The Keepers of the Library (23 page)

“Back here. Dealing with the biggest problem you’ve ever had.”

“What can I do?”

“I need Phillip’s NetPen. Do you still have it?”

“I put it on my windowsill for safekeepin’. Haven said th’ sunlight charges it. I thought, just in case.”

“That’s good. Bring it to me as soon as you can.”

“What would you do?”

“Knowledge is power, Cacia. It’s the only weapon we’ve got. If the world doesn’t know about your Library, then when the authorities take this place—and they will—they’ll seize the books and suppress the hell out of it. They’ll probably keep people in the dark about the Horizon, and they’ll start up another Area 51 kind of place to exploit the data for military and political purposes. They might even kill us or lock us up to make sure no one ever knows.”

“My God,” she whispered.

“I was in the same situation years ago and the only way I saved myself was to leak the information about Area 51. We’ve got to do the same here.”

“Who would ya tell?”

“Not my wife. She’d be obliged to keep the secret from the FBI. I can’t compromise her. There’s someone else. I think I can trust him. He’ll be perfect. Please, Cacia, bring the NetPen to me now.”

“I’d be betrayin’ our family, our legacy. Generations of Lightburns. Wouldn’t I?”

“No. You’d be saving your family and protecting its legacy. I know how this works. I know how it’s going to end unless we work together. You know what I’m telling you is true.”

With a nod of her fiery hair and a look of resolve, she left him there, free to wander on his own. The Library was so vast it was almost disorienting. Like staring into opposing mirrors, it seemed to go on infinitely. He had a momentary urge to head to the far end of it and browse the near future, but he stopped himself from doing that. He truly didn’t want to know when he would die. Or Phillip. Or Nancy. Or his daughter, Laura. Or Nick. He never wanted to know. And he didn’t want other people to know either.

Instead, he plucked out a book at random from the distant future. The page was for 21 May, 2440. The names he saw were a rainbow of diversity, dozens of languages and ethnicities.

The world is going to be all right, he thought.

Cacia came back, breathless, with Phillip’s NetPen.

“I’m trusting you t’ protect us,” she said.

He took it from her and kissed her forehead. “I won’t let you down.”

And though he fumbled at the NetPen’s unfamiliar
buttons, he managed to get off a flash photo of a long row of books.

C
acia chained Will back to his bunk and with a heavy glance, left him alone with Phillip and Annie.

“Look what I’ve got,” Will said, pulling the NetPen from his pocket.

“She gave it to you?” Annie asked incredulously.

“She did.”

“We’ve got to contact my headquarters, let them know the situation,” she said.

“No, we’re going to play this another way,” Will said firmly. “Phillip, I need to send an encrypted message.”

“You want to tunnel?” Phillip asked.

“Yeah, tunnel. Can you do it for me?”

“Sure.”

“And I want to send the photo I just took.”

“Give it to me. Do you want to type or dictate?”

“Type.”

“Let me set up the screen for you, and you can start. Who’re you sending it to?”

“Uncle Greg.”

Will struggled, running his big fingers on the small virtual keyboard, but he managed to get it all down. He handed it back to Phillip, and said, “Send it.”

There was a loud noise as the door to their room banged against the wooden partition.

Daniel came in, his eyes blazing with anger. Andrew was behind him, aping his father.

Daniel spotted the NetPen in Phillip’s hand and snatched it away roughly.

“Andrew saw what his mother did, and he told me as soon as I came back from spyin’ on those fuckers from th’ barn.” Daniel threw it on the floor and
stomped on it twice with his boot, flattening the tube and sending small pieces of metal and plastic flying.

“Now tell me th’ truth, lad, or I’ll thrash you th’ way I thrashed me wife.”

Will couldn’t stop himself. “Manly thing to do, Daniel. Beating your own wife. How’d you like to take a man on?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Daniel said. “I asked you, boyo, did ya call anyone?”

Phillip looked at him squarely, and said, “No.”

“Are ya lyin’ t’ me?”

“I swear. I was going to, but I didn’t get the chance.”

“All right then, we’ve got enough trouble out there without having t’ worry ‘bout you lot.”

And with a final stamp of his boot, Daniel took his son and left.

Will wished he could put his arm around his son, but he couldn’t, and besides, the kid would have been embarrassed by the gesture. “Did you send it?” he asked.

“Of course I did,” the boy said proudly.

“You’re an excellent liar,” Annie said, approvingly. “There’s a career for you in the intelligence services.”

“I wasn’t lying. He asked if I made a call,” Phillip said. “He needs to ask better questions.”

G
reg Davis finished a late lunch and
sent his assistant, Maggie, packing for the day. It was sleeting outside, so a bike ride was out of the question and there was little appeal to a walk. He stretched out on the sofa, fiddled with his curly hair, and took the TV off mute. CNN was running a story about the Chinese government’s retaliation against the postcard affair by expelling a number of American diplomats in Beijing they accused of being CIA operatives. The US government was strenuously denying the accusations and was said to be weighing an appropriate response. When he’d finished with his sofa time he’d post a link to the story on
China Today
.

Though he’d gone bald on the top and his remaining hair was now salt and peppery, his appearance hadn’t changed much from his days as a young newspaper reporter. People who hadn’t seen him in twenty years instantly recognized him. Their friends called him and Laura, who had also kept the hippie throwback look of her twenties, the eternal couple.

The nerve center for Greg’s media company was the second bedroom in his Greenpoint apartment in Brooklyn. For a two-employee company, Today
Media put out a lot of product. Greg’s webzines blanketed the large immigrant communities in America with sites tailored to their interests. There were ones for Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Indian-Americans, Pakistani-Americans, Brazilian-Americans, Japanese-Americans but the one that was getting the most attention these days was
China Today
.

His concept was to aggregate news from home and abroad of relevance to the target audience, get knowledgeable freelancers to write original content, and sell ads aimed at the ethnic group. But for the past few years, his viewer numbers were too small to command good ad rates, and he eked out a paltry profit.

To his discomfort, his lifestyle was largely supported by his wife’s book earnings. Laura had written nine novels, all of them reliable sellers. Her first book,
The Wrecking Ball
, loosely based on the breakup of her parents’ marriage, had even been made into a film, owing to broad interest in Will Piper following his public disclosures. And though she had perpetually tried to establish her own identity apart from being Will Piper’s daughter, she had been persuaded by her publisher to exploit her namesake once again with her latest book,
The Horizon
. Given the anxiety of the times, it wasn’t surprising that the book had become her first bona fide best seller.

Yet far from bringing marital happiness, her success had merely stoked the long-simmering and unspoken rivalry that existed between her and Greg. Within days of her publisher’s throwing her a party for hitting the
New York Times
fiction list, their arguments had become particularly nasty.

Then, out of the blue, Greg’s fortunes turned in an unexpected way. Residents of New York’s Chinatown
began receiving postcards, and his Chinese Web site caught fire. Capitalizing on his role as the
Washington Post
reporter during the 2010 Area 51 exposé,
China Today
became the go-to site for breaking news and analysis for the Chinese-American community and for a lot of general readers as well. The ad dollars began to roll in and his fractured ego went on the mend. Laura noticed the difference and told him it was nice not living with a jerk. And when her father had his heart attack, Greg had been a proper supportive husband and son-in-law. Laura informed her kitchen cabinet of girlfriends that it was looking like their marriage was going to survive after all.

Laura came home, peeled off her rain-soaked coat, and sat down to take in the TV news.

“How was your workout?” Greg asked.

“Okay, I guess.”

“You sound tired.”

“I slept all right. It’s the worrying.”

“No news on your dad?”

“Nothing.”

“Nick called,” Greg said. Their son, off at prep school, was the same age as Phillip. Nancy and Laura famously had been pregnant together, and Will had come close to having to choose between attending the birth of his first son or first grandson.

“Everything okay?” Laura asked.

“He’s fine. He just wanted to know if we’d heard anything about the guys.” Then he added, “When was the last time you talked to Nancy?”

“Yesterday morning. I told you about that, didn’t I?”

He nodded as if remembering. “How’d you say she sounded?”

“Stressed. She’s worried out of her mind, but she can’t get the Director to let her fly to England.”

“Because of China?” he asked, waving at the TV.

“You know, it’s China! The whole thing sucks for everyone but you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked angrily.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m a mess.”

“Yeah.”

She rose. “I’m going to take a shower.”

He couldn’t seem to let it pass and called after her, “Just because I’m finally making some money doesn’t make me a villain, you know.”

“Whatever.” She sighed, closing the bedroom door.

Greg’s NetPen chimed at the arrival of a new e-mail. He seemed inclined to ignore it, but after a while he snatched it off the coffee table and commanded it to read the message.

The husky female voice he’d chosen for the function purred, “Sender: Phillip Piper. Subject: For Your Eyes Only and Laura’s Latin Eyes. Message: Encrypted. Sorry, read-mode unavailable.”

Greg practically ran to his office and opened the e-mail on his work tablet. The body of the message was a jumble of machine code symbols with a header that read: tunnel protocol 1812.

“What the hell?” he mumbled.

He hit the command button on his NetPen and summoned the work number for his company’s IT consultant.

“Hey, Nelson, it’s Greg.”

A calm voice came over the mobile, “What’s up man?”

“I got an encrypted e-mail with something called tunnel protocol 1812. How do I open it?”

“It’s an open-protocol encryption tool but it’s heavy-duty. There’ve been some moves to ban it because bad guys use it for bad-guy shit, but it’s still out there. You need a key to open it.”

“What key? I don’t have any key?”

“Then you’re out of luck, man.”

Greg raised his voice. “Nelson, this is a goddamn emergency. Life-and-death shit, okay? I need your help.”

“I hear you, man. Why don’t you forward it to me, and I’ll take a look.”

“No can do. We shouldn’t even be talking on the phone. Come over to my place.”

“In Brooklyn?”

“Jesus, Nelson, you’re in Manhattan. What’s the big deal?”

“It’s like a different zip code, man.”

“Take a cab. I need you here now.”

N
elson Federman arrived an hour later bearing an irked expression on his young, chubby face. Greg had told Laura he was coming over to help him sort out a Net-site problem and she didn’t seem to think twice about his presence. Although the stress had pretty much blocked her ability to write, she kept going through the motions and was hunched over her ancient laptop.

“Hey, Laura,” Nelson said. “Got to love the old-school keyboard.”

“I can’t dictate,” she said. “I’m too old to change the way I write.”

“I liked your last book. When’s the next one coming out?”

Greg interrupted the chitchat. “Come on, Nelson. Time’s money,” and beckoned him into the office and shut the door.

Nelson looked at the e-mail and rubbed his wispy goatee. “Look, the way these things work is there’s
usually a prearranged key that both sender and receiver already know. This guy Phillip? He didn’t send you something in advance?”

“No, nothing.”

“There’s nothing I can do, man. This protocol is a 620-bit-key elliptic-curve algorithm. It may or may not be breakable. There’s been some chatter in the hacker universe that some spook agencies can break something this big, but you’d need some kind of next-gen monster computer to do it.” He looked at the work screen again, and said, “What do you make of the subject line?”

Greg read it out loud. “For Your Eyes Only and Laura’s Latin Eyes. I don’t know what he means by Laura’s Latin Eyes.”

“Well,” Nelson said triumphantly, “there’s your answer, dude. I’ll bet that’s the key.”

“What? Laura’s Latin Eyes?”

“If you’re going to the trouble to tunnel, you’re probably not putting the key out there. But this guy Phillip might be steering you to the right answer. Here, give me control of your machine.”

Greg commanded a user change, and Nelson took over the voice commands, maneuvering to a hacker encryption site. He cut and pasted the e-mail message into the encryption engine and entered LaurasLatin-Eyes as the key.

Decryption Failure
.

He tried some variants without success.

“Okay, man, what’s cool about Laura’s eyes?”

Greg thought for a few moments, and suddenly his face got animated. “They’re different colors! One’s blue and one’s brown! Her father’s always kidding her about it.”

“Okay, then. Let’s try that.”

He spent a while trying every word combination of one is blue and one is brown he could muster.

Every time:
Decryption Failure
.

Nelson furrowed his brow, and said, “Hey, I know, maybe we need to be using the Latin words for blue and brown.”

Ten minutes later, they’d looked up the words and exhausted all the permutations of
puteulanus
and
frons
with no luck, and Nelson started getting antsy, looking overly obviously at his watch.

Finally, Greg got out of his chair and opened the door, calling into the living room, “Laura. That thing with your eyes. Does it have a name?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Nelson is like obsessed with them.”

“Hey!” Nelson said, defensively. “Leave me out of this.”

She shouted through the door. “Glad you like them, Nelson. It’s a congenital condition called
Heterochromia iridum
.”

Greg slammed the door and declared, “Latin!”

With Greg’s help Nelson spelled out the term onto the log-in line, and said, “Enter.”

Decryption Successful
.

There was a lag of a couple of seconds, and the gibberish message turned into words and at the end was a photo.

Greg quickly stepped in front of the screen, blocking Nelson’s view. “You’re the best, Nelson. Double your bill and send it to me.”

“Can’t I read it, man?”

“You could. But then I’d have to kill you.”

“I’m tripling my bill because you’re such an A-hole, Greg.”

When he was gone, Greg sat down and read the e-mail, stuffed to the gills with anticipation.

Blinking in disbelief, Greg looked at the image of a row of old bookcases containing a sea of leather-bound books. The ones nearest the camera were clearly marked: 2440.

O
fficer Brent Wilson was relieved from his post manning a roadblock on the B6259 long enough to get a mug of hot tea from the incident van. While he sat on a folding chair in the night chill enjoying the break he heard his name being called.

His Assistant Chief Constable was on the steps of the incident van summoning him in. Still clutching his mug he was led to the rear of the vehicle, ducking his head to avoid cracking his skull against the doorframes. The Chief Constable of the Cumbrian Authority, John Raab, had arrived from Penrith and was seated behind a desk.

“Officer Wilson,” Raab said. “Have a seat and carry on with your tea. There’s a lazy wind blowing out there.”

“Aye, there is, sir,” Wilson replied. “It’s brutal.”

“I’m told you met Annie Locke and Will Piper when they first arrived in Kirkby Stephen.”

“I did, aye.”

“Tell me about them. Everything you can remember. I want to get a sense of how they might react under threatening conditions. I asked the MI5 chaps about her, and they acted like they’d be divulging national secrets.”

“They were both very nice, very friendly I’d say. I met them at th’ station house and helped ’em print up some flyers with th’ boy’s picture so they could canvas th’ town.”

“What about Piper? What were your impressions?”

“Well, he’s a big fellow. Not a youngster, but I reckon he can handle himself. Far and away I thought that this was a man worried sick about ‘is son.”

“And Miss Locke?”

“A go-getter, I suppose. Young and fit. Determined, I’d say, the type who you’d bet on t’ succeed in the Security Services.”

“Pretty too.”

“I’d agree with that.”

“Piper’s apparently got a reputation as a ladies’ man. Any sign of a personal connection between them?”

“Sorry, sir?”

“It might affect their judgment and decision making under dangerous conditions.”

Officer Wilson still seemed flummoxed by the question. “I think they’d just met that morning, sir.”

“Very well, finish your tea and resume your post.”

When Wilson was gone, the Assistant Chief Constable asked Raab, “We haven’t attempted contact in about two hours. Would you like us to try again?”

“Yes, why not? Use the bullhorn this time. Keep hectoring them every five to ten minutes but vary the interval for maximal annoyance like the old Chinese water torture, eh? If we’re not going to sleep tonight, neither should they.”

“A farm like this, they could have enough provisions for a month. How long are we going to wait them out?”