And there, in the wall behind it, was an electrical socket.
In the centre of the socket was a toggle switch with only two possible positions; left or right. They were marked with symbols which initially looked identical; a rocket with a light bulb inside it. Then he saw that the second symbol, the one for the position which the switch was not set to, was not a lightbulb at all. It shared the same basic shape, but one of the lines did not join as it should.
Because it was, in fact, a question mark.
He focused on the switch, clicked the button on his chair and the toggle clicked over. A humming sound instantly filled his ears. The kind of humming that heavy-duty power cables made.
Two minutes later he was back at the spaceship. The lava lamp had told him that the ship needed power and now he had re-routed that power from the lamp to the ship. It really was that easy. He pulled the lever and the steps came swinging down. When he pushed his lever forward his view climbed those steps and entered the spaceship.
The inside was dark, with the same kind of corroded-metal shields protecting the windows that he had seen on numerous imported and badly dubbed episodes of Star Trek and Babylon Five. There was a worn leather seat in the centre of the cockpit waiting for some virtual Space Bandit to throw orders to his crew, and a large control panel replete with the ubiquitous switches and dimmed lights. Then, set into the centre of this panel, Joaquim saw yet another lever. A highly-polished silver lever like the one on the platform further along the island.
He clicked on it as quickly as he could.
The shields that had covered the windows pulled backward to the digitised sounds of straining metal and the control panel became a glistening spectrum of colour. The buttons illuminated fully and a small-scale plasma-screen burst into life. Through the windows he could now see a virtual reality mountain landscape through which the spaceship would probably fly on command. In the centre of the plasma-screen was a simple message:
I/S PlaNetWorX IS NOW ONLINE
PLEASE SELECT YOUR DESTINATION
Joaquim heard a voice on the real-world speaker system announcing; ‘ladies and gentlemen, Joaquim Aldez of Lima, Peru has solved the first puzzle!’ Then he felt Maria’s hand on his shoulder again and he heard her whisper, ‘Well done, Joaquim. Now try to solve puzzle number two.’
He retreated from the spaceship and hurried down the stairs, pausing at the base. Where next, he thought? He had no clues for any of the other puzzles. All he could guess was that each of the answers he needed was hidden amongst the hundreds of objects in the circular building.
This time he decided that he needed a closer look at the bigger item first. Although it was positioned at the other side of the round room, the galleon still seemed to be the closest of the three remaining devices and he set off to find it.
If the spaceship was the route to the mountains of planets, then he was pretty sure that a galleon would be designed to travel through the ocean of history; ClockWorX. In Joaquim’s mind that immediately linked the galleon to the sundial.
He hoped that it would be as easy to figure out as the spaceship...
the lord sent thunder
and rain that day
1 Samuel 12:18
“You worry too much,” Jack said, pulling his collar close around his neck. “We’ve checked and double checked. We’ve scoured the sites and fine-toothed all the surrounding areas. Relax, everything’s secure.”
Warner lifted his hand from the lever which controlled his chair and stroked his chin as a large dark cloud obscured the last rays of the morning sun. The campus fell into half-light. “I still don’t like it,” he said. “You told him that you’d found the nuclear devices and he didn’t bat an eyelid. In fact, he told you that he’d expected you to find them.
“He was bluffing.”
Warner shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. He had planned every last detail when it came to accessing the power of the book. I think he may have had a contingency plan.”
“I don’t know,” Jack said, with an almost relaxed lack of concern, “maybe he was planning something else, but he’s dead now and anything else he may have had planned died with him. Besides, his mass devastation did not necessarily have to coincide with my launch.”
“But it would have been so much better if it did,” Warner explained. “Because I can almost understand his thinking now. In his eyes if a high technology launch leads to thousands of deaths then people will turn back to traditional thinking. Perhaps even Biblical thinking. At which point he emerges as, I don’t know, some kind of Prophet for the New Age. Plus, we already know that his timings were his true weapons. He knew that you would have uncovered the primer one week before the launch. So, if he had stolen it from you, his timings still allowed him the opportunity to feed it into one of his own lesser systems and break the code.” He gestured to the crowds who still stared wide eyed and open-mouthed through the heavy rain toward the plasma screen. “It would take his system a lot longer than yours, but he would still have been in time for this...”
“You’re determined to ruin my big day, aren’t you,” Jack said with a smile. He checked the screen; fifteen seconds until the system focused on the leading child. “Relax Frank, everything’s fine. Sorry, but I gotta go.”
Warner sighed. He still didn’t like it. Not one little bit.
* * * * *
ClockWorX was indeed the galleon, but it could not be boarded because the gangplank had been turned to one side. Joaquim needed to turn the gangplank. But how?
He told himself to think as hard as he could. To think until it hurt to think any more.
It had to be something to do with the sundial; the ‘clock’ in ClockWorX. It had a digital display set to 12:00 on the front, as well as buttons for ‘HRS’ and ‘MINS’. He had tried it once and noticed that if he keyed a time into the digital display, the sundial turned until the shadow matched the entered time. Then it clicked as if trying to open something and returned. But he had no idea what time the digital display required in order for it to complete its task.
Which left only the toy galleon on the shelf in the round building. This galleon was actually a novelty alarm clock so perhaps he had to keep changing the time on that until the alarm went off. Whatever time it read when it did could then be entered into the sundial.
But it would take too long to scroll through all the possibilities on the alarm clock. Way too long.
So Joaquim headed back toward the real galleon, searching for inspiration. It was on the western side of the valley, moored to a wooden pole on the dock. As quickly as he could he looked it up and down, searching for some indication of a time. But he couldn’t find one. There was nothing that he could see on deck or on the sails. He sighed and the real air which surrounded him; the air occupied by Maria and the onlookers, tensed dramatically. Where was the damn time?
Then he saw the name of the boat; Mayflower 1620. He smiled, knowing now that this was his clue.
He rushed back to the sundial, entered the time into the digital display and pressed the button. The sundial rotated, clicked and rotated back, the time on the display returning to 12:00.
Nothing happened.
Thinking quickly, Joaquim headed back into the round building and looked around the shelves until he saw the toy galleon. Then he pushed the lever on his chair arm to take him forward. On the front of the alarm clock were two buttons; HRS & MINS, just like the sundial. Focusing the circle in the centre of his line of vision he pressed the button until the ‘HRS’ button scrolled up to ‘16’ and the ‘MINS’ to ‘20’. The alarm sounded and the LED display started flashing.
And, as it did, the time on the digital display changed. Now it read 18:05. Joaquim had no idea that the figure had been chosen by the IntelliSoft programmers to represent yet another historic event; the Battle of Trafalgar, but nor did he care. To him it meant one thing; five minutes past six.
He headed back out and down the long path that led to the sundial. When he r
eached it he hit the keys until the display also read 18:05. Then, with his heart in his mouth, he pressed the button. The dial started to spin a second time, stopped at five minutes past six and his ears were filled with the digitised sound of cogs turning. The dial started to twist upside down and steadily exposed a model galleon hidden underneath.
On the model was a gangplank which, like its full-size counterpart, was turned to one side. Joaquim focused the circle, clicked on it and straightened it out. In the distance, through his speakers, he heard the sound of wood grating against stone. He smiled when he realised what was happening. On the Western side of the valley the plank on the real galleon was also turning.
Less than a minute later he was aboard. Next to the ship’s wheel he found a silver lever and he clicked on that also. As the lever was pulled, a primitive compass to the right flipped over one hundred and eighty degrees and became a digital control panel. The message in the centre read:
I/S ClockWorX IS NOW ONLINE
PLEASE SELECT YOUR DESTINATION
Two down, two to go.
our inheritance is
turned to strangers
Lamentations 5:2
Jack leaned against the scaffolding and watched the screen. It was displaying the same view that the current leader; 088 / Joaquim Aldez / Lima / Peru could see through his virtual headset. The boy had just been aboard the galleon and was now way ahead of the others, some of whom had yet to solve even one of the puzzles. Based on the speed he was going, the Peruvian kid would probably complete in a total of around thirty to thirty-three minutes. Longer than expected, but still damned good and still well within his forty-five minute allowance.
Jack looked across to the mountains and saw no change in the weather. In fact, the rain seemed as though it might actually worsen before it got any better. A full sheet was visible on the horizon, steadily being brought forward by the high winds that had been building with steady regularity since early morning. Every few minutes a bright flash illuminated the gloom followed by the long, ominous rumble of thunder as it struggled to catch its faster associate. It was what the weather man on Channel-7 had termed a ‘freak storm’. In other words, nearly every meteorologist on the West Coast had singularly failed to predict it. It had not, they said, been visible on any of the day’s high-technology satellite images.
Turning away from the miserable weather Jack looked at Warner, waiting at the base of the steps, and saw that his spirits were still dampened; his face still locked in anxious thought. Then he looked back across the crowd. They were all very cold, all very wet and yet still completely entranced by the whole event. The beautiful graphics and set pieces visible on the screen were so exquisite that nobody seemed to want to blink for missing just one tiny detail. Perhaps they all hoped that they could be there, basking in the sunshine offered by the virtual landscape rather than braving the elements. The launch, Jack decided, was going to be a complete success despite the conditions.
It would still go down a storm long before he allowed it to be dampened by one.
To his left, some distance behind Warner, he caught sight of those in charge of security and event management chatting beneath a makeshift canopy. It strained under the force of an increasing wind and the weight of the water which had congregated in its seams. Of the eight men, five wore IntelliSoft-yellow overalls but, because they wore their own corporate white, the three pyrotechnics experts seemed to stand out much more clearly in their midst. As Jack watched them laughing and joking, one of the men turned to speak to a colleague, the back of his overalls just visible through the sheet of pouring rain.
The text that he could read instantly caught Jack’s attention, and completely refocused it...
Veracruz Toy & Game S.A. Pyrotechnics Displays Division Veracruz, Mexico
Below the text was a small ‘group’ logo; a red circle with the white of the overalls showing through a simple shape. It looked like a white horse rearing onto its hind legs.
But it wasn’t rearing, it was flying.
A white horse with wings...
Pegasus.
Jack’s mind instantly raced back to another time, another place. He was sixteen years old, sitting in the cold blue of the deliberately cheap plastic chair which faced Principal Collen’s opulent desk, the smell of sweat lingering in the air. Jack’s was fresh, a product of his worry, but Collen’s was anything but. In his ten years of office the overweight man’s odour had steadily been embedded into the very fabric of the room. When students cringed at the recollection of a calling before the Principal it was for two distinct reasons; the harshness of the beating and the pungent acridity of the smell.
And this had been Jack’s fourth such calling. He and Andy had been caught drinking smuggled beers in their dormitory. Strictly forbidden and even more strictly punished. When they had been discovered by the House Prefect they had been drunk to the point of incoherency. The following day, with his head still pounding as he faced Collen’s ruddied face across the inlaid mahogany desk, Jack’s distaste for the man had led to him being overtly flippant. When questioned about being blind drunk, he had described the event as an ‘eye-opener’. And the red of Collen’s face had intensified in an instant. It was the job of true education to open the eyes of the blind, he yelled, not alcohol. In the coarse cloth of the Principal’s devout heritage, alcohol was little short of a temptation sent by the devil himself. It added bass to the man’s booming Southern drawl as he quoted the New Testament by way of a rhetorical question. Only one answer was expected:
John: Chapter 10 Verse 21: Can a devil open the eyes of the blind?
No, it could not. Jack had offered respectfully. This fresh expression on Collen’s face had told him instantly that the time for being flippant was gone.
But yes, Jack thought now, sometimes it could. Because now he was staring at the logo of Pegasus Holdings; one of Simon’s corporations and the evidence was there. The devil himself had single handedly opened Jack’s eyes far wider than he had ever dared imagine.
Veracruz, Mexico. The same town where Warner had uncovered his one unsolved sarin case, the one that he had desperately tried to link to Jack. A man named Manuel Deguerra who had worked for a toy importer and who had been celebrating his child’s birthday. A toy importer that now, it seemed, was one of the many global businesses owned, developed and utilised where necessary by Pegasus Holdings. By Simon.
Deguerra took some of the fireworks home, he thought. He stole them to use for his child’s party and he killed his entire family when they were launched.
They were laden with Sarin; a venomous liquid with a remarkably low evaporation temperature. Hidden in such high-powered fireworks, it could be dispersed effortlessly over a huge area, contaminating the air and the falling rain as it cooled. It would kill thousands. Each would scream and choke and each would die the same slow and torturous death. Just like Dave Clearwater had. And all the time they would beg for their souls to be saved.
But it was those who lived that Frederico would fear for.
Jack looked to Warner, who could see now that something had changed in his friend’s eyes. From his expression alone, he knew that something was wrong. The confidence had been stolen. Something was very wrong indeed.
Jack suddenly ran the full length of the gantry and took the rain-soaked steps two at a time, struggling hard to keep his footing during his rapid twelve-step descent.
“They rigged the goddamned fireworks,” he said, his voice breaking as he ran past his friend.
Leaving Warner with only confusion he disappeared into the blanket of rain, eventually pushing his way through the Technical Department’s heavy glass doors and entering the lift to the lower level. He wiped the raindrops from his eyes and, when his retina had been scanned, started his descent. It seemed to take a lifetime, the dripping of water from his clothes ticking away the seconds and creating reflective pools across the dull metallic floor.
The instant the doors opened he hurried the full length
of the corridor to the Quotient Room. Inside the press were moving like microscopic cells, agitated by the heat of their enclosure. There was no screen for them down here because their task was simply to get good pictures of the system in action. But the minute Jack entered the room, all cameras turned. IntelliSoft’s C.E.O. in action seemed to form a much more exciting image that of a translucent yellow box.
With no inclination for apology Jack permeated the nucleus like a virus and knocked violently on the side of the glass-walled office. Eric Lacy glanced up from his control terminal with a puzzled expression. He pressed a button and the door buzzed open.
“Shut the system down,” Jack said breathlessly, his hair plastered flat against his forehead and streams of water running down his cheeks. “Shut it down now!”
Eric’s eyes opened wide, his disbelief sculpting an uneasy silence.
“I can’t,” he said eventually.
“I’m not joking, Eric,” Jack ordered. “Shut it down. Now!”
“Honestly... I can’t,” Eric protested, his face curled in abject apology. “Don’t you remember? We put in the one hour delay to get round the hacker. There’s no way it can be shut down without submitting to that delay. You asked me to keep it in for the duration of the launch. Because of the assault on Western Power, even our electricity supply is now protected by backup systems.”
The press had completely redirected their attentions and were now shooting pictures of a rain-soaked and increasingly distressed Jack through the glass. This, it seemed, was hot news.
He raised a hand to his forehead and gently massaged the deepening furrows in his brow. Slowly his mind’s sense of confusion mutated into one of horrified realisation. The hacker. He had broken into the systems on numerous occasions and informed them that he would do the same again come launch day. He had tricked IntelliSoft into stepping up security and putting their own contingency plans in place. He had even made them place the fireworks within a secure unit and award it its own backup power supply, just in case. With fear as his weapon, the hacker had dexterously engineered it so that IntelliSoft could not shut their own system down during the launch.
Codex Page 48
