Death Cry. James Axler

Philboyd chipped in, “we know that the code is alphanumeric and that it uses uniform block placement to disguise any natural patterns that might be there. Maybe if we drop some of the letters and transpose others…”

      “And stand on our heads and rub our stomachs,” Brigid added.

      Philboyd scratched at his head absently. “That might help, too,” he admitted.

      Lakesh took them both in with a kindly look. “We’ll break it, my friends,” he assured them calmly. “Just let’s all take things logically, one step at a time.

      “And the first step,” he added firmly, standing up and feeling the twinge in his joints where he had been hunched over the computer terminal too long, “is to make everyone a cup of tea so we can all retain our sense of focus.”

      A few minutes later, as the three of them sat nursing mugs of tea, Cerberus’s resident communications expert, Donald Bry, left his post as the day shift began and came across the room to join them.

      “I’ve worked up a quick program that you can use to reverse selected batches of the coded sequence,” he explained, brandishing a shiny CD with the words Reverse decoder scrawled across it in permanent marker.

      Lakesh reached across and took the CD, thanking Bry as he did so. “We’ve thought of reversing every other sequence, but it didn’t generate any definite patterns,” he told the communications man, “but this will open up more options, I’m certain.”

      Bry nodded. “All we can do is try, right?” he told them, trying to buoy their spirits.

      Her hands clasped around the warm mug of tea, Brigid nodded. “Thanks, Donald,” she said, feeling the cold ache of tiredness creeping over her and clutching the mug tighter to stave it off.

      Lakesh stepped across to a free terminal and began running Bry’s program from the CD, while Brewster Philboyd transferred a copy of the recovered hard drive across for him to work with.

      Bry stood behind Lakesh as he began typing instructions out at the keyboard. “Maybe if you reversed every third or fourth or, I dunno, tenth part of the string,” Bry suggested.

      Lakesh’s brilliant mind was already several steps ahead. “I’m adding something to your program,” he told Bry. “A little randomizer so that we can test different parts of the coding in different ways. That should save us quite some time, assuming this provides a key to open the files.”

      Still sitting beside Philboyd, Brigid felt Lakesh’s words wash over her as her eyelids began to get heavier. The steady rhythm of clicking computer keys had an oddly calming effect as she closed her eyes and began thinking, for no particular reason, about a game she used to play in her childhood that involved chasing boys to kiss them, much to their disgust. Eyes closed and her breathing deep and regular, Brigid smiled at the memory.

      T HE CAVE WAS ALMOST entirely dark, the only light source coming from the faint glow of a computer screen. Five men had come there to confer, away from prying eyes.

      “Somebody has tapped into the Keyhole orbital comsat,” Rock Streaming explained to the others as they stood together in a tight circle. Rock Streaming was a tall man in his early twenties, with long black hair tied in a ponytail and light brown skin the color of milky coffee. He had a wide forehead and a wide, flat nose beneath dark, intelligent eyes. He wore boots and combat pants with a long, tan-colored duster worn open across his bare chest. Tribal tattoos could be seen beneath it, dotted across his wide chest, swirls and black flames surrounded by curlicues.

      The other men in the cave bore the signs of similar ethnicity, with café-au-lait skin, dark hair and flat noses, and the younger ones had harsh, bold tattoos striping the sectors of bare skin that they displayed.

      One of the older men nodded sagely. His face displayed a tangled beard, as dark as his messy hair, and he was dressed in a simple loincloth, leaving the rest of him, including his feet, bare. A strange-looking cuplike object was tucked into his waistband, connected to a long section of twine. “Have you secured the feed?” he asked, his voice a low mutter.

      Rock Streaming nodded, flexing his fingers for a moment like a prestidigitator warming up for his act. “They don’t know we’re there, Good Father, I guarantee it.”

      The older man nodded once more, his eyes distant as he considered the implications of the young man’s statement. “Where is the link?” he asked after a moment. “Where is it that you are monitoring?”

      The long tails of the duster coat whipped behind him as Rock Streaming strode across the cavern to the quietly humming laptop. He crouched, displaying uncanny balance as he dropped to rest on pointed toes, and tapped at the keyboard for several seconds. “The old United States,” he replied as a satellite image appeared to one side of the main display on the terminal. As Rock Streaming worked the keys, labels flashed up on-screen, identifying different parts of the image. “A place called Bitterroot in the area known as Montana by the old mapmakers.”

      Another of the men spoke then, addressing his question to Rock Streaming. Like Good Father, this man was older than the other three, with a clumpy beard and flecks of gray appearing in his tangled hair. He wore a waistcoat over his chest and rounded belly, with grubby shorts, and had also left his feet bare. His gray eyes held a quality of tremendous age that seemed somehow out of place in a human being. “And you are sure that they have no inkling that you are monitoring them?” he asked, his voice the low rumble of a distant storm. “You are sure? ” he emphasized.

      Rock Streaming nodded, looking up from his crouching position before the glowing laptop screen. “These Americans have no idea that I’m watching them, Bad Father,” he said with certainty.

      One of the tattooed young men spoke up, his tone respectful to the older tribesmen but still proud of his contemporary. “They say that to be hacked by Rock Streaming is to be caressed by a secret lover, Bad Father,” he assured the old man in the vest. “The system cries out for more but refuses to speak of the tryst to its operators.”

      Bad Father nodded, his lips pressed together in a thin line. “Let me know of any developments,” he instructed Rock Streaming. Then he turned away in unison with Good Father, and the pair headed toward the tunnel that led out of the cave.

      Still crouching at the glowing laptop monitor, Rock Streaming turned to his two remaining colleagues and nodded once in silent acknowledgment. In the linear, subjective world, the time was coming.

       Chapter 5

      The breakthrough finally came two days later, when geologist Mariah Falk recognized a sequence of digits tucked away in the streams of coded information as an old-fashioned grid reference. As soon as she pointed it out, Lakesh slapped his forehead for being so stupid as to not notice it before.

      “But where is this coordinate referencing?” he asked her as they sat together in the cafeteria that sometimes doubled as a meeting hall for the Cerberus personnel.

      Brigid sat with them, prodding a fork through a yellow swirl of scrambled eggs on her plate. “Let me see,” she suggested, looking at the deciphered location code on Lakesh’s printout.

      Mariah, a large woman who, while not especially attractive, had an ingratiating smile and an amazingly resilient personality, closed her eyes tightly as she tried to work out the reference numbers. Her arms moved before her, gesturing up and to her right for a few moments before she opened her eyes and spoke. “Northwest Russia somewhere, I think. I’d need to see a map to get you any closer than that, though,” she admitted.

      “Great,” Brigid muttered disconsolately, “more snow.”

      Lakesh was already standing, and he took in a hearty breath as he looked at his companions. “If Mariah is right, we can use this system to decrypt the contents of the computer and find out what it is we’ve been looking at for the past five days.”

      It took another half day to write the decryption software and run the program through the files they had found, and even then parts of it appeared