by Nathan Swain
And then, a voice from the past pulled him back to the present.
“Hello, Jane.”
Eastgate’s anxiety was replaced by light-hearted relief. It was the voice of a brother.
“Come here, Pearlsy,” Eastgate said, smiling broadly, “you pathetic piece of shit.”
Eastgate’s forearms enveloped his frat brother’s slender frame, squeezing his bird-like skeleton tight. The feeling instantly brought back memories of that moment over ten years ago when Eastgate pulled Pearl’s near-lifeless body out of a lake in a frat ritual gone wrong.
Pearl was still rail-thin and pale. His cold, hazel eyes were blank, betraying nothing. The same shock of prematurely-white hair hung over his right eye.
“Damn, Pearl, you haven’t changed.”
“You look like you’ve had the shit kicked out of you six ways from Sunday,” Pearl said. Eastgate shrugged. He couldn’t deny it.
“You should see the other guy.”
Pearl stared nervously at Eastgate, biting his fingernails. “So, you’re in some trouble, huh?”
Eastgate nodded. “Sure am.”
Pearl’s gaze shifted skyward. “Let’s get inside,” he said, pointing into the clouds. “Satellites. They’re watching.”
Pearl led Eastgate down the gravel road into a forested area on top of a steep mound. Pearl extended his arms. “Welcome to my castle, Jane,” Pearl proclaimed, addressing Eastgate by his frat name.
Eastgate stared at him blankly.
“On this mound, about a thousand years ago, stood Ongar Castle.”
“I see,” Eastgate said, scratching his chin in mock admiration.
Pearl pointed to the horizon at a series of rolling hills in the distance. “And surrounding it, down in the valley, you can see the mote. Isn’t it awesome?”
“It sure is. So, do you just curl up here every night with the squirrels?”
“Not quite.”
Pearl waived Eastgate forward and pushed a knot on a stout elm tree nearby.
The ground vibrated. Eastgate’s legs started to tremble. The earth beneath his feet began to sink into the mound.
Chapter 23
Eastgate put his arms out to catch his balance, as if on a surfboard. The platform descended underground into an enormous, enclosed space, and clipped into place like a puzzle piece in the ground.
“Relax, Jane, it’s a hydraulic platform.”
Eastgate looked around. They appeared to be inside what looked like a renovated warehouse. Two yellow Corvettes, newly washed, scrubbed and glowing, were parked near the platform. Next to them: two black Humvees with tinted windows. They all had bullet proof glass. In the corner, the ceiling extended upward into a dome that was divided into four triangular sections. Directly underneath sat a two-passenger helicopter. It looked like a Japanese motorbike capped by a tiny glass bubble top. The barrels of two slender machine guns stuck out from the nose of the helicopter like the antennae of a bee.
A block of a dozen computer screens shined and blinked against a wall to Eastgate’s left, flashing sheets of data and video feeds. Two others showed a slow moving aerial view passing over a blue expanse of empty ocean. Next to them, four towers of glassed-in machinery hummed and purred. Eastgate knew Pearl was a major player in the world of black-market intelligence, but he didn’t expect anything like this.
“Pearl, why do you have a lair?”
“It started as a bunker for my computer servers and equipment. The underground keeps the hardware cool, and the mound protects against surveillance and missile attack. I spent so much time working here, it eventually became home.”
Pearl led Eastgate past the computer equipment. The massive room opened up into what must have been Pearl’s living room. A few large couches forming an L shape were positioned in front of a 60-inch television screen. X-Box, PlayStation, and Wii video game consoles sat on the floor in front of them. Mounds of clothes, each about three feet high, were piled against the wall. In the corner was a life-size cardboard cutout of Thomas Jefferson.
Pearl’s couches were covered in layers of scum and the whole living room reeked of sweat and beer. Pizza crusts were everywhere.
“Pearl, have you ever had this place cleaned?”
“I had a lady down here once but she got too nosey and I had to kill her.”
“Oh, yeah? Did you jettison her into your tank of sharks?”
“Exactly,” Pearl said, happy Eastgate could still take a joke.
Eastgate brushed a white t-shirt off the couch and sat down.
“What you’ve got here is a real, doggone lair,” Eastgate said, continuing to look around. “I like it.”
“Thanks,” Pearl said, more pleased by Eastgate’s approval then he let on. “It serves its purpose.”
“Which is?”
“Secrecy. And evasion.”
“From whom?”
“MI5. They’ve been hunting me for years.”
“Bet they’re not the only ones.”
“Sure. There’s Hamas, the IRA, Mossad—and those are just my clients,” Pearl said, as if he was joking. Eastgate guessed that he wasn’t.
Pearl had disappeared after college. He completely fell off the map. It had been a year after graduation when Eastgate came home to a copy of the Bible that had appeared on his coffee table. It was opened to Matthew, chapter 13. Verses 45 and 46 were highlighted. They read: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.”
It was classic Pearl. Intellectual, mysterious, egocentric. A week later, Eastgate found an Iridium phone sitting on his coffee table. The screen flashed a missed call from an extension in the United Kingdom. Eastgate had been waiting for Pearl’s next contact. He called the number and they talked for half the night.
“It looks a little lonely down here,” Eastgate said, wondering the last time Pearl had seen a person in the flesh. “Maybe you should get a dog.”
Pearl shook his head. “Couldn’t risk walking him. Satellites,” he said, pointing upward like before. “They’re watching.”
Was Pearl being practical or paranoid? Eastgate couldn’t tell. But what he knew of his friend’s career seemed to justify his caution.
Pearl had used his frat name as his principal nome de guerre, which allowed Eastgate to follow his exploits through intelligence reports. He was an intelligence gun-for-hire and one of the top fixers and freelance hackers in the world.
Pearl’s independence was a big advantage. Untethered to any single nation or intelligence outfit, he was hired by all of them: governments, gangs, cartels, pirates, oligarchs, even Hollywood moguls. In the process, he built an intelligence network that transcended interest groups. He had informants around the world, and clients who owed him favors. He had few peers in the UK or abroad. Operators of his caliber could be counted on one hand. And from his lair in the London suburbs, he functioned like an agency unto himself, hacking corporate and governmental computer networks, operating weaponized, pilotless planes, accessing satellite imagery, and communicating with assets in the field.
Had it been almost any other time, Eastgate would have gotten the hell out of Pearl’s lair. He didn’t want to get mixed up in Pearl’s mercenary enterprises. Pearl would probably end up in a Russian prison before the decade was over, Eastgate suspected. But now, running for his life, Pearl was the ace up his sleeve. It’s why Eastgate reached out to him for help only hours after being ambushed at the checkpoint in Iraq. He probably was not supposed to get out of the Heathrow Airport alive. Fortunately, Pearl’s envelope of fake IDs and assets in the field had bought him a little time. He needed more of it.
“You’ve gotten yourself into quite a fix, Jane.”
“I guess you could say that. But I haven’t come for you to bail me out. I just need help staying hidden a little longer.”
“If you’re as hot as you make it sound, the real James Callender is probably already in a re
ndition camp in Poland getting his fingernails removed.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured. A former adversary of yours?”
“I wouldn’t honor him with that title. He ruined my taxes. My federal refund went to some asshole in Sandusky, Ohio.”
Pearl seethed for a moment, apparently recalling the snafu. “Here’s a new passport. You’re Canadian now. So, try not to be such a smart ass.
“Canadian,” Eastgate said with a grunt. “This may be my toughest assignment yet.”
“You’ll want to keep your M11. But here’s something else for you.”
Pearl held up a rectangular black box. “Looks harmless enough, right? Maybe a battery for your laptop? If you left it on the table at Starbucks to go take a piss, no one would blink twice, right?”
Pearl slid the top of the box to the side and unfolded it piece by piece until it formed a sleek machine-gun.
Eastgate grinned. Pearl was as gear-obsessed as he was.
“I know. Scary.”
“I’ll take it to Starbucks the next chance I get.”
“And how about one more?” Pearl offered.
Eastgate hoped he wasn’t drooling. “You know I love this stuff.”
Pearl handed him a pair of performance sunglasses.
“I already have a pair.”
“Not like these. Put them on.”
Pearl cut the lights. “Whoa, what are you doing?” Eastgate asked, surprised to have been sent into total darkness.
“Do you feel that little button on the left just behind the lens?”
“Yeah.”
“Go ahead and push that in.”
The room lit up in shades of green. Pearl looked almost translucent. It was the sharpest night vision display Eastgate had ever seen.
“This is incredible. Where did you get this?”
“Couture by Langley.”
“The CIA? Why don’t we have these in the field?”
“The really useful tech rarely gets used. It just gets prototyped. They use it if they have to, but then if they use it the Chinese and the Russians find out about it and steal the design. And then what’s the point?”
“That’s so backward it must be true,” Eastgate said, shaking his head. “How did you get them?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Pearl turned the lights back on.
“Do you want to see what all of this is about?” Eastgate asked, pointing at the briefcase.
“Better not. I already know too much.”
Eastgate nodded.
“But whatever it is,” Pearl said, “can I give you a piece of brotherly advice?”
“Shoot.”
“Go back to London, throw it in the Thames, and never look back.”
Chapter 24
Olivia looked at her cell phone. It was another text message from Samir: “I can’t wait to see you tonight.”
She rolled her eyes. She and Samir had a dinner date scheduled. But she had been dodging his calls. It was time to end it, she had decided. Samir had become a bit stalkery.
They had spent another night together at Samir’s flat in Belsize Park. Samir then arranged a nice picnic for them, which included consumption of two very expensive bottles of Domaine Leroy Musigny Grand Cru, outside the illuminated glass houses at the Cambridge Botanic Gardens.
After that, things just fizzled out. She felt nothing like the intensity of their first night together. Samir’s mysterious manner was alluring from a distance, but made any kind of relationship impossible. “There was no there, there,” Olivia told her friends. “I ran out of things to say.”
It had been a somewhat amusing, mostly regrettable fling, she decided. Nothing more. Samir would quickly move on to a foxy blonde prof in the Faculty of English, she had no doubt.
But even as Olivia came to this realization, Samir’s ardor only seemed to intensify. He sent her a flurry of roses and cards. Olivia had no problem with a gentlemanly pursuit, but Samir was going too far.
Fortunately, Tell Eatiq provided a convenient excuse to end things. Olivia had finally reached the decision that the best way to protect Tell Eatiq from looting and thievery was to resume her work there as soon as possible—personally. It would draw media attention, which she believed—on top of blood and treasure—was all the US and UK cared about. If anything happened to her, it would be a PR disaster. She was determined to force their hand and give the coalition armies no choice but to send a security force to protect the site. “It makes no sense to start a relationship when I’m about to head back to Iraq for another year,” she planned to tell him.
But she couldn’t deal with Samir just now. It was fifteen minutes before she was scheduled to give a lecture at Cambridge’s Madingley Hall. As was customary with her public appearances, Olivia saved her preparation for the last minute. Fortunately, she was an expert compartmentalizer. It was one of the habits her father most admired about her. He would say: “You’re like a man in that way, O.” She took it as a compliment. Knowing her father as she did, it was one.
Striding onto the auditorium stage in long black leather boots over blue jeans, Olivia tossed her black shearling sheepskin bomber jacket onto a nearby chair and ran through the slides on her laptop, which projected on to a large screen above the stage. Each slide had a catchy heading.
“Knowing Our Past, Knowing Ourselves.”
“The Power of Written Language.”
“The Unruly Law.”
“Crass Commercialism.”
The lecture was titled, “The Importance of Assyriology to Our Modern World.” It was directed at students enrolled in an adult education class, and it was one of her favorites to deliver. It took her away from the Garden of Eden lecture, which—like the greatest hits of a classic rock band—everyone wanted to hear. By Olivia’s reckoning, half of England had.
The gist of the lecture was that the roots of modern civilization were sewn not in the stone-walled fields of England, but in Mesopotamia, where cuneiform slowly developed over thousands of years. The diffusion of written language in religion, government, and commerce was a leavening force that revolutionized the world. Here at Cambridge, which generally regarded itself as the center of the universe and the cerebellum of the world, it was Olivia’s specific goal to burst the bubble of her students’ Anglophilia.
The mythology of being English included the cornerstone belief that modern government, the courts, and the free market all grew from the unique amalgam of Celtic-Anglo-Saxon-Norman culture. This fantasy of English exceptionalism had survived waves of moral relativism and political correctness. In reality, Olivia would explain, the great institutions of the modern era were direct descendants of Mesopotamian—not English—culture.
Olivia’s message was driven home by a video, which she played for the audience at the beginning of the lecture, provided to her by a curator at the Louvre Museum in Paris. A surveillance camera took it above one of the museum’s most famous possessions—the Code of Hammurabi. A basalt stele in the shape of a seven-foot-tall index finger, the code is carved into the imposing black stone in cuneiform writing. The code itself consists of Babylonian laws, terms for commercial contracts, and social mores during the reign of King Hammurabi, some 1800 years before Christ.
The video, played at double speed, showed a torrent of tourists flowing directly toward the center of the room, moving in concentric circles, with the code at the center, rising above them all.
“We go to the Louvre to marvel at the great treasures that Europe has salvaged from the Middle East,” Olivia would begin. “It is a Eurocentric viewpoint. But, as this video shows, it is the Code—and all it stands for—that is at the center of our world, and we Europeans continue to look to it, to be drawn in by it, and our world continues to be shaped by it to this day.” With that message delivered, Olivia could sense her students’ Anglophilia begin to wane.
With a few clicks of a mouse, Olivia tested playing the video on the screen hanging over the stage in the auditorium. Sh
e grinned in anticipation of the audience’s response. They’re going to hate this!
But her glee was interrupted by an unfamiliar voice. It was Eastgate. “Have you seen it?” he asked.
“What’s that?” she mumbled, not interested enough to look up.
“Hammurabi’s Code,” he replied.
Sufficiently annoyed, Olivia finally directed her gaze at Eastgate. He wasn’t what she was expecting. Handsome and athletic, he stood about five-foot ten-inches tall, with blonde hair and a stylish buzz cut. He was well dressed in tan corduroys and a cashmere sweater. Rather than darting and nervous, like the eyes of most conspiracy theorists who approached her before lectures, his blue eyes projected a quiet energy.
Still, Olivia was irked by the interruption. “No, I’ve never really found the time. Yes, of course I have. I’m an Assyriologist for Chrissake.”
Olivia pointed to her photo on the projection screen. You’re a bloody idiot, apparently.
“May I show you something that’s quite a bit more interesting?” Eastgate asked.
Olivia instinctively scanned the auditorium for security. Oh God, not another nutter.
The auditorium was nearly full, and attendees began to crowd around Eastgate in the first row. “Listen. This really isn’t the time or the place. But I can give you the name—” Eastgate didn’t let her finish. He had nothing to lose. If the tablet was as important as he believed, she wouldn’t need much time to realize it. Showing her the tablet in front of the crowded auditorium was less than ideal, he recognized, but he may not have another chance. He stretched a long, corduroyed leg from the auditorium floor and hoisted himself onto the stage.
“OK, go ahead then,” Olivia said, throwing her hands up in exasperation.
Eastgate lifted the tablet out of the briefcase and gently passed it to Olivia, as if he was handing a newborn baby to its mother.
Olivia squinted at the tablet for only a moment. But in those few seconds, she absorbed much: a proto-cuneiform script and an unorthodox size and column structure. This can’t be real.
“Very interesting, and very fake, Mr.—”
