Since the noise of the rotors was too great to allow a telephone conversation and since I didn’t want to talk about this out loud, I took out my phone and sent a short text message asking the Splashdown team to get the afternoon’s CCTV footage from the museum downloaded to my computer as soon as possible.
“There,” Miranda pointed and up ahead I saw the spire of the Agency rising above the otherwise rather flat horizon.
The helicopter made no attempt to head for Kidlington Airport (the helicopter landing pads being prudently located well away from the airship section to take into account the mess that a set of rotors could make of an airship’s envelope), but instead swept low over the ring road and across the housing estates of the eastern end of town. These were mainly lower paid workers and students housing, so we were unlikely to cause any complaints about the noise. Had we come in over the more affluent north or west then the well-to-do house owners there would have kicked up a stink. The Agency tried to keep in the good graces of all its neighbours where it could, but was quite willing to step all over them and their petty concerns if it became necessary.
Apparently the pilot had been told it was necessary.
That same pilot didn’t start to slow the vehicle until the tracks of the railway passed under us and I thought that he’d left it too late, but he proved why he was paid a pilot’s wage and I wasn’t by bringing the craft in a sharp sloping descent right down onto the loading bay at the back of the building, which doubled as a landing pad and had been cleared of large vehicles for that very purpose.
“You’re wanted inside,” the second crewman told us over the intercoms in our headsets. “Miss Harcourt has been cleared through security already.”
In any normal workplace the arrival of a squat and undeniably dangerous-looking quasi-military helicopter in the back yard would have elicited crowds of faces at the windows, but on a scale of the odd things that happened at the Agency on an average day, this barely registered. We ran, crouched over, to the staff door and the chopper blasted off into the air as soon as we were clear of the downwash, this time rising straight up past the floors and floors of reflective windows until it cleared the top of the building. It then rotated until it was facing towards the airport and then set off in that direction at a more leisurely pace. I wondered if the pilot had done that to check out the state of his aircraft in the reflection or just because it looked good and he wanted to show off some more fancy flying. I decided that it really didn’t matter.
We entered the building, accompanied by a small cloud of dust and dirt from the maelstrom that the helicopter’s departure had left swirling around and were immediately greeted by Mettles just inside.
“I’m sorry miss, but I need to check you out,” he said to Miranda, not realising that she was a woman who was well used to men checking her out.
“Of course,” she replied and raised her arms obligingly.
Mettles ran a wand, this one both magical and electronic, briefly over her arms, legs and torso before stepping back and declaring, “That’s fine, thank you. No weapons. Other than your devastating good looks of course.”
I stared at him slack-jawed. Miranda actually blushed. This was a side of the man that I had never seen before, that probably nobody had ever seen before, not whilst he was on duty anyhow. Mettles, oblivious to (or just ignoring) my reaction, turned businesslike. “You are both expected in conference room 7 Agent Ward,” he told me, adding ominously, “I presume that you can find your way there this time?”
“No escort required,” I assured him and we headed for the lobby.
The Agency conference rooms were all in the public area on the ground floor and varied in size to suit an intimate conference of four or a press conference of a few hundred. This was so that attendees didn’t have to pass through the stringent Agency safety checks every time they came in for a brief meeting. Press conferences were rare since the Agency operated on the principle that the public had a right to know, but really couldn’t afford the trouser-cleaning bills. Conference Room 7 could comfortably hold about ten, so the three of us who found ourselves inside had plenty of room to spread out. Along with Miranda and myself was a small, but wide, man with a handlebar moustache that merited no less a superlative than ‘magnificent’. It was thick, black and luxurious and so eye-catching that it took a few moments for the rest of the man’s face to come into focus. As we entered, he was riffling through the contents of his briefcase for something.
“Hello, hello,” he said, coming over in order to grab my hand and pump it up and down as though he expected to get water gushing out of my mouth sometime soon. “I am Cimarron Escobar, head of the Cryptography section. We spoke on the phone and teleconferenced a short while ago.”
“That we did,” I agreed, managing to extricate my hand from his grip. It was surprising that he thought we would not recognise him from the earlier teleconference. His was not a face or manner that was easily forgettable. He immediately turned to Miranda, “And hello to you also Senora.” He took her hand, but instead lightly brushed the back of it with his lips. From the pursing of her lips, I assumed that the resplendent ‘tache must have tickled.
“Actually I think it’s technically Senorita,” she replied, making sure that she reclaimed the hand quickly.
“Ah, I had hoped that it was so, but could not believe that British men could be so stupid as to allow you to remain free for so long,” Escobar gushed, escorting her to a chair at the modern glass conference table.
“Perhaps it is I who has allowed them to remain free,” Miranda flirted back, her eyes flashing with amusement.
“But of course it is,” Escobar agreed with a throaty chuckle. “I am sure that the situation would not remain so for long if you were in Espana.”
“Which sounds like a good reason not to go to Spain,” I muttered under my breath as I took a seat as well. “I take it that you have some sort of good reason for rushing us back here through just about every no-fly zone in the south of England, Mister Escobar?” I queried archly.
“Of course, of course,” he flapped his hands at me in a dismissive Spanish fashion, “but there is always time to exchange pleasantries with such a charming, and unattached, senorita.”
“All right, can we consider the pleasantries exchanged and get on with the cryptography stuff?” I demanded, a little more abruptly than was really necessary, but this case was starting to get to me. Or perhaps it was her. Miranda was starting to get to me and I didn’t like it when other men showed her the kind of attention than any woman who looked like she did was going to get shown by any man. I hoped that wasn’t it. That was unprofessional and if there was one thing I prided myself on, other than managing to get under Grayson’s skin, then it was that I was a professional.
“Ah yes,” Escobar’s attention switched immediately from Miranda to his work. His cheerful enthusiasm reminded me strongly of Professor Houseman. If she had still been alive then it might have been good to get them together and watch the energy building to critical. “The information that you sent was exactly what we needed to decipher the message, though the quality of the image left something to be desired.”
“I was in a hurry,” I told him defensively. I didn’t bother to mention the flooding or the sphinxes.
“Still, we managed to make of it what we needed,” he allowed and pressed a control built into the surface of the desk. A small screen slid smoothly down from the ceiling and lit up with an image of the soaked paper that Houseman had given her life to scribble on.
“Looks pretty clear to me,” I muttered with a petulant pout.
“None of this means anything at all on its own,” Escobar said, pointing at the symbols with one of those laser pens that shines a dot on the screen or distracts pilots trying to land planes depending on whether you’re a responsible adult or a twelve year old kid. “These appear to be random symbols with little or no connection to each other, but when we start to use these in the messages that you found in the books…
”
“Wait a minute,” Miranda interrupted with a frown. “What books?”
“The chemistry books that were in your brother’s apartment,” I took up the opportunity to explain, “the ones that had bookmarks in them. And the dry wipe board.”
“That is quite so,” Escobar took back control of the explanation, bringing up a series of images of pages from assorted chemistry texts onto the screen. “The book pages were a primer, a bigger key if you like, that unlocks the message on the white board. The smaller key on the inside of the ring provides a primer that shows us how to use the larger primer. I could analogise it to the ring providing the alphabet and the books providing basic words and grammar.”
At least we could understand that. I felt like I was back in Mrs Grimshaw’s English language lessons trying to learn the meaning of the phrase ‘past participle’. I was never interested in what the technical grammar terms were, only in how to use the grammar to pass the test and get the hell out of school.
“And so the message is?” I tried to prompt him, but it was a bit like Canute trying to get the tide to come back in when he wanted it to.
“The message itself was to be found on the dry wipe board,” Escobar continued as though he hadn’t even heard me, which was quite possible since he was so caught up in the subject that he was lecturing on. Apparently there was something of the lecturer in all subject specialists just waiting for the chance to get out and strut its funky stuff. “It was very cleverly hidden amongst the formulae. These are quite advanced scientific notations and so it is unlikely that anyone other than a highly qualified chemist would realise that they actually make no sense whatsoever.”
Which made it a very clever cry for help since none of the people that Arnie had been forced into working for would be qualified enough to realise that he had made a cry for help. Of course it also meant that there was very little chance that anyone would come to his rescue since even his would-be rescuers would probably not realise that it was a cry for help. Sometimes people can be too clever for their own good.
“By using the scientific notation that is missing as well as what is present and what is incorrect, we have been able to decipher a quite detailed amount of information from what appears to be relatively little on the board. It is a remarkably complex code, very subtle and very hard to crack. Are you sure that your brother did not work in cryptography?”
“I am sure that he doesn’t,” Miranda said with a sad smile, clinging to the present tense (thank you Mrs Grimshaw) for comfort, “but he is a very smart chemist.”
“Well, if ever he feels like a change in occupation then you can tell him that I would gladly have him come and work for me,” Escobar told her with a nod of his head that set his moustache to moving in lush waves. “The translated words from this soaked paper finally gave us enough to run a statistical analysis and translation matrix that checked the meaning of each word against the known words, the previous word and the contextual meaning. Thus each iteration refined the message more clearly.”
“What did the message say?” I asked, emphasising each word so that they might get through to the cryptographer individually.
“Oh yes, that,” he again waved his hand dismissively. Clearly for him the process of extracting the message from beneath its layers of codes and formulae and hieroglyphs and dead secret languages was far more important than the meaning of the thing that was unearthed itself. He went back to the briefcase that sat on the end of the table and took out one of the buff document folders. This one carried a blue flash that meant I was cleared for the contents, though it could have been any colour of the rainbow for all I cared. At this point I would have read the message no matter what colour was splashed all over the cover.
I was desperate to know what was in the message after the long, and mainly unnecessary, lecture, but as I read the contents of the folder I started to get very worried indeed.
“Oh crap.”
“What?” Miranda demanded, “What is it?”
As a non-member of the Agency, she didn’t have the security clearance to read what was contained in the folder, but we’d come a bit too far to worry about that now. I handed it over to her.
“This looks like a ceremony to raise up the gods of ancient Egypt,” she said as she scanned the information. “Is that even possible? Is this for real?”
“I knew I’d have to teleport to Egypt,” I complained as I handed it over.
The Abu Simbel Centre For Antiquity
“Wow. That impresses me every time,” Miranda said as she stepped out of the teleportation booth into the station at Abu Simbel.
I can’t say that I shared her appreciation of the process of teleportation. Though it had been around for over a decade now, teleportation had not become the common mode of mass transportation that the inventors had envisaged. Quite apart from the people who refused to travel by it, there was the matter of the cost, which kept it out of the range of most ordinary people. There were some private networks that had been established by large multinational corporations for moving their own staff around between offices across the globe, but the public system had proved to be slow in spreading beyond the major centres of population.
The main barrier was the cost of the process itself. Quantum particle physicists will tell you that matter is energy and energy is matter and that at the subatomic level everything exists as both particles and waves. Matter teleportation is therefore simply a matter of exciting the particles into their wave states and sending the waves to the new location before ‘unexciting’ them back to their matter component. Turning the whole body into a mass of waves and then back again would have been utterly impossible, at least the turning back again part, so the process dealt with one subatomic particle at a time. Only the advent of ultra fast supercomputers had allowed for the near instantaneous transmission of the huge amount of tiny energy packets with the necessary precision for reassembly. The process was apparently indescribably painful, but was over so quickly that human neurons didn’t have time to register anything out of the ordinary.
That didn’t mean that the system was perfect. The waves could lose a small amount of coherence in the transmission, but this rarely led to anything noticeable. Loss of coherence normally led to something such as a couple of fewer freckles or an extra grey hair. Significant changes could happen, but they were so rare that they had passed into the stuff of legend that everyone spoke of in hushed awe. Nobody had ever met the person who had grown an extra toe, become spontaneously left-handed or swapped gender. Officially that was because they didn’t exist. The Agency knew that it was really because they had been paid a huge amount of money by the teleporter companies to keep their mouths (assuming they still had those) shut and enjoy the luxurious lifestyle offered on a private Caribbean island.
This didn’t prevent Teleportation Phobia from developing into a very real condition that afflicted a seemingly growing proportion of the population. Even though the statistics showed that you were more likely to be hit by a flaming meteorite than suffer internal organ adjustment syndrome (as the ‘porting companies like to describe suddenly finding yourself wearing your heart on the outside) in the teleportation system, some people just could not face the idea of having their bodies messed around with at the most basic level. The uninformed feared that since the particles didn’t actually travel through the system as particles, teleportation wasn’t transportation at all, just a means of making cheap, imperfect copies, except that it wasn’t all that cheap. They feared that the process took away a person’s very soul, which might have explained the way that society was heading these days. The fact that this system of teleportation merely changed the state of the human body and transmitted the resulting waves before reincorporating them meant that what arrived was truly what had left and not just some reconstituted copy of it was something that they did not seem to be able to comprehend. It also meant that it was impossible for the rich to be able to store their ‘pattern’ to be resurrected at a
later date should anything untoward happen to them, thus becoming effectively immortal.
Abu Simbel was not a major centre of population, but it had a mainline teleport station because of the archaeological digs and historical centres that brought millions of visitors there each year. All around the temples had been found dozens of others sites, all of them containing invaluable insights into the past of the country and of humanity as a whole. The two huge temples built into the hillside had caused a projected Nile dam and reservoir project to be shelved, leading to water shortages throughout the area for almost a century. The tourist trade and constant stream of historians and archaeologists coming to visit these sites and spending money in the locality provided the traffic demand that had convinced the teleport companies to provide a station effectively out in the middle of nowhere.
There was no air conditioning in the station, so the air that I breathed in was hot and fetid with the exotic, spicy aromas of Egyptian cooking. The oversweet scents of Couscous R Us and Baklava Hut, the country’s major chains of fast food restaurants, lay heavily over everything else, but the various perfumes of flavoured hookah pipe smoke also threaded through the leaden air.
“So this is Egypt,” Miranda said with something akin to an awed sigh.
“No,” I contradicted her, “this is Abu Simbel station. Everything here is for tourists. The real Egypt starts about ten miles from here. Come on.”
The information that had been decoded from the message left by Arnie in the language of the Pharaoh’s original secret service had consisted of instructions for a ceremony that would bring about the return of the ancient animal-headed gods of Egyptian folk lore back to Earth from wherever it was that they had actually gone. The burning question, therefore, was whether it was genuine and could actually do what it was meant to do or whether it was the archaeological equivalent of an election manifesto promise. The group that I was pursuing clearly thought the former or they wouldn’t be going around relocating Sirens and killing everyone in their sights, but I needed independent verification from an expert and since the death of Professor Houseman all the suitably qualified Egyptologists were to be found in Egypt. So to Egypt we had come.
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. - the Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist Page 19