The Stone of Secrets

by K. L. Nelson

  Blinded with burning rage, the Saxon king cried out and spurred his horse into a gallop directly at Vuradech, sword held high. Vuradech kicked his horse and rushed into the meadow to meet him. Swords clashed with an ear-splitting noise that sent sparks into the air and threw both riders from their mounts. In a daze from the impact with both Ecgfrith and the ground, Vuradech struggled to his feet. His sword was sticking in the ground twenty feet away. He turned to see the hilt of Ecgfrith’s sword landing a blow across his face. The blow knocked him to the ground once more. Vuradech writhed in pain on the wet earth. Blood ran down his face as he heard Ecgfrith laugh in a horribly annoying tone. Then he said something in his native tongue that Vuradech didn’t care to have translated. He looked up at the Saxon king, who was standing with one foot on Vuradech’s chest and his sword held above his head, ready to send Vuradech into the next world. For a moment Vuradech thought it was the end.

  Suddenly a smile crept over his face. He remembered something Tergalot had told him many years before, but it could have been last week. “Sometimes, the best way to stay alive is to not care if you die.”

  Quickly Vuradech extended one arm to the inside of Ecgfrith’s ankle and the other arm to the outside of his knee. With all his strength he brought the man spinning to the ground. The surprise gave Vuradech enough time to reach his sword and face Ecgfrith on equal footing. Ecgfrith rushed him, but Vuradech met his lunge with a block that sent him stumbling past. Ecgfrith turned with a swing at Vuradech, which he avoided with a quick move to the side. The two crossed swords in an epic battle of skill and strength.

  But in the end, King Ecgfrith capped a day of critical mistakes with one that cost him his life: he simply underestimated his opponent. Taking a risk, he lunged at Vuradech with all his strength. Vuradech saw it coming and used the Saxon’s strength against him. As Ecgfrith went barreling past, Vuradech dealt a blow to the back of his head that sent him to the ground. Without delay, Vuradech put his sword through the heart of the Saxon king.

  Ecgfrith was no more.

  With his victory, Vuradech would welcome death. He slunk to his knees in pain and fatigue, ready to accept the blows of the Angles all around him. He could fight no more.

  But when he lifted his eyes to the men surrounding him, he saw familiar faces. There was Cinaed, and Uurist, and Helmsdorf, and his old friend Hadrian. He was surrounded by Fidachians! True they were covered in blood, some of it their own. They looked like death itself. But they were the most beautiful sight Vuradech had ever seen. As the men helped him to his feet his laughter echoed off the cliffs.

  “Oh boy,” Hadrian said. “I think he took one too many hits to the head. We better get him cleaned up or Galem will kill him!”

  As the men tended their wounds, King Bridei rode up ahead of a band of his captains. The Fidachians stood to face him as he dismounted and approached the group. The King looked down at the bloody corpse of King Ecgfrith as he walked to confront the men. Indeed there were dead Angles strewn all across the meadow.

  “Vuradech, son of Morog,” he addressed the chieftain.

  Vuradech stepped forward. “Yes, King Bridei, son of Bili.”

  The king stood face to face with Vuradech in solemnity. His head was high and he looked straight into the eye of the chieftain. “I heard you are responsible for this mess,” he said sternly.

  Vuradech straightened up. “Yes, my king. I with the brave sons of Fidach have done it.”

  A smile came over the king’s face. He reached behind his neck and unclasped the Chain of the Matriarchs he wore around it. He held the immaculate silver double-ringed chain above his head. “The Seven Kingdoms have been honored to fight with the sons of Fidach this day,” he proclaimed. Then he put the chain on Vuradech and fastened the clasp behind his neck. “Wear this chain as a memorial to the strength and valor you have shown this day in the defense of the village of Gunneld, your fellow warriors, and the nation of Pictland.”

  The king withdrew one pace. With his captains behind him, King Bridei held his right fist to his chest to salute the Chieftain of Fidach. The pain from Vuradech’s wounds was swallowed up in the pride he felt as he returned the salute.

  Behind him, Hadrian leaned over to Cinaed. “There’ll be no living with him now,” he whispered.

  Chapter Nineteen

  FBI Headquarters

  J. Edgar Hoover Building

  935 Pennsylvania Ave NW

  Washington, D.C.

  Ted Braddock was the top hacker in the FBI. It was an unofficial title he held onto tenaciously by always delivering something really impressive when the agents were in a bind. There were lots of geeks in his division, but Ted was the best. That’s the way he wanted it.

  Emmett walked into the conference room where Ted was working. “You wanted to see me?”

  Ted got right to the point. “You’re going to want to see this.” With a tap of his finger on his tablet, his work appeared on the large flat screen on the wall. Emmett sat down.

  “Looking at your investigation, I started wondering if we’ve been looking for the wrong thing. We can’t intercept any communications, right?”

  Emmett nodded.

  “Maybe that’s because there aren’t any.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “At least not in the traditional sense,” Ted continued. “We’ve been looking at emails, texts, cell signal, land line, social media; all the usual routes of communication with absolutely nothing turning up. I started thinking, how odd that an organization as sophisticated as The Pact doesn’t use electronics. It just doesn’t make sense. Then it hit me: they have their own.”

  “Their own what?” Emmett asked.

  “Their own media. It’s like their own internet that only they can use. It’s not a new concept. How did all this communication get started? Someone decided that we needed a way for computers to talk to each other and they decided on a certain signal. They said, okay everyone use this signal and it will work. So that’s what we did and BAM: computers all over the world talking to each other at light speed all day and all night. But if someone decides he doesn’t want to use that particular signal what happens?”

  “A lonely conversation.”

  “Exactly. He’ll be talking to himself because no one else will be using his signal. The internet only works because of standardization. It doesn’t mean there’s no other wavelength to communicate on; it just means we decided to use only one to make things work.”

  “So why can’t we pick up this other signal?”

  “That’s where things get interesting. The truth is we can…sort of. Look at this:” Ted tapped on his tablet and opened a file on the screen. “It’s possible to conceal a signal by encrypting it, sort of like putting password protection on your bank account. But naturally the FBI has ways around that, so I started looking around. There are actually thousands of encrypted internets out there. Most are pretty mundane. Someone needs a signal to link their networks from corporate offices across the globe for instance. It can make it hard to interface but sometimes that’s exactly what people need to do whatever it is they’re doing.

  “So as I’m poking around looking at all these encryptions I came across one that had hardly any data being transferred, but very high hit counts. That got my attention.”

  “Why?”

  “Ever look at the file size on a typical text only email? We’re talking just a few kilobytes, right? But it’s even that big because of the applications we use to send it. Strip all the fancy stuff away and just send the text and now you’re looking at a very tiny amount of data. If you don’t need fancy fonts and colors and effects, you can send a tremendous amount of information with a very small data stream.”

  “And no one notices,” Emmett concluded. “So what did you find when you hacked the encryption?”

  “Don’t get ahead of me, cowboy. Look at this…”

  Ted tapped another file and thousands of tiny symbols swept across the screen.

  “W
hat’s that?” Emmett asked.

  “That’s the encryption,” Ted replied.

  “So…do what you do. Hack it,” Emmett prodded.

  “Go find me a Martian and I will. Look at those symbols. They’re not any known language.”

  Emmett jumped up and looked closer at the screen. He smiled at what he saw.

  “Ted, you’re going to be just fine,” he said heading for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Ted hollered at the departing agent.

  “To find you a Martian!”

  Later that day

  “Sign me up for the next flight to Mars!” Ted said when he saw the woman entering the conference room with Agent Burke.

  Skye looked at Emmett, confused.

  “Computer geek,” Emmett explained with a shrug. “Anyway, Ted Braddock, this is Professor Skye McAlister. She is from the archaeology department at Steinbridge. I believe she can help you translate that Martian writing.”

  Skye approached the screen. “It isn’t Martian, it’s Pictish.”

  Ted chuckled. “I knew it wasn’t really Martian of course…um…Mrs? Miss?”

  “Professor,” Skye and Emmett said at the same time.

  Skye examined the screen closer. “Looks like the Picts found the information age. This is their encryption?”

  Emmett nodded.

  “So Mr. Braddock, if I tell you what these symbols mean, you can hack into their network?”

  “That’s what I’m here for honey…er, Professor.”

  “Well you two have a lot of work to do,” Emmett said. “If you need me I’ll be at my desk. Skye when you need a break stop in and see Maddox down the hall. He’ll get you squared away with HR.”

  “HR? What are you talking about?”

  “You know -- Human Resources: direct deposit; withholding; 401K; all that fun stuff.”

  “Emmett I told you I already have a job.”

  “Had a job. You’re dead, remember? Like it or not you’re working for the FBI now, sister.”

  Skye chuckled as Emmett walked out of the room. She caught the smile that crept over his face just before he turned away. It meant that he had won, and he was quite pleased with himself.

  “I didn’t know Emmett had a sister,” Ted interjected.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He called you sister. Are you guys related in some way?”

  “Not that I know of,” Skye replied.

  “Darn.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because the way you were just looking at him, he’s either your brother or my chances just went out the window.”

  Skye looked at him perplexed. “Mr. Braddock, I have no idea what you are talking about. Now what do you say we take a look at those characters?”

  “Ice cold,” Ted responded. “I love it. This is going to be fun.”

  ***

  One of the things Emmett learned about the Picts in his research is their tribal nature. They had a strong sense of family, including a profound respect for ancestry. He had a hunch about these people who became patricians on the continent in the tenth century. It wasn’t just a group of Picts. It was a family.

  Emmett sat at his desk and started looking at everything the FBI had on individuals in The Pact. He came up with a list of names and started digging into their family history. The internet gave him a wealth of information that enabled him to find records on each individual dating back to the time of Holy Roman Emperor Otto the First. What he found did not surprise him. All the names had the same ancestor going back to that time. The Pact was a family.

  Emmett wondered where The Pact’s center of power was. One of the advantages of searching family history is the availability of death records. People move around in life, especially if they’re trying to hide. But they tend to be buried at the place they called home.

  Emmett comprised a graphic of known death locations over the last five centuries. Once he had isolated the genealogical line, patterns were visible in the sea of records. What he found was interesting. Early on, the members of this family were almost always buried in one of a very small list of cities: Luxembourg, Frankfurt, Lubeck, Venice, Paris, Florence, Antwerp, Flanders, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam.

  Then in later times other cities began to appear on the list: London, New York, Toronto, Zurich and Lisbon. Still later, cities around the world began to appear like Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo, Sydney and Hong Kong.

  Emmett saw the significance immediately. Members of The Pact always live in major economic centers. He thought of what Skye had said about the patricians. It would seem they’ve been carrying on the family business in a big way. Truly they were a race of modern day patricians. Their complete focus over centuries of time suddenly seemed ominous.

  But was wealth their ultimate goal? The words of the eastern text of the Marnoch Stone loomed in his mind: Our objective is domination. Our means is wealth.

  What concerned Emmett most of all was that wealth was only the means. Assuming they still took this thousand-year-old oath seriously, The Pact was intent on domination. Emmett thought of the corrupt politicians putting their offices up for sale through back room deals and donations to supposed charities. But donations to front organizations like charitable foundations were easy to track for the FBI. And none of them linked back to The Pact. If it wasn’t political, what were they planning to dominate?

  Emmett stared at his graphic of worldwide death record locations. What else did all these cities have in common? Suddenly it hit him. They weren’t just major economic centers. They were the stock markets of the world.

  Emmett picked up the phone and dialed Maddox. “I have something for you to look at.”

  ***

  Ted was making far more progress with the encryption than he was with the professor. With the nearly complete translation of Pictish, he had already sent the work order to the hardware people to begin work on the keyboard to interface the two languages. The new keyboard would have the Pictish characters superimposed over the Standard English alphabet, similar to keyboards used for other languages. Until the custom keyboard was finished, Ted made do with little bits of masking tape on his keys. He was already working on the programming to interface the languages. The professor’s work was instrumental in making it all possible.

  “So what happens when you figure out the encryption?” the professor asked as Ted’s fingers clicked away at the keys on his laptop.

  “If all goes according to plan,” he replied, “we’ll be able to log in and find out what these guys have been up to.”

  “Will they be able to tell we’re in their system?” Skye asked.

  “It depends. The FBI has ways to hide our tracks. But every measure has a countermeasure. The Pact has proven to be very sophisticated in their applications.”

  “So they could be smarter than you?” Skye asked.

  Ted stopped typing and looked at the professor. “Huh?”

  “The techies over at The Pact could be smarter than you, is what you’re saying right? They could be more capable than you guys here at the FBI. Or maybe they have better hardware?”

  Ted pushed his chair back from the table. “I can assure you, Professor that the FBI has the best hardware on the planet. And as far as being capable, there is no one that can hold a candle to me.”

  “Oh,” she replied. “That’s good to know.” Skye could have said more, but looking at Ted she decided to leave it. She’d coaxed his ego just enough to motivate him, but not enough to antagonize him. She smiled at the man’s pride and how it would be put to good use.

  Emmett walked in. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  Ted didn’t look up from his computer, so Skye answered. “Well, Ted here has just informed me that there is no better hacker in the world than he, and that our systems are much more advanced than The Pact’s. So all in all, I’d say it’s going very well.”

  “Sounds about right,” Emmett replied.

  Ted was already too immerse
d in his work to pay much attention to them, so Emmett sat down and spoke with the professor.

  “I think The Pact is going to target the stock markets.”

  “Why would they do that?” Skye asked.

  “I’m not sure, but it can’t be good. For years they’ve been amassing around the trading centers of the world. It’s like they’re gearing up for something. Remember the eastern text – Our objective is domination? Think what would happen to the world’s economies if markets around the world suddenly crashed.”

  “But the NYSE and NASDAQ are equipped with circuit breakers. Wouldn’t that stall the crash?”

  “The Pact would know that. They may have a plan to counter it. Maddox is bringing the white collar division up to speed.”

  Suddenly Ted spoke up. “Ladies and gentlemen…” With a few clicks on the keyboard he brought up his window on the wall display. “…I give you PactNet!” He spun his chair to face the display and stabbed one last key. Suddenly the screen was filled with text.

  Emmett and Skye started skimming the words. There was far too much there to read it all.

  “Can you print this off?” Emmett asked.

  “Done,” Ted replied. While the document printed, Emmett and Dax assembled a team to comb the pages for intel. They worked at this for the remainder of the day. Dax kept everyone late to get it done. In the morning they all met in the conference room to report.

  Skye sat at the head of the table with Emmett and Dax. Dax introduced Skye to the group. “If you haven’t met her yet, this is Professor McAlister of Steinbridge University. She is consulting for us on the Pact case. She’s already been instrumental in making inroads into this elusive organization. Please give her your complete cooperation.”

  Ted took the floor first to give everyone the situation on PactNet. “Though we’ve been able to infiltrate their communications network, our access is only viable for twelve minutes per day before they know something’s up. I have my staff working to get us more time, but until then we’ll have to work within the twelve minute window.”

  Dax asked for a report from the agents who studied the printout from PactNet. Each agent in the room gave a synopsis of the material in his individual stack. The data was overwhelmingly informative. The FBI now had a list of data a mile long. Everything was there—names, dates, activities. All the details of their day to day operation was open for perusal.