“Like a 128 by 12.2 gigahertz I.Q. array, you mean?”
John smiled. “We think alike, Jack. We really do.”
“I could loan you one, I suppose. See what you can do with it,” Jack offered, “but only if you get your guys to build me a room like this in Glendale to play with.”
John’s face turned serious. “Virtuosity retain full rights on this, Jack. We’re only a profitable arm if you allow us to be.”
“I’m fine with that,” Jack assured him. “You have my word I won’t sting you. Hell, I don’t need to sting you. I just want to mess around with it for a bit that’s all. See if we can’t find a few uses of our own.”
“And it’ll up the funding I’ll need. I’d be looking closer to fifteen than ten.” He was smiling again. Mischievously.
Jack smiled. “You really are a god-damned genius, John,” he said. “If nothing else you’re a genius at getting money out of me. The transfer will be in your account by 9am tomorrow. Now then, take me to the guys who make you look so damned good so I can ask them to build me one of these toys.”
John looked offended. “It’s not a toy, you know.”
Jack didn’t care. His entire body was smiling like an excited schoolboy.
“Of course it’s not,” he said, patting John firmly on the back and frowning with mock sincerity. “Technology never is.”
put forth a riddle
Ezekiel 17:2
When the meet-and-greet session came to a close and Jack felt that he had learned all he needed to know about the ReelRooms System, he rang the hired chauffeur’s mobile number and shared a parting handshake with the team.
He felt renewed confidence that Virtuosity and, more importantly, IntelliSoft’s stake within it, were set for a healthy future. With that stake already in excess of twenty-five percent, an agreement had been made to share any future developments that were made, either by John’s team or Jack’s, but to launch all products and upgrades under the Virtuosity banner-heading. To Jack this meant an exciting new area of development within IntelliSoft and he could already picture an I.Q./ReelRooms combined system taking shape. It helped his current state of mind to see something of excitement occupying the closer horizons and, for a few brief hours, it had actually helped him to forget.
“The guys will be over in a few days,” John said, his face still exuding the gratitude of increased funding. “We’ve got all the components bar the lasers and there’s only a two day lead-time on those. Oh, and I’ll let you have Phil’s number as well. Just for those instances when your guys tinker about with the system and end up breaking it.”
Jack smiled. “We’ll try not to. Thanks a lot, John. I really am very impressed.”
“Hey... I did warn you.” He watched as Jack disappeared through the revolving door and hurried down the steps, his raincoat pulled high against the rain. He almost dived into the back of the limousine.
The chauffeur was just lifting the umbrella from the passenger footwell. “Sorry, Sir. I was just on my way up,” he said, genuinely apologetic.
“Never did go in for all that V.I.P. crap,” Jack smiled, “but thanks anyway.”
The chauffeur replaced the umbrella, relieved. “Heathrow?” he asked dutifully.
Jack was wiping the rain from his face with his handkerchief. “Yes please. Terminal three.”
He shook as much water as he could from his coat and placed it on the facing seat where it lay feeding the remainder to the carpeted floor, then leaned back into the leather and tried to relax.
The rain was filling the air and making the surrounding world a dull grey like his mood whenever his mind was left to wander. This was why he stayed busy, despite the continued protests of MaryBeth and those closest to him. If he did not work he would think and if he thought too much...
He didn’t want to think about it.
A few minutes after heading back into the midday traffic there was a recurring ringing sound, audible but muffled. Initially Jack ignored it, but it soon began to grate. Ultimately he relented. “You can answer that you know...?”
“Not mine, Sir,” the chauffeur replied, barely turning his head. “Mine’s still on ‘Jingle Bells’ from Christmas.”
Knowing that he did not even own a mobile phone (despite the high-tech industry in which he was now ensconced, Elizabeth had always believed the reports of them ‘frying your brain’), it took Jack a moment to realise that it was actually his laptop computer. Normally communicating via direct video conferencing from his PDA (which had a separate and very distinct alert tone) when away on business he often forgot that the laptop also contained simple cellular technology for receiving voice calls, faxes and Emails.
He rummaged under his coat and retrieved the computer from a leather case, the flashing amber light on the front indicating that he was receiving either an e-mail or a simple text message.
Which was odd, to say the least. All such messages were designed to come in via the system in Glendale, only being passed on to him, either verbally or via the hand-held PDA, by MaryBeth if she felt they warranted his attention.
There were few others who even knew the direct router number by which his laptop was identified.
He flipped open the screen and used the trackpad to move the cursor over a flashing icon marked: RECEIVE. Clicking once, the ringing stopped and a window rose up from the base of the screen to display the message.
The sender’s address was given as ‘[email protected]’.
The address was not one he recognised and the message was not of the kind he was expecting. But then, he told himself, he hadn’t actually been expecting anything at all. Had he?
The screen filled with a long string of symbols which Jack, given his Jewish descent, instantly recognised as ancient Hebrew letters. Ancient because they lacked the dots placed later to add vowel inflections to the modern system:
At the base of the letters was a simple message typed in English: ‘2809 LETTERS ONE HOUR TO BREAK ELS AND CODE GO’.
Who in God’s name was sending him a code to decipher? And why the hell was it in Hebrew? And why, while he thought about it, did he only have an hour in which to do it? Suddenly it dawned on him, and he smiled. MaryBeth. Typical of her style and quite obviously an attempt to offer him some brief, unexpected - and unbelievably well-timed -fun for the journey to the airport.
Jack instantly recognised the phrase ‘ELS’. It was a term used frequently within a large number of the more basic coding systems, and formed an integral part of the codebreaking devices from which most modern computers had been developed. It was an abbreviation of ‘Equidistant Letter Sequence’; a system whereby the process of taking every second, third, fourth or ‘nth’ letter made a new sentence. In the sentence ‘nights here fly ably along’, for example, read on an ELS of ‘4’ (whereby every fourth letter was isolated), the word revealed would be a simple ‘hello’. It was by far the simplest form of code, he thought, and therefore shouldn’t present too great a problem for a man of his abilities. In reality, it should be phenomenally easy. Were it not for the fact that it had been written in Ancient Hebrew.
What he did know, however, was that the sender had chosen to tell him just how many letters were contained in the string: 2089, and he guessed that such unnecessary information would therefore constitute some form of clue. He suspected that the unknown constant - the ‘n’ in the ELS - would divide perfectly into 2089. Which meant that it couldn’t be any of the obvious ones: two, three, five, ten or multiples thereof. He called up the calculator contained on the system and keyed in 2089; his first instinct proving also to be his best. Selecting the square root function the solution came up as a whole number: fifty-three. To rearrange the symbols into lines of fifty-three letters would give him fifty-three lines. A perfect square.
Either this was way too easy, or he was too damn good.
Whilst his Email software contained international language selection, he knew that his other software would not. In order to decipher the code h
e would need to load a specific Hebrew typeface into the computer’s temporary system file. Calling up the font database he scrolled down to ‘H’ and was presented with two available variants: Hebrew/Roshem and Hebrew/Vilner. He chose Hebrew/Roshem, highlighted the face and clicked the button marked ‘ADD TO TEMPORARY’.
He copied the text into the computer’s RAM and launched another program. Once inside he selected the Roshem typeface, pasted the string back in and asked the computer to rearrange the lines.
The string disappeared from screen, reappearing an instant later in lines of fifty-three characters long. Jack studied them for a moment, his brow furrowed.
“Everything alright, Sir?” the chauffeur asked, his eyes visible in the rear-view mirror.
“Fine,” Jack replied. “Somebody’s sent me a puzzle, that’s all.”
The chauffeur shrugged and turned his attention back to the traffic as Jack continued to scour the grid:
Before long he could see that, running down the left hand side of the text, and undoubtedly in the most obvious of places, was a sequence of letters that, if memory served him correctly, could not be described as random. Reaching into his case he retrieved a notepad and fountain pen, copying the fifty-three letters onto the top sheet of paper, adding backslashes in places where he could detect definitive word breaks:
It took all his powers of memory to recall childhood Hebrew studies, but he could just about translate the message. Probably because, like those childhood lessons, the message contained a Biblical passage. Working from right to left, as the Hebrew script dictated, it read:
‘As for you, you have caused many to stumble at the law of Jehovah,
and thou art cast out of heaven with everyone who does evil.’
Suddenly Jack didn’t like this game. Not one little bit. The first thing that struck him was that this was no light entertainment sent by MaryBeth. He had no idea what the message meant, or why it should have been sent to him, but given recent events it was starting to secrete a sour taste into his mouth. There had to be more; something that might hold even a passing resemblance to an explanation. After pondering the options for a minute he toggled the computer back to the Email software and read the initial message once again. This time he noticed something he had previously overlooked: 2809 LETTERS ONE HOUR TO BREAK ELS AND CODE GO
It said to break the ELS ‘AND’ the code, which meant that whilst he might well have uncovered the hidden message, he had not actually broken the code. In other words what he had achieved so far was probably nothing more than uncover a further clue as to things he had yet to do. He glanced at his watch; still unsure as to why there should be a time limit imposed, but it had taken less than twelve minutes to get this far. Carefully he studied the remaining block.
It was definitively Ancient Hebrew, as the hidden message had confirmed, but the remaining letters appeared desperately random short of falling into small groupings of like-like. A dual-layer code. He pondered his best recollections of Ancient Hebrew as a written form: Twenty two actual letters plus twelve variants from ’Aleph to Tãw. All were consonants, no vowels, and all had shapes similar to the objects they had initially signified. None of which seemed to help in the least.
The longer he studied the text the less he saw. There was no damn pattern.
Scribbling on his pad he began to make notes of the letters he could see and over a period of a few minutes realised something that he knew should have leapt out and shaken his collar a great deal earlier. Of the thirty-four letter variants contained within the Hebrew language some, for unspecified reasons, did not appear anywhere in the grid. He looked again but knew he was right.
Seven of the letters were missing.
Testing the limits of his memory yet again, Jack recalled the missing letters and keyed them one by one onto the screen: cfhprtu. He saved the file as ‘MIS/LETS’ onto his hard drive before trying to decipher their relevance.
The solution did not present itself quite as quickly as he had initially hoped; there was certainly no clear word formed by the letters and no Hebrew anagram which had been his two initial, and most obvious, conclusions. Jack was lost again; the harder he searched for clues, the more reluctant they seemed to make themselves known.
Unexpectedly, the laptop suffered a system crash and the screen flicked to black. Jack creased his eyes sceptically. Crashing was something that not one of his personal computers had done in the entire time he had owned them. He always kept his system clean, assigned memory generously, limited the number of system extension files and rarely used incompatible software packages. So why the hell had it happened now of all times?
Still eyeing the machine suspiciously he waited for the startup sequence to complete before relaunching the ‘MIS/LETS’ file again. As the file appeared on screen the computer beeped and flashed a warning; ‘Hebrew/Roshem not loaded. Default font (Times) will be used instead’. Jack sighed heavily. As ever, he had only loaded the Hebrew typeface into the temporary file and as such it had been cleared by the unexpected restart of the machine. He clicked ‘OK’, knowing that he could load the required typeface again once the file had opened. The computer would update its font database on-the-fly and the letters would instantly revert back to their Hebrew form.
When the page appeared his eyes widened, then narrowed again as he saw the English variants offered for the missing letters. The machine was not displaying the language variants of the letters, but rather the key variants; the letters that would need to be pressed on an English language QWERTY keyboard to obtain the relevant Hebrew symbols. As Jack stared at the letters; ‘CEIPRTU’, his throat began to tighten.
Somebody - somebody bearing the address [email protected] - knew exactly how he worked and he was suddenly becoming aware that the computer’s ‘unexpected’ crash had been far from unexpected at all. It had been timed. Whoever had sent this file knew that Jack would only load the typeface into the temporary file and they knew he would forget to reload it on re-booting the machine. So they had added a simple virus-crasher to the body of the message. It did not take much code-breaking now to see that the letters he was now being presented with, when changed to a recognisable font on computer, had formed a very clear anagram of the word ‘PICTURE’.
He looked out through the tinted windows of the limousine as it squeezed through heavy traffic, surrounded by vehicles on all sides. To his left a motorcyclist, a similarly tinted visor fronting his helmet, glanced straight through the window. Paranoia was now making Jack feel that the man was looking directly at him, even though he knew that he could not possibly see inside. No, he thought, he was merely admiring the limousine. Or his own reflection. So why, when this was one-way glass, did Jack still have the awful feeling he was being watched?
Worse still, why did he feel that he was being played?
[email protected] was telling Jack that the remaining letters in the grid formed a picture; what he had to do now was somehow make that picture visible. He thought through the possibilities for a few moments, then realised that if each letter pertained to a different ‘shade’ in the picture, then it would most likely transpire to be a greyscale image rather than a full colour one. It would make sense therefore, Jack decided, to assign white levels to the first letter of the alphabet and black levels to the last.
He flicked back to his ‘CODE’ file and saw that the entire grid was now written in the default (English) typeface but, save for certain regular groupings, the patterning was still apparently random. Scrolling his cursor over the text he accessed the programming level of his laptop and quickly typed a single line of coding:
ASSIGN LEVEL
WHITE-BLACK / A=WHITE / Z=BLACK
GREY VARIANTS B-Y
IGNR-C,E,I,P,R,T,U / SQUARE>PIXELS.
With every press of the computer keypad he felt increasingly uneasy as to what image the system was going to throw his way.
The computer spent less than half a second calculating values and the letters disappeared from screen. Wh
at appeared in their place froze Jack from somewhere deep inside and made every hair on his body stand on end. There was only one word to describe the image that was presented; ‘sick’. It was a joke that had suddenly ceased to be funny. Beneath the image a simple message, designed to appear only when the task was complete, was now flashing at half-second intervals. Only now did Jack understand why he had been given a one hour time limit in which to complete the puzzle:
WELCOME TO LONDON MR BERNSTEIN - CONGRATULATIONS NOW FIND THE TRUTH
CHURCH OF NOTRE DAME DE FRANCE LEICESTER PLACE OFF LEICESTER SQUARE - 1PM - ALONE
For a while the chauffeur had trouble believing what Jack was saying. They were less than ten minutes from Heathrow, had only just made it out of the worst of the traffic and now he wanted to head all the way back into the city again.
“Sir? You’ll miss your flight,” he protested.
Jack checked his watch; a quarter to one. He would never make it in time. “I’m not catching it,” he said without thinking. “Just get me to Leicester Place as quickly as you can.”
The chauffeur resigned himself to the fact that client went where the client wanted to go. “It might be tricky, Sir,” he offered apologetically. “I could probably get you to the Square, but I’ll have to do the one way system to get you to Leicester Place. It might be quicker to walk the last stretch.”
“Then get me to Leicester Square,” Jack said, deep breaths whistling through teeth clenched in anger.
Unsure as to whether Jack’s anger was, in fact, directed at him, the chauffeur turned the car around at the next junction and maintained a solemn silence, leaving only the repetitive thud of the wipers to score the journey back into the city.
the gate of his city
Genesis 23:10
Whilst Jack’s limousine was being bombarded by the full force of London’s winter rain, a thirteen year old boy - Joaquim Aldez - was sitting in the southern hemisphere’s glorious morning sun; watching. It was almost eight and he was still a good ten minutes away from school. Not that he cared much, he had been at least ten or fifteen minutes late ever since the show had come to town. The one in which he fully intended to take a starring role in less than four weeks’ time.
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