The Bloodline Cipher

by Stephen Cole

  Jonah soon found an internet café not far from the grand, colonial-style City Hall. It smelled of fish, and the chairs were sticky, but the PCs were fair spec and the only staff member seemed engrossed in the TV.

  He bought ten minutes of time. Then he quickly bypassed the no-uploads protocol, hacked into the timer so it didn’t count down and loaded some heavyweight security software to make sure his trail through the web couldn’t be traced. Finally he loaded up Instant Messenger; Maya had suggested he message her instead of calling if anything came up, insisting it would be more secure. She’d had that spooky look in her eye that suggested she saw so much more than he did. And with stuff this big going down, he was taking no chances.

  Jonah searched for her status and found she was online.

  Hey maya, he typed, and waited impatiently for a reply.

  He sent a prod.

  U asleep?

  Then the little yellow envelope appeared by the Messenger icon. He clicked on the window.

  I’m here, her message read. How do I know it’s you?

  Look in second drawer to your left u will find pants

  There was a pause. Then she wrote again:

  Ugh! What else will I find?

  Jonah suddenly realised and swore. Er … grotty magazine that isn’t mine and I never saw before?

  Next time let’s agree a password. What’s up?

  What’s ROUND u mean. :-) He paused, smiling like the emoticon he’d typed. Want to get excited?

  Is it the circles?

  Yeah some of the overwritten ones are perfect, u cant see where pen stroke begins. But then on others, u can. Check it out

  He waited, drumming his fingers on the desk. After so much time spent staring at those bloody overwritten characters, he felt he was finally getting somewhere. And once again, the clue was in the drawing of the letters rather than any inherent meaning they might carry – an almost entirely self-reflexive cipher. Jonah found himself wondering about the guy who’d encrypted this. ‘You were a clever old bastard,’ Jonah murmured. ‘But maybe not quite clever enough.’

  A few minutes passed before Maya wrote back:

  The start positions are all in different places!!!!!

  Jonah smiled and typed again: Yep. So we know DEF not normal handwriting. The author cycles through the different start points. It’s a carefully assembled pattern. And that makes me wonder if this really is a ciphertext – v convenient that random encoding allowed for such a pattern.

  There was a pause. Jonah waited impatiently for a response.

  OK … you’re far enough away over there that you can’t come back and hit me.

  He frowned. Wot u on about?

  Promise you tell no one. Not Coldhardt, not Tye, not anybody. Swear it

  He shrugged. I swear. And pretty soon he really was swearing, as her block of text blinked into being.

  Remember I said before the manuscript might be plaintext – a written-down version of a hotchpotch of languages? Actually I know damn well it is. It is the written form of an obscure language system derived from a thirteenth-century Sino-Vietnamese dialect – with some other stuff thrown in. My tutor in Russia, the one who disappeared, member of that occult group I do translations for – he spoke a little.

  A few seconds later a fresh message appeared.

  Hate me?

  Jonah felt so angry he almost killed the exchange then and there. But that would let Maya off the hook too easily. He started tapping hard on the keys.

  No wonder u weren’t interested in main part of the manuscript. U already knew wot the bloody thing said. Bet u only went to Blackland cos he had a copy of manuscript with appendix.

  That’s right … Sorry.

  Then you know what the Bloodline Cipher is!

  No.

  Don’t dick me around.

  A minute or so passed while Jonah fumed in the corner of the café. Then Maya wrote again.

  Tutor thought the Bloodline Cipher was in the appendix only, with the key concealed throughout the bulk of the book. The key to something very powerful. That’s why so many have tried to steal or destroy each copy of the manuscript. Blackland’s is only copy with appendix intact.

  Why are you so bothered about it? Jonah typed.

  Told you. Don’t like unsolved mysteries.

  So what does the main bit say, he typed crossly. Or can’t u tell me?

  I trust you, came the instant response. Then a lengthy pause. Jonah imagined her, sitting at his desk, picking the right words to put in and leave out. He glanced nervously at the café proprietor – his ten purchased minutes were long since over – but the man was still absorbed in the TV.

  Finally, Maya’s response came through.

  Manuscript gives higher understanding of the meridians of energy about the body. Depending on point of view it is either ultimate medical handbook – or DIY manual on How to Destroy a Human Body. Incredible knowledge.

  Jonah sighed. And now we find it has an added mysterious pattern, he typed.

  But what does pattern MEAN? she shot back.

  Jonah sighed, feeling the nerves clench in his stomach. May have to leave that to u to work out. Think gonna be busy

  There was a pause. Then she wrote back:

  Doing job tonight?

  Jonah began to type: If we find ship before sunset.

  Then he thought twice and deleted the line of text, tried again:

  Could tell u. But then I’d have to kill u. See u (I hope)

  He logged off and removed all trace of his uploads, then left the café. He stepped out into the bright sunshine, looked down the hill towards the wooded promenade and the indigo swell of the sea. And Jonah wished and wished that it would never get dark that night, while wishing too that this whole business was over.

  If Maya was right about what the manuscript contained … then what further powers did the Bloodline Cipher promise?

  Maya waited for another message from Jonah, just in case. It didn’t come.

  Sensing a presence behind her, she turned and started. Coldhardt was standing there, watching her from the doorway.

  ‘I think it’s time we talked frankly,’ he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jonah wedged himself into an uncomfortable flip-down seat in the boat’s cabin beside the door, the hot stink of diesel in his nostrils, the roar of twin engines deafening in his ears. Whoever thought that taking a trip out on a moonlit sea was romantic had clearly never gone for a three-a.m. jaunt in a ‘toratora’.

  They’d secured it from a man in one of Zamboanga’s sleazier bars, who claimed to be a gunrunner. Some soft, compelling words from Con in Tagalog had him eating out of her hand – the same hand that was clutching his ignition keys just five minutes later.

  ‘I’ve sent him home to sleep with orders to say nothing,’ Con told them. ‘No one will be able to tell what craft we’re using.’

  The souped-up fishing boat was maybe sixteen metres long from prow to stern. The cabin was compact and crowded – particularly with a radar set built in as an optional extra. Tye was at the wheel. Motti sat at a table behind her with a stack of maps, marking out their course. But it was Con working the hardest, practically swinging from a handgrip in the low ceiling as she turned between Motti, the maps and the radar screen, feeding through instructions to Tye, trying to keep her balance as the boat ploughed across the choppy sea. A bright red bulb glared down on the scene; red light didn’t mess with your night vision, so your pupils didn’t have to readjust to the dark. Out at sea in the seamless, shifting shadows, Jonah supposed losing that advantage could cost you big time.

  Feeling about as much use as a fifth wheel, he gathered his black poncho around him and stole outside to see how Patch was doing. Since the boy was hanging over the rail at the side of the boat looking like death, Jonah figured the answer was ‘not so good’.

  ‘Seasickness or nerves?’ Jonah asked.

  Patch groaned, then threw up noisily over the side of the boat.
<
br />   ‘Enigmatic answer. Like it.’ Jonah patted Patch’s back sympathetically and crossed to the prow of the boat.

  The night was hot, and the gibbous moon looked paper thin, shining eerily through a black mist of clouds. A few stars glimmered fitfully. The only other light came from distant fishing boats, parked out for the night, their decks lit by coloured strings of globe-sized bulbs hanging overhead.

  In contrast, Tye had left their boat’s lights switched off because it made them harder to spot, especially at speeds of sixty miles per hour. The bad news was, they would look suspicious if picked up by other ships’ radar. There was no good reason for a boat to be speeding at night, only a dozen dodgy ones. Pirates would most probably leave them alone, but the Filipino navy had at least ten ships patrolling the area. If their paths crossed just one of them, it would be Game Over.

  Jonah itched the stupid lump on his neck, and sighed. They were eight miles from shore. It didn’t sound like much. But Jonah watched the cresting waves swell and crash over the prow, and imagined floundering through that churning darkness, knowing you had no chance of reaching safety …

  Not that safety was waiting ahead of them at the end of this little trip.

  Tye and Con had sighted the Aswang just a few miles north of where Jonah had predicted after calculating the ship’s average cruising time, course to date and final destination. So here they were, ready to sweep in and start marauding like good’uns – without even knowing what treasure they’d be taking away with them …

  A wind was whipping up, and the boat lurched. The sound of Patch’s heaving carried across the deck, and Jonah decided to go back inside. He skidded starboard to the cabin door, and opened it against the wind. He wasn’t feeling brilliant himself.

  ‘Hope Patch is going to be OK,’ said Jonah, joining Tye beside the wheel. ‘Can’t see him opening much in that state.’

  ‘He’ll get it together,’ said Tye. She gave him an encouraging smile. This used to be her world, he supposed, night after night. It was just routine stuff for a smuggler, but it was going to take more than a smile to make Jonah feel confident.

  ‘We’re getting closer,’ Con reported, tapping her screen. ‘This dot is twenty-two miles away, towards the limits of the radar. But if it stays on this course, and we catch it up no trouble, then it’s definitely the target.’

  Jonah felt a hard frisson of nerves. ‘What if the navy intercept us?’

  ‘There’s over seven thousand islands in the Philippines, geek, with over half of ’em uninhabited.’ Motti didn’t look up from his maps. ‘We’ll find someplace to hide.’

  ‘And if pirates intercept us?’

  ‘We mess our pants.’

  All too soon, Jonah saw the cargo ship’s silhouette loom ahead of them beneath the purple-black contusions of cloud. Their little ship was lurking off the starboard bow, and Jonah stood watching from the deck with Patch and Motti.

  Patch looked up at Jonah, pasty-faced. ‘Bet now you’re wishing we’d gone for the beach party.’

  ‘Just a bit. We are sure that’s the Aswang, right?’ But even as Jonah spoke, the clouds parted enough for him to read the plain white legend near the prow. The walls of the ship were thick with great dark continents of rust; the moonlight made them look like old bloodstains.

  ‘That’s what we gotta climb. Maybe thirty metres.’ Motti pointed to six rugged-looking launchers he’d laid out on the deck. ‘US navy issue. They use compressed air to send up a titanium grappling hook on a Kevlar line. Noiseless and accurate – and ’cause we all know Patch could only throw his hook about a metre.’

  ‘Shut your hole,’ said Patch. ‘Why’s the thing so dark?’

  ‘Ship that size, if they light up the deck, they can’t see pirates coming alongside,’ said Motti. ‘But they’re bound to have –’

  A massive beam of white light arced out from the side of the ship, raking over the choppy surface. It scanned first one way, then another. Jonah heard the engines stir, felt the ship lurch as Tye turned the toratora, taking them out of range of the searchlights. As they circled round, he saw a spooky, eldritch glow from the port side of the ship, as similar spotlights skimmed the waves.

  ‘D’you think they heard us?’ Patch fretted.

  ‘Not over the sound of their own engines,’ said Motti. ‘Nah, that looked like a routine sweep, more a deterrent than anything else. We’re dark and we’re small and we’re too close for their radar to work properly.’

  ‘Then they don’t know we’re here,’ said Jonah, hoping it was true.

  ‘But now we know the range of those lights, and that there’s someone port and starboard manning those things.’ Motti nodded thoughtfully. ‘There’ll be a chief mate on board with responsibilities to watch everything for the captain, who’ll probably be sat on his ass someplace snoring. As for the rest of the crew … got no idea. A full crew complement could be as many as thirty if this was a working ship. Reckon we’ll only find a handful, but they’ll have radios and most likely be armed …’

  Suddenly, the spotlights cut off. ‘Missed us,’ Patch hissed triumphantly. The darkness grew absolute, and Jonah found it hard to tell where sea stopped and sky began.

  ‘Now’s the time to get going,’ Motti announced. ‘Where the hell’s Con?’

  ‘Here.’ She pushed open the door, dressed now in a black jumpsuit with her hair stuffed inside a black beanie. She was wearing fingerless leather gloves, and passed round three more sets. Tye eased off on the engines, holding them maybe two hundred metres off the port bow.

  Con watched Jonah, Motti and Patch put on their own gloves. ‘We run through the plan once more now, yes?’

  Motti nodded and drew them closer for their final briefing. ‘Me and Jonah shoot the hook and line and go up first. We take the deck. Any crew, we subdue.’ Motti pulled out a large wooden baton from a locker. ‘Found this. Oughtta help.’

  ‘Any spares?’ Patch asked.

  ‘Nope. But you can bet your ass the crew will be armed. We can always take their weapons.’ Motti gripped hold of it as if for comfort. ‘So, once we’ve secured the area, me and Jonah signal for you two to come up. While you’re climbing, we scout around for someone Con can put the ’fluence on to decoy the rest of the crew.’

  Con nodded. ‘Got it.’

  ‘With everyone distracted, Patch gets us below decks. We locate Coldhardt’s little gift, hope it ain’t too big to carry, and radio Tye for pick-up. Then we keep going down till we reach the bilge pump at the base of the hold. Patch’s exploding eyeball makes us a hole in the hull we can jump through, Tye pulls alongside in the toratora and gets us the hell out. Any questions?’

  Patch put his hand up in the air. ‘Please can I go to the toilet?’

  Motti cuffed him round the shoulder and turned to Jonah. ‘Geek, you can go tell Tye to take us in.’ He paused, gave a tiny, knowing smile. ‘But be back out here inside sixty seconds, OK?’

  Jonah nodded and ran to the cabin door. Tye was at the wheel. She turned as he entered. He ran straight over, put his arms round her waist. She grabbed him back and held him tightly.

  ‘I’m sorry I was a bitch,’ she whispered.

  ‘You weren’t!’ he protested. ‘I was stupid.’

  ‘You’re never stupid. I wish you were stupid.’ She looked at him. ‘But don’t be stupid up on that ship, ’K?’

  ‘I’ll be totally sensible,’ he promised. ‘As sensible as you can be scaling thirty metres of rust, anyway.’

  ‘You scared?’

  ‘God, yeah.’

  She kissed him. ‘Me too.’

  He glanced back at the door. ‘Motti says to take us in. Wish I didn’t have to –’

  ‘Go,’ she whispered, smiling. ‘It’s OK. We’ll pick up later. Promise.’

  ‘That’s what I call an incentive.’ Jonah pressed a clumsy kiss to her lips and ran out through the door, a swell of adrenaline rising through him. Yeah. We’re going to do this, he thought, snatching up his grappling h
ook launcher.

  He looked back at the closed cabin door.

  We’ve got to do this.

  He heard the note of the engines change as Tye opened the throttle and they rode the black waves, nudging closer and closer to the rusting stretch of the ship until it towered over them like a dark cliff. Motti shoved the baton through his belt and checked it was secure. Then he aimed his launcher up in the air and motioned Jonah to do the same.

  At his nod, Jonah braced himself for the recoil and fired. With a click and a hiss the line disappeared up into the darkness. ‘Please, please, please,’ Jonah murmured, bracing himself for the hook to come tumbling down on his head.

  It didn’t. He pulled down cautiously on the line and felt it grow tauter.

  Motti yanked a lot harder on his. ‘If this comes loose while we’re halfway up, it ain’t gonna be pretty.’ He gave one more tug then grunted satisfaction. ‘OK, then. Last one up kisses Patch’s ass. Move.’

  Jonah gripped the line, glad of his cushioning gloves, and launched himself into the air. His feet clunked loudly against the throbbing hull as he pulled himself up, one hand after the other. The grate of the huge ship engines, the hiss and churn of the swirling sea beneath him, his muttered prayers and swearing and the drum of his panicking heart all seemed to crowd in his ears. He kept looking up, dreading the sight of a Filipino face and a gun muzzle peering down at him. How long would it take to fall? Jonah drew comfort from the sight of Motti, a gangly shadow-spider matching him for pace as they scaled the side together.

  His arms were shaking and he was hoarse for breath as he reached the top. With a final effort he hauled himself through a gap in the safety railings enclosing the deck perimeter and dropped to the rusty floor. It was trembling harder than he was with the force of the engines.

  Jonah got up stealthily, his eyes now fully adjusted to the darkness. The long deck was a rusty jumble of boom chains, vents, backhoes and huge spools of wire. There was no sign of any crew – but now Motti was clambering quietly through the railings.

  ‘No one around,’ Jonah murmured, helping him up.