Search For Reason (State Of Reason Mystery, Book 2)

by Miles A. Maxwell

  “That’ll work. Port 80.”

  “Duh — Okay . . . I’m in. Then —” Jacob typed. “We telnet over to the ol’ Ministry of Industry and Energy — Even if they spot us, they’ll probably think it’s some old KGB guys looking over their shoulders.”

  “Using Russian computers to hack their own system!” Ray let out a mule’s “He-haw! He-haw!” Jacob never got over his older brother’s infectious laugh. And it was pretty funny. He joined in, his own rising-falling counterpart.

  When they calmed down, Jacob typed in several more commands.

  “How about four of their own less-protected in-house processors?” Ray asked.

  “Good idea.” Jacob chuckled, attacking the keyboard furiously. Both knew Ray was the better hacker. Jacob’s thing was really hardware.

  “One — over here . . . two — got ’em!” Jacob said. “And . . . running —”

  “Now we wait,” Ray said. “Shouldn’t take too long. Probably just a puny little 128-bit word defense. If —”

  A bell chimed.

  “Hey!” Ray said at the text box center screen. “Not even 128-bit encryption!”

  “Seems more like 32 bit,” Jacob answered, slashing the mouse across the screen.

  “Ahmad Hashim. Put it in — no, Bro. Not Ahamad, Ahmad.”

  “I am. Relax.” Jacob’s fingers rustled the keys.

  The screen changed and there he was. Short wiry dark hair. Dark eyes in wire-rim glasses.

  Three lines of English sat below the photo:

  Ahmad Hashim

  Pakistan Atomic Engineering, Rawalpindi / Nihon

  INACTIVE

  “Says his ID’s expired here too,” Ray said.

  A message flashed onto the monitor. “Hey!” Ray pointed.

  TRACE AT FIRST NODE!

  “Get out! Somebody’s onto us! Get out!”

  Jacob’s right hand hit the mouse. He closed the browser, the text window next to it. “Did they —”

  “No. Just starting to look at our connection to the Energy Ministry.”

  “Shit! Maybe we should send this stuff to the FBI.”

  “I’m not sure. What’s the FBI gonna think of us hacking into some foreign government database?”

  “Hmm. The Jacksonville Herald, then?” Jacob tried. “Anonymously?”

  Silence. After a minute Jacob added, “Post it on the net?”

  “Maybe —” Ray barked out a doubtful laugh, “but if they trace it back to us —”

  “Yeah, well, at least we’re minors.”

  “What’s going on?” a soft female voice said behind them. “And why exactly does it matter so much if you’re minors?”

  It was the voice of their mother.

  Message Of Peace

  “I can never believe it!” the voice whispered smoothly, calmly, with force. “How can the tens of thousands of innocent children who died in the United States bombings be guilty of manslaughter — of corruption of any kind?”

  In a luxury apartment overlooking Doha’s brilliant blue Arabian seacoast, Taufiq, short and chubby and newly married, sat down at his television to watch the holy man. The speaker stood behind a microphone in the long white robes of a religious imam. Beneath the white headpiece, something in the dark eyes cut into Taufiq’s consciousness.

  “I am an American, and though long have I been a Christian, I am also now a Muslim.

  “So please, let me ask you — in Surah 5:32, does it not clearly state: ‘The killing of one innocent man is as the killing of the entire world? Must this be only for the Jew? Many killed in America were Muslims! Many were Christians! Is not the killing of these children, these young innocent People of the Book, as the killing of all of us?”

  Taufiq’s friends at work all agreed, the position of Muslims everywhere had become suddenly perilous. Each day the United States rattled its retaliatory saber more loudly. Pointing in one direction — at Al-Islam! Should that sword be pulled from its scabbard, what options did any Muslim have? Run? Hide somewhere as refugee?

  But Where?

  “Rockshandra!” Taufiq called to the kitchen. “I feel an inherent truth in this man’s words. Might I have your opinion?”

  Taufiq’s beautiful dark-haired wife stopped preparing their dinner and walked behind his chair in the main room, placing her hands gently on her husband’s shoulders.

  They watched as the holy man said, “Even were such a heinous crime ever to be perpetrated by Muslims, they would not be ordinary Muslims. Only the truly evil — those of a most radical sect — could ever conceive such atrocity.”

  It was not merely his words, but his voice, that implied a feeling of security and safety while it seduced as much as it soothed and reassured.

  A sense of peace flowed through Rockshandra unlike anything she had ever known. The picture changed to a huge stadium.

  “Hear his word!” an announcer said. “Bring him your sick, your blind, your crippled . . .”

  It was a long minute she was silent.

  Taufiq felt himself doubly blessed. A wealthy oil engineer, living within Qatar’s country-wide two-to-one shortage of females, he had imported his woman from his childhood home in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He knew how fortunate he was to even have a wife.

  When she did respond, her voice was calm and relaxed. “Yes, Taufiq. As you say, his words do soothe me. They offer a sense of safety. Are you thinking we should travel to Pakistan, my husband, or watch the event from here?”

  “I am thinking we should attend.”

  Into every high-rise, every shack, once every hour, the two-minute-long commercials flowed, into nineteen countries across the Islamic world.

  What The Hell, Greg!

  Five-foot-five-inch bulldog-necked Senior CIA Field Op Greg Claus waited inside, checking his razor-cut hair in the reflective black marble wall. Turned as his Joint Task Force counterpart approached the pedestrian barrier inside CIA Langley.

  Lance looks pissed, Claus thought.

  “Is it true the President’s sending the George W. Bush to the Arabian Sea?” Lance Bolini shouted from twenty feet away. “What the hell is going on, Greg? Isn’t he considering the evidence we’ve turned up? Why send a sub to the Middle East if the bombs’ deliveries were local?”

  “Shhhh! Wait ’til we’re back in my office, will you, Lance? That’s exactly what I’ll be asking the Director half-an-hour from now.”

  Claus handed Bolini a visitor’s pass and, under the careful eye of three guards, waited as the FBI agent slid it through a reader. Two yellow flippers retracted.

  “That bomb didn’t come from Pakistan,” Bolini said, unbuttoning his overcoat as they walked the hall to the elevator.

  “That’s not the information Director Sloat has,” Claus said. “The plutonium —”

  “I know, I’ve heard,” Bolini interrupted, surprising Claus that the FBI man could be so well informed (Does Lance have a source inside the Agency? I better look into that). “But even if the plutonium were Pakistani, Greg, has it occurred to you, it still might be this group of white separatists who brought the bomb in, delivered it, saw it detonated. Has the President even seen what our team’s turned up in New York State?”

  As they entered Claus’s ten-by-ten-foot office, Bolini handed Claus an update, a list of wire transfers.

  “Look at item number six. Large enough to buy at least one nuclear weapon, wouldn’t you say, Greg? Maybe more than one.” He pointed, “That account’s traceable through a shell corp to one Benoit Kalagi! Kalagi’s —”

  “I know who Kalagi is,” Claus’s eyebrows narrowed. “Look Lance, everybody wants answers. Hell, the country expects answers. Ideally somebody’s chopped-off head on a pike.”

  “Being excessively graphic, aren’t you, Greg? Answer my question. Has. The President. Seen. Our. Stuff?”

  Claus shook his head, jaw clenching. “I don’t know. But I’ll find out.”

  “Has Homeland Security got anything?” Bolini ask
ed. “You’re coordinating. Any related information? Maybe I should talk to them myself.”

  “You and I both know those guys don’t really do anything.” Claus’s left fist clenched in anger. His right hand dipped into his pants pocket and came up with a large silver coin he flipped into the air. Lance Bolini, oblivious for the space of that moment to how his life hung with the spinning coin, watched it rotate, fall into Claus’s hand.

  Claus considered the result, then forced in a slow breath. Let it out even more slowly . . .

  “Awfully glad to have you working with me on this thing, Lance.” He smiled lightly. “Awfully glad. Just give me an hour. I will see that everything you’ve given me is presented to the Director. Personally.”

  The Temple

  At the Salt Lake Airport, a young blonde woman holding a sign with Franklin’s name on it introduced herself as Deirdre. “What’s that?” she asked.

  Franklin held up his backpack. “Just my books.”

  She frowned slightly.

  As jagged mountains grew in the windshield, he asked himself for at least the tenth time, What in hell am I doing here?

  Twenty minutes later they parked in Temple Square. Workers were pushing mounds of fresh snow, clearing the wide walkways. Franklin tilted his gaze upward to the Gothic spires rising against an azure sky as she led him toward the building’s gray stone walls. “We’re going inside? You don’t normally allow that, do you?” Usually the Temple was closed to all outside visitors. Supposedly because of sacred rights given only to the worthy.

  “Very special circumstances,” she smiled.

  The heavy gray stone induced a feeling of awe. In a moment, he’d be one of few non-members ever to set foot inside.

  He remembered what he’d read about the amazing building. The early Mormons cut its granite from a local canyon now famous for its ski resort. Like modern Egyptian slaves, the Temple workers placed fifteen-foot-wide stone foundations into the earth, then raised the Temple’s towering eight-foot-thick walls. And he wondered, If this building were down south on Manhattan Island, would it have stood against the blast?

  Deirdre ushered him through the cavernous main entry, then blocked his path, “This way, please . . .” with an open hand pointing hard left. Along a hallway, down a staircase he suspected was inside one of the corner towers, through a dimly lit hall into a basement room — one he imagined few outside the church’s inner circle had ever been to. The publicity value of my budding fame? The Mormons’ willingness to make this exception proved just how badly they wanted his involvement.

  “Dr. Hyram Millar,” Deirdre introduced.

  “Dr. Millar.” Franklin and Millar shook hands.

  Millar was of wide frame but not stocky. His short blond hair and graying sideburns put him in his mid forties.

  He returned Franklin’s analytical gaze. “I had no idea from your picture you were so young, Dr. Reveal.”

  “Thirty-three,” Franklin said.

  “Christ was thirty-three in his last days,” chuckled a blue-eyed Irish-looking man in a white lab coat, and a priest’s white collar — an oddly unfocused look in his eyes. He put a hand out in Franklin’s direction. “Cardinal Bruce — O’Shaughnessy.”

  Franklin frowned as he took the cardinal’s flabby hand. “St. Patrick’s?” he asked. He’d heard of O’Shaughnessy . . . missing in the New York blast? Del’s radio? That crazy program?

  “Yes, that’s right,” Cardinal Bruce laughed. “Fortunately the reports of my demise were exaggerated greatly. I was traveling.” He turned from Franklin to Millar. “Seems I recall Joseph Smith was only twenty-nine when he received the Book of Mormon, wasn’t he?” a friendly crinkle in the corners of his oddly vacant eyes.

  “Twenty-one, actually.” Millar went on, “Allow me to introduce the other members of the authentication team.”

  Besides the six Mormons — including two professors from Brigham Young University in Provo, two leaders of the local Salt Lake City stake, plus Dr. Millar and Deirdre — Franklin was surprised to find they’d also invited a second Catholic, Father Tom O’Day, a black Baptist reverend — named T. Jefferson Parker, a female Methodist bishop named Elizabeth Hoy, and a balding rabbi wearing a large grin named Moshe Specowitz.

  “Good of you to join us,” Specowitz welcomed.

  Something tickled unpleasantly at the back of Franklin’s mind. All these religious leaders — weren’t they supposed to have been lost in the destruction of New York City? Then he remembered. Yesterday morning. Marjorie’s obituaries!

  All had changed into standard white lab coats. Franklin donned a coat Deirdre offered him. For a moment he thought every one of them seemed to have a bit of Cardinal Bruce’s glazed look. And then it was gone, their eyes darting back-and-forth between the flat white cloths spaced along the benches; the whiteness of the coats and cloths a dramatic contrast to the room’s bare granite walls, which felt somehow grayer now.

  A wizened old man, bone thin with paper skin, entered the room. He held a carved and polished wood cane in his right hand. An assistant at his left elbow. He didn’t look as though he would last much longer. Franklin could feel the old man’s peripheral vision on him, a kind of indirect out-of-center focus. His face easily as famous as Franklin’s, he was Canon G. Smith the Prophet, president of the Mormon Church.

  The old man turned his head suddenly and looked straight at him. For just a moment, Franklin thought he felt a vanishing look in the old man’s face. The surprisingly hard sly look of cunning.

  It was one of the previous Mormon prophets, he remembered — not this one — who’d been fooled by Mormon bomber Mark Hofmann into purchasing forged old Mormon documents. It had always bothered him. God would allow the Prophet to be misled? It was impossible to see in this Prophet’s wise old face a man who could ever be fooled by anything.

  “Dr. Reveal,” the Prophet said, smiling, “You look just like your picture.”

  He spun a copy of the local Deseret News around, its cover filled by Franklin’s TIME magazine FACE OF HOPE photo.

  He offered a weak smile. “Like your last name, Dr. Reveal, we hope today you will reveal an inspiration to many. Very nice to meet you all,” the Prophet said to the others.

  Franklin inclined his head politely.

  The Prophet nodded at Millar and waited at the door.

  “And now,” Millar announced, “the Plates!”

  The Bandwagon

  Gold gleamed in the reflected overhead lighting as Millar whisked a white cloth from the first Plate, then stepped quickly bench-to-bench, removing with a flourish the dust cloths one after another, a metallic glow brightening the room.

  All of Millar’s guests, Franklin the only exception, began to clap.

  “We appreciate you taking the time to come out here to see us,” the Prophet said, looking around as the applause died out. “Please do your best. Tell us what you think. We value your opinion.” Accompanied by his assistant, the Prophet left.

  Each Plate had a tiny numbered piece of masking tape in its lower right corner. Fascinated, Franklin walked to the nearest one. Number 6 was rectangular, its metal sheet-thin, like a piece of notebook cardboard, eight inches tall, six inches wide.

  “Kind of like meeting God!” O’Shaughnessy quipped.

  “Did you find the Urim and Thummim, Smith’s translating tools?” Franklin asked seriously.

  “No,” Millar said, exposing a shade of disappointment. “Nor the sword of Laban. We believe either the Urim or Thummim was used to translate Egyptian characters into Hebrew characters; and the other translation stone, Hebrew into English. But because of what we’ve learned since the First Prophet’s day about ancient languages, we hope the Urim and Thummim will no longer be necessary.”

  The Plates were covered with tiny sixteenth-inch-tall symbols, surrounded by occasional scratches and small uneven dents as if hammered many times. They certainly looked ancient. Franklin couldn’t place th
e metal. The color was somewhere close to the yellow of gold but with a red hint of fresh copper. He felt its weight with his fingertips. Thin as it was, the Plate felt too light to be pure gold. It didn’t appear to be particularly worn or oxidized. He leaned closer.

  “Being made of solid metal,” Millar said, “the Plates are of course impossible to date using radioactive methods.”

  “Have you assayed the metal?” Franklin asked.

  “Yes. They aren’t pure gold. They’re twenty-three carats at the surface but actually they’re tumbaga.”

  “An alloy of gold and copper,” Franklin said.

  “Ah — very good, Dr. Reveal,” Millar smiled broadly. “Probably they were treated with an acid of some type, citric perhaps, to remove a thin layer of copper, leaving only gold on the surface.

  “After the Plates were unearthed at Palmyra, New York, and transported here, we removed them from their binder to allow review of more than one at a time. These are only a fraction of what was found. The rest remain sealed until we get the go-ahead . . .” Millar’s voice trailed off.

  “Waiting for the church president’s okay?” Rabbi Specowitz asked.

  Millar pointed upward pleasantly. “A little higher authority than that.”

  A few amused laughs echoed around the room.

  “These Plates — highly impressive,” Bishop Hoy stated.

  “I agree!” said Reverend Parker — O’Day, O’Shaughnessy, the other non-Mormon clergy, all jumping enthusiastically onto the bandwagon.

  What is going on? Franklin asked himself. How can they all be so eager to agree? Like they’re already sure the Plates are genuine.

  Translation

  “So it’s — some kind of Egyptian Demotic,” Franklin puzzled aloud. “There’s been a lot of debate over what language Joseph Smith translated into English. Chaldaic, Assyrian — even Arabic.” He looked carefully at the second line on Plate 6. “Most believed it to be something he called Reformed Egyptian — not quite Demotic . . .”