Wreckoning
Page 17
Chapter 24
26th November 14:30
“Flight 887 is now boarding. Would all passengers please make their way to runway thirteen.”
The public address system barely registered as Alana sat reading cross-legged. Their flight to New York was not due for another hour. A brother and sister played hide and seek amongst the hand luggage and empty seats. Alana brought in her shoe as the young boy hurtled past her, squealing with laughter as his older sibling gave chase. Their mother yelled for them to come to heel but the youngsters ignored her, rushing to the shopping area. The boy slammed into Michael who had emerged clutching a newspaper. The lad landed with a thump and the tears began to flow.
“I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” Michael said stooping down.
The burly mother with a backside to match a baby elephant steamrolled towards him.
“Hey. Get away from my kids.”
“I was checking to see if he was hurt,” Michael said feeling the need to justify himself.
“Just stay back, you British pervert,” she barked and dragged her son away by the scruff of his t-shirt.
Several onlookers were staring at him but Michael decided not to reply. He moved to the far row of seats where Alana was minding their things.
“The sooner we get home the better,” he said and slapped the folded paper open.
“Uh-huh.”
Alana flicked onto the next page. She was fiddling with her silver necklace as Michael started to rant.
“What a complete waste of time. I honestly believed McBride was behind everything. Instead, Wreckoning stole from him and he wants them stopped almost as much as we do. There’s twenty-six hours until the final attack and we’re still no closer to stopping them.”
He connected his phone to the free wireless signal. “I’m contacting CTU, see if anything’s cropped up.”
Michael marched to the panoramic window to watch a plane take off. All of this was unnoticed by Alana. She had decided to read the children’s story written by her father while he was in prison. It was a fairy-tale about two girls who discover a magic chest buried in a graveyard. A warning was carved on the ebony wood:
Once opened all will be loosed. Truth brings both life and death.
Alana supposed it was a variant of Pandora’s Box. As the girls try various ways to unlock the chest they notice a set of tumblers. Each block has a special symbol which must be aligned. When they solve the combination the box opens. The spirit of a dead man awakens to proclaim they are now the masters of death, choosing who will live and who will die. The eldest sister becomes obsessed by her new power and takes the life of everyone that has hurt her. The younger sister uses her gift to restore the life of the ones her sibling has killed.
In the end the older girl is so enraged that she kills the other but immediately regrets it. She tries to make her rise again but all of her bitterness has removed her power of giving life, and so she kills herself, her spirit becoming the new occupant of the chest.
It wasn’t exactly a bedtime story but Alana recognized the truth in Cameron’s words as any child would. She had been bitter most of her life at the man who called himself her father. Now she knew the full story she recognized the power she held to finally forgive and let go. Harbouring resentment was soul destroying. It was time to forgive.
Alana had trained her mind to ignore Cameron Faith to protect her heart from being broken further. As he veered in and out of her life the fragments dislodged until her soul could take no more. She snubbed him completely and also poor Victor, a good man caught in the centre of his step-daughter’s turmoil. She agreed to visit a psychologist after a hard battle with her mother but found it frustrating talking about her father and soon ended it.
Now as a woman she could see the bigger picture. There were valid reasons for Cameron to be unexpectedly absent, why he couldn’t go to the school sports days or take them to the park. She couldn’t imagine how much he had suffered desiring to be a dad but being refused at every step. Yet it didn’t make her forget the reasons why. The horrific details of his crimes had scorched her mind. But she still loved him. After all, he was still her father.
“London’s in chaos,” Michael announced as he came to join her. “Charlie’s questioning anyone he can get brought in but force numbers are so thin on the ground it’s almost impossible.”
He moved his unread newspaper to the side and sat down. Alana looked up from her reading.
“I don’t really want to go home but I need to make sure my family are okay,” she said.
“I agree. It’s tempting to take a flight to some exotic island and run away from it all.”
Alana took his hand in hers.
“I’d love that. Maybe one day we could.”
Michael cupped her chin and stroked away a loose eyelash.
“You have my word. If we manage to make it through all of this we’ll fly away together.”
He gently pulled her closer, his gaze locked on her sky-blue eyes. He tilted her face and felt her hot, sweet breath against his stubble making the tiny hairs shiver. Their lips met. It lasted only seconds but Michael wished it could go on forever. She rested her forehead on his and smiled.
“Alana?”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you something about McBride?”
Alana tutted and pulled away.
“Sorry, I find it difficult to switch off.”
Alana knew she was the same. “What is it?”
“How did you know McBride was telling the truth about not being behind Wreckoning?”
“John McBride is egotistical, even maniacal, but his sense of morality is quite different to Wreckoning’s.”
“How so?”
“Wreckoning’s goal is to serve justice on those who have offended them. They have preached that message from Guy Fawkes Day. McBride made it clear he had no interest in justice only vengeance. He wanted to destroy his enemies not expose their failings. He wouldn’t have shown mercy whereas Wreckoning gave us an opportunity to reform.”
“But it was forced.”
“True, but there was a period of grace.”
Michael leant back to contemplate this. Alana placed the legal file on her lap and opened it at the beginning of Cameron’s journal.
“Is that your father’s file?”
She nodded “He was smart; I can read that in his writing. It’s a pity I didn’t get to know him better.”
Michael prised open two pages whose corners had stuck together. He pulled them out. “The Ebony Chest. Is that a story?”
“A children’s tale. I found it to be quite deep. It’s about a buried box that has the power to kill or raise someone back from the dead.”
“And anyone can open it?”
“The sisters in the story have to figure out how to unlock it otherwise someone unworthy could break in. There are five rotating cubes that act as the key.”
“Like your necklace.”
Alana reached up to finger the five silver blocks. They spun around as her nails brushed against them.
It can’t be.
Her memories came into focus: her father presenting her with a gift box wrapped in pink paper as she met him in the Social Services centre for the first time; flipping the strange little cubes around until she found her name A-L-A-N-A followed by L-O-V-E-S and D-A-D-D-Y; speaking with him on the phone before his accident when he specifically asked her if she still had the necklace.
She fumbled to unclasp the latch and held the jewellery up to the light, examining it more closely than ever before.
“What’s wrong?” Michael said. He had noticed the sudden shift in Alana’s mood.
“The key, Michael. This is the key.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Whoever set that file on my computer knew about this necklace. They identified me as the key. They knew my father well and I’m betting they spent time with him in prison as he wrote that story. He probably confided about the present he would
buy for me when he would be released and the puzzle that matched the one in the Ebony Chest. That person knew the truth about my father and wanted to share it with me except Cameron wouldn’t allow it. His wish was for me to find the truth by myself one day. Those anonymous emails were sent as a trigger to start me on that journey. The responses changed when I mentioned Cameron went to prison which his friend was well aware of. Perhaps like my father, and even John McBride, he was torn apart by the press, the police, and the courts and wanted a voice.”
“This person would have to be a skilled computer technician,” Michael said.
“My father certainly was and had five years to teach everything to someone willing to use it. He was also the architect behind Hydra’s software. I bet he shared its flaws with his friend.”
“So you think the mastermind behind Wreckoning is a former jail friend of your father?”
“I do.” Then something else struck her. “Around the time that McBride’s money was stolen my father died in a boating accident. Perhaps it wasn’t an accident. Maybe he was murdered because he knew what was about to happen.”
“$1 billion is a lot of money. People have been killed for far less,” Michael said. “But who is this other man? Does his name crop up in any of your father’s files?”
Alana was unsure and so they sat on the floor of the terminal and spread the documents around.
“I’ll look through the transcripts of the arrest interview.”
“No.”
Alana didn’t want Michael to become exposed to the details of Cameron’s misdeeds.
“His name wouldn’t crop up until he went to prison. You read The Ebony Chest and I’ll search through the journal.”
Twenty minutes passed and Alana returned the stack of handwritten sheets to the floor.
“There’s too much here. It’ll take hours. There’s little in the way of names anyway bar my sister, mother, and me.”
Michael looked puzzled as he studied a page in his hand. “It says here that the girls open the chest by using a keyword.”
“Yes, like a cipher.”
“Find the keyword and unlock the secret.”
“And?”
“And,” Michael said as he picked up the silver necklace, “we already know the keyword.”
“We do?”
He turned each of the cubes to spell out the word that had meant more to him every day.
“A-L-A-N-A. You are the key.”
Alana opened her mouth but nothing came out. Still fishing for something to say, she reached instead for her handbag to dig out a pen and some paper.
“When I was younger my father used to create puzzles for me to solve. His favourite was a single digit alphabet code.”
“What’s that?”
She jotted down the twenty-six letters of the alphabet making sure to leave a gap under each.
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
“Every letter represents a number, so A=1, B=2, C=3 and so on. But that’s a very simple code to crack. To make it a little harder every letter with a value of ten or higher has its digits summed. For example, K=11 so add 1+1 to give 2. It means that some numbers can represent up to three letters like 5 is E, N, and W.”
Alana continued to place the corresponding number under the characters, adding together any double digits until each was represented by just one.
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
“Next you would read the message, usually a random-looking series of letters that appears to be gibberish. I would then place each phrase under the last, convert the letters to numbers, and add them together. The result would then be changed back to letters to form the hidden word.”
Michael kept nodding as Alana talked. He hadn’t the faintest idea what she was saying. She spotted his confusion and drew a grid, five squares wide and four deep.
“This represents my necklace. Every square is a side on the five cubes. You can only view four of the six sides because the chain runs through the middle of the other two. That gives a total of twenty squares.”
Alana tapped the grid with her pen as she spoke. “The top row is the keyword, in this case A-L-A-N-A, and we ignore that when adding things later. Then I place the other letters in sequence below it.”
A
L
A
N
A
L
A
D
S
S
S
O
E
D
Y
D
W
V
E
F
She twisted round the cubes, pausing to fill in the next empty square in the grid.
“The next stage is to match each letter with its number.”
She ripped the sheet in half and handed Michael the alphabet code. “You call out the number as I write it in.”
A
L
A
N
A
L = 3
A = 1
D = 4
S = 1
S = 1
S = 1
O = 6
E = 5
D = 4
Y = 7
D = 4
W = 5
V = 4
E = 5
F = 6
“So you just add up the numbers?” Michael said examining Alana’s grid. “3+1+4+1+1 = 10?”
“Not quite. Work from top to bottom and ignore the keyword on the first line. L, S, and D; 3+1+4.”
“That’s eight.”
“Now reference the alphabet code chart. What letters are represented by the number eight?”
“H, Q, and Z.”
“We need to figure them all out first and then solve the word at the end.”
8
12
13
10
14
8
1+2 = 3
1+3 = 4
1+0 = 1
1+4 = 5
H,Q,Z
C,L,U
D,M,V
A,J,S
E,N,W
“In this bottom row lies the answer to the puzzle.”
Alana pointed to the last five trios of letters. Michael rubbed his chin deep in thought. He was swift at
solving enigmas of the more criminal kind and hadn’t set eyes on a word game in years. It was Alana who figured it out first.
“Can I borrow your laptop?”
“What’s the answer? Did you get it?”
He lifted down his bag and took out the computer. Alana switched it on then connected to the Internet. Her breathing quickened as she opened her email. She scrolled down to the last message from al@n.a and hit reply.
Who was Cameron Faith?
I believed him to be a stranger, someone who drifted in and out of my life, and who didn’t really give a damn about me. Then I learned the truth about what he did and I hated him. I was glad he was dead. I considered him to be a monster.
But then I delved a little deeper.
My father was truly sorry for what he had done. He did love me and my sister but was prevented from showing it. He died a lonely man and all he wanted was to be my daddy.
She typed something then swivelled the screen so Michael could see.
Who was Cameron Faith?
He was my father and only HUMAN.
Michael recognized the word in capitals: H-U-M-A-N, the solution to the puzzle.
Alana clicked send and waited. In a few seconds a reply came but it was quite different from the others.
“Looks like another code,” Alana said.
“No, I think it’s much easier than that.”
Michael took the laptop and placed it on his thighs. He highlighted the series of numbers in the email and searched online. A map appeared and tilted from their current location in San Francisco to the south-east.
“These coordinates point to Rio de Janeiro.”
He showed her where the red marker was hovering over the east coast of Brazil.
Alana stood up and shook off a light cramp in her calf. “We need to change flights,” she said.
Michael rose too but the pins and needles in his feet made him fall onto the seat.
“Are you seriously considering flying to where this person says? If it is Cameron’s friend from prison he could be dangerous. You said yourself he might have killed your father because he knew too much.”
Alana swung her handbag over her shoulder. “Do we have a choice? We came to America to stop Wreckoning. I love my country and I don’t want to see it burn.”