The Book Of Secrets Part 33

'Are you sure this is the time to be playing computer games?' asked Emily. She sat next to him on the threadbare banquette, sipping a Jack Daniel's and c.o.ke.

'You know the slogan, "The network is the computer"?' She shook her head. 'Well, in human terms the network is Randall. Urthred. If there's anyone who can help us, Randall probably knows him somehow.'

'I don't understand. We've got an Internet connection here.'

'Nowhere near fast enough. And we need to scan the pictures. You can't do that with a mobile-phone camera.'

On the laptop screen, Urthred reappeared out of nowhere. Nick put the headset back on and tried to ignore the sneering looks he drew.

'I got it,' Urthred bragged. 'You heard of a place called Karlsruhe?'

'No.'

'It's in Germany about an hour away from you, according to the Interweb. Hochschule fur Gestaltung. It's some kind of technical college. There's a chick in the computer science department there, Sabine Friman. She can hook you up.'

Nick hesitated. 'Can we get there without a car?'

'What am I, a fricking concierge service?' Urthred crossed to the large book spread on the wings of an eagle-shaped lectern and consulted it. 'Says there's a train from Strasbourg to Frankfurt at 21.50 that stops at Karlsruhe. You want me to tell you where the restaurant car is too?'

'We'll find it.' Nick reached for the lid of the computer, ready to shut it down. 'But there's one other thing I need you to arrange.'

Whatever dangers lurked in the forest, we reached our destination without harm. Schlettstadt was an unremarkable town some twenty miles up the Ill from Stra.s.sburg. Like every town in those days, it existed in a state of siege. Guards manned the walls, and its gates only opened when we had proved we carried no weapons. Suspicious gazes followed our progress along the winding alleys inside, up the hill towards the church.

'Have you noticed how goldsmiths always keep their shops near churches?' Drach muttered. 'Jesus preached poverty and forsaking worldly goods.'

'Keep your voice down,' I warned him. 'It's bad enough that everyone here thinks we must be an advance party of Armagnaken, without you sounding like a Free Spirit heretic as well.'

We found what we had come to see in a steep-gabled house plastered red between its branching beams. Much of it was familiar from all goldsmiths' shops: the tools on the walls; the boxes of beads and wire; the plate glinting behind the bars of the show cabinet; the residues of quicksilver and hot metal.

But they were not fresh. No smoke rose from the furnace at the back of the house, and the anvils were silent. These were lean times for goldsmiths they could not work gold when it was all buried under mattresses and floorboards.

I leaned on the empty counter and peered inside. A man sat on a stool, pulling rings off a spindle and polishing them one by one.

'Are you Gotz?' I asked.

He nodded. He must have been about thirty, with bushy brown hair and a thin face. I introduced myself.

'I am a.s.sociated with the goldsmiths' guild in Stra.s.sburg. I have seen your work there. A brooch of Christ on his cross.' It had been Andreas Dritzehn's. His brother had brought it into Dunne's shop to sell after Andreas' death. Through discreet enquiry, I had found out who had made it. 'The lettering on the inscription was exquisite. So precise.'

He accepted the compliment in silence.

'I a.s.sume you cut the letters with punches.'

A suspicious look. I sympathised. 'I do not want to steal your secret. I want to buy it.'

I put a purse of coins on the counter.

'I want you to make me a set of punches, exactly as you made your own.'

Gotz eyed the purse but did not touch it.

'I can cut your punches.' He hesitated. 'But not exactly as I made my own.'

'What do you mean?'

He chose his words cautiously. 'You want punches that will stamp each letter in metal. I do not have any.'

'But the brooch . . .'

'You could scour my workshop from top to bottom and you would not find a single alphabetical punch.'

I tried to remember everything I could about the writing on the brooch. 'Surely you did not engrave it freehand?'

He pushed the purse back towards me. 'I would rather not say.'

Frustrated and perplexed, I was about to turn away. But the wink of gold in his cabinet delayed me. I peered through the leaded gla.s.s.

'May I examine that cup?'

I could see his doubts but the purse still lay on the counter, and I might be the only customer he would have that week. He unlocked the cabinet and handed me the cup. It was about six inches tall, with a bowed stem and garnets set into the bowl. Around the base was written a verse from St John's Gospel.

I studied it a few moments, pressing my fingertips into the sharp incisions. The lines were too straight, too clean to have been carved by hand. They must have been stamped. Yet Gotz claimed he had no letter punches.

I put down the cup and picked up the purse.

'Thank you.'

The taxi dropped them off outside the Hochschule fur Gestaltung. In the dark, Nick couldn't see much more than a cl.u.s.ter of square, practical buildings surrounded by trees. Sabine Friman was standing by the front door waiting for them. She was a lithe woman with short blonde hair that poked around her ears in elfin spikes, blue eyes and a tanned face. In spite of the cold, she wore nothing more than an olive-green tank top and cargo pants.

'The Wanderer arrives,' she said. Her English was perfect, with a Scandinavian crispness. 'Did you have a good journey?'

She led them in. Even at that time of night, there were plenty of students in the corridors. Everything was warm, bright and clean; it was the safest he'd felt in ages.

'Randall told me what you need.' She unlocked a door from the ring of keys clipped to her belt. Inside was a small, windowless room with a computer monitor and a scanner set up on a plastic folding table. 'The scanner is 2,400dpi, and we have a direct connection to the i-21 data network.'

'Great. Can we start with the scanner?'

Sabine lifted the lid and held out her hand. To her obvious surprise, Nick reached in his coat and handed her what looked like a pile of greetings cards.

'Did you forget someone's birthday?'

Nick flipped one round so she could see the back. Tiny sc.r.a.ps of paper made a mosaic on the glossy red card. 'We needed a high-contrast reflective background. This was all they sold at the rail station.' Thankfully the train had been pretty empty, not too many pa.s.sengers to wonder why he and Emily spent the journey gluing the fragments on. 'It'll make scanning easier.'

Sabine laid the greetings cards on the scanner and closed the lid. It hummed into life; a bar of green light slowly traversed the platen. A vastly magnified picture of the back of the card slid down the screen.

'Now to upload them,' said Nick. He sat down on the metal chair. 'This is where it gets interesting.'

Sabine leaned over his shoulder and studied the screen. 'How does it work, exactly?'

'We upload these pictures to the server that hosts my program. That picks out the fragments of paper and turns them into individual images. Then it a.n.a.lyses them for edge shape, fragments of letters or words and tries to piece them back together. Like doing a jigsaw.'

Emily looked at the computer as if it were an alien object. 'Can't you just do it on your laptop?'

'The raw number crunching you need for this thing is way too intensive for a home computer.' Nick opened a web browser and typed in an address. 'It's like trying to solve all the possible outcomes of a chess game, but with thousands of pieces that are all different shapes. The processing has to be done on ma.s.sive central servers in this case, belonging to the people who fund my research.'

'Who's that?'

'The FBI.'

Even Sabine's ice-cool composure took a knock. 'You want to hack into the FBI's computer system? From here?'

'I'm not going to hack in anywhere. I'm going to walk up to the front door and use a valid user name and pa.s.sword.'

Sabine shot him a crooked look. 'Randall said you were maybe not so happy with the police right now.'

'That was the NYPD. The parts of the Bureau that fund me are a long way away from the parts that hunt bad guys. If we're very lucky, the right hand might not have gotten round to telling the left hand what's been going on. After all, it's the last place they'd expect me to go.'

'Maybe they've got a point.' Emily folded her arms and walked to the back of the room. Sabine glanced between her and Nick.

'Can I get you a drink?'

'Something with caffeine. It's going to be a long night.'

Sabine went out. After a moment, Emily turned back to see what Nick was doing. To her surprise, she saw that the scanned picture had given way to a thick forest, through which Nick seemed to be navigating a one-eyed man in a grey cloak and a bronze helmet.

'Gothic Lair?'

Nick didn't look up. 'Whoever's after us, they've tracked every move we've made.' Emily noticed how white his knuckles were as they gripped the computer mouse. 'I don't want Sabine to end up like Brother Jerome if they trace us back here. So I'm taking the long way round.'

On screen, the Wanderer came out into a clearing that surrounded a giant oak tree. It looked ancient. Its branches sagged low and its wizened bark was pocked with disease. A mess of gnarled roots tangled the earth around its base like cables.

'You came.' Urthred the Necromancer stepped out from behind the tree. He sounded disappointed.

'Did you manage to do it?' Nick asked.

'Did I ever tell you about the time the FBI came to visit me when I was sixteen?' Urthred examined the leaves on one of the low-hanging branches. 'Not a good time in my life.'

'All you have to do is get me to the front door.'

'It's all set up.' Urthred pointed to the bottom of the tree, where a fat root split in two like a cloven hoof. It forced the earth apart, leaving a triangular hole in the fork. 'Down you go.'

The Wanderer jumped. The screen went black as the hole swallowed him. Nick waited for something to happen. The green light on the computer's network card blinked furiously, but the screen stayed blank. Had Randall screwed up?

'Should something be happening?' said Emily.

'I got him to set up a secure connection to the FBI servers in Washington. Hopefully it'll make us untraceable.' Nick drummed his fingers on the desk and stared at the screen. All he saw was his own reflection. 'If we get there.'

A blue screen appeared with a government seal and the words FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION emblazoned across the top. Nick had never thought he'd be so glad to see it. He typed in his pa.s.sword and held his breath.

Pa.s.sword accepted The screen changed again, a plain list of files and folders. Nick clicked one and entered a file name. The lights on the network connection went into overdrive; a green bar began crawling across the screen as the file started to transfer.

'How long do we have to wait?' Emily asked.

'Maybe half an hour for the upload. After that . . .' Nick shrugged. 'The program's written to deal with bags of shredded material at a time, so one sheet should be quicker. On the other hand, we don't know if we have all the pieces, and we don't know how wet they got in the snow. And there's the question of what was actually on the original sheet of paper. The more detail, particularly words, the easier it is for the algorithm to figure it out.'

'Nick you there?' Randall's disembodied voice jumped out of the computer speakers. Nick leaned towards the microphone he'd plugged in.

'Worked perfectly.'

'That's what I'm telling you: it didn't. Somebody's sniffing all over that connection. You must have triggered some kind of alarm when you logged in.'

'Is it coming from the Washington end?'

'Doesn't look like it. How much longer do you need?'

Nick looked at the status bar.

FILE TRANSFER: 12% COMPLETE.

'It's going to be a while.'

'That was a wasted errand,' Kaspar complained. But I saw his eyes dart towards me as soon as he'd said it, always probing.

I played along. 'I found it useful.'

A brief silence followed, while he pretended he did not want to know and I pretended I did not want to tell him.

'How?'

'Every letter has a different shape. But each is composed of a much smaller number of basic shapes. A stroke, a dot, a curve. I would guess that with a set of six punches, maybe ten, you could strike almost any letter.'

Drach snorted. 'So reductive. You reduce the page to words and the words to letters; now the letters to lines. Next you will want to form each line from individual grains of metal. And you still don't know how to make any of it work.'

'Gotz does.'

'Then why don't you hire him?'

'Maybe I will.' I was fed up with Dunne. I suspected he had stopped believing in the enterprise long ago, and now saw me only as a tap of easy money to be left dripping as long as possible. 'But first I must know what I want Gotz to do.'

I sighed. Trying to comprehend the project on every level, from the finished plate to the tiniest stroke of each letter, turned my mind inside out. Every level depended on the others, and the least change to one caused changes to all. It was like trying to imagine the design of a cathedral while simultaneously knowing every stone within it. Sometimes I glimpsed the harmony of the whole, or felt its resonance. More often, it made my head hurt.

'We should start back.'

Kaspar looked back at the clock tower. 'It will be dark before we're halfway there.'

'We'll find an inn.'

We ducked out of the town gate and joined the road back to Stra.s.sburg. High clouds had covered the sky. Without the sun the leaves no longer seemed so vibrant, merely old. They put me in a melancholy mood. I looked at their withered faces, the waxy green of youth dulled to dry brown, and saw my own face mirrored back to me. The purse of gold weighed like lead in my pocket.