The Paper Factory (Michael Berg Book 1) (8 page)

Chapter 25

  Seventeen tables. Each covered with two crisp, linen tablecloths, eight sets of silver cutlery and a delicate garland of white lilies as a centerpiece. White jacketed waiters with dark, heavily creased trousers dotted among the tables, one-handedly balancing silver trays, pouring coffee, tea and delivering freshly prepared bacon and eggs, salmon, eggs Benedict and pastries from the kitchen to the well-heeled guests. The early morning sun, having crested the mountains on the other side of the valley, flooded the ornately decorated room with light.

  Something sparkled. The reflection of light from
an object placed on the porcelain in front of her. It was difficult to mistake the white star that adorned the silver cap. The pen was striking. Not in its complexity of design, but rather in its clean cut simplicity and elegance. MMVIII had been engraved into the casing. A subtle reference to this year’s conference. Elisabeth read the copperplate inscription on the inside of the accompanying card.
Dear Elisabeth, welcome to Bilderberg. MMVIII.

  “
So, Mrs. Kennedy, is this just a blip or are we in for a rollercoaster ride?” Ludovic Verstraeten, Belgium’s prime minister, raised his eyebrows, accentuating the seriousness of his question. All eyes at the table turned to her.

  “
All in good time, Mr. Verstraeten. If you can wait a few more minutes, no doubt you’ll hear my answer to that particular question, and a good many more.”

 
As if on cue, Augustus Goodfriend appeared alongside the raised podium and deftly knocked a fork against his water glass.

  “
Ladies and gentlemen, the hour has arrived. I warmly welcome you to the Fifty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Bilderberg Group. Never before have the services of this esteemed group of people been needed so much by the world at large. Whatever is decided in this room in the next two days could well define the fate of hundreds of millions, in fact billions of people, over coming decades. The cracks started to appear some time ago and the dam is about to break. I do not have the answers, but perhaps you do. On that note, let me introduce our keynote speaker. The deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States of America, Elisabeth Kennedy.” Goodfriend burst into a round of applause which was reciprocated by all.

 
Elisabeth stood and confidently climbed the three steps to the podium. Goodfriend shook her hand and stood down. Tradition dictated a simple address. There were too many titles to recant.
  “Ladies and gentlemen …”

             
                                                                      ---

  She glanced at the watch on the podium. Twenty minutes had passed. Time to wrap up.
Elisabeth looked her audience in the eye and drove home her message. Success would be marked if she noted fear in their eyes.

  “Within
six months there will be a cataclysmic financial event. It could be a bank. It may be a sovereign state. It will be cataclysmic because it will drag everything else down with it. Many of you have known, for two, three years, that global financial markets were out of control.” She paused, they needed to hear the truth. “You might have stopped it then. You could have stopped it then. Not now. It’s too late. You’re still dancing, waiting for the music to play out.”

  “
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t like it and I’m sure you don’t like it, but this is the last dance. There’s only one thing we can do to avoid total collapse. Flood the system with money. I have to say I find it distasteful. Distasteful to provide a backstop to the people we should be relying on to look after our money. People, who decided instead, to bet their customers’ money like chips on a gigantic roulette table. There is no choice. Liquidity will be provided. If not, the consequences are too painful, too damaging, too costly to contemplate.”

  There was silence. Elisabeth took a step back.
The applause began. It wasn’t fear that she sensed. The opposite. The chairmen of several global banks appeared most relieved, happy, including her friend Augustus. No wonder. To have their financial institutions bailed out by the taxpayer, and hang on to their well-paid jobs was significantly preferable to being stripped, tarred, feathered and put in the stocks. Two hundred years before, the story would have had a different ending.

Chapter 26

  It was after midnight. He had lost his way twice. They would be watching the train station. Probably the airport. The most logical way for him to leave the city. Michael needed to get to a computer with an Internet connection. He was unlikely to find that in Katowice at one o’clock in the morning. It would take another hour to get into the center of the city. He was shattered, hadn’t slept well since leaving Zurich. Didn’t smell too good either. With each step, he walked towards the people he at all costs needed to avoid.

  There was no alternative.
He walked, wincing at the irritating ache of blisters chafing against the heels of his shoes. Rows of multi-storied, concrete apartment buildings stretched as far as he could see. The sulphuric yellow of the streetlamps bathed the road in a dingy, nicotine hazed glow. The backpack, although not particularly heavy, straps digging into his shoulders, was wearing him down. A symptom of exhaustion other than anything else.

  Walking always helped him think things through
. It had to be Sharp. Sharp wanted him dead. He’d been lucky. Sharp was afraid that Michael was getting close to the truth. Michael wished he had the man’s faith. All he had was a scrap of paper scrawled with unintelligible nonsense.

 
The low hum of a car’s engine on the road behind him. Damn. Of course they’d be trawling the streets looking for him. He glanced backwards, as subtly as possible, swiveled his eyes sideways until they hurt. His heart pounded, the exhaustion that had plagued him moments before evaporated in a spurt of fear- fueled adrenalin. His legs, although moving at a casual lope, were ready to spring him forward into a fast run at any moment. He knew the route he would take. He hadn’t been completely ambivalent to the risks of walking along an open road. To the left, one hundred meters ahead of him, was the entrance to the nearest apartment block. Behind it there were others, separated by stretches of open land where someone at sometime had thoughtfully planted a good number of trees. He knew this because he saw no reason why the pattern he’d been observing for the last twenty minutes would change. No shortage of cover. The buildings have multiple exits. He would have some kind of a chance.

 
His first thought was that he must be mistaken. He was so sure that he was about to be run into the ground that his mind would not let him think otherwise. This was why it took him a full five seconds to begin waving his arms frantically in the air, even when his brain had registered the fact that he was gawping at an illuminated taxi sign. As the car slowed, Michael peered through the rear window. The driver of the dilapidated Mercedes was alone. Michael opened the passenger door. The driver was mustachioed in traditional style, cropped grey hair, unsmiling. Michael pulled out a one–hundred-euro note.

  “Krakow,”
proffering the money to the driver.

  “
Nie,” the driver shrugged, the expression on his face unchanging.
  Michael called the driver’s bluff and turned to walk away.
Not smart
. This was the only car, never mind taxi, he’d seen in the last half an hour. He was dead on his feet and there were at least two people in relatively close proximity that would rather see him under the wheels of a car than sitting in one.

He turned around,
pulled out another hundred, held open his hands and shrugged his shoulders.
  “Krakow.”

 
The driver’s mouth stretched into a broad grin, the sight of his less than perfect teeth signaling acceptance of the arrangement. The driver took the money, placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket, opened the window, lit a cigarette and moved off. Michael sank into the worn leather seat, springs creaking, inhaling the musty smell of a car well beyond its use by date. The old man performed a u-turn. They headed back out towards the city limits and the motorway. The driver turned to Michael, smiled, tapped himself on the chest.

  “
Piotr.”

 
Piotr reached below his seat. Metal clanged against metal. Michael had got to the point where he didn’t care what might happen next.

 
He didn’t know whether the driver had taken pity on him because of the downtrodden way that he looked or whether the old man was keen to celebrate his unexpected windfall. When the half-full bottle of vodka was thrust into his hand, Michael took a long, slow slug. The harsh liquid spread its warmth to his mouth, throat and stomach. He thanked the driver without thinking too hard about why the bottle was only half full. His eyelids drooped, soothed by the deep, steady rumbling of the old car’s engine.

Chapter 27

  He chose the computer closest to the door. He was alone, most of the guests still enjoying breakfast. Michael pulled Google up onto the screen and keyed in: aksim lajvih allun tah cnimrah zit tah cloyn to ygen. Google wasn’t very helpful.

No standard web
pages containing all your search terms were found.

Your search -
aksim lajvih allun tah cnimrah zit tah cloyn to ygen - did not match any documents.              

Suggestions:

- Make sure all words are spelled correctly.

-
Try different keywords.

-
Try more general keywords.

-
Try fewer keywords.

 
He tried Google translate, hoping that it would give him some clue as to what language this was. If indeed it was meaningful in any sense at all.

 
He drew a complete blank. He took each of the first, the third, the fifth letters, guessing that this might be some kind of code. Then the second letter followed by the other even numbered letters. Dead end.

 
Aksim sounded Arabic and indeed when he Googled the word on its own it appeared to be an Arabic or Muslim first name. Google translate came up with nothing when he looked for an English language translation. He tried the rest of the words individually, feeling that he might be getting somewhere, although he could not see where there could possibly be a Middle Eastern or Islamic connection.

  Lajvih, as far as he could see, meant nothing. But Allun was clearly an alternative spelling of Allan.

  Aksim, Allan.
Were these the people responsible?
Well, if they were, it was a huge leap forward, but only if he or the police could track them down. He tried the other letters, hope overcoming logic.

 
Tah didn’t get him anywhere. The word had thirteen million entries. Nothing on the first five pages of hits stood out.

 
When he entered cnimrah and clicked on the first entry, his eyes widened.

Numbers 32:1–36:13

The Tribes Settling East of the Jordan

32
Now the children of Reuben and the children of Gad had a very great multitude of livestock; and when they saw the land of Jazer and the land of Gilead, that indeed the region
was
a place for livestock, the children of Gad and the children of Reuben came and spoke to Moses, to Eleazar the priest, and to the leaders of the congregation, saying, “Ataroth, Dibon, Jazer, cNimrah, Heshbon, Elealeh, Shebam, Nebo, and Beon, the Country which the Lord defeated before the congregation of Israel,
is
a land for livestock, and your servants have livestock.” Therefore they said, “If we have found favor in your sight, let this land be given to your servants as a possession. Do not take us over the Jordan.”

  The passage from the bible specifically referred to the return of the tribes of Israel to the Promised Land after spending forty years in the wilderness. Nimrah was a leader of one of the tribes. The c in cnimrah was a reference which when clicked on referred specifically to the passages in Numbers 32 to 36 where God gives the Israelites the Kingdom of the Amorites, the Kingdom of Og and the Kingdom of Bashan. These kingdoms lay on the opposite side of the Jordan River from modern day Israel. It was after establishing themselves in these two kingdoms that the Israelites crossed the Jordan and were commanded by God to:

“drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, destroy all their engraved stones, destroy all their molded images, and demolish all their high places; you shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land and dwell in it, for I have given you the land to possess.”

 
Michael couldn’t discount a Middle East connection. Aksim was a Middle Eastern name. Some of the references to Tah seemed to have Arabic connotations. And then there was the reference to cNimrah. Was it plausible that the stolen money was being used to support Hamas or Hezbollah? Michael moved on to the final three words.

 
The first twenty pages of almost fourteen million hits for zit referenced everything you wanted to know about teenage acne. He moved onto Cloyn. Cloyn appeared to be another name of Irish origin. Was there an Irish connection? Ties between Middle Eastern terrorist organizations and the Irish Republican Army, the IRA, were well documented.

 
With twenty-five billion hits on the word “to” he quickly moved on to “ygen.” The dozens of entries he glanced at all referred either to power generation or, in most cases, referenced websites being used by companies and individuals all trying to jump onto the y generation bandwagon.

  His mood had sunk
from rising elation that he was about to discover something that would reveal an international terrorist conspiracy, to mild disappointment that the last three words had yielded nothing.
  He sat back and gazed unseeingly at the framed print hanging before him on the wall. He waited for five minutes, letting his mind clear. He decided to go back through the words on Google to see if he had missed anything. He saw nothing unusual or especially interesting until again he got to cnimrah.

 
The word had fewer than forty hits and at least half of them pointed to websites with a domain name ending in .hu. A quick search revealed that .hu was a suffix for websites registered in Hungary. Yet when he used Google Translate to get the Hungarian to English for cnimrah he drew a blank. He’d run out of ideas.

 
A thought occurred to him. It was simplistic, but why not apply the same simple trick that he used with his own passwords?

He reversed cnimrah. Harminc.
He hit Translate.

Thirty

  He straightened in his chair.
Coincidence
?
Probably.
He tried another word, again reversed, translating from Hungarian into English.

Four

  When Michael had finished, he couldn’t believe that he’d made something relatively simple, so ridiculously complicated. He pumped all the words in backwards with the exception of Miska which apparently was a Hungarian diminutive for Michael. He’d been hunched over the computer for more than three hours. The green shaded reading lamp rocked as his hand slammed onto the table, adrenalin pumping into his system. He was looking at a message very specifically meant for him.

Mike call me 0630106854

  He couldn’t make the call from the hotel. He had no idea who might be watching him. The same went for the woman who had left Michael the message. Someone might be tracking her calls. Why else write with such secrecy?

 
He picked up some coins from the receptionist and strolled out into the market square. It would be dumb to call from his hotel.

 
He crossed to the far side of the square which, because of its large size, took a full ten minutes. He stopped by a bank of public telephones and stepped into one of the booths.

 
He removed the hotel notepaper from his pocket and looked down at the number. Anxiety flooded through him. Who was she? Why leave a message? What would he say to her when she answered? What if it was a man’s voice on the other end of the phone? He grinned to himself.
Your life’s hanging in the balance and you’re acting like a teenager asking a girl out on a first date
.

 
He dialed the number. It rang. Kept ringing. Then it cut out. No voice mail. He tried again. The same thing happened. He had no choice but to keep trying. He hit the keys and waited.