The Alboran Codex

by J C Ryan

  The sergeant, who’d been called to the scene as soon as Shorty’s body was discovered, counted the stories of the opposite building, to the one parallel with the one in which Shorty’s body still rested. He sent a patrol officer scurrying down the stairs and across to the other building, where he soon appeared in a window, waving frantically. The sergeant suspected his officer had the wrong window, but a quick radio conversation explained. The occupants of the apartment where the officer had waved out the window had told him the next apartment over was currently vacant, the owners away on holiday. The officer wanted guidance, whether to wait for a search warrant or break down the door.

  A third alternative was quickly found. The concierge had a key and was glad to let the police in. While there was no evidence to be found, crime scene technicians pointed out that finding NO fingerprints was as suspicious as finding those of known criminals. They had the right apartment all right. They just had nothing to lead them to a suspect.

  The next piece to fall into place was the third victim’s ID. Shorty had a name at last. He was Gerard Weber, a Swiss German. From the location and the presence of a sophisticated sniper rifle, the police deduced he’d been the one who’d shot the still unknown couple on the sidewalk below. It didn’t take long for the information on their ID to leak to the media. Olivia and Jean Girard, a Canadian couple from Quebec, according to their passports. The media went wild, sensationalizing the story of a couple of tourists being assassinated in Zürich.

  What didn’t leak was the conundrum the police had on their hands. Preliminary examination of the bodies revealed the tiny bugs hidden in their clothing. Could that mean these weren’t ordinary tourists? It seemed so. Especially when they also found the access card to a prestigious bank in the very block where the Girards were killed, along with an obscene amount of cash, and their hotel keycard.

  Some of the best detectives in the city were quickly pulled together to brainstorm the meaning of all this. Clearly Herr Weber was a professional sniper. The precision of the shot that had killed him suggested another pro. Were they after each other, or both after the Girards? Were they spies? And how did two wealthy Canadians fit in? The trappings of secrecy for the banking suggested that the couple weren’t just innocent bystanders, somehow taken out by accident when Herr Weber lost his life and presumably control of his weapon. No, it seemed the killings were linked, but how?

  The Girard’s hotel, of course, being one of the elite, valued their guests’ privacy. Even if the guests happened to be dead. They flatly refused to allow entry to the suite without a warrant. Which gave Charlie a head start.

  Charlie, in fact, had already heard from one of his contacts within the police that no laptop or flash drive had been found with the bodies. He wasn’t surprised. From the distress his client had shown, whatever information was contained in those items was explosive. Maybe literally; he had no idea. In any case, he wouldn’t have been carrying something like that around with him either. It was probably in the hotel room.

  He took the time to contact his female operative and received a verbal vivisection. No, of course she hadn’t had time to search the bodies. She’d murdered the couple in broad daylight, on the street, as instructed. He wasn’t to call her again for at least six months — it was too dangerous, even with their top-of-the-line security. No, she absolutely would not go and search their damned hotel room. Get someone else. Charlie was a bit surprised by the salty language she employed with those answers, but not by the answers themselves. But, being a careful man, he made sure to dot all his I’s before crossing the T’s. He called another of his “angels” as it amused him to refer to them.

  This time he chose one whose looks would stun anyone into compliance. The hotel had excellent privacy and security policies in place. Though it would be best for his operative to slip in unnoticed, that wasn’t likely to happen. He gave her his instructions and went back to his worried pacing, knowing that if he failed in this mission, it meant the end of his lucrative association with the man he only knew by a code name, Spider. This man had made Charlie a wealthy man over the years, but Charlie had exotic and expensive tastes and habits. Failure was not an option.

  While Charlie worried, his “angel” dressed carefully. The assignment was tricky. Get in unnoticed if she could, but if not, get in somehow. The boss had made it clear that whatever she needed to do to gain entry to that room was authorized. She wasn’t unaware of the commotion in the streets of Zürich. A pair of tourists had been murdered in front of hundreds of witnesses, but no one had seen it happen. A rush assignment on the same day was probably related, so when Charlie said "whatever you have to do”, he probably didn’t mean murder. Too messy.

  Accordingly, she dressed in a pair of black leather pants that hugged her curves and a black silk button-down blouse with the top several buttons left undone. A quick check in the mirror assured her that her best assets were on display. To be absolutely sure, she added a delicate necklace with an arrow-shaped pendant to lead the eyes where she wanted them. No straight male hotel clerk alive would be able to resist her allure. She only hoped she found a straight male on first encounter.

  Upon arrival at the hotel, she took a moment to get her bearings. Few guests were in the lobby this time of day, but a lone clerk stood at the desk. The woman put her shoulders back and walked toward the desk, her high heels clicking on the floor briskly. The clerk looked up. The woman knew she had him when she saw his eyes widen along with his smile.

  “Good afternoon, mademoiselle! How may I help you today?”

  She summoned a smile, while keeping a distressed expression in her eyes. “Oh, you are too kind. I’m afraid I’ve lost my key, and my . . . husband . . . is not answering his phone. If you’d be so kind as to help me get upstairs?”

  “Of course, madam. Your name?”

  She cast her eyes down, and then peeked at him through fluttering lashes. “Oh, I’m afraid you’ve mistaken . . .”

  His eyes widened again in sudden understanding. Flustered, he stammered. “Of course, I, ah . . .”

  She laid her hand on his arm. “Perhaps I can do something . . . nice . . . for you. After . . .”

  Breaking into a sweat, he took his card and keyed the secure elevator for her, and as the car arrived, whispered urgently, “I am off duty at five.”

  As the doors closed, she winked at him. “That should give me time.”

  On her way to the floor and room number she’d been given, she laughed silently. That poor clerk would be waiting long after five for his turn with her.

  Once she reached the room, she ransacked it without finding a laptop or flash drive. She used her cell phone to inform Charlie, and then slipped down the stairs to wait for an opportunity to leave the hotel without encountering the amorous clerk again.

  Charlie’s heart gave a lurch when he received the report that the missing laptop and flash drive weren’t to be found in the hotel room. His last hope, that they would be in the hotel safe, was dashed by his informant within the police department. The warrant had arrived in due course, and it included the fact that the Girards had left nothing in the safe. They didn’t find anything of interest, either. His informant asked what Charlie was looking for. In a huff, Charlie disconnected the call. It was none of the man’s business.

  All the pacing he’d done, his mind churning with alternatives should the missing items not be found, had led him to one conclusion. No matter how unpleasant it would be to inform Nabati he’d failed, it would be even more so if he tried to lie and was discovered. Reluctantly, as if he was moving through a vat of molasses, he picked up his phone.

  Chapter 34 -

  He didn’t answer Charlie

  When Nabati’s assistant had informed him of the cause for the commotion downstairs, and he’d received Charlie’s notification that it was indeed the Girards who’d been killed, he breathed a sigh of relief. He wouldn’t have to report failure to his mother, a truly frightening prospect.

  The relief
was short-lived. As soon as he learned Charlie’s assassin was also dead, he knew he had a problem. Somehow, someone else knew of the contract on the Girards, and that meant the entire mission was compromised. Who could it be?

  He briefly considered it was Saudi secret police, who also wanted Algosaibi’s children dead. But several considerations made that idea unlikely. First, they would have wanted a public beheading, and the Girards would have been detained and deported. But then why would the Saudis have killed his man? Besides, if they’d known who the Girards were, they never would have gotten out of Rome, where extracting them would have been easier than in Zürich.

  No, it was Charlie’s operation that had been compromised, and not by the Saudis. Only two possibilities remained. Either Charlie had double-crossed him himself, or his first operative, the observer in Rome, had double-crossed Charlie. Either way, Charlie had made a royal mess of the assignment, the biggest mistake of his life.

  Now Charlie was messaging again with more bad news. The laptop and flash drive were missing. Nabati was too angry to respond, and his silence gave Charlie all the answer he needed.

  Charlie’s worst scenario had come true. There was no way to save the business relationship, and only one way he could think of to save his life, and that was to find the missing items before someone else did. Even that might not prevent his death. He had reason to suspect that Spider’s resources were apparently infinite, and he had no illusions that he was the only “project manager” Spider knew and used.

  The alternative was to run and hide as some of his contractors would do — as he suspected Durand had done, for he was convinced Durand had somehow betrayed him. For a certainty, Durand was the most likely suspect in Weber’s murder. And the most likely person to have possession of the cursed laptop and flash drive that would be the death of him. Charlie grinned ferally. They’d most certainly be the death of Durand, if Charlie had anything to say about it.

  For his part, Nabati had given up on keeping the mess a secret from his mother. The news media would do his job for him if he didn’t contact her immediately. May have already done so, in fact. If he waited, he might very well find himself on the business end of an assassin’s weapon. He was under no illusions that motherly love would prevent her from doing what she felt she had to do to protect the Council and the ancient family.

  “Maman,” he began. “I have bad news, and I’m afraid the Council must convene for a crisis meeting.”

  “I’m aware,” she answered, frost riming her words as surely as if she’d spoken them from the North Pole. “Give me the details and your best assessment of what we can do now.”

  Nabati knew her calm words belied a cold rage that made him glad they were hundreds of kilometers apart. A crisis meeting of the Council was no small matter. They didn’t have to do it often, since their reach and resources meant their affairs usually went exactly as they’d planned. They didn’t like screw-ups, and this was a big one. Gigantic. Earth-shattering. As long as the information on the laptop and flash drive was in someone else’s hands, it risked exposure of their ancient secret, and that could not be allowed to happen.

  Indeed, Mathieu Nabati, his mother, and the rest of the Council only speculated what was on the electronics. They had to assume Algosaibi anticipated what would happen if his plot was uncovered, and to protect his children, he had informed them of the secrets, either to provide them with a bargaining chip to negotiate their safety with the Council, or out of spite because the Council wouldn’t support him in his quest to overthrow and destroy the Saudi royal family. Indirectly, they were the cause of his downfall because of that lack of support. And in the past year or more, he had constantly been in conflict with the Council, refusing to bow to their instructions to abandon his political agenda.

  Whatever Algosaibi’s motivation, the recording of the conversation between the Algosaibi siblings, which Charlie’s contractor made in Rome, left very little doubt Xavier Algosaibi recorded it all for his children’s knowledge.

  As Nabati laid out the analysis for his mother, who agreed wholeheartedly that they were facing the biggest crisis since the year 106 AD, he received a text message from Charlie.

  Know I screwed up. Give me a chance to fix it. I’ll clean up mess; I’ll pay.

  Nabati read the message to his mother, with his editorial comment. “He’ll pay all right.”

  He didn’t answer Charlie.

  ***

  Elsewhere in the city, a medical examiner unzipped the body bag containing Olivia Girard’s remains. The naked corpse lay face-down on the autopsy table, an anxious police detective hovering nearby to get any details that would help him explain the strangeness of this case.

  “Well, you are wrong about a shooter at a distance,” was the first thing the ME said to him. “This woman was shot at close range, probably with a small-caliber weapon.

  “See here, the gunpowder residue?

  “And what is this?”

  The doctor’s career was brought to an abrupt halt as he reached to pry out the foreign object embedded but partially exposed in the wound. The object destroyed the evidence that would have been critical to understanding how the woman was killed, as well as taking the doctor’s fingers on his right hand. Blood spattered against the horrified officer’s face as he staggered back from the small, but destructive, explosion. How had that device not been triggered by the bullet that passed by it within millimeters? It would be one of the questions the replacement ME would be hard-pressed to answer. The next pathologist would have to take much more care when examining the male.

  In the aftermath, the members of the investigative task force were even more confounded by the latest development. Who the hell were these people? And what the hell was happening in their city?

  Chapter 35 -

  The library of the giants

  Carter helped Ahote squeeze the last of the luggage into the hold before taking the pilot’s seat and waving goodbye to his friend. He turned to scan the faces of his passengers, Mackenzie and their children, and said, “Ready to go see Grandma and Grandpa?” Receiving a big smile and an enthusiastic nod from Liam, he took it as agreement from baby Beth as well, and started taxiing.

  “It will be good to see Mom and Dad,” Mackenzie remarked, once they were safely in the air. Even though Carter was an expert pilot and flying his plane back and forth from Freydís was no more stressful than driving a car to him, she never wanted to distract him during take-off or landing. Especially not with such precious cargo on board.

  “I’m looking forward to it myself. And we’ll be busy getting the software developed long enough for you to have a good visit with them. It’s high time they had a chance to bond with Beth, too.”

  “I love you, Carter Devereux,” Mackenzie said impulsively.

  “Why, just because I happen to like my outlaws?” He grinned and winked at her, eliciting a small smack against his shoulder.

  “You goof,” she answered.

  ***

  A few days later, having left Mackenzie and the children with his “outlaws”, Carter met with Jim Rhodes, Rick Winslow — the computer whiz — and his colleague Samantha, as well as Irene O’Connell, Deputy Director of A-Echelon. Liu had arrived the day before, she was looking forward to the translation software development as much as Carter was.

  Irene had arranged the use of three of DARPA’s electron microscopes for the initial task, which was to scan all the plates in their possession, some ten thousand of them. The task, which would have been monumental otherwise, was accomplished in only fifty hours. Experts Irene had also borrowed from DARPA were feeding two hundred sheets per hour through the microscopes with no loss of fidelity in the data. After watching for a few minutes, Carter declared he was dizzy from the speed, and although Liu agreed, she said it was like watching grass grow when they could be much more productive elsewhere.

  They left Irene to supervise the scanning, while Carter, Liu, Rick, and Samantha worked together to design and load a dat
abase of all known Semitic languages. Then Carter stood back and watched in awe as Rick’s and Samantha’s fingers started whizzing over the keyboards as they began to code algorithms for the software using a combination of machine translation and computer-assisted translation to get as close to an idiomatic translation of the language on the plates as they thought possible.

  Before beginning, Rick had given Carter a thumbnail sketch as to why they were using this approach, as well as a brief description of MT, as he referred to the machine translation, and CAT, or computer-aided translation. Carter, to some extent, but especially Liu would be an integral part of the latter.

  Carter was quick to get the idea. The machine translation algorithms would substitute modern English for the proto-Semitic words on a literal basis and then process the result with CAT in an iterative feedback loop until the MT began to learn entire phrases or idiomatic use of words as well as anomalies for which translations were impossible at first.

  Gradually, as the AI (artificial intelligence) algorithms coded into the software became more “trained”, the MT part of the multi-part program would be able to effectively take over the bulk of the translation, freeing Carter and Liu to analyze rather than simply translate Giantese (as the research group was calling the language on the sheets).

  “In other words,” Carter summarized his understanding of what Samantha had just explained, “as the program becomes more proficient at Giantese, the more automated the translation process?”

  Samantha nodded. “Yes, we are using the latest and most sophisticated translation technology, able to use the comprehensive dictionaries of the database and the linguistic rules of the giants to completely automate the rest of the task.”