‘Something with caffeine. It’s going to be a long night.’
Sabine went out. After a moment, Emily turned back to see what Nick was doing. To her surprise, she saw that the scanned picture had given way to a thick forest, through which Nick seemed to be navigating a one-eyed man in a grey cloak and a bronze helmet.
‘Gothic Lair?’
Nick didn’t look up. ‘Whoever’s after us, they’ve tracked every move we’ve made.’ Emily noticed how white his knuckles were as they gripped the computer mouse. ‘I don’t want Sabine to end up like Brother Jerome if they trace us back here. So I’m taking the long way round.’
On screen, the Wanderer came out into a clearing that surrounded a giant oak tree. It looked ancient. Its branches sagged low and its wizened bark was pocked with disease. A mess of gnarled roots tangled the earth around its base like cables.
‘You came.’ Urthred the Necromancer stepped out from behind the tree. He sounded disappointed.
‘Did you manage to do it?’ Nick asked.
‘Did I ever tell you about the time the FBI came to visit me when I was sixteen?’ Urthred examined the leaves on one of the low-hanging branches. ‘Not a good time in my life.’
‘All you have to do is get me to the front door.’
‘It’s all set up.’ Urthred pointed to the bottom of the tree, where a fat root split in two like a cloven hoof. It forced the earth apart, leaving a triangular hole in the fork. ‘Down you go.’
The Wanderer jumped. The screen went black as the hole swallowed him. Nick waited for something to happen. The green light on the computer’s network card blinked furiously, but the screen stayed blank. Had Randall screwed up?
‘Should something be happening?’ said Emily.
‘I got him to set up a secure connection to the FBI servers in Washington. Hopefully it’ll make us untraceable.’ Nick drummed his fingers on the desk and stared at the screen. All he saw was his own reflection. ‘If we get there.’
A blue screen appeared with a government seal and the words FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION emblazoned across the top. Nick had never thought he’d be so glad to see it. He typed in his password and held his breath.
Password accepted
The screen changed again, a plain list of files and folders. Nick clicked one and entered a file name. The lights on the network connection went into overdrive; a green bar began crawling across the screen as the file started to transfer.
‘How long do we have to wait?’ Emily asked.
‘Maybe half an hour for the upload. After that…’ Nick shrugged. ‘The program’s written to deal with bags of shredded material at a time, so one sheet should be quicker. On the other hand, we don’t know if we have all the pieces, and we don’t know how wet they got in the snow. And there’s the question of what was actually on the original sheet of paper. The more detail, particularly words, the easier it is for the algorithm to figure it out.’
‘Nick – you there?’ Randall’s disembodied voice jumped out of the computer speakers. Nick leaned towards the microphone he’d plugged in.
‘Worked perfectly.’
‘That’s what I’m telling you: it didn’t. Somebody’s sniffing all over that connection. You must have triggered some kind of alarm when you logged in.’
‘Is it coming from the Washington end?’
‘Doesn’t look like it. How much longer do you need?’
Nick looked at the status bar.
FILE TRANSFER: 12% COMPLETE
‘It’s going to be a while.’
‘That was a wasted errand,’ Kaspar complained. But I saw his eyes dart towards me as soon as he’d said it, always probing.
I played along. ‘I found it useful.’
A brief silence followed, while he pretended he did not want to know and I pretended I did not want to tell him.
‘How?’
‘Every letter has a different shape. But each is composed of a much smaller number of basic shapes. A stroke, a dot, a curve. I would guess that with a set of six punches, maybe ten, you could strike almost any letter.’
Drach snorted. ‘So reductive. You reduce the page to words and the words to letters; now the letters to lines. Next you will want to form each line from individual grains of metal. And you still don’t know how to make any of it work.’
‘Götz does.’
‘Then why don’t you hire him?’
‘Maybe I will.’ I was fed up with Dunne. I suspected he had stopped believing in the enterprise long ago, and now saw me only as a tap of easy money to be left dripping as long as possible. ‘But first I must know what I want Götz to do.’
I sighed. Trying to comprehend the project on every level, from the finished plate to the tiniest stroke of each letter, turned my mind inside out. Every level depended on the others, and the least change to one caused changes to all. It was like trying to imagine the design of a cathedral while simultaneously knowing every stone within it. Sometimes I glimpsed the harmony of the whole, or felt its resonance. More often, it made my head hurt.
‘We should start back.’
Kaspar looked back at the clock tower. ‘It will be dark before we’re halfway there.’
‘We’ll find an inn.’
We ducked out of the town gate and joined the road back to Strassburg. High clouds had covered the sky. Without the sun the leaves no longer seemed so vibrant, merely old. They put me in a melancholy mood. I looked at their withered faces, the waxy green of youth dulled to dry brown, and saw my own face mirrored back to me. The purse of gold weighed like lead in my pocket.
We had not gone far when a new noise intruded on the rustle of leaves and flowing water. The staccato clop of hooves, soon swelled by a murmuring chatter of voices. Kaspar and I glanced at each other, then scurried off the road and crouched behind a pair of thick oaks. I clutched the purse tied under my shirt and tried to see who was coming.
LVII
Karlsruhe
TRANSFER COMPLETE
‘Now for the hard part.’
Nick took a deep breath and hammered out a few commands on the keyboard. The file icons disappeared; the screen turned a hazy purple. One by one, white blots appeared like raindrops on a window. Some faded back to nothing; others beaded together in clusters and spread across the screen. The effect was hypnotic.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Emily. ‘Is that what the program’s doing?’
Nick hit a key. The screen blinked out of existence.
‘That’s just the visualiser. The people who write the cheques like to see it. It keeps the grants coming in, but it slows everything down.’
Emily looked anxiously at her watch. ‘Then do we have to wait here? Can’t you leave the program running and pick up the results somewhere else?’
‘It’s not designed for that. The Feds get antsy if confidential information is left unattended. Even on a machine. If you log out, it pulls the plug.’
‘So we just sit here?’
Nick pushed back the chair and punched the tab on a can of Coke. ‘You can explore the wide world of Gothic Lair if you like.’
He pressed another key. Suddenly, they were back in the forest. By the edge of the clearing, Urthred was scratching himself with jerky, repetitive motions that meant Randall had gone somewhere else.
Emily looked at the shimmering forest. ‘Do all video games provide back doors to the FBI?’
‘Randall’s a seventy-first-level mage.’ Nick saw that didn’t explain much to Emily. ‘He’s also done some work for the guys who publish Gothic Lair. He has a lot of access.’
‘And a whole lot of pain.’
The Wanderer turned around. Urthred had come up behind him, apparently repossessed by Randall.
‘It’s a shitstorm. Someone was tooled up and ready for you to go back to that account. They’re trying to take it down. Massive botnet DoS.’
‘What does that mean?’ said Emily.