The Hidden Eye

by Oliver Davies

  “What’s going on?” Fletcher demanded. She even stamped her foot a little bit, one fist threatening me with more violence.

  I stood and clapped Fletcher on the shoulder. “Congratulations. You’ve been officially indoctrinated into the Inverness Police.” I flashed her two thumbs-up as she glared at me, demanding further explanation. “You remember the Rabbit I told you about?” She nodded. “Reilly and I used it to prank people after it was… decommissioned, and it evolved into an office-wide thing to welcome new hires. Funny, yeah?”

  “Mate, I nearly had a heart attack!” Fletcher threw her hands in the air. “You know I watch all sorts of scary films. I honestly thought there was some kind of possessed demon come to kill me!”

  “Yeah, that’s why it’s funny,” I said, grinning at her.

  “It is not funny.”

  “It will be when we do it to someone else,” I promised and turned back to Rayla who had watched the entire exchange with a confused look on her face. “Sorry. That was bad timing, since I literally just promised you that Fletcher and I are responsible.”

  “That’s okay.” Rayla laughed and nudged me in the arm conspiratorially. “It was pretty funny when she burst through the door like a bat out of hell.”

  Fletcher spluttered at the two of us as we laughed together. “Don’t think I won’t get you back for this,” she promised, pointing a finger at my face. I winked at her, willing her to bring it on, and she tugged the cuffs of her jacket straight. “Now, some of us have real work to do. So if you don’t mind…” She gave me one last, pointed look before she spun on her heel and walked back towards evidence lockup, back straight as she tried to prove that she wasn’t afraid of some stuffed animal.

  “Ah, classic,” I said as I watched her go. “Never gets old.”

  Rayla placed her hand lightly on my elbow, drawing my attention back to her. “I should go. Thanks for the talk. I feel a lot better now.”

  “It was nice to see you,” I said honestly.

  Rayla smiled and tipped two fingers in goodbye before she gathered her handbag and headed for the door. I watched her go for a few seconds before I sat down at my desk and booted up my computer. We needed to secure an audience with Raymond MacPherson II.

  An email notification popped up on my desktop as soon as I woke it up, but there was no subject line or the sender’s address, and I stared at it suspiciously, wondering if it was a virus lying in wait. The preview line read, “Kafka Runs and Kneels Each Night.”

  I stared at the gibberish. It really read like a dangerous spam message, but then I put the letters together, and my eyes widened. When put together, the first letter of each word read “KRAKEN.”

  So I took a chance and opened the email. Aside from the coded name, there were only two other lines of text. One was an address. The other simply read, “Come alone.”

  I stared at the message for a long moment, leaning back in my chair, rubbing at my face with one hand. I sat up again and plugged the address into Google Maps. It sat right on the waterfront, but it wasn’t anywhere I recognized.

  I glanced towards the door leading to evidence lockup. Fletcher hadn’t re-emerged yet, but if she learned of this, she would no doubt insist on coming with. The Kraken seemed like the kind of person who would be a stickler for the come alone rule, and if I really wanted to learn about my father’s disappearance, I would have to follow it.

  Despite the fact that just previous to this, I’d decided to ditch this investigation, I forgot about all that the instant I read the Kraken’s email. Now, I wanted nothing more than to know what was going on.

  I put the address into my phone and then deleted the email and cleared the recycling folder as well before I stood and gathered my coat and keys. I didn’t glance around, didn’t check to see if anyone was watching me, didn’t do anything that might be construed as suspicious. I simply walked right out the door and over to my car, hands stuck in my pockets as if I didn’t have a care in the world even though my insides were churning like waves within a crumbled cave.

  Thirteen

  I found myself parked before the single most ramshackle houseboat I had ever seen. It sat on a private dock far away from any of the usual marinas. A narrow, rickety wooden walkway led from the street across the murky water to the small, green and beige boat. There were no lights that I could see, but all the windows were boarded up, the door hanging askew on its hinges. The paint on the walls was peeling, revealing the dark wood underneath, and it seemed to me that the houseboat was sitting much lower in the water than it should have, the lightly lapping waves only an inch or two from the rim of the deck. A ‘Condemned’ sign hung off the railing. The buoys had long since deflated away to nothing.

  I was definitely about to get murdered.

  I almost turned right around and drove away. The houseboat was textbook trouble, the perfect picture of a trap, but curiosity had a stranglehold on my brain, and I found myself climbing out of the car and making sure that it was properly locked. At least it was the middle of a relatively sunny day. If it had been raining or nighttime, I would have been out of there in a flash.

  I paused at the start of the wooden dock. The walkway out to the slip was only about two metres long, but it seemed like ten, the planks clearly rotten in places, the dark water showing through underneath. I took a deep breath and stepped carefully onto the death trap. The wood and its rusted metal supports creaked alarmingly under my foot, and I swore I felt the plank bow, threatening to splinter, as the whole structure dipped towards the water. I froze, though I didn’t know how that was supposed to help, and then forced myself to walk across like it was just another length of pavement. I watched my feet like a hawk, making sure I only put my weight on the most solid patches of wood, and bit by bit, I eased my way towards the houseboat.

  The main dock was more solid, though it swayed with each gentle hit of the waves. I looked over the houseboat, searching for signs of life, but the windows were boarded up tight, and there was only darkness between the wooden slats. The door hung haphazardly in its frame, creaking slightly as the boat rocked. The whole structure had the feel of a long-dead skeleton half-buried on the beach.

  “Hello?” I called from the relative safety of the dock.

  I glanced back towards my car as I waited for an answer. My car and the road it was parked on seemed like a whole other world, as if the dock was wrapped within a bubble that didn’t let anything in or out. Even the air was noticeably colder, though I wasn’t that far from shore. The sunlight seemed wrong, out of place, as it fell on the peeling paint and bowed roof.

  When no one answered my call, I steeled my nerves and stepped up off the dock and onto the boat. Just my weight was enough to dip the deck down enough for a little bit of water to slop over the edge. The place smelled of mildew and old wood, and though I listened as hard as I could, I could hear nothing but the waves against the hull.

  I cautiously pushed on the door, and it swung open easily, the wood rough on my fingers, threatening splinters. Oddly enough, there was not a speck of rust on the hinges. I clicked my phone’s torch on before I stepped into the dark throat of the houseboat, but the beam didn’t do much to illuminate the interior.

  “Hello?” I called again.

  I stepped into the cramped entrance which led directly to an empty sitting room, the chairs covered with age-spotted plastic. I moved deeper inside, sweeping my torch around. Both doors off the sitting area were closed tight, and the whole place certainly felt abandoned, though I noticed a glaring lack of dust being kicked up by my boots.

  The front door swung shut with a bang. I spun around sharply, torchlight slicing through the air. My heartbeat jacked up into my throat. A hooded figure stood before me, the barrel of a hunting rifle pointed right at my chest. I went still as a statue, slowly lowering my hands so I would be less of a threat. The light of my torch only caught the line of a wrinkled jaw and the barest hint of a bottom lip, the rest of the person’s face swallowed by the shadows
of their hood.

  “Easy,” I said, voice pitched low and calm. “I got an email with this address. Are you the Kraken?”

  “Did you come alone?” the person demanded. It was a woman’s voice, crunched by age and a lifetime of smoking cigarettes.

  “Yes,” I promised. “Just as you asked. It was you who sent that email, yes?”

  “Are you Alasdair MacBain’s son?”

  My pulse stuttered as she said my father’s name, and I struggled to keep my barrage of questions under lock and key. “Yes,” I said. “I’m Callum.”

  “You got some ID?” the woman asked.

  “I do. May I reach into my pocket for it?”

  The woman gestured for me to do so with her rifle, and I reached into my pocket as slowly and carefully as I could, taking out my police badge and flipping it open for her to see. She didn’t take a step closer, but she did dip her head down for a better look, hood bobbing as she nodded with satisfaction.

  “Good. Now, I hear you’ve been looking for me?” She swept her hood back, revealing a face well worn by time and age. Wrinkles carved crevices around her eyes and mouth and across her forehead, but the skin between them was soft and pale, dotted with liver spots. Grey hair fell to her shoulders, looking dry and brittle and ready crack in half at the slightest touch. Her shoulders were stooped, but she was still tall and thin, and her fingers were long and thin around the rifle.

  “Are you the Kraken?” I asked again.

  “At your service,” she said and gave me a sweeping bow. Then she tossed her gun carelessly at one of the plastic-covered chairs, grinning with a mouth full of yellowed teeth as I flinched. “Don’t worry. It’s just a prop gun. Realistic, right? One of my buddies in the film industry nabbed it for me. Gotta scare off unwanted visitors somehow. Come on. Follow me.”

  The Kraken--that was a lot to wrap my head around--started for one of the doors leading out of the sitting room, but I stayed where I was, unwilling to go to a secondary location with this woman.

  “Hold on,” I said, and she paused with her hand on the doorknob. “You really knew my father?”

  “I did. How did you hear about me anyway?”

  I didn’t answer her question. I’d come here to have my own answered after all. “And you’re really some kind of master hacker?”

  “I was. I’m retired now.”

  “So why did you contact me?”

  “I still keep my ear to the ground. I saw one of Alasdair’s old profiles go active again, and I figured it had to be you.”

  “How well did you know him?” If I wasn’t still holding on to my phone and its light, I’d wrap my arms around myself. It seemed like the houseboat had suddenly become quite frigid.

  “Let’s not talk out here. It’s the least secure place on the boat.” The Kraken pushed the door open, and light and the somewhat angry buzz of many computer fans flooded into the sitting room. I took a step to the side so I could see more fully into the room, and my jaw dropped open. The largest spread of computer monitors and keyboards that I had ever seen coated the walls and sat on desks crammed haphazardly together. All the monitors were awake and gently glowing. One showed a view of the dock I’d just walked up, a live security feed from a camera I hadn’t noticed, and most of the others held lines of glowing code or message boards. Another was open to an internet search about worms, and the smallest screen, a battered old laptop, seemed to have Tumblr pulled up.

  “I thought you said you were retired,” was all I could think to say.

  The Kraken shrugged as she stepped into the room, motioning over her shoulder for me to follow her. “It’s more of a hobby now. Come on. I haven’t got all day.”

  I took one last look towards the closed front door and the safety of my unseen car beyond it then did as I was told. The Kraken shut the door behind me, sealing us into the room. It was warmer than a summer’s day from the heat of so many running computers and layers of insulation along the walls.

  “Soundproofing,” the Kraken explained when she saw me looking. She dropped into the room’s only chair and spun it to face me so that she was backlit by the glowing monitors. “So what do you want to know?”

  “Just like that?” I asked, and she nodded.

  “I’ll tell you all I know. It might not be very much, got to warn you.”

  I found I’d suddenly forgotten every question I’d ever had about my father and his disappearance. I was distracted by the sweat quickly beading across my forehead and the constant drone of the computer fans.

  “Do you know what happened to him?” I asked finally.

  “No,” the Kraken said, and my heart fell even though I knew it would have been too good to be true for her to have that answer.

  I stripped off my coat, rolled it up, and balanced it on one of the few patches of open desk, rolling up my sleeves to ward off some of the oppressive heat. The Kraken didn’t seem to mind, bundled in her black jumper, many pocketed trousers, and boots.

  “A man named Kane told me about you. Who is he?” The thought of Kane still made my skin crawl. There had been something in his eyes that I simply hadn’t liked, nor did I trust how he said he’d been friends with my father.

  The Kraken’s faint grimace confirmed my suspicions. “I never did like that man much. You have to understand that, despite my name, I wasn’t really involved in all that cryptid hunting. Too frivolous for my taste. I was one of those white hat hackers.” I shook my head, not understanding. “Think cyber Robin Hood. I’d worked with Kane a couple of times before, and the man always wanted to take it further than I was comfortable with.”

  “What kind of jobs?” I interrupted.

  The Kraken wagged her finger, shaking her head. “Like I’d tell an inspector all about my misdeeds.”

  “I wouldn’t--” I began, but I cut myself off. I wouldn’t turn her in, but I supposed if I were in her position, I wouldn’t tell me either. “Sorry. Continue.”

  “Kane gave your father my information without my permission,” the Kraken went on. She paused just long enough to fish a beer from the mini-fridge under her desk and crack it open. She offered me one, but I shook my head. I wanted to sit down, but there was nowhere to do so in the cramped room. I shifted on my feet and leaned up against the door. “I got an encrypted email from him. I was pretty impressed with it, actually. It took me a minute to crack it. That’s how you know someone’s legit. If it’s easy to access it’s a trap.” She gave me a look, and I turned a little red.

  “Oi, I don’t know how to encrypt stuff,” I said defensively. “I needed to get a hold of you.”

  “I tracked the IP address for your post. When I saw it was from your father’s usual spot, I figured it was above board, so I decided to take a chance.” The Kraken grinned her old lady grin and then kicked her boots up onto the desk and leaned back in her chair like she was still twenty.

  “So what did my father want?” I asked. I was so close to the next piece in the puzzle that I could almost taste it.

  “I don’t know,” the Kraken said, and my excitement shattered like a glass in the heat.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” I spoke slowly, struggling to rein in my sudden wash of emotions.

  “Here, I’ll show you his message.” The Kraken twirled her chair around, and her fingers flashed across one of the many keyboards, moving faster than I thought humanly possible. It still took her a minute to pull up exactly what she wanted, because apparently, she had saved every email, document, and scrap of information that had ever come across her computer. “Take a look.”

  I pushed off the door and took three steps to cross the tiny room, leaning over her shoulder to read the archived email, the stench of old cigarettes in my nose.

  “Kraken,

  Kane gave me this address. I know it's probably against protocol or something to directly email you like this, but there’s something I need your help with. It’s huge and potentially dangerous, so much so that I don’t feel comfortable disclosing a
nything more electronically. Can we meet to discuss it?

  Yours,

  AM”

  “Is this it?” I asked, unable to keep the hint of disappointment from my voice. The email didn’t really sound like my father. He had been almost painfully straightforward. And there was practically nothing in that message. A handful of words. The promise of a cryptic discovery. I just wanted to know what had happened. I was tired of following this awkward trail of breadcrumbs.

  “Unfortunately,” the Kraken replied. “I felt much the same as you obviously do. I also didn’t fully trust him, despite the fact that he name-dropped Kane.” She paused, considering her words. “Or maybe because of that. I tried to get him to tell me a little more about what he found, but he was adamant that he would only speak about it in person. So against my better judgement, I agreed.”

  “You seem to take a lot of risks for such a paranoid hacker.” I glanced at her soundproofing set up, the security feed, and the screens of scrolling data on her many computer monitors.

  The Kraken looked offended by my statement, but I couldn’t tell if it was because I called her paranoid or a risk-taker. “We set up a meeting for the next week, and, as I’m sure you can guess, your father never showed.”

  “Where were you supposed to meet?” I didn’t know what, exactly, I’d be able to do with the answer, but I wanted to get as much information as conceivably possible.

  “The Cafe Royale, in the city centre. He was going to wear a red bowtie and me my little Kraken badge so we would recognize each other.” She pulled said badge from her pocket, cupping it in one hand. “My plan was to wait for him to sit down first before I approached, but I sat at the pub across the way for two hours and never saw anyone in a red bowtie. I never heard from him again… until you woke his profile back up.”

  “Did you have any idea at all what he wanted to talk about?”

  “It wasn’t hard for me to figure out who he was, of course.” The Kraken preened a little bit, rightfully proud of her own talent. “I dug into all the work he did with Far Reach Industries, but even I couldn’t figure out what it was he’d found.”