The Code War (29 page)

'So tell me Nancy,' she began, now the
pleasantries were over, 'who is - or rather was - that man and how
did you get mixed up with him?'

'Oh him? Yes. What will happen to him, I
mean his body, will the police..?'

'We take care of our own affairs,'
said Doreen firmly. 'It's not like Bristol where I used to live. No
sense in bothering the police here. They only get in the way. We
can do our own justice.'

'Oh, right. Was there anything on the
lorry?'

'No.' Doreen looked intently at Nancy.
'And if there had been something on the lorry, what might it have
been?'

'Oh, nothing.' So Lafi had handed off
the drugs before coming to look for her at the village. Street
dealers all over Europe would be very happy about that.

'You were saying?' Doreen knew how to be
persistent.

'Well...
'

But as Nancy played for time and
tried to think up a story about being abducted by Lafi while
walking around Banjul as an ordinary tourist, she absent-mindedly
picked up the mirror again. Only instead of her own face, the
mirror showed a small letter 'd', as fine and neat as if made from
cut glass, with bevelled edges and a rainbow-like prism of light
around it.

'Oh,' gasped
Nancy as she pulled her hands away and the mirror fell to
the floor.

In the same moment, Doreen drew
back in her chair as if Nancy was radio-active.

'My dear,' she said, her eyes wide
in fear and her hands held up in front of her like a barrier. 'My
dear, there's something going on with you that I haven't ever seen
before.'

'What do you mean?' replied Nancy
innocently, while trying not to think. 'R', 'e' and now 'd'.

'I mean that there's stuff, spiritual
stuff around you that's intense. I've seen ghosts and other strange
goings-on in my time but what's around you is much too big for me
to meddle with. I don't know what you're about, my dear, but I
think you best be on your way as soon as you can.'

Red.

And with that, Doreen sent a
messenger to summon Happy Face and Jonah to come to the compound.
When they arrived they seemed a little disappointed to hear that
Nancy was leaving them so soon.

'Take miss Nancy to Banjul,
anywhere she wants to go, in the market van,' ordered Doreen. 'You
two brought her to the village so it's appropriate that you two see
her safely away from the village. Understand?'

The two fishermen regained their
smiles. 'I'll take you anywhere you want to go,' laughed Happy Face
to Nancy. 'So long as you promise not to go swimming in the sea
again.'

Nancy laugh
ed, relieved that there were no hard feelings. 'Are you
going to keep the lorry?' she asked of Doreen.

'No, we don't need it,' replied Doreen.
'We'll probably sell it and use the money to buy packaging
equipment. For the fish. We can sell more fish if they're properly
wrapped and labelled.'

The moment had arrived. Nancy made
a tearful good-bye with Doreen who, although keen for her to
continue on her journey, had also become a little mumsy.

'You take care, you hear,'
encouraged Doreen. 'You've got a strength about you like a tree in
a storm. Stay true to your roots and you'll be all
right.'

Red. Red flag? Red squirrel? Red
bus?

'Thanks Doreen, I'll always
remember you,' said Nancy who kissed her on the cheek and followed
the two men out into the night.

Heaven's
Shore

'Red. It could be anything. But it's
starting to look like this adventure is taking Nancy to Hong Kong.
I know we've said it before but we need to stop just following
events and get ourselves ahead of this game.'.

Jabez was hosting the meeting and
the other three were present on his shingle beach by way of their
globes. This time Jabez insisted they make themselves comfortable
rather than roughing it with him. So Ruth was curled in her feather
air chair, Agatha lay in a softcane swing seat and Luke sat
cross-legged on a vast leather armchair the size of a small
room.

'African proportions,' he said with a
cheeky grin. 'It's a cultural thing. You wouldn't understand.'

They didn't try to.

Jabez retained his rock saying
that anything else would disturb the ambience of his environment.
He was doing his best to look relaxed but the others could see he
was tense.

Ruth had volunteered to provide
t
he refreshments however and decided to
introduce the team to a new range of drinks.

'Got sump'n special for y'all,'
she declared with a smile as wide as a cotton field. 'Take 'em out
and fill 'em up.'

Each one opened a container she'd
sent over and took out a tall crystal glass. A second container
produced a jug of elderflower and ginger cordial while a third
disgorged thin coconut cookies.

'The fourth container is the one that
makes it all come together.'

Jabez was first. The door of the
tiny freezer container, barely the size of his fist, opened and
jettisoned several ice cubes into his glass. As the cubes melted,
they freed up little peppercorn-sized butterflies that leapt into
the air and hovered above his drink for several seconds, flapping
their wings before disappearing in a puff of mist. Soon the space
above everyone's glass was filled with dozens of these diminutive
fliers, spinning dizzily and vaporising in front of their
eyes.

'Who made those Ruth? They're so
beautiful.' asked a delighted Agatha.

'My friend Valentine makes them
over at his ranch in Eternal Springs,' replied Ruth with a hint of
pride. 'The water there has a unique chemistry that allows a short
bio simulation. He makes all kinds of butterflies and miniature
birds out of the minerals in the water and then chills them into
ice. While they're frozen he calls them 'still life'. Course,
they're not really living, they're just crystals with miniature
heat-exchangers in their joints. The crystals absorb the ambient
warmth of the passing air at different rates and that causes the
wings to flap and rotate.'

Silence reigned for a few moments to the
accompaniment of several faint drumbeats of Music.

'I liked them better before you told me
that,' declared Luke.

'Oh, I'm sorry y'all. I just done
and took the romance out of the whole thing. Tush, what a thing to
do,' laughed Ruth stirring her drink. The last of her butterflies
leapt from her glass, took flight upwards in a lazy spiral and
abruptly evanesced in a vapour rainbow.

Jabez stirred his drink to allow
several butterflies to escape together. As they rose from his glass
he opened his mouth and gulped them in. 'It's better than sparkling
wine,' he exclaimed.

Soon they were all trying to
capture the insect sparklers in their mouths and the air was
t
hick with exclamations and
hoots.

Finally Jabez called a halt.

'This is great but
it
's not getting the children to school.'
He was still laughing as he put down his glass. 'At least I feel
less anxious than I did before. Laughter is a great way to begin a
meeting. I have a feeling we're going to be more productive than we
otherwise would have been. Well done Ruth. Thanks to your friend
Valentine. Tell him he's got a great product line.'

He looked around the shore at the
others who saw that his face was still holding onto his smile.
'Right, let's get started on our strategy. But first, has anyone
got any questions?'

Agatha put her hand in the air. 'I
have.'

'Fire away, Aggy
.'

'Remind me, Jabez, how we got to Hong
Kong,' said Agatha, brushing coconut crumbs from her knees.
'Because the last we saw, Nancy was in West Africa by way of Israel
but lives in England.'

Jabez bedded his cordial glass
into the sand at his feet.
'OK, quick
recap. Ruth discovered that Nancy comes from a Russian Jewish line
but her great great grandmother was Chinese. That ancestor, Mya
Ling, was a member of a triad society. The other side tried to
erase visibility of her membership of that organisation by covering
up her triad tattoo when she was on the Manchur. It's as though
they didn't want us seeing the triad connection and following the
logical trail to Hong Kong.'

'Or else,' put in Luke, 'very cleverly
teased us in order to make us think it was important so we would
waste time on a dead end.'

'That's possible,' admitted Jabez, 'and
we'll have to watch out in case it's a false trail. But it was very
subtly done. Too subtle, in my view, to have been a deliberate ruse
to send us in the wrong direction.'

'Probably right. I don't disagree,'
concurred Luke.

'Also,' continued Jabez, 'Brother
is based in Hong Kong. If Inferno has big plans for Nancy, doesn't
it make sense they'll bring her there sooner or later?'

'I agree, it's possible that it's a
false flag,' added Ruth. 'But right now it looks the most obvious
next step for Nancy if they're going to continue her education.
We'd be crazy not to prepare for it.'

'OK, that's fine by me,' agreed Agatha.
'I just wanted to check.'

Ruth looked at Jabez sitting on
his uncomfortable rock, his
empty glass
at his feet. 'You mentioned that you might have to get close to the
enemy at some point, Jabez.'

'That's right.'

'I
just
may be able to help you with some risk management solutions. It's
some technology that might help you keep out of
trouble.'

'You have the floor Ruth,' invited
Jabez.

'Well, while I was working on exposing
the Skajj defection as a fraud, I encountered some angels working
on an exciting project in the Ninth. It's a lightship that can't be
seen by demons. It creates barely a ripple in Fourth Dimension
spacetime. You could be inside this craft and be right next to a
satyr and he won't know you're there. If you're going to have to do
as much interference on Earth as I think y'all are, the lightship
will help you stay hidden. Plus, it's real comfortable. What do you
say I take you to meet my friends Chan and Jo and see if they'll
let y'all play with their new toy?'

'Ruth that sounds amazing, I'd love to
see the lightship. And meet Chan and Jo. Thank you.'

'No problem, amigo.'

'Well, that's a step in the right
direction,' continued Jabez. 'But we still need to find a way that
we can start to influence Nancy in our direction. The enemy has
this 'red' business and whatever they plan to follow that with.
We've followed her thought waves and they've already got her
thinking about what it might mean. That means that they're gaining
traction on her mind. We need to counter their evil, downward
strategy with a positive, healthy one that will lead her upwards to
freedom and victory.'

'Actually, I've been thinking along
those lines already.' Agatha.

'You have?' asked Jabez gratefully.
'What have you got Agatha?'

'Well,' began Agatha coyly. 'I was
thinking about the murky world of Hong Kong criminal triads. And I
was wondering what kind of people triad members encounter in their
daily lives. And it struck me that we have a friend in place who
could be a most valuable asset.'

They all nodded, knowing that by
'friend' Agatha meant a mortal who was destined eventually to
arrive in Paradise.

'
We
might be able to arrange that this 'friend' I'm thinking of could
meet Nancy in Hong Kong. We'd have to think carefully how we could
engineer such a meeting. But, if it could be done, he could give
Nancy a message that will block the 'Red' code they're trying to
infect her with.'

Agatha paused to see if the others
were on her wavelength.

'Go on,' encouraged Jabez. 'This is
interesting. But tell us more. What is this message that you're
thinking of.'

'It's a message that all of us
here know very well.' Jabez noticed that a delicate smile was
playing on Agatha's mouth. She was quietly confident about what she
was about to say.

'But the thing is, we don't just
tell her the message,' Agatha went on. 'That won't work at all. We
have to build it up. We have to get her intrigued so that when it's
finally explained to her, she's desperate to hear it.'

Luke was leaning forward, almost
falling out of his oversized seat. 'And…
how do we do that? How do we build it up?'

'Easy,' said Agatha, now smiling
like a Cheshire cat. 'We do what the other side are doing. We give
her a mystery. We give her a mind game that she
's impatient to solve. We give her a riddle that she wants
to understand. But we take our time over giving her the solution.
Then when she does finally get the answer, it will mean so much
more than if we told her straight out.'

'I get it,' said Ruth. 'We make
her work hard to solve our puzzle. Then she'll own the answer in a
much deeper way. Very smart.'

'That's right
,' said Agatha. 'What I have in mind for Nancy is to give
her a hidden message that she's desperate to break open. We give
her a code.'

Inferno, Navaho's
Squawhouse

'And so, we now know clearly the
layout of Mya Ling's mind, particularly the exact
l
ocations of her ambition and
ruthlessness. When we first looked into Nancy's soul some time ago
and understood her great potential for Destructive Purpose, I made
a similar chart of her mind's layout. Now I can prepare to map
across all the evil from Mya Ling's mind to Nancy's across the
centuries. When that's done our job will be nearly
complete.'