by Dina Rae
“I was wrong and you were right. This is not costume jewelry. This is old, very old. Like hundreds, or more likely, thousands of years old, but I don’t understand the design. The golden leaves were soldered onto the piece later on. They are definitely Roman like you mentioned. But these winged beings, I am not sure. They look too human-like to be birds. Either angels or a deity with wings. See above the band, it’s open. The gold filigree doesn’t close. And it’s gold. There is a missing piece.”
“Like a ribbon or something that tied the two open parts together?”
“Yes, it could be a ribbon or a gold chain, a knot, gold tassels, a gold brooch, well, just about anything. The space is too big for it to just sit on one’s head.” There were a good three inches between the ends of the headpiece. “I think this once belonged to a princess or prince. Maybe eleven or twelve years old. It’s a little too small for me. But then, like you already mentioned, people were smaller in ancient times.”
“So it once belonged to a princess? How do you know it comes from royalty?” I thought of Alberta Ross. She wasn’t royalty by anyone’s standards, just another rich politician and new member of the elite. How the hell did she get this? But I kept my silence with Harper.
“Well, the monarchs are the only ones who wore these pieces. Athletes wore them from time to time.” Harper had yet to even look at me. She was touching the stones set in the gold band as she talked. “The athletes would have used a ribbon to tie the ends of the diadem in place. But this one is much too elaborate for an athlete. My money is on a member of an important royal family. But where did this come from? That’s what I don’t get. The more I look at the winged being, the more I think of Lilith. The feet are like talons, probably from an owl,” Harper said. She then pointed to the crown’s peaks, “These horns are from a ram or bull. It’s too primitive to be certain. Lots of cultures worshipped horned beings. The gemstones are odd. This is an emerald and this is a topaz. Here are some turquoise stones. These are lapis lazuli. I am not sure about these? Maybe beryl? And the rest I have no idea.”
“So I am still at square one.”
“No, Raphael. You’re not. Some more research is in order.”
“I was hoping to keep this very quiet. Please don’t tell anyone.”
“It’s stolen isn’t it?” Harper said with a smirk. “Your secret is safe with me. I haven’t been this fascinated since I was young and working on a dig. Thank you so much for including me and for trusting me. I think I can figure this out in a few days. And don’t worry. I won’t use the computer. I have so many books. We’ll figure it out.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Raphael
It was Wednesday morning, and I temporarily forgot about my classroom behavioral problems. Minutes before class even began, Justine charged at me, loaded for bear. She attracted her own fan club both in and out of the classroom. Today my students’ hazy eyes were bright and focused on her, not me. Roughly half the class was eager to hear what she would say. I resented it. This was my dog and pony show, not hers.
“Professor King,” Justine called out. I gave up on correcting her about my lack of professor credentials. “What if say…Steele, Laurie, Ronchild, Herrman, and Chin for starters met with an untimely death? Could freedom of speech be restored?”
Nice. Untimely death. Talking about killing world and corporate leaders in a recorded classroom. I looked up to the corner of the room where the camera was pointed at me. Ignoring her question, I told her fan club to either take a seat if they were enrolled in the class or leave. Justine wouldn’t stop yelling. I dismissed the class for the day, but she still refused to leave. Her followers stood outside of the door, waiting for the show to continue.
In silence, I locked up my desk, grabbed my hat, and left the room. The provost’s office was on the other side of the campus. Although October, the sweltering heat did not let up. I barely noticed the air conditioning was not working as I walked briskly to the administrative offices.
Justine had an agenda. She wanted to set me up for something, but what? Without a doubt, she was clearly the smartest student in the class. In fact, she was the only one who bothered to read all of the assignments. Her papers were in-depth, well researched, and thought-provoking. But there was another reason for her interest that had to do with me.
The provost’s secretary wore a dowdy summer dress circa ‘80s. Her dark gray hair was kept in a short no-nonsense hair style. Lack of make-up only magnified her wrinkles, jowls, and under-eye bags of her pasty, veiny face. I guessed her to be around eighty years old, and wondered how many family and friends she lost in the war. It was only nine o’clock in the morning, and she looked ready to go home. She looked at me with faded brown eyes, and smiled. “Can I help you, Sir?”
“Yes, Ms. Merriweather.” I read her name off of her I.D. “I need to talk to the provost about a student.”
“The provost is at home, ill. He will be calling in, checking messages throughout the week…I mean day.”
She looked sheepishly down at the floor and I knew she was lying. I assumed the provost would be gone indefinitely, and she was the only one around to air my grievance. “My name is Raphael King and I teach journalism. The student in question is Justine Capriati. She is in my Monday and Wednesday nine o’clock.”
Ms. Merriweather typed Justine’s name into her computer. She turned the screen around so that I could view it. “Is this the student?”
I studied the photo. The girl in the school photo had dark brown hair. Justine’s hair was light brown. The girl had an olive complexion. Justine was tan, but her freckles gave away a much fairer complexion without sun. The girl looked Italian or Mexican whereas Justine was white. Hair dye and contacts were not enough. They could not be the same person.
“Ms. Merriweather, this is not my student. I never saw this woman in my life.”
The secretary looked confused. “Give me a minute, Mister King. We need to get to the bottom of this. If someone is not paying their tuition…” She turned the screen back and typed profusely at the computer keyboard. “Okay. Here we go. Here’s the footage of your class from today, the most recent.”
I watched the video. The teacher was a tall, young blonde man who seemed to be talking about math. Or maybe it was physics. “Ms. Merriweather, that’s not my class.”
“Oh dear, it isn’t.” I watched her tired face come alive with fear. “Something is wrong.” She typed away frantically, pulling up footage from everyone’s classes. None of the footage seemed to go with the file name. Finally, she said, “It’s October. I should have triple the storage size of video feed available. This looks like enough for the first week of class. We have some kind of snafu, Mister King. Our video feed needs to be fixed. Oh dear. It’s either broken or…”
“Or what? Hacked?” I asked.
“I am sorry, but your problem will have to wait. We have a much bigger one to fix.”
I tracked down Harper for lunch and told her everything-Justine, the school’s video problem, all of it. She listened as she slowly ate her yogurt. A comfortable moment of quietness passed. I almost saw the wheels in her sharp mind turn.
Finally, she said, “So our cameras aren’t working right now?”
“Yes, but I wished they did. Justine would be recorded, trying to set me up. Justine or whoever the hell she is.”
“Raphael, don’t you get it? She is the one who disabled the cameras. It all makes sense. Think. Who in their right mind would say those kinds of things knowing they could be imprisoned, or even killed? She what if’d you on killing the world’s elites. She’s setting you up alright, but maybe she’s doing it in a good way. You inadvertently learned that the cameras are not working and the provost is not here, probably won’t be here for a while. Who knows? Maybe even longer.”
“So what are you trying to say?”
“When the cat’s away, the mice will play.” Harper smiled an almost diabolical smile. “What if we are free to say what we want in our classroo
ms? What if we are free to look up what we want on the Internet? What if she has given us some freedom, although temporary, to do what we want to do?”
“I could kiss you right now!” She smiled at me and looked down. “I mean, that is if I found you remotely attractive.” I couldn’t help but stare into her bright, beautiful blue eyes as she answered my problems. If things were different, if the world was different I would have leaned over and kissed her, maybe even more would have happened if she shown interest. I chickened out.
“Harper, what do you want to do with this supposed newfound freedom?”
“Me? You’re the one who should be using this to your advantage. You said she seems to know you. Maybe she once watched your news show and likes your politics? Before you rat her out again, talk to her. That’s what she wanted you to do today, isn’t it?”
“I don’t trust her.”
“And you shouldn’t. But she might not be out to get you. Okay, I got another class. Manana, Raphael.”
I also had another class which I blew off with a tacky handwritten piece of paper taped to the window of the door that read “Emergency-class canceled”. I held my office hours in the afternoon. No one ever dropped by until the last week of the semester. Usually, they were the students who were failing and wanted to make up for the time wasted not doing the assignments. Fear of losing their productivity factors kept them in line. I thought about blowing the office hours off today, but I wasn’t ready to go home. Grudgingly, I plodded up the stairs to the Humanities Office.
The office was located on the second floor in the corner of the building. The space was massive and stark with only one window too high to open. The harsh lighting consisted of long, florescent tubes held up by cheap metal brackets that should have been swapped out for energy efficient bulbs decades ago. The salmon cinderblock walls added to the institutionalized décor. No pictures, calendars, schedules, or even phone extension lists were hung up.
Seven mismatched desks for myself and six other instructors lined the walls. All of the desks looked unused, devoid of pictures, knickknacks, sticky notes, pens, and any object that proved signs of life. The only items on each of the desks’ surfaces were large monitors that sat on top of large hard drives. I hated the room, as did the other six instructors. Those who honored their office hours held them in their classroom instead. No one wanted to spend time in this second floor dungeon.
I sat down on my burgundy, snagged rolling chair and typed in my user name and password, instantly logging onto the school’s network. Ms. Merriweather’s words haunted my mind-we have a snafu. So far, nothing looked out of the ordinary. Computer worked. All of my apps and shortcuts were on the desk top. My gradebook and search engine were connected. But the look on Ms. Merriweather’s face… On a hunch, I logged out. I logged back on with my same username, which consisted of my name along with the school’s extension. I then typed password. Once again, I was on the school’s network.
Holy shit! I logged off and then logged back on again, using the user name of the art history teacher down the hall, and then her name as the password. I was now on her account. The whole school was hacked!
I walked over to Leah Satriano’s desk and typed her name into the username box and then used the word bitch as the password. Voila! I walked over to Viktor Androkov’s computer. Typing in his name and then Dickhead for the password opened up his account. The guy was a real asshole. I stayed on his account and searched up guns on the Internet for grins. The word was a flag. After clicking on a couple of articles, I checked the browsing history. Blank! Did I have Justine to thank for this little snafu in the college’s security? Or was this a temporary glitch? My phone extension rang. On the second ring I picked up.
“Glad you’re still here. Any username from the college and any password…”
Recognizing Harper’s voice, I interrupted her and said, “I know! Privacy! Breathe it in. Smell it. Because it won’t last. Ms. Merriweather figured it out and she is on a mission.”
“Even so, that will at least take a few days or even a week. My class is over at three o’clock. I’m cutting it short, say two thirty. Come down to my room.” Click.
I could look up whatever I wanted without a trail, at least for the time being. Just to be cautious, I sat at Viktor’s desk and used his computer. Boston news was the first thing I searched. There was no mention of a raided arsenal. I then searched for crowns and treasures. Eight pages of related articles popped up. I clicked on the first article, a robbery at the Museum of Iraq. The Treasure of Nimrod was missing. Gold coins, trinkets, jewelry, and even crowns were part of the heist. Could my new crown be related? I heard a knock at the door.
Shit! I lumbered to the door and breathed a sigh of aggravation. Looking up from the floor I nearly screamed. Justine Capriati or whoever the hell she was stood in the doorway.
“I wanted to talk to you after class,” Justine said as she barged into the office. She saw the monitor I was working on. I quickly x-ed out of the screen. She rolled over another ratty chair. This was one of the few times in my life where I wished there was a working camera in room. What would be next? A rape charge?
“So talk.”
“Have you figured it out yet?”
“Justine, I am not in the mood for whatever game you are playing. In fact, I am tempted to record this conversation since all of the cameras in the school aren’t working at the moment. Let me get my phone out…”
“Keep your phone out of this,” she interrupted. “The cameras aren’t working because of me. The computers are not secure because of me. This is my gift to you-freedom. The freedom you once had back when you hosted the news.”
I scoffed at her idealism. “You think I had freedom? Sure, it was more freedom than we all have at the moment, but I was always under the thumb of the network’s president. You must know that. The things you say in class could get all of us killed. You must know that as well.”
She twirled her long, honey brown hair. “You still don’t get it, do you? No one is getting killed. Your camera has been disconnected since the second week of school. Class by class, the rest of them are all disconnected. I am trying to help you and Jaxie.”
“Jaxie? How do you know her?” She shrugged. “Justine, or whoever you are, spell it out for me. What the hell are you doing and why are you doing it?”
“I am someone who wants to help you. As you might have figured out, Justine Capriati doesn’t exist. Her name was made up and her picture was taken from a picture frame that I bought at a gift shop. I want to be a member of your terrorist cell. I know about Alberta Ross’s home. I followed you into the subdivision and then watched you and your little army leave as the house blew up.”
“Are you threatening me? Who are you?”
“For now, let’s just say that I am a friend. You and I need to continue our rivalry within the classroom. I will ask you provoking questions, and you will get pissed off at me. Soon, very soon, you will tell us all about New World Order and inspire us to rebel. I’m talking some easy indoctrination. They are all ripe, ready to follow someone who will lead. You are that leader. You are the one that we’ve been waiting for. And I can make that happen.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Raphael
As Justine or whoever she was blabbered on about her plans for my class, my mind swirled with questions. I stopped listening to her words and started watching her mannerisms. I never met her before the classroom, but there was something familiar about her. Her dialect was bland. I guessed somewhere in the western part of the country, maybe California or Washington. Her gestures smoothly went with her words, almost like my grandfather. She mentioned Jaxie’s name. Both women were brilliant with computer security. Maybe she once worked at Fogle. I intended to find out.
I let Justine droll on with her ‘ends justifies the means’ lecture. Had heard it before. I believed the rhetoric more when it came from my own mouth, but she was no doubt convincing. What would my grandfather have thought of Jus
tine? Who was I kidding? He would have been impressed like I was at the moment.
George was not a computer hacker, but he knew a few tricks. Fake diplomas, phony jobs, collection agency phishing, insurance frauds, and funeral chasing were just some of what the great man taught me. These tricks increased in difficulty as technology progressed. The Georges of the world could no longer compete with the Justines. However, when it came to personal connections, most techies did not have a clue.
Gaining one’s trust was a skill. George called it the art of pretending. As a child, George taught me how to play The Good Samaritan. It was a raw and simple game, exposing the decency among strangers. I acted helpless or in trouble in a public place. A mark would come along and offer his or her help. George would then come in for the purse snatch or wallet pickpocket as I cried in my hour of need. Great fun as a child, but I stopped playing many years ago until now.
Justine began playing the Good Samaritan game, except the rules had changed and I was now the mark. She was helpless and needed a leader. I looked at the door, almost waiting for her partner to come in and metaphorically rob me in some way. What shit was I about to step into?
She took a breather from her loosely planned speech and stared into my eyes. I refused to blink. A full minute, maybe two, passed and then I finally said, “Don’t con a con. What do you want from me? Tell me straight.”
“Wow, you cut through the shit, huh?”
“Yes, I do. I know this scam. You jammed the security system, right?” She nodded. I took out my registered phone and called Jaxie from the office. She picked up on the first ring. “Jaxie, it’s me. Listen, I’ll skip the small talk. Quickly, I got a student named Justine Capriati. Do you know her…”w
“Wait!” Justine yelled. “Put down the phone! Gloria Prestwyck. I’m from Washington. I only know Jaxie from you. I heard a private conversation…I’ve been spying on you for a while.”