The Bergamese Sect (34 page)

Linsky nodded and read the message aloud. ‘Harry Westport. I hear the coughs are causing you trouble. Have the things taken out and you’ll do much better. Watch out for the tourists, they can be trouble too. By the way, where are you holidaying this year? Send me a note – I’ll be in Boston soon. Rick Diaz.’

‘
That’s from Walsh,’ Lewis said, shuffling down into the depression and grabbing the small receiver from Linsky. He stared at the words on the backlit display.

‘
Yes,’ he said, ‘this is from Walsh. He must be in some kind of trouble. I wonder what that attack in Washington was all about.’

Lewis read the words to himself again, trying to see the gist of Walsh’s instructions. Their meaning wasn’t obvious to him, though it should be. He’d spent months in the classroom with Walsh, devising and deciphering cryptic messages, practising the skills needed to fool an adversary and pass detailed information in innocuous communications. The schemes they’d devised were based on personal knowledge. A set of words and facts that only those two men would recognise.

Slowly, an arrangement made many years earlier came back to Lewis; a method they’d devised to establish each other’s location in the event of a tragedy. But there was more to Walsh’s message than just a ‘where are you?’ He was warning them, but the nature of the warning eluded Lewis.

‘
What does he mean?’ Linsky had voiced the words circling in Lewis’ mind.

‘
The coughs are causing you trouble,’ Lewis mumbled to himself. ‘Have the things taken out and you’ll do much better.’ He was frowning.

Suddenly his hand shot to the back of his head. ‘Shit!’ he said and looked at Linsky, his face stricken in the pale light of the moon.

‘
What is it?’ Linsky asked.

‘
COFS! They’re tracking us.’

‘
Who?’

‘
Those guys down there. That’s why we haven’t been able to shake them off. They know we’re here!’

‘
How?’

‘
Walsh’s message. They’re tracking us through our implants.’

Linsky’s face also turned pale. The realisation shook him; the enemy could this very moment be hiding yards away, the radio beacons in their heads shouting out their location for all to hear. His vision darted fearfully between the rocky outcrops.

Lewis gave him an equally terrified look, shimmied back up the depression and grabbed the night-vision binoculars. He swept along the valley sides, away from the shack, searching for the missing adversaries. He could find no one.

Then he began a slow arc toward the top of the valley.

There they were. Two figures well illuminated by the rising moon, trekking up the exposed side of the valley toward the glacier. Following the trail Lewis and Linsky had left only hours before in the water-laden tip of the mass of grinding ice.

‘
Pack up,’ said Lewis, ‘we’ve got to get out of here. They’re coming.’

‘
What about the target?’

‘
It’s too dangerous. The enemy already know we’re onto them. If we start down the valley now they might do something drastic, even kill the target. We can’t risk it. We’ll have to leave it till another day and just hope the target is safe until then. We can continue to track the girl.’

Lewis was already stuffing the binoculars in his backpack. He stood and zipped up his snowsuit against the alpine breeze.

‘
Where to?’ asked Linsky.

‘
I don’t know,’ Lewis answered, biting his lip again, surveying their position. ‘It won’t take them long to skirt around the glacier and get up on the peak. If we’re still up here they’ll be able to pin us against the mountainside from above.’

Linsky looked behind him at the summit of Castor Peak. It towered above them, steep and snow-covered, monstrous against a star-strewn sky. ‘Up?’ he suggested.

Lewis shrugged. ‘Yes, up and over, then north-west back into the pass.’

They hauled their bags over their shoulders and began pulling themselves up the slopes toward the summit.

―
§ ―

Random confusions of colour washed over the laptop screen. Some were like beautiful fractal patterns, others like TV static.

‘
That’s it,’ Henric said. He hit a key to stop the sequence of images.

They were staring at a montage of colour, but there were clearly words hidden in the confusion. ‘Hold on,’ Henric said and punched in a key sequence. The image changed to a greyscale and the words instantly lost their confusing hues, like a colour-blindness chart that suddenly resolved into a huge numeral of dots.

Before them were three columns of text with a series of empty boxes below. At the bottom of the image it said ‘Rm 122, dead friend’. They scanned down the words, looking for a simple message. But the words formed a series of questions.

Henric read the first line. ‘What year did you pass your driving test?’

There was silence. Henric turned to Matt who was just staring at the screen, frowning. ‘These questions are for you,’ he said.

‘
Oh, er… ‘97.’

‘
How many permanent scars do you have?’ Henric asked.

Matt frowned again. ‘None. Look, I thought this message was supposed to tell you where to find this guy.’

Clara leaned over the computer. ‘Just hold on a minute, Matt,’ she said. ‘We obviously have to do something with your answers.’ She tapped on the screen, pointing at the series of boxes below each column. ‘Perhaps we need to fill in the answers here. Perhaps that will tell us something.’

‘
Okay,’ Henric said. He grabbed a pen and paper from across the table, drew an exact copy of the boxes on the paper and wrote ‘97’ and ‘0’ in the appropriate blanks.

‘
Right,’ he said, turning back to the computer screen. ‘How many lovers have you had?’

‘
That’s a bit personal, isn’t it?’ Matt replied.

‘
Sure, now you see why we need you? Be honest.’ Henric and Clara continued to stare at Matt, waiting for an answer.

‘
Three,’ he said.

Henric raised his eyebrows but didn’t say a word, just filled in the blank box with the number three. They went through each question, each one personal and specific to Matt. His golf handicap, the number of broken bones he’d had, how old he was when he lost his virginity, the year his best friend had died.

Some of the questions faintly bothered him. The bit about his friend who’d died was the worst. He’d told no one about that. He wasn’t responsible, but he’d done nothing to prevent it. He’d tried his best to forget it, had just about managed it too. Until that September day three years ago, when the police had knocked at the door. Ever since, Matt had been convinced his parents’ accident was some kind of retribution for his inaction. If he’d been a religious person, he’d have accepted that kind of purgatory. But he wasn’t, and that made those dark thoughts even worse. The admission that the retribution was clinical, mechanical, but no less real. The knot of confusion wrangled in Matt’s stomach.

When they’d finished the list of questions, they were left with three long numbers on Henric’s paper. They all stared at the result, perplexed and silent –
970300 -5663759 2758612
.

‘
What the hell is that?’ said Matt.

Henric continued to stare at the computer screen. ‘It must be something obvious. Three numbers. Three long numbers.’ He tapped his pen on the table in thought. ‘Well, it’s not an address or a phone number. I can’t see how it could be an IP address. Or an email address. Three numbers.’ He tapped the pen harder on the table and chewed the inside of his mouth in thought.

‘
It’s clear this man wants us to find him, right?’ he said. ‘These numbers must be a location, somehow. But what coordinate system is it?’

Matt was losing patience. ‘Seems we’ve had a wasted trip. We’ve come thousands of miles for a list of meaningless numbers.’

‘
Give me a while to figure this out, will you?’ Henric snapped. ‘Clara, give me your mobile.’

Clara stepped over to her coat that was hanging on the back of a chair. She reached into the inside pocket and pulled out a tiny, blue mobile phone. She handed it to Henric. ‘I wouldn’t use that for too long,’ she said. ‘My number may be monitored.’

Henric fiddled with the phone. He shook his head. ‘Makes no difference,’ he said. ‘I can’t get a signal up here anyway.’ He tossed the phone back at her.

Clara picked it out of the air. ‘Hold on,’ she said and began rummaging around in her backpack. She pulled out a black brick with a long rubbery antenna attached. ‘Satellite phone,’ she explained, handing Henric the enormous device.

Henric took a cable and hooked the phone up to the computer. Firing up some software, he connected to the Internet and began browsing through web sites, searching for clues.

Clara returned to pacing the room, fiddling with the sleeve of her sweater. Matt thought she was angry, that she would suddenly explode and throw the computer through the window. But when Matt caught her eyes, the expression was just one of resignation, disappointment. For five minutes, Matt and Clara watched a frown come and go on Henric’s face.

‘
I’ve got it,’ he said suddenly. ‘These must be geodetic coordinates.’

‘
What’s that?’ Matt asked, leaning forward.

‘
It’s a way of giving a precise location on the Earth.’

‘
Like latitude and longitude?’

‘
Yes, except the third number gives your distance from the centre of the planet. The numbers are expressed as metres and the Earth is modelled as a flattened sphere, an ellipsoid.’

Matt looked at the numbers on Henric’s paper again. ‘So how do we know where this is?’ he asked.

‘
Hold on,’ Henric said, ‘we should be able to convert them.’ He began typing again, pulling up a search engine and typing in some keywords. A list of matches flashed onto the screen and Henric clicked on one of them. A smile crossed his face.

‘
Right, this should do it.’ He typed the three numbers into a series of boxes on the web page and hit the submit button. Up popped an answer.

‘
Okay, latitude 25:47:41 north, longitude 80:16:43 west,’ he said. He noted down the result on the paper, drew a swift circle around the numbers.

‘
Where’s that?’ asked Clara. She came back to look at the screen.

Henric thought for a moment, trying to decipher the numbers. ‘Don’t know. Hold on.’

He typed another web address in the browser and connected to a topographical map server. Punching in the numbers, he turned to the others and said, ‘you ready for this?’ They nodded as he hit another submit button.

Within a fraction of a second, a detailed map popped up on the display. At first, they didn’t recognise what they were seeing. But then they realised the intersecting lines on the screen formed the three runways of a huge airport. A crescent shaped terminal building with extensive arms lay between two of the parallel runways. On the inner curve of the crescent sat a red cross marking the exact position of Henric’s coordinates. It was within the airport terminal building. Henric clicked and the map zoomed out to encompass the entire airport.

‘
That’s MIA,’ Henric said. ‘Miami International.’

‘
He’s in the airport?’

‘
Could be.’

‘
How accurate are those numbers? Does it just mean the airport, or somewhere specific inside?’ Clara asked.

Henric thought about this. ‘The geodetic numbers give you the location to within a metre or so. Seems pretty specific to me.’

‘
Okay,’ said Clara. ‘Let’s try and pinpoint it. Could we get a map of the terminal building?’

‘
Don’t need one. I know the layout pretty well,’ Henric answered. ‘That cross is right at the entrance to the airport hotel.’

‘
The hotel? He’s hiding out in the hotel?’

‘
Looks like it.’

‘
Doesn’t seem like a very good hiding place,’ Matt said.

The others nodded. ‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Henric.

‘
Is that what ‘Rm 122’ means?’ Clara said. ‘Is that his room number?’

Henric pulled up the image again and stared at the words. ‘Maybe. What does this ‘dead friend’ mean though?’

‘
That was one of the questions,’ Matt pointed out, ‘what year did my best friend die?’

‘
You’re right. What was his name?’

‘
Duncan Talbot.’

‘
Maybe the contact is checked in under that name.’

‘
Or maybe we should use it to check in ourselves.’

The room fell silent. Matt detected a shift in the atmosphere, a tension dispersing like frosted breath. Clara’s face was unusually relaxed, her lips no longer angular, the eyes no longer drawn, eager. Henric looked like he’d just won a game of squash.

‘
Okay,’ Clara said, ‘that’s a good start. We should get to Miami as soon as possible.’ She began clearing their plates and cups off the table. ‘We’ll get some rest here tonight. First thing tomorrow, we’ll head back down into the Pass, pick up the car and head for Vancouver. We should be able to get a flight direct to Miami from there.’

‘
Isn’t Calgary closer?’ Henric said. He stood, stretched his arms with a grunt.

‘
Yes, but it’ll be better if we don’t back track. Keep our trail cold. I think we should take another route back down to Rogers Pass as well.’

‘
Why?’

‘
Just to be safe. We can climb up over the Asulkan Pass and around the Mount Jupiter peaks. We’ll come down on the other side. It’ll be hard going; there’s no trail that side. It’ll probably take most of the day to get back to the car. But with a bit of luck we can be in Miami by Friday.’