The Bergamese Sect (12 page)

Castro looked again at the psychiatrist, his frustration subsiding. He didn’t like Kennedy’s conceit, but there was an undercurrent of honesty in the man. Perhaps he had a right to believe. Perhaps he didn’t deserve condemnation.

‘
Sure,’ said Castro, ‘I won’t argue with that. Maybe one day I’ll write that best seller.’

He sighed and gave Kennedy a genuine smile. The psychiatrist couldn’t convince him of the reality of abduction, but Castro didn’t need convincing. A frightened old man on a remote farm in Arizona had done that. A man without motive, with no agenda. Kennedy was no nearer the truth than Castro.

He picked up his wineglass and raised it toward Kennedy. ‘Here’s to finding the truth,’ he said.

‘
And here’s to you, David,’ Kennedy responded, making a grab for his glass. ‘You’re paying!’

Chapter 8

The streets of Warsaw were busy. Trams skimmed along the long, straight roads, cars dodging between them, hooting noisily. Scurrying through the chaos were crowds of shoppers, groups of them loitering at bus stops and waving for taxis. An acrid taste of diesel and kerosene wafted along the pavements.

The sky was pale – the sun muted by the thick purple fumes that hung over the Vistula Valley. The pollution made the summit of the enormous, stark Palace of Culture and Science strangely dimmed, distant. It was like a cathedral gone mad, the architect unable to stop the monstrous spire growing from the city centre. The sightseers on the thirtieth floor seemed oddly isolated from the bustle of the streets below.

A silver Fiat, covered with grime, headed past the rows of hotels toward the suburbs. It passed a military academy, a rusting MIG lying forgotten in the long grass behind a barbed wire fence. It followed a commuter-filled train, heavily decorated with street art, past decaying factories. Soon the dilapidated warehouses gave way to dilapidated apartment blocks and rows of wooden, shanty-like homes. Networks of old telegraph cables and bent TV aerials enmeshed the post-war residences like flies caught in a web of neglect.

Eventually the car wandered into the back streets and turned into a cul-de-sac whose name had long worn off. It reached the end of the road and stopped outside a single storey house of lime green and white wooden panels. Net curtains shaded the interior from view and the tiny garden was circled by a picket fence, its paint flaking.

The doors opened and four men and a woman stepped out, their clothes creased and damp from the cramped space. They didn’t speak, just got some bags from the back of the car and walked up the gravel path to the house. One of them unlocked the door and they disappeared into the building.

A moment later, a green pickup passed quickly by the forgotten street sign, slowed to a halt and reversed under the cover of a tall sycamore.

―
§ ―

‘
Right,’ said Henric. He swept the empty plastic cups and newspapers off the kitchen table, leaving them where they lay on the floor. Taking out the laptop, he hooked it up to the electricity supply and telephone line.

‘
What exactly are you looking for?’ Matt asked as the machine whined into life.

‘
Dunno,’ said Henric, ‘let’s take a look.’

He waited a moment for the computer to finish booting and started up the mail application. He read the subject lines of Matt’s mail messages. ‘We might have to ping these to find it.’ Lodging a memory stick into the laptop, he quickly installed some software, typed a few things in and sat back. The computer began to converse with the outside world, data coursing through its arteries.

They all watched the screen. A window was rapidly scrolling text and numbers past their eyes. ‘Okay, I’m checking the validity of the messages and their contents,’ Henric said. ‘The software should pick out anything unusual.’

Several minutes passed as they watched the scrolling messages. Eventually a beep sounded and Henric frowned.

‘
What’s up?’ Clara said.

Henric looked at her. ‘There’s nothing here.’

‘
Nothing?’

‘
Well, nothing I can see. Hold on a minute.’ He typed hurriedly on the keypad again, clicked the mouse. A moment later, he was frowning again, this time more severely. ‘Nope, all these messages are from valid origins. None of them appears unusual. No obvious keywords or encoding. Nothing.’ He looked at Clara and then at Gerry.

‘
Shit!’ said Clara standing upright and looking away. She looked like she was going to hit something.

‘
What’s wrong?’ Matt asked, not entirely sure what they expected to find.

Henric sighed and brushed the hair over his forehead, scratched his untidy beard. Matt noticed his temples were starting to sweat.

‘
I don’t think the message is here,’ he replied, despondently. He rested his head in his hand and shook it slowly, staring at the screen.

Gerry and Clara walked through to the living area and began talking under their breath. Matt followed.

The old house was dingy and dirty, apparently left empty some time ago. A threadbare carpet of brown and orange flowers covered the floor. The living room opened directly into the kitchen area and beyond, through a creaky door, lay two small bedrooms. The metal kitchen furniture looked like it had come from a down-market burger bar, circa 1955. Chairs covered in synthetic cream leather. A rickety red Formica-topped table.

It was early afternoon. They’d landed at an airstrip on the far side of Warsaw about eight that morning. They were met by a short, unshaven Pole called Andrzej who led them through a thicket of alpines to a waiting Fiat. The Pole was now loitering by the window, twitching the curtains apart, peering into the street.

Henric sat for half an hour, crouching over the small machine, flexing his fingers occasionally, and watching the computer’s responses as he smoked a cigarette. Now and again, he could be heard cursing to himself, and once or twice he sighed angrily and threw his lighter on the table with a loud crack.

Eventually, he stood and came into the living room. ‘No, it’s not there.’ He threw himself on the sofa.

Clara’s anger hadn’t dispersed. ‘Shit!’ she said again. ‘What the fuck is this guy doing? Todd was killed getting that laptop.’ This time she hit the wall.

Matt shuffled round in his chair. The girl’s anger was ferocious. He looked at the other men. Andrzej was now sitting silently in a corner brushing fluff from his sweatshirt. Gerry and Henric were staring at the floor.

‘
Could it just be well concealed?’ Gerry asked suddenly.

Henric shook his head. ‘No, I’ve tried everything. The message will be encoded or whatever but it will have something, a little label or something, which says ‘here I am’. Otherwise, it’s pointless sending it. There’s nothing on the machine at all. If it were there, I would’ve found it.’

‘
So, what now?’ said Gerry.

‘
Fuck knows,’ replied Clara.

Henric began tapping his lighter on his knee anxiously, Gerry scratching at the flaking varnish on the arm of his chair. Andrzej stood again and returned to skulking up and down by the windows. Clara was just staring at the wall.

‘
Perhaps I deleted the message,’ Matt offered.

Henric looked up. ‘Maybe,’ he said and ran back to the computer. They followed him to the kitchen table and watched over his shoulder as he typed.

‘
Okay,’ he said at last, ‘there are no deleted messages on the hard drive. But we can solve that. Just keep your fingers crossed the file location hasn’t been over-written.’ He loaded more software on the machine and began running another program.

‘
I’m bypassing the file indexes and actually looking on the disk to see what’s there,’ he said. ‘If the file was zapped it may only have been deleted from the file index and actually still be on the disk. I’m checking the disk byte by byte to recover any intact files.’

A few minutes later, the laptop beeped and Henric examined the results. ‘Right,’ he said excitedly, ‘we’ve got a few emails back from the disk. I’ll just check them.’

Text began scrolling up the screen again. A minute passed.

‘
Ah, this could be it.’ On the screen, Henric’s software was flashing a message. ‘One of these has come from an invalid domain. That’s probably it.’

Matt couldn’t help butting in. ‘What does that mean?’ he asked.

Henric turned to him, smiling. ‘Well, whoever sent this message isn’t stupid. They didn’t just send it from the office or the PC sitting at home. If it fell into the wrong hands, they’d instantly know where he was, or would soon track him down. He’s had to be clever. The Internet is like a road system. Messages start from your computer and are routed along electronic highways. They pass through hubs, computers that do nothing but route emails to their destinations. I’ve checked all the messages on your machine. I can trace them all back through the hubs to their point of origin. But this message here…’ he pointed to the screen, ‘can’t be traced. It’s as if it jumped onto the highway from the hard shoulder, if you like. It doesn’t have a point of origin. Whoever sent it got onto a network unseen, through a back door, dumped his email somewhere heading for a router, and got off before anyone sniffed him out. That’s why it can’t be traced. He’s protecting himself.’

‘
So that’s the message, is it?’ Matt asked, pushing forward to get a look at the screen.

‘
Well, we’ll see, but I think it’s pretty likely. I’ll have to do some more checks on it. If it is the message, we can be thankful it didn’t get zapped from the disk.’

Matt squinted over Henric’s shoulder. ‘Viagra without prescription,’ he read.

‘
That’s it,’ said Henric. ‘It’s a spam!’

―
§ ―

The following morning Matt rose, had a quick wash, and joined the others out front. Henric was still tapping away on the computer. Matt assumed he’d actually got some sleep, but his eyes said otherwise.

Andrzej nudged Matt in the arm and handed him a paper bag. Inside were some fresh pastries and a couple of passports. Matt opened them up to see his mug shot next to a couple of fake names. The documents were surprisingly convincing.

After breakfast, Clara asked Henric how he was getting on with the message. ‘Good, it’s definitely the one. I need time to look at it closely.’ He took the laptop, disappeared into the back bedroom. The others sat in the living room, drinking coffee and smoking.

Clara seemed nervous, impatient. She kept grabbing her notebook, scribbling furiously in it, pacing around the room, mumbling. She would often fumble with the buttons of her blouse. Matt couldn’t help feeling that she was something of an enigma; something in her make-up didn’t quite fit. The girl seemed intent on a purpose most would find laughable, a concept for which he still felt an uneasy cynicism. An idea that attracted the world’s gullible hordes – that should be shelved under the fiction section along with Tarot readers, spoon-benders, psychic crime detectives and crystal healers. It just didn’t add up. There must be more to her convictions than she was prepared to admit.

And those convictions were madness. Matt had once heard a physicist describing his visits to Mars, recounting his conversations with Venusians. Not just any old physicist. A well-known one. The media took him seriously of course. Why? Because, like Clara and her companions, he was educated, respectable, and had the certificates to prove it. It made Matt uncomfortable to see these people caught in such a travesty. It made him despair of a world where irrational wisdom could flourish. Where people refused to speak out because no amount of rational discourse could avert those misguided beliefs.

Or perhaps
he
was wrong? Perhaps his perception of what is real, allowable, was somehow warped. If intelligent people could follow such dogmas, perhaps he was the one deluded. There was a tiny doubt germinating in his mind, but he brushed it aside.

In the late afternoon, Clara took them through to Henric’s bedroom, leaving Andrzej to resume his role at the windows.

‘
Okay,’ she said, ‘time’s up. What’ve you got for us?’

Henric turned around and smiled. ‘Come and see.’ He moved aside and let them crowd round the small screen again. ‘Right, we’ve identified the correct email. If we take a look at it…’ – he clicked the mouse and the message popped up in the mail application – ‘… it looks just like a spam. Viagra without prescription. But look at the text.’ He scrolled the message through paragraph after paragraph of pointless discussion and endorsements. Exactly the kind of thing most people trashed instantly. ‘Do you notice anything strange about the text?’ he asked the onlookers.

They all leant forward and inspected the screen. ‘Not really,’ Matt said. ‘Although there’s a few spelling mistakes.’

‘
That’s it,’ said Henric, excitedly. ‘Spelling mistakes. You might expect one or two perhaps but if you read the message through you find there’s an awful lot of them. Not only that, but the grammar and syntax are often confused as well. It looks just like a foreigner wrote it.’

‘
Well,’ said Gerry, ‘that doesn’t sound that odd. Spam’s like that – you’re bombarded from every corner of the globe. It’s often unintelligible. It’s often made like that intentionally to get through spam filters.’

‘
Sure, that’s right, but we know this isn’t a real spam, it’s just made to look like one, and it occurred to me that it looked a bit too contrived. Last night I spent hours looking for hidden attachments in this email. I literally took the file apart byte by byte, looking for the part you couldn’t see. When I couldn’t find it, I sat and stared at the screen for an hour. I found myself actually reading the message and realised that what we’re looking for isn’t cleverly hidden away somewhere. It’s right there in front of us, in the text of the message.’