“At the same time, I get you involved by subsequently murdering your daughter when she is of no more use to me and...” he shrugged at the memory of Flight 320, “...a few others. I then fuel your desire to find her killers by promising you a grandson; an heir you don’t already have. I make you want it so badly that you are even prepared to promise that you will obtain the book for me. Then, carefully, I start to kill the people around you so that you begin to fear for your own life. When you do finally get hold of the book you see from its layout that it possesses the same code that I used to bring you to the church. MaryBeth knew you well enough to know that you would attempt to break that code.”
“I make you think that you have won,” he continued, “and all the time I ultimately gain what I need to control my Kingdom when judgment is passed. The Code. Who better to be a Messiah to a shattered world than a man who has the answers to the future held firmly in his hands?”
“So the settlement, MaryBeth, the companies? You sold them all out just so that you could obtain the key to decoding the book?”
“Their sole purpose was to help me obtain this key,” Simon said, holding the disk aloft. “Because by doing so they served the Saviour of Mankind. Me. I do not expect you to understand. You have no idea of the future that this disk will unlock. When the world is devastated this will offer me the ultimate power; the power to remove every vile icon of corruption from the earth.”
For the first time Jack looked confident. Because, unbelievably, he realised that he had won. His eyes burned with victorious passion. “We found the nukes, Simon,” he said with a leering smile. “We found them all and we dismantled them. Your judgment will never come.”
“Of course you found them,” Simon replied with a disaffectedly gentle shrug. “Because I made you find them. Everything that you do, everywhere that you go and everything that you discover you do because I command it...” The clear focus of his eyes burned victoriously as he raised the weapon back to eye level and placed additional pressure on the trigger, “And now you die...,” he continued, “...because I command it.”
a fool to do mischief
Proverbs 10:23
A single deafening gunshot reverberated through the limited confines of the room. Jack jumped, though he did not know if it was from the sheer fright he felt at the sound alone, or from the fact that he had just been shot.
Except that, as far as he could tell, he hadn’t been shot.
Slowly, and with agony etching harsh lines into his face, Simon fell to his knees.
Behind him, Jack saw Warner’s body slump heavily to the floor, his last thread of energy exhausted as the Gloch fell loose in his hand. Recomposing, he ran to his friend, leaning over to help as the wounded agent struggled for breath, but Warner instantly shook his head. “Run Jack.” The look in his eyes told Jack that he fully understood the implications of what he was saying. The point was not open to discussion. “Get the hell out of here.”
Jack looked his friend straight in the eye and took a deep breath. It was wrong to leave him to die, suffering all the way into the final darkness. But even though it was wrong, he was right. Somehow Jack had to get out of there, to get away. If he did not, then it ended here. That was what Warner was saying, because that was what Warner knew. There was no reason for two men to die, not unless one of them was Simon.
“Here,” Warner said, his shaking hand offering over his gun. “Highly effective point and click interface.”
As their eyes fixed on each other in situational recognition, Jack squinted in thought for the briefest instant and then winked before turning to head for the door. He had an idea.
With a long, laboured breath and a gentle smile at his own humour, Warner closed his eyes.
Simon’s body was creased in agony as the wound in his back commenced the healing process. He lifted himself wearily to his feet and exhaled deeply. Still weakened by the initial impact he staggered toward the door, ignoring the immobilised Warner completely. In the corridor outside the pyramids of light were empty, though he was aware that nowhere near enough time would have passed for Jack to have run its full length. So he was still close. Very close. Presumably making a vain attempt to hide in one of the adjoining laboratories; D-10 or D-12. He suspected that he knew which it might be. With new found confidence echoing in his footsteps and the gun poised in his hand he headed toward his prey. His shoes clicked regimentedly along the corridor, and their pace did not slow until he had pushed his way hard into D-12.
The room was empty, although the systems inside were all online. He scrutinised the area surrounding each of the glowing screens which pierced the darkness but there was no-one in sight. Flicking on the light the room started to fill with a steady hum as section after section was illuminated incandescent by the tubes. He crouched low in order to look beneath the benches and see if he could detect a hiding figure. Still no-one.
Then, as he turned to his right, Simon saw the five steel doors which ran along the furthest wall of the laboratory and noticed that one of them, the second one along, was slightly ajar. He smiled.
As he pushed the door open, Simon instantly saw two people inside. One of them was Jack. He was crouching against the furthest wall with a look of fear that filled Simon with confident pride. In his right hand he still held the yellow data disk. Between Simon and Jack, however, was another figure.
Seated at a table containing only a chess set, was Lara; Jack’s daughter.
Simon took three steps forward and looked straight at the girl.
She looked back, smiled and said: “Hello,” with wide, expectant, digital eyes.
“What’s this?” Simon scorned mockingly. “Am I somehow to be amazed? Am I to think that you somehow managed to bring your daughter back to life? That you are some kind of magician, perhaps even more powerful than I?” He shook his head in disgust. “I know everything about this system, remember? You came to see me in London the same morning you went to see Virtuosity. MaryBeth even made the system resemble your daughter so that you would never give up; so that you would have a constant visual reminder of how you had ultimately failed your little girl.” He laughed wickedly. “So that you would do everything you could to find your grandchild. So that you would do everything that I expected you to do.”
He shook his head and extended his hand, passing it through Lara’s face in a long sweeping motion and watching as the particles dissipated along the air stream he created. Then he watched again as they re-formed and laughed.
“As a magician you have a lot to learn,” he said as he raised the gun again. “Unfortunately I don’t have the time or the inclination to teach you. This is what you might call...”
He stopped, the confidence in his eyes falling like raindrops to the floor. Something was wrong. The image of Lara had moved its eyes. Only a fraction, but enough. She was not looking at Simon now, she was looking slightly behind him. Her sensors had picked up another figure entering the room.
“Good morning, Jack,” she said. “How are you today?”
Instinctively Simon swung around. It was already too late.
Jack allowed him only the briefest of moments to realise what had happened.
“This....” he said through clenched teeth, “... is checkmate.” With aggression focusing his eyes he fired Warner’s gun three times.
Each pull of the trigger poured vengeance into the dark pools of his eyes. Each explosion filled the room with a sound which roared like a victorious lion standing abreast its prey. And each bullet found its mark. The smell of burnt powder thickened the already nervous air.
Jack had not been in this room at all, he had been next door where the camera systems were positioned. He had leaned against the wall with the scared expression of a cornered rabbit and set the cameras to film him, just as they had filmed John Case’s ‘waiter’ at Virtuosity. Then, when he had heard Simon enter the ReelRooms Suite he had waited a few seconds before pressing a button which would freeze the image. That had allowed him the
time he had needed to exit the adjoining room and return to the ReelRooms Suite.
Simon collapsed to his knees again, but this time he smiled as he fell. Because he finally understood that Bernstein had learned nothing. For all that he might have momentarily been tricked by Jack’s virtual image, his adversary was, in reality, one more fool who did not observe or question the things that happened around him. He had ignored his opponent’s swift recovery from the F.B.I. man’s bullet and still believed that The Abraham could be removed from the earth with such a blunt and ineffective weapon. He was so very wrong.
Reduced to his knees he raised his own weapon again, ready to fire, but was compelled to fight against the temporary weakness. The wounds were healing, but not nearly quickly enough. And Jack did not waste a second of the time he was offered. Before Simon could pull the trigger he fired a fourth shot into his forehead and the man was thrown backward. Instinctively his hands clenched tight against the pain. Now the pressure on his own trigger was too great. The weapon fired and a single bullet rocketed upward.
Painfully exhausted, Simon fell forward onto his hands and knees again, facing the floor. A split second later the perforated glass panels above his head shattered. As the last of the silicon-enriched droplets fell to earth, Jack and Lara’s respective images were pulled into stretched streaks of red, green and blue. Then they disappeared completely, huge shards of razor-sharp prisma-glass falling in their place like hellish rain.
One triangular shard, three feet across, shuddered within its framework but did not immediately fall. It hung downward, one edge clinging to the rubber housing like a tiring climber hanging by his fingertips to a desperate overhang. Jack looked up, saw the unstable nature of the panel and smiled. Divine intervention. Looking back to Simon he saw the weakness in his eyes and the pain he was currently enduring. The pain of being beaten. The pain of failure. With only the slightest snap to break the silence the housing gave way and the shard fell to earth. It tore through the air with the aerodynamic force of a weighted guillotine as Simon screamed a final realisation of his ultimate fate.
In one clean slice, his head was removed from his body.
Jack had never once assumed that the bullets would kill Simon but he had realised, when Warner had fired, that they could be used to momentarily immobilise his enemy. Perhaps only for a few seconds, but that few seconds would have been all he would have needed to remove the fireman’s axe from the safety cupboard in the main area of D-12 and finish the job for himself. He knew that the bullets would not be fatal because, when he had looked into Warner’s eyes, he had seen the eyes of a man who had no longer cared about his fate. It had reminded him of another.
In his mind Jack had seen an aged face, his eyes serene and his expression sincere. How could the Man of Eternal Life be killed? Frederico had asked. He had almost felt the old man’s finger grating across the skin of his throat, digging into his windpipe with enforced menace.
Peter had been embarrassed. You remove his head.
But, in the end, there had been no need. Simon’s death grasp and the angle of the falling glass had completed the task for him. In many ways it possessed a sense of poetic justice. Simon; controller of so many fates, had ultimately controlled his own. Still shaking, Jack dropped the gun to the floor and ran back to D-11.
Warner was still laid against the wall, his eyes closed and his chest unnaturally still. The sweat glistened on his motionless cheeks and the pool of deep red liquid which surrounded his body was spreading like hungry flames across the scrubland of the polished floor. Straining against the sound of his own heart, beating as though amplified a thousand times, he crouched low, leaned as close to Warner’s mouth as he could and listened. There was no sound. Then, against the cool of his own cheek, he felt the gentle warmth of failing breath. Warner was alive, but only just. And for how long?
As quickly as he could Jack started to rummage through the pockets of the agent’s blood-soaked trenchcoat.
“Hang in there, buddy,” he said, finding the mobile phone that he knew Warner carried and dialling 911. Tears started to sting in his eyes, impairing his vision, but he was not going to let this man go the way of so many others. Whilst initially having taken the role of the enemy, this man had now single-handedly saved the lives of both Jack and his grandson. His actions had left a debt that Jack must now do everything in his power to repay.
“Just hang in there,” he repeated. “Don’t you even think about dying on me.”
thy gates shall be opened
Isaiah 60:11
Four days after Simon’s death, at precisely three in the morning, the Quotient system controlling the virtual Lara unit did exactly as its software instructed it to do; it logged onto the main network and searched for any fresh information that had been added via the numerous terminals located throughout the campus.
With much of the Research and Development activity having been interrupted by the shooting, she only found two fresh files. One was a string of Hebrew letters with the ‘.OCR’ tag still attached and the other was what appeared to be a computer ‘primer’; a key to breaking a code. Lara was not bored or looking for things to occupy her virtual mind, she was simply programmed to do everything that she could to update her system. And logic, her primary chess tool, told her to run the primer across the string of Hebrew text. Because it made sense. It was the only way to understand its content and accurately allocate it within the FireWorX database.
She was not happy about performing her task, but nor was she sad. She just did what her ability to calculate suggested was the best possible course of action when faced with new information that lacked an allocation code.
Within her newly repaired ReelRooms Suite, Lara had no monitor capabilities, so the letters occupied her virtual space. They circled her image like seagulls waiting to feed from her knowledge as small recognition blocks flickered at equidistant intervals within them. They were forming new words from within the larger sentences. More and more phrases appeared and, as they did, each was added to her databank.
She sat in the centre of the room and watched them swirling; smiling at them like butterflies.
Jack had used the Quotient in D-11 to scan the text and uncover the primer and now, having raided the system at his susceptible command, Lara was putting the two elements back together. She was solving the greatest puzzle mankind would ever hope to know.
* * * * *
Joaquim Aldez felt like a God. They had come to collect him from his house near Lurin in a big car. A big shiny car that had made wide tracks in the dust. It had been so big that some of the people who lived in the street had needed to move their fruit baskets to allow it through. When Joaquim played football in the street they complained that he would tip over their baskets and they made him play somewhere else, but not today. Today they had moved them out of the way for him.
It was a woman who said ‘hello’ to him first. A young, good looking woman in an expensive blue suit who had said she was called Maria. She said she was the ‘NetCenter-Manager’ in Lima, which meant that she would be the lady in charge after the launch. She would be the one who would help the children when they came to access the systems. She had shaken Joaquim’s hand, not patted him on the head like the teachers at school when he was a good boy. She had shaken his hand like a grown up and she had smiled at him.
Even though it was very early in the morning, all the other children had still come out of their houses to see. Some had asked Joaquim if they could ride in the big car with him, but he had told them ‘No’. They had sent the car to take him to Lima and he was not allowed to take his friends, he had said. In reality he did not know whether that was true or not, but he did know that he did not want them to ride in the car with him. This moment belonged only to he and his father.
They had taken lots of pictures of him with Maria. Pictures outside his house, pictures as he got into the car and pictures when he had reached the town. Lots and lots of pictures.
He was famou
s.
He had hoped that they were treating him like this because they knew that he was going to win, but then one of the local men with a camera had said ‘Smile, Joaquim. Do not be the only child who does not smile for the camera.’ He thought he had been smiling but had then realised that he was not; he had actually been looking around with his jaw hanging low in wonder and awe. When the man with the camera had told him that all the children were having their picture taken he had looked a little shocked, but then he had smiled bigger and wider than he had ever smiled before. The man was right. He would not be seen as the only child who did not smile.
The NetCenter was still hidden beneath a big yellow sheet so that nobody could yet see into it, but they had taken Joaquim right inside. Though the glass was dark from the outside Joaquim could see now that from the inside it was quite clear and the sun would flood in once the sheet was removed. It would light him up in his chair as he won the competition. The other children across the world would be in awe of him then. They would say ‘who is this boy who has beaten us?’ and they would be desperately unhappy. Joaquim would not. He would take great delight in this and would become a hero for his country. Such glory would undoubtedly mean that he would be able to get a good job when he was older and buy a car for his father.
The photographer made Joaquim sit on his chair. It was big and his feet would not reach the floor so Maria came and made it go lower. She leaned over him and she smelt nice; not like the women who were teaching him at school. The chair went down and his feet rested on the yellow footrest that was underneath the desk.
Codex Page 46
