Sentinel of Heaven (29 page)

The queen. 
Most powerful, because she is most motive.

Angela had
been speaking to her.  Angela; dark and damaged.  What had she said?

“She straddles
the checkerboard, Moira – she bestrides it.”

Don't you
mean a chessboard, Angela?
Moira asked her memory silently. 
Checkerboards
don't have queens.

She straddles
the checkerboard, the memory repeated.

Moira froze in
place with the next cherry inches from her lips, her eyes fixed on the middle
distance. 

What have
I read?

Straddling
checkerboard.

Unforget.
  No – don't simplify it!  Don't
assume you understand; the true meaning is obscured when you do!

Not one word
but three: “un for get”.

Eight
letters, two spaces.  Ten characters.

Moira dropped
the piece of fruit onto her desk, unmindful of what stain it might leave on the
surface, scrambling for her legal pad frantically.  She pawed through it with
sticky red fingers to the first blank page and wrote the words.

UN FOR GET

Almost
casually she watched as her hand moved itself, her mind blank.  It created a
grid with those blocky capitals on the second row.  On the top row over the
letters she wrote the numbers zero through nine; the two and the six were
positioned over the two spaces.

She extended a
column out to the left and wrote the two on row three, the six on row four. 
Then she filled in with the rest of the alphabet.  This was a table called a “straddling
checkerboard”.

The last two
spaces she made a period and a slash for the escape character – used to denote
that the items following it were supposed to be rendered as numbers and not
letters.  But probably not needed, no.  The message was short.

She skipped
down a line and paused.  Licking her fingers clean she opened the folder from
her laptop bag and drew out the copy of the photograph of the bible page, printing
the letters directly from it instead of relying on memory:

ETRNWORFNGQFF

Using the
table key she'd written, she converted it back into numbers:

895164453176133

Every “6” she
saw was the start of a pair – either 64 or 61. Too clever, too clever.  Angela's
birthday was the key.

So she wrote
it beneath, repeating:

895164453176133

671982671982671

Modular
addition was how the original encryption had been done in the example Moira had
found online what felt like a lifetime ago, so to undo it she'd have to do
modular subtraction.  If the number on bottom was larger than the number on
top, add ten to the top number and subtract.

Breathlessly
she went through the pairs, then checked her math again.

224282882294562

Here we
go.

Every “2” and “6”
was the start of a pair, so it'd be more like...

22 4 28 28 8
22 9 4 5 62

With aching
slowness, as if she were setting the final level on a house of cards, she
translated the numbers using the table:

COLLECTORS

Moira stared
unblinking for a long moment, then underlined it, then lay down her pencil
beneath it.

That isn't
a dog; that's the whole puppy mill right there.  That's the whole fucking
establishment.  Holy shit.

Moira felt the
giggles rising up and clamped a hand firmly over her own mouth until she got
them under control; she was still wheezing a bit in elation when she picked up
her forgotten cherry and ate it, licking her thumb to wipe up the juice from
her desk.

But look, said
the little voice.  Look.  Look again.

And Moira
looked again, at the copy of the photograph of the torn-out page.  Now that the
words were meaningful she could ignore them in favor of their placement on the
page.

The coded
string of letters was written over Revelations 6:4.

“un for get”
was written over Revelations 6:8.

“angela's
birthday - 6/7/1982” was much farther down the page, separate from the others,
written over Revelations 6:17.

She gathered
both her legal pad and the picture of the page into her lap protectively and
pulled up an online bible, King James Version, and navigated to Revelations chapter
six.

Verse four:
And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that
sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one
another: and there was given unto him a great sword.

Verse eight:
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death,
and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part
of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the
beasts of the earth.

Verse
seventeen (completely obscured on the picture by the written words and date):
For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

Alarm bells
were ringing in her head.  Who was this?  What investigation was this?

But she knew;
she already knew, despite all the effort she’d ever made across the years to
block it out.  No one else it could have been.  Oh dear God.

Molon Labe
Staffing.

It sounded
almost innocuous.  Call it “Rent An Army” instead.  Call it “Mercenary Scum”. 
Call it “Killers for Hire”.

And hired they
had been – to the eternal embarrassment of the United States government, if the
story was released.

Fortunately
they'd only been sent on one job in Afghanistan.  Fortunately they'd only
messed it up
just enough
.  It wasn't the casualty-ridden Holocaust
they were capable of and more than willing to create.

It wasn't the
raping, looting, gratuitous murder carnival they had created in other less
fortunate lands for less morally-burdened masters.

It was just
bad enough to get them sent home, get them investigated fully – the armed
forces military police had seized one of their offices and plundered all its
paperwork.

The money in
the accounts had vanished immediately, of course; long before Moira had seen
the cataloged pages, the thousands of pictures and scans.  The people had
disappeared even sooner, spirited away in huge aircraft better than what the
Army normally had.

All that she
and her department had helped do was put the seal on the notice: none of you
are welcome back to the United States ever, and if you try to enter the country
you will go to jail for a very long time.  You may even be put to death.

It didn't stop
the nightmares, though, caused by the material she'd had to dig through.  The
pictures.

The souvenirs,
you might call some of them.

Moira knew she
hadn’t seen all of them, not even the worst of them; but what she'd seen had
stuck with her for ages after.

Don't fixate,
Moira.  Put it together.

The Collectors
have bought themselves an army of some of the most vile bastards to walk the
earth.

No.  A worse
idea was blossoming.

Molon Labe
Staffing had worked for a company or entity known to them and others as the
Collectors – that was so powerful that
even Molon Labe Staffing
had
been cowed into encrypting the connection between them and obscuring their name
in their books.

The tramping
sound of boots.  The oncoming black pawns in the valley, there in the cradle of
the tall sharp mountains.

Oh,
Angela.  Oh God, you poor girl.  If you're in those clutches now...  You're
right, there'll be no help, none that I can give at least.

But I WILL
do what I can possibly do.  I will make this presentation Friday.  I will show
the managers over Erica the connection I've found, and the danger that the
Collectors present.  And if they won't listen I'll go to the authorities, and
I'll keep on until someone hears me.  I'll keep going as long as it takes.

She bent to
her work with a will in the silent and almost empty cubicle maze, barely hearing
Erica murmur on her phone far away.  She kept working on building her case and
her cause until nearly time to go, then backed up her findings again.

It felt odd to
put that USB drive in her laptop bag along with everything else.  It felt like
it was a time bomb ticking quietly; a clock with both stark hands poised to
ring the midnight hour.

Moira found
herself thinking about them again on the commute home.  No... not 'thinking'. 
Say 'dwelling' or even 'brooding', instead.

Molon Labe
Staffing.

The first two
words were ancient Greek, reportedly the defiant response of King Leonidas to
Xerxes I of the Persians when the latter demanded the Spartans lay down their
arms at Thermopylae.

Moira had
looked this up at the start of the investigation into their dealings, their
acts.  It was her job to understand letters and numbers.  The phrase could be
translated as “Come and take them!”  Brave words and suicidal ones, spoken in
protection of a homeland.

Twisted and
corrupted, in this particular modern use.

Still, pulling
up the node-object in her mind marked “Greek influence” lifted all the strings
tied to it – seeing connections is what would have made her a good journalist,
or a good teacher, or a good novelist.  It was what made her a great forensic
accountant.

Most recent
first – up before her eyes, which were only half-focused on the traffic, rose
the brassy visage of Medusa seeming close enough to kiss.

She found it a
satisfactory talisman for the memories attached to Molon Labe Staffing.

It was fairly
standard for the various authorities to send her everything related to words
and numbers from an investigation, with a thorough and descriptive list of all
other items in case she needed to request additional pictures or scans.

In this
case...

They'd sent
her pictures and scans of any photos that had words or numbers present.  Even
just a street sign or a store sign.  No way to know at first blush what might
be important.

The photo that
had stuck with her – out of several horrors casually forwarded to her – had the
corner of a neon beer sign in view.  All you could read was “weiser”.  It had
been taken in a bar somewhere.

The photo was
of three smiling men – a fourth must have been holding the camera.  They looked
moderately young.  They looked normal.  Alumni frat brothers perhaps, at a
reunion. 

The outer two
were lifting their beer glasses.  The one sitting in the middle was holding up
his closed fist, and hanging from it by a chain was an object similar to a
rabbit's foot.

In fact, the
civilized mind wants to believe it is a rabbit's foot and will fight hard to do
so.

But it had no
fur, Moira's rational side insisted.  It was brown and wizened and wrinkled. 
Same size as a rabbit's foot, hanging on a chain like a rabbit's foot, but all
else different.

Including the
heel and ankle joint.

Maybe a
monkey's paw, the sensitive soul hurried to suggest.  Still weird and gross but
nothing more, nothing more than that.  Surely.

I’ve never
seen a monkey with toes that short,
Moira's logical brain answered.

Please no, the
heart longed to say.  Let it be something, anything else.  She picked up the
phone and dialed her contact with the military who was known to her as 'Mr.
White', no first name.

He picked up
fairly quickly and knew her from caller ID, wasting no time.

“Moira, what
can I help with?” he asked.  His voice was old but jovial; a great-uncle you'd
see only at Christmas who'd come bearing odd and eccentric toys.

“Hi, Mr. White
– I'm looking at the photo called 'Personal Effects B201-R3' and I had a
question for you about it.”

“Let me get my
glasses...”  Shifting and scrabbling noises on his end of the line.  “R3, R3...
okay, shoot.”

“That thing
the man in the center is holding,” Moira asked carefully.  “Is that... a human
foot?”

And when he
didn't answer straight off she continued in a much lower voice:  “Is that an
infant's
foot?”

'Mr. White'
sighed.  “Is this important to your research, Moira?”

“In that it
helps me to understand the caliber of people I'm investigating, yes,” she
replied.

“But I'm
pretty sure you understand that already, Moira,” he responded shrewdly.  In his
tone she saw something of the MP he must have been a decade or two ago.

“Girl,” he
instructed after a moment of silence, tired but still mostly kind, “don't go
through life asking questions simply because you don't like the answers you've
already got.  Call me back when it’s important.”

The line went
dead in her hand.

Thank you,
Mr. White.  A far more honest and descriptive answer than “It's classified.” 
Left me both sadder and 'weiser'.