by Nick Thacker
He held up the glass, a signal of offering to the rest of the group, but only Ben obliged. He stepped up to the front of the bar, pulled out a gorgeous solid wood barstool and sat on it. Reggie seemed more than pleased to pour the man a drink, and Ben held it up, inspecting the color.
Julie thought the two of them might completely disregard the rest of the team, consumed by their love for fine spirits, so she cleared her throat.
Amanda walked closer to the bar. “Mr., uh — Reggie…” Reggie looked up but didn’t offer his last name to the woman. “Sorry… I mean, thanks. Thank you for what you did back there.”
He nodded, scrunching his face slightly to exaggerate the expression.
“But, we, uh…” her voice trailed off.
“I know,” he said, interrupting the awkward silence. “You need to find out who wants to kill you. ”
Her eyes widened slightly, probably surprised at the man’s bluntness, but then she nodded.
“Yep, working on it.”
Julie watched the man pour himself another glass, then refill Ben’s. He carefully placed the bottle back on the rack it came from, the unlabeled decanter facing perfectly out toward the room. He turned back to Ben. “That’s a 1970, and it goes down about as well as anything twice the price. I know the guy who makes it — local, actually.”
Julie watched as Ben closed his eyes and took a long sip.
Unbelievable.
Ben was the type of man who could so focus on one thing she often thought there was something wrong with him. She often told him he’d die one day pushing himself too hard, unable to quit when he needed a break. The only two things she’d ever known to be able to break him from his focus was herself, offering something he couldn’t provide on his own, and a good glass of whiskey.
And this glass of whiskey must have been particularly good. He’d essentially blocked out everything else around him, taking in the aroma, then the taste, then the feel of the liquor.
He looked at her, and she raised her eyebrows. Done?
He snapped out of it. “Sorry, just… it’s good.”
She wanted to smack him. “I’ll get a bottle of it for you before we leave.”
“No, can’t do that,” Reggie said, unaware of the unspoken fight going on between Ben and Julie. “It’s local, but it’s not actually for sale. Sorry. I might be able to —“
“Listen, Reggie Whoever You Are. We’re really thankful that you’re here and all, and that you’ve taken us in to your underground safe house, but we really need to figure out who’s behind all of this. And I —“
Reggie held up his pointer finger, giving Julie the immediate urge to smack him as well. “We’re already working on it.”
This time, Paulinho, Amanda, and Ben seemed surprised.
Chapter 12
“I forwarded the file from Amanda’s phone to my own online storage system when you were sleeping.” He reached below the bar and pulled out a shiny silver remote control. Pressing buttons on it, Julie watched as a huge projector screen rolled down from the ceiling and onto the wall nearest Ben, opposite the couch. “Wasn’t any trouble, since it wasn’t encrypted anyway. Still wouldn’t have been, since I’ve got…”
Reggie realized the others were staring at him.
“Look, I’m not a hacker. It was easy enough. The point is that I wanted to have it ready to queue up here in the house, so we wouldn’t have to wait around any longer. Grab a seat, let’s figure this out.”
He grabbed his glass and headed over to one of the armchairs. Ben and Julie followed, and soon they were all seated facing the giant screen. True to his word, Reggie had gotten the video and other files downloaded onto whatever computer he had hidden in the house, and the main video was loaded up and ready to go.
“We don’t need to see this again, correct?” he asked to no one in particular. When no one answered, he hit a button and went back to a directory listing of the other files. Clicking the first one, he sat back in the chair, relaxing into the comfortable plush of the upholstered furniture piece.
Julie watched the screen as a map appeared. It was a map of the Amazon Basin in the center, but zoomed out enough to show nearly the entire continent of South America. Rio de Janeiro was at the bottom-right of the map, labeled in handwritten text that had been painted on the digital image.
He pressed forward and watched as the screen changed. The same map was displayed onscreen, but another handwritten label appeared. ‘Cristo Redentor,’ #1, was written above a line that stretched from Rio to the edge of the top-left of the map, cutting through the Amazon basin.
“Christ the Redeemer,” Paulinho said, translating from Portuguese. Julie immediately recalled the image of the large statue of Christ in her mind, sitting with arms outstretched atop a Brazilian mountain.
They stared at the image a moment, then Reggie progressed to the next image. This image was the same map, but the line changed almost imperceptibly, and the label as well: ‘Cristo Redentor,’ #2 .
A third image came up; still the same map, but another line, and another label: ‘Teatro Municipal.’
There were only three images in the folder, so Reggie scrolled through the directory and went to the second of the folders, one labeled ‘Florianopolis.’
The first image appeared, the map shifting slightly and yet another line appearing. The label read, ’Hercilio Luz.’
Paulinho explained. “Hercilio Luz is a well-known bridge in Florianoplis, Brazil.”
Reggie scrolled through five more images, each with a perfectly straight line drawn on it in a slightly different location, and each with a unique label. Julie was amazed at the clarity of the writing, and the lines, no doubt traced with a ruler by Dr. Ortega moments before his death.
They scrolled through a few more folders, mostly labeled after locations and in Brazil, but there were a few from around the world. One was as far away as Paris, France, and showed the location of the Eiffel Tower, the diagonal line superimposed on the map connecting the two locations .
“What do the locations have to do with your research, Dr. Meron?” Julie asked. Amanda hadn’t spoken since they’d arrived, and Julie wasn’t sure what the woman was thinking.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m not sure why Dr. Ortega went through all this trouble. It seems like he’s just drawing lines from the location of the subjects we studied to… something else.”
“Locations of what, though?” Paulinho asked. “Where the subjects were born? Or where they were last known to be living?”
“I don’t think so. The labels are of tourist attractions, and I remember some of these tests. The dreams we recorded sometimes had very recognizable scenery in them. The Christ the Redeemer statue was particularly striking in some of them, and I’m sure the Eiffel Tower would have been, as well.”
“So these people — subjects — visited these locations,” Ben said. “Then Ortega drew lines from the locations to… something else. So what?”
“Dr. Ortega wouldn’t have gone through the trouble if he didn’t —“ Amanda’s voice stopped mid-sentence.
“What is it?” Paulinho asked.
“Pega-veretas,” Amanda said. “What does it mean?”
“It’s a game, just like he said,” Paulinho answered. He paused a moment, trying to think of the best translation from Portuguese. “Rods, or sticks — ‘pick-up the sticks ,’ I believe it’s called.”
Chapter 13
Ben had seen this game before. Sticks, or rods, laying on each other on the floor, and two players attempted to pick them up one at a time without disturbing the other sticks. He’d never played it, but he’d seen it in toy stores as a kid. Amanda stood and walked to the map, pointing at the line. “He’s drawing the ‘sticks’ on the maps,” she said. She was getting excited, and Paulinho and Reggie stood to join her near the map. “Reggie, go back. What other folders are there?”
Reggie followed her instruction, showing them the list of folders within the directory. Ama
nda read the list, then pointed. “There! ‘Zoomed images.’ Pull that one up.”
Reggie did, and the first of the images appeared onscreen. The label was one they’d seen before: ‘Cristo Redentor, #2.’ The line also appeared, drawn to extend past the edge of the image toward the top-left of the screen. But the map itself was zoomed in much closer to the Christ the Redeemer statue. They could see the outline of the mountain’s topography, dotted nearby with the unmistakable shape of houses and buildings. What was most evident, however, was the word ‘subject,’ scrawled in Portuguese near the base of the mountain.
There was a tiny ‘x’ near the word, and the line began and extended from it.
The next image was similar, but with a different ‘x’ and a different line .
“All the lines are diagonal, from top-left to bottom-right,” Julie said. “Or vise-versa.”
The next image, however, changed that theory. It was another ‘x,’ another ‘subject,’ and yet another line, but this one was sharply descending from the top-right of the screen to the bottom-left. The title of the image was “Estátua da Liberdade.”
“The Statue of Liberty,” Paulinho immediately translated.
“It seems like the lines are all pointing at the same spot, right?” Julie asked.
As soon as she said it, Ben spoke up. “Is there a folder with all of the lines added to one map?” he asked.
Reggie flicked through the folders again and found one labeled ‘Convergence ’ in Portuguese. He clicked on the first image, and everyone in the room gasped. Ben stood up and walked toward the screen.
“They’re all converging on the exact same point ,” she whispered. “It’s… just like he said. ‘Pick-up sticks,’ but the sticks are these lines. They all cross each other, at some point in…” her voice trailed off.
Amanda picked up the rest of the sentence. “…In the Amazon rainforest. Reggie, can you print these?”
Reggie nodded. “Of course.” He navigated around the menu system on the computer.
Ben squinted at the top-left of the map, mostly centered on the upper half of the South American continent, and saw the words ‘Floresta Amazônica ’ written in the same clear, delineated handwriting. There was a circle hastily drawn around the convergence point of the lines, and they all took a moment to examine the map.
“But where is he getting the directionality of the lines?” Reggie asked. He navigated back to the list of folders, searching for anything that might be helpful. Paulinho told him to stop at one of the last folders.
“Positioning Screenshots, or Placement Screenshots,” he said as Reggie entered the folder. Ben examined the first image. It was nothing more than a splash of color, shades of lighter and darker colors, all blended together, with a grid carefully drawn on top of the entire image. Lighter blues and yellows appeared near the top, and darker shades toward the bottom. On the bottom-right of the screen, against a background that was a similar golden shade, he saw a man staring straight at him. As Dr. Meron had explained, the man was perfectly in focus. It was too small an image to see the man’s facial features, but Ben could tell the man was standing in front of something large. He forced his eyes out of focus, and an image seemed to appear around the golden man.
“Christ the Redeemer,” Julie said aloud. He saw it too. A fuzzy triangle dominated the image, dead-center, with a much smaller triangle of a bluish tone sitting on top of it. There was sky around the “statue,” and Ben knew it was a view looking up at the statue, the mountain itself covering most of the picture. The golden man was placed in the image, standing still and, as always, looking straight at the subject.
“Well, if that ain’t the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen,” Reggie said.
Ben had to agree. He’d never seen anything like it, and it wasn’t even a faked image. “You mean this is a screenshot of a recording of someone’s dream?” he asked.
Dr. Meron nodded. “We’re getting better every month at rendering the images. More and more sensors, designed to pick up the exact locations of neurons firing in the brain, allow the computers to project certain lights, colors, and pictures onto a screen. It’s just creating a visual representation of what’s happening electronically in the brain.”
“This is amazing,” Julie said. “How do you even do something like this?”
Amanda nodded again. “Thank you. It’s been a long process, but the basic technology and techniques have been in place for years. We started with an eight-by-eight grid of lights placed on a piece of board in front of our subjects, and when we’d light one of the lights, a certain area in the brain would light up as well. The same place would light up the same way every time, and by tracking that information thousands of times with hundreds of subjects, we were eventually able to create a ‘map’ of the brain. That map could then be used in reverse: we told the subjects to think of one of the lights lighting up. To actually picture it in their mind.
When they did, the same areas of the brain would light up the same way, as if they were physically seeing the lightbulb turn on and off. Eventually, that research allowed us to know what type of image, for the most part, their brain was conjuring up.”
Reggie smiled. “Fascinating. Then, naturally, you took it a step further, and started recording their dreams?”
“Dreaming and how dreams are produced is one of the most understudied fields in neuroscience, because it has been impossible to ‘see’ someone else’s dream. We’ve had to work from descriptions, and as you all know, remembering a dream that happened the night before can sometimes be a challenge.”
Ben agreed, but he still wasn’t sure what this all meant, and what Drache Global wanted to do with it.
“So, again, how is Dr. Ortega determining directionality?” Ben asked.
They all turned back to the image onscreen. “It seems like he’s calculated approximately where the golden man is standing, in relation to the subject and the recognizable scenery in the image. In this case, the statue of Christ the Redeemer.”
Paulinho pointed at the two elements in the image, the golden man and the statue. “He drew a grid over the image, probably to help determine distance. I guess you could theoretically calculate distance by measuring the size of the statue, and where the subject is in relation to it, since we easily know that information. Then you could triangulate the location of the man, and in what direction he’s facing.”
“Yes,” Dr. Meron said. “Yes, you could. It seems to me that the man in the image is placed so a line could be drawn from the subject, to the golden man. ”
“The same ‘lines’ we’ve been seeing on the other maps.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she responded.
They played around with the images in the folders, guessing and estimating, and tracing the lines on the large projector screen. Each of the images in the ‘Placement Screenshots’ folder showed a similar image: an out-of-focus view of an easily recognizable tourist attraction or major location, and a golden man standing somewhere in the image. Every time they imagined a line segment connecting the subject to the man, then extended the line segment beyond the golden man, they realized there was a corresponding map of that exact scene, viewed from above. Dr. Ortega had drawn in all of the lines, extending them off each of the maps.
Reggie pulled up the convergence map once more. “I’d have to say Dr. Ortega has done some fine work here. I’m no map expert, but I’ve done my fair share of planimetric and topographic navigation. Everything seems to check out.”
No one disagreed, but Ben asked the question that had been on his mind since they’d seen the convergence point. “So, we’ve got a golden man showing up in people’s dreams, and this little man is trying to point us somewhere. We know it’s somewhere in the rainforest, but the question I’m wondering is: what exactly is he pointing us to?”
No one answered.
Finally, Amanda spoke up. “I don’t know. I have no idea what this is, and we couldn’t figure out what any of this ‘golden man
’ stuff meant a month ago. But Dr. Ortega died trying to tell us, and I want to go find out what it is.”
Reggie raised his eyebrows. “You’re being chased by a group of military-trained killers, and you want to go traipsing out in the jungle? If they don’t kill you first, the jungle surely will.”
“I think what we’ve discovered here has something to do with why they’re trying to kill me,” Amanda said.
“I don’t doubt it, girly, but that doesn’t mean it’s a smart idea to just run into the most deadly environment on Earth, chasing a creepy dream-dude.”
“Reggie,” Paulinho said. “You’re a skilled survivalist, and you teach camps for people —“
“I teach , I don’t run into the jungle with an army trying to kill me.”
“But you could help us get there?”
Ben watched the man’s jaw clench and unclench a few times, trying to decide what to do.
“We’d have an advantage out there for a little while at least, that’s for sure. I doubt they’re expecting a deep-jungle campaign, and I know they’re not as prepared for it as I would be. I can keep us alive, I think, as long we stay ahead of them. But if they catch up…”
Ben walked over to Reggie and clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m going into the jungle, Reggie. You’ve already helped us more than we could ever repay, but I have to ask for your help once more. You’re not obligated to come with us, but I’m going.”
Reggie looked Ben up and down. “‘Bout as stubborn as I’d suspected.” He walked back over to the bar and poured himself another drink, this time a much taller one.
“Fine,” Reggie said. “Let’s do it. Let’s go find this little golden man’s secret.”
Chapter 14
Reggie left the group in the living room of his underground bunker and walked into the rear rooms of his home. It was a relatively small layout, less than 2,000 square feet, but it was more than enough for him. The main living room and bar was the showpiece, where he entertained his wealthier clients and sold his high-end survival camp packages to corporate executives. They always wanted the ‘best of the best,’ even though they had no idea what that meant. It was a cycle of men trying to impress other men, and weekend-long survival camps were the new golf courses of Brazilian business networking.