Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

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.

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.

Nick covered his mouthpiece. ‘It means they’ve got a network of zombie computers – machines they’ve infected with a virus – that they can get to all try to make connections to the FBI server at the same time.’ He thought for a second. ‘Imagine you’ve got a water fountain where people go and get a drink. As long as everyone takes his turn, no problem. Now imagine that a hysterical mob converges on it, all fighting to get a few drops of water at once. Eventually there are so many that they actually block up the pipe and no water can even get out. The pipe backs up, or breaks open, and the whole thing’s wrecked. That’s what they’re trying to do here.’

‘Will it work?’

‘It’s already pissed off the Feds,’ Randall’s voice said from the speakers. ‘Now they’re on to us as well.’

‘Do you think they can shut down the program?’

‘I doubt it. They need you to stay logged in.’

‘How come?’

‘So they can find out where you are.’

Two horses came around the bend in the road. Both riders wore chain-mail hauberks and carried lances. I could not see any insignia, though that would have meant little. Plenty of knights had lost their standards to the Armagnaken. I crouched lower in the undergrowth.

But the riders were only the vanguard. Behind them came a group on foot – men and women, walking together, laughing and talking. About two dozen of them. Many carried stout walking staffs and wore short capes, with pointed hoods raised against the autumn chill. It was a company of pilgrims, probably bound for the shrine of St Theobald near Strassburg.

With a breath of relief, I stepped out into the road. One of the riders saw us and spurred forward. I stood my ground and made the sign of the cross. He reined in just in front of me.

‘Who are you?’

‘Travellers on our way to Strassburg. Can we join your company?’

A fat priest with an officious face stepped out from among the pilgrims. ‘Can you pay?’

I paused, taken aback.

‘The road is dangerous.’ He pointed to the two riders. ‘We have hired these guards from our own pocket. If you wish to share their protection, you should contribute.’

Fear outweighed my sense of injustice. ‘I can contribute.’

He held out his hand. ‘Now.’

I reached inside my shirt and fumbled in the purse, trying by touch to find copper rather than gold. The pilgrim grabbed the coin that emerged, sniffed it, then pointed to Kaspar. ‘And one for him.’

‘When we arrive safely.’

The door banged open. Nick, who had been dozing, almost fell off his chair in surprise. Sabine stepped into the room with two more cans of Coke. On screen, Urthred and the Wanderer meandered in eccentric circles around the clearing, bathed in the silver light of an improbably bright moon.

‘Getting far?’

Nick rubbed his eyes. ‘I don’t know. What time is it?’

‘Four a.m.’

‘Damn.’ He snapped open the can, trying to remember something. Something he’d been thinking before he fell asleep. He was sure it had seemed urgent.

‘Once we’re done on the server, we’re going to have to get out of here pretty fast. You too. There are bad guys after us and you don’t want to be around when they show up.’

Sabine nodded. ‘I have a car here.’

‘Great.’

‘Nick?’ Randall’s voice barked out of the computer. ‘We’ve got a problem. They’ve figured out our weak link.’

Nick snatched up the headset and snagged it over his ear. ‘What do you mean, weak link?’

‘Gothic Lair. The way I set it up, this is the cut-out. They can’t penetrate the connection between DC and the game, or between the game and where you are. But there’s nothing to stop them coming inside.’

A rumble of hooves welled up through the speakers. In the clearing, the Wanderer looked around. Something was moving in the forest.

‘Oh, cute.’