“Who were they?” Kelly looked over his shoulder as she finished.
“A nasty little cult that was hiding out in the highlands of northern Syria,” she explained. “They finagled their way into a few decent castles and used them as outposts and training centers for their corps of secret operatives. A bit like Osama bin Ladin and his terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.”
“You mean they were terrorists?”
“In a manner of speaking. They were few in number, but used subterfuge, sleight of hand and threat of assassination to exert influence on both the Christian and Muslim lords in the region. In fact, the word Assassin, as it’s used in the West today, dates from this period. Here, let me show you.” She keyed the word and ordered an origins search to get a number of reference links immediately.
“See here,” she pointed reading aloud:“For 800 years, the sect has been largely shrouded in mystery and still is glimpsed through a mist of rumors, charges and speculations. But it is known that the word assassin, still used to describe a political murderer, was applied to members of the sect…” She selected a second reference and read it aloud.
“The origin of the organization’s name is unclear. Maalouf follows a number of Ismaili sources in affirming that ‘assassin’ is derived from the Arabic assass (foundation), via assassiyun (fundamentalists); they were simply believers in a purer and more basic form of Islam. A more highly-colored derivation, favored by Western writers, points to the Arabic hashshashin (eaters of hashish) to explain both the name of the Assassins and their fanatical devotion to their leader, the Old Man of the Mountain, as their sanguinary tactics were fueled by narcotics.” (1)
“How strange,” said Kelly. “Bin Ladin’s group, Al Qaeda, was also supposed to mean ‘the base’ in Arabic, and I ran across references associating the word for ‘foundation’ as well.
“Birds of a feather,” said Maeve. “I guess these Islamic fundamentalists all tend to think alike.”
“Well,” said Kelly, “we had better get the comparison run going. I’ll have the system flag any data that has a variance rating of .05 or higher—that was my threshold for yellow on the color bar. It will extract any dating information on the reference materials and we’ll do a scan by month beginning with 1187.”
He had the job ready to run a moment later, and Maeve watched while the familiar green line started across her screen, month by month. All was well until late in June when the solid green line suddenly changed to yellow near the end of the month.
“Bingo!” she chimed. “We get our first deviations in June of 1187, just as I thought. The Battle of Hattin was in early July, right on the 4th or so. Seems history has a thing for that week: the Declaration of Independence and the end of the battle of Gettysburg, to name a few choice moments in our own affairs. Let’s see what’s wrong. You better pull up a chair and help me out. I’ve already got over a hundred files that show alteration.”
Kelly settled in next to her, and they began to work down the list. The system was designed to display red text for any word in a file that did not exactly match the corresponding text from the primary data, the signature files that Kelly had stored in the RAM bank last month. They were getting little things at first: changes in grammar, sentence structure and choice of words in the documents, but no real alteration of key facts. A half hour passed like this, and Kelly began to get frustrated.
“This is going to take forever,” he breathed. “Here, I’m going to ask the system for data flagged with greater deviation values. Just for yucks, I’ll query for outright anomalies.” He entered a few commands and squinted at the screen.
“Here we go,” he smiled as he read aloud. “Archeologists unearth strange find in hidden archive. It’s a newspaper article. How’s that for a headline?”
“What was it?” Maeve asked as she paged through a file on her terminal.
“That’s odd,” said Kelly. “Hey it came up under that last keyword you threw in, the Assassins. Listen to this: ‘A team of Harvard based scientists rushed to the site near a ruined medieval castle in Syria today as construction crews working on a restoration project for the Aga Khan Foundation unearthed a hidden vault in a cave near Masyaf. A sealed iron strongbox there contained a number of items, most significantly, a copy of the Holy Koran, believed to be well over a thousand years old. That in itself would make the typical historian’s day, but an odd find, hidden behind a sealed leaf of the volume, had researchers quite perplexed. It was a portion of a laminated playing card from a typical modern deck—the King of Diamonds, to be precise.”
Maeve gave him a frown. “We’ve got to hit the event data harder than that, Kelly. Come on, will you?”
“Well this file had a super high anomaly rating,” said Kelly. “Sure, it sounds ludicrous. It probably migrated down from the construction crews—a typical example of site contamination.” He glanced at a few more lines of the article and saw something that jarred him. “Workers at the site insist the box had remained locked and undisturbed before the researchers arrived. ’We have no idea how a thing like this could be authentic,’ said Professor Sims of the Harvard-MIT institute, ‘unless, of course, the occupants of this library were fond of playing poker or bridge in their spare time.’ The site was the location of the nefarious group known as the Assassins, a cult of fanatical fundamentalists who terrorized both Muslim and Christian interests alike during the twelfth century, AD.” They even have a picture on file—” Kelly cut himself off, leaning forward suddenly to squint at the screen. “It can’t be…”
“You will be if you don’t get down to some serious work, Mister.” Maeve protested again from the next terminal.
Kelly said nothing. He was fishing for something in his wallet, his face furrowed with concern. Maeve turned to see him holding something up to the monitor screen. “Weird!” He exclaimed. “It’s a perfect match! The King of Diamonds—or at least the top half of it.”
Maeve gave him a frown.
“Look,” said Kelly. “It’s the top half of a laminated playing card.“ Kelly was shaking his head, the bill of his baseball cap swinging back and forth, but slowing as he continued to stare at the screen. “We cut the damn thing in half years ago,” he whispered.
“What are you talking about?”
“The card. It was our Red Arrow. I’ve carried this thing around for over two decades and…”
Maeve was looking at him like she was about to reach for something sharp, but he held up a warding hand, begging her forbearance. “Remember your Tolkien, Maeve? Gondor sent the Red Arrow to Rohan as a sign of great need. It was only to be used in the last extreme—a call for all the muster of Rohan to ride to Gondor’s aid.”
“Kelly,” Maeve nearly shouted at him. “The whole world is spinning out of control and you’re wasting valuable time here.”
“You don’t understand,” Kelly defended himself. “Paul and I had this ritual. We took a playing card, the King of Diamonds, and cut the damn thing in half. He kept one half; I kept the other. We made a promise that if we ever received the other half of the card in the mail, it would indicate dire need. It was a token of our friendship, and a summons to render immediate aid—our Red Arrow.”
“Lovely,” said Maeve. “Truly endearing.” She gave him a withering look that said her patience had finally run out.
“Well there’s the top half,” Kelly pointed at his screen. “And I’ve got the bottom half; laminated too… a perfect mate to the card shown in this article!”
“That’s impossible. It’s got to be coincidence.”