"Thank God!" Kerrin made no attempt at hiding his relief.
"Why? What's the matter?"
"Nothing…nothing. It's okay. Just overreacting. Listen, I'm sorry. I'm not going to make the 1 o'clock flight after all. I think I need to go over to Elizabeth's house."
"Okay, that’s fine. But please try to make it home tomorrow…you know we're meant to be going to dinner with the Petersons tomorrow? Oh, by the way, Elizabeth called this morning. Wanted to know what you were up to and if you'd made any progress. She sounded a lot better…"
"I'll call her now. Are you okay?"
"Yes. Fine,…don’t worry about me. But just make sure you're back tomorrow!"
Kerrin knew that his sister was trying to reach him. His cell phone told him she had called him three times so far, while he was on the phone to the others but he had not yet got round to calling her back. He dialed her cell-phone number.
"Hey Sis! How are things going?"
"Oh…as good as can be expected I suppose. The weather here in Arizona is fantastic. And there is so much to do here on the ranch. It's keeping us all occupied. But the children have taken it very hard. I try my best to console them, but I don't think they understand yet…I don’t think I do either. We all miss Martin. Anyway,…how's everything going with your investigation?" Elizabeth asked.
"Interesting. Very interesting."
"Listen Kerrin, don't do anything stupid, will you? Promise me? I've already lost Martin…I couldn't bear to lose you too!"
"Don't worry. I'm a big boy now. Elizabeth, I would like to go round to your house and have a look at Martin's computer. Would you mind?"
"No. Not at all. Do you still have your keys?"
"Yes."
"Okay, but I'll need to tell you the security code so you can disable the alarm on the way in the door. Don't forget…otherwise you'll have half the Orlando police force on your back."
"Did Martin have a safe-place where he might keep any private files or personal CD's, …or back-up hard-drives or memory sticks for his computer?"
"Yes. In his office he had a book on the bookshelf that looked as if it was leather bound, but was really hollow on the inside with a metal box hidden inside the cover. It's on the third shelf up beside the window."
"What's the book called?"
" 'A Golden Collection of Shakespearean Tragedies.' It's quite thick with a red cover. And the spare key to Martin's study will be with the others in the usual place." Kerrin knew where that was. It was inside the large green vase beside the television. That's also where they kept the spare car keys.
They chatted for a while, Kerrin took a note of the security code to disable the house alarm, and then said goodbye. He promised to call her again later that night.
It was a long drive back up to Orlando. This was the third time he had made the trip in as many days. The sunny mood that he'd been in a few days ago had evaporated, and he had lost interest in sightseeing along the coastal route. He took I-95, the Interstate freeway, hoping to get there as soon as possible.
Martin and Elizabeth's house was in the small suburb of Angelsea, south of the city. A large house, impressive yet not over the top. Since they had moved to Washington, Kerrin and Dana had spent many happy days there, visiting his sister's family as often as they could. It would be strange going there by himself this time, the first member of his family to go into the house since Martin had died.
He wasn't looking forward to it.
Kerrin kept both of Elizabeth's house keys on his key fob. He let himself in through the front door, and hurried into the hallway, quickly typing in the six digit security code into the alarm's control panel. Thankfully he had got it right, and the flashing light turned a constant green. He turned round and gently closed the door behind him, putting the pile of mail he had brought up from the mailbox onto the table in the lobby.
Unlike the other times Kerrin had been visiting, when the sound of screaming children, conversation and loud music had filled the house with life, this time it was uncomfortably quiet.
Walking through the rooms, stopping to reach down inside the long dried willow grass and pick up the study key from inside the green vase, he could feel the presence of his brother-in-law all around him. Martin had been a good, strong man, and an excellent father. His sister had been lucky to find him.
Martin's study was at the back of the house, facing the indoor swimming pool. He used to sit there at his computer, watching his children and wife swimming in the pool through an internal window he had had especially knocked through the wall.
The water in the pool looked inviting as Kerrin slipped past it into the study. Perhaps he would take a dip afterwards.
He stopped in his tracks.
The door to the study was wide open, having been visibly forced. He reached for the gun in the holster underneath his arm. Perhaps the intruder could still be inside the room! He couldn’t take any chances.
He quietly kicked off his shoes so that his footsteps wouldn't give him away on the marble surrounds to the swimming pool, and stepped slowly forward.
He reached the door to the study, and with a single deep breath, he stepped swiftly into the room, his gun outstretched and searching, looking for a target.
Thankfully, there was none to be found. The room was empty.
Empty as in 'no intruder', but also empty as in 'no computer.'
Somebody had beaten him to it.
He looked around at the bookshelf beside the window. None of the other books had been disturbed but on the third shelf there was a gap in the tightly packed row where a single book was missing. A gap where until recently Kerrin knew there would probably have been a copy of Shakespearean tragedies.
Kerrin felt a chill run down his spine. Whoever had got into the house had known both the security codes for the house alarm, and where Martin had kept his secret box. It had to be either a very close friend of the family, or someone who must have intercepted the phone conversation between Kerrin and his sister that morning!
Whoever it was, they had also known where Martin and his sister had lived. They must have come and gone very recently, probably within the past few hours. He checked the rest of the house, making sure all the other doors were still closed and the windows locked. Everything was fine.
As far as he could see, nothing else had been taken and the rest of the house looked completely untouched. That meant that the person who'd let themselves into the house had been a true professional. He or she hadn't been tempted by the obvious valuables lying around the house, only in completing a specific task: taking the computer and the computer disks.
He sat down in one of the large chairs in the living room. What should he do now?
He debated going to the police to report the theft, but then wondered what help that would bring. The police must know by now that the suicides had been murders, but in spite of that, they had closed the investigations, and mislaid the files. Whoever had persuaded the police to ignore the suicides, would make sure this got a similar treatment.
As he lay back on the sofa going over everything in his mind and wondering what his next move should be, a blanket of exhaustion overtook him, and he fell into a deep sleep.
He was woken a few hours later, the loud ringing of a telephone very close to his head ripping him out of his dreams and thrusting him back into the world of questions that had become his life in the past week. He struggled to open his eyes, for a second not remembering where he was or how he had got there.
The phone stopped ringing and the answering machine kicked in. It was Martin's voice.
"Hi! We're not in just now. Could you leave a message please and either Elizabeth or myself will get back to you! Bye."
Kerrin could hear the person at the other end of the phone hesitate for a few seconds, obviously wondering whether or not to leave a message.
"…Hi, Martin, it's Alex…I was just wondering if you're okay…"
Kerrin lunged for the phone, knocking the phone off
the table as he did so, then fighting with it on the floor, and trying to grasp the handset and untangle it from the cable.
"Hi… Hi Alex,…DON'T HANG UP! It's Kerrin! Martin's brother-in-law! You know me! We met a few weeks ago!"
The voice on the other end of the line stopped talking in mid sentence.
"Don't hang up," Kerrin shouted. "Martin's dead and I need to talk to you!"
Silence.
"Alex, I hope you’re listening to me. I'm a friend. I know you are scared and probably don't want to talk to anyone, but I need to talk to you… We can’t speak on this line. It's probably bugged…but don't hang up. I have an idea. Follow my instructions… I want you to think of the place we met a few weeks ago. Remember the name of the place…Take the first part of the name and remember it. Now I want you to go into an internet café and create yourself a hotmail email account and sign onto the messenger service, so that we can chat online. Make your username the same as the first part of the name of the place we went to…i.e. [email protected]. Got it? I'll get to an internet café too. In one hour from now, I'll send an email to you at that account name, and then we'll chat using the hotmail Messenger Service. We'll take it from there? Do you understand…just say yes if you do, then hang up."
The line at the other end had not yet gone dead…Kerrin knew there was somebody listening to him. He prayed that person would acknowledge him with a 'yes'. The few seconds seemed like an age, but eventually the man at the other end grunted a 'yes', then hung up. So far so good.
Now all Kerrin had to do was find an internet café within the next hour.
Actually, it wasn't as difficult as he first thought it was going to be. As he drove down I-95, he passed a big mall, which he guessed would be quite a good place to look for one. He pulled into the parking lot, and walked inside. Sure enough, on the second floor, just opposite Gap for Kids there was a little trendy café that sold a million different types of coffee and internet connection by the minute.
Within a few minutes Kerrin had created himself his own new email identity, '[email protected]', and had sent an email to Alex, wherever he was. He just hoped that Alex had been able to remember that the name of the golf club where they had played only a few weeks ago under such different circumstances was called Duddingston Gardens Golf Club. Just in case, he sent emails to three different addresses: [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].
Hopefully, if Alex had really understood his instructions, at least one of the emails would get to him.
Kerrin then signed onto the Messenger service offered by Hotmail and MSN, and created three buddy aliases under the three email ids Duddingston, DuddingstonGardens and DuddingstonGardensGolfClub.
If Alex was online and had signed onto Messenger under any of these id's he would be able to see him.
He only had to wait ten minutes. A little message popped up into one of the MSN messenger boxes to tell him that his 'buddy' was online.
Kerrin immediately sent him a message back.
"Alex, Hi! It's Kerrin. Please prove your identity. Who won the day we first met?"
Two seconds later a message box popped up on his own screen.
"Hi Kerrin. Martin did. What happened to him? And why were you in his house?"
From that point a barrage of short messages flowed back and forth across the internet between them.
"I was there to pick something up. Martin tried to escape from America. His Lear Jet blew up in mid-air en route to the Bahamas. Do you think it was suicide like the rest?"
"Like hell it was. None of them were…"
"Where are you, Alex?"
"How can I trust you?"
"You can't. But who says I can trust you either. You're the only one left alive? Did you kill the others?"
"Fair point. And no I didn't. Forgive the precautions, but if you are who you say you are, then you can ask your sister's son a question. Ask her to tell you where I went on vacation last year! Her son kept the postcard. The postcard comes from the town where I am now…find the postcard…find the town…and find the entrance to the place mentioned on the postcard. I will meet you there at 2 p.m. in five days from now. Come alone."
"Okay…"
Kerrin waited for a response but there was none. A message popped up on his Buddy List saying that Duddingston had signed off.
He paid the spotty teenager behind the bar for his thirty minutes of online time, then walked through the mall, trying to find a shop that sold pre-paid cell phones. The phone he already had was obviously bugged, and he had to stop using it.
He found a shop near the entrance, paid for a phone in cash, and left the mall. Inside his car he called the business office at his sister's ranch, and asked the office manager to transfer him to Elizabeth, who was a guest in the main house. When she eventually came on the phone, he apologized for the skullduggery, and explained that her cell phone may be bugged. Then he asked her about the postcard.
"Yeah, Danny loved it. It was from South Africa, some windsurfing place…hang on a second I'll get him…"
There was a few minutes silence, then the next voice that spoke was Martin's son. His voice had lost the excitement it normally had. There was no joy there. Only sorrow.
"Uncle Kerrin? Hi…"
"Hi Danny. How are you?" Stupid question.
He could hear the boy fighting back the tears.
"Can I ask you something Danny…it’s important. Last year, one of your dad's friends sent you a postcard…from South Africa?"
"Uncle Alex? Yes…it's an ace card…" The little boy's voice had livened up a bit.
"That's the one. Do you still have it… I need to take a look at it…it's important."
"Yes, I do…Why do you want to see it? "
"I can't tell you…but it'll help me find out why your father died."
The boy at the other end thought for a moment.
"Okay, but it's in my secret place…with my secret stuff. If I tell you, you have to promise not to tell anyone else, and you have to promise…make me a double promise that you won’t look at anything else there, and that you won't read my diary…? Promise?"
"Absolutely. I double promise you Danny. And I won't tell anyone about where your special place is. Especially your sister. Okay?"
"…Okay. Do you know where…" And Danny told Kerrin where all his childhood secrets were kept.
Twenty minutes later, Kerrin slipped the postcard out of a cardboard box hidden underneath a loose floorboard in Danny's bedroom. Before he put the lid back on the box, he dropped three twenty dollar bills into the box and smiled. Danny was a good kid.
The postcard was split into two separate photographs juxtapositioned against each other. In the bottom left picture was a long, sandy bay, with rolling surf crashing onto the beach. Two windsurfers were in the photo, one surfing a wave on a board with a tall yellow sail, and the other flying upside down above the surf, caught by the camera in the middle of doing a jump.
The other picture showed a long, blue stretch of water covered by Windsurfers.
Along the bottom of the picture were the words, 'Langebaan Bay, South Africa.'
Chapter 15
Day Twelve
New York
His office on the sixty-third floor of the Rohloff Tower building looked out over the water towards Staten Island. The view, as Rupert Rohloff had once described it to his mistress, was 'truly exceptional.' And it was. Rupert never failed to lose interest in the view of the world outside. From here he could see the merchant ships arriving in the harbor, bringing their goods to America from every corner of the globe; tourists flocking to the Statue of Liberty on the pleasure craft that brought them to see the greatest symbol of freedom in the world, and the ocean liners arriving and disgorging their cargos of rich playboys, excited about arriving in the best city in the world.
Rupert Rohloff loved America. Only in the United States could he have arrived as a poor student thir
ty years ago, armed only with a degree in Electronic Engineering and a will to succeed, and turned his dream into a reality that spanned every state of the country, and overflowed into Europe and beyond. Rohloff Enterprises Worldwide was one of the most powerful conglomerates on the planet. The companies hidden under the banner of Rohloff Enterprises had interests which spanned electronics, computers, networking, telecommunications, semi-conductors, health-physics, bio-medicine, genetics, and most recently bio-science. In the past three years during the collapse of the stock market which accompanied the dot.com technology crisis, an aggressive campaign of acquisitions had brought many household names under the control of his holding-companies. Yet, he preferred to keep the extent of his wealth and power a well-protected secret.
Rupert Rohloff was not a vain man. It mattered not to him that people did not understand the true scope of his power. Politically, it was often more prudent that way. Economically, it made things much easier.
Rohloff Enterprises Worldwide was a private company. There were very few shareholders. Rupert Rohloff himself owned 78% of the stock. That made him the undisputed owner, CEO and boss of over three hundred thousand people in the world.
Yet, if you asked the average man on the street, hardly anybody had ever heard of his name. Although, those who had, never forgot it.
Rupert Rohloff was not what you could realistically call a good looking man. He was only five foot six tall, what most women would describe as small, and he was almost completely bald. Only a few patches of brown hair still clung to the sides of his head above his ears, but they too were beginning to disappear. Rupert's brown eyes were a little too close together, and this sometimes made people a bit uncomfortable when they looked at him. His nose, broken in a fight when he was a child, had never been professionally reset and now the bridge angled down obliquely to a bent and flattened tip. His round and extended belly protruded a few inches over the edge of his trouser belt. Rupert knew that he looked a little odd, and to compensate he spent a fortune on clothes. His expensive designer suits went some way to making up for his lack of stature and good looks, but not far enough to attract woman on their own. What attracted the women was his money.
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