by Tim Ellis
'You're trying to get me into serious trouble, Miss Chevalier.'
'I think you can call me Justine now. What should I call you?'
'Quigg.'
'Haven't you got a first name?'
'No.'
'So, what do you say?'
'Why me?'
'I like you, I like older men and I've heard stories.'
He raised an eyebrow. 'I'm not that old.'
'Older than me. Most men my age are juvenile idiots. So, I'm combining my need for regular sex with a reasonably attractive and intelligent man, with my desire to be a famous journalist.'
'And I'm your stepping stone to greatness, am I?'
'If you like. You can go onto those comparative websites and do a search if you want, but I don't think you'll find a better deal anywhere else.'
'What stories have you heard?'
'I went into the Duke of Cornwall pub just round the corner from the police station where some of the officers congregate after work and got friendly with a group of female officers. It's surprising what stories you hear.'
'Oh?'
'I'm sorry. I couldn't possibly say.' She scratched a dribble of cream inching across her right nipple.
Helpfully, he licked it off.
'We should get a shower?' she suggested.
'Yes. I am a bit sticky.'
She passed him a towel that she retrieved from further along the worktop. 'So you don't drip cream all through the apartment.' After grabbing a towel herself, sliding off the worktop and wrapping it around herself she said, 'Follow me.' She led him through the flat and into a walk-in shower that had been built on the back. 'A disabled woman used to live here, so I have a walk-in shower.'
He dropped the towel on the floor and followed her in.
She turned the water on, used the controls to adjust the spray to the right temperature, and then sprayed him and herself to remove the slime from the strawberries and cream.
They then washed each other using a shower gel.
Already his erection was as tall as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. What was wrong with it? He seemed to have no control over the damned thing. It only wanted what it wanted and didn't care about what he wanted. What did he want?
There was an airbed leaning against the wall. She kicked it and manoeuvred it onto to the floor.
'Lie down on your front,' she said.
'Is that really necessary?'
'You're my first test subject.'
'That doesn't sound like something I should be getting involved in. You're not one of those creatures from a rubbish horror movie who sucks the blood from their prey, eats them, or infests them with spores are you?'
She grabbed his penis. 'Would you really care if I was?'
With difficulty, he lay down on his front. 'No, probably not.'
She dribbled a clear liquid from a bottle over the back of his body. 'I've been teaching myself how to perform a Nuru massage. It's a Japanese erotic massage technique.'
'A massage! Yes, that would be good. I have had a stressful day.'
'You'll be my first test subject. The liquid is Nuru gel with nori seaweed, grapefruit extract, herbs and aloe vera.'
'Do I need to sign a consent form?'
'Not tonight.' She squatted on the back of his thighs and began rubbing her thighs up and down to apply the gel. Next, she lay on top of him and began sliding her body up and down, gliding into his lower back and buttocks. She sat up and started applying more pressure by gripping his thighs with hers, gliding up and down his back with her buttocks and using circular motions. Using her palms, she put her weight onto the front of her body and began sliding over his buttocks and using her feet to massage his back. Then, she lay on her front, wrapped her hands around his ankles and used them as handholds so that she could glide up and down his body. 'Turn over.'
He did as she instructed.
She continued to massage him as he slipped inside her and then, within the space of a hummingbird's beating wings, he ejaculated.
'Well, that did the trick,' he said.
'Marks out of ten?'
'Twelve. And for what it's worth, I think you'd earn a lot more money doing Nuru massages than writing newspaper articles.'
'Do you really think so?'
'Definitely.'
'Maybe I'll charge you next time.'
'You already are charging me.'
'Oh yes! So I am.'
They showered and had sex again.
He got dressed and just before he was about to leave she said, 'So, do we have a deal then?'
He shook his head. 'I feel as though I'm on the road to Hell, Miss Chevalier. But yes, we have a deal.'
While she made shorthand notes, he told her what had happened during the day.
'Weird!'
'You can say that again.'
'Weird!'
***
Lucy climbed down into the tunnel, retrieved the sim card from Delilah Garrett's phone, returned to her room and inserted the card into the reader attached to her computer.
Surely Jack was making it all up. How could she have missed a phone app?
It took her a while, but she eventually found a line of code that retrieved an app from the darknet when an incoming call with a hash at the end of the number was received. The code had been hidden in the phone's operating system. Very ingenious! Something she'd never heard of, or seen before. Not only that, but it meant that there was no way to trace the incoming call beyond the app, because it was simply an app on the darknet – nothing more, nothing less. Once a call ended, no records were stored on the phone or in the app, so the Chairman remained anonymous and untraceable. It made sense though that only one person was in control. Who ever heard of an enterprise being run by a committee?
Her father was right, she'd missed it. She was getting sloppy in her old age. And she was old now – twenty years old! Her birthday had been last month. Nobody had remembered, not even her father. Maybe she'd been distracted by the fact that she was no longer a teenager, but had become an adult without anybody noticing; or maybe it was the possibility of Quigg getting her pregnant; or maybe it was all Quigg's fault after all. It certainly sounded like it was something he might be the root cause of.
And then there was the shadow board! What the hell had gone wrong there? How had she missed a whole nine people? None of the officers she'd tortured had mentioned a shadow board. Maybe they just didn't know.
So, now she was forced to correct her mistakes, but unusually for her she had no idea where to begin. After hacking into everything belonging to the dead police officers and the Board of Directors, which included their Smart TVs; baby monitors; smart cameras; mobile phones; wi-fi routers; landline voicemails . . . she'd found nothing that had offered any clue about a Chairman or a shadow Board of Directors.
She sent Li Xue an email, who responded almost immediately:
You look for the money. I'll look for the Chairman and the shadow board.
Okay. Great to work with you.
And you. Come across any clues about them?
I found this darknet link in a partially deleted folder on the Human Engineered Software server entitled: "Vackra Arter". I don't know if it's connected to the enterprise: http://88rjude5ro4of9a36.onion/
Thanks. If you need any help, let me know.
Of course.
She went onto the darknet site. A message in white type against a black background appeared:
Hello,
We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in the image below. Find the message, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few who will make it all the way.
Good luck!
She looked at the image of a dog. It wasn't the first time she'd come across digital steganography: The concealment of secret information within a digital file – hiding secrets in plain sight. Mostly, it was used to conceal child pornography. Was that what was hidden in
the image? Was the site a child pornography site? Or would it lead to the people she was searching for?
She put the image through a program called 7-Zip that extracted the plaintext message from the image and displayed it with a line of meaningless letters:
Tiberius Claudius Caesar
xgbnxeqgntigzcra5gujfvpqkrxc43qtyxytj6u2kgynoc7cx6fzixwzkjekj
It didn't take her long to realise that the meaningless letters probably made up a Caesar cipher, which was used by Julius Caesar in private correspondence around 60 BC and replaced characters by a certain number of positions down the alphabet. As Claudius was the fourth emperor, she shifted the letters "four" positions along, which revealed another web address buried in the image's code:
http://bkfrbiukrxmkdgve5kynjztuovbg43uxcbcxn6y2okcrsg7gb6jdmbad.onion/
She clicked the link. A picture of a duck appeared with the message:
Whoops! Just decoys here. Looks like you're not one of the intelligent people we're looking for.
The message made her angry. She threw the wireless mouse against the wall and screamed, 'Bastards!' Who the hell were they to tell her she wasn't one of the intelligent people they were looking for? She was more intelligent than intelligent people.
Once she'd calmed down, she realised that maybe the decoy was a decoy to a literal clue. After numerous attempts to crack it, she ran the image of the duck through an online stenographic decryption program called OutGuess, which revealed another hidden message on the news forum Reddit. Encrypted lines from a book – The Lady of the Fountain, a poem about King Arthur taken from The Mabinogion, a collection of pre-Christian medieval Welsh manuscripts – which were being posted every few hours, but there were also strange symbols comprised of several lines and dots, which she soon discovered were Mayan numbers. When she translated them, they led her to another cipher.
It was like a scavenger hunt. Whether it related to her search for the "Chairman" or the "Shadow Board", she had no idea and she didn't care – she was hooked on the hunt. It was the best fun she'd had in ages. Not only that, the puzzles were getting much more difficult and required increasingly complex decryption techniques. They began branching out into hexadecimal characters, reverse-engineering and prime numbers. Pictures of a cicada insect, that was used in Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs, began appearing on every page. The cicada insect only emerged every prime number of years – thirteen or seventeen – to avoid synchronising with the life cycles of their predators.
The more puzzles she solved and the deeper she travelled into the darknet, the more she wondered what the scavenger hunt was all about and who was behind it. So far, the puzzles had featured a poem, a tuneless guitar ditty, and a clue on a lamppost in Hawaii. She had solved the puzzles using number theory, philosophy, classical music, the Victorian occult and Mayan numerology. And now, the puzzle displayed on the screen involved cyberpunk writer William Gibson – specifically his 1992 poem "Agrippa", which was a book of the dead. It was infamous for the fact that it was only ever published on a three and a half inch floppy disk, and was programmed to erase itself after being read once.
Was the scavenger hunt leading her to the "Chairman"? Or was it something else entirely? Such as a sinister recruitment drive by the CIA? The NSA? Or GCHQ?
She decoded the "Agrippa" puzzle to reveal a different type of message:
Call us: 0207-938-1360
Had she reached the end of the scavenger hunt? Had she found the Chairman? The Shadow Board? Had she become one of the intelligent people?
It was a London number in Kensington. She called it and listened. An answering machine's robotic voice told her to find the prime numbers in the original image. She returned to the image of the dog and found the prime numbers. After various dead ends, she multiplied them together to reveal a new prime number and a website:
845145127.com
A countdown clock and a huge picture of a cicada confirmed she was still in the hunt.
The countdown clock was counting down and had three hours four minutes to go – that would be midnight GMT. Three hours four minutes! Jesus! She had to wait three hours and four minutes. Jesus! She didn't think she could wait that long. She got up and paced around. Three fucking hours and . . . three minutes. Jesus!
Just then, there was a knock on the door, it opened before she could tell them to fuck off.
Duffy came in.
'Not now, Duffy.'
'We're all about to sit down with popcorn and watch the recording of the séance.'
'Not now, Duffy.'
'Everybody's there. As well as popcorn we have crisps, ice cream, coke, beers . . .'
'Which fucking part of "Not now, Duffy" don't you understand, Duffy?'
'You might be able to . . .'
She screamed.
Duffy left and shut the door behind her.
What was she going to do for three hours and two minutes?
Popcorn! She liked popcorn, she liked crisps . . . In fact, there wasn't anything on Duffy's list that she didn't like.
She'd already seen the recording of the séance, but she couldn't solve any more puzzles while the clock was counting down. Jesus! Three hours and one minute. How long was that in real time? What was going to happen when the clock reached zero?
Popcorn, crisps and beer would give her something to munch on while she thought about what had just happened, where it was leading her and what she was going to do next.
Chapter Twelve
'I thought you weren't coming?' Duffy said, pulling a face.
'I changed my mind,' Lucy said, sitting on the sofa next to Ruth. 'I'm allowed to change my mind, aren't I?'
'Of course. Just don't be grumpy about it.'
'Grumpy! Me?'
They all looked at her and nodded.
'You're confusing me with someone who gives a shit.'
Just then, Jack came in from the kitchen singing like a rat drowning in syrup and carrying a plate with a cake that had a lit candle in the centre:
Happy Birthday to You
Squashed tomatoes and stew,
Bread and butter in the gutter,
Happy Birthday to You.
He placed the plate on the coffee table in front of his daughter.
They all clapped, cheered and wished her a happy birthday.
'Only a month late, daddy dearest,' Lucy said.
'Your birthday is today.'
'Today last month,' she threw back at him.
Jack passed her a crumpled birth certificate that he took out of the back pocket of his jeans. 'See for yourself.'
She'd never seen her actual birth certificate before and thought it had been lost. All she had was a forged one she'd paid five hundred pounds for. She stared at the date. It was today's date all right – December 2 – twenty years ago. 'Then why have I been celebrating my birthday on November 2 my whole life?'
Jack shrugged. 'Blame your mother. All the drugs and alcohol she consumed probably addled her brain.'
She only had a vague recollection of her mother, and had no idea if she was alive or dead. Between the ages of two and a half and thirteen she was passed around foster homes and Local Authority residential units like a parcel in a party game. At the age of thirteen, she'd run away and lived in squats.
'Are you sure this is my birth certificate?'
'That's your name on it, isn't it – Lucy Fifi Neilson?'
'Fifi!' Quigg said with a smile.
The others laughed.
She glared at them. 'I have loaded guns that I'm prepared to use indiscriminately.'
They stopped laughing.
'Blame your mother,' Jack said. 'I assumed she liked the name.'
'That's convenient for you, isn't it. She's not here and can't defend herself, so none of it is your fault.'
'I wasn't even in the country at the time. It was a drunken one-night stand. All I know is that her first name was Lola and she came from Devon. I didn't know she was pregnant, and I didn't know I had a daughter until years la
ter. Anyway, I'd love to stay here and chat about your lost childhood that I know nothing about, but I have things to do.' He passed her a nine-inch square unwrapped brown cardboard box. 'Happy birthday.'
'What is it?'
'A box. It'll make up for all the years I was never there for you.'
'I doubt that.'
He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. 'Have a great evening.'
'Bound to.'
He left as silently as he'd arrived.
They all gave her birthday cards and presents.
'Someone could have said.'
'We all thought you would know when your birthday was,' Ruth said.
'You'd think.'
'Aren't you going to open your cards and presents, Fifi?' Quigg said.
'The next person who calls me that gets buried alive in the garden with a thousand cockroaches for company.'
'What about the presents?' Duffy asked.
Lucy grunted. 'Let's just watch this stupid movie, shall we?'
'Blow out the candle and make a wish,' Ruth said.
Lucy leaned forward and blew out the candle.
Ruth cut the cake into four, put each quarter on a separate plate and passed the pieces out.
'What did you wish for?' Quigg asked.
'That I lived alone.'
'You don't mean that.'
'Every word. And why does it smell of strawberries in here?'
Nobody had an answer.
Duffy handed out the popcorn and put the other sundries on the coffee table. 'Help yourself when you want,' she said.