Ringing off her phone somewhat tartly, Akosua exhaled irritably. She had completed the purchase of
Dirigo Lux
as soon as it had become available on the Verker girl's eBay shop, having already spent literally hours regularly checking the site to be ready to buy it as soon as it appeared even though it was not expected to be put up for sale until the following week.
She was resoundingly relieved to see the book loaded up, primarily because she really did not want to have to spend a whole weekend or even longer, glued to the screen of her laptop, refreshing the page every five minutes so as not to risk missing the sale and possibly losing it to another buyer. With Rey and Frans following up the lead on the
Sigil Ring
, she knew that the laborious task would have come down to her.
Akosua sat back and sighed, stretching her arms behind her head to put some vigour back into the muscles that had become stiff and tight from sitting in one position for too long. Half the job was practically complete and if Rey and Frans could get the ring back that evening then they were home and dry, although of course, they needed to actually take possession of her purchase to complete their mission.
She had called the Verker girl straight after buying the book and had requested to pop round to pick up it up right there and then, but, she had been politely informed that Monday was the earliest time that she could come to retrieve it.
Akosua had tried to cajole the girl, suggesting that it was really inconvenient for her to wait until Monday, but Gertrude Verker was having none of it; she could pick it up in person on Monday or have it posted to her over the weekend once the postage price had been determined and paid. It was an easy decision - Monday it was! There was no way that Akosua was going to risk losing the book in the post.
After settling down with a steaming cup of fruit tea, she had tried to call Rey but his phone was obviously switched off with Frans' phone also giving the same response. Damn! They must have been in the field and did not want to be disturbed; a phone ringing at an inconvenient moment could put a real dampener on events, especially if they were trying to surreptitiously trail somebody.
Akosua stretched her arms high above her head again and relaxed back. It was no matter that she could not contact Rey or Frans, they would report back soon enough and she could tell them the good news then!
Frans saw the white-blue glow of bi-xenon headlights swing into the street first and he nudged Rey with an elbow, simultaneously jutting his jaw in the direction of the oncoming vehicle. They both watched as a highly polished azure blue BMW rolled to a stop level with the coffee-shop, a deep rhythmic booming clearly audible if not tangibly felt from the seismic vibrations radiating from the epicentre of the car's upgraded speaker system. The car's headlights beamed unnecessarily at full brightness and Frans adjusted his position to place the offside pillar of the windscreen at just the right angle to shield his eyes from the worst effects of the penetrating rays.
'Perhaps his mother has come to drive him home because his dinner is on the table?' suggested Rey, looking at the car with undisguised disdain.
Three youths appeared from inside the shop and crowded about the passenger door, one of them ducking down to lean through the open window and chat, the driver turning down the volume so that they could hear themselves speak.
Quickly flicking open the passenger glove compartment, Frans rummaged around and pulled out a small pair of rubber coated binoculars. He peered through them and adjusted the focus to sharpen the image.
'Is one of them our man?'
Rey took the binoculars as Frans offered them, leaning slightly toward the centre console to get a better view and refocusing to his own requirements.
'Same jacket as the guy I saw earlier, same stone-washed denim jeans, that's him with his head in the car!'
As if on cue the leaning youth pulled his head out and stood up, shouting and waving his hands about as his friends broke into fits of laughter about him.
Rey looked at him, taking in every detail; the shaven head accentuated the youth's ears which were already inclined to protuberance and the thin bony face exuded insolence even without the decoration of expression. He was wearing a shiny wet-look black quilted jacket with a ludicrously wide fur trimmed hood, although his fashion sense stopped just short of practicality as he appeared to be wearing only a T-shirt beneath it and the voluminous hood remained flat across his shoulders in spite of the cold. The tight fitting stone-washed jeans did nothing to disguise the thin spindly legs and the no doubt fashionable trainers upon his feet appeared too large for his overall frame.
He was probably in his late teens but Rey considered that a couple of generations of malnutrition had constrained his growth; his scrawny build would not pose too much of a problem in any hand-to-hand encounter, although he was aware that the likelihood of a knife being drawn was a high probability.
'The one in the centre with the black jacket is definitely our man!' Rey confirmed as he handed the binoculars back to Frans.
'What is he shouting about though?'
'No idea,' Frans shrugged as he then lowered his electric window a few centimetres to allow him to listen to their voices a little more clearly.
'He isn't speaking in Dutch, well, not proper Dutch, it is some kind of street talk I think, a mixture of different languages.'
He lifted the glasses to his eyes and refocused on their identified target.
'Some of the street gangs are made up of immigrant kids and teenagers from many different countries and they develop their own way of speaking with each other, it is like a form of recognition, like their own identity.'
Rey sniffed.
'Oh yeah, since when did you become such an expert?'
'I keep up to date you know, I read that the Dutch authorities are sending police officers and teachers on courses where they learn to adapt to street culture, they are taught to respect the youth gangs. There is no tolerance for intolerance in this part of the world my friend.'
With a sneer and a sideways glance, Rey arched an eyebrow at Frans.
'Are you having a laugh?'
'No, not at all, I read about one officer who was beaten up by a pair of street kids. He was taught how he should have approached them, to shake hands with the leader of the group to show respect and gradually gain their acceptance. These groups are highly hierarchical and you can achieve a lot if you get their leader on your side.'
'Now that sounds familiar!'
Frans chuckled at the parallel that Rey had hinted at; their own organisation was a highly ordered group beneath the jurisdiction of a single leader, their
Sigulah
.
'Look, you can see from the way they move about that our friend is the alpha male in this little trio. We have ourselves a leader!'
Rey shook his head slowly and sat back, nestling into the backrest of his seat.
'Perhaps we should negotiate with him to get the ring back rather than just taking it by force?'
A grin appeared on Frans' face beneath the rubber field glasses.
'Something like that I am sure.'
Rey looked up and down the street; he could see no-one else about.
'Wherever he's going next, he needs to get going soon, I'm starting to get hungry.'
The voices from the group echoed down the street and Frans could now discern the words easily. He nestled the binoculars into the centre console.
'I think he may have heard you, he's talking about where he'll see them tomorrow.'
They watched as the youth they had identified as 'their man' suddenly leapt onto one of his friends and placed him into a headlock, hooting loudly and laughing as they tumbled about. Just as quickly, he released his captive with a shove to further fits of giggling from their other comrade.
After a moment of shouted exchanges they each raised a hand to the driver of the BMW, the powerful engine starting to rev intermittently as the driver pumped the accelerator.
The tyres suddenly squealed urgently as the clutch was abruptly released and eventually gaining purchase, the wheels shot the car forwards to speedily accelerate past Frans and Rey a second later.
Using the mirrors of their car they could see the red glow of brake lights as the car swerved acutely around the corner of the junction further behind them and the interior of the Volkswagen became silent as the now malevolently attentive occupants watched their prey blithely milling about on the pavement.
Frans and Rey were both immediately thankful as their target moved away from the other two and started heading in their direction on the opposite side of the road. He turned about but kept walking backward, lifting both arms high and shouting some kind of chant to his friends who trilled in amusement as they wandered off to their end of the road.
'Let's just take him,' Rey said impatiently.
'Did he have the ring when you saw him at the window?'
'If he doesn't have it on him we'll have to follow him and confront him at some point anyway. I really cannot be arsed to traipse all over town after this little shit. I'm hungry; my stomach is starting to rumble. Come on, he's almost level with us, let's just do it. You follow up just in case I need backup.'
Before Frans could respond, Rey had flung open the door and exited the car.
Frans sighed and nimbly hopped out. The youth had not paid any attention to a couple of middle-aged men exiting the car across the street. He did not pay any attention as one of the men crossed the road to fall into step a few metres behind him or as the other shorter man kept pace with him on the opposite pavement.
In fact, his attention to anything rapidly melted into oblivion as a vicious blow to the back of his head made an explosive impact between the base of the skull and the first vertebrae, violently shaking his brain and upper spinal cord, bouncing and rebounding that most important organ of consciousness against the bony interior of its protective cocoon, the concussion rendering him senseless to the point of complete blackout.
Frans saw the youth's head snap forward from Rey's carefully aimed punch, the full weight of his comrade's body sending a shuddering knock-out blow into his victim via the points of the first two connecting knuckles.
It was not easy to get the punch just right, a surgically applied percussion rather than a blundering hammer blow, especially when the recipient probably weighed less than two-thirds of the assailant and the danger of overkill was high. Too much force and there was a risk of major and long-lasting damage to the lobes of the brain dealing with sight, smell, taste, kidney function, hearing, and respiration. The so-called rabbit-punch could be used to lethal effect and was never to be underestimated.
After a short stagger, the youth collapsed upon rubbery legs and sprawled onto the pavement face up. Rey was immediately upon him and dragged him into the small recess of an apartment entrance. Frans jogged over to the huddled pair, excitedly grinning.
'How's he doing?'
Still kneeling down, Rey did not look up but kept rummaging through the pockets of their catch, safely depositing items into his own jacket.
'His breathing is a bit shallow but he'll live, although he may be tongue tied for a couple of hours once he wakes up.'
'Do you have the ring?'
Rey's left hand reached into his own pocket from which he extracted their prize, holding it aloft pincered between his finger tips.
'Found and delivered, just like the man promised.'
Taking the ring gently, Frans held it up and gazed at it for a while, the street light highlighting the cast silver symbols against the black painted recesses.
'Beautiful!'
'We also have a couple of chunky gold rings, heavy but not aesthetic, a gold chain with decorative pendant, some smokes, a disposable lighter, some chewing gum, a mobile phone, a lock knife and around seventy Euros with change. The guy's wallet has an ID card and some scribbled notes with what appear to be mobile numbers written on them, not much else. We'll keep hold of the wallet, dump the rest of this shit and drop the cash into a charity box. He can keep his earring and eyebrow studs.'
Rey stood up and sighed, looking at Frans forlornly.
'Can we please go and get some food now? I'm famished!'
Frans gave him a couple of sharp slaps on the shoulder.
'My friend, it's on me, all you can eat!'
The end of the week is nigh -
For Jackson Revere, each Friday now represented yet another calendrical marker in the steady countdown to the end of an era, albeit a largely personal era. He would soon be retiring from the Library Services of the Central Intelligence Agency; the prospect of erstwhile working weeks consisting entirely of blank days admittedly causing him some trepidation. His tenure within the company - as it was colloquially known - had been consistent and mostly assured, but the significance of his work had waxed and waned along with the preoccupations of the serving presidential executive.
Supping his take-out cinnamon latte from one hand and adolescently swinging his battered tan saddle-back leather briefcase in the other, he wandered the last leg of the journey through the maze of corridors to his office in the main building of the CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Musing on his lack of briefings and meetings for the forthcoming day, Jackson reflected on the recent changes within the organisation and considered that in spite of his reservations, retirement was the right decision.
Like all good civil servants, he had remained ostentatiously apolitical for the duration of his career and despite his current secondment his section had largely withstood the purges, reorganisations and politically motivated dilemmas to be expected of over three decades in government. However, perhaps in accordance with his relatively uneventful residence the respect which his particular office had initially been accorded had steadily declined.
Stretching from the benign morality and human rights interests of the office of Jimmy Carter, through the cold war arms race of the Reagan years, the inference of irrelevance had ultimately been engendered by the Bush dynasty's self-fulfilling prophecies of fundamentalism which had only been temporarily rebutted during the apparently profligate Clinton administration.
With some resignation, Jackson approached the electronic entry door to the open plan office space that housed his team where his seniority was implied by experience rather than expressed by rank; as it was, the authority of the old lion was inevitably on the wane and his territory encroached upon by chieftains who were intent on expanding their own domains.
Standing before the door tag reader with both hands full, he bent forward slightly and dodged his torso back and forth so that the identification card hanging about his neck danced about in front of the magnetic card reader. Eventually it brushed past at just the right angle and a shrill electronic beep indicated that entry had been granted.
It was a fact that his specialisation was now regarded as defunct, subsumed by a proliferation of integrated sections and unified teams as a result of the agency's renewed strategic goals. The remaining members of his team would be migrated to and merged with other departments, the names of which were at least slightly less ambiguous than the one they were coming from; 'OSINT/SOCPOL/FSE - Department of Sociological Politics, Office of Fraternal Society Ecology'.
Jackson's last five years had been spent seconded to the OSC, the Open Source Centre established under the auspices of the Office of The Director of National Intelligence; a discrete staff reporting to the CIA Deputy Director. It had been something of a sideways move for him and the organisation itself had been inaugurated to bridge some of the jurisdictional complexities between the CIA and the FBI, notwithstanding the territorial disputes between the myriad of other open source intelligence gathering centres.
Since its inception, its primary functions had included data collection, analysis and research, training and information technology management to support government-wide access and application. Information was routinely collected from the internet, public and private domain databases, the media, geospatial data, photos and commercial imagery, all on behalf of the intelligence community for use by the military, law enforcement agencies and civil administrations.
Classed as a professional position, his job title of 'Librarian' did little to convey the scope and general oddity of his particular area of expertise, highly specialised in one particular and quite narrow field of world culture. Certainly, it did not reflect the great academic knowledge which he possessed or the extent of his long service, acting only to emphasise his lack of interest in promotion, the numerous offers of which he had assiduously declined.
Jackson knew that he had already ascended and descended the highest peak of his professional career, in fact, that particular mountain had been climbed near the very beginning of his employment. During the early years of Reagan's term of office he had been instrumental in collating the data that was used to provide the intelligence for the State Department and other interested offices of the US government in the 'Propaganda Due' affair; the 'P2' Masonic Lodge.
Operating under the jurisdiction of the Grand Orient of Italy until 1976 when its charter had been withdrawn, it had been labelled as a
black lodge
; constitutionally illegal in Italy and suddenly a source of fantastical newspaper headlines around the world once the collapse of the Vatican affiliated
Banco Ambrosiano
became public knowledge.
The ensuing run of deaths of a number of high profile international bankers in what were routinely described as 'mysterious circumstances' had filled countless newspaper column inches, the tenuous Masonic connections guaranteed to render a kitsch infamy to the scandal. Jackson felt that had such an end been visited upon the protagonists of the recent global banking crisis, cheers of delight would have been elicited from the general public rather than just conspiratorial fascination.
Although he had been lauded for his work, his departmental section's specialisation in so-called occult groups and their influence on modern politics and society had always been viewed with some disdain and misconception. Just under a decade ago he had once been treated to the folksy wisdom of perhaps the most famous member of probably the most infamously kitsch secret society.
Yale 'Bonesman' President George W. Bush had visited the agency's Langley headquarters during his first term and in his cornbread Texan drawl had jokingly characterised Jackson's section as an 'eccentric great-uncle', indicating that it was useful when some obscure academic fact needed to be checked but otherwise considered as potentially embarrassing, especially at social functions.
At the time, Jackson had been obliged to humour the remark; although he had fought a career long action to repudiate the irrational antipathy that so often regarded and labelled his office as an 'in joke'. When the opportunity was available, Jackson would often remind detractors that the Ku Klux Klan had been founded along fraternal lines by veterans of the Confederate army in 1865 and had been formalised as such with a national and state infrastructure during its second incarnation just after the initiation of the First World War.
Notwithstanding the fact that Jackson was himself an African-American, faces often grew solemn and contrite when confronted by a black man with an incisive knowledge of the effectiveness of such a fraternity in preaching racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, especially as was evident in the Southern States where acts of terror often took the form of lynchings, murders and other violent activities.
As a consequence of the modern approach to characterising and classifying terrorist organisations, regardless of whether they were foreign or domestic, Jackson had seen his responsibilities sliced up and apportioned to other avowedly dynamic agencies. The concepts of intrigue and perfidy had been traduced by association with conspiracy theorists and had been replaced by much more pejorative nouns such as
fundamentalism
and
radicalism
.
As usual, he was first into his office and as he plodded through the dim and quiet open-plan space to his desk the overhead lights automatically flickered on, illuminated at the behest of motion detectors employed in an effort to reduce the electricity consumption of the massive office complex.
Dumping his coffee cup and briefcase onto the tidy desk surface, he draped his jacket over the back-rest of his chair before dragging it out and lumping down in the seat, sighing in bored anticipation of the day to come as he reached forward to power up his computer.
The flat screen of his monitor brightened into life, displaying a blue hued image of the OSC tessellated cube logo before the machine connected with the Library Services network and prompted him for his login. Extracting his identity card from the holder slung around his neck, he pulled the keyboard towards him and inserted the credit card sized plastic wafer into a slot before tapping in his personal identification number as requested.
Jackson's personal workspace loaded onto the screen and he eased back in his chair to scan the display for items of interest hidden between the generic dross of inter-departmental communications, system maintenance announcements and pre-emptive task reminders.
The most important screen window was a list of 'hits' produced by 'trawl vectors' which directed the incredibly powerful computers available to the OSC to constantly scan through the intricately spun spider web of the internet, locating items that matched specific criteria and triggering a notification flag for each event. The flags were promulgated to the appropriate intelligence sections and hits from the over-night run regularly provided a back log of messages to be examined and assessed.
Scanning through the list of updates Jackson's attention was suddenly spiked by a rather subtly entitled automatic mail from one of the open source data collection sections. He flicked the mouse pointer over the entry and double-clicked to open it.
One of the major responsibilities of the OSC was to collect what was described as 'latent data' and huge amounts of information could be methodically and automatically extracted directly from the World Wide Web. Quite recently, some apparently innocuous internet offers of cheap cigarettes had furnished evidence of a highly organised smuggling ring which had been extremely useful to the Treasury and Justice Department's Alcohol and Tobacco Bureaus.
Individually, each department and agency was deficient in the availability of the human resources, the technical competency and the financial budget necessary to monitor the electronic vastness of cyberspace and the world media channels; however, the OSC had been given the mandate to do it for them. The point was to objectively collect, collate and submit as much data as possible which might warrant further investigation after careful analysis by the appropriate interested parties.
It was not just obscure electronic message boards or internet chat rooms that provided the fertile fields in which the seeds of sedition could grow into the first shoots of insurrection. Since the days of J. Edgar Hoover the FBI had regularly monitored the borrowing habits of the population via the national public book repositories and in modern times so the OSC could ascertain the purchasing proclivities of citizens both home and abroad via direct information exchange with the largest online media retailers and auction sites. This represented the heavily mechanised coal-face of data mining so necessary to discover the few raw diamonds buried within the millions of tons of rubble.
Reading through the summary text of the mail, Jackson took in every detail as his reactions morphed steadily from mild surprise to absolute astonishment, his body leaning forward expectantly. A publication flagged as highly sensitive had been placed for sale on eBay, the world's largest online auction site. The notification that a flagged document had suddenly appeared in the public domain was not entirely unusual, Jackson himself had instantiated a number of watches for documents that were of interest for his work, however, this particular flag had been inherited from previous incarnations of the library system and to his amazement it had originally been set in 1946. Most curious of all, the sensitive publication in question was an antiquarian book printing from 1735.
Jackson slowly sat back in his chair and softly blew out the air from his puffed cheeks. Maybe this Friday was not going to be as dull as he had initially imagined. A hundred and one questions were already formulating in his head and he was eager to investigate the appearance of such an oddity. First things first though, Jackson reached for his desk phone and started dialling the extension of the sourcing section referenced in the header details.
The phone trilled in his ear a couple of times before it was abruptly answered.
'Dee-See-Ell-Ten-Eleven, Casper!'
The greeting was instantly recognisable to Jackson as was the designation for the data collection centre concerned with retail and auction site internet searches.
'Casper, this is Jackson up in FSE.'
The voice immediately changed from mild irritation to relaxed familiarity.
'Hey Jackson! I haven't heard from you in a while. Aren't you retiring? Did the Freemasons finally get to you?'
Jackson coughed a guttural laugh at the often voiced but collegial sarcasm, although he was keen to get straight to the point.
'Yeah, something like that, look, I received a trawl vector flag overnight, I'll send you the key reference, I need a complete inception genealogy, a parent trace as far back as you can go and all child references you can locate, it looks like there is some archive material that may need to be retrieved as there are no resource links on the flag profile. Will you do that for me?'
'Yeah, sure, it's not like I have a list of things to do as long as my arm. Give me a call in an hour or so if I haven't sent it to you by then, and Jackson, we should meet up for lunch in the canteen some time soon, you can tell me all about who has been black-balled in the White House staff recently.'