Chapter 53

 

 

DAY 4

 

 

ST. GILES SQUARE, WEST LONDON

0811 hrs.

 

“You’ve got to believe me, Allegra,” Jack said.

Her eyes didn’t give away much.

Jack removed his hand from her mahogany table, nearly knocking over a prized lion statuette carved out of pure gold she’d once mentioned was from a royal official in Bhutan. His arm muscle throbbed, having spent the last twenty minutes perched over her well-organized desk like a ravenous pelican.

Ever the diplomat, by profession and in manner, Allegra’s stance remained calm.

“I’m sorry Allegra, but I didn’t get much sleep last night after jetting out of Santorini and by the time we left the hospital, it was late.”

Allegra leaned back against her chair. “I understand.”

I wish I’d brought Calla with me. She has an edge with Allegra. Firm, but an edge.

“That computer was registered to ISTF under Mila Rembrandt’s name,” Jack said.

“How did that happen if it wasn’t you?”

Allegra was polite. “Mila is no more a hacker than I am. Let the poor girl rest in hospital. I’m sending my physicians there in a couple of hours to check on her condition and have ordered ISTF protection for now. What we need to consider is why Mason sent his operatives after her.”

Hadn’t she heard him? Her words stung Jack like cobra fangs. Didn’t she understand the gravity of his dilemma? Jack wiped his beading brow. The anguish of his Santorini discovery was more than he could take.

His tone relaxed. “I’m sorry Allegra, maybe I’m not making myself clear. ANX is a top secret program used by government, military and defense agencies. We developed it at ISTF, then licensed it to NASA and the UK Space Agency, among other select government agencies a couple of months ago. You signed it off.”

She took a sip of her aromatic, peppermint tea that had sat brewing on her desk for the last several minutes. Her eyes stole a glance at his face. “Yes, I realize that.”

“But what you may not know is that the code was created to be impenetrable, so a hack could only have come from an inside informant or aid.”

“There’s no such thing. I’ve spent the last seven months weeding ISTF of Mason’s ill influences.”

Jack took a breath. “With all due respect, I understand that. But see my point. ANX is a difficult program to hack. You’d need the right code, encrypted and accessible only to three people. NASA and the UK Space Agency don’t even know how to control its dynamics. That’s how they wanted it. We alone control its dispensation. We’ve been trying to gain entry into the very systems that have collapsed.”

“We must have some skill here.” Trained technicians? Plan B.”

Jack shook his head. “No, Mason deauthorized further development.” He dipped into the cream chair in front of Allegra’s desk. “This proves my theory further. The hack was an inside job.”

“Exactly. Mason.”

His eyes narrowed. “How?”

Allegra placed her china cup on the saucer and shot up from behind her desk. “Mila accessed Mason’s mainframe computer. Mimicking everything ANX does in an attempt to stop him.”

The blood nearly left his face. Ashen like chalk, Jack could not believe the operative had hacked his program. It had taken him months to create the world’s first antihack system.

Jack didn’t like holes in any of his creations. ANX programming was at least fifteen years ahead any known, computing technology. What has this operative done that I, its brainchild am struggling to piece together?

He edged back in his seat and laced his hands behind his head. “Mason must have apprehended her plan. Those where his operatives in Santorini weren’t they? Mason knows she was onto to him. If I know him, he’ll change tactics. The Santorini signal was my first break in the case and now it’s gone.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know. This is the first known breach in ANX. But I can find out if I get your authorization to override the systems within the UK Space Agency.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Jack.”

“But our whole defense and government systems are wide open. We’ve no idea where Mason is or from where he’s controlling the virus. The quicker I can access those systems, the better.”

“No, Jack. Even if I wanted to?”

Provided the information remained confidential, that’s how they wanted it.

“This means we are back to the drawing board,” Jack said.

“Not necessarily.” Allegra circled the length of her desk moving to the edge, before taking a seat on it in front of Jack. “Jack, I believe in you. You can fight this. Just find a way to override the hack.”

“But—”

“I can’t, Jack. ISTF is shutting down. If I authorize your entry, it’ll raise suspicious eyebrows from powers above me.”

Jack shifted in his seat. Even though the tone in Allegra’s voice resisted, her eyes said something else. She’s in a tight bind.

Jack leaned forward. “Allegra, I don’t know how long we have until Mason’s starts manipulating every computer, gadget, cell phone and network system. This hack is spreading.”

Allegra thought for a few minutes and clasped her hands together. What’s holding her back? She’s taken risks before. She kept the Deveron Manuscript from ISTF, why can’t she do this. All she has to do is sign the bloody paperwork!

Had she lost her confidence in her job as head of ISTF? Her authority?

She rose and paced to the back of the room, leaving Jack mincing behind like a hunter whose prey had fled. Allegra swiveled round Jack, her eyebrows pinching together. Her voice had a hesitant tone to it as she spoke. “Mila spent years investigating Mason and his tactics.”

Jack hesitated. “When we broke into his house seven months ago, we could get onto his motherboard and disengage all his programs. That’s how we overrode the original hack. Perhaps, I should’ve looked around for other gimmicks. He must have planned this a long time. He failed to secure firewalls around his systems, thinking no one would suspect him.”

“Longer than you know, Jack. Much, much longer than we all do.”

Jack scratched his head. “We checked Mason’s home, accounts and systems thoroughly, even the laptop he was allowed into prison.”

“Mason is not an amateur. He is an operative who’s been anticipating payback for something much deeper than we understand. We need to find what that is. A simple reprogram will not suffice here. He knows how to conceal anything and keep it buried even while it stares right at us,” she said.

“So where does that leave us?”

Allegra slanted a glance Jack’s way. “We’d better decrypt Calla’s mother’s note. Mila told me Calla’s mother once obtained information on Mason’s weakest vulnerabilities. How she accomplished that all those years ago, we don’t know. But she must have pissed him off and he’s still sour.”

 

 

 

0945 hrs.

 

CALLA’S FINGERS FILED through a charcoal journal. Its velvety cover, smooth under her touch, despite its age. The aging journal had remained well-preserved under the conditions she’d put it through while in Sub-Saharan Africa during a plunge in a crocodile infested Nile. She’d kept it in her office safe as she’d done repeatedly with antiquities she needed to authenticate. Responsible for the Roman and Byzantine collections from the Eastern Mediterranean, from the late third to the mid-fifteenth century, her collections boasted metalwork of gold, silver and bronze, treasures coming from places as diverse as Esquiline, Carthage, Lampsacus and Cyprus. Calla also handled glass, textiles, ivories, and pottery including Byzantine, Greek and Russian icons.

A head peered through the half-open door. “Sorry, Calla but we used your office for storage. We weren’t told when you’d be back.”

“That’s all right, Hera. Not sure I’ll be using it extensively at the moment.”

“Was Egypt all you expected?”

Calla smiled at her colleague, a curator of horological collections with her passion fondly around French provincial and American clocks. “Quite.”

“Next time, take me with you.”

Hera shut the door behind her as she left. With a contented smile, Calla clammed the journal shut. She edged back in the light wood chair, her arms folded in contemplation. Before she’d been assigned on the team to authenticate the Deveron Manuscript, she’d been thinking of moving to her first love, linguistic anthropology and perhaps finding a post in the Anthropology Library. Nothing amused her more than handling books, pamphlets, journal titles, microfilms, maps and sound recordings, especially as it concerned lost languages and codes.

It had been easy to accept ISTF’s request to join their signals intelligence arm. Understanding riddles and programming was second nature to Calla.

The quiet room, with scattered shelving space needed a good tidy up. It hadn’t been touched in months and Calla’s eye caught sight of a film of dust along the sturdy desk. Her blue Bathysphere and the scores of antiquities in boxes lay on the floor waiting to be indexed and possibly shelved for lack of room space. She sometimes wondered how staff at the British Museum were expected to work with priceless artifacts in such cramped spaces. Confined in the basement of a Georgian building, in quarters that were historically servants’ quarters, Calla longed for the opening of the new conservation center. Here she would continue her research into rare languages and their effect on civilization.

Calla threw open the journal, having spent the best part of the early morning reading its carefully indexed symbols, symbols that should have been second nature by now. The journal was worn, but had opened her eyes to historical possibilities of language structures’ she’d never imagined.

She smiled to herself wondering how the little book had survived a forty-foot drop at Murchison Falls and the rapid currents of the Nile River. Calla fished for the microfilm Mila had given her, and scanned it through the microfilm reader on her desk, producing a legible printout. She jotted down codes from the journal, translating symbol after symbol in her mother’s work. The letterings were foreign, undecipherable, but at least now she knew they were meant to be, and the journal would get her there in the end. The microfilm had come with a note from her mother, handwritten and quite hurriedly by the looks of the graphology, especially the strokes along the more rounded hieroglyphics, mimicking the symbols of the Deveron Manuscript.

Her parents had interacted with the manuscript for years and as they began to decipher it, and quite successfully it seems, they’d marked all their findings in this journal, then hid it for years. Without the journal, she couldn’t have unraveled the mystery of the Deveron Manuscript. Her heritage. Her legacy.

She heard a knock at the door.

“Your colleague thought, I may find you here.” Stan’s distinguished face peered into the room.

“Fa. . .father?”

Stan brushed into the room. “So this is where you work?”

Calla set her reading on the desk and nodded as she observed Stan’s curious gaze around the office. Tall, commanding and green eyes like hers, framing a handsome square face, she’d only found her father seven months ago. There was much he didn’t know about her and the impression was mutual.

Feeling apologetic about her disappearance without telling him, in hindsight, she guessed he knew why after his own absence from her entire life.

Stan seemed at ease as he swaggered from artifact to book, commenting on her accomplishments. Her eyes suddenly narrowed, watching him as if he were a hawk. She bit her lower lip. Why did you not tell me the truth?

Calla glanced down at the microfilm and printout on the table. She quietly hid the items in the pages of the journal. Stan concluded his exploration and sagged into the padded sofa by the door. “I see you like working in solitude.”

“Maybe I get it from you.”

“Touché. I deserve that. I’m proud of you, Calla. This place is astounding and what you do here.”

“Most times, it’s quite inspiring.”

“It’s easy to know why you like working here,” Stan said. “You’ve a mind to make history relevant to the present, take the best from it and reinvent it for a better world. I can see why the operatives desperately needed you, and why ISTF came knocking, asking you to drop your curator brush.”

“I really haven’t.” Her eyes narrowed into his. “You’d probably have had me work in some clandestine, mendacious, agent organization. Let’s see, possibly at the Secret Intelligence Service like you. I imagine secrecy and lies become a habit there.”

Stan shifted in his seat and leaned forward, his eyebrows burrowing. “I deserve that and I’m sorry, I didn’t tell you everything about your mother.”

A tear welled in the corner of his eye. He wiped it away with a white handkerchief he pulled from his tweed jacket, despising himself for revealing his gentler side. Calla’s heart suddenly felt heavy, sympathizing with the burden of responsibility, guilt and mistakes he’d carried.

“Stan. . .father?” She hitched herself on to the desk and smiled. “I’m still not used to calling you, father. I know there’s so much that we need to—”

“I don’t blame you one bit. Your mother and I fled operative life. And rightly or wrongly, we tried to hide you from it too.”

She slid to the sofa next to him and folded her warm hands over his chilled knuckles. “I know.”

Uncertain how much he knew about Mila’s microfilm, she took the handkerchief from his hand, and dried a second growing tear. “I forgive you. But right now, I need you.” She knew the words meant more to him than life.

His eyes lit. “What can I do?”

“I came across something recently that I think you can help me with.” She watched him attentively, choosing her words carefully. “Was my mother’s name Nicole?”