapped the side of her head. ‘Allows us to share memories.’
‘How?’
‘They’re another form of energy, just like your personal timeline. Seers do it all the time. It takes a lot of practice to isolate the branch you want. Otherwise, it can get a little too personal.’
‘So you can teach me to speak Greek just by giving me the memories.’
‘No. Language is hard. It uses so many different parts of the brain.’
Josh looked disappointed.
‘But,’ she added, ‘we do have specialists that can help us with that.’
She turned and walked over to a shelf of glass jars with what looked like large pickled walnuts inside. She went along the row, reading the labels out loud.
‘Dianthus, Peteor, Jullian de Meer. Ah, here we go — Janto Sargorian.’ She lifted the jar down from its resting place and set it on the table, then began attaching electrodes to metal contacts on each side of the glass.
‘That’s not —’
‘A brain? Of course it is. What else would you store memories in?’
‘But . . .’ He couldn’t think what to say next.
‘They donated their minds to the Order. It’s seen as a very noble gesture.’
‘But they’re dead!’
She opened a drawer in the table and pulled out a metal crown to which she attached the other ends of the wires.
‘Stop being a pussy. Sit down and put this on. It’s not like I’m going to make you eat it!’
Josh sat on the edge of the table and let Caitlin place the crown on his head.
‘Now, according to the label, this mind has been dormant for the best part of four hundred years, so he’s not going to take too kindly to someone banging around in his personal space. Try to tread lightly, and whatever you do don’t let it get too deep into your mind — just keep thinking about the coin. Okay?’
Josh nodded nervously, playing with one of the metal discs. ‘I thought you weren’t supposed to mess in other people’s timelines?’
‘Not living ones. These are more like filing cabinets of accumulated knowledge. Not as systematic as a library, but a hell of a lot faster for acquiring knowledge than a book.’
Josh fell the contacts on the crown warming against his temples.
‘Now lie back. I find it helps to close your eyes and focus on your breathing,’ she said as bubbles started to form in the liquid around the brain. ‘He’s waking.’
Josh felt the presence of the mind gently reach out to probe his own; it emoted warmth and friendship — like a child waking. Colours and shapes began to form on the edge of his consciousness, not like the timelines of an object: these were more abstract, more organic. It was impossible to make out any distinct branches.
WHAT/WHO/WHEN?
The questions formed inside his head. There wasn’t a voice; the words were not exactly like speech, but more like the meanings of a thought.
HELP? Josh replied without speaking.
The shapes changed, reformed and flowed into one another as if searching for the right response.
WHO.WERE/ARE. YOU?
JOSHUA JONES.
There was a stillness and the colours faded into purples and blues as the mind contemplated his answer.
I. JANTO. LAST. SARGARIAN. YOU. REQUIRE/NEED. HELP/ASSISTANCE/GUIDANCE?
The mind was probing him now. Josh could feel it spreading across the surface of his mind. He concentrated on the image of the coin as Caitlin had instructed — imagining the small round disc spinning over and over like the Copernican flipping it in the hall.
HELLENIC COIN > CIRCA 9th MILLENNIA?
‘Tell him you need a lexicon memory for Hellenic Greek,’ she whispered in his ear.
Josh did exactly as he was told.
&nbs
p; WHY? Came the response.
‘He wants to know why,’ Josh repeated to Caitlin through gritted teeth.
‘He’s playing games. Tell him it’s a temporal imperative. Level Nine-Beta-Five.’
ACCEPTED>PREPARE> LEXICON FOLLOWS:
Josh saw a complex geometric form appear from the abstract swarm of information. It was full of sounds and symbols, and flashes of imagery. As it solidified, he felt the usual sensation that he experienced with a timeline, and allowed his mind to enter it.
It was like watching a thousand movies at once. His head ached as the information flowed into his memory. He felt like his mind was going to burst, and he reached up to pull off the crown, but Caitlin stopped him.
‘It will pass,’ she said. ‘Just relax.’
A few minutes later it stopped, just as if someone had pulled out the power. Josh felt able to breathe again and opened his eyes.
THANK YOU. He imparted to the other mind as he felt it separating from his own.
WHO WAS FATHER?
Before Josh could respond Caitlin removed the crown and the connection was broken. He sat up and rubbed his temples.
‘That was some pretty crazy shit.’
Caitlin laughed as she took the jar back and placed it on the shelf.
‘What’s so funny?’
She turned and smiled. ‘You’re speaking in fluent Greek.’
44
Lenin and the Professor
‘Go back and loop over those last fifty frames,’ Professor Fermi instructed the security guard who was operating the CCTV playback. He was staring at a bank of monitor screens all showing various angles of the same scene in the lab just before Josh triggered the fire alarm. There was a point in the footage where the face of Josh, grainy from the multiple magnifications, had gone from looking confused and scared to calm and determined — in a split second.
‘Tell me, Boyce, would you say that looked like the same man?’
The guard shook his head. He wasn’t sure what the professor was trying to prove from the change in the kid’s expression, but the overtime paid double.
‘OK. Go back to the other guy. The one with the gun.’
The footage wound back until Lenin appeared from the store room with the trolley laden down with canisters.
‘STOP!’ the professor commanded ‘Enhance that guy and print me out a couple of copies.’
The guard did as he was told.
‘Now, what I still don’t understand is why our friend here.’ He pointed at the blurry figure of Josh. ‘Sets off the sprinklers and jeopardises their mission. Run it forward again.’
The video continued, and they watched as Lenin struck Josh with the butt of the gun, then took one look at the lift and ran up the stairs.
‘Go back to the point where they are watching the lift. There!’
Boyce stopped the recording.
‘Now wind it back a frame at a time. You were coming down in the lift until the fire alarm went off. I’m guessing they are programmed to stop automatically when the alarm is triggered. Yes?’
Boyce nodded.
‘So, he stopped you coming down to the lab. I think, my friend, that boy might have been trying to save your life. Put a copy onto this.’ Fermi handed him a USB stick. ‘And leave the printouts on my desk.’
It had taken less than twenty-four hours to find out who the kid with the gun was. Boyce, who had taken early retirement from the police, still had a few friends on the force and had little trouble finding out that the perpetrator was a local gangster and drug dealer known as Lenin.
Fermi had lived in Italy long enough to know how to deal with racketeers. They were simple animals, driven by a pathological need to dominate and an almost suicidal lack of respect for authority. The only thing they cherished more than power was money, and Fermi had a lot of that.
His father had left him a vineyard in Piedmont that had an annual revenue in the millions. He had no interest in viticulture and had recruited a South African estate manager by the name of ‘Dieker’ to run operations so that he could pursue his research into quantum fields. Research that had been entirely self-funded up until now, but that was all about to change since his systems had picked up the gravitational wave given off by the watch.
He moved the microscopic camera further into the body of the device. The inner workings of the watch were more intricate than any circuit board; fine gears and wheels moved in perfect regularity above an iridescent crystalline structure. Fermi guessed that the quantum heart at the centre of the crystal was being held there in some kind of stasis, but knew better than to start breaking it apart. Black holes were highly unstable and incredibly powerful, and the scientific method required him to observe and analyse, not smash it open with a hammer.
He looked down at his notes. The sheets of paper were covered with sketched diagrams of the mechanism, copies of the symbols from the fascia and comments on what they might represent. His current hypothesis was that the dials were some kind of measurement of time, but not marked in hours. He calculated that the total possible number of configurations could span twelve thousand years at least.
What he couldn’t reconcile was how and why the boy had such a device. It was evident from the way he had used it to escape that he knew exactly how it worked — which would save Fermi a great deal of time and frustration if he could find him again.
This was where the notorious Lenin came into the equation. Boyce’s associates had no problem tracking him down and even providing the names of his known associates, including a certain Joshua Jones aka ‘Crash’, who had just finished his latest round of community service for some petty burglary.
Fermi read the charge sheet again. The boy had been in trouble since he was ten years old. The crimes were mostly all misdemeanours, apart from one serious incident when he was twelve — a boy had died in a car accident in which Jones was driving, and many others had been injured.
There had been nothing but an empty, boarded-up flat at the last known address the police had on file for Jones. Someone had sprayed a ghost tag over the metal gratings that covered the windows. It was a menacing symbol of which Fermi had seen similar versions in the streets of Naples. It was a ‘Segno Nero’ — the black mark — Jones was literally a dead man walking.
Fermi wondered if he might make an alliance with Lenin. They both wanted the same man and Fermi had something that Lenin needed, Ephedrine — vast quantities of it. The professor was willing to do anything to get his hands on Joshua Jones.
The guy was not as stupid as he looked, thought Lenin as he watched the stranger park up on the opposite side of the multi-storey car park. There weren’t many who knew about the CCTV in this place; the security had been knocked out months ago and no one had the time or the money to repair it. He watched in the rearview mirror as a well-dressed, middle-aged man stepped out of the black Landrover and held up his hands as if to say ‘I’m not armed’ — his driver, however, who remained at the wheel, looked like he was ex-military.
Lenin patted the gun that was tucked inside his jacket and got out of the car.
‘Stay here. Keep an eye on the jar-head in the other car,’ he ordered the two boys who had slid down on the back seat.
The stranger walked confidently towards Lenin and stopped halfway; Lenin did the same, and each studied the other for any signs of betrayal.
‘You are Lenin?’ the stranger asked with a slight Italian accent.
‘You got the meth?’ Lenin asked, not bothering to acknowledge the question.
The stranger smiled. ‘Straight to business. Very good.’ He motioned to the car, and the driver came out with a briefcase, he was massive and walked with an air of confidence that made Lenin wonder if a bullet would actually stop the guy.
The stranger took the case and held it out to Lenin. ‘A sample of our new partnership.’
‘Open it — slowly,’ Lenin instructed.
The stranger shrugged in that Mediterranean way and flicked the locks to revea
l two metal cylinders with ‘ETHANOL HYDRATE’ printed in large type down the sides.
‘That’s not what we agreed!’ Lenin complained, his hand drifting towards his gun. ‘You said you could get me thirty litres.’
‘This is better. It is hydrate, smaller and easier to transport — it just needs water. With these two you can make sixty litres. Ask your chemist.’
Lenin thought about calling Elena, but somewhere at the back of his drug-addled mind, he knew that what the guy was saying made sense.
‘OK, hydrate — cool,’ he said, taking the case.
‘So, what about my part of the bargain?’
Lenin nearly pulled the gun on the guy, just to see what would happen. The contact who had set up the meeting had said something about this dude wanting to know where Josh was, but Lenin hadn’t seen him since he screwed up the job at the university.
‘So you looking for Crash?’ Lenin sucked air in through his teeth.
‘That was the deal.’
‘He’s a dead man.’
‘Perhaps, but first I need to talk to him. Twenty-four hours should be all I need, and then he’s yours.’
‘No one’s seen him — he’s gone dark.’
‘He is in hiding. I was told you would know how to find him.’ The professor’s voice was strained.
‘Not him,’ Lenin took out a joint and lit it. ‘His mother. She’s sick. He’s a devoted son. It’s a simple case of waiting.’
Lenin turned back towards his car and started walking.
‘And where do I find his mother?’
‘Barts. Neuro ward. Josh’ll be there, he’s always been a mummy’s boy.’
Fermi went back to his car and got into the front passenger seat.
‘Everything OK?’ the driver asked in a thick South African accent.
‘Yes,’ replied Fermi thoughtfully. ‘Get in touch with Professor Turner at St Bartholomew’s. Tell him we need to organise a patient transfer to Harley Street.’
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 24
