by Eliza Green
GENESIS LIE
Genesis Series, Book 2
By
Eliza Green
Copyright © 2013-2020 Eliza Green
Smashwords Edition
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All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Content Editor and Proofreader: Averill Buchanan
Cover Design: Deranged Doctor Design
Update 2020: Nerd Girl Editing
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1
Bill Taggart’s hands shook as he held his wife’s coded letters. He ran a finger across his name on one of the cream envelopes, trying to remember every little detail about Isla’s handwriting. Were these written under duress?
Laura O’Halloran, the woman who worked in the Earth Security Centre, had been given these letters. Her last admission swirled around his head: ‘The government, Bill. It’s been them all along. Deighton was responsible for Isla’s disappearance. The board members ordered her to be killed.’
But without a body, how could he be sure they’d carried out those orders? What if Isla was hiding out somewhere?
The ‘T’ in Taggart had its usual curlicue at the end of the horizontal line. He loved her handwriting, so feminine, almost like calligraphy.
His stomach flipped as he turned the envelopes over in his hands. What was so important that she had to write it down? He’d thought of nothing except these letters for days now. Isla hadn’t been herself for months before her disappearance, over two years ago. Maybe the coded letters contained an explanation... So why couldn’t he open them?
Because they reminded him of his failure to protect her.
He snatched up his mug and took three large gulps of coffee, then set it down with a sigh. He had to open them at some point.
Bill ran his fingers over the chair he sat on, covered in a cream fabric that Isla had chosen. He’d followed her all over Nottingham so she could hunt down the right shade to match the synthetic alpaca wool rug in the living room. Everything in their privately owned apartment had been chosen by her.
His skin prickled as he looked around their shared space. This was the first time he’d been back since he was sent to Exilon 5 to head up the investigation into the Indigenes. On his return to Earth, the CEO of the World Government had ordered him to work in the International Task Office in Washington DC, closest to government offices. After two weeks and with no work, Bill was sent to the London-based ITF office. He assumed Charles Deighton had lost interest in him.
But Bill had been back on English soil a full day now and he still hadn’t heard from his London ITF boss, Simon Shaw, as to when he might return to duty. Doing nothing was killing him; he needed to keep his mind active. He needed to know if Isla might still be out there, waiting for him to find her. The thought punched him in the gut.
Stacks of boxes of Isla’s things sat next to the window, stuff he’d packed away in moments of anger and self pity. He hoped to have a reason to unpack them one day. The coded letters gave him hope. For now the boxes, placed four high and two wide against the blind-covered windows, served another purpose: to block any external view into the apartment. Bill stood up, collected the blanket from the back of the sofa, and pinned it to the wall. The blanket barely covered the Light Box’s virtual facade, but it would mask the view of any ITF spies clever enough to decipher the Box’s encrypted pass code.
Bill returned to the kitchen table and cleared the glass top of two burgundy placemats, a white milk jug and a matching sugar bowl. With the table clear, he sat down again and checked the boxes one final time to make sure they covered the window.
Items in one box—some of Isla’s clothes—caught his eye. The guilt he’d felt over packing her life away bloomed fresh in his chest. Another box contained a bowl that used to sit by the front door, stuffed with dried lavender and patchouli flowers. The music function on the Light Box hadn’t been activated since she was last here—the last selection was Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, her favourite. After her disappearance, he’d slipped back into his former isolated existence with alarming ease. Her letters had to contain a clue as to her whereabouts. The lingering smell of perfume on the envelopes gave him hope that she’d only recently written the letters.
He placed the three envelopes on the glass surface, lining the edges up against each other.
There were no instructions with the envelopes, no order on which to open first. He pulled his DPad out of his bag and placed it beside him. Laura had not been able to identify the code used. To help decipher them, Bill had downloaded a bunch of articles on secret languages and codes from the Nottingham Central Digital Library.
He slid his finger under the already opened flap of one of the envelopes, noting the sections where the glue felt thicker. Laura had received them, already opened, from the woman from booth sixteen, but the glue indicated that someone else had re-sealed them prior to that.
It chilled him to think about the Earth Security Centre or the World Government showing an interest in his wife’s letters.
At least they were coded.
Bill pulled two letters out of each of the two envelopes and a fifth letter out of the last one. He laid each one flat on the table. The fifth, solitary letter, he noticed, was not coded. Skimming the top line, he drew in a tight breath and refolded it, shoving it deep into the back pocket of his trousers.
The four remaining letters had a number scrawled in the top right hand corner, possibly indicating the order in which they’d been written. The first letter read:
Dhtei teiao osonm dorta etire estch cehae ihaed veust
Rrone osugi bvake eebia mcipc eooeo mnnad ruati ertsn
hpytfa awieoe imodui sernbo wurteu ichuya sasloe tticlr hitole
ridngh esebee ugttne rtoude ehorid yiitks onnoin iaieanl fdmpcep
Bill pulled his DPad closer and opened the downloaded files about codes and ciphers. He worked through the files sequentially, to figure out which code Isla had used. The only one vaguely familiar to him was Morse code, something Isla had mentioned once a long time ago and which had sparked her interest in developing a secret language. He should have pushed her to share her ideas. But her back-to-back shifts as a military trainee on Exilon 5 had left her with little energy to do anything other than sleep.
Each evening they’d chat over the Light Box. And whenever he’d asked how her day was, she always said the same thing: ‘I’ve had a dog day, Bill.’
‘Anything I can do to help?’ he’d ask.
‘Nah,’ she’d say, playing with the tags that hung around her neck. ‘All part of the job, I suppose.’
Bill opened the first file on his DPad and read about the different codes that someone might use in a message. The first code used ciphers or substitution of letters. He tried various permutations, starting with the first letter, substituting the A for C, B for D, C for E, and so on. When the first word made little sense, he increased the distance of the substitution, until the A became Z, B became A, and C became B. But the first sentence still made no sense, and after an hour wasted he finally discounted that method.
Bill scrubbed his head as he stared at the letters. Ciphers were too obvious a choice. Presuming the
letters had originated from inside the ESC, where the woman from booth sixteen had discovered them, then someone would have tried to read them. But Bill believed their continued existence meant the gibberish had been too complex to decipher. Isla would have used something other than ciphers to code these. Not only was she trained military, but her father, a military man with an obsession for security, would have taught her a few things beyond the standard textbook regime.
Bill considered using a substitution cipher wheel, the next topic mentioned in the first document he had downloaded, but he had no clue on what key to use with the algorithm. He opened the library icon and poised his finger over the library avatar. With one touch, he could engage with the avatar, ask about the most likely algorithms that someone might use. But his hesitation grew when he remembered all avatars recorded their conversations and requests. He didn’t want to give the World Government a heads up that he had the letters. Pinning the section, he moved on. If no other methods worked, he would try the wheel last.
Next was a document on Pig Latin, where the first consonant of a word is moved to the back and the letters ‘ay’ tagged to the end. But Isla’s text didn’t fit at all—there were no ‘ay’s anywhere in her letters.
The third section discussed transposed cyphertext, but both the sender and receiver had to know the algorithm or method to unlock the code. He couldn’t think of anything Isla might have said or left behind that would enable him to decipher it.
Bill scrubbed his head again.
What are you trying to tell me, Isla?
He fought the urge to work through the problem out loud. While he’d somehow kept his Nottingham apartment off the grid, the ITF had ways of worming their way into his life. He would do another sweep for any listening bugs later, but his priority now was to keep the content of Isla’s letters a secret.
Bill stood and looked down to the street below. It was around this time that the beggars changed shifts. He watched as those off the clock walked towards the bullet train station while new ones wrapped themselves in the filthy blankets left behind. Passersby ignored the beggars sat cross-legged and shivering in the bone-chilling air on Nottingham’s cold streets. Few people cared for the less fortunate. With the conditions that prevailed on Earth, everyone was in more or less in the same situation.
One of the street beggars removed something from his pocket. Bill pulled a pair of magnification glasses out of his bag and zoomed in. He saw the beggar talking into a communication device.
He shook his head and smiled. One of Deighton’s men, presumably, reporting back to base that their unpredictable investigator was still in his apartment. He closed the blinds and rearranged the boxes. Something else caught his attention and he went rigid.
Shit.
Isla had left him a clue, several to be exact, but he hadn’t had the motivation—or letters—before now to connect the dots.
Numbers. That had to be it. It was the perfect algorithm.
‘I’ve had a dog day,’ she used to say. She hadn’t been looking for sympathy. She’d been trying to tell him something.
Bill ran to the bedroom and jerked the wardrobe door open. The door creaked as he pulled his old leather suitcase out and flung it on the bed.
His adrenaline-charged hands fumbled with the code that kept the old-style metal clasps in place. He punched in a number. The panel flashed red and he cursed. On the third try, it opened. Bill yanked the suitcase apart and turned it upside down. Everything he owned that mattered to him fell out onto the bed. He ran his hand along the smooth base of the suitcase until he heard a click. The false panel came away in his hand and he tossed it onto the floor. Among the hidden items were Isla’s dog tags, the ones she’d been given when she first transferred to Exilon 5. The ones she had conveniently forgotten to take with her on her last trip.
He ran his finger over the indented metal tag, over Isla’s name, but more important over the nine-digit number allocated to her:
8 9 6 7 3 4 5 1 2
Bill clutched the dog tags so tight, the metal bit into his skin. He returned to the kitchen table and grabbed the first letter. He thought about keying the information into his DPad; it would be faster. Instead, he flipped over one of the other letters, fished a pen out of one of Isla’s boxes, and scribbled the numbers down on the back. He took the first line of text from letter one:
Dhtei teiao osonm dorta etire estch cehae ihaed veust
He listed each word into columns, as the article on transposed cyphertext had suggested.
D T O D E E C I V
H E S O T S E H E
T I O R I T H A U
E A N T R C A E S
I O M A E H E D T
Then he placed Isla’s dog tag number on the top row above each letter and rearranged them in numerical order. Suddenly words appeared.
I V E C O D E D T
H E S E S O T H E
A U T H O R I T I
E S C A N T R E A
D T H E M A E I O
He shook his head and smiled. ‘Isla, you crafty girl.’ As fast as he could, he applied the code to the rest of the text until he had deciphered the first letter:
I’ve coded these so the authorities can’t read them. Remember our conversation about speaking in code? I came up with this. Sorry I couldn’t tell you before. If you’re reading these, I’m in too deep to turn back. Indigenes need help.
Bill’s nerves jangled as he applied the same method to the three remaining letters. He read them several times.
CD has asked DG to spy on me. They’ve already searched my locker at work, probably looking for these. I’ve hidden them away, but if they get their hands on them, they should be meaningless. I have a contact on E5. He’s more open to change, I think.
We were ordered to flush the Indigenes out of their hiding place and into the open. The government wants us to capture one, so they can study it in greater detail. You need to tell the Indigenes this. I never had a chance to. They pulled me off the case before I could. Trust your instincts, Bill. You were always good at that.
The military are playing games with me, probably at CD’s request. I don’t know how much longer I will last here. They have created individual files on each of the Indigenes, the ones who’ve surfaced in the last year. They seem most interested in the younger ones, the newest generation. You have to warn the Indigenes. Nothing else matters. Remember I love you.
Bill tossed the letters onto the table and sat down hard on the chair.
Remember I love you. It sounded too much like she was saying goodbye.
He pulled at his grey speckled hair, ignoring the pricks of pain. Hours passed in this way. To him, it felt like seconds.
2
May 2163
Stephen barely made it back to District Three in one piece.
His filtration device had stopped working and he’d almost suffocated on the last leg of the journey. But he made it to safety only to find Elise, Pierre and Leon waiting for him. Anton had not returned.
‘Don’t worry,’ Elise said. ‘We’ll figure something out. At least you’re home and safe.’
‘I wish it were that simple. We’ve got bigger problems.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Pierre.
Leon peppered him with questions. What happened to you both? Where is my son?
Stephen waved his attention away. It was too much and he was exhausted. Elise, the empath, appeared to pick up on his mood.
Let him rest, she said to Leon. We can all talk later.
Grateful for her intervention, Stephen shuffled to his quarters alone and was out like a light the second his head hit the pillow.
Sleep was fleeting; his guilt kept him awake for most of the night. Strange dreams had plagued him on board the passenger ship. Alone in his quarters now, the dreams wormed their way into the quieter moments.
They were no different to other dreams he’d had before. But on the passenger ship, when they’d become strange and confusing, he’d accepted them to be a manif
estation of his guilt over leaving Anton behind.
But home safe and the dreams would not go away. Always set inside the same room; always followed by a strong sense of loss. Even familiar surroundings couldn’t shake the dreams loose. A deep ache built up in his head as the thoughts, the ideas, invaded his solitude. With a shake, he attempted to knock the dreams loose.
A piercing pain hit him suddenly and forced his eyes open. Panting, Stephen assessed his surroundings with wild eyes. When the familiar sight of his quarters came into focus, he drew in several deep breaths. The pain in his head lingered; he broke it up into smaller, more manageable parts and dispersed it to other areas of his body. His arms and torso stung as they received the pain.
To dream was normal. To have the same dream each time was not. With the pain gone, Stephen tried to remember details of the room he’d seen many times. Large shards of rock were piled up around him.
Should he know this place?
He’d tried to leave the room, but each time something trapped him and left him unable to move. Was this a telepathic link to Anton—the trapped feeling somehow representing Anton’s inability to leave? The scientist within him disregarded the idea; the link would sever over such a vast distance.
Stephen knew of no Indigenes with the ability to control dreams. Yet his own failure to control his left him feeling bitter and uneasy. He could always find an explanation for everything. Maybe some external force was trying to control him?
