“I thought we said three...?” he said. Then, shaking his head in resignation, added; “How the hell does she do it?” He watched with lusty eyes as she disappeared through the swing doors and then realised exactly how she did it. MaryBeth was the kind of woman whose natural beauty was enough to send objection clean through the nearest window. When she was gone he made the sign of somebody wrapping a helpless sap around their little finger and shook his head at his own lack of discipline. “Always manages to do it.”
Dave was guessing that MaryBeth was nestling somewhere in her mid-thirties; the age where beauty and wisdom in a woman seem to converge so effectively, although MaryBeth had seemed to be in her mid-thirties since he had known her, so she was probably a little older - she simply didn’t look it. Dave himself, on the other hand, was only just in his twenties and bore no resemblance whatsoever to Dustin Hoffman. Still, as Mrs. Robinson dreams went...
She sure was a beautiful woman. Slightly olive skin, pure and smooth and long, jet black hair - the kind seen on many of the women of his own tribe, but yet so beautifully cut that it seemed as if she had perfected an art that the womenfolk of his people had been trying to protect for many centuries. She always wore just the right amount of make-up - the accent on accentuation - and her clothes were not just cut expensively, but also cut well. Almost as well as the body beneath them.
He sighed. Another life perhaps.
One of the mainframes in the furthest corner of the room beeped suddenly and Dave slid his chair across to check it out. The sound was a sign that somebody was logging onto the database via an external connection. He pulled down a menu and stopped at ‘DISPLAY REMOTE’. In an instant the title came up: ‘REMOTE USER > JTBERNST@HME’
“Good evening, Mr. B,” he said with the kind of smile he might wear if Jack were standing right in front of him.
He cleared the screen and pushed his feet hard against the wall, sliding the chair back to his own console to commence his task. In the process he left his boss to do whatever it was that his boss was doing.
guest with a sinner
Luke 19:7
Paulo Estadore had been extremely surprised, and not a little worried, to see the vehicle coming toward the house; he was not expecting visitors. Only three vehicles ever made the detour that led up Paulo’s dusty track; his father’s battered Fiat, the postal van and the DHL bike which sometimes brought packages from his internet contacts. This car - a very expensive and very clean four wheel drive Jeep - was none of the three. Still, it was a beautiful day in the Spanish hills high above Sanguesa and eventually he had assumed that perhaps this was a tourist who was lost. It happened.
Although it never had before.
When he had pulled open the thin plastic of the blinds and peered through the window he had seen the man as he had pulled the vehicle to a halt and stepped out into the light. Tall and powerfully built with a mop of jet black hair he wore a dark suit and a long black overcoat, despite the heat. As he walked the remaining distance to the house, glancing left to right, it also appeared that this man had a very subtle limp.
Paulo was puzzled. Uneasily so. Now that he could see the man fully he could also see that had an appearance that bore a closer resemblance to that of a government official, rather than a tourist. Shit, he thought, this can not be good news.
He went straight to the door and opened it before the man had even had chance to knock.
“Can I help you?” he asked in a thick, suspicious accent.
The man removed his sunglasses and smiled. Instantly, Paulo liked the look of him less. It was a gut feeling. He had a slight scar on his right cheek and close up his eyes looked as sharp as those seen on a snake. He could also tell that the smile was too wide; too forced. It was deliberately disarming.
Paulo had hacked one or two lesser mainframes in his time. For a price. Always remote, but never remotely serious. Not in the great scheme of things. Certainly nothing that would result in a government official visiting his home, surely? Not recently.
Hopefully.
The stranger reached into his breast pocket. Paulo began to sweat.
“Hola. My name is Benito Perez,” the man said, his smile cheesy and wide. He produced an identification card bearing his details and his picture. “I am from NetWorld Magazine. You are Paulo Estadore, yes?”
Paulo looked at the card. It was expensively printed, bore the relevant green and orange logo and had been sealed with the man’s name and picture inside prior to the gentle holographing technique used on passports, but still he was dubious. He subscribed to NetWorld, certainly, and had done for many years, but could not begin to wonder why they might want to pay him a home visit. Still, the man had the right credentials and the right house.
“Si,” he said.
The man replaced his card and held out his hand in greeting. Paulo shook it; cold and rough. The soft fingertips told him this was not the hand of a computer-jock, so he must be an executive. A suit, hence the fact that he was wearing one, he guessed. “We have spoken to people, other subscribers. They tell us that you are a man who is good with problems,” he continued. His face took on a sense of regret. “Well, we have a problem, a big problem that we could not discuss electronically for security reasons, and we need some help. May I come in?”
Paulo smiled. He had been dubious with little reason. The man was smartly dressed because he was a representative of a prestige magazine and all such representatives were smartly dressed, were they not? They had a technical problem and word had gotten around that Paulo might be able to help. Paulo knew so many people, gave out so much technical info, hints and tips, that it had surely only been a matter of time before someone official came and asked for his help. Intrigued as to what form the problem might take, but guessing that it must be big for them not to trust his Email, he had indeed allowed the man to come into his home. He then offered him a drink, an offer that was respectfully declined.
He offered to take the man’s coat, but he declined that also.
“Are you alone in the house?” the man asked. He looked worried. Kind of ‘this really is highly confidential’ worried. It seemed a strange question to ask, but not that strange. Only one thing was worse for a large corporation than an embarrassing problem, and that was having such a problem broadcast.
Paulo answered honestly. Why would he not? Yes, he was alone.
If only he had lied.
The man hit him. Hard. Full in the face, his nose bursting across his face like a water-balloon. Paulo fell backward with the force of a wrecking ball, his back slamming against the inner wall. Not content, the man hit him again. And again. Short, sharp punches from the shoulder to the centre of his face, where it hurt the most. He kept hitting until Paulo slid down the wall to the floor. But there was no need; the first punch was so hard that Paulo was going all the way anyhow. Only friction had slowed his descent.
The man’s mop of black hair also toppled to the floor. A wig, and underneath completely bald. God, he looked so much more sinister without the hair, if that were possible. Not that it mattered any more. Paulo suspected that he was in way too deep now for his suspicions to matter in the slightest.
The man twisted Paulo roughly onto his stomach, produced a set of handcuffs and secured the young man’s flattened wrists (unnaturally flattened by them resting on desks for many hours at a time) behind his back. At the end of those wrists were fingers; heavily calloused from the keys. Fingers which were now quivering with abject fear.
The man was strong. Very strong. The kind of man who, for some reason, needed to be strong.
As though he did this kind of thing for a living.
He grabbed the collar of Paulo’s check-shirt and dragged him face down into the front room like a sack of leaves, the fabric at his neck starting to tear as his feet scraped across the floor. As they crossed the threshold a loose carpet tack tore through Paulo’s knee. It hurt like hell and his screams were both loud and completely ignored.
The man
- Benito Perez, Systems Executive for NetWorld if you believed the card - found a suitable wall and threw Paulo against it. Once there, he slumped as before. His entire face had become one slow, thumping pain and he felt a sticky warmth creeping from his nose and spreading down over his mouth. It tickled slightly, tormenting him, but with his arms fixed tight behind his back there was little he could do to assuage it. All the while the man who had done this was behaving as though Paulo was not even in the room. Instead he looked intently at the screen of the younger man’s computer; still alive with numerous chat-screen windows before, taking a seat in the facing chair and... relaxing. Double clicking on something out of sight he began to key in some codes. Paulo could not see the screen, but he knew from the timing of the keystokes, something he heard as regularly as his favourite record, that the man had somehow placed himself back at root level on the system and was now doing some direct-access programming.
Every language, whether computer or otherwise, has its own very distinct tempo. A speed at which the flow of letters, words and breaks are delivered. Paulo recognised a great many of them as distinctively as a Rolling Stones drum track and could tell with eyes closed whether someone was keying in Spanish, English, UNIX (East or West Coast variants), BASIC, Cobol, Pascal, Natrel or C++.
This man was now working in UNIX, West Coast. Direct web access.
He leaned back casually and asked Paulo some odd questions. The look in his eyes was now telling Paulo not just to fear for his health, but perhaps also for his life, and so he answered each of them as truthfully as he could. He spluttered blood as desperately as he spluttered the words. When the questioning was over, a long period of waiting began. It would be a great many hours before either man moved or spoke again.
Throughout those hours the young Spaniard would understand nothing of what was happening to him and even less of what was about to happen. Consequently he had absolutely no idea just how much worse - or how much shorter - his life was going to get. Many suggestions, speculations and vague ideas would spiral in the dark void that sat behind the thumping of his head, but few of them would fight back strongly enough to ever become clear.
Eventually he would be left with only the most stupid of thoughts.
What in God’s name had possessed him to shake this man’s hand?
taken the daughter
Nehemiah 6:18
Jack was now afraid, and if there was one unnecessary emotion he hated more than any other in this world, it was being afraid. He fully understood that it was both a natural and a necessary part of life, but he despised the sense of helplessness it brought with it. When he played chess he was never afraid, nor when he negotiated a deal for IntelliSoft, purely because he had absolute faith in his abilities and he understood the situation around him.
Yet now, whilst having that self same faith in his own abilities, he was also acutely aware that he was dealing with something that was, in essence, a completely uncontrollable situation; one which he did not understand in the least. In such circumstances even the strongest of faiths is nothing if not blind.
He had already sent the email through the secure channels to Germany and put forth his request for forensic details. Direct from his computer the memo had travelled thousands of miles along cold, unfeeling fibre optic cables. What hurt Jack most was the fact that the same method would ultimately be used to deliver him an answer - one that might well affect the rest of his life. What if it was the wrong answer? What if it was that answer; the one that was supposed to result in a huge smile and a loving embrace? To receive nothing more empathic than a pixelated ‘_txt’ file regarding his daughter’s child, many months after the event. What the hell kind of father did that make him?
A thoroughly inadequate one, he was guessing.
Five miles from the main IntelliSoft campus, on the third floor of the ranch, it was that same fear of inadequacy that had made Jack spend his waiting time connecting to the IntelliSoft mainframe. He guessed that Dave would still be down there somewhere, watching him log on, but it mattered little. This was something very important, so it was hardly surprising that they were both working late on it. By the light of a single desk lamp, a hastily constructed cheese sandwich and an empty coffee cup nestled underneath, he was now logging back into the heavily-protected depths of his personal file.
Within a few seconds the same grainy opening frame he had seen following Lara’s funeral appeared on the screen. Unlike every other time he had opened this file, however, he did not press ‘PLAY’ and allow the other frames to fall. Today he wanted to dig just a little deeper into the single-frame image itself.
Whilst Dave looked into the images shown on the cards, Jack figured the best thing he could do for his own peace of mind was to look at the bigger picture that surrounded them. He would do for himself the same thing that he insisted Dave do on his behalf before every important negotiation - thorough research. He would try to find seemingly irrelevant fragments of additional information that might help him sit in the place where he was most comfortable; ‘ahead of the game’. He had hoped that details in the file might offer some clues as to whom Simon might be or who he might claim to represent. Because they had not, Jack still could not shake his belief that the man was lying; that he had smelled the putrid stench of opportunity when he had somehow discovered that Lara Bernstein had been aboard that fatal flight.
But as Jack well knew; ‘believing’ was not as closely related to ‘knowing’ as it so very often claimed to be.
Selecting the entire frame, he selected a pull down menu labelled ‘DESPECKLE’ and watched as the image of his daughter became less grainy and her features became clearer. The computer had looked for isolated pixels, calculated an average from those which surrounded them and filled the isolated pixel with the resulting colour. The image, like each of the movie files, was a standard 800 x 600 pixels in size, so Jack now selected ‘DOUBLE SIZE’ from the same menu, followed by ‘INTERPOLATE’. This allowed the image to fill more of his screen as the computer added extra pixels, which it again coloured by averaging those which surrounded them. Finally he selected ‘UNSHARP MASK’, a function with which the software made its best effort to analyse the image and pull out the subtler details. With a larger, clearer image than he had ever chosen to view before, albeit on a single frame, he now looked beyond his daughter to the environment from which she had transmitted the message.
Behind her left shoulder were a number of items resting on a black shelf. Many were blurred beyond recognition but there was definitively a row of five paperback books leaning against what appeared to be a table lamp. Powerful as Jack’s software was, he knew that the titles were illegible beyond even the best sharpening function currently available.
In the top left of the image, just visible over Lara’s right shoulder, he saw again the corner of the painting housed in the golden frame. Only the bottom right hand section was visible, and he had no idea how much of the complete image it might actually comprise, but there was a clean enough structure to the visible fragment to offer him a sense of hope. It was primarily dark, almost black, but also contained a pale yellow area whose shape seemed to indicate clothing. Above and to the right were some blurred highlights and a pale shape which was almost certainly a face. Jack looked at the layout and the colour scheme and smiled. If he squinted his eyes it looked suspiciously like the work of an Old Master. If it was, then he could almost certainly find out precisely which one and ascertain whether or not it might have some connection to the paintings detailed on the postcards.
He accessed the copy function and directed a duplicate file to a second computer on a desk three feet to his right. With a quick flick of his ankles his chair was sliding across the polished attic floor and he selected the portion of the image which contained the painting. He copied it into the computer’s RAM and a few mouse clicks later was performing his own bench test on just one facet of the yet to be launched ArtWorX system.
Deftly negotiating his way through the ethe
real beauty of ArtWorX Valley’s real and imaginary flora until he reached the Fine Art section, he clicked a blue daffodil which, as explained on a large leaf at its base, launched the ImageFind function. Then he pasted the picture fragment back onto the screen and selected another function labelled ‘DEFINE SECTION’. The computer beeped and offered him six options; ‘TOP-LEFT’, ‘TOP-RIGHT’, ‘BOTTOM-LEFT’, ‘BOTTOM-RIGHT’, ‘CENTRE’ and ‘UNKNOWN’. The latter selection would call each one of fifteen million images into the RAM, scale and position the section over five hundred times to find a match anywhere within the image and, if none were found, move on to the next. This would probably take days to complete but, as Jack was pretty sure that he was looking at the bottom right section of the image, that was the function he selected.
It probably wouldn’t even take an hour.
Even so, with the blurred and undefined nature of the section, the computer would probably find numerous possible matches. It would then be left to the best search engine in the world, the human eye, to take over and make the final decision. He only hoped that the print behind Lara had been showing the complete painting, rather than just a section. If he was already looking at a cropped version of the image then the search engine, powerful as it was, would miss the match because, whilst it might be the bottom of right of his image, it would not be that of the original.
As his chair slid back into place, a buzzer sounded from the computer and ‘ENTRANCE NORTH EAST’ appeared on the screen. He hit the ‘TAB’ key and MaryBeth’s face appeared on the screen in a floating palette, her features slightly distorted by the wide-angle lens as she looked up at the camera.
“Hiya boss.”
He smiled. “I’m in the attic. Could you do me a favour?”
MaryBeth smiled back at him. “Coffee?” It seemed that, as ever, she knew him just a little too well.
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