The Book of Secrets

by Tom Harper

  The man was trapped. He slowed to a walk, then stopped. Nick skidded to a halt on the icy path, keeping well back. He raised the gun as his quarry turned to face him. They stood there among the trees and snow in silence, a dozen paces apart like duellists. But only one of them had a gun.

  ‘Who are you?’ Nick shouted. The night seemed to swallow his words.

  The man didn’t answer. He looked down at the bag still dangling from his hand, then let it drop. It landed in the snow at his feet. The movement drew Nick’s attention; in that moment, the Italian’s hand dipped inside his pocket. Nick’s gaze snapped back. With the sickening knowledge that he’d made a fatal mistake, he raised the pistol. But his finger hesitated on the trigger.

  The man hadn’t pulled another gun. Instead, he’d extracted a sheet of paper. His hands scrabbled with it as he folded it over and over, then began tearing it into pieces.

  ‘Stop!’ Nick shouted. Tiny fragments fluttered to the ground like a shower of snow. Nick jerked the gun – but he couldn’t shoot a man in cold blood.

  A brilliant beam of light swept across the park behind him. A barge was coming up the river, its captain taking no chances in the darkness. In a second, Nick would be picked out like an actor on stage. He lowered the gun to his side, into the shadows. Like deer caught on a road, neither he nor the man dared move.

  The barge drew level with them. The river was so narrow here that the boat’s hull almost touched the embankment, its deck only a foot or so below Nick’s feet. Floodlights bathed the park in light, blinding Nick. In that moment, the Italian jumped. He heaved himself over the railing and dropped like a stone onto the barge. Nick ran to the rail, but all he saw was a wall of dazzling light blazing back at him.

  Footsteps crunched behind him; he swung around. Emily was running across the park, her breath fogging the night.

  ‘Where is he?’

  Nick pointed to the barge, now disappearing around a bend in the river. ‘He got away.’

  He walked over to where the bag lay and scanned the ground. As his eyes readjusted to the darkness he found he could pick out a few of the scraps of paper lying limp in the snow. He picked one up. It seemed to be normal office paper, with a fragment of a word on it.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Something important. When I had the guy cornered, the one thing he cared about was destroying it.’

  They knelt together in the snow, sweeping the ground and gathering the fragments in shivering hands. Nick thanked God there was no wind. When they had collected as many as they could find, they shook the snow off them and bagged them in a pocket of Nick’s backpack. Emily looked doubtfully at the pile of sodden scraps, not much bigger than confetti.

  ‘Do you think we’ll make any sense of that?’

  Nick grimaced. The city glow reflected off the snow and gave his face a ghoulish cast. I piece things together.

  ‘We have the technology. We can fix it.’

  LVI

  We would tear it up and piece it back together.

  By liberating the beasts from the flat cage of their copper plates, Drach could make any card he wanted. Even if only one animal remained, he could print and reprint it as often as he wanted onto the same card. The system was not only perfect, it was infinitely variable.

  It was not a new idea. We had started down this road when we divided the indulgence plate into four paragraphs. But we had not gone nearly far enough. One afternoon I counted three thousand and seventy-four individual characters in the indulgence. We would cast each one individually and bring them together to form a single page, as thousand of souls form a single Church.

  Hans Dunne disliked the plan. ‘Each time you encounter a problem, you find an answer that creates ten new problems and does not solve the first,’ he warned me. But he had earned more than a hundred gulden from me for creating the copper plates which had proved so troublesome, so I ignored him.

  Kaspar did not like it either. ‘You are turning in on yourself. You are trying to climb a mountain by counting pebbles. You will spend the rest of your life making this art so intricate that nothing can be done with it.’

  We were journeying through a forest in late October. It was like walking through fire: all around us the leaves burned vivid shades of scarlet, ochre, yellow and orange, shimmering in the breeze. It was a dangerous time to be abroad.

  ‘And even if you succeed, it will just turn out like the mirrors,’ Kaspar prodded me.

  Much had happened since the night Andreas Dritzehn died. His brother Jörg had sued me to be admitted to our partnership – and lost. The judge awarded him fifteen gulden. The Aachen pilgrimage had come and gone, the relics put away for another seven years. Some of the mirrors waved aloft to capture the holy rays had been mine, but not many. First, a good portion of our metals had been sold to pay the interest on my debts. Then we had been swindled by our barge captain and decimated by tolls along the river, before being opposed at every turn by the Aachen guilds. By the time we were finished, the torrent of tin and lead I had prepared to pour down the Rhine had dwindled to a trickle. The torrent of gold I had hoped would flow back to me suffered a similar fate. Once I had paid our costs, paid the investors, paid my debts, including the fifteen gulden to Jörg Dritzehn, only the thinnest residue remained.

  Kaspar hated it when his comments drew no reaction. He tried a third time. ‘And it is madness to be on the road now. I heard that a week ago Breisgau was razed to the ground. They made a bonfire of the village and roasted its livestock on the coals. Some say they also roasted the inhabitants and ate them too.’

  I shuddered. For months now the country around Strassburg had been infested with a plague of wild men, the Armagnaken or ‘poor fools’, the remnants of a great army which had been marauding around Europe in the service of one duke or another for years. An unholy cabal of the French king, the German emperor and the Italian pope had schemed to send them to Switzerland to sack Basle: the king because he wanted them out of France, the emperor because he aimed to annex Switzerland to the empire; the pope because he wanted to put a stop once and for all to the council which Aeneas and his friends had conducted now for over ten years. The Swiss had defied the Armagnaken and defeated them at terrible cost. The survivors had fled, rampaging down the Rhine in a storm of fire and blood that – men said – only the Apocalypse would equal. They had arrived near Strassburg in the spring. Many thousands had died.

  The forest was no longer beautiful. I peered into its depths, trying to see what lurked behind the blaze of foliage.

  ‘Nick? What the hell happened to you? I’ve been hearing some bad things.’

  Urthred the Necromancer paced his chamber in front of a roaring fire. A unicorn stood tethered obediently in the corner.

  ‘Long story. I need some help.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Strasbourg.’

  ‘Is that Kentucky?’

  ‘France.’

  ‘Right.’ A waxwork scowl was fixed on Urthred’s face. ‘Um, I’m kind of a long way from France right now.’

  ‘I need a high-res scanner and a fat data pipe. As fast as possible. I thought you might know someone.’

  Urthred tapped his staff on the stone floor. Blue sparks fizzed from its tip. ‘Sheesh, Nick, you don’t make it easy. What time is it with you?’

  Nick checked his watch. ‘Nine at night.’

  ‘You know, this is not cool Nick.’ A pause, then a grumpy sigh. ‘OK. I’ll check my contacts for insomniac French data-centre managers with a hard-on for fugitives from justice. Stick around.’

  Urthred disappeared in a puff of smoke. Nick unhooked the headset from his ear and looked up from the laptop. The cobwebbed walls and swirling mists of the Necromancer’s tower were replaced with thick red paint and cigarette smoke, an underground bar off the Quai Saint Jean. To Nick, the other customers seemed as outlandish as anything in Gothic Lair: piercings through every permeable patch of skin, hair dyed red or purple or green, steel chains around t
heir necks and waists. None of them looked as if they’d come to take advantage of the free wireless Internet.

  ‘Are you sure this is the time to be playing computer games?’ asked Emily. She sat next to him on the threadbare banquette, sipping a Jack Daniel’s and Coke.

  ‘You know the slogan, “The network is the computer”?’ She shook her head. ‘Well, in human terms the network is Randall. Urthred. If there’s anyone who can help us, Randall probably knows him somehow.’

  ‘I don’t understand. We’ve got an Internet connection here.’

  ‘Nowhere near fast enough. And we need to scan the pictures. You can’t do that with a mobile-phone camera.’

  On the laptop screen, Urthred reappeared out of nowhere. Nick put the headset back on and tried to ignore the sneering looks he drew.

  ‘I got it,’ Urthred bragged. ‘You heard of a place called Karlsruhe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s in Germany – about an hour away from you, according to the Interweb. Hochschule für Gestaltung. It’s some kind of technical college. There’s a chick in the computer science department there, Sabine Friman. She can hook you up.’

  Nick hesitated. ‘Can we get there without a car?’

  ‘What am I, a fricking concierge service?’ Urthred crossed to the large book spread on the wings of an eagle-shaped lectern and consulted it. ‘Says there’s a train from Strasbourg to Frankfurt at 21.50 that stops at Karlsruhe. You want me to tell you where the restaurant car is too?’

  ‘We’ll find it.’ Nick reached for the lid of the computer, ready to shut it down. ‘But there’s one other thing I need you to arrange.’

  Whatever dangers lurked in the forest, we reached our destination without harm. Schlettstadt was an unremarkable town some twenty miles up the Ill from Strassburg. Like every town in those days, it existed in a state of siege. Guards manned the walls, and its gates only opened when we had proved we carried no weapons. Suspicious gazes followed our progress along the winding alleys inside, up the hill towards the church.

  ‘Have you noticed how goldsmiths always keep their shops near churches?’ Drach muttered. ‘Jesus preached poverty and forsaking worldly goods.’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ I warned him. ‘It’s bad enough that everyone here thinks we must be an advance party of Armagnaken, without you sounding like a Free Spirit heretic as well.’

  We found what we had come to see in a steep-gabled house plastered red between its branching beams. Much of it was familiar from all goldsmiths’ shops: the tools on the walls; the boxes of beads and wire; the plate glinting behind the bars of the show cabinet; the residues of quicksilver and hot metal.

  But they were not fresh. No smoke rose from the furnace at the back of the house, and the anvils were silent. These were lean times for goldsmiths – they could not work gold when it was all buried under mattresses and floorboards.

  I leaned on the empty counter and peered inside. A man sat on a stool, pulling rings off a spindle and polishing them one by one.

  ‘Are you Götz?’ I asked.

  He nodded. He must have been about thirty, with bushy brown hair and a thin face. I introduced myself.

  ‘I am associated with the goldsmiths’ guild in Strassburg. I have seen your work there. A brooch of Christ on his cross.’ It had been Andreas Dritzehn’s. His brother had brought it into Dunne’s shop to sell after Andreas’ death. Through discreet enquiry, I had found out who had made it. ‘The lettering on the inscription was exquisite. So precise.’

  He accepted the compliment in silence.

  ‘I assume you cut the letters with punches.’

  A suspicious look. I sympathised. ‘I do not want to steal your secret. I want to buy it.’

  I put a purse of coins on the counter.

  ‘I want you to make me a set of punches, exactly as you made your own.’

  Götz eyed the purse but did not touch it.

  ‘I can cut your punches.’ He hesitated. ‘But not exactly as I made my own.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He chose his words cautiously. ‘You want punches that will stamp each letter in metal. I do not have any.’

  ‘But the brooch…’

  ‘You could scour my workshop from top to bottom and you would not find a single alphabetical punch.’

  I tried to remember everything I could about the writing on the brooch. ‘Surely you did not engrave it freehand?’

  He pushed the purse back towards me. ‘I would rather not say.’

  Frustrated and perplexed, I was about to turn away. But the wink of gold in his cabinet delayed me. I peered through the leaded glass.

  ‘May I examine that cup?’

  I could see his doubts – but the purse still lay on the counter, and I might be the only customer he would have that week. He unlocked the cabinet and handed me the cup. It was about six inches tall, with a bowed stem and garnets set into the bowl. Around the base was written a verse from St John’s Gospel.

  I studied it a few moments, pressing my fingertips into the sharp incisions. The lines were too straight, too clean to have been carved by hand. They must have been stamped. Yet Götz claimed he had no letter punches.

  I put down the cup and picked up the purse.

  ‘Thank you.’

  The taxi dropped them off outside the Hochschule für Gestaltung. In the dark, Nick couldn’t see much more than a cluster of square, practical buildings surrounded by trees. Sabine Friman was standing by the front door waiting for them. She was a lithe woman with short blonde hair that poked around her ears in elfin spikes, blue eyes and a tanned face. In spite of the cold, she wore nothing more than an olive-green tank top and cargo pants.

  ‘The Wanderer arrives,’ she said. Her English was perfect, with a Scandinavian crispness. ‘Did you have a good journey?’

  She led them in. Even at that time of night, there were plenty of students in the corridors. Everything was warm, bright and clean; it was the safest he’d felt in ages.

  ‘Randall told me what you need.’ She unlocked a door from the ring of keys clipped to her belt. Inside was a small, windowless room with a computer monitor and a scanner set up on a plastic folding table. ‘The scanner is 2,400dpi, and we have a direct connection to the i-21 data network.’

  ‘Great. Can we start with the scanner?’

  Sabine lifted the lid and held out her hand. To her obvious surprise, Nick reached in his coat and handed her what looked like a pile of greetings cards.

  ‘Did you forget someone’s birthday?’

  Nick flipped one round so she could see the back. Tiny scraps of paper made a mosaic on the glossy red card. ‘We needed a high-contrast reflective background. This was all they sold at the rail station.’ Thankfully the train had been pretty empty, not too many passengers to wonder why he and Emily spent the journey gluing the fragments on. ‘It’ll make scanning easier.’

  Sabine laid the greetings cards on the scanner and closed the lid. It hummed into life; a bar of green light slowly traversed the platen. A vastly magnified picture of the back of the card slid down the screen.

  ‘Now to upload them,’ said Nick. He sat down on the metal chair. ‘This is where it gets interesting.’

  Sabine leaned over his shoulder and studied the screen. ‘How does it work, exactly?’

  ‘We upload these pictures to the server that hosts my program. That picks out the fragments of paper and turns them into individual images. Then it analyses them for edge shape, fragments of letters or words and tries to piece them back together. Like doing a jigsaw.’

  Emily looked at the computer as if it were an alien object. ‘Can’t you just do it on your laptop?’

  ‘The raw number crunching you need for this thing is way too intensive for a home computer.’ Nick opened a web browser and typed in an address. ‘It’s like trying to solve all the possible outcomes of a chess game, but with thousands of pieces that are all different shapes. The processing has to be done on massive central ser
vers – in this case, belonging to the people who fund my research.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘The FBI.’

  Even Sabine’s ice-cool composure took a knock. ‘You want to hack into the FBI’s computer system? From here?’

  ‘I’m not going to hack in anywhere. I’m going to walk up to the front door and use a valid user name and password.’

  Sabine shot him a crooked look. ‘Randall said you were maybe not so happy with the police right now.’

  ‘That was the NYPD. The parts of the Bureau that fund me are a long way away from the parts that hunt bad guys. If we’re very lucky, the right hand might not have gotten round to telling the left hand what’s been going on. After all, it’s the last place they’d expect me to go.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve got a point.’ Emily folded her arms and walked to the back of the room. Sabine glanced between her and Nick.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘Something with caffeine. It’s going to be a long night.’

  Sabine went out. After a moment, Emily turned back to see what Nick was doing. To her surprise, she saw that the scanned picture had given way to a thick forest, through which Nick seemed to be navigating a one-eyed man in a grey cloak and a bronze helmet.

  ‘Gothic Lair?’

  Nick didn’t look up. ‘Whoever’s after us, they’ve tracked every move we’ve made.’ Emily noticed how white his knuckles were as they gripped the computer mouse. ‘I don’t want Sabine to end up like Brother Jerome if they trace us back here. So I’m taking the long way round.’

  On screen, the Wanderer came out into a clearing that surrounded a giant oak tree. It looked ancient. Its branches sagged low and its wizened bark was pocked with disease. A mess of gnarled roots tangled the earth around its base like cables.

  ‘You came.’ Urthred the Necromancer stepped out from behind the tree. He sounded disappointed.

  ‘Did you manage to do it?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about the time the FBI came to visit me when I was sixteen?’ Urthred examined the leaves on one of the low-hanging branches. ‘Not a good time in my life.’