by P. W. Child
Now more than ever Nina could see a resemblance between her and her twin brother. He had never discussed her in all the time he and Nina were involved, but after reading between the lines of their remarks to each other she could gather that their last parting was not amicable—or perhaps just one of those instances where a quarrel became bigger than it should have been due to circumstances.
“Any joy on the starting point, dearest?” the astute blonde asked as she sat down on the bed with Nina.
“Not yet. Does your client not have a name for our German soldier? That would make things so much easier, because then we could track his military record and see where he settled, check census records and such,” Nina said with a resolute nod as the laptop screen reflected in her dark eyes.
“No, not as far as I know. I was hoping we could take the document to a graphologist and get his handwriting analyzed. Perhaps, if we could clarify the words it might give us a hint as to who wrote the journal,” Agatha proposed.
“Yes, but that will not tell us whom he gave it to. We need to discover the identity of the German who brought it here after he returned from Africa. Knowing who wrote it won’t help one bit,” Nina sighed, tapping her pen against the sensual bend of her lower lip as her mind sought alternatives.
“It could. The writer’s identity could tell us how to find out the names of the men in that field unit where he died, my dear Nina,” Agatha explained, crunching whimsically into a cookie. “My goodness, it is rather an obvious deduction I thought someone of your intellect would have considered.”
Nina’s eyes pierced her with a sharp warning. “It’s a fucking reach, Agatha. Actually tracing existing documents in the real world is quite a bit different than it is to conjure up fantastical procedures from the safety of a library.”
Agatha stopped chewing. She leered at the bitchy historian with a glare that quickly had Nina regretting her retort. For almost half a minute Agatha Purdue remained static in her place, inanimate. It made Nina terribly uneasy to see this woman, already resembling a human porcelain doll, to just sit there and act like one too. Suddenly Agatha started chewing and moving, startling Nina within an inch of a heart attack.
“Well said, Dr. Gould. Touché,” Agatha mumbled enthusiastically through her cookie. “What do you suggest?”
“The only idea I have is . . . sort of . . . illegal,” Nina winced, taking a drink from the wine bottle.
“Ooh, do tell,” Agatha grinned, her reaction taking Nina by surprise. It seemed after all that she possessed the same affinity for trouble as her brother.
“We’d have to gain access to home affairs documents to investigate immigration of foreign nationals at the time, records of men enlisted with the Foreign Legion also, but I have no idea how to do that,” Nina said in earnest, helping herself to a cookie from the pack.
“I’ll just hack in, silly,” Agatha smiled.
“Just hack in? Into the German consulate archives? Into the Federal Ministry of the Interior and all its archived records?” Nina asked, deliberately repeating herself to make sure she completely fathomed Miss Purdue’s level of insanity. Oh Christ, I already feel the tingle of prison food in my gut after my lesbian cell mate decided to cuddle too much, Nina thought. No matter how she tried to stay out of illegitimate activity, it just seemed to take another route to catch up to her.
“Yes, give me your machine,” Agatha said suddenly, her long thin arms lashing out to take Nina’s laptop. Nina reacted quickly, jerking the computer away from her enthusiastic client.
“No!” she shouted. “Not on my laptop. Are you nuts?”
Again the chastisement provoked an odd momentary reaction from the obviously slightly mad Agatha, but this time she snapped out of it almost immediately. Impatient with Nina’s oversensitive approach to things that could be thwarted at a whim, Agatha relaxed her arms, sighing.
“Do it on your own computer,” the historian added.
“Oh, so you’re just worried about being traced, not that that it should not be done,” Agatha told herself out loud. “Well, that is better. I thought you saw this as a bad idea.”
Nina’s eyes widened at her amazement of the woman’s nonchalance while she waited for the next bad idea.
“I’ll be right back, Dr. Gould. Hang on,” she said and jumped up. Opening the door, she looked back briefly to inform Nina, “and I am still going to take it to a graphologist, just for good measure,” she turned, flying out the door like an excited child on Christmas morning.
“No fucking way,” Nina said softly, hugging her laptop protectively against her chest. “I can’t believe I’m already snugly tarred with shit, just waiting for the feathers to rain down.”
A few moments later Agatha returned with a tablet that looked like something from an old Buck Rogers episode. The thing was basically transparent, made of some sort of fiberglass, about the size of a piece of writing paper with no touch-screen facilities for navigation. Agatha pulled a small black box from her pocket and from it, used the tip of her index finger to dab at a small silver button. The little thing sat like a flat thimble on her fingertip until she stuck it to the left top corner of the strange tablet.
“Watch this. David made this, not two weeks ago,” Agatha boasted.
“Of course,” Nina scoffed and shook her head at the efficiency of the far-fetched technology she was privy to. “What does it do?”
Agatha shot her one of those patronizing stares and Nina braced herself for the inevitable don’t-you-know-anything? tone.
Finally the blonde replied plainly, “It’s a computer, Nina.”
Aye, there it is! her annoyed inner voice announced. Just let it go. Let it go, Nina.
Slowly succumbing to her own inebriation, Nina elected to calm down and just take it easy for once. “No, I mean that thingy,” she told Agatha and pointed to the flat, round, silver object.
“Oh, that is a modem. Untraceable. Let’s say invisible, in fact. It literally picks up satellite bandwidth frequencies and piggybacks the first six it can locate. Then, with three-second intervals, it switches among those chosen channels so that it bounces, collecting data as it feeds off various service providers. That way it looks like a dip in connection speed, instead of an active log. I have to give it to the idiot. He is quite good at fucking the system,” Agatha smiled dreamily as she bragged about Purdue.
Nina laughed out loud. It was not the wine that prompted her to do so, but rather the sound of Agatha’s proper tongue saying “fucking” so gratuitously. Her small body slumped against the headboard of the bed with the wine bottle as she watched the science fiction show in front of her.
“What?” Agatha asked innocently as she swiped her finger across the top edge of the tablet.
“Nothing, madam. Do carry on,” Nina chuckled.
“Okay, here we go,” Agatha said.
The entire fiberoptic system lit up the hardware in a pastel violet that reminded Nina of a light saber, only not as sharp in hue. Her eyes beheld the binary that came up after Agatha’s trained fingers punched in code in the center of the rectangular screen.
“Pen and paper,” Agatha ordered Nina without peeling her eyes from the screen. Nina grabbed her pen and some loose pages from her notebook and she waited.
Agatha read out a link of indecipherable ciphers, which Nina penned as she spoke. They could hear the men coming up the stairs, still bantering about absolute rubbish just as they were almost done.
“What the hell are you doing with my gadgets?” Purdue asked. He should have been more defensive in his tone, Nina thought, for his sister’s audacity, but he rather sounded interested in what she was doing, not what she was doing it with.
“Nina needs to know the names of foreign legionnaires who entered Germany in the early 1900s. I’m just getting that information for her,” Agatha explained, her eyes still darting over several strings of code, of which she selectively dictated the right ones to Nina.
“Fuckin’ hell,” was all Sam could
muster, since he spent most of his physical ability on staying on his feet. Nobody knew if it was awe directed at the high-tech tablet, the number of names they’d retrieve, or the fact that they were mostly committing a federal crime as he watched.
“What do you have so far?” Purdue asked, not too coherent either.
“We’ll download all the names and identification numbers, maybe some addresses. And we’ll present it at breakfast,” Nina told the men, trying to sound sober and in control. But they bought it, and agreed to go on to sleep.
The next thirty minutes went into a tedious downloading of seemingly countless names, ranks, and stations of all men enlisted in the Foreign Legion, but the two ladies kept their focus as much as the alcohol permitted. The only disappointment of their research was running out of Walkers.
Chapter 15
Nursing their hangovers, Sam, Nina, and Purdue spoke in hushed tones to spare them more throbbing headaches. Even the breakfast prepared by the housekeeper, Maisy McFadden, could not alleviate their discomfort, though they could not argue the excellence of her toasted tramezzini with mushroom and egg dish.
After their meal they convened in the eerie living room once more where the carvings leered from all perches and masonry. Nina opened the notebook where her indiscernible scribbling challenged her morning brain. Through the list she checked the names of all enlisted men, living and deceased. One by one Purdue entered their names into the database his sister had temporarily reserved for them to peruse without its server picking up any discrepancies.
“No,” he said after a few seconds of scanning through each name’s record, “not Algeria.”
Sam was at the coffee table, having actual coffee from the percolator so coveted by Agatha the day before. He had his laptop open, emailing a few sources to help him trace the origin of the lore behind the old soldier who wrote a poem about the world’s lost treasure that he claimed to have laid eyes on during his stay with an Egyptian family.
One of his sources, a kind old Moroccan editor from Tangiers, responded within an hour.
He sounded stunned that the story had reached a modern-day European journalist like Sam.
The editor replied, “As far as I know, that story is but a myth told over two world wars by legionnaires here in North Africa to keep the hope alive that there was some magic in this savage part of the world. Not really ever considered to have any flesh on those bones. But send me what you have and I’ll see what I can help with from this side.”
“Is he trustworthy?” Nina asked. “How well do you know him?”
“I have met him twice, when I covered the skirmishes in Abidjan back in 2007 and again at the World Disease Charity’s convention in Paris three years later. He is solid. Very skeptical, though,” Sam recalled.
“That is a good thing, Sam,” Purdue said and tapped Sam on the back. “Then he will not see this assignment as more than fool’s errand. That is better for us. He will not want a piece of what he doesn’t believe to exist, will he?” Purdue grinned. “Send him the copy of the page. We’ll see what he can get from it.”
“I wouldn’t just go sending copies of this page to anyone, Purdue,” Nina warned. “You don’t want it out on the airwaves that this legendary story could have historical validity to it.”
“Your concerns are noted, dear Nina,” Purdue assured her, his smile somewhat sorrowful at the loss of her love, certainly. “But we need to know that for ourselves too. Agatha knows practically nothing about her client, who could just be some rich kid who inherited family heirlooms and wants to see if he can get something for this journal on the black market.”
“Or he could be baiting us, you know?” she accentuated her words to make sure both Sam and Purdue understood that the Black Sun’s council could be behind this from the beginning.
“Doubt it,” Purdue replied instantly. She reckoned he knew something she did not and therefore had the confidence to roll the dice. Then again, when did he ever not know something others did not. Always one step ahead and furiously secretive about his dealings, Purdue showed no concern for Nina’s notion. But Sam was not as dismissive as Nina. He gave Purdue a long look of anticipation. Then he hesitated to send the email before saying, “You seem awfully bloody certain that we are not being . . . coaxed.”
“I love how you three are trying to have a conversation without my realizing that there is more to what you are saying. But I know all about the organization and how it has been the bane of your existence since you inadvertently fucked with several of its members. My God, children, this is why I hired you!” she laughed. For once Agatha spoke like a cogent client, not some barmy waif with too much time out of the sun.
“She was, after all, the one who hacked into the Black Sun’s servers to activate your financial status . . . children,” Purdue reminded them with a wink.
“Well, you don’t know all of it, Miss Purdue,” Sam replied.
“But I do. My brother and I might be in constant competition in our respective fields of expertise, but some things we do share. Information about Sam Cleave and Nina Gould’s trying task for the infamous Brigade Apostate is not exactly covert, not when you speak Russian,” she hinted.
Sam and Nina were shocked. Would Purdue then know that they had to find Renata, his ultimate secret? How would they ever get her now? They looked at each other with a bit more worry than they wished.
“Not to worry,” Purdue broke the silence. “Let us help Agatha obtain her client’s artifact and the sooner we do that . . . who knows . . . we might be able to come to some arrangement to secure your allegiance with the brigade,” he said, looking at Nina.
She could not help but recall the last time they had spoken before Purdue disappeared without a proper explanation. His “arrangement” obviously meant a rekindled, unquestionable loyalty to him. After all, in their last conversation he assured her that he had not given up on getting her back from Sam’s embrace, from Sam’s bed. Now she knew why he also had to have the upper hand in the Renata/ Brigade Apostate matter.
“You’d better keep your word, Purdue. We . . . I . . . am running out of shit-eating spoons, if you catch my drift,” Sam warned. “If this goes south, I’m out, for good. Gone. Never to be seen in Scotland again. The only reason I have come this far was for Nina.”
A tense moment had them all quiet for a second.
“Good, now that we all know where we stand and how far we are all riding until we get to our stations, we can proceed to send the email to the Moroccan gentleman and start following up on the rest of these names, right, David?” Agatha directed the group of awkward colleagues.
“Nina, would you like to come with me to my appointment in town? Or do you fancy another threesome with these two?” Purdue’s sister asked rhetorically, and without waiting for an answer, she took up her antique satchel and placed the significant document inside. Nina looked at Sam and Purdue.
“Will you two play nice while Mummy’s gone?” she jested, but her tone was brimming with sarcasm. It pissed Nina off when the two men insinuated that she belonged to them in some form. They just stood there, Agatha’s usual brutal honesty having shaken them to their senses for the task at hand.
Chapter 16
“Where are we going?” Nina asked after Agatha procured a rental car.
“Halkirk,” she told Nina as they started driving. The vehicle bore south and Agatha looked at Nina with a peculiar smile. “I’m not kidnapping you, Dr. Gould. We’re going to see a graphologist I was referred to by my client. Beautiful place, Halkirk,” she added, “right on the River Thurso and not more than a fifteen-minute drive from here. Our appointment is at eleven, but we’ll get there before then.”
Nina could not argue. The landscape was breathtaking and she regretted not getting out of the city more to see the countryside of her native Scotland. Edinburgh was beautiful in its own right, fraught with history and life, but after her consecutive ordeals of the recent years she considered taking up residence in a smaller vi
llage on the Highlands. Here. Here would be good. From the A9 they turned onto the B874 and headed westward to the small town.
“George Street. Nina, look for George Street,” Agatha told her passenger. Nina whipped out her new phone and activated her GPS mapping with a childish grin that amused Agatha into a hearty chuckle. When the two women found the address, they took a moment to catch their breath. Agatha hoped that analysis of the handwriting could somehow shed light on who the writer was, or better yet, what was written on the obscure page. Who knows, Agatha reckoned, a professional who looked at handwriting all day would surely be able to make out what was written there. She knew it was a stretch, but it was worth exploring.
As they stepped out from the car the gray skies breathed a pleasant light drizzle over Halkirk. It was cold, but not uncomfortably so, and Agatha clutched her old case against her chest, covering it with her coat as they ascended long cement stairs up to the front door of the small house at the end of George Street. It was a quaint little dollhouse, Nina thought, that looked like something from a House & Home edition of Scotland. Impeccably shorn, the lawn looked like a patch of velvet just thrown in front of the house.
“Ooh, hurry. Come out of the rain, ladies!” a woman’s voice cried from the crack in the front door. From the dark beyond it peeped a hefty, middle-aged woman with a sweet smile. She opened the door for them and gestured for them to hurry.
“Agatha Purdue?” she asked.
“Aye, and this is my friend, Nina,” Agatha replied. She omitted Nina’s title as not to alert the hostess to how important a document it was that she needed analyzed. Agatha intended to pretend that it was just some old page from a distant relative that came into her possession. If it merited the sum she was paid to locate it, it was not something that should be advertised.
