by Rufus Offor
‘What’ve we got then?’ Shoop directed the question at Dr Komodo who’d been studying the evidence as they flew, over night, to the island.
‘I wish I had better news,’ said Komodo, ‘but I can’t find anything in here that’ll open up our search. I’ve put all the information onto your computer, pictures, scans of documents, the lot, and I’ve been staring at it for hours and can’t see a damn thing. No hint, nothing. The only thing I can think of is that I’m missing something, maybe Carl had something, or maybe I’ve been looking at it for so long that I’m staring right through what I’m supposed to be finding.’
‘Give it here!’ said Shoop.
Komodo tossed the computer over to Shoop, who walked over to the other end of the shack to poor his attention over it. The small screen lit up with photos of buildings. He scrutinised each of them individually with a furrowed brow and pursed lips. Something tingled in his belly. His sixth sense was trying to tell him something. He stared on, through the hundreds of photos that’d been taken.
Dr Komodo was right, nothing was immediately apparent but Shoop wasn’t one to give up easily. George had taught him a thing or two about clue hunting, he would possibly have a different angle on it than Komodo. He continued staring intently at the wealth of photos, his sixth sense buzzing, telling him that the clue had to be somewhere on a building. Something important was in the pictures but he didn’t know what it was, he was a blind man waving his arms around in search of a wall but he knew it was only a matter of time, perseverance and lateral thinking.
He went through every technique that he’d learned through his years of investigations, the way that buildings were constructed, secret geometrical messages, the materials used, the architectural shapes, anything that would give him a hint. His search yielded nothing, which was when the lateral thinking came into play. He’d gone through a world of complexity in his mind and found nothing, which made him think that maybe the problem wasn’t complex. Maybe it was on the surface rather than under it.
Then he saw it.
On the front of several buildings were Latin inscriptions. The buildings were all churches. There were sentences in Latin on the front of each of them, but with a select few, three in total, some of the words had been carved slightly bigger than the others. There was one word per church that stood out which had a small symbol next to it. Shoop recognised it as the triangle from the Priory Of Sion seal, he didn’t know any Latin, however, so he wrote the words on a piece of paper and headed back to the group.
He’d been sitting in his corner for more than four hours, straining over the computer and its images while the men all sat nervously waiting for a sign. They were all on tenterhooks, drinking nervously, sweating in the heat of the day, unaware of their fate. When Shoop got up and walked over to them with a piece of paper in his hand, they all sat forward on the edge of their chairs in anticipation, apart from Yan, who just nudged forward half a millimetre or so, a slight motion, but one that was very apparent. The air seemed to shift in the whole room as he moved.
‘I think I’ve found something,’ said Shoop handing the paper to Jim, ‘You know Latin right?’ Jim nodded, ‘well see if you can make any sense of that.
Jim flattened the paper out and began to read the words, struggling to make the words fit together in some sort of coherent way. Shoop ordered another round of drinks as Jim poured his attention over the puzzle.
The air was thick with silence. Even Yan seemed a little agitated. It was nothing in his demeanour; it was just that the atmosphere seemed to wobble around him, like heat rising from a desert road. They were all waiting for a thread of hope in the uncertainty that encased them all. They all suddenly felt the importance of the moment. If this thread of a clue didn’t yield anything then they would all become both redundant and hunted. It would be up to George to solve their mystery for them and none of them liked the idea of that, not one little bit.
They were all secretly touched by doubt and none of them relished the idea of entrusting their fates to a small ginger librarian on the other side of the planet.
They drank quickly and nervously as the barman prepared more, the flow of booze was consistent. The barman hadn’t worked this hard in his life.
For Jim, there was nothing else in the universe other than the scrawled Latin text in front of him. The world fell away; there was nothing but his intense, blinkered concentration.
An eternity passed with every second.
‘I’ve got it!’ said Jim triumphantly, ‘piece of piss!’ The two minutes that’d passed had felt like an age upon an age to the uncertain company. Were they going on? Or were they going into hiding?
‘Australia,’ said Jim, ‘the vessel went to Australia!’
Sighs of relief wafted through the group, they hadn’t wanted to show their doubts, but with this new destination, it didn’t matter any more. They had a trail to follow. After the mess that Carl made in Singapore, they’d been given another chance. The Sphere didn’t know where they were or where they were going and the trail of the vessel was hot again. They all visibly slumped with relieve, even the wavering air around Yan calmed and faded.
The relief washed over Shoop, but then he realised something, ‘Oh, bloody hell!’ he said.
The others looked confused.
‘What is it?’ Said Dr Komodo.
‘I HATE Australia!’ He’d never forgiven them for wanting to give up the Queen and the royal family.
Australia’s feelings toward Shoop were very mutual.
Chapter 21
Latin Can Be Fun
Ben was excited and was thoroughly enjoying himself. He was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, waiting for Mike to deliver the punch line to Jill impatiently.
It’d been Ben’s idea to send Shoop to Australia. He knew how much Shoop resented the Australians for trying to get rid of the monarchy and so take itself out of the common wealth. In the end the Australians had voted to keep the Queen as monarch, but the taste of rebellion was still bitter in Shoop’s mouth. The idea of Mr Winkle being forced to spend time there amused Ben’s sense of mischief. He knew it’d tickle Jill too. It’d make for another fine Shoop TV night.
‘So,’ said Mike, ‘what we did is, we found these three churches that had the words that we needed written on them in Latin, we got our guys to carve tiny little triangles, like the one on the seals we’ve got, next to the words and then made the selected words just that little bit bigger than the others.’ He fondled the ethnic beads around his neck excitedly, shifting from foot to foot, barely able to contain his enthusiasm. The fact that Jill was sitting, leaning forward, grinning broadly, eyes wide and clasping her hands together in anticipation only increased the air of exhilaration in the room.
‘Here are the words,’ said Mike with unconvincing calm, ‘novus universitas carcer… which basically means…’
‘The new world prison!’ interrupted Jill, unclasping her hands and clapping them together playfully in full realisation, ‘so they’ll think of a prison land from the eighteen hundreds and go off to Australia! That’s great man ….. oh that’s really good …..well done boys!’
Ben and mike were bouncing up and down gleefully like five year olds that’d just won a game of pass the parcel and been rewarded with a games console.
‘Any plans as to where they’ll go next?’ asked Jill.
‘Oh we’ve got dozens of places worked out,’ said Ben, ‘and they’re going to really hate most of them, they’re all nice happy sunny places, well one of them isn’t sunny, but it’s nice and happy.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘We were going to try and send them to Lapland at one point, but we’re not sure how to pull it off.’ Said Mike.
‘Oh you’re just mean!’ exclaimed Jill smiling broadly, ‘Mr Winkle meets Santa Clause, that’s fabulous!’
She sat back, beaming with pride at her boys and clearly enjoying the level of ridiculum that they’d managed to inject into the proceedings.
‘I wonder how long we can keep this up for?’ she thought out loud.
Chapter 22
Carl’s Escape
Carl was very tired. He’d managed to make it as far as the Malaysia/Thailand border and immediately set about trying to find some gainful mercenary employment. It hadn’t taken long before he was killing for cash and living the life of a mini guerrilla general. The people who had employed him soon recognised his exceptional talents and had given him a platoon to administer and fight with. It’d been a long few weeks and he’d decided that he needed a bit of a rest.
The Malay/Thai border was rife with violence and unrest, which suited him down to the ground. It was pretty much the only atmosphere in which he felt at home. The flying bullets, the gung-ho maddened slaughter, the screams and the terror, ‘great!’ he thought to himself. He’d taken up with a group who operated under the guise of religious insurgents but were, in fact, not much more than hoodlums and pillagers. They gave him food, water, nice new military clothing, money and he got to keep anything that he managed to pilfer. He was a pig in a pen. Happy as a clown.
His gunshot wounds still hurt a bit but pain drove him on, kept him moving, kept him sharp and alert. He was in his element. He’d had a good hard days fighting and was resting in a remote village hut, soaking up his aches and pains happily with the aid of some fresh opium. The drug gave his pains a warmth that he found deeply satisfying. Every bruise, cut, scrape and graze felt like the hot Mediterranean sun was bathing it with gentle rays, toasty, soothing, heavenly. He basked in pain as pleasure and pleasure as pain, a starving man at a banquet for kings, he lapped it all up.
As he lay in his warm ache soaked utopia, flat on his back on a hard floor with his pack for a pillow, puffing on his opium bong, his mind ambled lazily back to Singapore.
The last thing that he remembered was wanting sex. He remembered trying to glance seductively at some ladies in a bar but with hindsight realised that he may have looked a lot more like a dirty slavering pervert than the sex god that Jack Daniels had convinced him he was. Vague mental pictures came to him. Violence, a car, smashing glass, gunshots and then blackness.
He’d woken in a pristine white room, handcuffs restricting his movement and someone had seen fit to install a small roadwork crew in his head. All of the crew appeared to be using pneumatic drills to dig up the more useful parts in the tarmac road of his mind, which was odd, as any time that Carl had ever seen a road work team they were usually nowhere near their pneumatic drills but were having a bit of a sit down and a cup of tea instead. His skull throbbed mercilessly with the constant barrage of internal noise.
The experimental chip inside his brain was working well though. It increased the production of a certain chemical, which had a name so long and complicated that Carl had never seen fit to remember it. It had the practical upshot of making him mind bogglingly sturdy and increased his bodies healing abilities by twenty times its natural rate. His gunshot wounds were already half way to being fully healed. When his body was in crisis the chip worked over time and had things fixed very quickly. He was still in pain but not nearly as much as he should have been, taking into account the extent of his injuries. Any normal man would’ve been in a coma for a few years; or more plausibly, they'd be dead. He’d only been shot a few days ago and was ready to get up and take some more of the same.
He was also blessed with very small hands and freakishly chunky wrists, so with a little bit of wriggling and pulling he’d managed to free his hands from the manacles that attached him to the metal hospital bed. Once freed, he yanked out an interesting array of tubes that stuck out of numerous different parts of his body and carefully turned off any equipment that looked like it might raise an alarm.
He stumbled off the bed and spent some time drinking water from a washbasin in the corner. The liquid invigorated him, he could feel his strength returning with every gulp and the thumping pain began to subside a little. His mind began to clear and he started pondering his options for escape. He had no idea how much time he had before someone came to check on him so he had to move quickly. He did a few swift sit-ups, press-ups and jumping jacks to reacquaint his muscles with movement and he was just about ready to go. There was still pain but he used an old meditative trick he’d learnt in India to block the pain off. With enough concentration he managed to file the pain away from his mind. He knew that 75% of pain was mental, so forcing it to stay in his body and not creep into his thoughts eased things up considerably.
He took some deep breaths and drank a little more water. He was ready.
The first thing he had to do was find some clothes. He had no doubt that his own clothing would have been densely bloodied judging by the amount of gunshot wounds that riddled his arms and legs. They would have been cut from his unconscious body. He held out no hope of finding them, which meant that clothes had to come from elsewhere. There was bound to be a guard.
He peered cautiously out of the small window in the door to his room, flashing his eyes at the corridor outside for little more than a split second taking in every detail of the scene outside his door. His intelligence training in the military had given him an exceptional talent for memory recall and the chip in his brain only increased the ability. He could flick through a phone book in less than a minute and remember every name, address and phone number with frightening accuracy. There was a guard, as he had predicted, opposite his door, sitting, slumped in a small chair and reading a magazine that appeared to be some sort of soft porn. This was good; it meant that he was both negligent and deeply distracted.
Carl walked over to a drip trolley that had been supplying Carl with a clear thick liquid, wheeled it over to the door and threw it to the ground with a clatter. There was a fumbling noise from outside, the squeak of shoes on the plastic tiling and a loud thud as the guard stumbled through the door, his soft porn flapping around his legs as he clumsily rushed to see what the crash had been.
‘This is too easy!’ thought Carl.
He was about to pounce on the man and render him unconscious but as luck would have it, the porn loving guard did all the work for him. He was in such a rush to get in the room and had been so absorbed in his magazine that, upon fumbling through the door, tripped on the drip cart that Carl had thrown down, fell forward with frightening speed and cracked his head off the side of the bed. He flopped to the floor with a dull thud, the various tools of his trade that dangled from his utility belt clattering and knocking against each other.
‘Pillock!’ thought Carl shaking his head in disgust at the man’s incompetence.
He dragged the dozing lump out of view, stuffing him under the bed after removing his nightstick from his belt. Carl was fairly sure that there would be other guards on the floor that would have seen or heard the racket and waited for them behind the door. Sure enough he heard feet pelting up the corridor outside and the door swung open as two men bounded into the room. Carl had little problem clouting them both on the head and dropping them to the floor. The whole thing was over in seconds but he had to act fast. There would be other men stationed around the building.
He swiftly stripped one of them of his uniform, put it on with lightening speed and darted out of the door. He pulled the cap down low so as to hide his features. He confidently strode down the corridor and set about trying to find a way out of the hospital. He encountered eight other guards but none of them proved to be anything more that flies to be swotted in the face of his unnatural stealth and strength.
Panic ensued. Doctors, nurses, patients and visitors all ran to avoid the violence being done. The pandemonium served him well, he liked panic, it was a very effective cloak sometimes. He even fired his newly acquired gun at some strip lights, shattering them in a firework display of electrical sparks, just to increase the level of chaos. In the midst of it all, he scanned a number of rooms, choosing one that housed a man who appeared to be of similar stature to him. The guards wouldn’t take very long to figure out that Carl was
dressed as one of their own so he needed a swift change of disguise. The man in the room was silenced with a quick crack to the side of the head and Carl had a new set of clothes. He got changed and slipped the gun and nightstick into the waistband of his new trousers. Luckily the man supplied a baseball cap, handy for avoiding other people’s looks, and a very full wallet.
He bolted down a corridor toward a fire exit, leaped down the stairs and was calmly walking down a busy street within three minutes. Before the credit cards in the wallet could be reported stolen, he’d bought a full compliment of survival supplies from an army and navy store, a motorbike (he’d had to bribe the salesman quite extensively to ignore the fact that he looked nothing like the person on the driving license), a hearty meal, a bottle of bourbon, two hundred cigarettes and was making for the border.
He felt the locator that Shoop had injected into him flicker to life briefly as he made his getaway. He hoped that Shoop had seen the signal on his computer, if he had then it’d mean that he would know that Carl was safely out of the clutches of the Sphere of Influence, well, for the time being anyway. It would be a weight of his mind. Carl felt a little bad about his getting caught, but not so much that he was going to pummel himself with guilt.
He had no way of getting in touch with his comrades, which disheartened him somewhat. He knew that he wouldn’t be free until Shoop had finished his mission, and even if he did, Carl knew that he’d have to find Shoop before he could ever know if he was truly out of danger. In the meantime, he had to keep busy and stay underground.
‘First things first though.’ He thought as he rode his nice shiny new motorcycle North to the border, ‘Time I got my hands on some weed!’ He headed for his little marijuana garden that was tucked away in the hills. The lack of smoke had done bad things to him. He could feel his uncontrollable rage creeping up inside him. The chip in his skull was very hard to resist once it went into full swing. For the moment he was safe though as it was busy trying to fix his battered body. He just hoped he could get to the garden before he did anything else stupid. Once he got to the garden there was a little known path that lead down into Malaysia from there. Nobody knew about it apart from him and a few country dwellers so there was little chance of any official entanglements.
