Tom Harper: The Book of Secrets

‘Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.’ The clerk reached inside the bag and pulled it inside out. ‘Nothing.’ He consulted the ledger. ‘There were forty before.’

The clerk glared at the moneyer. The moneyer stared at the master, who glanced anxiously at my father. Nobody thought to look at me – but that made no difference. I knew that the all-seeing eye of God was upon me, could feel His angry gaze. Sweat trickled down into my palm. The gulden became lead in my hand, bearing down the full weight of my guilt.

My hand opened. Perhaps it slipped, perhaps I wanted to let it go. The gulden spilled out, dropped at my foot and rolled away. Five heads craned to follow it across the stone floor, then slowly turned back to me. One was faster than the others. A stinging blow hit the back of my head and knocked me to the ground. Through my tears, I saw the clerk bend down to pick up the errant coin, dust it off and place it lovingly in the final square of its row. The last thing I remember before my father dragged me away was seeing him lick his pen to record the outcome in the vast ledger at his side.

My father beat me again that evening, thrashing me with his studded belt while he damned my sins to everlasting hell. I cried readily – stoicism only made him angrier. But as I bent over the chair and stared into the hearth, all I saw was an endless cascade of gold gulden, each one a bright fragment of perfection.

New York City

People used to have circles of friends, Nick thought: now they had lists. Thumbnail photographs tallied on a web page like a fighter pilot’s kills, or ladders of contacts displayed in real-time league tables of how recently you’d been in touch. Never mind how you felt: if you didn’t keep talking, your friends fell ruthlessly into social purgatory. Part of Nick found it unsettling, but he still used the programs. He was looking at one of those lists on the monitor in front of him now, at a green button flashing next to a highlighted name. The name had been anchored to the bottom of his list for months, down among the former colleagues, old classmates and vague friends-of-friends. But that didn’t begin to tell the story.

Gillian. Nick leaned back in his chair. His apartment was dark: the only light was the purple glow of the monitors on his desk, and at the opposite end of the room, an answering beacon where the unwatched television played a late-night movie. He’d longed for this moment for months: checked his cellphone, his voicemail, his instant messages and his different email accounts, even got his hopes up when the mailman came each day – a dozen ways to be ignored. And now here she was.

The cursor hovered over the green button, still flashing. Nick’s heart had kicked into overdrive. He took a deep breath to steady himself, tugged on the neck of his sweater to straighten it. He should have shaved. He clicked.

The scream ripped through him like a knife. His first thought was it must have come from the TV, but that was on mute. He waited a second for it to come again. Nothing. Had he imagined it? On screen, a grainy image had appeared in the window. It looked like wallpaper: a grey-white wall with small green Christmas trees stencilled on it. Or perhaps a curtain – the trees seemed to ripple and sway in front of the camera. The picture was so jerky it was hard to tell.

‘Gillian?’ he said to the microphone above his computer. ‘Are you there?’ He squinted into the camera. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ A sourness began to spread inside him. He should’ve known it would be a disappointment.

But someone must be there. He heard voices – men’s voices – and some sort of commotion. Suddenly, the Christmas trees shot back. A man’s face appeared – dark Mediterranean features squashed like a potato where the camera lens distorted it, a glowing cigarette jammed between his lips. There seemed to be splash of blood on his cheek – perhaps he’d cut himself shaving. Nick could see brown tiles and a small bathroom mirror over his shoulder.

The man shouted something furious that Nick couldn’t understand, then reached forward as if to drag Nick through the window. The hand filled the screen, blurry and pixellated but so vivid that Nick pushed back from the desk in panic. Then the image went black.

Nick looked at the screen, dazed. The video was blank, but the message panel was still open. For the first time, he noticed the two lines of text that had come through underneath.

use this. bear is the key

help me theyre coming

Beside it, a flashing icon showed that a file had been downloaded.

Naples, Italy

The black Mercedes prowled through the cobbled streets. The morning half-light made the world a grim place: men and women in sober coats and suits scurried to work under the clouds, sometimes glimpsing their reflections in oily puddles. Cesare Gemato watched them from the back seat of the car, through tinted windows that made the world almost black. He liked this time of day, this season. He’d lived all his life in the shadows.

A sudden squawk of opera broke the silence in the limousine – a tinny Pavarotti singing Puccini through a mobile-phone speaker. Gemato’s grandson had changed the ringtone when his back was turned; for all his undoubted power, Gemato hadn’t yet found a way to undo it.

The young man sitting beside him fished a phone out of the calfskin briefcase on his knee, spoke a few words, then passed it to Gemato.

‘Ugo,’ he said. ‘Si.’ Gemato listened. ‘Good. You found anything with her? The book?’

He frowned.

‘Is it possible he saw you on this machine?’ Through the window, he noticed a young woman in a white raincoat pedalling hard on a bicycle. Black hair tumbled down her back; the wind blew her coat taut against her body.

‘Send it to our friends in Tallinn. Find out who, where, what this man knows.’

He ended the call and passed the phone back to his assistant. That was the problem with doing favours, he thought, even for someone he owed as much as his patron. There was always one more thing to take care of.

‘Get me Nevado.’

New York City

Nick sat on the bench in the diner. His laptop lay open on the table, next to a sheet of paper and a vanilla milkshake in a stainless-steel shaker. At four in the morning the place was almost empty, but he liked coming here when he couldn’t sleep, liked the neon and chrome, the leatherette and Formica and the dollar-fifty bottomless cup of coffee. It felt authentic – though he knew he only thought that because a hundred Hollywood movies had perfected the fiction. Gillian had pointed that out to him.

Gillian.

He stared at the laptop. The Greeks who ran the diner weren’t so old-fashioned that they hadn’t installed wireless Internet when they noticed their customers drifting to the coffee shop down the street. Nick had been logged on for an hour, watching the screen with tired eyes to see if Gillian reappeared. Her name had leaped to the top of the list, but the icon beside it stayed grey, lifeless.

Last seen: 06 January 07:48:26

He sipped his shake. 7:48, that put her six hours ahead of him. Where was that – somewhere in Europe? What had she been doing there?

Help me theyre coming.

It had to be a joke. With Gillian, anything was possible. But if anything was possible…

Why would she go all the way to Europe to play a prank? He replayed the video in his head: the scream, the snarling face filling the screen, the hand reaching out to the camera. It hadn’t looked like a joke.

With Gillian, anything was possible.

And then there was the file she’d sent. He slid the printout across the table and studied it. He’d expected it to be the answer, some sort of punchline that would explain the whole charade. Instead, it only added confusion. There was no writing, just a black-and-white picture showing eight hand-drawn lions and bears in various poses: stalking, crouching, sleeping, roaring, digging, climbing. One of the lions sat up on its haunches and licked its jaws; it stared out of the page at Nick, holding his gaze, daring him to come closer.