Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

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?’

‘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.’