“It’s quite alrig-” I began.
“Oh, it certainly is not! Foolish, foolish, foolish! I’m terribly sorry. I’ll just page Miss Belmont, and be packing up my box then.” She was flustered, rearranging papers back and forth, utterly lost. I spotted a tear at the corner of one eye.
I opened my mouth to speak, and she leveled a gnarled finger at me. “Oh, no you don’t. If I’m to be fired, I’ll do it with all the dignity an old lady can muster.”
“But-” She slapped her hand down onto her desk like a clap of thunder.
“No! You should be ashamed of yourself, letting me ratter on like that, digging my own grave. You are everything I heard about if you would do such a thing to an old woman. You don’t need a role model. You need Jesus!” The last was a shriek.
The door to Ashley’s office flew open then. Gunnar was pathetically trying to suppress a laugh, doubled over with his hands clasped around his knees. “What in the hell is going on out here?” She saw me, and blinked. “Master Temple. Is everything quite alright?”
I shrugged. “I was trying to tell Greta that all is well, and that I appreciate a little honesty now and then. Even a lot of honesty.” I added with an appeasing grin. She scowled back. “Anyway, no harm done. Mind if we talk to Miss Belmont, Greta?”
Her eyes were twin coals, her cheeks reddening with embarrassment now. She waved a hand, shooing us on, but her gnarled finger locked onto our tour guide and her voice was low, dripping with venom as she proceeded to strip away his hide. Ashley looked bewildered, but stepped aside so that we could enter. The doors closed with a soft click behind us. “What happened?” Ashley asked carefully. “She’s an old woman. I don’t know how you managed to get her so worked up. I was outside just five minutes ago. How could you have possibly gotten such a reaction in so short a time?”
Gunnar spoke up between bouts of laughter. “He has a gift. Oh, god. My stomach.” He wheezed. “It hurts. Laughing so hard. Sometimes I wish I had his charm, and then other times…” He waved a hand towards Greta in the other room, and began laughing all over again. Once he got a breath he continued. “I’m glad I don’t.”
Ashley looked at me and I shrugged. “She saw us, and began talking about that rapscallion, Nate Temple.” I mimicked her aged voice. “I should have stopped her sooner, but it was hard to get a word in. She’s a tough old bag. I like her.”
Ashley studied me, fighting a grin. “Me too. I’d like to keep her around for a while… without her having a heart attack on me.”
That sobered me up. “Sorry.”
She nodded, motioning towards her desk. We followed, declining her offer of drinks. “So, you have come about the video feed?” She asked carefully, eyeing Gunnar a few times when he wasn’t looking.
I nodded. She typed a series of commands on her iMac desktop.
“Well, I can’t say I quite understand it. It seems to be a feed from a security camera that runs separate from the rest of the system. Nobody even knew of it until we had input your information into the system as an employee. As soon as your social security number hit the system we got a critical ping. Any time something important or dangerous happens at the company, the upper echelon of management gets a 911 email. This one came only to me and you.” I leaned forward, interested. “I haven’t been able to open the feed. It’s encrypted, and I have no idea what the password could be. Your… parents gave me a list of potentials, but I regret to inform you that none of mine worked. I have been efficiently locked out. Our only hope is to see if you have access to it.”
“May I?” I asked, pointing at her desktop. She nodded, getting out of her chair and holding it out for me.
“I already logged off.” Gunnar leaned back in his chair, curiously watching the scene unfold, or possibly just watching Ashley. Puppy love. Did they even realize they were each checking the other out? She guided me through the logon process, and then helped me open my email, which in turn asked me a series of questions that only my parents could have arranged years before. Successfully answering the questions, my email finally opened. There at the top of the page — marked with a blinking exclamation mark — was the 911 email. I double clicked it, and a password warning popped up. I looked back at her and she grinned sheepishly, stepping back and turning her head.
I typed in the verse from Dante’s Inferno that my father and I had frequently discussed through a tough semester in college. I flourished my finger dramatically, and asked her a question. “How many attempts did you have before it locked you out?”
“Three.” She answered nervously.
“Here, we, go.” I said, then pressed enter. The password box wiggled a wrong answer. “Hmmm.” I mentally glanced at the list in my mind, wondering if any of the other passwords might work, depending on the severity level of my father’s warning. I hadn’t tried the last password yet, as I had been hoping that it might not be as serious as we all thought. I mean, how would the video feed know how important it was? It had to be something my father frequently monitored as a security precaution if it was automatically logged as such an important breach. Something others wouldn’t have access to. Not even Ashley, judging by the fact that it had only appeared to her after my information was logged into the system.
I leaned back, thumbing my lip at the puzzle.
The room was as tense as a china cabinet in front of a live orchestra. Not thinking of a better idea, I typed the last password on my parents’ list, realizing that the irony must be a coincidence. The title of a journal written by Isaac Newton about Nicholas Flamel, the Alchemist who supposedly discovered the philosopher’s stone: The Caduceus, the Dragons of Flammel.
I typed Caduceus, remembering that the coin the Minotaur had given me depicted that very staff on one side. It was in my pocket now. Another discreet reference to Hermes. That bore looking into.
The password box shook again in angry denial. Ashley unbuttoned the top button of her blouse, breathing heavily. “One more shot. I don’t think it was one of the passwords on their list.” She added respectfully.
I leaned back again, closing my eyes. She was right. It would have been too simple if it were the last password. I was letting my infatuation with dragons overwhelm my logic, but it had been the direst password on their list, so it had been worth a shot. I mentally zipped through memories of my father, trying to catch something, anything, that might give me a clue. An everyday password he would undoubtedly use. If it was to a secret video feed, then it was something he wanted kept separate. Something he could privately monitor at his own leisure. Which might mean a secret project. But why keep a project secret from his company? It must have been dangerous if he didn’t deem it worthy of his employee’s knowledge. I began to get a terrible feeling in my stomach. Was something here, in my new company, that he didn’t trust any of his employees with, even his protégé, Ashley Belmont? My memory snagged on a brief conversation we had had while on a yacht in the middle of the ocean on my 21st birthday. Something I had only heard once. Something that only I had heard.
I slowly leaned forward one last time. Surely it couldn’t be. That had been a night of hard drinking, a sharing of talk like we had never had before. An introduction into manhood, he had called it. We had talked until the sun came up, on everything from ancient alchemy to modern day particle theory at CERN; from Aristotle to Ayn Rand; from Greek myths to the Bible’s Revelations; from one topic to another in almost every field of study. Then we had briefly discussed extremes. Extreme measures in particular.
My forearms pebbled as I remembered the two words that he had uttered as we had drifted off to sleep on the deck. He had repeated them three times, and then fallen asleep. I had merely assumed it was a disturbing thought from some vague mention of one of our topics, as we were both heavily intoxicated, but my eidetic memory was profound, and I had remembered these words despite the fact. Only now did I consciously dreg them up from the bottom of my memory, and the feeling of that wonderful night threatened t
o break me.
I hunched over the keyboard, shivering both in fear at the tone of voice he had used to utter the words, and also in profound loss, realizing all over again that I would never have the chance to speak with him again.
My fingers punched in each key, slowly, robotically. Pandora Protocol. I hoped my capitalization was correct, or that the password was even correct. It was a far-fetched idea, and to be honest, it didn’t feel right. One drunken night, years ago? My father was much too methodical for that, right?
I looked up at Gunnar. His eyes revealed how much it hurt him to see me so grief-stricken. I turned to Ashley. Her eagerness was gone as her eyes filled with empathy. She slowly reached over to place a hand on my shoulder. “If this isn’t it, then it doesn’t matter. He can’t expect us to type in a password that we were never given. It’s no one’s fault but his own if he created an unbreakable encryption that was important enough for us to see, but not important enough to receive a hint. He couldn’t expect that.” She repeated.
“Oh, yes. Yes, he could. He would demand it.” I whispered.
Without further preamble, I pressed my finger to the enter key the same way I would have pressed the lethal injection button at a sanctioned execution of an innocent man. The computer chimed above me, as my eyes were still locked on the enter key. Realizing the password had worked, my shoulders slumped further. No, please not this. He couldn’t have…
My father had kept his promise then. His secret project had indeed been real. Was that why my parents had been killed? Had someone discovered his secret work? I slowly lifted my gaze to the screen. Ashley was shifting nervously from foot to foot behind me. I clicked play.
It flickered to life instantly. I read the timestamp on the recording as I waited for something to happen. It must have been a motion activated camera, because it jumped ahead at random intervals, and only when someone was walking past a particular door. As each person did, a name would materialize at the bottom of the feed. Jenna Davis. Accountant. Regular. I began to frown after seeing the first few people caught on film. Each time one passed, their name, title, and the word regular would appear at the bottom of the screen.
I felt a chill at the back of my neck. Each person would walk by the door as if it didn’t exist. One woman dropped a paper and it landed directly in front of the door. She glanced down at the ground, searching back and forth as if trying to see the paper that was barely two inches away from her toes. But she didn’t seem to see anything. She checked a few papers in her hand, frowned, and then glanced at the floor again. With a sigh, she turned back the way she had come. Five minutes later, she reappeared on camera, walking briskly past the discarded piece of paper on the ground without a care in the world.
We looked at each other curiously. Gunnar had stepped behind the computer to watch. “Is she blind? It was right in front of her.”
Ashley spoke up. “She has perfect vision. She also isn’t a regular.” Sure enough, the word regular hadn’t appeared at the bottom of the screen, but no elaboration had been listed either.
We turned back to the camera to watch a few more people enter and leave the frame. Then, my parents came onto the screen. Their forms sparkled like radio disturbance on the feed, but all else was clear. They conversed casually, leaning against the wall beside the odd door, glancing out of the camera’s view frequently. Then, in the middle of speaking, they both darted inside the door and then closed it behind them. A minute later, someone walked near the door, looked back and forth, searching, then turned away, as if he had been searching for my parents.
“Creepy,” I said warily.
“Can you pause it?” Ashley asked.
I did, and turned to her. “That door doesn’t exist.” She said simply. I arched a brow at her. “Look at the symbol above the door. It’s the Omega symbol. I recognize the hallway, and know I’ve walked past that stretch of camera at least two dozen times in the last week. But I have never seen that door.”
“It’s cloaked then.” I told them. It was as if I spoke a foreign language. “Hidden. Secret. Hocus pocus.” I waggled my fingers.
“Then how can we see it on this feed? And how does the camera know all the information about each passerby?” Gunnar asked.
I pondered that. “It must be why this camera is off the main system. It’s unique. It can see anything, even through magic. I bet it could even sense-” I began, looking at Gunnar, and then stopped. I had been about to say that it would probably reveal his wolf form, but Ashley didn’t know about that.
“You were going to say that it would probably show Gunnar’s werewolf form.” She said simply, as if reading my mind. “You’re right. It would. I designed the software, but never thought of merging it with live cameras.”
We each turned to her, eyes wide. “I know almost every freak in town. Your parents kept tabs on everyone. You would be surprised at some of them, but your secret is safe with me, Agent Randulf. No one else here knows.” She smiled, unabashed.
“Well, isn’t that something.” I added.
“You will be granted access to the Arcanum that your parents compiled whenever you wish.” She told me as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. My thoughts were racing. My parents had indeed pursued their secret then. It couldn’t be anything else.
“I’m going to keep playing the feed.” I said. Everyone nodded, leaning closer.
The feed jumped forward seventeen minutes. Then my parents bolted out the door, each leaving in a different direction. Odd. Ten minutes later, a shadow blinked across the hallway, and a new figure stepped into view. A string of question marks appeared at the bottom of the screen. The figure didn’t sparkle like my parents. He seemed to be cloaked in shadows, as if outlined by them. He looked each direction, and then slipped up to the door he shouldn’t have been able to see. He fiddled with the handle a moment, and was then inside the room, the door closing behind him. The feed blinked red for a few seconds, the word unidentified intruder blinking instead of the string of question marks from before.
The feed jumped ahead seventeen minutes again, and then he slipped out of the room, darting down the hallway in the same direction my mother had left. Less than a minute later, my dad entered the feed, sparkling with his name at the bottom of the screen. He studied the door, seeming nervous. Then he lifted his eyes to the security camera and spoke silently. His face was haggard. I studied it carefully, reading his lips, and my blood ran to ice. Then he set off in the same direction as the intruder. A steel door slammed down over the invisible door, securing it from any future tampering, and then the feed stopped. The video feed jumped ahead half an hour and then froze, blinking the date and time in large red letters. The only other letters on the screen were Titan!
Then it shut off, the whole computer shutting down, and rebooting.
I stood urgently, pacing back and forth. No one spoke. My mind scattered, rebelling against my futile attempts to control my fury. I felt my power rising up inside me like a tidal wave. I finally spoke, panting uncontrollably. “The feed stopped within one minute of the Time of Death announced by the coroner. That feed was somehow tied to my parents’ heartbeat, stopping as soon as they died. That can’t be possible.” I said, exasperated.
Still, no one spoke. I rounded on Ashley. “Do you know anything, anything, about this?” I demanded.
She shook her head urgently. “Nothing. I swear.”
Gunnar spoke softly. “You understood what he said to you.” It wasn’t a question.
I turned to him, slowly. “Oh, yes. I understood it perfectly.” I continued pacing, trying to keep up with my fleeting thoughts.
“Care to share?” He asked sympathetically. I ignored him as the computer chimed back to life. I flew to the desk, logged back in, and signed into my email, but the video feed was gone. I logged off, and strode out of the room, Ashley and Gunnar barely keeping up.
Greta stood, looking horrified as she saw my face. A box was neatly packed on her desk.
“You,” I leveled an angry finger at her, my power leaking out enough to launch a flurry of papers from her desk into the air. She squeaked like a child, terror filling her eyes as the tempest of papers floated down around her like snow. “Are not leaving my company. Sit. Down.” My voice was rough with emotion. She obeyed, collapsing into her chair with a faint squeak of hinges. Then I was off again. I called over my shoulder. “We’ll be in touch, Miss Belmont. We will definitely be in touch.” I turned my head to look her in the eyes over my shoulder. “Soon.”
Gunnar followed in my wake like a good dog as the Master Temple stormed out of his castle to pick a fight with a dragon, or the Minotaur, or some helpless bystander who happened to tick him off on the way.
Someone was going to die. Soon. By my hand. And I was going to relish every second of it. But first, we were headed to the expo center to try to learn something about the dragons’ sudden interest in the eclipse tomorrow afternoon. Maybe I would get the chance to kill someone there.
One could dream.
Chapter 27
W e had picked up Tory and were headed into the parking lot at the Eclipse Expo! Or so the signs said. The hotel was vast, full of auditoriums designed for conferences and proms, loaded with luxurious restaurants, several spas, and a smattering of gift shops. I had been in a daze since leaving Temple Industries, pondering the implications of my father’s last message to me. He had known it was the end, or at least seriously assumed it to be the case. He had relied so heavily on my eidetic memory, and skill of lip reading, and even the knowledge of a password that had mostly been a lucky guess. Now I had one answer, but it only led deeper into the rabbit hole, giving me countless more questions. When this was all over I would bury myself in solving their secret before it was too late. If it wasn’t too late already… It was too volatile of a project to be left unattended. And it had been over a week.
Being so distracted, I had barely noticed Tory joining us. Her and Gunnar had made small talk while we drove, complimenting each other’s clothing, but I had been mostly ignoring them. Not purposely, just so enveloped in my own thoughts that nothing else had mattered. My phone vibrated in my pocket. I plucked it out, glanced at the screen, and then answered.
Obsidian Son (The Temple Chronicles Book 1) Page 19
