Codex

by Adrian Dawson

  Just to bring it home.

  He rubbed the strain from his eyes and blinked them open, still looking dejectedly to the polished floor. The light was glaring back from the varnish and he needed to blink a few more times to adjust. As he did, a shape entered his restricted field of view. Two shapes. Dark, black almost, but with pronounced blue-white highlights. Shoes.

  Very, very expensive shoes.

  “You’re late,” he said, looking up at Simon’s face silhouetted against the blue as it stole through the stained glass beyond.

  “I told you to be here at exactly the same time,” Simon said calmly. “You were fourteen minutes late a fortnight ago. You made me watch and wait, now I have done the same.”

  So that was it? Jack was late for the previous meeting, so the bastard thought it would be amusing to be similarly late today. An eye for an eye; very biblical. He wanted to throw the man something derogatory, but realised that it really wasn’t worth it.

  “So...? Am I to take it that you are prepared to accept my terms?” Simon asked.

  Jack snarled. “You mean the ones where you finally tell me who you believe killed my daughter so that I can use my influence to ‘close them down’ as you so eloquently put it.” He looked straight at the man with contempt. “Would those be the terms to which you refer?”

  Simon walked the few feet to the mural, temporarily turning his back. It seemed as though he was doing everything he could to be deliberately antagonistic. Jack found it hard to believe that he was even considering brokering a deal with this man.

  When Simon finally stopped and faced the picture, he did not turn around but Jack could see that he was gently shaking his head. “I cannot tell you who killed your daughter, Mr. Bernstein, just as I cannot tell you where her child is. If I could then I would not need you. I thought I had been very clear on that point.”

  Jack had to bite his lip again. “So if I do accept your terms, what happens when I have the child? How can you be so sure that I will deliver you your book?”

  Simon turned around. “You make it sound like you have a choice.”

  Jack tried in vain to look defiant. “I do.”

  Simon reciprocated with a victorious smile. “You also had a choice as to whether or not you came back here, and yet here you are.” His expression changed again; every ounce of emotion disappearing in an instant. “Be sure of one thing, Mr. Bernstein, you will find them for me. And I will get my book.”

  Jack had to concede defeat. Whether or not the book would be traded was a matter for another day. First he had to get the details he needed. “The child is still safe?” he asked.

  “To the best of my knowledge he is still alive and well, yes. How safe he continues to be is probably proportional to how quickly you find the people who are holding him.”

  “Please,” he said quietly. “Tell me where he is. You will get your book.”

  He felt as though he was reduced to begging for scraps. He hoped to God that it was worth it.

  Simon smiled perversely and reached into his breast pocket, retrieving a bulging envelope. “Like I say, I do not know where the child is,” he said. Calmly, he took three steps forward and dropped the envelope in Jack’s lap. “That is why I need you. You have far more resources than I when it comes to deciphering such tenuous links.”

  Jack half expected him to say something else, to explain what he might find inside, but only silence followed. The envelope was unsealed and he pulled out the contents. There were around fifteen sheets of cream coloured A4 paper concertina-folded contained inside. He opened them out and looked at the first. His brow furrowed. He looked at the second, then the third. One by one he looked at them all and the furrows grew deeper.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked. It told him nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  “Companies and products,” Simon offered, brushing invisible dust from the shoulder of his jacket.

  Jack looked at the sheets again. It made no difference; they still told him nothing. Each sheet was headed with the name of a different company, a few of which Jack recognised, and below the heading was a list of products. On each sheet only one or two of those products seemed to be relevant and had been highlighted in yellow as before. There was a wide range; everything from sodium fluoride to interferometers, whatever the hell they were. Nothing contained on any of the sheets seemed to relate in any way to the fate of Flight 320.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” His voice was almost tearing with disbelief.

  “You do what you agreed to do;” Simon said. “You solve the clues. You find the links.”

  “And this is it? This is what you brought me here to receive?”

  “If I could give you more, Mr. Bernstein, then I would,” Simon said. “Unfortunately this is all I have, so it is all that I can offer you.” He shrugged apologetically, and yet he did not look even the slightest bit sorry.

  Jack, however, remained incredulous. “A list of fucking companies and the products they make?” His anger was growing with every exchange. He wanted everything, he got nothing. Despair was swirling around his feet like a cold wind.

  Simon narrowed his eyes. “The products they buy, Mr. Bernstein, not the products they make.”

  Jack’s face broke and reddened with rage. He stood, moving his face as close as he could bear to the target of his wrath. “I did not come here for a fucking purchase ledger, you lousy bastard, I came here so that you could help me find my daughter’s child.” He stared deep into the cold restraint of his opponent’s eyes. “Cut the shit and give me the meat. Where the fuck are these people?”

  Simon did not flinch. “They are everywhere, Mr. Bernstein, and yet they are nowhere. That, in a very real sense, is the problem. They are bigger than you could possibly imagine, and yet they are still concealed from view. I have searched for years to find the pieces and now I need you to put those pieces together for me. Remember, the clock is ticking for your little one.”

  Jack narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean the clock is ticking? I thought you said the child was safe.”

  “The child is safe,” Simon replied. “But how safe are you? How safe am I? Have you not noticed...?” He turned away, pacing the floor with the careful strides of an attorney summing up, “...that they are fighting back?” He no longer looked at Jack, preferring instead to glance idly around the church as though he were pulling his words directly from the cold air which surrounded them both. “Lara tried to rescue the child and shortly afterward she was dead. Now you are trying to do the same, and I am helping you. You involved young Dave Clearwater and now I understand that he is also no longer a member of the global family. He involved others... need I go on? I do not choose to meet you in private because I enjoy creating an air of intrigue, Mr. Bernstein, I do so because I have no desire to die before I have my book.”

  So why, Jack wondered, if the cult were protecting the child, had they not just killed him outright? Why were they choosing instead to ‘warn him off?’ The simple truth was that he was still breathing whilst Dave was not which, in addition to ‘who were they?’, could only lead to one further question: ‘why did ‘they’ need Jack alive?’

  “I am told by my sources that this list is far from complete,” Simon continued. “More specifically, that precisely a quarter of it is missing. How or why that should be I do not know, but it is a list of companies and products that I believe will ultimately point the way to my book. I have had to concede that with your contacts you are far better placed than I to find the questions that will deliver my answer.”

  For the first time since they had met, Jack noticed a hint of desperation in Simon’s eyes. It was as though he hated the fact that he was having to turn his work over to a stranger, perhaps symbolising some failing on his part. “You have everything I can offer; the deal is done,” he said. “I will find you again when you have my book.”

  Looking at the range of companies again, Jack could still see no pattern. No clues. The sheets were a
lmost deliberately diverse. There were companies in every sector from mining to manufacturing and from farming to pharmaceuticals. He could not conceive how any one of the pieces of paper, or indeed the sheets as a group, might lead him where he needed to go.

  “So why don’t these people just…?”

  By the time he had looked up again Simon was gone; a cold wind blowing through the open doorway. It brought a similarly cold chill which tore through the aisle and warned Jack that he might just, for the first time in as long as he could remember, be impossibly out of his depth.

  Still, it was too late now.

  Like Simon said; the deal was done.

  death of the high priest

  Numbers 35:28

  Whenever he had been forced to spend the entire evening holed up in his office, Frank Warner realised just how much he actually hated this shit. ‘Riding the desk’.

  He was a field agent, always had been and always would be. As such that’s where he needed to be... in the field. Spending time in a cramped third floor honeycomb with less than enchanting views over the dull grey FedEx building wall was not how he had wanted to spend the rest of his life when he had been one of the first black agents to pass out of Quantico. It was certainly not where he wanted to be at… he checked the clock on the wall… twenty past eleven. He had a wife for God’s sake. And a kid. At least he thought he had, because sometimes he wondered. It was not like he got to see much of either these days.

  It was all Bernstein’s fault. All of it. Not just because Frank had been brought in to research all the U.S. passengers of Flight 320 and their families, of which Jack was one, but also because of what Jack did for a living as well. The man built computers for Christ’s sake.

  They were supposed to revolutionise investigations and sure, things like the VICAP database of violent crimes had indeed eliminated some of the confusion associated with tracking down killers who consistently moved from state to state, but they also took the onus away from Frank doing what Frank did best; meeting people. Interrogating them. Thoroughly. Carefully.

  These days he could call up a file that told him everything he needed to know about a suspect, from his past criminal record to how much he had spent at K-Mart during the preceding week. If the guy was suspected of being in a certain place at a certain time, then the first thing Frank liked to do was ask him, see what he said and watch his eyes. Then he would speak to his family and neighbours to make sure their stories tallied down to the smallest detail. These days, questioning increasingly seemed to be the second thing he did; the first was to key the guy’s name into the computer and see if his credit or ATM cards had been used anywhere near, or check computerised CCTV files to see if had had been spotted in the area. These days you could track a man’s movements right the way across the country, state-to-state, with just a few clicks of a computer mouse.

  There was no doubt in Frank’s mind that computers were revolutionising investigations, but it was in a way that he did not like one bit. He was sitting in an old school and he had no burning desire to graduate. Not yet. Not ever.

  He had received training on the systems, as had all agents, but most of it seemed to go into one ear and fly helplessly out of the other with no duty-free stopover. Often he was forced to get help from one of the others; the ‘new breed’ he despised so much. Those who could use a computer as easy as they could a gun. One more powerful weapon in their arsenal. In Warner’s hands the computer usually came across looking more like the enemy. Another unyielding, blank-eyed hurdle he must negotiate with as best he could to get the answers he needed.

  In addition to his other talents, Kyle McCarthy was one of the best computer guys in The Bureau. He was still in his twenties and still in his office. Frank had seen his light when he had gone to the coffee machine. Kyle was assigned to high-tech cases and had come down from the L.A. Field Office to the Rodondo Beach Resident Agency to get closer to the action. Now he too was working late; although he was doing it from an office with a wide view across the dark Pacific. The spoils for those who reached out and embraced new methods.

  Frank pointedly refused to go to Kyle. He could not bear to see his supercilious face as he demonstrated yet again how easy it really was to pull what was needed from the system. Kyle was a religious guy, deeply so. Because of this, amongst other character traits, his face permanently said ‘holier than thou’. It might take twice as long but what the hell? Frank would get the information he needed on his own. Eventually.

  There was still a lot of shit flying as to how the bomb had actually come to be aboard Flight 320 in the first place. It was obvious to all concerned that Dalkamouni and Mil’el were responsible and that Friedricks had been the one who had done the deed, but ‘obvious’ did not constitute any form of proof. You could not just walk into a courtroom and say ‘These guys did it. How do I know? Well, because it’s obvious.’

  The events in Berlin the preceding year might have served to nudge a jury, but more was needed if they were going to be fully swayed, especially given the international ramifications that any verdict would bring. The cold hard facts of how and why Flight 320 came to be spread across thirteen square miles of Danish countryside were still out there somewhere; they just needed to be found before the trial.

  By checking the families Frank had been assigned a very minor task in the investigation as a whole, symbolic of his lessening role within the agency he once loved. There were now over one hundred and twenty agents working the case, most of whom were in Germany, Denmark or based permanently in the laboratories at Quantico. Frank was merely one of many local field agents whose simple remit had been designed to match their low-tech abilities. ‘Arrive at the family home as the informer and display genuine concern, but ask as many gently leading questions as possible’. The questioning was designed to rule out each of two possibilities; a suicidal sympathiser or an unwitting mule on board the flight itself.

  The FBI file detailing terrorist attacks on civilian aircraft given to aid all field agents working on Flight 320 contained many previous suicide and/or mule missions. On March 9th 1985 an eighteen-year-old Saudi Arabian on a suicide mission had travelled with a suitcase bomb on board a Royal Jordanian Airlines TriStar airliner. Unfortunately for him the bomb had failed to detonate until after the plane had landed and the bags were being unloaded. On June 26th 1986 a suitcase bomb destined for an El Al flight exploded at Barajas Airport. The man who was unwittingly carrying the bomb onto the flight believed he had been trafficking drugs to Israel.

  Had either of the sabotage attempts gone to plan, the effects would have been every bit as devastating as those of Flight 320. It was instances like these which meant that the FBI could not rule out a genuine passenger carrying a bomb on board without thorough legwork. And, of course, computer work. Frank, along with others in the Bureau, had checked with each and every family as to where their loved one was travelling - from and to - the reason for their flight and any strange behaviour they may have exhibited in the weeks or months prior to their journey.

  When Frank had spoken to the big one; Jack Bernstein, he had not been impressed with his answers. Any of them.

  Okay, so it was a bad time and it did not help that Frank had carried with him a cold lack of sympathy for the mishaps of people whose sole aim in life seemed to be the accumulation of extortionate amounts of money, but there was definitely something more where Bernstein was concerned. He did not like the way that Jack had seemed a little unsure as to where his little girl had actually been in the days before the flight, or the precise times of her flight and arrival. Sometimes it had seemed that MaryBeth, his assistant, had known more about her three-year study trip to Germany than he had.

  Frank had checked it all out, of course, and it had, but there was still something that he could not put his trigger finger on. Something not right. When he had telephoned the family she had reputedly stayed with, they did not answer his questions as swiftly as he would have liked. They knew all about Jack and IntelliSoft and
MaryBeth, sure, but not as much about the girl as he would have expected. Frank got a nasty itch on his neck when people seemed to be thinking on their feet and every question he had asked about Jack’s daughter resulted in him scratching like a kid with measles.

  German measles.

  He had wanted to have limited surveillance placed on the German family, just in case, but that had been overruled. This was Jack Bernstein, they said, and Jack Bernstein was Chairman and CEO of IntelliSoft. You don’t go screwing with guys who carry his kind of political influence because they have a habit of turning round and biting you in the ass. Besides, although the FBI had the power to investigate violations of the law against US citizens, even if the violation had not occurred in the United States, they had no intelligence gathering powers overseas. That was the job of the C.I.A. who, conversely, could not spy on Americans whilst they were on U.S. soil. Getting the C.I.A. to do some covert watching on the FBI’s behalf probably meant more paperwork than Frank would ever wish to see in his lifetime.

  So Frank let it be. At least, that was the impression he gave to his superiors, but it didn’t harm if he spent a few hours on the computer looking into young Dave Clearwater’s past though, did it? Just to see if he uncovered anything that might link Jack and IntelliSoft to something a little more serious. In a lot of ways he did have to concede that the computer helped with that side of things because questions would be asked if he did go to see the young man’s family. Nobody would know who it was he was looking into when he was alone in his office at this time of night. He wasn’t looking into the eyes of anyone who cared, only at nearly a half million coloured electrons, not one of which understood the meaning of the term ‘leading questions’.

  He had started looking into Clearwater at six o’clock and it was fast approaching midnight. Six hours and he had found nothing. The kid, as far as he could tell, was as good as his name; clean and clear.