Nick hesitated. ‘Can we get there without a car?’
‘What am I, a fricking concierge service?’ Urthred crossed to the large book spread on the wings of an eagle-shaped lectern and consulted it. ‘Says there’s a train from Strasbourg to Frankfurt at 21.50 that stops at Karlsruhe. You want me to tell you where the restaurant car is too?’
‘We’ll find it.’ Nick reached for the lid of the computer, ready to shut it down. ‘But there’s one other thing I need you to arrange.’
Whatever dangers lurked in the forest, we reached our destination without harm. Schlettstadt was an unremarkable town some twenty miles up the Ill from Strassburg. Like every town in those days, it existed in a state of siege. Guards manned the walls, and its gates only opened when we had proved we carried no weapons. Suspicious gazes followed our progress along the winding alleys inside, up the hill towards the church.
‘Have you noticed how goldsmiths always keep their shops near churches?’ Drach muttered. ‘Jesus preached poverty and forsaking worldly goods.’
‘Keep your voice down,’ I warned him. ‘It’s bad enough that everyone here thinks we must be an advance party of Armagnaken, without you sounding like a Free Spirit heretic as well.’
We found what we had come to see in a steep-gabled house plastered red between its branching beams. Much of it was familiar from all goldsmiths’ shops: the tools on the walls; the boxes of beads and wire; the plate glinting behind the bars of the show cabinet; the residues of quicksilver and hot metal.
But they were not fresh. No smoke rose from the furnace at the back of the house, and the anvils were silent. These were lean times for goldsmiths – they could not work gold when it was all buried under mattresses and floorboards.
I leaned on the empty counter and peered inside. A man sat on a stool, pulling rings off a spindle and polishing them one by one.
‘Are you Götz?’ I asked.
He nodded. He must have been about thirty, with bushy brown hair and a thin face. I introduced myself.
‘I am associated with the goldsmiths’ guild in Strassburg. I have seen your work there. A brooch of Christ on his cross.’ It had been Andreas Dritzehn’s. His brother had brought it into Dunne’s shop to sell after Andreas’ death. Through discreet enquiry, I had found out who had made it. ‘The lettering on the inscription was exquisite. So precise.’
He accepted the compliment in silence.
‘I assume you cut the letters with punches.’
A suspicious look. I sympathised. ‘I do not want to steal your secret. I want to buy it.’
I put a purse of coins on the counter.
‘I want you to make me a set of punches, exactly as you made your own.’
Götz eyed the purse but did not touch it.
‘I can cut your punches.’ He hesitated. ‘But not exactly as I made my own.’
‘What do you mean?’
He chose his words cautiously. ‘You want punches that will stamp each letter in metal. I do not have any.’
‘But the brooch…’
‘You could scour my workshop from top to bottom and you would not find a single alphabetical punch.’
I tried to remember everything I could about the writing on the brooch. ‘Surely you did not engrave it freehand?’
He pushed the purse back towards me. ‘I would rather not say.’
Frustrated and perplexed, I was about to turn away. But the wink of gold in his cabinet delayed me. I peered through the leaded glass.
‘May I examine that cup?’
I could see his doubts – but the purse still lay on the counter, and I might be the only customer he would have that week. He unlocked the cabinet and handed me the cup. It was about six inches tall, with a bowed stem and garnets set into the bowl. Around the base was written a verse from St John’s Gospel.
I studied it a few moments, pressing my fingertips into the sharp incisions. The lines were too straight, too clean to have been carved by hand. They must have been stamped. Yet Götz claimed he had no letter punches.
I put down the cup and picked up the purse.
‘Thank you.’
The taxi dropped them off outside the Hochschule für Gestaltung. In the dark, Nick couldn’t see much more than a cluster of square, practical buildings surrounded by trees. Sabine Friman was standing by the front door waiting for them. She was a lithe woman with short blonde hair that poked around her ears in elfin spikes, blue eyes and a tanned face. In spite of the cold, she wore nothing more than an olive-green tank top and cargo pants.
‘The Wanderer arrives,’ she said. Her English was perfect, with a Scandinavian crispness. ‘Did you have a good journey?’
She led them in. Even at that time of night, there were plenty of students in the corridors. Everything was warm, bright and clean; it was the safest he’d felt in ages.
‘Randall told me what you need.’ She unlocked a door from the ring of keys clipped to her belt. Inside was a small, windowless room with a computer monitor and a scanner set up on a plastic folding table. ‘The scanner is 2,400dpi, and we have a direct connection to the i-21 data network.’
‘Great. Can we start with the scanner?’
Sabine lifted the lid and held out her hand. To her obvious surprise, Nick reached in his coat and handed her what looked like a pile of greetings cards.
‘Did you forget someone’s birthday?’
Nick flipped one round so she could see the back. Tiny scraps of paper made a mosaic on the glossy red card. ‘We needed a high-contrast reflective background. This was all they sold at the rail station.’ Thankfully the train had been pretty empty, not too many passengers to wonder why he and Emily spent the journey gluing the fragments on. ‘It’ll make scanning easier.’
Sabine laid the greetings cards on the scanner and closed the lid. It hummed into life; a bar of green light slowly traversed the platen. A vastly magnified picture of the back of the card slid down the screen.
‘Now to upload them,’ said Nick. He sat down on the metal chair. ‘This is where it gets interesting.’
Sabine leaned over his shoulder and studied the screen. ‘How does it work, exactly?’
‘We upload these pictures to the server that hosts my program. That picks out the fragments of paper and turns them into individual images. Then it analyses them for edge shape, fragments of letters or words and tries to piece them back together. Like doing a jigsaw.’
Emily looked at the computer as if it were an alien object. ‘Can’t you just do it on your laptop?’
‘The raw number crunching you need for this thing is way too intensive for a home computer.’ Nick opened a web browser and typed in an address. ‘It’s like trying to solve all the possible outcomes of a chess game, but with thousands of pieces that are all different shapes. The processing has to be done on massive central servers – in this case, belonging to the people who fund my research.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘The FBI.’
Even Sabine’s ice-cool composure took a knock. ‘You want to hack into the FBI’s computer system? From here?’
‘I’m not going to hack in anywhere. I’m going to walk up to the front door and use a valid user name and password.’
Sabine shot him a crooked look. ‘Randall said you were maybe not so happy with the police right now.’
‘That was the NYPD. The parts of the Bureau that fund me are a long way away from the parts that hunt bad guys. If we’re very lucky, the right hand might not have gotten round to telling the left hand what’s been going on. After all, it’s the last place they’d expect me to go.’
‘Maybe they’ve got a point.’ Emily folded her arms and walked to the back of the room. Sabine glanced between her and Nick.
‘Can I get you a drink?’