Thieves Like Us 01 - Thieves Like Us (5 page)

Then his ears pricked up at the steady rush of a serious air-con system behind a set of frosted glass doors. Data centre, he reckoned. In which case that computer would have some serious power behind it.

‘So where’s Coldhardt?’ said Jonah to the others, trying to act casual. ‘Stepped out for a pee? Gone to pick another black rose? Both at once, if the neighbours aren’t watching?’

‘There’s always
someone
watching, Jonah Wish.’

The voice was velvet and rich, with a slight Irish lilt to it. Jonah turned automatically to see, but the lights cut out the same second. The TV feeds seemed to go the same way, and the room was plunged into blackness. Then the plasma screens flickered on again.

Jonah felt a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. All twelve monitors showed the same picture of
him
.

There he was on his doorstep, waving goodbye to Marion, his foster mum. Jonah could tell from her clothes – from the look she was trying to hide in her eyes – it was the day the police came calling.

The image changed. A close-up of him in the street, livid with rage, face all snot and tears, screaming. The photographer pulled back a little to show the police gripping his arms. Out further to reveal his foster dad pushing Marion back inside the house. A little more to show the waiting police car with its doors wide open for him, and the gawping crowd gathered on the pavement.

‘What is this?’ he croaked. The next picture showed him inside a shabby grey room, sitting behind a desk, head bowed. ‘That’s the bloody police interview room for God’s sake.’ He looked at Con and the others, who were studying the picture dispassionately. ‘How’d you ever get to take pictures inside –?’

‘Like I say,’ the heavy voice steamrollered over his own, ‘there’s always someone watching.’

The lights came back up. And now a dark, gaunt figure sat at the head of the huge oak table.

His head was crowned with white hair, brushed up stiffly from his lined forehead. He looked to be in his early sixties, but there was a lean and hungry look about the pale, craggy features that put Jonah in mind of someone far younger. His eyes were a piercing blue, one eyebrow raised in either challenge or amusement. The thin lips curled into a half-smile as he rose now to his full imposing height, which had to be way over six feet. He was dressed like a big businessman: a dark suit, a silk shirt open at the neck to reveal a glint of
gold – an amulet of some kind, clearly nothing so mundane as a St Christopher.

Jonah took a deep breath. ‘You’re Coldhardt?’

The pale man looked disappointed. ‘You need to ask?’

‘Nice entrance. Hope we didn’t leave you crouched behind the filing cabinets for too long.’ Jonah swallowed hard. He wasn’t going to give this joker the satisfaction of knowing how rattled he was. ‘How did you get these pictures?’

‘I’ve had you on file for some time, Jonah. Along with several other interested parties.’ Coldhardt smiled again, a cold smile that never came close to his eyes. ‘In fact, this photographic material comes from one of them. I can’t claim credit. I only stole it.’

‘So, what, now I’m supposed to be intimidated and impressed at the same time?’

‘Just be thankful I got to you first.’

‘Yeah, well, cheers for making me a fugitive.’ Jonah pulled up a chair and slouched into it. He pointed to the screens. ‘Got any of me looking to the left? Only that’s my best side.’

The image switched to the outside of the detention centre, ugly and stark. A shudder ran through him at the sight of it.

The strange smile still flickered round Coldhardt’s lips. ‘The Bible talks of a Hebrew prophet named Jonah, who lived around 800 BC. He was consumed by a giant fish, and vomited out three days later, unharmed. I’m afraid you had to wait two months to escape the place that swallowed
you
up.’ Coldhardt crossed to one of his dark cabinets. ‘But then, you
have to allow for inflation.’

‘Bible? Don’t tell me you’re all mad religious cultists?’

‘Our faith is in
you
, Jonah. I do hope it’s not been misplaced.’ Coldhardt nodded to the others, acknowledging them for the first time, and they all took a seat at the table. Then he slid some papers to Jonah along the table. They were colour copies of parts of what looked to be old parchment, covered in exotic symbols. Many of the signs were barely visible, blotted out by stains or age. But Jonah recognised a few, and guessed what it was he was looking at.

‘It’s a scytale cipher. Simple matrix transposition.’

Patch frowned. ‘Simple what?’

Jonah shrugged. ‘Just a way of scrambling letters, making a code.’

‘And what’s a scytale?’ asked Con.

‘Kind of a special-sized stick,’ he told her. ‘The Ancient Greeks, Egyptians – they all used them to send coded messages. See, you take a strip of parchment and wrap it around the scytale in a spiral till all the wood is covered. Then you write your message, one letter on each pass of the parchment along the length of the stick.’

‘What if you run out of room?’

‘You just start a new row underneath. When you’ve finished, unwrap the strip of parchment, and hey presto: the message becomes just a jumble of letters. Until the person you send it to wraps it round a scytale that’s the same size, and the message reads normally again.’ He smiled over at Coldhardt. ‘You know, you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble
by looking that up in a book.’

This time, Coldhardt didn’t smile back. ‘The fragments are believed to be part of a Spartan military cipher, hailing from the fourth century BC. I want you to tell me what this message says.’

‘You have a scytale handy, and the rest of the parchment? Oh, and a crash course in Ancient Greek would help.’

‘I don’t believe you’re taking me altogether seriously. And you really should, you know.’

‘Amen to that,’ breathed Motti.

Coldhardt gestured to his computer. ‘Use this, Jonah. Tell me what the message says.’

So here it was: the inevitable test. ‘What’s in it for me?’

‘A new start.’ Coldhardt’s eyes seemed to stare into his soul. ‘A life that most people your age could only dream of.’

Jonah stared down at the fragments of paper. He’d wasted so much time inside, bored and listless – no computers, no challenge. And now suddenly he was in a different world, being asked – no,
told
to do what he loved.

What was written here that was so important, worth so much?

He realised he was dying to find out.

Without a word he got up and walked over to the desk: Coldhardt stepped smartly aside to let him pass, and Jonah caught the tang of some subtle, expensive cologne. He studied the computer, located an internet icon on the plain black desktop and double-clicked. At once, a request for a password came up.

Jonah was about to ask Coldhardt what it was, when he bit his lip. Might as well show initiative.

It was the work of seconds to hack into User Account Properties. From here, Jonah reset the Administrator and cleared all user passwords. He rebooted the computer in safe mode, then created a new Windows account for himself, one that allowed him full access to everything on the system. He checked the internet connection – as he’d expected, it was secure, all file traffic encrypted.

The parchment copies gave him only fragments to work with, but that was cool. That made it more of a challenge. A scytale was only a basic cipher; a systematic guess-and-check approach would crack it in the end, and without much personal effort. A year or so back he’d created a shadow directory on a local server – an invisible folder, its location known only to him. It was filled with all the cipher-cracking software and algorithms he’d acquired or written over the years, waiting to be downloaded as and when he needed them. Now was the time, so he clicked on some old favourites to get the party started.

There were obstacles, of course. While he didn’t need an actual scytale – you got the same effect just by fitting the characters into the rows and columns of a blank grid – he had no way of knowing the length of the original message, and so didn’t know how long and wide the grid should be. But if it was a military cipher, then the message was most likely a command. Brisk and to the point – say, no more than a hundred characters …

Jonah had written some code way back that would
calculate the various permutations. But he’d also need to patch in a language program that would recognise and retrieve genuine Ancient Greek words from the random gibberish. That, together with some skill and a little intuition …

Slowly, Jonah allowed himself to become entirely engrossed in his work. All through his life, no matter where he was, whatever the circumstances, the world he looked in on through the screen was always home turf. And with a rush of excitement, he realised that Coldhardt’s computer was faster than anything he’d ever worked on. The software was working at an incredible rate, cross-checking thousands of possible matrix sizes against millions of possible character substitutions, trying to crack the cipher.

But as the minutes passed, Jonah sensed something was wrong. Something he was missing. Sure enough, the program told him that no matches were found. Either the translation software was dodgy or there was something else going on with this mystery message …

He became aware of Coldhardt’s shadow beside him, black and heavy across the desk.

Jonah drove all doubts from his mind. He
would
crack this. Column substitution? Seemed unlikely. The Spartan sending the message would have to copy out the characters on his scytale into a grid first, then arrange the columns in a different order before copying it out on to a new strip of parchment. The person receiving the message would have to go through the same process in reverse at the other end. That was a lot of faffing about …

But perhaps the message was important enough to warrant it.

He upped the size of the possible grids, patched in a new program to test his theory. Come on, come on …

Jackpot!

His heart beating faster, Jonah watched as a handful of words tumbled out of the translator. Then he frowned.

The answer to life, the universe and everything it wasn’t.

‘OK, I think this is it,’ he announced.

Con raised an eyebrow, prepared to be impressed. ‘After just twenty minutes?’

‘It’s better encrypted than anything I’ve seen from that time. But there’s only fragments – not much sense.’

‘Go on,’ said Coldhardt softly.

‘“Catacombs … north … stars buried in patterns.” That’s the main bit. Then there’s just gibberish … Doesn’t sound like real words. “Imhotep”? And um, how do I say this? “Oph …”’

‘Ophiuchus.’ Coldhardt looked at the others. ‘That’s
oh-FEE-yoo-kus
. It’s a mouthful, but get used to it. It’s a name you’ll be hearing a lot of.’

‘So I did it, then,’ said Jonah. ‘Do I win a coconut?’

‘Your interpretation matches that given to me by the original parchment’s owner – a man who wishes to avail himself of our services.’ Coldhardt seemed pleased. ‘Although I believe he took a little longer to come by the solution.’

‘Well, now you know what it says,’ said Jonah, erasing the account he had just created. ‘But what
does it mean? What
is
Ophiuchus?’

‘You mean,
who
is Ophiuchus. You’ll find out in due course.’

‘Great, we’re back to the man of mystery thing.’ Jonah shut down the computer and stood back up. ‘Look, if you already knew what the fragments said, why did you need me at all?’

‘I wanted to be sure I was being told the truth,’ said Coldhardt. ‘And while I know of many celebrated geniuses who could have confirmed the information for me, those same geniuses are known to my opponents.’ He gave a wintry smile. ‘Secrets are hard to keep. And true new talent is hard to find.’

‘So you break me out of jail –’

‘– to be sure of exclusive access to your very capable mind.’

Jonah felt a shiver run through him. ‘And I’m
your
prisoner now, is that it?’

‘I prefer to use the word
employee
.’ Coldhardt took the parchment copies and walked purposefully back to the black cabinets. ‘I want you to work for me, Jonah. Like I say, you’re fresh talent. There are harder tasks and greater challenges ahead.’ He carefully filed the papers away. ‘I can help you reach your full potential, boy.’

‘Yeah? What if I turn you down?’

Coldhardt turned and stared intently at Jonah. ‘Then you must leave us, of course. We shall have to release you somewhere remote, and since you have no passport and no money – nothing save for the clothes you stand in – getting back to England might prove difficult. But you can always hand yourself over to the
local police. They’ll gladly deal with you, I’m sure …’

Jonah couldn’t meet the intensity of the gaunt man’s gaze any longer. He looked away, down at his Diesel jeans, at the brand new NBs on his feet. Thought back to the sumptuous cool of the room he’d woken up in, and the hangout down the spiral stairs.

What was the alternative? Back to prison, with time added on for breaking out. And after a few years, out again with a record. No home, no family or friends to speak of.

No future.

‘Well, Jonah?’ Coldhardt prompted him. ‘Will you join my fold?’

Jonah imagined that once the decision was taken, there was no going back. He looked at the others. Con was watching him expectantly. Patch nodded in encouragement, polishing his glass eyeball on his sleeve. Motti’s attention was on the detention centre that loomed large and pin sharp on the dozen screens.

Tye was looking right at Jonah, her expression unreadable.

‘I s’pose I’m in,’ Jonah said.

The luxury Range Rover was as big and black as the night. Tye was playing chauffeur, enjoying the smoothness of the ride, taking the tight mountain bends with ease. Con sat beside her in the passenger seat, peering into the sunshade mirror as she applied yet another coat of lip gloss. Coldhardt sat brooding in the back, gazing out over the dark jagged landscape of foothill, forest and crag, sipping champagne from a pewter goblet.