“I’d like to speak to the evidence locker.”
The evidence locker was, inevitably, a good deal larger than a locker. All the evidence from current and past investigations (and, in one unusual case, a future investigation) was stored in a secure underground location hidden halfway between Oxford and Swindon. It wasn’t particularly well hidden considering the amount of barbed wire fencing that surrounded said hiding place and the large number of guard dogs and armed security personnel that patrolled the boundary, but it was, at least, secure. Inside the barbed wire perimeter there was a line of pressure pad alarms and a small minefield to cross before finally reaching the apparently empty field at the middle. It was the most heavily guarded empty field in the country, probably the world, and so everyone knew about it as a result. Even had they been able to penetrate the security it was unlikely that anyone would have tried considering that a large minority of the items stored there possessed the kind of magical potential that could ruin your day at a hundred paces. There was more lead used in the construction of the underground bunker than any other building in the world.
“Evidence locker,” when I was connected, the voice at the other end of the phone was as bored as only a person who is in charge of a warehouse full of potentially dangerous, but mainly inert, objects can be.
“I need to see the wedding rings from the personal effects of Cynthia Traske, Geoffrey Helliman and the as yet unnamed Siren,” I told him once the initial identification checks had been run through.
“Serena Goldwater?” the man asked for confirmation. I could hear him tapping the names into the computer terminal.
“They’ve identified her? Great.”
“That’s the name that she has been using,” the unseen locker man reported. “As I understand it, that’s still all that is known about her. Okay, we have the effects list for Cynthia Traske and there is no wedding band listed.”
“There must be,” I contradicted him, though I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that had nothing to do with the fact that I was precariously perched on the top of a giant balloon cruising at more than a thousand feet above the ground. “I saw it on her finger.”
“There’s other jewellery listed,” the man replied, “most of it sounding a touch on the trashy side, but nothing about a wedding band. Let me try Helliman.” There was more tapping of computer keys and then, “Helliman also has no wedding band listed amongst the personal effects.”
“I saw his ring as well,” I said. It was true that I had noticed his wedding ring when Miranda and I had first met with him, but things had happened a little fast when we found his body and so I couldn’t be sure that he had been wearing it then, but most people took their wedding rings off only infrequently and rarely before becoming unexpectedly dead.
“It is not on the list. I am also checking Serena Goldwater and … no, no wedding band.”
“They cannot have all gone missing.” Now I was mad, though part of that anger was aimed at myself for not noticing the potential significance of all the major players sporting similar rings sooner.
“They haven’t gone missing, they were never logged in,” the man replied, slightly offended. “I’ll get someone to make a visual check and I will contact the evidence collection teams to get them to check their records as well.”
“Damn right you will!” I snapped. “And whilst you’re at it you can get a diving team back to the bottom of that reservoir under the Water Board HQ in Slough to go over the bottom inch by inch. I want one of those rings or you’ll be answering to Director Grayson.”
I cut the unfortunate man off before he could respond and dialled the enquiries desk who ran through the identification procedures with the usual admirable speed and efficiency, which was just as well as I was in no mood for wasted pleasantries.
“I need for you to get an agent out to…” I realised that I couldn’t pronounce the name of the quarry that I had just left. Instead, I tapped the name on the phone keypad.
“Isn’t that where you have just been?” the enquiries desk operator asked, having confirmed the name of the place with absolutely flawless welsh inflection.
I didn’t even attempt to ask how they knew that. There was probably a tracker either in my phone or the car that we had been using. “Yes, but I am in no position to go back there and this cannot wait until I am.”
“The agent has already been despatched,” the operator confirmed without even registering my tone as aggressive. “When they arrive?”
“They need to find Jamal Khaled, quarry foreman, and take him into custody immediately. He should be wearing a wedding ring. They are to confiscate this ring immediately and bring Khaled back to HQ. Is that clear?”
The operator repeated the instructions back to me exactly, so I hung up and slowly climbed precariously back down onto the ladder and then down to the walkway. The Captain was waiting for me patiently at the bottom.
“Any problems?” he asked as I stepped off the ladder.
“Not that need concern you,” I thanked him.
“No sudden, heart-stopping bolts of electricity?” he further enquired.
“Erm, no nothing like that,” I reassured him.
“Well it isn’t a stormy night,” he said with a relieved sigh and handed me a comb, “but you might want to run that through your hair before returning to the cabin.”
“What for?” I wondered, but then caught sight of myself in a reflecting surface. The follicles of hair on my head had risen up from the scalp. They weren’t standing on end, but they certainly made me look pretty strange. “Oh, thanks.”
I ran the comb through my hair to an accompaniment of small crackles as the static dissipated into the teeth of the special comb, which I then handed back to the Captain.
“You wouldn’t want to be here in a thunderstorm,” he informed me as we made our way back to the gondola.
“You’re right,” I agreed, “I wouldn’t.”
By the time that I got back to the dining lounge, Miranda was not to be seen and the other public areas were equally empty of her. Assuming that she had taken advantage of one of the sleeping berths that came with the ticket, even though the journey wasn’t all that long, I went to the bar and got a few drinks in, waiting for the lights of Oxford, dominated by the illuminated spear tip of Agency HQ to come into view.
Oxford International Airport
I switched on my mobile as soon as the airship’s engines set into idling mode, keeping the dirigible lined up against the light wind that was trying to push it across the tarmac at Oxford International Airport into the small town of Kidlington that had been swallowed up by the airport development on the edge of the city despite the vehement objections of the local residents and the environmentalists who had discovered three kinds of rare newts on the sites of the various runway expansions. The best laid plans of newts and environmentalists, however, don’t mean a thing when up against the persuasive might of the Agency legal machine and the site was developed to accommodate the big cargo planes and airships that serviced the organisation, pushing the smaller rich people’s jets out to a minor runway at the southern end. The phone beeped constantly for half a minute as a flood of texts poured down the reopened link. Most of them I deleted as soon as I opened them. Even the Agency communications filters that could block almost any form of electronic eavesdropping on the devices could not effectively stop anonymous people trying to sell me Viagra or fake Swiss watches.
Two of the remaining texts caught my attention straight away. The first was a report from the agent who had teleported out to apprehend Jamal Khaled at the quarry site. The demolitions man had fled, leaving work shortly after my visit. His apartment in town had been hurriedly vacated by the looks of the discarded clothes on the bed and the single case missing from a set of three in the wardrobe. The search to locate him was on and expanding out nationwide, but none of the public transport services had record of a ticket bought under that name and there was no car registered to him on the
vehicle licensing database. He had, effectively, disappeared. It was a thorough and professional report, but one that didn’t hide the fact that Khaled had gotten away from under my very nose.
The second was more unexpected, so I called the number displayed on the screen. It connected, but unusually for an Agency department it rang out for a while before finally being answered. The greeting was also far below expected Agency standards even before the heavy Iberian accent made it harder to decipher, “Hello, yes?”
“Hello … Is this the Cryptography section?”
“Isn’t that who you were expecting?” the man at the other end responded rather distractedly.
“Well it is who I believed I was calling,” I decided not to make any rash assumptions at this point.
“Then I believe that your belief is justified,” was the rather convoluted response. I supposed that this was what you got when you locked people away with puzzles and codes all day long.
“It is the Cryptography section then?” I tried to clarify.
“That’s what I just said.”
I wasn’t actually sure that it was, but decided not to push the point anyway. “I’d like to speak to,” I checked the name on the text, “Cimarron Escobar.”
“Who did you think you were going to talk to?” the man queried archly, “Pedro Picasso?”
Considering the way this conversation was going, I was beginning to feel that I might have gotten myself trapped in one of Picasso’s more surreal paintings, one of those that looked like a five year old could have done with finger paints and absolutely no grasp of human anatomy.
“Look,” I snapped, hoping to get through to him, “I’m Agent Ward and I received a text from Cimarron Escobar about some chemistry formulae…”
“Ah si,” the man’s demeanour changed immediately, like the sun coming out just too late to save a soggy autumn bank holiday. “It is a very nice little conundrum that you have provided us with here. A very sultry tango it has led us on.”
“But you have deciphered it?” I prompted when he seemed happy to go not further.
“No, but it is most certainly a code, a very cunning one that uses several layers of encryption, each of a different type. We have broken down four of the layers, but the next one defeats us because there is incomplete information. Nobody could decode this information without access to some sort of key. A starting point if you will. If you wish to know what lies behind all of this then you will need to bring me a Rosetta Stone.”
“How about the actual Rosetta Stone?” I suggested. “That I can get hold of.”
“Without the key it would be simpler to get Shakespeare’s monkeys to type Hamlet 2: The Revenge of Denmark than to break this code,” he stated, misquoting the ownership involved in the monkey imagery, but not the title of the Bard’s most loved sequel.
“I am working on it,” I promised him.
“Por Favor, work harder. This code is … how is it that you say … ‘doing our heads in’. I have not been so challenged since the all-Espana paella-eating championship.”
“Yes, well, I hope to have taken the raging bull by the horns in the very near future,” I lied optimistically.
“Senor Ward, when the bull is raging the best thing to do is to get the hell out of his way,” Escobar replied and then hung up with no further conversation.
I was left standing, looking at the phone in mild confusion when Miranda arrived beside me.
“Bad news phone call?” she asked sympathetically.
“Phone call yes, but beyond that I wouldn’t like to commit myself,” I told her. I opened the next of the non-virility-enhancing texts and checked my watch. “The diving team will be in Slough within the hour,” I informed her urgently. “And we need to be there. Come on.”
The car that had been ordered to meet us at the airport was a standard Agency courtesy car rather than an agent’s vehicle, so there weren’t any built-in blue lights and sirens to use on the way. Consequently, my speed and constant weaving in and out of the otherwise orderly computer-controlled traffic brought a number of concerned and dirty looks from other drivers who were disturbed from reading the paper or fixing their makeup by the evasive action that the central computers were forced to make. Even though my vehicle was on manual control, the computer systems would automatically override any really dangerous manoeuvre that I made, so I just put my foot down on the accelerator and went as fast as I could.
The underwater search team still managed to arrive at the home of the Water Board before us, so I resisted the urge to lay down a couple of lines of rubber by braking hard across the car park. It might have relieved my frustration a little, but it would also have probably brought a letter of reprimand for the misuse of Agency property. Fortunately, the divers were only just entering the water as we walked into the bare room that had once been Helliman’s water quality testing lab. Every item of equipment, every piece of paper, every item of furniture had been removed from the scene of the team’s death and thoroughly examined. Nothing had been discovered relevant to the case. The police and Agency crime scene tapes were still strung everywhere, though the diving team had torn a swathe through them.
“Wow!” Miranda echoed my unspoken thoughts, “It looks a lot different from the last time we were here.”
“Should be a lot less dangerous as well.”
“You really want to make that assumption?” she challenged me as we headed through the room and out into the cavern beyond.
“I think it’s safe to assume that we won’t be targeted by any psychotic Sirens this time,” I pointed out.
Half a dozen heads encased in orange rubber were bobbing on the surface of the lake like cheap plastic marina buoys, but they all submerged as we approached across the rocks, leaving only a single man with a laptop computer that supplied radio communications, sonar plots and images from the cameras that the divers were equipped with. Those images became grainier and much more restricted in range as they descended out of the light.
“Hi there,” I introduced us as we approached him, “I’m Ward and this is Miss Harcourt.”
“Geoff Kirk,” appropriately enough, his handshake was as limp as a clump of dead seaweed. He looked young enough that he still ought to have been studying for his 50m swimming badge at primary school. “Ward? So this is your show huh? Is this right?” He indicated to a clipboard holding the orders for the operation. “You expect us to find a wedding ring down there?”
“Expect no, hope yes. You might want to start out over by that spit of rocks over there,” I pointed to the place where the Siren had come to her shocking end. “That’s where the main action was and the most likely place where the ring might have come off.”
“One place is as good as any other to start I suppose,” he said with the indifference of youth, “but that’s an awful lot of lake bed to cover, especially in the dark.”
“I understand that,” I said appreciatively. “Oh and if any of your people see three large shapes cruising through the water they don’t need to worry; they’re not carnivorous.”
“Good to know,” he agreed and relayed the information to the troops underwater. “You might want to make yourselves comfortable. This is going to take a while.”
In the end, the search didn’t take as long as any of us thought that it was going to. The magnetic fields of the metal detectors that the diving team were using detected the gold ring’s presence after only a couple of hours and it took another couple for the teams to narrow down the actual location. Along the way they found six Coke cans, three teaspoons and a mint condition 1974 Ford Pick up truck.
“Is this the ring you’re looking for?” Geoff Kirk asked after having the band transferred immediately to an evidence bag to ensure that any surviving forensic material wasn’t lost. There wasn’t likely to be a lot of that after the ring had been in the water so long. He handed me the bag and waited impatiently. The bright orange clad heads of his team were again bobbing in the water behind him.
&nbs
p; The ring was nothing special to look at initially, a simple golden band with no obvious markings, but as I peered closer through the distorting plastic of the bag, I could make out markings on the inside face of the metal. They were tiny, but there were a lot of them and they did not look random. The first symbol (or the last depending on where you started looking) was large enough to make out, though. It was a cartouche, an ancient Egyptian naming hieroglyph.
“It’s the one,” I confirmed, pocketing the bag. There was no way that I was letting this out of my sight until I got it back to headquarters.
The British Museum, London
The Egyptian Galleries at the British Museum remained hugely impressive places even though most of the real exhibits had been handed back to the governments of the countries from which they had been stripped during the Imperialist Era. It was no longer the case that there were more obelisks in Europe than there were in Egypt. Each item, though, had been replaced by an exact duplicate fashioned to the most exacting standards of archaeological accuracy. This meant that the museum was now free to create impressive displays of artefacts without the fear of damaging them. The entrance to the Egyptian section, for example, was between two towering seated stone figures clasping ankhs to their chests and scowling down onto the crowds.
“I feel like they’re watching me,” Miranda whispered, no doubt feeling a bit foolish for thinking such thoughts, but she was far from alone.
The Siren’s ring had brought us here. I had taken it back to Oxford to the forensics labs, which were actually located outside of the main HQ in a large building attached to one of the older colleges. The labs were affiliated to the internal research labs run by Mrs Freidriksen, but didn’t handle secret, and usually dangerous, research and so could be outsourced, but kept within the university confines to provide a training as well as an investigative facility. I practically stood over the shoulders of the lab-coated technicians who studied the ring right down to the molecular level and back. By the end of the examination, they were able to tell me where in the world the gold had been originally mined and which firm of goldsmiths had fashioned it.
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. - the Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist Page 16