Jessa Ch. 15

Erich's scoff had a tinge of bitterness to it, but his voice betrayed nothing. "I never wanted to be an Agent. Like hell I was going to go through life without the pleasure of women. Once you're an agent, if they catch you at even a one-night stand, you can get slapped with interminable desk duty. Can you just imagine women all over the countryside being put in jeopardy like you were with Renik?"

"But Torah," Jessa whispered.

"Yeah, well, like I said, Torah plays by the exceptions, not the rules, and while he may not have as much power as his father did, he's got power enough."

Jessa glanced at Torah, but he still seemed to be sleeping, and Erich betrayed no concern over whether he heard the comments. She decided this must have been something they'd hashed out some time ago, and maybe explained the mixture of emotions Erich seemed to have toward her. "Frankly," Erich continued, "What you said in Paris explained some stuff. Or at any rate made more sense that what we'd been told. It's no secret among the Circles that we're in deep genetic shit, but of the entire team in Dusseldorf, Torah should have been the least likely candidate for marriage. Being an Agent is a hell of a lot more than just spy games and shoot-em-ups. There are far more desk jockeys than field agents. Any of them would have been a better candidate than Torah. Hell, I bet Drau wouldn't even recognize some of them as agents, let alone some outsider trying to get leverage over an Agent."

Erich scoffed bitterly. "They had the audacity to suggest that if it went well, other Agents would be allowed to marry or take mistresses. Hell, the Brits do, and Jacq and some of his men. But obviously it was only to hide the real reason that you and Torah needed to be together."

"Erich, why did you leave the Security Forces, then, if that's what you wanted?"

He eyed her for a long time through the mirror, then sighed. "Drau. He pulled me out and made me an offer. Then he made clear that there was only one answer to the offer. I still don't know why. I was a couple of years behind Torah in training, but I knew of him, knew he'd been given the elite team even though he was barely out of training, knew I could work with him." He shrugged. "I figured it had to do with politics. Torah was deep into that because of his father. And Drau, well, it goes without saying. I wasn't interested, so I admit I didn't ask enough questions, especially at first, when Drau seemed to want to pick my brain about the Special Forces stationed in Berlin, the officers I worked under."

"But he was on the Council. Surely, he would have access to troop rosters, ranking officers, all of that," she protested.

"That's what I mean. What he was after, as far as I could tell, went deeper. And I suspect he picked me because of my boyish charms... And my ability to blend into the woodwork when people are talking carelessly about things they really should keep hidden."

"Well, I can't speak to the other, but you certainly do have boyish charms," Jessa agreed, earning an elfin smile from Erich for the first time in a long time. She smiled in turn, but then quickly returned to the more serious matter at hand. "Do you think he got what he wanted from you?"

Erich shrugged. "I don't know. I gave him mostly drivel, true but meaningless, least as far as I knew. Once I was confident I could trust Torah, we discussed more of what I'd heard and seen, but neither of us could figure out exactly what Drau was angling for. Most of the time, Drau has me sitting in Dusseldorf monitoring Special Forces transmissions and translating or deciphering communications. As you so accurately deduced, I am highly fluent in a number of languages, though apparently not as fluent - and accent-free - as I thought."

Jessa ducked her head. "It's only because I was listening for it. It took me a long time to learn how to listen for the sounds without getting caught up in the words and nuances and double-entendres."

"Maybe you should have been a spy or Council Agent," Erich suggested, his face totally serious in the mirror.

"I guess I am, now. What else can you tell me about the Forces? Help me understand. What was your rank?"

Erich shifted into a more comfortable position and launched into a monotone recitation that Jessa suspected was intended to hide his feelings and perceptions of the world he'd been immersed in during the waning years of his training and then young career. He entered the service at the usual age of eighteen - following the six years of preparatory training and schooling - as a lieutenant, but was quickly promoted to captain, though he was never assigned a unit to command, even from a distance. His duties consisted of serving higher ranking officers, allegedly as a secretary of sorts for confidential matters, but behind the scenes, as much for his verbal and body language skills. In occupied Berlin, for example, many of the troops were Berliners, and Erich's command of German sent him hobnobbing with the enlisted men in beer clubs, checking on morale should anyone inquire, though his commanders made no secret of the fact that he expected him to produce more "juicy" rumors at least occasionally.

Over the next couple of hours, he detailed the rankings and general duties of each position, and the cities where the Command Centrals were located. Jessa's education had merely mentioned Special Forces as people charged with maintaining borders and refugee movements. They might occasionally perform some security-related service for the small towns that served as food and goods hubs to the largely rural populations, and she now knew that they were an erstwhile presence in the occupied sections of old cities that stood as Council Seats. But as Erich listed off the old cities that were being used as Security Force bases, she began to wonder if there were any old cities that didn't have occupied sectors. His list included St. Etienne, which was where they had presumable sent their cell phones on their way back to Dusseldorf, and Toulouse which they were headed in the general direction of now. She knew there had been tense negotiations with refugees from both Spain and Italy, so perhaps she should not have been surprised that Special Forces maintained a presence in border cities along the southern front. Or for that matter, along the northern seas, not really that far from where Summer's End had celebrated the coming of age of Elites each year. It was a very poorly kept secret that what was now Russia coveted access to more southerly waters and it wasn't going to get that through the Black Sea or the Mediterranean any more. But more to the point, why Berlin? Why Munich? Why Geneva? Those weren't on borders. And just how expansive were the Special forces?

"So how many people are in the special forces?" Jessa asked with foreboding.

"One point five million, according to internal numbers," Erich replied.

Jessa's jaw dropped. "Where does the money come from?"

"Ah, that's the question to ask," Torah cut in. Jessa spun around to look at him as he moved his seat into an upright position, looking totally refreshed.

"I hate you," she muttered, and he grinned.

"Maybe you just took the wrong programs. Deep Meditation instead of Astrophysics for example?"

"I can find my way to North America from the middle of the ocean," she argued.

"Yes, and you can tell me why Saturn has rings. Doesn't really help at the moment."

"And if I can tell you where the money comes from?"

"Now that would be useful," he conceded.

She unbuckled her seatbelt and squirmed into a more comfortable position, then quickly re-buckled it when she glanced up and saw Erich glaring at her in the rear-view mirror. As she thought about it, if he was going to drive with his eyes on the mirror more than the road, the seatbelt was probably a good idea. She dove into a long, involved answer.

"When I was trying to find my way around the Councilary Web, I found myself tripped over onto the dark web on more than a few occasions. There were a lot of transitory black market and contraband sites. It dawned on me that it was too often to be a coincidence. The links were usually hidden, not old broken links that had been redirected."

"If they were hidden, how did you find them?" Erich questioned skeptically.

Jessa looked at him with a frown, then caught herself. "I was mostly looking at the code, not the screen shots. I was more interested in the... intent, I guess you could say. What the coder was trying to accomplish with the site." She sighed, trying to think of how to explain. "The Councilary Web is informational, and minimally so at that. Like a Council's calendar page. If you have a reason to know, you go straight to the page. There aren't going to be any cutesy flowers or scrolls. Just a grid of dates and a bare outline of agendas. The agendas don't link to anything because either you are supposed to know what's going on, or you're not supposed to know anything about it. When you look at the code for a page like that, you can tell at a glance. So when I found a page that wasn't straightforward, it would make me curious."

"Of course it did," Torah muttered, but he readily signaled her to continue.

Jessa shrugged. "The more complex the coding, the more likely there were to be hidden links. I had to follow them," she argued defensively and Erich snickered.

"Which did you prefer, the hookers or the gambling dens?" he chided.

Jessa smiled to herself. "Actually, neither. There was one site I found of particular interest. You had to find the 'doorway' to get in, and that portal kept moving, but behind the doorway, it was huge. And it felt like you could buy anything on that site. The currency is a sort of reinvention of the old Bitcoin, and I won't even begin to try to tell you how they've hidden that 'banking' site."

"So how did you keep finding this site?" Torah interrupted, apparently well away of the underground currency. "Was it like an algorithm, or something?"

"No, actually. I just learned where to look for the links to the doorway. On the Councilary web, the graphic objects are almost always embedded rather than called from a library, one of the reasons a heavily, but unnecessarily, graphic page seemed out of place, especially if it is a page that regularly requires updating." She shrugged. "So I'd look at the code, and there would be a hidden link, hidden in the middle of a picture, except the link 'hit' spot would be barely more than a pixel or two smack in the left eye of a person in the picture. The link would take you to the doorway. But to get through the door, you had to have an account and password. You couldn't get that until you'd given them a verifiable Bitcoin account. With a substantial balance."

"Do I want to know how you accomplished that?" Torah asked.

Jessa bit her lip. "Probably not."

Torah shook his head, but encouraged her to continue. "So this Bitcoin is where the money is coming from?"

"Not directly. It's the stuff that's for sale on the site, I think."

"Like drugs?" Erich offered.

"I would think that if they were selling drugs it would be in a more wholesale way than what is available on this site. There are those too, and it might be worth pursuing. They would certainly have the infrastructure to mass produce in all those cities. I was thinking more of antiquities, art, that sort of thing, though."

"Antiquities?" Erich scoffed. "You mean like mummies for sale! Get real."

"I've seen it, have you?" she demanded.

"You've seen a website. Who'd pay for such a thing, anyway, in this day and age."

"People with too much money and too little to do," Torah muttered. "What kinds of things and for what kind of money?" he asked.

"Pretty much anything you can imagine from anywhere in the Mediterranean area. Imagine every museum in Italy being ransacked. And just about anything left in the Middle East after the NeoCrusades. The Grand Egyptian Museum. Even whole slabs of painted stone from the Egyptian tombs." She took a deep breath. "I even saw a piece of the Rosetta stone."

Erich snorted and shook his head in derision. "You saw a picture of a piece of the Rosetta stone. Anyway, I thought it was still in Britain, so it was probably a chunk of the copy they made for the Egyptians."

Jessa shook her head. "The stone was secretly in transit to Egypt by a replica of an ancient sailing ship. To be formally repatriated; you know, the ship would sail dramatically up the Nile to Memphis and deliver the stone. It had supposedly reached the Mediterranean when Alexandria and the other port cities like Rosetta were closed by the pandemic. By the time the captain realized they were never going to be able to enter Egypt, the Suez and Gibraltar were blockaded. Rumor has it that the people on the ship anchored it and fled ashore in skiffs. It's doubtful they ever made it back north. The story proposed on the website was that the ship broke loose in a storm and crashed ashore somewhere, smashing the stone. I know it doesn't seem likely, but..."

"Even if you bought the thing, how would you ever know if it was real?" Erich complained.

"That's not really the point, is it?" Jessa snapped testily. "It's the money. And the fact that someone is going into the most dangerous part of this contaminated hemisphere, apparently with impunity."

"Or someone tore pictures out of an old encyclopedia," Erich pointed out.

Torah waved away Jessa's retort. "What are you suggesting?" he asked, turning toward her.

"Either someone with the protective equipment and medical resources of the Special Forces, or someone who knows there is no danger, other than an itchy mosquito bite."

"And maybe those two someones are the same," Torah concluded.

"You're buying this?" Erich blurted. "Is that why you're taking us into the heart of the dead zone?"

Torah shook his head at Erich in some unspoken communication. "How much money are we talking, here," he asked Jessa, though his eyes were on Erich.

Jessa closed her eyes, calculating. "Given the inventory I saw on the site, the apparent turn-over, allowing for maybe fifteen percent haggle reduction, the currency conversion... It might average out to eight hundred thousand Euros a month..."

"That's a drop in the bucket," Erich snorted.

"...From that one site. There are others. And other markets. Gems, gold, fossil fuels, tropical foods, spices. There was a site devoted to weapons - major weapons - that might have been recovered from the Middle East. Suppose the ancient Silk Road roared back into existence? Except without the pirates and roadside bandits. Torah, I've bought silk dresses and olives and mangoes in Paris. You offer someone a rich, rare luxury, they're often not too inclined to ask questions. Then there's opium from old Afghanistan or the Union of Stans, or whatever is left of that region."

Torah looked at Erich. "Do you want me to drive for a while," he asked so suddenly and incongruously, Jessa could only stare at him.

"Yes, because you're giving me one hell of a headache," Erich growled.

****

Jessa was dozing when the irregular thunking of the potholed road was replaced by the crunching of a gravel drive. She sat straighter in the seat, rubbing her eyes. Torah was still driving and Erich was asleep in the passenger seat. They were pulling up to another decrepit rural house. Torah pulled around to the back of the house to hide the car from whatever traffic wasn't driving up and down the old road. It actually didn't look like it had gotten all that much use back in the day, even.

"Wait here," he told her softly, though Erich immediately stirred and growled softly at the sight of the old house. She figured Erich must have taken the same sleep class as Torah to learn how to exist on just a couple hours of sleep for who knew how many days in a row. She was going to have to check into that and see if there really was such a program.

Despite Torah's orders, she climbed out of the car and studied the house. Was there some clue to indicate that it was occupied, at least occasionally? Wires draped down to the ground from a tilted utility pole near the highway. There wasn't as much vegetation as what covered the previous house, but this growth seemed no less invasive, even climbing inside through a broken window. She studied the yard about the house. There was no way the house could be on a sewer system after all these years, if it ever had. If it was on some kind of septic system, there was certainly nothing in the yard that was thriving from a drainage field that had seen active use. Yet once again, when Torah reappeared and waved them into the house, a handful of rooms in the house showed signs of frequent, if not continual occupancy. And this time, she could smell something hot and yummy baking in the oven. And yet, despite the welcoming interior, and a bottle of wine prominently displayed on the counter in an iced marble cooler, she found herself looking for the computer room. Torah pointed her toward a staircase leading down to the basement. Jessa gave an involuntary shudder, but technology was calling her name, and she trotted down the stairs, pleased to find, not only a computer room, but a bathroom. The bathroom even had a bud vase with a rose in it. Obviously, whoever had prepared the house for their arrival had been told to expect more than just the usual Agents. She stared at the rose and wondered ever so briefly if it was Jacq's way of forgiving her for everything she'd put him through. She decided to take it as that, even if it was simply meant to hold musty basement odors at bay.

She had barely fired up the server and satellite connection before Torah appeared with a glass of wine and plate of crackers and cheese for her. He remained, leaning over her shoulder, undoubtedly bored as she ran checks for malware, keystroke loggers and spyware. Anything she could think of that might betray their location, even if only by IP address. Through it all, Torah said nothing, though she became conscious of his warm, somehow minty breath falling softly on the juncture of her neck and shoulder. It reminded her of how long it had been since she'd seen a toothbrush, let alone toothpaste. She determined to find his stash and steal it before the sun rose again. She even smiled to herself over her evil plans as her fingers flew over the keyboard and she scanned the three large screens continuously.

Torah was insistently thrusting a thick slice of aged cheese, on a wondrously crunchy cracker, between her lips as she tried to speak around the obstacle. "There, shhhee," she exclaimed, shoving the cracker into her mouth to keep from having it crumble into her lap. Torah was already looking at the appropriate screen. Jessa clapped a hand to her mouth as if that could somehow capture the glorious flavor of cheese straight from the earthen vaults of the aging cavern. When she finally chewed and reluctantly swallowed, after a moment of worship on the center of her tongue, she pointed at the screen.

"That's fucking Tutankhamun," Jessa spluttered.

"Looks like a necklace to me," Torah pointed out.

"It's one of his pectorals, with his Prenomen or something," she said. "I can't remember what it's called, but I know it."

"Okay, well, since Erich isn't here, I'll be the skeptic. How do you know?"

She pointed at the screen with an impatient finger, as her other hand enlarged the image. "See that chip in the enamel?"

"The blue stuff?" he asked.

Jessa rolled her eyes. "Yes, the blue stuff. This was always photographed very carefully to hide the chip as best as possible. You know, vanity even 3000 years after the fact."

"Still not getting it," Torah replied, studying the screen, nonetheless.

Jessa tried to hide an impatient sigh. "In most any photograph you would find, you would have to look really, REALLY, close to see the tiny corner of the chip. If you had access to the photos any Egyptologist or curator would have taken, there would have been a full-on of the damage, to record it, so they wouldn't get blamed for it later. This is the sort of photo taken by someone who is just saying 'Here it is, take it or leave it.'