by Layton Green
Technology was insane.
Something that had caught her interest was geocaching, a high-tech treasure hunt played all over the world. Basic geocaching seemed too trite for the Star Phone. But what if the concept—GPS and embedded QR codes and the like—had inspired the new clue in some way? This line of thinking brought to mind the Star Phone and whatever technology connected it to the bust of Democritus.
A uniformed store clerk wandered over. He was an older man with kind, crinkly eyes and a scraggly gray beard. “Can I ’elp you?”
She said, “Do you know anything about GPS positioning?”
“Quite a bit, actually. My grandson’s fourteen—going on thirty, mind you—and it’s our common ground. I’m a letterboxer, and he loves Pokémon Go and Ingress, but we bond over waymarking.”
She had to work to understand his strong Cockney accent, and his low smoker’s growl didn’t help.
“I’d reckon ’im and me, we’ve hiked half of Britain together,” he said proudly. “What’s your question?”
What do I have to lose? She told him the five-digit code. He scratched his chin and asked her to repeat it.
“Hold on a bit,” he said, pulling out a smartphone with a green rubber case. His gnarled fingers pecked clumsily at the touch screen. After a short search, a slow grin spread across his face. “Thought so.”
Andie caught her breath. “What is it?”
“I’m curious where you got this.”
“I’m on a scavenger hunt.”
“Ah,” he said wisely. “Okay. Take a look-see.”
The image on his phone revealed a list she recognized at once as GPS coordinates. “I don’t understand—are these related? How did you get them?”
“Let me back up,” he said, taking the phone back. “Are you familiar with geohashing? Not caching—hashing?”
She shook her head.
“I’ve used it now and again, but it’s a lot more obscure.” He showed her the phone, which displayed a satellite map and a trio of text boxes at the top labeled LONGITUDE/LATITUDE, PRECISION, and GEOHASH. “It’s just a different way of getting coordinates,” he said. “That’s about all I know. I think it’s pretty complicated. We can reverse engineer it, though.”
He typed the Star Phone code “stt38” into the geohash box. Out popped a set of coordinates. The satellite map zoomed in, outlining a specific area in a transparent blue box. The location was Alexandria, Egypt, and Andie’s palm pressed into her thigh when she saw the name of the building in the lower portion of the outlined area, written in both Arabic and Latin script.
BIBLIOTHECA ALEXANDRINA
She understood the import at once.
Taken together, the geohash code and the scroll on the Star Phone had to be referring to the Library of Alexandria, the legendary storehouse of ancient knowledge.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
“Of course. Anything else I can help you with?”
“Not right now.”
“Right then. Good luck with the scavenger hunt.”
“I’ll need it,” she muttered as he wandered off.
After Googling “geohash,” she was even more convinced she was on the right path. An obscure geocoding technique invented by Gustavo Niemeyer, the system worked by subdividing the world into a spatial data structure, assigning numeric values, and expressing the location with an alphanumeric string. Instead of pinpointing a location on a grid, as with longitude and latitude, geohashing coordinates were expressed in bounding boxes that could be narrowed or expanded by altering the number of binary digits.
In effect, a geohash reduced a geographic region to numerical data. Expressing the world as mathematics.
How very James Corwin.
If her guess was correct, his use of geohashing instead of basic GPS coordinates was another subtle clue. Although the original Library of Alexandria had been destroyed two thousand years ago, the Egyptian government had erected a modern library on the suspected site of the original building. They had even renamed it the Library of Alexandria.
If desired, Dr. Corwin could have given her exact GPS coordinates for the new building. Yet he hadn’t. Instead he had given her a bounding box, a grid, which encompassed a larger portion of the city.
Why?
Her gut told her the image on the Star Phone—the ancient scroll and the geohash—referred to the original Library of Alexandria in some way. Yet how or why or what it all meant, she had absolutely no idea.
Malmö, Sweden
1933
On the journey to Malmö, a quick ferry ride across the narrow strait separating Denmark from the southern tip of Sweden, the events of the previous night seemed far away, fuzzy in Ettore’s memory. The long drive into the countryside, the moonlit walk through the hedge maze, the clandestine meeting with the prince and the American diplomat: Had all of that really happened?
Sometimes, when Ettore was not working out a complex mathematical problem or dwelling on the structure of the universe, it felt as if the world was a little bit less than real. Where was the line between dream and reality, consciousness and oblivion, quantum probability and the collapse of the wave function?
And yet, as another rare bout of sunshine sparked the tips of the waves, Ettore could not deny the presence of the mahogany-brown leather attaché case sitting on his lap on the ferry bench, or the Swedish border agent making his way down the aisle as the rocky shoreline of Sweden drew nearer outside the window.
The agent was checking documents and inspecting luggage in a diligent manner. This made Ettore very nervous.
What if the agent asked him to open his briefcase and Ettore had to tell him he didn’t even know the code to the lock? Would they confiscate it? Uncover the evidence of espionage it most certainly contained? Was it still too late to—
A stern voice interrupted his reverie. When Ettore failed to respond, the agent repeated the request in German. “Passport, please.”
Ettore looked up, blinked, and then fumbled in the pocket of his coat. “Here,” he said, handing over the passport.
“You’re Italian?” the border agent asked, flipping through the stiff pages.
“I’m in Denmark on a research grant. With the Niels Bohr Institute.” Ettore’s voice cracked on the last word, as if he were a child on the verge of a breakdown. Disgusted with himself, he willed his fingers to stop trembling as he held up a copy of the grant papers and his identification badge with the institute.
“Your purpose in Sweden?”
“I’ve never been before. It’s such a short trip, I thought I would spend the day in Malmö. I would like to visit the castle and Saint Peter’s Church, in particular.”
Why am I going on like this? Ettore wondered. All I have to say is that I’m a tourist. He was especially mortified that he had mentioned Saint Peter’s Church—the location of his covert meeting with Stefan’s contact—to the border patrol.
Could he be any more inept?
After the agent studied his documents, he gave the briefcase a long glance while Ettore quivered in his seat, sure he was about to be arrested.
“Do you always bring a briefcase on your sightseeing trips?”
Ettore chuckled, trying to play it off, cringing at the disingenuous sound of his own laughter. “Yes, it’s quite tragic. I’m afraid I have some work to finish today. I’m hoping to find a nice café in town.”
The agent’s eyes lingered on the briefcase for another moment. After glancing at the clock on the wall, he stamped Ettore’s passport and returned it. “Enjoy your visit.”
As Ettore wandered through central Malmö, the sky a deep bruise streaked with haze, his thoughts turned once again to the contents of the leather attaché case.
He had no reason to doubt the veracity of anything he had heard in the hedge maze. On the contrary, the presence of such luminary figures as a prince and a United States diplomat made him trust Stefan all the more. The other two men even seemed to defer to his German friend. Did this have s
omething to do with the hierarchy of the Leap Year Society? Did Stefan’s position in the organization transcend titles and importance in the world at large?
Yet why had Stefan not let Ettore mention the Society’s name? Because of some bizarre code that forbade nonmembers from speaking of it—or because it didn’t exist?
Or a third option: Perhaps the Society existed but Stefan had no intention of ever including Ettore. Had he been grooming him for some ulterior purpose? Perhaps for this very trip?
It seemed a little far-fetched to go to all that trouble just to deliver a single briefcase to Malmö. And Stefan’s knowledge of theoretical physics was very real. Thinking it through, Ettore truly believed the German held him in high esteem and wanted him to join their organization. Yet why the delays and the subterfuge?
On the other hand, serious events were taking place on the world stage. Events that transcended other interests. He could understand the caution. And if Ettore could play a role in slowing the rise of the fanatics in charge of Germany and his own country, the ugly nationalism threatening the fabric of democracy, he should be happy to do so. Delivering a briefcase seemed a terribly small contribution.
Buoyed by this line of reasoning, he enjoyed himself as he bundled up in his wool coat and scarf to absorb the sights of Malmö, waiting for the appointed hour. Though he knew nothing of intelligence matters—he had never even read a spy novel—he thought it sounded like a good idea to arrive early and not run straight to the contact. Besides, it was true Ettore had never been to Sweden. He might as well see a few sights.
He found Malmö to be quite different from Copenhagen, much more orderly and reserved. No one crossed the wide cobblestone streets when they were not supposed to. No children waved as they passed him on their bicycles.
Still, he enjoyed gazing upon the city’s timber-framed guildhalls and its Baroque squares lined with handsome rust-colored buildings topped with the curlicue facades of the Dutch Renaissance style. There was a fine castle in the center of town and plenty of cozy cafés to enjoy warm cinnamon buns and coffee. He suspected half of his pleasure derived from the anticipatory thrill of adventure as the meeting drew near. Never in his life had he done anything remotely like this.
As the fleeting March sun began to descend, Ettore approached Saint Peter’s Church, a hulking Gothic edifice right in the center of town. It was a very stern building, which aligned with his impression of the Swedes. Ettore circled the perimeter, his step slowing as he approached the intersection of Själbodgatan and Göran Olsgatan, looking over his shoulder at every turn, palms sweating inside the thick gloves he had brought to ward against the cold.
Then he saw it, just as Stefan had said it would be: a single wooden bench pressed up against the side of the cathedral, situated between two flying buttresses, barely visible through a thicket of evergreen shrubs. It was positioned just off a gravel footpath that encircled the grounds of the cathedral.
Sitting alone on the bench—again aligning with Stefan’s story—was a man in a gray coat and a matching bowler hat, a blanket across his lap for extra warmth, reading a newspaper and sipping out of a disposable cup. The full cheeks and ash-blond stubble marked him as a Swedish man about Ettore’s age.
The man never looked up as Ettore approached on the gravel footpath. As instructed, Ettore set the briefcase on the bench beside the man and kept walking, as if out for a stroll around the church. The man gave him a murmur of thanks, right before two gunshots exploded from very close by, causing Ettore to lurch to the side, cringing as the retort rang in his ears.
Unsure where the gunshots had originated, he spun in a circle—and saw the contact slumped on the wooden bench with a crater in the side of his head, a spray of dark blood blotting the cathedral wall behind him.
Horrified, Ettore stumbled away, his adrenaline spiking so sharply he couldn’t think straight. He knew only his life was in danger and he had to get away as fast as possible. After regaining his equilibrium, he started to run when a familiar authoritative voice called out from the foliage to his right.
“Stop running. Keep walking around the church.”
“Stefan!” Ettore said, as his friend stepped into view from behind a chestnut tree. “Did you see—”
“Keep walking,” Stefan repeated, more firmly this time.
It was then that Ettore noticed the smell of gunpowder in the air, caught a glimpse of steel as Stefan calmly buttoned his double-breasted wool coat, and put two and two together. Ettore’s words came out as a strangled whisper. “You killed him—”
Stefan gripped him by the arm and led him down the gravel path, around the corner of the cathedral. “Quickly now,” he said, “before the authorities arrive.”
Ettore felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He was shaking all over, his heart pounding against his chest as if trying to smash through. “Are you going to kill me?”
“What? Of course not.”
“Where are we going?”
“Back to the ferry. Our work is done.”
“I don’t understand,” Ettore said as Stefan guided him off the path and toward an intersection on the far side of the church. Voices shouted from somewhere across the street, cut off from view by a dense clump of evergreen bushes. A woman screamed, and Ettore knew someone had found the body. “What about the mission? Was it all a lie?”
“That was the mission,” Stefan said, intent on scanning the streets as they walked.
“The mission?” Ettore repeated in a daze.
After they had walked a bit farther, Stefan relaxed a fraction and said, “I apologize for the subterfuge. It had to seem real. Not just to you, but to the others with whom we met. We have a mole in our organization, Ettore, a Nazi sympathizer who would destroy everything we have worked for and place the world in grave peril. You have just helped to draw him out.”
“I have?” he said, still trembling like a frightened puppy. “That . . . man you just shot?”
“He was but a foot soldier. The one we sought was a much greater threat. Now that we know for sure, our people will deal with him as soon as I send word.”
Ettore thought it through. “Is it one of the men we met with?”
As Stefan gave a curt nod of acknowledgment, the ferry dock came into view, causing Ettore to press forward. He was terrified the authorities would apprehend them while still in Sweden, or that one of the slain man’s associates would appear, to take revenge.
Stefan placed a hand on his elbow to slow him. The German had two tickets in hand as they approached the terminal, and looked as calm as someone taking a morning stroll in his garden.
“What was in the briefcase?” Ettore asked as they headed down the metal ramp to board the ferry.
“Newspapers.”
As Ettore stopped walking, stunned, Stefan grinned and slipped an arm across his shoulders. “I would not have put you in peril. It was a test, Ettore, and you passed with ease. You’re brave, loyal, and resourceful.”
Am I? Ettore wondered. He just felt terrified, and sickened by the bloodshed in which he had played a role. On church grounds, no less.
A blond woman with severe lips and erect posture took their tickets, and then the two men were safely aboard the passenger ferry, on their way back to Denmark. It was a large and crowded boat, and they found seats near the middle. Ettore’s adrenaline ebbed during the return journey. Stefan sat quietly beside him, reading a thin volume of philosophical essays he had produced from the pocket of his coat. When the Danish border agent walked through, he gave their passports a cursory glance and stamped them.
Outside the ferry terminal in Copenhagen, once they had separated from the crowd, Stefan faced him and said, “I know what you saw was shocking to you, but in times like these, hard choices must be made.” When Ettore didn’t answer, Stefan continued. “I can’t disclose details, but you should know you’ve probably just saved an untold number of lives. A bullet from a gun kills one person at a time, Ettore, but a man in a position of power can kill
thousands, tens of thousands, with the stroke of a pen.”
Ettore shuffled his feet, struggling to relate to this abstract thing. Was that what it meant to be brave? The ability to feel great empathy for people he didn’t even know?
Though he could not get the awful image of the corpse and the blood-spattered wall out of his head, he did feel strangely proud about his part in the mission and was happy to have pleased Stefan. “What happens now?”
“I trust you’re still eager to join the Society?”
Ettore compressed his lips and considered the question. Part of him wanted to walk away and forget he had ever met this man of action, to ensure the sick thrill of danger never again ripped through his gut like a swallowed bag of razor blades.
Yet part of him had never felt so alive.
But more than any of that, Ettore’s curiosity about the enigmatic Leap Year Society, his yearning for hidden knowledge, had risen to a fever pitch.
“I am,” he said.
Stefan slipped on a pair of black leather gloves. “Then we are ready to receive you.”
“When?”
“Two nights hence. I’ll send another car.”
Ettore swallowed. That soon? “Okay.”
“Oh, and Ettore?” Stefan said as he backed away.
“Yes?”
“Your induction will not occur at a regular meeting of the Society, but during a very special one. I have an important announcement to make.”
“Which is?”
A hard but knowing glint had entered Stefan’s eyes. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
London
16
Shielded from the bright afternoon rays by her sunglasses, still wearing her hijab, Andie stood in the courtyard plaza at the entrance to the British Library, gazing at the mélange of glass, steel, and brick thrown together in a jarring mix of modernist and traditional design. The awkward angles of the multitiered edifice reminded her of a half-crushed termite mound. In the background rose the handsome red brick towers and spires of Saint Pancras station, in her mind a far superior example of architectural beauty.