Gary Gibson - Final Days

He looked around. ‘I’m here,’ he told her quietly, wary of Gibbs overhearing him. ‘I don’t see anything.’

‘It’s quite well hidden,’ she explained. ‘Look to your left, away from the cabin . . . there’s a boulder and some bushes. See them?’

Saul glanced to his left. ‘I see them.’

Then he spotted the shed, almost out of sight beyond the boulder. It was painted green, so nearly invisible among the tangled undergrowth.

The structure was in a semi-derelict state, leaning slightly to one side, and he pulled the door open only with some difficulty. Various tools hung from hooks, and the disassembled parts of a chainsaw lay scattered on a tarpaulin spread across the floor, so that he had barely enough room to squeeze inside and close the door behind him.

‘What am I looking for?’ he asked next.

‘All I know is that he kept some stuff in a floor-safe there. Maybe there’ll be something there to tell you where he’s gone.’

Saul bent down and quickly moved some of the chainsaw parts aside, then hauled away the tarpaulin to reveal a flat steel panel embedded in the concrete floor. ‘I’ve got it,’ he told her, ‘but there’s no external lock.’ Doubtless it needed a UP-coded password before it would open up. ‘Short of digging it out of the concrete, I can’t see any way to get inside.’

‘Maybe you won’t need to,’ she replied.

‘How so?’

‘Because if he was going to store anything in there, it would probably be a set of contacts, or the like.’

‘Yes, but if I can’t open the safe, I can’t get to them.’

‘Remember how there are back doors built into a lot of the commercial contacts. Maybe I can get you in through one of those. Are you physically close to the safe?’

‘I’m kneeling right over it, Olivia.’

‘Okay, I’ve got a data key that should do the trick, and I’m sending it to you now.’

An icon suddenly materialized, looking bright and cheery against the drab browns and greys inside the shed.

‘Got it. What next?’ he asked.

‘All you need to do is run it. If there are any contacts, or anything UP-compatible, in there, then they should open right up.’

Saul did as instructed, and a bright blue bubble popped into existence, hovering just above the floor-safe door.

‘I see something.’ He was suddenly excited. ‘Looks like you were right on the money.’

He touched the bubble and it expanded into a three-dimensional image of a filing cabinet. The wall of the shed cut through one side of it, shattering any illusion of solidity.

Saul pushed the shed door back open and peered in the direction of the cabin. Gibbs must be wondering where he’d got to by now.

He touched one finger to a drawer marked ALL, and it took mere moments to copy the complete contents of whatever data device was hidden in the safe over to his own contacts. Once he’d disengaged, the filing cabinet abruptly vanished in a cloud of animated smoke.

‘Thanks,’ he said, as he exited the shed.

‘Did you get anything?’ she asked.

‘I copied some data across, but I can’t check it out just yet. I’ll let you know what I’ve got later.’

He walked back around the front of the cabin and almost ran into Sheriff Gibbs, who had evidently come outside looking for him.

‘Find anything useful?’ the sheriff asked.

Saul gave him a sheepish grin. ‘Not a damn thing.’

Gibbs squinted at him, then scanned the line of trees amongst which the tool shed was hidden. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to tell me just exactly what it is you’re looking for?’

‘If I already knew that,’ Saul replied, ‘I wouldn’t need to be here at all.’

Gibbs gave him a frank stare, his whole demeanour radiating suspicion. ‘Yeah,’ he replied, ‘I guess not.’

That evening Saul checked into a Lakeside motel with a fine view of the mountains. He closed the blinds with a single spoken command, before summoning up the same filing cabinet he’d discovered in the tool shed. Some of its drawers refused to open, so he guessed they had been provided with extra security to guard whatever they might contain. Other, more easily accessible drawers contained merely junk: copies of scientific papers and back issues of journals, along with the random bureaucratic detritus of a lifetime.

Saul sat down on the edge of his bed, unable to fight a sense of disappointment. It wasn’t hard to guess that if there was anything that might help him find Jeff, it was hidden in one of the restricted drawers. He called Olivia and explained the problem.

‘Maybe you could forward the files to me?’ she eventually suggested.

Having sent them over, and now feeling obliged to wait for her to get back to him, he pulled on his shoes, thinking maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try and walk off some of his pent-up frustration.

The air outside was chill and sharp but, to his surprise, Saul found himself enjoying it. His mind felt clearer, more focused as he breathed in the fresh mountain air. He walked a few blocks until he came to the start of a nature trail, little info-bubbles popping up along its length as he approached. A faint white line joined the bubbles together, snaking upwards and over the crest of a hill.

He had supper later that evening in the hotel’s restaurant, where a TriView provided him with a selection of UP-compatible news feeds. Most were focused on volcanic activity near the Mariana Islands out in the Far East.

Olivia got back to him before he could watch any more. ‘I’m stumped,’ she told him, as he made his way back up to his room. ‘Whoever set up the encryption, they did a scarily good job. This is military-level work.’

‘You sound hurt.’

‘I am hurt,’ she replied. ‘It makes me feel like he didn’t trust me.’

Or maybe , thought Saul, he was trying to protect you . ‘Don’t you have any more keys or whatever that you can use?’

‘The tools I’d need to get past encryption that strong could only come from the ASI, and everything I can access from the work servers is tracked and tagged. My own security protocols would flag an unauthorized action and sound an alert.’

‘It’s funny how you’re suddenly worried about attracting the ASI’s attention, but just a little while ago you were feeling frustrated because you couldn’t get them involved.’

‘Yeah, well . . .’ She paused. ‘It’s different now. Now that I’m sure he’s alive.’

Her breathing had turned coarse and ragged as she made this last statement, and Saul guessed she was weeping.

‘Olivia?’

‘I’m sorry, Saul.’ She cleared her throat and, when she spoke again, she sounded a little calmer. ‘Looking at what you sent me reminded me of a detail I’d almost forgotten. I’m sorry I didn’t mention it before.’

‘Go on.’

‘There’s a man called Farad Maalouf,’ she explained. ‘When Jeff wouldn’t tell me where he was going, before he disappeared, he told me he’d make up for it. He said that, once he’d done whatever it is he had to do, he was going to take me to Newton, to see Farad. He said Farad had family there – and that we’d both be safe.’

‘Safe from what?’

‘I don’t know, Saul. I’m not really sure I even want to know.’

‘This Farad guy, do you know who he is?’

‘I met him about the same time I met Dan Rush, back at the Florida Array. He was another of Jeff ’s colleagues.’ She paused. ‘The thing that made me remember Maalouf just now is that he’s an encryption specialist. He’s well known in certain specialized technical fields. I couldn’t think at first why Jeff would need to hide something with military-grade locks on it, but then I remembered him talking about Maalouf and Newton and, with everything else going on, I wondered if maybe there was some connection with the files. It seemed strange he’d bring up Maalouf, of all people. And, even if there isn’t a connection, if there’s anyone that could break the encryption on those files, my guess is it would be Maalouf.’