Piercing the Veil

by Guy Riessen

  “Right, and it was still in the geology lab when Mary and I returned from the Black Nile expedition with the bleeding dagger,” Howard said.

  Mary leaned closer to her tablet, until her nose was nearly touching the screen, then suddenly sat up. She pushed her glasses up and looked at each of them. “Y’all should take a look at those runes carved into the thickest part of the staff.”

  Sarah’s eyes’ narrowed as she held up her own tablet, swiping back and forth with her finger. “They look like the ones on the iwisa,”

  “Yep, you called it, dude. And the same as on the bleeding dagger. Because there is no variation in angles, stem or spine length, the carvings are almost certainly contemporary with each other. I would even lay odds they were carved by the same sculptor.”

  “And, there’s our link.” Sarah nodded, jotting a note with her stylus. “Do we know what the rod might be used for? It looks a bit like one of those bottle-stoppers that slide into the neck of bottles of fancy cognac—you know the kind, on a silver tray that the butler would proffer while you waited in some wealthy family’s mansion parlor.”

  Howard leaned back in his chair. “Heh, ‘proffer.’” Sarah scowled at him and he cleared his throat. “Yeah it does, now that you mention it—although it’s about forty centimeters long and quite a bit bigger around near the thickest end. It would be one hell of a big bottle of cognac.”

  “The dagger was also carved from a dark green stone,” Sarah said, then looked over at Mary. “You were in Kentucky in nineteen ninety-five, yes?”

  “Sure was. Finishing my first doctorate in Geologic Field Research at U of L.”

  Howard looked at Derrick, who whispered “University of Louisville.” Howard nodded.

  Sarah was flicking screens across her tablet and said, “That was when you were first identified by MU for a possible research grant. Your work with the Xylor Stones.”

  “Wait, man, what? Xylor Stones were meteorite fragments found in a Cherokee linear burial mound complex that stretched from Kentucky to Tennessee.”

  Mary paused a moment to see if Derrick was going to add anything else, but he shrugged and said “That’s all I got, except that it was in the nineteen ninety-six American Journal of Archeology, pages one ninety-two through two twenty-eight. Wait a sec! Your name was on that paper!”

  “Yeah, it was the foundation of my doctoral thesis, but it made it into the Journal because of the three stone idols carved from the same iron meteorite—they were found in mounds exactly fifty miles apart.” Mary turned back to Sarah, “Holy ... are y’all thinking ...? Ah damn!”

  Howard slapped his forehead. “Shit.”

  “What?” Derrick sat up straighter, leaning forward. “What?” His eyes flicked back and forth between Mary and Howard. “Don’t keep the wounded guy in suspense, man.”

  Mary looked at Derrick, shifting her stylus to one side. “I didn’t know about the iwisa, and we haven’t done any analysis on the stone the dagger was carved from. Most of my research time has been revolving around the blood from the dagger and the analysis of the ash from the Black Djinns. But the artifacts could have been scattered to prevent them from being brought together again ... DCV’s eventual theory was that the Xylor stones were buried apart so that no other tribe could gather all three and use their power to control the nations.”

  Derrick threw up his hands. “I don’t get it.”

  Howard leaned over to Derrick and said, “They may all be carved from a single stone. If they’re all brought back together it could be like bringing together the twenty Rings of Power, dude.”

  Derrick whistled and said, “Gotcha. And we just brought them all together at MU, in one office!”

  Sarah set her tablet down on the table and tapped her stylus on the table. “Well, we still have the dagger in the vault. Let’s bump the schedule up on that—it would be great if we could determine that these artifacts are directly related, and identical stone chemistry would pretty much lock it. Mary, I want you to set up the geology lab with the best damn lighting in geologic history. Like satellite clean-room white. Get everything on lightboxes—see if we can’t lightbox the entire floor. I don’t want a single shadow anywhere in there.”

  Mary nodded at Sarah. “Gotcha, Chief.”

  “All right, we’ve got two out of three related artifacts missing on our watch, and there’s a timer counting down and we can’t see the numbers. All the evidence is pointing to this being big, real big, and it feels like we’re so far behind the eight ball we’re not even playing on the same table. I want us moving fast on this. We’ve got to catch up before ... well, before whatever.”

  There was a loud squeal of chairs being pushed back from the table as they all got up. Derrick pushed his chair back far enough to grab his cane and hobble out behind the others.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE DOOR LOCK BEEPED, and Sarah walked into Mary’s lab. “Ah, Derrick, I thought you’d be here,” she said.

  “Checked everywhere else, did you?” Derrick said, his voice slightly muffled. He perched on a stool, his upper body stooped over the table. His face was low to a specimen tray, and he was poking a metal probe into its contents. Mary was standing next to him, also looking into the tray.

  “Yep. You got something?” Sarah walked over to the table. Petey stood on his wooden base, toes curled tightly. A scalpel lay next to the base. There was no blood, but the heel had been cut open exposing the scarab’s now empty channel next to the heel bone. Sitting on the table by the specimen tray was a nine-volt battery hooked up to a small breadboard-style circuit board which had integrated circuit chips, various resistors, capacitors, and several LED lights which flashed intermittently.

  Sarah leaned over to look inside the tray. Pinned to the wax in the bottom of the tray was the Death Scarab. Portions of its shell were removed, and hair-thin gold wires stretched from the circuit board to disappear into the exposed organs of the beetle. “Is it dead?” she asked.

  Derrick paused and set the probe to one side. He straightened up and stretched his arms high over his head. His shoulders and back cracked, and he released a long sigh. He rotated his head left and right then settled on Sarah. “Nope. Not dead at all. In fact, my little board there is feeding electrical impulses straight to the beetle ganglia. At this moment the scarab actually thinks we’re out for an afternoon walk.”

  He picked the probe back up and traced a few of the wires, pointing them out to Sarah. “These others here are picking up the scarab’s nerve responses, and this,” Derrick pointed to a smaller circuit board that Sarah hadn’t noticed, “is a Bluetooth receiver and a micro-receiver for all nineteen 3G and LTE bands.”

  “Nineteen bands?”

  “Yeah, since I wasn’t sure how it worked, I needed to watch all the frequencies for each cell phone carrier.”

  The receiver circuit board had a cord running to Derrick’s calculator watch which sat on the table, with numbers scrolling by. His phone was laying on the other side with the weather forecast showing.

  “OK, you’ve piqued my interest,” Sarah said.

  Mary looked up from the tray. “And it gets even more cool, Sarah.”

  “Oh yeah, this is some crazy stuff,” Derrick said. “I figured out yesterday that somehow I was broadcasting my location when I checked the weather or used something like Yelp on my phone.”

  “Makes sense, it’s using Location Services, except your phone is factory-new. There’s no link to the Haunt.”

  “I know. We checked all that.”

  “OK, and?”

  “Well after we sent the data to the printer from the EMRARS session, I checked the weather on my phone because I was jonesing for some tacos and wanted to see if it was worth trying to go out for them.”

  “I told ya, the guys had themselves Jesus tacos!” Mary said, looking at Sarah.

  “Yeah, the app said sunny, so off we went.”

  “And they didn’t even tell us, Sarah. Jerks.” Mary frowned.

 
; “Anyway, man, since the EMRARS keeps collecting data until you shut it off via its webpage control panel, I knew the weather app access would have been collected after we sent the data to the printer.”

  “And you checked it and found the positioning data! I see!” Sarah nodded.

  “Uh, nope.” Derrick spun back and forth on his stool, looking at her.

  “No?”

  “Nope. I pulled that last bit of data, and it definitely showed the EMR fluctuate as the phone sent the data request, and the time-stamp when the phone received the weather info for my position. But there was absolutely nothing unique or different about the access. There was the initial data request, then the streamed data for the weather in Arkham. Nothing else. Crazy, right?”

  “Uh.” Sarah looked puzzled.

  “Yeah?” Derrick said.

  “Well what’s the rest of the story? You were bored and frustrated, so you created a scarab scanner and cut up poor Petey?” Sarah looked at Mary and said, “It looks like Petey is in pain with his toes curled like that. Maybe, you should give him something for it?”

  “Oh crap,” Mary said, “I wasn’t even thinking about that. We were so intent on getting the scarab out and hooked up to Derrick’s doohickeys.” Mary walked over and looked through a cabinet and came back with a syringe and an ampule. “We fully iced it like before, so the scarab would go dormant. Still though, I’ll get him good and anesthetized.” She drew out a small dose and injected the foot in a few places near the incision. “I’ll stitch him back up too.”

  Derrick watched the interchange with a smile on his face, wondering when Sarah was going to realize she still didn’t know the actual story, but she turned back toward him and now she was frowning, her fingers were drumming on the black counter top.

  “So, uh,” Derrick stuttered realizing she hadn’t forgotten at all, “uh yeah. I knew the scarab had to be part of it, right? I mean why else go to all the trouble of kidnapping me and implanting it.”

  “Unless it was a failsafe thing. You know, maybe it could be triggered to burrow straight to your heart. Or your brain. Lay eggs. Chew through your optic nerve.” Sarah made crawly shapes with her hands.

  “Ugh, gah, Sarah. That’s gross, man. I’m glad I didn’t think of that. No. I figured the beetle was receiving the weather app request and in some way collecting, then storing, and transmitting the positioning data later.”

  “Positioning data is encrypted while it’s transmitted, isn’t it?” Sarah asked.

  “Yeah, but it turns out none of that matters. See the scarab-system only activates when it hears a weather or Yelp request. Makes sense because that’s one of the most common apps that are used in a variety of locations.”

  “What do you mean, scarab-system?”

  Mary leaned in, “That’s also crazy. See, that scarab is more of a tiny cyborg. Sure, it’s biological, but it’s got extra parts inside that are tech. It can receive the signal when Derrick’s phone accesses the weather app.”

  Derrick picked up his phone and closed the weather app. He handed Sarah his watch which showed all zeroes on the face, then he called up the weather. Suddenly numbers flashed across the screen.

  Derrick said, “See the beetle just heard the weather app being accessed by my account. That’s why the Frenchman needed to have my phone for a while. He knew, even though I might get another phone, my account would stay the same. The scarab recognizes my account pattern, even though it can’t decrypt any of the numbers. It recognizes that my account is being accessed with a location request—it just doesn’t know any of the real data.”

  Sarah’s brows drew together as she concentrated. “OK, so it knows it’s you, and that you sent a request ... but then how does it determine the geolocation and how does it broadcast it without an EMR trace?”

  “That’s the real trick to why I couldn’t figure it. No energy out, no data can be broadcast, right? He pointed to a gray cube glob inside the scarab. “Next, this mechanism activates. Effectively it’s a tiny low-power Stingray that just has one function. That’s what keeps it so tiny.”

  Sarah was looking questioningly at Mary, who said, “Y’all might’ve heard of it, it’s a cell phone scanner that police departments use for drug raids.”

  “Yeah, man. It fools a cell phone into thinking it’s a trusted cell tower. Once that happens, a Stingray can pull positioning data from the phone ... without knowledge or intervention from the user. That’s why the police love it.”

  “Shit. We’re going to need to fix that little problem.” Sarah shook her head.

  “Yeah, I’ll get on that later,” Derrick said.

  Sarah ran her fingers over her hair. “But why didn’t the EMRAR pick up the Stingray signal?”

  “Well, see how the numbers have all returned to zero again? That’s because the scarab hears the data request, but it doesn’t broadcast anything for a while. The things we thought were eggs here work like the e-ink microcapsules in an e-reader. Each ‘egg’ can hold one of ten levels of gray—from white to black. And, just like your e-reader, there’s no need to use power to retain the image of the positioning data. The scarab then uses the phone’s near field power at a biologically determined random later time to boost-broadcast the positioning data that’s stored in the ‘eggs.’”

  Mary walked over and dropped the syringe in a red sharps container on the wall. “I’m not sure what’s acting as the timer, but it’s biological—hunger, sleep, restlessness? We organisms have a lot of things that activate due to stimuli at seemingly random intervals. And that makes it the perfect random key. All’s it has to do is keep the active-tracking hidden, even though Derrick knew he was being tracked in some way.”

  “Yep,” Derrick said, “it seems to be something that trips somewhere between twenty minutes and an hour after Location Services is accessed by my phone account. Then zap, it broadcasts the positioning data out on four different bands. Three-G bands two and ten, and LTE bands twelve and twenty-six.”

  “Can we trace with the carrier?” Sarah asked.

  “Well those bands were chosen to obfuscate. The bands are used by AT&T, Sprint, US Cellular, and Verizon. Pretty much everybody in the cellular game.” Derrick shrugged.

  “Damn. Wait though. Isn’t it broadcasting your location now? Oh no wait, never mind,” Sarah waved her hands before Derrick could say anything. “There’s no cell signal in the Basement.”

  “Bingo. It’s drawing null information from location services. But the cool part is, the Stingray has no way of knowing that. Once we had everything hooked up, the ploy was blatantly obvious because suddenly my phone thought it was connecting to a friendly cell tower. Once we isolated that fact, it was just a matter of figuring out what stuff inside this scarab,” Derrick pointed the probe at the specimen tray, “didn’t match up with the stuff inside the Entomology departments scans of a real Egyptian death beetle.” Derrick pointed over to the monitor on the rolling stand which showed a rotating 3D render of a beetle.

  The door lock beeped, and Howard walked in. “What? How come I wasn’t invited to the party?” he said, walking straight over to the monitor with the 3D beetle. “Whoa, cool! Dude, is that Petey’s beetle?”

  “It’s complicated, but Derrick’s unraveling the Mysterious Case of the Biological Cybernetic Death Beetle Cell Plan.”

  Howard laughed, a bit more than Derrick expected.

  “What’s so funny, man?” Derrick asked.

  “You had a cell phone in your foot. That’s better than a shoe phone, dude.”

  “Oh yeah!” Derrick and Howard bumped fists.

  Sarah and Mary swiveled their heads back and forth between the two of them as Derrick started to laugh as well.

  “Tried to find the signal but ... missed it by that much, Chief,” Derrick said.

  “Would you believe ... a beetle in a severed foot,” Howard said.

  “So, Mary,” Sarah said. “Want to go grab some tacos?”

  “Hells yeah,” Mary said.

>   “A beetle?” Derrick said, “no, Max, I don’t believe I would.”

  “How about a loaf of bread?” Howard said.

  Mary and Sarah walked out the door.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  SARAH WAS THE ONLY member of MU’s DCV team who didn’t also teach classes. She was officially listed as an assistant dean of the Department of Antiquities. Each semester her office and her office hours were listed in the class schedule as TBD. In reality, her office was in the Basement and not accessible to anyone except those holding the security clearances to use the elevator, and the biometrics to enter the double doors in the small room that the elevator opened to.

  Derrick leaned in to let the scanner see his retina. “OMG, Sarah is going to pop when she sees this data.” He hummed to himself. He was wearing black skinny jeans and a World of Warcraft T-shirt—For the Horde! His hair was brushed back, and he held his tablet tucked under his arm.

  “C’mon ... c’mon,” he said under his breath as he pressed his thumb against the print reader. This was the first time he was going to see her alone, just the two of them, since he’d left for the Trinity Alps. An angel Howard sat on one shoulder whispering that this was his chance to break free from his slow sink into the friend zone. The devil Howard said it was too late.

  The locks beeped and clicked as Derrick pushed the door open. Beyond was a bright white hallway. A Roomba with the wax-and-buff attachment perpetually cleaned the floors, leaving them gleaming in the light of the large LED panel lights in the ceiling. It functioned secondarily as security, making sure that only one person ever entered the hallway per biometric scan. Intense security, but then MU, Miskatonic College back then, was the location where DCV began in 1642 when the colonies that would eventually become the United States were still young.