by Layton Green
I’m in.
The reply came swiftly: I know.
U sure I’m alone?
Reasonably.
Cal swore and hurried through the kitchen, dining room, living room, piano room, and guest suite. No sign of a computer.
He took the stairs two at a time, ears cocked for an approaching vehicle. All of the doors on the second floor had been removed, and the rooms were full of mixed-media paintings and objets d’art on elaborate stands. The art was of the modern ilk—abstract and bizarre—and sported a theme: the transformation of mankind and planet Earth by technology. Much of the work resembled a digital fever dream of people and places warped into pixelated images. Papier-mâché figures made of bytes, emerging out of caves in the bushveld. Pop-art tapestries of classic cars driving into outer space. One entire room had been cleverly painted to induce a three-dimensional feeling of stepping into a futuristic cityscape.
On the third floor—the living quarters—Cal worried someone would pop out of one of the doors in the long, silent hallway. Yet no one did, and he grew excited when he found a Lenovo desktop in the study attached to the master bedroom. He didn’t bother trying to figure out how to unlock the screen; he inserted the flash drive and texted Dane.
We’re on.
The computer expert repeated his earlier reply.
I know.
Cal rolled his eyes and paced the room. The paneled study had a private elevator and vintage wooden furniture. The decor was an ode to the art of stage magic: enameled decks of playing cards; handcuffs and wands and other props displayed in glass cabinets; framed photos of Houdini. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf was stocked with historical tomes on illusions, escapes, mentalism, and other tricks. The blend of magic and technology in the house, reminiscent of the Infinity Lounge, made Cal wonder if Elias sponsored the private club himself.
Or what if the club had another purpose? A gateway into the Leap Year Society for a select few, like the online puzzle?
He probably started it to get laid.
Not that he would need it.
When the desktop unlocked, Cal rushed over to take a look. The background image was a grayish circle that filled most of the screen, blurred at the edges to lend it a mysterious, otherworldly aura. Two words were inscribed in fancy font along the bottom, though Cal had to move some folders and app icons around to read them.
Ascensio Infinitus
After rearranging the desktop a bit more, he gripped the mouse when he saw a large L filling the left side of the background image, and an S on the right. The Y in the middle stretched artfully across the entire diameter of the circle.
LYS
Cal’s eyes whisked hungrily across the screen, scanning the names of the folders. Most of them appeared to pertain to Aegis, and he knew he didn’t have time to sort through them all. He thought Dane would have taken control of the cursor, but the USB drive was flashing, so the big man must be content with a remote data transfer.
The names of the folders drew Cal’s attention. Nootropics. Paleoacoustics. Ocular Nanotech. Compelling stuff, but there was an itch he wanted to scratch. After pulling up the search bar on the start menu, he typed in his own name, not really expecting a result.
To his surprise, there was a hit: a zip file nested in an archived folder titled Closed Marks. A hollow feeling started to expand inside him when he saw his name in alphabetical order among a long string of others. When he clicked on his name, he saw his entire life laid out before him, in a series of Word docs and PDF files.
Birth Certificate and Social Security. Education. Credit History. Curriculum Vitae. Persons of Interest. Addresses. Personal Information.
Opening the Personal Information file revealed a list of his hobbies, haunts, favorite restaurants, daily routine, dog walk routes, everything. Chills swept through him as he checked the dates on the folders and the zip file. As best he could tell, they had started a file on him the same day he had published the piece on PanSphere’s black-site lab.
The last entry was the day he was fired.
He stared at the file in disbelief. These are the people. These are the bastards who ruined my life. With a shaky hand, feeling in his bones that somewhere in the zip file was proof that his source had been authentic and the evidence against him falsified, he started to move the file onto the USB drive, just to be sure it got on, when the screen flashed twice and went blank.
Stunned, he started pressing keys at random, trying to unlock the screen. A buzz from his phone caused him to look down. It was Dane again.
Get out. Now. Run.
Cal pounded on the keyboard. “No, goddammit!”
But he knew it was useless. He jumped to his feet, wanting to take the entire desktop and instead grabbing the USB drive. The desktop was too heavy to run with, it might have a tracker, and it was surely now compromised. After stepping toward the elevator and deciding that entering an automated coffin was a bad idea, he dashed into the hallway and raced to the stairs.
A floor-to-ceiling window on his left provided a view of the street below Elias’s house. At the edge of his line of sight, he saw a black van turn onto the street.
I’m never going to make it.
By the time he fled down the stairs and out the front door, he could hear the van’s engine roaring up the hill. Dane had left the gate open, and Cal raced for his rental, trying to judge whether he could reach the gate before the van blocked him in. He doubted it. But he didn’t see another option.
As he sprinted away from the house, a familiar electronic whir caused his stomach to lurch. He reached the driveway and confirmed his suspicion: they were closing the gate on him. The black van didn’t even have to beat him to the house. They could just trap him inside.
In a panic, he thought about where he could hide, and debated ramming the gate with the rental van. He discarded both ideas, turned, and sprinted for the wall behind the house. It was out of view of the driveway. If he cleared it quickly enough, he might have a small window to escape. The problem was the height of the wall. Nine feet at least. In high school, Cal could dunk a basketball, but that was twenty years and thirty pounds ago.
Already huffing from the run, he jumped for the top of the wall, managed to grip it with both hands, and hung on for dear life. His toes slipped through the ivy as he scrabbled for a foothold. Shouts came from the driveway as his forearms burned with the effort. At last he found a notch in the stone, dug in with his left foot, and threw an elbow atop the wall. He risked a glance back and saw two armed men in dark suits slipping through the gate just before it closed. With a heave that brought him the rest of the way up, unsure if the men had seen him, Cal threw himself over the wall and onto the scrub-covered hillside below.
London
13
Cautiously hopeful the bust of Democritus held a secret connected to the location of the Enneagon, or would help her solve Dr. Corwin’s murder in some way, Andie stepped through a set of double doors that granted access to an entrance hall supported by marble pillars.
Admission was free to the renowned gallery, which boasted the world’s largest collection of decorative art and design. Millions of paintings, ceramics, costumes, textiles, and other objects filled the museum, spanning over five millennia of human history. Inside a vast hall to her right was a reconstructed Roman villa, replete with life-size statues, fountains, and carved Ionic columns. The ceiling rose up through the higher floors and set the tone for the grandeur of the museum.
After checking her backpack and passing through security, she took a moment to orient herself. She had studied the map online but wanted to be aware of her surroundings in person, especially the exits. She observed the other visitors as well. No one jumped out at her as suspicious, but there were so many people it was impossible to keep an eye on everyone. She would just have to get on with it.
With over seven miles of galleries, the museum resembled a gigantic square doughnut, four massive wings on four main floors surrounding an open-air green s
pace in the middle. Before leaving Durham, she had called to verify the bust of Democritus was on display, and after asking for directions at the information desk, she walked through the gift shop toward the central courtyard, where dozens of visitors were basking on the lawn or dipping their toes in the shallow basin of the fountain. Just before entering the courtyard, she ascended a wide staircase to the third story—in British parlance, the second floor.
Halfway down a hallway covered in frescoes and mosaics, she turned down a wide corridor with a line of glass display cases in the center. More cases were attached to the wall on her right. To her left, a balcony overlooked the Roman villa.
According to the information desk, this hallway was home to the Democritus bust.
Dozens of small objects filled the glass cases: statues, masks, pottery, metalwork. Andie walked the room once, didn’t see the bust, and then returned more slowly, eyeing each and every piece. She finally spotted it in a display case in the center, about halfway down the hall. The carving was made of beige soapstone and much smaller than she had expected, not even six inches high. The bust portrayed Democritus with a beard and a sharp nose, dressed in the classic robes of a Greek philosopher. The head was turned slightly to the right, covered by a tight-fitting hat similar to a skullcap. A sly grin suggested the wily old scholar was in possession of a secret.
Let’s see about that.
As a steady stream of tourists wandered through the hallway, Andie bent to study the bust. Unlike the larger pieces in the museum, the knickknacks in the display case had no descriptive placards. She stared at the bust for some time, unsure what to do, and felt eyes on her back. Trying not to overreact, she turned and saw a smiling woman with cropped gray hair limping toward her, a museum badge pinned to her chest.
“Can I help with anything?” the woman asked.
“Just browsing.”
“Of course.”
“Actually—do you have any more information on this bust of Democritus?”
The worker pointed at a tiny crystal cube in the display case, placed between Democritus and the next piece over. “That tells you where to look in the information booklet.” Her finger moved to a corner of the room, where a binder dangled from a chain attached to one of the cases.
Andie leaned in. She had noticed the crystal, but not the number 32 lightly engraved on the surface. What an odd way to provide information. Maybe it was meant for the staff.
“They called him the Laughing Philosopher,” the woman said, “because of the way he mocked human folly.”
“We’re a pretty easy target.”
“The sad chap next to him is Heraclitus, the weeper. They were often paired together in eighteenth-century sculpture. The stone is steatite, you know. It’s quite rare.”
She wandered off, leaving Andie questioning why she had spoken to her and no one else. Was she being paranoid? Or was it a message of some sort?
What if the woman was about to go report her presence to someone?
A glance at the binder revealed the artist, Johann von Lücke, and the date, 1757. The woman had conveyed the rest of the pertinent information.
Andie grew nervous about standing in the hallway for so long. A heavyset Indian man with glasses, chapped lips, and hair curling out of his ears had entered not long after Andie. He was still there, perusing one of the cases near the far end, wearing a puffy gray jacket that seemed too warm for the season.
Was she missing something? What was she supposed to do? Or was the image of Democritus on the Star Phone a red herring, a simple screen saver? Was all of this a product of her twisted imagination, like her visions probably were?
Forcing away her doubts, she recalled what she knew about the ancient philosopher. Why had Dr. Corwin chosen Democritus instead of Heraclitus, the old man sitting right beside him?
Was it a statement? Laughter over tears? Or was someone laughing at her?
Born around 460 BCE, Democritus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who made a startling array of contributions. Though none of his writings survived, his works were quoted and referenced by plenty of ancient writers. He had penned lengthy treatises on subjects as wide-ranging as epistemology, aesthetics, literary critique, ethics, language, politics, anthropology, biology, mathematics, and cosmology. Democritus had believed in a spherical Earth and the existence of multiple worlds, and posited that the Milky Way was a dense mass of stars.
Knowledge far, far ahead of its time.
Yet the reason many—including Dr. Corwin—considered Democritus “the father of modern science” was his work on atomism. Democritus had argued—shocking Andie when she had discovered it—that all matter is composed, at the basic level, of tiny invisible atoms; that these atoms are always in motion and are indestructible; and that a void exists around and among these atoms.
Before Andie began studying science, she had never even heard of Democritus. In college, she would have pegged the Enlightenment—at the earliest—as the genesis of atomic theory. And to some extent, she would have been right. Plato fought to bury Democritus’s ideas. Aristotle respected him but rejected his ideas on the atom. Due to conflicting philosophies and other factors—chiefly the suppression of scientific theory by the church—atomic theory would not be revived until Descartes and Boyle in the seventeenth century.
Incredibly, Democritus had hypothesized the invisible building blocks of reality two thousand years before the West threw off the shackles of Aristotelian physics.
In reality, we know nothing, since truth is in the depths.
A saying attributed to Democritus. Andie gave a little shiver thinking about how far humanity might have progressed had his ideas caught on.
While she bowed to his intellect, she identified with sadness more than laughter as representative of the human condition. The ancient philosopher had urged his followers to strive for a state of ultimate good or cheerfulness, in which the soul lives in tranquility. That was something Andie couldn’t get behind. Democritus was a trust fund baby who had traveled the ancient world on his parents’ dime. How hard was it to have a sunny disposition when loafing around the agora or strolling through the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?
She stared hard at the bust. Those parted lips seemed to mock her. After glancing around and noticing the Indian man bent over a different glass case, she took the Star Phone out of her pocket. If he or anyone else was watching, they must already know she had it.
Or maybe not. Maybe no one but she knew what Dr. Corwin had kept inside that safe.
In any event, she didn’t know if she would have another chance at this. Feeling rather foolish, she waved the Star Phone around the room, then aimed it at the bust of Democritus. When nothing happened, she peered through the camera eye and got the same disappointing result.
Maybe the appearance of the old woman—where had she disappeared to?—had significance. She had led Andie to the information booklet, yet before that, she had pointed out the tiny crystal cube beside the steatite bust. Pretending to snap a photo, Andie aimed the Star Phone directly at the cube. No effect. She pressed the device to her face and peered into the camera eye, and then the room started to spin.
Reeling, Andie lurched backward and stumbled into someone, thinking she was having another of her visions. But no shadowy realm appeared, and the room stabilized as soon as she looked away from the Star Phone.
After apologizing to the startled teenager behind her, realizing the device must have caused the effect in some way, Andie exhaled and tried a second time, doing her best to look innocuous. As soon as she focused on the crystal cube, the room spun again. This time, she held on as the cube expanded into a life-size image of Democritus, similar to looking through an augmented reality lens. She guessed the cube must have some sort of embedded code aligned to the Star Phone, maybe RFID or a block cipher.
But how in the world had Dr. Corwin managed to attach it inside a glass case in a world-famous museum?
She could worry about that later. The enlarged ima
ge of the philosopher, still dressed in flowing robes and a skullcap, was moving like a GIF: every few seconds, the old philosopher shook with laughter, and the gnarled hands clasped at his belly spread apart to reveal a nine-digit code string of numbers, letters, and symbols. Excited, Andie memorized the sequence and then examined the rest of the image, aware how vulnerable she was.
The only other deviations in the augmented image were two symbols in the top corners. On the right was the same marking she had seen on the replica Enneagon: the representation of an atom with a black hole in the nucleus. In the top left loomed a white circle inscribed by a black border, with infinitus written along the bottom. An elongated Y filled the center of the circle, set between an L and an S.
She caught her breath. LYS. Leap Year Society.
Three shapes hovered in the white space above the Y: a hollow square, a sun, and a lemniscate—commonly known as the infinity symbol. She had no idea what it all meant.
When Andie finally looked away from the phone, the Indian man was gone. That made her nervous. Had he left to seek help?
As much as she wanted to try the new code in the Star Phone, she decided it was time to get the hell out.
Taking a different route, she passed through a section filled with silverwork and jewelry, then hurried down a set of stairs in the opposite wing, which led to the cafeteria. She merged with the crowd and inhaled the aroma of fresh pastry. The cafeteria spilled into the courtyard, and she squinted in the bright sun. When she reached the gift shop, she almost collided with the thick-bodied Indian man. It took all of her self-control not to react. Though he gave no sign of recognition, she didn’t like the way his red-rimmed eyes lingered a moment too long on hers.
After retrieving her backpack and checking to ensure everything was in place, she slipped into a hallway to the left of the main entrance, aiming for an elevator. With constant glances over her shoulder, she slipped inside and shut the doors. The elevator opened onto a subterranean tunnel that Andie had scouted online. To her right, a sign pointed her toward the Science Museum. A much-longer tunnel on her left led to the South Kensington underground station.