by Stephen Cole
‘Maybe he’s worried the whole damn lot of them are gonna come back.’ Motti rubbed his sore head. ‘To haunt him with a baseball bat.’
‘This guy obviously knows Coldhardt,’ Tye went on, ‘and must know all there is to know about us.’
‘Gee, d’you think maybe he’ll send us cards on our birthdays?’
‘He knows about the Bloodline Cipher too …’
Motti turned the page of his comic book. ‘Whatever the hell that is.’
‘We know that the older Coldhardt gets, the harder he chases ways to live longer,’ Tye reminded him. ‘Elixirs of youth, mad Aztec goddesses …’
Motti looked at her. ‘What, and now a code in some old book?’
‘I’m the living proof of something Coldhardt will never own …’ She shrugged. ‘If Heidel’s supposed to have died thirty years ago, maybe whatever’s in that cipher helped him stay alive?’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Motti, ‘and maybe Scooby Doo’s a documentary.’
‘I know it sounds far-fetched.’ Tye held up her hands. ‘But it would make sense of why Heidel threw the manuscript into the flames.’
Motti got her meaning. ‘He wanted to make damn sure Coldhardt didn’t get the benefit of what’s in there?’
An uneasy silence hung in the air between them.
‘I hope this Maya bird works out all right,’ Patch announced, coming over to join them. ‘Then Con and Jonah can come back and we’ll all have a new buddy to get to know.’
Tye half smiled, despite herself. ‘You’re always first to accept anyone new, aren’t you?’
‘Safety in numbers! You can never have too many people watching your back.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Motti took a swig of beer. ‘Trouble is, Cyclops, Red can’t watch your back while you’re staring at her front.’
‘Nothing to stare at,’ said Patch, forlorn. ‘Her shoulder blades are bigger than her baps.’
‘Don’t be so gross,’ Tye complained. She threw a cushion at Patch, spilling hot coffee into his lap. He jumped up, yelling in pain.
‘One in a million shot, Tye,’ Motti drawled, putting down his beer. ‘You actually hit something down there.’
Patch grabbed the beer and poured it over his steaming crotch. Then he sank back in his seat with a relieved sigh.
‘OK,’ said Motti calmly. ‘You got exactly ten seconds to fetch me another beer.’
‘Maybe I could wring out my trousers into a glass?’
‘And maybe you could wind up with two broken legs.’
Patch hurried away to the fridge. He turned on the sound system while he was there, and strident, doomy guitars thundered out from the speakers scattered about the room. ‘That’s better!’ he yelled. ‘Better party while we can. ’Cause when Heidel and Bree said they’d be seeing us again …’ He itched the skin beneath his eye patch. ‘I reckon they meant it.’
Motti nodded. ‘This whole thing’s got “grudge match” written all over it.’
‘So why’d they have to take it out on us?’ complained Patch.
‘They’re against Coldhardt and all he stands for,’ Tye reminded them. The big man gathers his little ones to him, Heidel had sneered. Insists that they prove their love by risking everything, time after time.
‘Coldhardt won’t take this lying down,’ said Patch confidently. ‘He’ll sort that lot out.’
Motti touched the cold beer bottle to the angry bruise on his head. ‘You mean he’ll make us do it for him.’
Their luck holds for a time … Tye closed her eyes and seemed to see Heidel’s, the colour of stagnant water. But then, in walks death.
‘We must be strong,’ quoted Patch, parodying Coldhardt’s voice. ‘All of us.’
Tye didn’t smile, and Motti went back to his comic. They sat with Patch in distracted silence while the music blared on around them.
Chapter Nine
Tye woke early. She wondered how Jonah had slept, what his bed was like. How it would feel with him lying beside her. Not just for those snatched, secret hours when the house was quiet, or when the others were too wasted to hear the creak of the floorboards outside her room, but for a whole night, every night. The two of them with nothing to hide.
Nothing to hide? Tye dwelled on the idea with a kind of numb fascination. Reading lies off everyone else her whole life hadn’t exactly encouraged honesty in herself. She had feelings buried so deep even she’d forgotten what they were, most of the time.
She stared up at the virgin white of the ceiling. Damn Jonah Wish for not being here right now.
As she turned in bed she caught sight of her smokestone lying on the top of her dresser, sparkling in the earliest strands of sunlight through the pale curtains. Weird; she was sure she hadn’t left it out in the open. She held it between dirty fingernails; it was beautiful the way a speck of night seemed caught inside it, like a tiny fly in glittering amber. Coldhardt had given one to each of them when they’d joined up; his way of telling them they had proved themselves to him.
The day she’d got hers had been one of the happiest of her life, her entrance into a world she could never have imagined. Now she could hear a lazy little voice whispering in the dawn quiet: you bought that crap – and he bought you.
The soft, insistent beep of her pager woke her from her thoughts. Coldhardt was calling another meeting. Surely he couldn’t want that Jonah back-up rota off her already …?
Or else something happened to Jonah in the night.
Tye rose from her bed, threw on some clothes, half-tamed her hair with a headband and ran from the room.
Fifteen minutes later, back in the stark striplighting of the hub, she was wishing she’d spent a little longer on her appearance. Coldhardt, Patch and Motti were not yet here. Con was back, nursing a coffee. And while Tye sat quiet and dishevelled at the table, Jonah and Maya were chatting bright-eyed and busily like members of some secret code-crackers club.
‘My first water coolers were hand-made out of old aquarium pumps and home-made water-blocks,’ Jonah was saying. ‘Used to piss off my foster families so much …’
Maya laughed. ‘I can imagine – this weird kid they’d taken in, taking apart their PC and shoving things inside it.’
‘Not that weird!’ he protested. ‘I just couldn’t stand the noise of the fans working overtime to vent all that heat …’ He sighed. ‘Now I order purpose-built cooler kits and it’s just so easy.’
‘Something to be thankful to Coldhardt for,’ said Tye, prising herself into the conversation. ‘Hello, Maya. We thought you were being kept at the safe house?’
‘We had a kind of breakthrough last night,’ said Jonah, eyes smiling. ‘Told Coldhardt, and got the summons.’
‘I had to wear a blindfold!’ Maya looked at Jonah with mock reproach. ‘You tied it too tight.’
Tye stiffened as the two of them shared a look. What was going on? It was a look that spoke of intimacy. But surely Jonah wouldn’t … no. Telling herself not to be so dumb, she spoke lightly. ‘Don’t tell me you broke the cipher already?’
‘We’ve got Coldhardt what he asked us for,’ said Jonah; Tye felt he was choosing his words carefully. ‘And we were just saying thank God we weren’t being driven mad by a mega-noisy cooling fan to offset our overclocking …’
Act interested, Tye decided. ‘What’s that, then?’
‘Overclocking?’ Jonah looked over as if noticing her properly for the first time. ‘It’s when you crank up the clock frequencies in your circuits to speed up performance. But all electronic circuits get hot because of the electrons moving through them, right, and the harder you work them …’
As Jonah kept on, Tye felt a numbness rising through the base of her skull. She didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. And there was Maya, nodding along ’cause she got every word. She looked from one to the other, trying to seem interested and not dismayed.
Tye was glad when Motti walked in and parked himself beside her with a gruff hello, soon followed by Patch, who
sat the other side.
But before she could begin a conversation of her own, Coldhardt walked in. Even if the temperature did drop a degree or two, at least Maya and Jonah’s baffling chatter stopped. Con stifled her next yawn, acting all ears as the boss sat down to speak. Maya seemed to drink it all in, eyes dark and hawklike, fixed on Coldhardt.
‘Jonah,’ Coldhardt began without ceremony, ‘read out your translation of the title page.’
‘Good morning to you, too. This is Maya, by the way.’ Jonah smiled at the girl as he pulled out his PDA, as if this were some private joke they shared. ‘Couldn’t have done this without her.’
Tye felt a stab of jealousy. Stop it, she told herself instantly. He’s just been doing his thing. Maya’s been helping him. She fought to keep her face blank. She might be the real expert on body language, but Coldhardt wasn’t too bad at it himself, and if he picked up anything …
‘Get on with it, Jonah,’ snapped Coldhardt.
Jonah switched on his Palm’s screen. ‘The life of a creature is in the blood. Through the mercy and purity of Guan Yin, who gave up her eyes so her father might see, this Bloodline Cipher is disposed to thee. Thy flesh –’
‘– be stitched with threads immortal …’ Coldhardt spoke the words in unison, ‘… they hold fast though the blood sweat fastens.’
Jonah looked at Coldhardt as both finished their recitation, his face clouded with confusion. ‘How’d you know?’
Coldhardt smiled. ‘You have independently reached the same translation of that opening page as I was given by certain … agencies.’
Jonah’s face darkened. ‘Then you didn’t really need us to do this?’
‘On the contrary – your translation was vital.’ Coldhardt eased back in his chair. ‘How else could it be demonstrated that my sources are telling the truth? Now I can contact them and tell them I shall proceed to the next stage.’
‘Of what?’ Jonah put down his PDA. ‘You’re making less sense than the translation. Don’t you think we have a right to know what’s going on?’
‘Please, Jonah …’ Coldhardt’s eyes twinkled. ‘No showing off in front of our new guest.’
‘Now that you know what it says,’ said Motti, butting in quickly, ‘any pointers on what the hell it actually means?’
‘In the old stories, Guan Yin was the pure daughter of an evil ruler,’ said Con. ‘Her father went blind with plague, and Guan Yin gave him her eyes so he could see. Her sacrifice so moved him that he repented his evil and became good. In turn, his conversion made Guan Yin whole again.’ She snorted. ‘A ridiculous story!’
Tye looked at her. ‘Been swotting up?’
‘I had to do something to pass the time while Jonah and Maya were locked away in their private world for half the night.’
The words stuck in Tye’s ears like hooks, but she managed to mask her feelings. ‘So whoever wrote this manuscript knew their Chinese myths,’ she said coolly. ‘What’s that stuff about immortal threads?’
‘The ancient Greeks believed the course of a human life to be a thread,’ Coldhardt remarked, ‘spun and measured out by the Fates, and cut at their command.’
‘So an immortal thread would be Fate-proof, yes?’ said Con brightly. ‘Like eternal life!’
‘There are lots of possible meanings,’ Jonah noted. ‘I suppose a bloodline is a kind of thread too – a line of descent from a common ancestor …’
‘All the way back to Adam and Eve,’ joked Patch.
‘In the search for serious answers,’ Coldhardt interrupted, ‘I’m afraid we shall have to leave Jonah and Maya to continue their excellent work on the manuscript. Now that I know the translations tally, I must learn whether the man named Heidel you encountered is truly the man I knew long ago – or else an impostor.’
‘Not in any hurry to meet him and his mates again,’ said Patch, clutching his stomach.
‘Nevertheless, if I am to have the proof I need, you must get close to him, at least.’
‘Hmm. An older man surrounded by younger gang members.’ Maya, it seemed, had grown a little bolder. ‘“The big man gathers his little ones to him,” that’s what Heidel said. The model seems obvious to me, Coldhardt.’
Coldhardt regarded her, a dangerous glint in his eyes. ‘Does it, now.’
‘Heidel looks to be around your age,’ she went on innocently. ‘Were you and he as Jonah and Motti are now – selling your skills to a big boss?’
‘You could say Heidel and I were together a long time,’ he equivocated.
‘And now you are the age of your former boss, you’re working the same scheme yourself.’ Jonah looked at him. ‘Is that right?’
Tye held her breath. She didn’t even dare look at any of the others. The questions were obvious, begging to be asked; but to do so felt like heresy, somehow.
‘An inquiring, analytical mind is a useful tool,’ Coldhardt noted, with a smile that seemed genuine. ‘Perhaps I shall tell you more – if it transpires that Heidel is truly who he claims to be.’
‘That is our incentive to find Heidel?’ Con remarked. ‘A history lesson?’
‘We’re thieves, not private detectives,’ Patch agreed quietly.
‘Each of you shall receive a bonus of three hundred thousand pounds for undertaking this mission,’ Coldhardt announced casually.
Tye felt a jump in her chest like her heart just fired a cannon. ‘That’s more than usual.’
‘Danger money?’ asked Motti, gruff as ever.
‘Sod the danger, gimme the cash!’ Patch rubbed his hands gleefully.
Con sat up straight in her chair, her eyes agleam. ‘How are we supposed to acquire this proof?’
‘Thanks to Maya and Jonah’s efforts, I believe I have located Heidel’s stolen copy of the Guan Yin manuscript.’
‘But it was blitzed in the limo fire,’ said Patch. ‘Wasn’t it?’
Coldhardt leaned back in his chair. ‘It seems the transponder tag inside it is still transmitting.’
Tye felt static prickle the hairs on the back of her neck. ‘Where is it now?’
‘In the early hours of this morning it was detected – thanks to Jonah – by RFID scanners at Heathrow airport.’
‘Look, Coldhardt, Tye and I are sure it was the grimoire that Heidel burned.’ Jonah looked to Tye for support and she nodded. ‘Surely this has to be either a reading error or a trap.’
‘My money’s on a trap,’ Motti agreed. ‘I mean, what are the chances of Heidel using regular air travel?’
‘Why shouldn’t he?’ said Coldhardt. ‘Not all the players in this business have their own pilot. And besides, there is a credible reason for him being in London. Some rare paintings by an artist he favours are up for auction in central London.’
‘Why would he take that manuscript with him on an art-buying trip?’ Motti challenged. ‘And he’s had ages to take out that tag.’
Coldhardt looked at Maya. ‘How difficult would its removal be?’
‘It was inserted into the wooden spine beneath the vellum, then restored to leave no trace of incision,’ she answered. ‘But I don’t know if Blackland told Heidel the location of the tag before he was killed.’
Now Coldhardt turned to Tye, who nodded. ‘She’s telling the truth. Heidel bundled in Blackland’s body from another room, used it as a decoy.’
‘In which case Heidel could have removed the transponder before he even entered that room,’ Jonah pointed out.
Con looked perplexed. ‘But if he made such a show of burning the manuscript in front of you, why would he now expect Coldhart to be listening out for the tag?’
‘Perhaps because he knows how much this manuscript means to you,’ said Maya, regarding Coldhardt. ‘He knows you will clutch at any straw.’
A flicker of annoyance crossed his face. ‘Heidel is playing a game. And yes, there is a good chance he is baiting a trap.’
‘A trap you’re gonna send us into,’ said Motti quietly. ‘He gave you that signal at Heathrow in
case the auction thing on its own wasn’t enough for you to come running.’
‘Perhaps. But this time, you will have the element of surprise.’ Coldhardt shifted in his seat. ‘Because it’s not the manuscript I want, now. It’s intelligence on Heidel. Track the tag signal and you track him – or one of his associates, who can lead you to him.’
‘And then what?’ asked Tye.
‘I want data – surveillance footage, fingerprints, speech, distinguishing marks …’
‘Maybe we could ask him to give blood?’ Motti suggested.
‘One thing,’ said Tye. ‘What about Jonah?’
Coldhardt gave a regal smile. ‘He and Maya will receive payment to the same value should they crack the Bloodline Cipher.’
Jonah and Maya swapped glances, but Tye shook her head. ‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘Yeah,’ said Patch, ‘you said he needed back-up in the safe house at all times in case …’ He trailed off, glancing at Maya.
‘Given the situation now, Patch, I feel you need the back-up more than Jonah,’ said Coldhardt smoothly.
Maya stared. ‘You think of me as a threat?’
‘I’m not sure quite what to think of you,’ Coldhardt replied. ‘In any case, Jonah will have some back-up, as I will shortly be conducting business of my own at the safe house.’
‘Oh?’ said Jonah. ‘What business is that?’
‘When Heidel told you, “Time waits for no men,” he was in a playful mood.’ There was no trace of amusement or appreciation in Coldhardt’s lined, craggy features. ‘He didn’t mean “no men”. He was referring to a particular organisation called Nomen Oblitum.’
‘That means Forgotten Name in Latin, no?’ said Con.
Tye suddenly noticed that Maya was looking slightly flustered. ‘You’ve heard of them?’ she asked.
‘What?’ Maya glanced her way. ‘Oh, yes … Yes, I’ve heard of them, seen them referred to in old texts. Blackland was especially interested in their history – what scraps there remain of it.’ She seemed selfconscious to suddenly be the centre of attention, her fingers straying to her birthmark. ‘Nomen Oblitum was the title used by a secret cult of European occultists in the fifteenth century.’