by Gabriel Kron
The ten digit code plus his own number allowed Mark to open a document sent to him only ten minutes before. The document showed a bank sort code and an eight digit account number. Following the account details was a single digit number that told Mark the actions he was to undertake.
The level required now was five. Level 5 meant total deletion of the account and had been designed to paralyse the target financially.
Mark entered the account details into the first set of utilities. This stage took less than thirty seconds and returned as much information about the target as could be retrieved from the account.
Mark now had at his disposal the target’s name, home address, business address, phone numbers, proofs of ID (image file-names included), email address, sample signature, available funds and End of Day balances.
This was scarily easy. Using another utility, programmed as a trawler search engine, other information about the target was gathered. Now Mark had obtained family names, dates of birth, previous addresses, open ports, IP addresses, credit ratings, plus a myriad of random links and references.
Ten minutes after receiving the target information, Mark’s finger poised over the Return key.
He tapped it and the job was done. The target no longer existed electronically.
Somewhere, someone was about to find they couldn’t use any of their bank accounts, cards, phone or internet logins.
What normally would have taken Mark hours or even days to accomplish, now took just ten minutes.
Wartburg Hotel. Saturday night. Day 2.
“I always look forward to our proper games of chess, Daniel.” Dominik Becker moved his black Queen diagonally across the board. “Check.”
“Yeah yeah, I know,” I said and castled my King. “You know I can’t cheat when we’re face to face,” I said, reminding Dominik of how I managed to beat him once by getting the computer to play my side of the game when we played on-line against each other.
We were sitting opposite each other in front of one of the many shelves that Dominik Becker had filled with books on his favourite subject, history. An old chess set was on a small table between us, along with two glasses of beer.
Dominik Becker was in his mid-fifties, five foot ten, athletic build. He had owned Hotel Wartburg since 2000, the year after both his parents had died. He was their only son and heir and had been left a considerable estate, enough for him to give up being a concierge at other hotels and for him and his wife, Maria, to buy outright the Hotel Wartburg.
I had first stayed there in 2001, when I attended a works conference regarding new legislation in the sector I was writing software for at the time, insurance. It was so boring and useless that I left the conference and got talking to Dominik, who gave me plenty of recommendations of the sights to see, and whilst exploring the delights of the old German towns, I had purchased an antique wooden chess set. Nothing fancy, but old and well made. Dominik had challenged me to a game as soon as he saw it and the rest was history. I had lost that game, along with nearly every other game we had played since; Dominik was a formidable strategist across the board.
There was a knock at the door and Dominik’s wife, Maria came in.
“Ah, guten Abend, Daniel, schön, dich wieder zu sehen. Dominik, Abendessen ist bereit, isst Daniel bei uns?” Maria smiled, she knew my German wasn’t good and always encouraged me to speak more of it when I visited. I had no idea what she said.
Dominik decided to play the killer move at that point. “Check mate — mate,” he said trying to emulate a London accent.
I ate well and enjoyed every last morsel of the Rindergulasch Maria had cooked. I doubted I would find better food in the whole of Stuttgart. That’s what I told Maria, and it wasn’t a lie. We spent the rest of the evening talking, playing chess and drinking more of Dominik’s own home-brewed beer.
Wartburg Hotel. Sunday Day 3.
I woke before dawn, showered and collected some breakfast and strong coffee before setting straight out again on the search. It took less than ten minutes to drive straight back to Freiberg. A morning mist, with the sun starting to burn it off, felt like a good omen for the day.
I continued the seemingly random search pattern marking the route taken in bright red marker.
It was just as I was leaving Remsek that suddenly something caught my eye. I slammed on the brakes and reversed the car a hundred yards back up the road. Something had registered, but I wasn’t entirely sure what until it came back into view.
Tucked behind a large overgrown holly tree was an old wooden sign hanging from a tall wooden post. The tree was now partly obscuring the sign, but the lettering was clear: Locke.
My heart started to pound faster as the excitement built. I couldn’t believe it, I had finally found the place, or I thought I had.
I reversed a few more yards and pulled the car into the entrance to a large cobblestoned yard. Just beyond the hedge row, there stood the building I was looking for. A brick-built barn with high windows and a corrugated roof. The front door had been changed, but everything else was just as it was in the old photograph on the post card to Jack.
I needed to record this as it happened. To me, finding the location was a big deal. It meant that the first real test of Jack Welch’s story had passed. Grabbing my camera, I left the car in the yard and walked back to the road entrance to take photos of the Anitiquitäten Locke Emporium sign.
It was badly weathered, the black background cracked and peeling, but the red and gold lettering had faired a little better.
The place looked closed. In fact it looked like it was shut down, so I was very surprised when I tried the front door and found that it opened. As I entered I was met by a treat for all the senses and quite a contrast to the bleak exterior.
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata played softly in the background of a large room as tall as the rafters. It was crammed full of second hand furniture, light fittings, and architectural items as well as old tools, radios, books, butler sinks, millstones — and even a headstone.
The walls were covered in old enamelled advertising signs, some a little rusty. Paintings, mirrors and flags hung in the spaces. The lighting was low key. A string of bulbs hung along the centre beam of the room, their yellow glow creating a warm atmosphere. They reminded me of fairground lights.
This was truly a treasure trove of goodies, a fair few of which I would normally have enquired about buying, but I was looking for one thing in particular. The low level of lighting meant that there were many dark corners and I wished I had brought my torch in with me. I took a few random photographs, mostly with no flash as I wanted to try and capture the warm peaceful ambiance.
The lights. It was the lights that caught my attention. Were they pulsating slightly? I stared at some of the bulbs. I could clearly see the bright glowing elements through the clear glass. They were indeed pulsating. This probably meant that they were being powered by a generator as grid mains wouldn’t pulsate. I listened carefully for the characteristic drumming sound made by most generators but I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the radio.
I continued to browse round the shop. Tall wooden shelves formed an island in the middle of the floor and were filled with a collection of old books, candles, lamps, quite a few old cameras and hand tools. There were nice examples of good quality antique furniture amongst more practical examples of oak and pine.
Towards the rear of the shop was even darker and I again regretted not remembering the torch. I was about to go and get it when I realised I wasn’t alone.
Behind a large oak desk in the corner of the room sat an older man, perhaps in his late eighties dressed in a white shirt and waistcoat but no tie. The lamp on the desk was off and the lack of light meant I hadn’t seen him until I was literally standing right in front of his desk.
“Guten Tag, Herr,” I said, but the old man didn’t answer or move. Leaning in a bit closer it was apparent he was asleep. I coughed to try and get his attention. He didn’t flinch, but did open
his eyes.
“Guten Tag,” I said again. “Sprechen sie Englisch? Bitte.”
“Nein,” he answered and gestured for me to look around the room.
I pointed to the lights and asked, in English, how they were powered. I didn’t expect him to understand, but thought he might realise somehow that it was the lights I was interested in. He just kept saying “nein, nein” gesturing towards the shop. I wondered if he was trying to tell me to leave.
How I wished I had managed to learn more German over the last five years. I was able to get by in an everyday way as long as it wasn’t conversational and didn’t stray from the standard touristy expressions.
I decided to go and get my torch. If there was anything here to investigate then light would be useful in finding it.
I had one of those torches that supposedly was the equivalent of one million candles. As I browsed round the shop, the torch shed light on various items of interest I hadn’t seen already, but nothing that looked like a generator. I had little idea what a Lockridge Device would look like, other than it was in a large sewing machine shaped box. Was it really likely that the generator would be in the shop anyway, even if it did exist?
The old man had lit the old oil lamp on his desk and started reading a newspaper.
I looked at the lights again, the pulsating lights, but there was something else about them, something slightly unconventional. With the torch I was able to follow the wire that connected the bulbs back along the beam. The wire was a lot thinner than normal mains flex, but was easy enough to follow given its shiny coppery lacquer, it ran from bulb to bulb and then down the wall and into the floor.
There was obviously a basement, where a generator could be running these lights. I couldn’t help but think that mains lights would normally be a lot brighter than these.
I tried asking the old man again about a generator, pointing to the lights and showing him the wire that went through the floor, but his English was far worse than my German which was not good enough.
I showed the old man the postcard Jack had given me. He took it and looked at the picture, then turned it over and read the back. The message wasn’t anything special. I had tried to translate it but the handwriting was hard to read and faded somewhat. It was, however, obviously addressed to Jack and signed Kaspar. Was the old man Kaspar I wondered?
He sat up and looked from me to the card a couple of times. He placed the card on the table and then quite surprisingly pulled an Apple iPhone from his waistcoat pocket. It was quite surreal, this old man in an antiques shop where nothing was less than fifty years old, with an oil lamp burning and valve radio playing, owning and using a smartphone.
He stabbed at the touch screen, put the phone to his ear and said something I couldn’t make out. He then handed the phone to me.
I was greeted by a woman’s voice, “Hallo, my grandfather has asked me to speak to you, can I help you?” she said in heavily accented English.
“Thank you, I hope so. I’ve been searching for something and a friend of mine, an elderly man, Jack Welch, told me that I may find it here.” I explained that I wanted to ask some questions about a machine that they may have had and that Jack Welch had given me the postcard to help me find this shop.
“Ja ja, I understand, I heard of Jack, he was married to my great aunt Vanessa....my father’s aunt I think... I’ll come to the shop, I’ll be five minutes.” She said.
I walked around the shop whilst I waited, took a few more photos, even getting a sneaky shot of the old man at his desk, reading his newspaper by the light of the oil lamp. I worked out in my head that the old man must either be Kaspar Locke, or his brother.
It seemed like a long five minutes and just as I was about to check my watch, the door to the shop opened and a young lady walked in. Mid-thirties, black hair cut as a bob. She was dressed for horse riding, with black leather boots over a pair of dark beige jodhpurs.
“Hello, hello, sorry I was so long,” she said. “I am Sophia Locke.” She held out her hand to shake, I was surprised how warm it was and was conscious I might be holding it too long.
“Daniel... Bateman. Excuse me but is your grandfather, Kaspar Locke?”
“No no, Großvater Johann is Kaspar’s brother. You said you were looking for something, a machine?”
“Yes, something that Jack Welch said he gave to Kaspar many years ago...” I went on to explain about my obsessional hobby of collecting old German technology and also about the OTG and its purpose.
“...The holy Grail of what we are researching is a device that generates electricity without the need of any fuel.” I pointed to the lights. “Please, what’s powering those lights?”
She looked at the lights and then walked towards the back of the shop “Großvater...” she said and then lowered her voice to a whisper to speak with her grandfather. They spoke far too quickly for me to understand anything they were saying. Although I did hear Jack’s and Vanessa’s names. The old man picked up the postcard I had given him and showed it to Sophia.
Sophia beckoned me over. “My grandfather wants to know what you would do with such a machine?”
“If I were able to find such a machine and be able to examine it and measure it, then I’d be able to make one. The significance of it would be substantial,” I said.
Sophia translated what I said before asking, “And then what will you do with it?”
“Well, I’d like to teach others how to make it, so they can then teach others the same as well.”
This was something I had thought a lot about. The significance of a self-running generator was obvious, but it was a common belief that the big energy cartels, oil companies and even governments would not let such a generator get to market. They would prevent it by intimidation, litigation, corruption and many believed murder of the inventors of devices that could break our dependence on oil and energy. To guarantee that a free energy machine was made available to everyone, it would ultimately have to be open source.
“....I’d like to make sure that this is made available to those that really need it and not those that just want to make mega-profits from it or even suppress it.”
After Sophia translated, Johann, led us towards the back of the shop.
“So you do have one of these generators then?” I asked as we walked through a door that had been hidden behind a large rug hung on the wall.
“You will see Herr Bateman. My grandfather has never spoken to anyone about it, so you are the first. No-one was supposed to know, other than Jack Welch,” she said.
In the back room of the shop, Johann Locke unlocked another door to a set of wooden stairs leading down to a basement. As we descended the stairs Johann got Sophia to translate some more.
“He says that right up to the mid-fifties this basement was used to hide things from the US troops. To stop them stealing our property. They would hide everything, including food down here.”
“That was part of Operation Overcast or Paper-clip I guess?” I asked even though I knew the answer.
The basement was a living rock basement, cut directly into the bedrock. It was clean and tidy, but damp-smelling and I wasn’t surprised that they weren’t storing anything down here anymore. The basement was quite large with a single bulb in the centre of the room, glowing and pulsating slightly like the others in the shop. Johann walked over to a large wooden crate and unlatched one of the sides which then swung out to reveal a dark polished wooden box. As I approached the crate and its contents, I could make out three wires attached to screw terminals from the base of the box and at one end was a large flywheel that had two metal arms either side of it.
This was fantastic, I could feel that I was smiling hard so I put my hand over my mouth in as much astonishment as well as hiding my expression. At one end of the box the flywheel protruded from the casing and was spinning, though not fast. In fact, it was spinning in time with the lights pulsating. The wire from upstairs ran into the top of the crate and connected to a thumb screw co
nnector on the device itself. Another connector had a characteristic green earthing wire that ran out from one side of the crate and connected to a metal spike buried into the floor next to it. The third wire appeared to circle the basement, it being tacked to the wall and looked like it just ended. Was it an antenna of some kind, I wondered?
I could see no sign of an external power source or smell any fumes. In fact, for a damp basement, the air was remarkably fresh. I took my camera out.
“Can I please take pictures?” I asked as I looked closer at the generator. I could see a small brass plate on the top and evidence of another that had been removed.
“Ja ja ja,” Johann said and started walking out. “Machen sie es nur nicht kaputt, Herr Bateman.”
“Please help yourself, just don’t break it,” Sophia translated. “Is this what you’ve been looking for?”
“Oh yes. It certainly is. It obviously doesn’t generate much, but what it does is theoretically impossible and breaks all the laws of science. You’ve no idea how many people are looking for this, it’s incredible. Thank you for letting me see it.”
“You’re welcome, but I need to finish the horses and then unfortunately we will have to close up the shop. Would you like coffee?” Sophia said.
“Yes, I understand and yes I’d love a coffee. Black please.”
Sophia left me alone, giving me the chance to investigate further. I would have liked the meters that Clive had lent me, but I didn’t want to risk not being allowed back down here if I went and got them. I decided I could manage without — it was obvious that this was authentic. I was actually looking at a real Lockridge device. Even better, it was working.