Advanced Mythology

by Jody Lynn Nye

  “No way to tell until Omnivore dredges up the surrounding data,” Ming said ruefully. “We still haven’t got anything on the original message yet. It could be days. Weeks.”

  “I don’t want to spend weeks at it,” Beach snapped. “Boris and Natasha here will drive me mad by then.” He snapped the phone shut on Ming’s chuckle. He needed more data. Omnivore was amazing, brilliant, but it moved too slowly. Nothing to be done about it, he’d have to get into the place and look for himself. He looked around for Maria and Stefan. They were plastered against one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, gabbling to one another. “Come on, children!” he called. The scenery shifted alarmingly as he walked. Good God, but this building gave you vertigo. “If you’re very good and come with daddy now, he’ll buy you a nice ice cream before you go back to the asylum!”

  “But, Beach!” Maria complained. “We are in the presence of emanations!”

  He took her arm and turned her toward the elevator. “If anyone was storing magical artifacts up here, someone, probably the janitor, would have noticed it by now. We are busy exploring other options. Come along.”

  ***

  Chapter 15

  Bracey jabbed Holl hard in the ribs. “I told you someone was bumbling around out here.”

  The two elves lay on their bellies in a hollow just a few feet from the edge of the road. The men who busied themselves around the open hatch of their truck were so near that Holl could have reached out and tugged their pants legs. He read the logo on the vehicle’s white-painted side.

  “It’s just the telephone repair men,” he whispered.

  “And why, in the name of Mother Nature, would they be right here, miles from anywhere, unless they were spying upon us?” Bracey asked.

  “I suspect because we have the only telephone for miles,” Holl said. “Keep your voice down. They may not be able to hear everything we say, but it would only take a word.”

  “But why now?”

  Holl sighed, burying his face in his forearms momentarily. “I would have expected them sooner. The telephone has not worked correctly since that fireball bounded around the kitchen. Someone farther along the same wire must have complained. There, you see?” he asked, as one of the men, wearing rubber gloves and pants and a helmet with a little light above his brows, clambered up the nearest telephone pole. The two elves watched as he poked at the wires and transformers.

  “The circuit breaker’s shot,” said the shortest man. He seemed to be in charge. “Someone go ring the bell and see if anyone’s home.”

  Holl began to back out of his hiding place, more silently than a mouse. “We’d best find Marcy and ask her to answer the door.”

  “We cannot let them come through to the door,” Bracey whispered indignantly. “They are intruding.”

  Holl glared at him. “They’re doing their job. Do you want to draw the attention it would bring for them to be stopped at an invisible wall? Let us hurry. We want this line fixed as much as they do. And we’d best put a protecting on these men.”

  “On Big Folk? Whatever for?”

  “Because if one of them gets hurt it will start questions being asked,” Holl said impatiently. “And our homeowner’s insurance is not large enough to handle multiple claims. I will do it. Go find Marcy.”

  Grumbling under his breath, Bracey withdrew, leaving Holl to make his charm. He hoped that whatever had jumped out of the mead barrel at him the other night would leave the visitors alone, for an accident like that would bring not only claims adjusters and lawyers, but curiosity-seekers.

  * * *

  “… So I said, it’s great if you want us to come up with a killer ad campaign for them, but until they get a better phone service system I’m not the one you want to write copy for them,” said a young man in a royal blue dress shirt with a white collar to an older woman in lime-green pants and a baggy white cotton sweater. “I spent half an hour on hold trying to get one lousy part for a home entertainment system cabinet. They’ve got like one woman answering calls for the whole country.” The young man put a pretend phone to his ear. “‘Thank you for calling Starter Furniture Boutique. Our coffee breaks are very important to us, so please sit there listening to our Muzak until we get back from Sumatra.’”

  His companion laughed. “What if you did one of those ‘good cop, bad cop’ campaigns, where that’s how Brand X treats their customers?”

  “That’d be great, until someone called Starter Furniture and figured out where we got the idea.…”

  The two of them walked down the stairs of the PDQ building and turned right, passing near enough to the darkened doorway where Beach and his minions stood hidden that he could have touched them. O’Dell, one of his operatives, swung a detector in an arc.

  “Still two body-heat traces on the third floor,” O’Dell said.

  “We can avoid two,” Beach said. “Go on.”

  His men slipped past him, Stefan keeping a lookout while Miller undid the lock. Cat burglary was an art. No longer was it necessary to rappel down a wall wearing black spandex and a balaclava. Modern burglars made a civil approach through the front door, disabled the alarm system, then gave the security cameras something to look at besides themselves while they went about their business. Beach reminded them sharply that they were to leave everything as they found it.

  “Cleaner, if possible,” he said. “We don’t want them having an idea that we were there. All we want is information.”

  Vasques and Wyszinski were a team he had hired there in Chicago. They drove VWs as a compliment to their last initials, an affectation that Beach found irritating, but they were good at searching. They had been private detectives who had had their licenses yanked for impropriety, but the state board couldn’t remove their knowledge. They went right to the files on the second floor, handing off folders to Beach and the other three to read over, looking for signs of the calligraphic characters of the mystery language or any reference thereto.

  A click made them all raise their heads. It sounded to Beach like a footstep on a concrete floor. Could the infrared detector have missed a janitor in the cellar? Unlikely. O’Dell was thorough. But the men held as still as statues until they were sure the noise wouldn’t be repeated.

  About half an hour into their illicit visit they heard the elevator. O’Dell held out his instrument and nodded. Both heat traces from the floor above were departing. They had the place to themselves. That was good, because the job was likely to take all night. The office was awash in paper. Apparently the place really did function as an advertising agency. Whatever was going on sub rosa was deeply buried.

  It wasn’t until they accessed the mail room computer at three o’clock in the morning that Beach began to see signs of his quarry. He almost smiled over Vasques’s shoulder at the screen. PDQ was so careful about the security coding of what it sent out over the web, it never thought to protect the computer from which such transmissions originated.

  On the user log they found four files of approximately the right size dating from the day Ming insisted the first graphic had been sent. The second one they opened, addressed to “Gadfly Electronics,” turned out to be the right one. There, on the screen, was the lingo, exactly like the copy he carried around in his pocket. The attached note was telling someone called Jen to look it over and give PDQ their approval as soon as possible. Beach made a note of Gadfly’s e-mail address for further investigation. Who were they and what were they using the magical language for?

  “Who routed this to the mail room?” Beach asked. He was so excited he was gripping Vasques’s shoulder with iron fingers. The man paid no attention, rapt on the screen, his face glowing in the reflected light of the screen. He typed in commands, brushing aside firewall programs and password prompts like cobwebs.

  “Dorothy Carver,” Vasques said, pointing at the name. A few more commands brought up a screen from Personnel. “Creative director.”

  Beach nodded to the other men. They scattered, looking for the name. In a m
oment, Wyszinski reappeared, cocking his head toward the rear of the floor. The window of Carver’s small office faced another building where people were still working late on an autumn night. Beach lowered the blinds and hoped that no one across the way would think it odd to see lights in Carver’s room. Together the five of them turned over every sheet of paper, every computer file in the office, until they found a copy of the graphic. Carver’s initials were in a small box in the lower left hand corner.

  “What’s this?” he asked, puzzled. The device on the page showed a blank screen. “The lingo didn’t come from Carver. It was added later. Keep looking until you find one with writing in this section.”

  Miller was the one who found the prize. On a cluttered desk in a different department he came across the finished page. Another set of initials joined Carver’s: KD.

  Back to Vasques and the Personnel files. KD had three matches in PDQ’s roster: Kirby Deane, an executive vice president; Kenneth Drabble, media services; and Keith Doyle, copywriter-trainee. From evidence unearthed during a search of his corner office Deane turned out to be on vacation in Tahiti and had been for three weeks. He couldn’t be the source. Kenneth Drabble was deceased. That left Keith Doyle, age 22. Beach frowned. How could Doyle, a trainee, be the source of a sample of a language that no one spoke, that was associated with magical artifacts and powers? Perhaps he was the government agent they were looking for.

  “Where’s his employment record?” Beach demanded. On his commandeered computer Vasques clicked through the files until he came to a screen headed with the name “Keith Doyle.” Beach leaned in, unable to believe his eyes. The photo in the record was of the redheaded boy he had approached in the park. He was the key to all this? Beach was filled with respect. The youth had seemed naturally flustered when he was confronted with the graphic. He had lied to Beach. Tricky. They’d have to be certain not to underestimate him again. “I want a copy of that, and make sure there’s an address on it. We need to pay a visit.”

  * * *

  Keith spotted the revolving blue lights on the street as he got off the bus. Funny place for a traffic stop, he thought, hiking down the block. But the police car wasn’t there to write a ticket. Men and women in uniforms were coming and going from one of the apartment buildings. As soon as he realized that the building was his own he broke into a run.

  The stern-faced black police officer at the door wouldn’t let him in.

  “But I live here,” Keith protested.

  “Then why doesn’t your driver’s license show this address?” the officer asked.

  “It’s temporary,” Keith explained, starting to pull files and letters out of his briefcase. “I don’t know how long I’ll be working in the city.…”

  He heard Dunn’s voice say, “Wait a minute. Doyle, is that you?”

  His roommate appeared around the corner. He looked half worried to death, his mild face creased around the mouth and forehead. Pat Morgan was behind him, looking more bedraggled than usual.

  “What happened?”

  “We had a break-in,” Dunn said wearily. “I just went out to get some lunch. When I came back, the place had been tossed. I couldn’t have been out of here more than forty minutes.”

  “What did they take?” Keith asked, alarmed. “Your program?”

  Dunn’s face was grim. “They blew my monitor, but your computer is all over the place.”

  “Oh, shit!” Keith hurried toward his bedroom. He was prevented from entering by a female cop, while a male technician, on gloved hands and knees, searched the carpet with a powerful flashlight. The tech rose, dusted his hands together, and sighed.

  “Nothing,” he said. “A very professional job. No footprints or fingerprints. I think Mr. Jackson must have interrupted them when he returned from outside, so they didn’t have time to steal it after they took it apart. Was there anything on your computer that would be of interest to thieves, Mr. Doyle?”

  Keith panicked for a moment, worrying whether anyone had opened his e-mail program and read the messages to and from the elves. Then he remembered that the program had been wiped. Nobody would get any information from it. “Nothing,” he said with relief. “Just the usual. Games. Word processing.” His eyes widened in alarm. “My essay!” He sat down heavily on the bed. The Master was going to kill him if it was gone. There went four late nights in a row doing research on the Internet.

  The tech grinned. “Nothing serious, then. Good.”

  Pat was helping the other officers as they went over the place trying to figure out if anything was missing. Whoever had come in had pulled every book off the bookshelf, tossed clothing out of drawers, and pushed over all the furniture. Keith wondered how many thieves there had been to trash the place so thoroughly.

  “Can we take this now?” asked the detective who was helping Dunn. He pointed at Keith’s monitor. “Will it be compatible with your CPU?”

  “I’ll make it work,” Dunn said determinedly. “Nothing had better be wrong with my drive. I’m writing software for my brother’s company. They’re depending on me.”

  “Would it be easy to copy?”

  “No way. People are in and out of here all the time. My machine is password-protected and encrypted. It works better than the alarm on this place.”

  “Now, Mr. Jackson,” the detective said. “We got here about the same time you did.”

  Keith trailed after them as they took the monitor into Dunn’s room, hooked it up, and booted the machine into life. Screen after screen demanded passwords, which Dunn typed in with uneasy looks at the police and his roommates.

  “It’s okay,” Dunn said, his shoulders slumping. The tension in the room eased. He pointed to the latest entry on a usage history monitor in the bottom right corner of the screen. “They started it up but they couldn’t get through the chastity belt. We’d better check the other guys’ hard drives.”

  Keith’s computer had been started, too. His usage history had been wiped, though neither he nor Dunn could say whether that was due to the problems he had been having with his email or not. Pat’s computer, much more basic than either of the others, had been started, too.

  “No way to tell if anything had been copied,” the detective said, making a note. “Maybe you two should start using passwords from now on.”

  “Yessir,” Keith said automatically, but his mind was elsewhere.

  In a while the police and their analysts departed, closing the door behind them. Pat and Dunn waited until the crowd of footsteps went down the stairs and out onto the street. Then they both descended on Keith.

  “All right,” Pat said, “which one of the little guys did you piss off?”

  Keith raised his hands. “None of them! Honest to God. Everyone thinks I’m the newfangled cat’s meow. But …”

  “But, what?” Dunn demanded.

  Keith hesitated. He wasn’t completely certain, not with the way Holl had been acting; refusing to talk about what was troubling him. Maybe … No. After all this time they’d certainly be more direct with him. They’d been friends a long time. “Could this be from the guy who followed me that day?” he wondered. “That Carnivore program that made a copy of my ad?”

  “Nope,” Dunn said automatically. “It’s supposed to pass unseen through protections, and if it’s messing with you, it’ll be messing with every computer attached to the modem line in this apartment, and it’s not. Besides, if they can rip your hard drive over the phone, why come in here and redecorate for us?”

  “I don’t know,” Keith said worriedly. “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  Beach’s people assembled in a safehouse far away from the handsome hotel room he used as his headquarters, to go over their booty.

  They had watched the apartment building for several days, getting to know the ins and outs of the inhabitants of apartment 3D. The lanky white man with long, black hair was an actor. His hours were the farthest off an ordinary workday, but he tended to come and go at approximately the same
time every day except Mondays. Their target, the redhead of average height, left in the early morning, then came back around suppertime or later. Beach’s greatest concern was the light-skinned black man, who spent most of his time at home. He only seemed to go out late at night. VW had followed him to what they called a “Nerd Bar.” Otherwise, he seemed to live on carryout food, which he went out for in the late afternoon. An interval like that was their best chance.

  They had lain in wait until mid-afternoon, when the actor had left, carrying a duffel bag and a bottle of water. A couple of hours later, the black man emerged, heading for the main street where all the takeaway restaurants were. As soon as he was out of sight, Beach and his men went in.

  “Make it look like a robbery,” Beach ordered. Wyszinski started taking photographs, and Vasques started looking for computers. Though there was one setup in each bedroom, all evidence pointed to the fact that the highest-tech array belonged to the black man, not the target. It seemed Dunn Jackson was a programmer.

  “Scan his drive anyhow,” Beach said, grinning. “Just in case he’s working on something I can use later.” Vasques echoed his grin, putting a read-write CD into the drive.

  Like little children throwing snow over their heads, Stefan and the others were throwing the three men’s possessions in the air, going for the greatest amount of mayhem. Beach enjoyed the spectacle for a moment, until Vasques came to tap him on the shoulder.

  As Beach had hoped, Doyle’s hard drive not only had that seven-line example of the lingo on it, but the alteration of the test that had so excited Ming.

  “This proves he’s got something to do with it,” he said, slapping Vasques on the shoulder. “Where’d it come from?”

  Vasques shook his head. “No way to tell. He could just be a mule, bringing the text in to PDQ.”

  “But for who?” Beach asked. “We need to learn more about his connections.”

  The e-mail program was no help. It contained a single love letter from a girl named Diane.