“What’s that?” Ashna asked, pointing at my hand. I stopped halfway into the car, realizing I was still holding the fake gun.
“Useful prop,” I said, turning and hurling it toward the river. It made a satisfying plop as it hit the surface and disappeared into the depths, joining the bundle of notebooks and the laptop. I imagined the three things, half sunk in the mud at the river bottom, forming a weird underwater tableau.
Chapter 18
Fortuitous Insomnia
July 4-5: London
“So you think they tricked Dworkin?”
“Yes,” I answered. “That part seems obvious now. Victoria Butler—she’s Jutting’s niece and personal assistant—went to Philadelphia and played on Dworkin’s ego. She got him to come to London and wait for her signal. Once they had an appointment set with me, she told him to break in and steal the notes and laptop. They probably weren’t even Wolhardt’s real notes. The thing I still don’t really understand is why they would have gone to the trouble.”
Ashna’s forehead scrunched up and she looked at me sideways, keeping one eye on the freeway ahead. “Maybe somebody found out Jutting had the notes and threatened him. He wanted to make it look like they were stolen and used you as a convenient witness.”
"I guess that’s possible but it would have to be someone with a big platform. Someone Jutting couldn’t just get rid of or pay off."
Ashna nodded, thinking. "We need to get back and see what Jutting is up to. I wish there was an easy way to get into his systems."
"Oh shit! Forgot to tell you. I planted that device you gave me in the old asylum."
"My little net spy?"
"Yeah. Plugged it into an unused port like you said."
"Excellent. Let’s hope that site connects back into his corporate network. Might be something there I can exploit."
****
Back at our luxe bear den Ashna got to work. I watched her hack, light from her laptop screen shifting and glowing on her face.
"Go away," she said after a while. "Need to concentrate."
I didn’t mind. I hated having people around when I was working. I went up to the roof deck of the townhouse and sat looking out over Kensington’s brick chimney pots, mansard windows, and trees. I wasn’t sure anymore why I was even continuing with the job. Jutting had tricked me, sending me down a blind alley. That meant he knew who I was and my real objective. Who had told him? Who else knew? Wolhardt, Bathmore, and Benderick. Bathmore might have been foolhardy enough to go back to Jutting and try to use the little bit of information he had to squeeze some profit out of the situation, even after Jutting’s goons had beaten him up and I had given him my best, most paternalistic advice to stay away. Benderick could have found out somehow that Jutting had the stolen notes, contacted him, and threatened to make it public unless he returned them. In either case, it would serve Jutting’s purpose to have me believe the notes had been stolen from him. I would look elsewhere and would tell the others, if asked, that Jutting no longer had the stolen goods. Sleight of hand and misdirection. Jutting was a good magician even if his dreams of occult power were obsessive nonsense. What was my next move though? I had the advantage now, at least for a little while. If Ashna could get into his systems she might be able to find a weakness and exploit it. I just needed a small crack to get into his house and get out with the notes. How close to solving the riddle was St. Martin though? How much time did we have? And had Wolhardt made any progress? It had been only ten days since I sat in his Culver City bungalow, discussing Elgar. I needed to check in with him. There were too many unanswered questions. It was late on the west coast of the U.S. I imagined Wolhardt was asleep but I sent him a quick email, hoping to have an answer by morning.
****
It was about two AM when a noise outside woke me up—a car door slamming down the block maybe. I lay in bed for a couple of minutes, thinking through all the details again, chasing down every possibility. Finally, I accepted that I wasn’t getting back to sleep any time soon, got up, and went down to the kitchen. Ashna was still up, sitting in front of her laptop at the breakfast bar, chin resting in one hand, narrowed eyes crinkled at the corners as she stared through her screen, working on some problem in her head. I could almost see the data streams converging and separating, looping and spinning in her eyes. I eased past and put water on, found some mint tea in a drawer, and made two cups. Ashna looked up when I placed the tea on the counter in front of her.
“This asshole’s systems admins are pretty good. His shit is well protected.”
“No luck?”
“Not yet. Growth mindset, Justin. Never say can’t. Say not yet.”
“Do you know the term hermeneutics?”
“Maybe. Biblical something or other?”
“Kind of. It refers to a protocol for interpreting communication. Not the interpretation itself, that’s exegesis. It’s just the theory of how you go about interpreting.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I feel like our problem is not that we can’t interpret the data we have, it’s that we don’t even have a good protocol for interpreting it. No idea how to even start.”
I left Ashna mulling that point, took my tea, and strolled over to the windows facing the street, thinking about the sound that had woken me. Belka, curled up on a club chair, chirped at me as I passed and I ran my hand over his head, scratching him around the ears. Outside all was quiet and dark. I stared out the window for a few minutes, thinking, until a movement caught my eye and I turned, looking up the street in the opposite direction. A black Escalade was parked in front of Jutting’s house. As I watched, a man in all black and wearing a chauffeur’s cap dropped out of the driver’s side. The front door of the house opened and a security guard came out. The pair stood in the street talking, glancing occasionally at watches, looking toward the house. Somebody came out onto the porch with a large suitcase and went back in. Jutting was going somewhere. Or maybe St. Martin? Either way, I wanted to know where, even if it was just to the airport. I ran upstairs, dumped my bag out, found what I was looking for, and bolted back down.
“Back in a minute,” I called to Ashna, opening the front door and exiting quietly. The night air was cool and the pavement was damp under my bare feet. I crouched low, staying behind parked cars on the opposite side of the street from Jutting’s house. Directly across from his front door, I stopped behind a Volvo wagon and peeked around. Another suitcase was on the porch. The guard and the driver were still in the street. They seemed to have run out of small talk. They were both standing silently, faced toward the house. The door opened and Victoria Butler came out. She rolled a third suitcase onto the porch.
“Put these in the back, please. We’ll be out in a couple of minutes,” she called then stepped back inside. The chauffeur and guard started toward the porch and I knew my opportunity had arrived. I darted out. The device I had with me was a GPS tracker with a magnet built into the case so it could be placed on the underside of a car. It was supposed to work internationally. I had used similar trackers several times before and always kept one with me when on a job. Keeping the bulk of the Escalade between me and Jutting’s porch, I quickly affixed the tracker to the bottom of the frame and slipped back around the Volvo. I waited there while they loaded the suitcases, listening in case they said anything interesting. Before long, I heard Victoria’s voice again.
“Mr. Jutting is coming. Get the car started and be ready please.” The engine roared to life. Doors opened and closed. I glanced around the back of the boxy wagon and saw Jutting, Victoria, and St. Martin walking down the steps. I waited until the last door thumped closed and the car turned the corner at the end of the road before hurrying back. Ashna met me at the door.
“What happened?”
“Jutting, St. Martin, and Victoria Butler left. They had suitcases. I put a tracker on the car.”
We went to the kitchen and sat at the breakfast bar, drinking tea and watching the blip on the ma
p. They headed north out of London and then northwest. It quickly became clear to me what was happening.
“They’re going to Powick,” I said. “To the asylum.”
“Why?” Ashna asked.
“I don’t know. But they’re headed that direction and I have a feeling that’s where they’re going.”
“Should we follow them?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yeah. Pack enough stuff for a day or two and let’s go.”
Chapter 19
Pentimento
July 5: Powick
“Pentimento,” Ashna said, glancing over at me. We were speeding along the road to Powick, my third visit in two days. It was very dark on that country highway. My phone showed that Jutting and company had parked at the old asylum. We were twenty minutes behind them.
“What about it?” I asked.
“It’s when an artist changes a painting. Like say they paint out a person’s arm or something and put it in a different position but there’s still evidence of the original composition.”
“Yes, I know. Remember, I’m the one who paid attention in art history.”
“Well, it just popped into my head. Could be a metaphor for our situation or something.”
“Deep. I was just thinking about something I read a long time ago. Can’t even remember who wrote it. It said, movement through darkness is the ultimate abstraction of life itself.”
“Even deeper. We are moving through darkness,” Ashna said in a creepy ghost voice. “Our path is unilluminated. The future is unknown, unseeable.”
“Fine. It’s not any worse than your metaphor searching for something to be metaphoric about.”
“Why did they go to the asylum? That’s what we should be thinking about.”
“Yeah. I have a guess. Given that Jutting used to be a member of the Masonic order, I’m guessing he’s into weird rituals.”
“That seems like a fair guess.”
“And judging by his subterranean ritual room, he likes a creepy location for his weird rituals.”
“Yes.”
“And, knowing that he is obsessed with the occult, his weird rituals in creepy locations are probably going to involve demons, spirits, blood, sacrifice…”
“Naked orgiastic sex rites!” Ashna broke in.
“Maybe that too. Anyway, where else would he go to do his deciphered Cellini via mad Cellini descendent via Elgar magic spell? He’s got to be planning some kind of ritual at the asylum. Maybe that’s why he bought the place, aside from the connection to his youth.”
“You’re probably right. What are we going to do about it?”
“A plan is percolating in my brain. We’ll need to hide this car somewhere and hike in though.”
We left the car on what looked like an unused side road leading out into a field, tucked into a group of trees that would keep it hidden from the highway. The sky was still nearly black with a faint tinge of blue at the horizon. Morning was approaching. The cool, damp air smelled like mossy soil full of fat worms. We were three quarters of a mile from the housing development. With nowhere else to walk, we stuck to the shoulder of the main road. Only two vehicles passed during the fifteen minutes it took us to get to the entrance to the estate. One was an old panel truck, the other a motorcycle. Both times we crouched amongst the trees until they were well away.
I had been driving a car through the housing estate on my previous visit but I had a rough idea how to get where I was going on foot. I led the way, dead reckoning through the silent, Stepford-like lanes until we stood in front of the model house the agent had showed me.
“What’s special about this one?” Ashna asked.
“It’s the model home. Electricity is on, water is on. It even has WiFi.”
“Got it. So we hole up here and use it as our base?”
“What if they decide to do a tour?”
“I doubt they’ll be showing any homes to potential buyers until after Jutting calls up the spirits of the dead, becomes a mighty necromancer, and seizes power.”
“Yeah, probably not.”
“How do we get in?”
“Front door. I memorized the combo for the key box when the agent opened it.” I glanced down the street to where the old asylum crouched in the darkness, its one, cyclopean chimney jutting up black against the dark sky. Something about the scene made me think of Goya’s terrifying depiction of Saturn devouring his own son. It was something in the composition, the colors, the brooding, claustrophobic horror. I turned away quickly.
“Is that it?” Ashna asked.
“Yes.”
“Creepy looking place.”
“It wasn’t so bad in the daylight. Let’s get settled. We have work to do,” I said, opening the key box.
Inside, we planted ourselves on the conservative, uncomfortable furniture in the living room. It was the kind of furniture that looks substantial but lacks proper weight. As soon as you sit down you realize it’s nothing but thin pine lumber, fiber fill, and fabric. We left the lights off and the blinds closed.
The Wi-Fi was open so Ashna connected and got back to work right away. I was prepared for several more hours of frustrated grunts punctuated by inventive curses but after only a few minutes she raised her hands in triumph. “Ha! Jutting’s own stupid laptop!”
“What do you mean?”
“My little hacker box that you placed in the asylum found another client on the network called mjutting. It’s running Windows ten. Probably a laptop. Probably not patched frequently. Sometimes the boss machine is the easiest one to hit. Sysadmins are afraid of the bosses so they let them get away with not running updates. I’m going to try a few exploits.” Ashna worked for a few more minutes, typing commands into a terminal window. I watched the output scroll by.
I had that feeling you get when it’s almost morning and you haven’t slept—gritty eyes, senses deadened and heightened at the same time. I was lying on the floor, stretching my neck and had just felt a very satisfying pop around my C-7 vertebra when Ashna raised her arms again.
“I’m in,” she said. “Good old remote desktop services remote code execution vulnerability CVE two thousand nineteen one two two six.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“You don’t need to. You just need to know that I am now the master of Jutting’s laptop.”
“Great. How does that help us?”
“He’s on the machine right now. I can view his screen just like I was standing behind him. He’s on a Skype call. Let’s listen.”
I got up and crouched next to Ashna’s chair. A window was open on her laptop that showed Jutting’s full desktop in miniature. He appeared to be on a video chat. The person on the other end of the call was an elderly man with white hair and a face like haggis. He seemed agitated and was talking quickly which made his jowls quiver with a stop motion animation-like video latency effect. Jutting’s face was visible too in a smaller box in the corner.
“…cannot use the ritual structure when you are no longer a member. Nor can you borrow ritual items or in any way associate your fiasco with our order. It’s inconceivable.”
There was a pause while Jutting presumably said something in reply. We couldn’t hear it because his end of the conversation was not being played back through his own computer.
“We’ve got to get Jutting’s audio,” Ashna said. “I might have a trick for that. Did he have an iPhone?”
“Yes, I think so. Only saw his phone for a moment,” I said, closing my eyes and calling up the scene. “I’m pretty sure it was an iPhone.”
“Great. I have a zero day in my pocket. Friend from Mossad told me about it. Interactionless exploit.”
“A friend from Mossad?”
“Yes. Not the kind of friend you know IRL Justin. The kind you meet on the dark web. And by ‘told me about it’ I mean gave it to me after I paid for it. Paid a lot of money for it.”
“I have a feeling you have a whole secret life going on that I know very little about.
”
“You’re one to talk. Remember when you spent years secretly being a master cat burglar without even your closest friends knowing anything about it?”
“Fair enough.”
“Anyway, what was Jutting’s phone number? I wasn’t planning on using the big guns but I want to know what that rat fucker is saying.”
Victoria Butler had given me Jutting’s private number to pass on to Ortoli. I found it and read it out to Ashna. She pulled up another window then quickly typed a command that included the digits.
“He doesn’t even have to answer the call,” she said. “I can capture audio from his phone’s mic. I can do a lot of other unsavory things too but I just want to hear what he’s saying right now.”
On the screen, we could see Jutting look down as if glancing at his phone. Output started to flow in the terminal window—lines of green text on a black background, moving by too fast to read.
“Got him!” Ashna exclaimed.
“…afraid it’s out of the question.” Haggis face shook his head back and forth forcefully.
“Matthews is coming.” Jutting smiled. His voice seemed flat with a tinge of robotic echo chamber to it.
“Archibald?” Haggis face asked, obviously surprised. The name Archibald Matthews was familiar but I couldn’t remember where I’d heard it. I put it aside to think over later and focused on the conversation.
“Yes. He’s in London on vacation. The fool told Benderick about my cryptographer and Benderick thought he could threaten me. That’s another story though, for another time.”
I turned to Ashna. “Benderick? How is he mixed up in this?” She shook her head and we both turned back to the screen.
“Philpot and Gentry too,” Jutting continued. “You are losing your hold, Richard. They are defecting.”
“Fine. Tell me what you’re planning, Jutting. I might consider it.”
Enigma Variations Page 19