The Chaos Code

by Justin Richards

‘I tried to warn you,’ Aunt Jane was saying. She sighed, like she was upset with him. ‘You are so like your father though. You just won’t be told.’

  ‘Told what?’ Matt demanded. He was angry now. He didn’t know why, or who with. He just was. ‘Don’t hang out with her, she’s old enough to be your great-great-great-great-grandmother several times over? What? Didn’t stop you and Dad, did it? I saw your pictures. You can have fun, but I should keep well away – is that it?’

  Jane shook her head. ‘No, that isn’t what I meant. Just …’ She sighed again and turned away. ‘It’s true,’ she said, more quietly, more sadly. ‘Just that. Just believe it.’

  ‘I don’t even know what you’re asking me to believe. I don’t know if you’re lying to me now, or if you’ve been lying to me all along.’

  ‘I never wanted to deceive you,’ Robin said gently. ‘I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know we …’ She stopped, closed her eyes for a moment, then went on: ‘I can’t just tell everyone I meet that I’m getting on for two-hundred-years old, can I? They’d either lock me up or cut me open. Maybe both.’

  ‘That picture you went back for?’ Matt said. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt like it didn’t fit. ‘Elizabeth Venture, in 1833.’

  ‘My mother. Dad loved her so much. There was never anyone else, not before and not since. But she grew old and died. And so did my sister Lisa. You’ve seen her in the pictures. With me.’ She swallowed a sob and blinked away a tear.

  Matt remembered the old woman he had thought was a grandmother, with the dark-haired girl he had thought was an ancestor of Robin’s. He thought of the pictures in Aunt Jane’s scrapbook – the children playing. The man who looked like Julius Venture. The girl who looked like Robin.

  ‘I don’t get old,’ Robin said. ‘At least, not quickly. Another hundred years and I’ll look like I’m all grown up, and then I’ll stay like that for centuries. Getting older, but oh so slowly like Dad. Not like everyone else. Everyone gets old. Everyone except Dad and me. Yes, it’s us in the pictures and portraits. There are so many of Dad, so many things he’s collected down the years. The lonely boring years. Like the metal disc.’ She fixed her startling blue eyes on Matt. ‘He was there,’ she said. ‘He saw it happen. The eruptions and the floods. The end of Atlantis.’

  ‘And you’re really over a hundred and seventy years old?’

  Robin smiled. It was a thin, sad smile, but there was some warmth in it. Some friendship. ‘I was flying helicopters before you were born,’ she said. ‘I played with Jane and your Dad when they were children. I’ve watched them grow up. But I stay the same. It’s difficult to understand, I know.’

  ‘Your father never understood,’ Jane said. ‘Not really. But then …’ She suddenly turned to Robin, like a small girl might turn to her older sister for comfort.

  Robin held her close as she cried quietly, and finished the sentence for her: ‘But then, he was in love. And he did try. He tried so hard to understand, to work it all out. That’s why he got interested in archaeology.’

  ‘Dad?’ That sounded harder to believe than anything else. Matt couldn’t imagine Dad loving anyone. Except Mum. And that was all over and done with. Dad was a loner, he didn’t do relationships. ‘He couldn’t have been at your christening,’ Matt realised, his mind setting off at a tangent rather than following the thoughts through.

  ‘He was giving us a clue,’ Robin agreed.

  ‘Telling us that Harper wasn’t to be trusted.’

  ‘That too.’

  Aunt Jane had pulled away from Robin and was dabbing her eyes with a tissue from her sleeve. ‘What else?’ she asked. And Matt realised what was odd about the way Aunt Jane was with Robin – she treated her not as a child, not even as an equal, but more like an older, wiser friend.

  ‘What happens at a christening?’ Robin asked.

  ‘You get your Christian name,’ Matt said.

  ‘What else?’ Robin prompted.

  ‘Well, water. The …’ He hesitated. Had she seen that back then? Was this how her father had worked out the truth about the churches of Valdeholm? ‘The sign of the cross,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right. Arnold wanted us to find the Treasure of St John. And he wanted to warn us about Harper. He knew we’d work it out from his clue, just as he left clues for you on that website.’

  ‘My clues were a bit easier.’

  ‘Different, maybe,’ she corrected him. ‘You have a way of looking at the world, of analysing it and working things out. Dad and me …’ She shrugged. ‘We just know. Our minds make different connections, see different patterns in things. That’s all.’

  ‘We used to hunt for treasure when we were kids,’ Aunt Jane said. She had recovered most of her composure now and was leaning against the side of the table. ‘You father loved it. We’d leave clues for each other to work out. It was so funny how Robin would work out some things just like that.’ She clicked her fingers. ‘But others, which I thought were so easy, she couldn’t get at all. I imagine she thought the same about us.’

  Robin nodded. ‘Let’s find treasure,’ she said. ‘You said that, Matt. I assume you and Arnie did the same.’

  Matt nodded. ‘He’s still hunting for treasure now. Poor Dad. He never grew up either. Just grew old.’

  ‘Not that old,’ Aunt Jane said sternly. Then she smiled. ‘And we have treasure to find too, don’t forget.’

  ‘Yes,’ Robin agreed. ‘Time to get back to work.’

  It was difficult to concentrate. Matt was copying the symbols from the other side of the clay disc, while Robin and Jane went through books and papers and manuscripts comparing old script with the symbols Matt had already copied.

  His mind kept wandering. He thought of what Robin must have seen, what she must have done. Had she really lived through two world wars? He remembered her describing the Russians tipping their gold into a deep lake – how she’d sounded like she’d been there and seen it. He felt somehow cheated that she could be so much older than him. He’d thought she was a friend.

  She was still a friend, he decided. Nothing would change that. He liked her. He liked her a lot. Only … And it was a big ‘only’ and it made him think of Dad.

  Even so, he almost missed it. He actually copied the symbol – mechanically, without really looking at it. Just letting his hand do the work. Only as he paused and checked back over what he’d done did Matt see it.

  The shape was different from the others because it looked more like a letter than an abstract symbol. Like a capital E, but with a line across the top. He hesitated, wondering why it looked familiar. Was there a similar symbol on the other side of the disc? Or had he seen it in one of the books that Robin had hunted out?

  The answer came like Robin had said. Like a pattern – like a jigsaw slotting suddenly into place to give a bigger picture that the individual pieces didn’t show. Matt felt the blood draining from his face. He shivered.

  ‘I think we’ve got a problem,’ he said, and explained what had just occurred to him.

  Robin and Jane each examined the clay disc closely.

  ‘Could be a coincidence,’ Jane said. But she didn’t sound convinced.

  ‘What do you think, Matt?’ Robin asked.

  ‘It’s LFT,’ he told them. ‘Has to be, doesn’t it? It’s Dad’s shorthand symbol for “Let’s Find Treasure,” the capital letters all laid over each other.’

  ‘Go on,’ Robin said. She was watching him closely, and Matt guessed that she had known in an instant what that meant, though he had to work it out.

  ‘So this isn’t a clay copy of the disc that we found. I think this is the original disc.’ He held it up.

  ‘But that isn’t thousands of years old,’ Jane pointed out.

  ‘No, it isn’t. And since it has Dad’s own shorthand on it, his mark, he must have made it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was wondering that too. It didn’t strike me before and it should have. Why did Dad have a clay c
opy of the disc, rather than an impression? Or a plaster copy taken from a mould he’d made? I mean, how would he copy the disc in clay?’

  ‘Go on,’ Aunt Jane prompted.

  ‘The answer is that I don’t think he did,’ Matt said. He was still working it all out himself, talking through it as his mind followed the train of thought. ‘What he did was, he made a clay disc, and from that he took a mould. It’s probably in his study somewhere buried under a heap of junk. Anyway, wherever it is, he used that mould to make another disc. The disc we found on Valdeholm. So what Harper has got isn’t an ancient key to Atlantis that is going to unlock the final secrets of the ancients for him so he can complete his model, or whatever it is.’

  Matt was grinning now, proud of his reasoning and also proud of his dad. ‘Harper’s got a fake, a made-up disc that Dad planted and led us to find. He’d already been to Valdeholm, like we thought. He found the treasure, took the real disc – if there ever was one – and replaced it with a fake for Harper to find. To throw him off the scent, lay a false trail. We can’t decipher these symbols and neither can Harper, because they’re just made up by Dad. It’s gibberish.’

  ‘Which is fine,’ Aunt Jane said. ‘Until Harper realises he’s been tricked.’

  ‘Then he’ll be after the real disc,’ Robin agreed.

  ‘If there is one,’ Matt reminded them.

  ‘Oh, there is one,’ Robin said. ‘We can be sure of that.’

  Matt looked at her closely, staring deep into her dark, blue eyes. ‘What haven’t you told us?’ he asked.

  But before Robin could answer, the doorbell rang.

  Once again, they met in Venture’s study. It reminded Matt of the first meeting with Harper, except that instead they were joined by the rather more rotund form of Mephistopheles Smith. And Robin’s Dad was absent. She had taken his place behind the desk, Smith sitting where Harper had been on the other side of it. Matt could tell they were firm friends.

  Smith listened and nodded and did not interrupt as Robin told him what had happened. Matt waited for him to leap to his feet and declare it was impossible, or stupid, or the imaginings of a teenage girl. But he never did. It slowly dawned on him that Smith knew the truth about Robin and her father. He was an old friend of the family – why wouldn’t he? Everyone knew. Aunt Jane, Matt’s Dad, Mephistopheles Smith.

  Everyone except Matt.

  ‘Robin thinks there is a real disc that Harper will want when he finds he’s been duped,’ Matt said as soon as Robin had finished.

  Smith nodded, though his expression was hard to read behind his dark glasses. Matt wondered if he ever took them off. ‘It seems reasonable,’ the man said. ‘After all, for whatever reason, Harper was expecting to find such a disc.’

  ‘And it’s another reason to plant the fake,’ Robin said. ‘Give him what he was expecting anyway. Less suspicious. He must have found references to the disc in some other source and realised it could lead him to the knowledge he needs. Besides …’ She hesitated, and again Matt was sure she knew more than she had told them.

  ‘Besides?’ he prompted.

  ‘We have Dad’s notes,’ she said, ‘though you have to realise he was working it out still, guessing at some things and filling in the blanks in what he knew. Trying to discover what Harper was really up to. But from what Dad did manage to work out, the way it works is this. They didn’t have computers back in the old times. So their model wasn’t bits and bytes, it was a physical thing, created from the elements. Principally made from the earth itself. A miniature recreation – a universe in little. A copy of the earth and the heavens in the architecture and the locations of the ancient sites, with the discs as a vital component. That’s what Harper is trying to recreate inside his computer. He wants a computer model of the world as accurate and as powerful as the physical model the ancients were building.’

  ‘So?’ Aunt Jane said.

  ‘So how do you think they planned to use that model?’ Robin asked.

  ‘All right,’ Matt said. ‘Tell us how.’

  ‘Remember they were trying to predict things, but they were also trying to manipulate events – people, places, things. To do that they needed to focus the model, to define exactly what they wanted to manipulate.’

  ‘Like hair for a voodoo doll,’ Matt remembered. ‘So that the doll is tied, linked in some way, to the specific person you want to affect.’

  ‘Exactly. You have to sort of aim the model – target it at the part of the world you’re trying to change. Now there are two ways of doing it. By a direct link of some kind, like with the voodoo doll and a lock of hair. Entanglement. That’s how Harper creates and controls his elementals, the creatures he set on us. They are linked to his computer models and he gives them instructions from his laptop. Like playing a computer game.’

  ‘Avatars,’ Matt said. ‘Creatures you give instructions to or move round with your mouse or whatever. He sets them off to complete some task and leaves them to it like the little people in Sim City or whatever.’

  ‘And the other way of specifying what you want to affect,’ Smith said, ‘would be by giving the location. Defining exactly where the events are to take place.’

  ‘Like map coordinates?’ Matt said.

  ‘That would give the place. You also need to give the time,’ Robin said. ‘You need to specify the moment when you want the effect to take place. Like setting a timer. And that, Harper cannot do – not yet. He can only affect the things he has fully modelled and in his computer code.’

  ‘So, how did the ancients do it?’

  ‘With the discs. I told you they were vital to the whole thing. And the reason is that the metal disc we had here was used to define the exact time of events that are to be shown and can then be manipulated, changed. It’s like a playback, except it could be future events. Any time that you can define using that disc to set the exact year, month, day. Right down to the hours, minutes, seconds … But Katherine Feather took it. So Harper has it now.’

  ‘And what about location?’ Smith said.

  ‘That requires another, different disc, that specifies geographical coordinates. One vitally important disc that has been lost for millennia. Or so my father reckons.’

  ‘The disc that Harper is now after,’ Matt said.

  ‘But what can he do with it if he gets it?’ Aunt Jane asked.

  ‘Assuming he realises how the discs work and what they are for, then he can manipulate, control, predict anything,’ Robin said. ‘If Harper knows what he is doing, he can recreate the discs inside his computer model – make his own versions of them, just as he has been modelling the ancient sites themselves. If he does that …’ She pursed her lips for a moment before saying: ‘Well, then he can probably predict what we’re doing right now.’

  ‘Even without this second geography disc?’ Jane asked.

  ‘We have to assume so,’ Smith told them. ‘If he has the rest of it worked out, he may be clever enough to solve the missing pieces himself rather than rely on copying what has already been done. It’s like a code, and he is dangerously close to cracking it – to discovering how to control and harness the chaos that is our world rather than just the elemental avatars he has now. The secret is, I suppose, to be unpredictable.’

  ‘And find the other disc, the real last disc before he does,’ Robin said.

  ‘Dad knows where it is,’ Matt said. ‘That’s why he created the fake. Has to be. Remember all those times we thought he’d jumped to conclusions or made a lucky guess?’ He shook his head. ‘Wasn’t luck at all, was it. He already knew where the real disc was, and he was leading us – or rather Harper – away from it. Things, clues, he ignored. It was because he didn’t want to draw attention to them.’

  ‘You could be right,’ Robin agreed.

  ‘Does that mean we can work out where the disc is?’ Jane asked. ‘If so, we can still get to it before Harper.’

  Robin was already working at the computer. ‘There was a point,’ she said, ‘wh
ere the Hospitallers split up. There was a lead that Arnie ignored, remember? An entry in a journal. A sighting. It’s here somewhere … The possible locations … He discounted Rosslyn in Scotland, which is probably right. But there was also the possibility of the disc ending up in Pomponini in Italy, or Pont St Jean in the south of France.’

  ‘I’ll have them both checked,’ Smith said. ‘But I suspect we are too late.’ He went to the door, and spoke quickly and quietly to the large man in sunglasses standing outside.

  ‘What makes you think we’re too late?’ Matt asked when he had finished.

  ‘At some point,’ Smith said, ‘Harper must realise the disc is not the one he is after and that he has been tricked. At that point, he will be as able to trace back the clues as we are. Your father knows that.’

  ‘That just means we have to hurry, to get there first.’

  Smith held up a pudgey finger. ‘Another thing. To create an authentic-seeming disc, your father must have had some idea what he was making a copy of. You can’t expect a forger to create a fake painting if he’s never seen the artist’s real original work.’

  ‘You’re saying that Arnold must have seen the original disc,’ Jane said. ‘So that he knew what Harper was expecting to find.’

  ‘It seems likely. He must have had a good idea of what the real one looked like so he could make a convincing fake with useless symbols on. That and his determination that Harper should not find the original would both suggest that Doctor Stribling did indeed discover the disc himself. It doesn’t matter where, because he didn’t leave it where he found it.’

  ‘So where is it?’ Robin asked. ‘Did he hide it somewhere else? Or destroy it, even?’

  ‘It’s a relic, it’s old,’ Matt said. ‘He’d want to look after it, keep it safe.’

  ‘And he wouldn’t leave it at his house,’ Robin agreed.

  ‘He was expecting Harper to come for him.’

  The realisation came to them all at the same moment. Aunt Jane was the first to speak.

  ‘Oh, the silly old fool,’ she said.

  ‘Typical,’ Robin agreed.

  Matt shook his head in disbelief. ‘He hasn’t hidden it anywhere, has he?’ Matt said. ‘Dad’s still got it with him. At the pyramid. With Harper.’