by Scott Baker
He looked at the napkin. ‘Roma? Roma?’
Rome, you idiot! Finally, his brain kicked in.
‘The chicken is in Rome? Are you kidding me?’
‘Not at all. You haven’t had your passport stolen yet, have you?’
Shaun spun quickly. Sitting next to him, eating a burger with some kind of white sauce spilling between his fingers, was a pudgy man with a slicked-back ponytail of mottled, dark-coloured hair. The man wore a long black coat and thin, black-rimmed glasses, and looked to be about forty, although it was difficult to tell.
‘Excuse me?’ Shaun said, then, basically because he could not think of anything else to say, he asked: ‘Are you the chicken?’
‘Well,’ the man said, swallowing the last of the fillet burger he was devouring, ‘let’s just say, the chicken is within me.’ The man smiled and licked his lips.
The joke was lost on Shaun. He looked at this man, trying to make sense of what this was all about.
The man held out his hand in an offer of a handshake. ‘David Black,’ he said.
Shaun looked at the hand. He wasn’t sure how to feel. In one sense he was relieved beyond belief that he had finally made contact with the man he assumed had called him and instructed him to come to Madrid. In another sense, he was enraged at this man’s casual demeanour. Slowly, tentatively, Shaun reached out and shook David’s outstretched hand. To Shaun’s great surprise, the man pulled him into an embrace and held him tight. It was the hold of a long-lost friend, but as innocent as it may have been, it caught Shaun off guard and he pulled out of David’s grasp.
‘I’m sorry,’ David said quickly. ‘It’s just that, well, it’s you! It’s really you. You’re here, right here in front of me. It’s just a bit hard to believe.’
‘Okay, I’m talking to you because you’re the only one who speaks English around here, but this conversation won’t last very long unless you stop weirding me out and start giving me some answers,’ Shaun said, looking over the other man, who was now standing. He was about three inches shorter than Shaun, but looked a good deal heavier. He had the look of a man who spent a lot of time indoors. Even in the bright sunshine and heat of Madrid, David Black had managed to stay pasty white.
‘Okay, okay. It’s really you. Okay, look, we can’t talk here, let’s take a walk.’
David led the way out of the little restaurant and diagonally up a cobblestone side street. Not seen from the main road, it appeared to be one of the many walk-only streets around the place. It was a metropolis for shoppers, with stores ranging in wares from silks to Toledo swords. It was a busy mid morning in the Spanish capital and the businesses had kicked into full swing. Shaun could not even remember which day it was. A man who didn’t know what day it was, was either drunk, an idiot or rich, Shaun’s father used to say. Shaun knew he wasn’t drunk or rich – well, not until this morning.
The narrow street led up a hill for several blocks before opening out onto one of the most beautiful places Shaun had ever seen in a city.
It was a large paved square about the size of a football field, enclosed by a solid wall of three-storey buildings on all sides. Most of the lower levels held cafes snuggled among the arches, but Shaun guessed that the thin windows of the upper levels belonged to backpackers’ accommodation and the like. There was a sign on a wall saying ‘Plaza Mayor’.
Shaun watched curiously as David Black followed a crisscrossing grid of stonework on the floor. He turned sharply and then turned again at right angles.
‘Okay,’ Shaun said as he walked, grabbing his new tour guide by the arm, ‘this is far enough. Who are you, how do you know me, and what do you want?’
‘Wow, that really sums it all up, doesn’t it?’ David replied, still walking.
‘Look, just on the other side of this square is the Palacio Real. There’s a large park, and it’ll be safe to talk there.’
‘What’s with all the crisscrossing crap?’ Shaun asked sternly, his patience beginning to fray.
‘It’s nothing, just protocol … I have a friend watching. If I walk in a certain pattern, he knows I’ve found you; if I walk in another, then I am with someone, ah, not friendly,’ David continued, starting for the other end of the plaza.
‘Who says I’m friendly?’ Shaun countered, not sounding threatening at all. ‘Is this friend of yours blind as well?’ he added, referring to the beggar.
‘Ah, Jeorge? He’s not blind. He wears white contacts because he doesn’t like it when people stare at him.’
‘Contacts? How does he get them out? Or in, for that matter?’
‘Mostly his wife helps him, or one of his kids.’
Shaun shook his head and let it go. They passed through the crowd and crossed another busy street, coming to a fence of tall iron spikes. Beyond the fence was a large, lush and heavily wooded park.
Shaun glanced around nervously. He was beginning to think that coming to Spain was a bad idea. The instant they passed the threshold of the iron-spiked gate and moved into the cover of the trees, however, David’s manner changed entirely.
‘Okay, listen to me: the trees keep us safe for a while; they can’t see us here,’ David said, the chirpy tone gone from his voice, replaced by a new seriousness. ‘I’ve spent the best part of the last two years trying to find you,’ he continued, walking more slowly. ‘I have reason to believe that you’re in danger.’
‘In danger!’ Shaun almost laughed. ‘Listen, I’ve been on the run for the last three days. My wife has been murdered, there are some crazy Mafia cops after me, and I’ve read some stuff that’ll keep you up at night.’
‘They’ve found you? They killed your—’ David looked to the ground.
‘Found me is an understatement! You have no idea.’ Shaun paused. ‘Who’s “they”?’
David stopped.
‘I’m working on it. About six years ago I used to be a researcher for a company called Newcom Technologies. We were a big research and development house and I was on some project they were paying a truckload for. I was the only researcher though. They had this … disc. This disc that they’d found in France somewhere. It was weird, really weird. It was tiny, like the size of a button, but apparently someone had hired Newcom to find out what was on this disc. Now, it was about three years worth of work just to come up with the idea that it was some kind of digital video. The data was encoded on the disc in a way no one had ever seen before. That’s when they brought me in.’
‘Why you?’
‘Well,’ David said a little modestly, ‘I’m the best video engineer in the world.’ He paused to no applause. ‘So, the stuff on this disc, it was like … Let me put it this way: I was the best in the world, and it was a full-time job for me six days a week to crack this code, to work out the format it was recorded in. It became my obsession.’
‘Well, surely there aren’t that many options,’ Shaun said, showing his ignorance on the subject. David shot him a look that politely told him to shut up.
‘The thing is, this data wasn’t in a codec that existed yet. Nothing like it existed. It was so far ahead of anything else in the world that it was like finding an F18 in ancient Rome.’
Funny you should mention Ancient Rome, Shaun’s brain said, squinting its mental eyes.
‘Anyway, I finally cracked it, but I was under strict instructions not to watch any of it. So, my boss, Randy, calls in the guys who had been paying us so much and they come in and sit and watch.’
‘And what did they see?’
‘Nothing. Well, nothing really, it was just some text. The rest of the disc was just black. I didn’t really realise the significance of what the text said at the time, I was just all hyped up because I had got an image. The fact that there was anything at all there meant that I had been successful, and that we were going to take this new codec to the market and make a mint off it.’
‘And what did it say? Do you remember?’
‘Do I remember!? I know every pixel. It said: “IDENT: 0012. SUBJECT:
Napoleon Bonaparte. OFFICER: X10.”’
Shaun nearly tripped where he stood. ‘Officer X10? Are you sure?’ he asked, though he knew it was not the sort of thing someone randomly made up.
‘That means something to you, doesn’t it? I knew it would!’ David’s enthusiasm built and he started to walk again, prompting Shaun to do the same.
‘Right after that, the Europeans took the player I had built, and Randy fired me. I looked up on the TV in a bar that night to find that my house had been shot up and Randy had been killed. So, I went into hiding. Stayed off the grid, and tried to find out what the hell was going on.’
‘And did you?’
‘Yeah. Well, sort of. The biggest thing is that I was determined that my work wouldn’t go to waste, so I used some contacts I had on the net to put the word out that I had a player for this disc, which was true – and also that I had found another disc, which I hadn’t. I established a certain contact protocol to protect my identity, which led me to a meeting with someone who did have another disc. We met at a cafe in Paris. He brought the disc, I brought the player, and it worked.’
‘Who was he?’
‘His name was Alberto. He was Spanish. But he mentioned the name of an Italian before he died.’
‘Before he died?’
‘They shot him then and there. I think they had been after him for a long time. I don’t know if they used me to get to him. At the time I thought they didn’t know where I was. I had been living in the attic of a crazy woman’s house in Paris, and I hadn’t seen them for months so I thought I’d finally lost them. But I hadn’t lost them at all. They were waiting. They were waiting for him and they shot him through the back of the head in the middle of the cafe. I ran, and took the unit with me, with the disc still inside.’
‘Why didn’t they shoot you?’
‘I think they thought they could use me.’
‘Use you for what?’
‘To find you.’
Shaun’s blood stopped where it was in his veins. Suddenly he saw it, clearly. He had been set up.
CHAPTER 35
Shaun had flown all the way to Madrid, avoiding detection the entire time, and keeping the diary safe, and now he had walked straight into their trap. He was about to bolt when David saw the look on his face.
‘No, no, no, don’t worry!’ he said, trying to be reassuring. ‘They don’t know you’re here. There’s a web-cam on the Plaza Mayor that I have monitored. When I walk a certain pattern along the grid of the paving, it sends a signal to disrupt the satellite feed they use to monitor me.’
‘Satellite? They monitor you with a satellite? Who are these people? Government? Military?’
‘Ah, there’s a bit more to it than that. Look, there’s something I want you to see.’
David veered off onto the grass among the trees. He came to an obscure bunch of bushes and reached in to them. After scratching around for a moment, he pulled on something, and heard a gratifying click. David’s smile was like that of a child, anticipation dancing in his spectacle-enlarged eyes.
He pulled his hand out of the bushes and walked around to a nearby tree. When he cleared away the dirt at the base of the tree he uncovered a small metal plate. He pulled on a handle and the plate slid to the side.
‘This is what made me come looking for you. You see, when I met with Alberto, he had a disc, but no player. They didn’t have the codec yet.’
‘I don’t follow,’ Shaun said, watching as David pulled a small plastic briefcase out of the hole in the ground.
‘This is what’s so valuable to everyone. It’s why they killed Randy and why they shot up my house, because they didn’t want anyone else around who knew how to develop a player that would play back the video codec on the disc they had.’
Shaun still didn’t look convinced.
‘Okay, every video in the digital age has a particular codec or format. DVD for example has an Mpeg2 codec. A standard DVD player will play any disc, any DVD video that is, encoded with the correct header information and which contains the correct Mpeg2 codec. That’s what I developed at Newcom. I didn’t just crack the codec on the disc, I developed a player, like a DVD player, that would play back these discs. But Alberto’s disc had contained something I didn’t understand at the time.’
David led Shaun over to a nearby bench and sat next to him. He opened the combination locks on the black case that now sat on his lap and revealed a black monitor built into the lid. He pulled out two pairs of black sunglasses from compartments in the briefcase’s base.
‘Here,’ David said, also handing Shaun some earphones.
‘Won’t it be hard to watch with sunglasses on?’ he asked.
‘They’re specially calibrated for each viewer. Here, play with this knob until you see an image on the screen.’
Shaun went through the process of calibrating his glasses and earphones until he was greeted with the words: ‘Welcome to the Love Shack’.
‘Okay, now, I’m hoping you can make some sense of this.’ David Black pushed play.
Black. Nothing.
Text, white on black:
IDENT: 0011
SUBJECT: Napoleon Bonaparte
OFFICER: X9
Black. Image.
At first Shaun could not make out what was happening. He was staring at blackness, but he wasn’t staring at a screen. He was staring into the screen. Then there was a light. As the image unfolded, he refused to accept what he was seeing. One moment he was sitting in a park in the middle of bustling Madrid, the next he was in a boat. He was in a boat on a lake, or was it the ocean? He could not be sure, but he was there, totally immersed in the vision.
The scene had immense depth to it. There was very real distance in what he was looking at. The sound of the boat cutting through the water came from all around him; and there were men. There was a man sitting right behind him, breathing hard from the effort of rhythmic exertion.
Shaun forced himself to look up and beyond the screen inside the briefcase. Yes, there was the tree, and there was the bush from which David had pulled the player they were now watching. He was still in the park, still in Madrid, but this was incredible. He returned his gaze to the screen.
A hand wearing an intricately carved gold ring, with the symbol of an eagle, reached forward from the bottom of the screen and rested on the shoulder of the man who was rowing. Something was said in French, but Shaun didn’t understand. Then a voice said in English: ‘This man is Jean-Paul.’ The man rowing turned and nodded his head. ‘He will take the device should anything happen to me. He knows the hide location.’
The voice then whispered something harshly as a rifle crack was heard in the distance. The image suddenly cut to a new scene.
The boat slid up onto the sand beneath him, the voice speaking about the bravery of his three companions, and slowly Shaun began to understand what was happening. A shudder went through him when he heard the name Fontéyne. Was this the same man who had written the journal? Shaun clutched the diary in his hands more tightly, feeling its shape through the cloth of the bag. And then something happened that made his heart skip a beat.
One of the men crouched behind a rock as they hid at the top of a cliff face. The man looked directly out at David and Shaun as they watched on. In an excited American accent, the man spoke. ‘Tell Strickland I owe him a beer, he really is a genius.’ With that he turned and leaped over the wall, silently, speedily.
The camera looked on as the man disposed of the three guards with professional efficiency. David’s glance darted sideways, gauging Shaun’s reaction. He had spent his days and nights for the last two years looking for the man called Strickland.
Shaun watched on in silence. He didn’t move, didn’t speak. He just watched – taking it all in. He examined every detail, every nuance. A few short minutes later the screen cut to black, and the words ‘Welcome to the Love Shack’ reappeared.
For a long while, Shaun just sat there. It was all he could do to breathe.
What he had just seen had all but confirmed the diary’s validity. If what he had seen was genuine, if it really was the rescue of Napoleon Bonaparte from his island prison on Elba, then it meant that the chances of him holding a diary written two thousand years ago were much higher. It meant that, somehow, beyond all his scientific conclusions to the contrary, time travel was possible. Someone had done it.
‘How—’ Shaun began but then stopped as his brain worked faster than his mouth. He could all but qualify what he had seen by the way he had seen it. The viewing experience in which he had just engaged was unlike anything he had experienced before; it was ahead of its time. The complete immersion, the depth of vision, the unbelievable hyper-reality of the sound – all contained not in the latest state-of-the-art cinema, but in a relatively small, plastic-looking briefcase. A briefcase that sat here on his companion’s lap.
It was now clear to Shaun that this could not be an elaborate hoax. The death of his wife, the pile-up on the freeway and the man falling from the train were all far too real.
Then, there was that moment. ‘Tell Strickland I owe him a beer, he really is a genius.’ The man had said it loud and clear. Slowly Shaun took off his glasses and handed them back to David who was looking back at him like an expectant child. Finally David spoke.
‘This makes sense to you, doesn’t it?’
Shaun didn’t respond.
‘I mean, it’s you. You’re the Strickland he was talking about? You know that guy in the video, right?’
‘No,’ Shaun said flatly.
‘No? But I’m sure it was … I mean, they have been after you?’
‘No, I don’t know that man,’ Shaun clarified.
David furrowed his brow then sat back. ‘But some of it makes sense to you, though?’
‘Some of it makes sense,’ Shaun confirmed.