The Bergamese Sect (13 page)

‘
Okay,’ said Clara, ‘you’re telling us the message isn’t concealed at all.’

‘
No, I didn’t say that. I realised the message was encoded somehow in the characters of the email, not cleverly hidden away somewhere. So, I ran an analysis on the character sequence. To cut a long story short, I found that every third character in this message, excepting spaces, is always one of only sixteen letters, and never anything else.’

Henric turned to face the onlookers in anticipation. Their faces were blank. He smiled lamely. ‘Not impressed, I can see,’ he said. ‘Okay, there’s twenty-six letters in the alphabet, right? So any character in the sequence could be one of twenty-six letters. But some letters are much more common than others in written English. Certain combinations of letters also don’t occur at all. So, it’s quite difficult to calculate the chances of a given character coming up at a certain point in a sentence. But if you analyse billions of text samples you can come up with some basic expectations. Anything that deviates significantly from those patterns is obviously suspect. In this message, as I said, every third character is always one of only sixteen letters of the alphabet. The probability of that occurring by chance is trillions to one. So I knew I was on the right track.’

‘
That’s why there’s so many spelling mistakes, right?’ said Matt.

‘
That’s it, the message is contrived. The errors are there not to make it look like a foreign spam but because the words are following a very restrictive rule. It must have been a nightmare to put this together. And it gets even wackier.’

Clara took the only other chair next to Henric and stared at the screen.

‘
Okay,’ Henric said, ‘so then I got to thinking; either every third character is important and we can throw away the others, or the number sixteen is important, or those sixteen characters themselves are the key. The first two possibilities are wrong. Unfortunately, they’re the ones I tried first.’ Henric turned and gave a grim smile, but no one offered any sympathy.

‘
Anyway,’ he continued, ‘it’s actually every third character that’s important. I stripped out everything else and you’re left with this…’ He clicked on another file and up popped a window filled with lines of characters. ‘It doesn’t look like much, does it?’

The others agreed.

‘
Remember, we only have sixteen characters from the alphabet in this sequence so we can’t expect it to read like English.’ The jumble of characters was indeed meaningless.

‘
I was stuck here for a while. Then it struck me. I was stupid not to see it sooner. Sixteen. Sixteen is important. Whenever we see sixteen cropping up, we think of hexadecimal, right? Simple. The letters aren’t letters at all; they’re numbers, hexadecimal numbers encoded with a group of sixteen letters of the alphabet. It then took me a few hours to work out that encoding. It’s quite complex and it actually changes as the message proceeds. The key is contained in the section headings of the spam message. It’s very clever. What’s more, the letter sequences are repeated using different encoding through the message. You actually decode the message more than 100,000 different ways to get the final sequence of hex numbers. Anyway, if we decode the letter sequence into hex we get this…’ He clicked another file and another sequence of characters popped up, equally meaningless.

‘
This is the good bit. I noticed that if you split this sequence up into sets of four characters each, every third group is always a hex number less than 256. This is a classic technique. What we have here is an image. The first two numbers are the x and y location of a pixel and the third is its colour. The resulting image is a 4096 pixel square.’

‘
Okay,’ said Clara. ‘Let’s see the picture.’

Henric clicked on a file. The screen immediately filled with colour.

‘
Is that it?’ Matt said.

Before them was a child’s painting. A carelessly washed blue sky surrounded a red triangular sail and brown boat. A huge yellow sun sent out beams of light and the waves were curvy lines of grey and green.

‘
What does that mean?’ said Gerry, confused.

‘
We haven’t finished yet. I’ve checked out this picture in the minutest detail. There’s nothing in it to give us any clues. No tiny writing on the boat, nothing. But I’ve seen this kind of thing before. What we have to do is rearrange the pixels another way to reveal the message. When we do that we should have the message staring us in the face.’

‘
So how do we rearrange them?’ asked Matt.

Henric tapped the laptop, thinking. ‘I don’t know yet,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent the last hour trying to find if there’s a clue somewhere, but I’ve drawn a blank. But that shouldn’t matter. Usually, there’s some simple formula for rearranging the pixels. It won’t be random. I’m about to run a code that does just about every kind of rearrangement possible, starting with the simplest. In a few hours we can check through the results and see if anything’s shown up.’

‘
Hold on,’ Matt said, ‘it seems to me that whoever sent this email went to great lengths to hide it away. But how could they be sure you’d know how to rout it out? And if you can rout it out, surely the wrong people could too?’

Henric nodded. ‘Yeah, anyone could find the message if they knew one was hidden there. If it went to the wrong person, there’d be no danger since they wouldn’t even suspect there was something up. They’d just trash it, like you. That’s why it’s made to look like spam. If it fell into the hands of our enemies, they’d be able to reveal the message too, just as we’ve done. But whatever’s eventually revealed, it’ll certainly be something only you can decipher. You’re the crucial key. All this encoding is a just a disguise to try to get through the networks to your mailbox before being spotted. It’s just camouflage; it’s not meant to protect the message. The people we’re dealing with have phenomenal means of checking network data as it passes around the globe. If this guy’s email were obvious in any way, they’d have stopped it getting to you. I guess they knew where it was heading, even though they didn’t catch it as it went through. Still, it didn’t take long to get two guys over to collar you in the street.’

Matt felt a pang of emotion. An anger at being manipulated, prostituted even, for someone else’s beliefs. It faded as another question occurred to him.

‘
So how did you lot know where to find me?’

‘
Remember, the sender of this message was trying to get it to us, not you. You just have the combination to the safe, if you like. He’s been feeding us information for a long time; most of it cryptic; like this message. But he’s been careful not to alert anyone about his target – you. It’s been difficult since our capabilities are far outweighed by the opposition. But he helped us along. We knew where we should be hanging out and when. We only knew it was you about ten minutes before we arrived. I guess the enemy knew as soon as you got the email, but of course, by then, they needed your computer as well as you.’

‘
If they’d got you,’ Clara said, ‘they’d have decoded the message, using you to interpret it, under some pretext. Then dumped you in the Thames. You, and what this guy knows, would be history.’

‘
They must really want this man.’

‘
Sure they do,’ Clara replied. ‘They can’t afford to let him speak out. But, as Henric said, you’re the key to all this. While you’re with us, it’s unlikely the government will strike. They need you as much as we do, to lead them to him. However, if it gets too difficult for them, they may change tactics. They know this man won’t go public without us behind him. So they may settle for just killing us; leaving the big fish for another day. That’s why we must be careful. I can’t guarantee you’re not a target if you remain with us. But I can guarantee you’re dead if you leave.’

‘
But why all this mystery? Why doesn’t this guy just send you what he knows, instead of hiding out somewhere and making us play these games?’

‘
Simple. If I walk into the
New York Times
and say I know what’s really behind this alien abduction story, because this guy I’ve never met told me, how much column space do you think I’d get? We need the man himself, as well as his information. And he needs us.’

‘
But why the hell drag me into all this? Why doesn’t he just tell you where he is?’

Clara gave a short laugh. ‘Again, simple. He doesn’t trust us,’ she said.

‘
Why not?’

‘
Because he doesn’t know us. We’re people who want the truth. We have a vested interest. He’s scared that some of us could be government infiltrators. He wants to be sure the person he talks to has no hidden agenda. And what better way than to choose someone himself, someone he can watch, understand, grow to trust? You, Matt.’

‘
You’re saying he’s been watching me?’

‘
Absolutely.’

‘
Do I know him?’

‘
I doubt it. But he certainly knows you.’

―
§ ―

It was early evening and the sun was still shining on the deserted street. Andrzej still clung to the dusty net curtains, anticipating the unexpected. As he looked toward the bottom of the road, the chrome fender of an old green pickup appeared beyond the wall of the most distant house. He watched the stopped car, but could see only the hood.

But then he saw the glint of a telephoto lens peeping above the fender. He turned from the window, waved his hand to alert his comrades. ‘Trouble,’ he said.

Everyone but Matt stood. Clara began walking over to the window. Suddenly, a faint ping sounded and a fist-sized hole opened up in the plaster behind Gerry’s head. Small shards of glass fell from one of the windowpanes onto the floor. There was a perfectly circular hole in the glass.

‘
Out,’ Andrzej shouted.

Suddenly, they were running toward the back of the house. Henric disappeared into the bedroom to retrieve the computer as Clara and Gerry bundled Matt toward the kitchen door. Gerry shouted something to Andrzej. The Pole nodded and crouched by the window, whipping out a large revolver from his jacket. He was staying behind.

The kitchen door opened onto a metal balcony suspended twenty-five feet above a concrete yard. A high wall enclosed the yard, which was bare except for a rusting bicycle and an old gasoline tank. An iron ladder, screwed to the wall, led down.

Clara pushed Matt out and onto the ladder. ‘Climb down quickly,’ she said.

As he stepped onto the rusting ladder, it creaked and jostled. He went half way down then jumped onto the concrete below. Looking up, he saw Clara hurrying after him.

Something sharp hit his head. A handful of grit caught him in the eye. The screws were inching out of the decaying mortar above, the ladder breaking away from the wall. ‘It’s coming loose,’ he screamed.

Clara jumped down beside him just as Gerry stepped onto the ladder. Another anchor gave way and the ladder jolted backward, threatening to throw him into the yard. Henric appeared on the balcony, the laptop case slung over his shoulder.

‘
Careful,’ Matt shouted but Henric swung himself over the railing immediately and made a grab for the ladder. It came away at the top and toppled outwards, held only by two screws at ground level. Gerry let go, fell flailing and landed badly in the yard. Henric dangled twenty feet up, kicking his legs with nowhere to go.

Matt saw the thin strap of the laptop case moving, slipping off Henric’s shoulder. Henric hunched, trying to prevent the strap easing off, but the motion caused the ladder to lean sideways. The bag slid effortlessly from his arm.

Clara screamed as the computer hurtled toward the ground, but Matt dived under it, cradling it in his outstretched arms, rolling over as he pulled it safely into his body.

Henric let go of the ladder and hit the ground hard, tumbling backwards as the ladder crashed onto the concrete with a deafening clang. He was unhurt. Standing, he grabbed Matt’s arm. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

They leapt over the high wall and jumped down onto a dusty back lane running between the rows of houses. Matt tucked the laptop under his arm and followed Clara up the road. Gerry and Henric hobbled after them.

There was the sound of a car behind them. Turning, Matt saw a battered saloon cruising up the lane. Gerry also turned, stopped running. He reached inside his coat, pulled out a gun and aimed it at the windscreen.

Its occupant, a young woman, screeched to a halt at the sight of the weapon. Gerry screamed something at her in Polish and she leapt out of the car, terror in her eyes. He motioned her away. She ran back down the lane without looking back.

Beyond her, Matt saw another car turning into the lane – a green pickup. The car accelerated quickly, clouds of yellow dust billowing into the air.

‘
Quick,’ Gerry shouted as he dived into the woman’s car. The others ran back down the lane and piled in after him.

Gerry hit the gas, the engine howling, the wheels spinning, trying to find grip. The pickup roared after them.

Suddenly a shot rang out and the back window shattered. Matt lay on the back seat next to Clara, covered with tiny cubes of glass.

‘
Keep down,’ she cried.

But Matt rose up to peer out the gaping hole. The pickup was thirty yards away, gaining on them. Then he saw a figure leap up onto the yard wall. It was Andrzej. The Pole dropped into the road in front of the pickup.

‘
Andrzej!’ Matt wailed but the man couldn’t hear his cry.

The pickup raced toward Andrzej. Hearing its approach, he turned suddenly, raised his revolver and shot. The windscreen shattered and the car swerved sharply toward him.

It picked up the stout Pole, tossing him, spread-eagled, onto the hood. With a deafening crash, it ploughed into the wall. A fireball leapt from under the car and engulfed the scene in thick, black smoke. Their accomplice was lost in the carnage of flame.