Journey Through the Mirrors (9 page)

The younger agent looked out over the large lake, which bordered the north side of Château Dugan. He and his partner stood on a wooden dock that stretched twenty meters into the water. A thick, chilly fog hovered over the surface of the lake. Their only companions were a band of coyotes howling in a dense forest to the west and an owl that hooted occasionally as it searched for a midnight meal. The young agent turned and gazed at the grand stone stairway that traversed four terraces and led to the main house at the top of a hill. “How does someone get so rich?” he asked, as he adjusted the rifle slung over his shoulder.

“It’s all family money,” the other agent replied. “The Hitchlordses were rich before the Great Disruption, and somehow they stayed that way.”

“I heard Simon Hitchlords gave a lot of money to charities and foundations.”

“Yeah, that’s the story.”

“You don’t believe it?”

“If he was such a good guy, why are we guarding his estate? I heard that members of our NAF team were after him in India, and before they could arrest him, he fell into some kind of fire pit.” The agent shook his head. “I think he committed suicide.”

“Now, see,” the young agent said, “that’s a good assignment. Why can’t we do something like that instead of standing out here?”

“You can take it up with Colette in the morning,” the older agent said. Then something caught his ear. He walked to the end of the dock, drawing his weapon. The younger agent followed him. “Do you hear that? Sounds like a boat motor.”

Following his partner’s lead, the younger agent readied his rifle. “I can’t see a thing through this fog.”

The two of them listened to the sound as it grew louder. The boat emerging out of the fog was smaller than they had expected. “Stop!” the older agent shouted. “Stop, or we’ll shoot.” The boat was close enough now for them to see that it was empty. They both lowered their weapons, confounded. It bumped into the dock, its motor still running. “That’s weird. Call it in,” the older agent said.

As the younger agent took out his PCD and started walking back to shore, he heard a muffled thump. Turning, he saw his partner lunge forward and fall into the lake. The young agent rushed to help him but was stopped by a sharp pain in his side. The last thing he saw was someone in a black diving suit.

The howling of the coyotes grew louder as the intruder pulled himself out of the water. With his gun still drawn, he walked to the end of the dock and made sure that the young agent was dead. He rolled the
body off the deck and into the water, next to the floating body of his partner. Then he pulled his PCD from the water-tight compartment of his wetsuit and pressed a few buttons, and the boat’s motor stopped running. After replacing his PCD in the pocket of his wetsuit, the man lowered himself into the water, grabbed each of the WCF agents by an arm, and, staying close to the dock, waded closer to shore. The dock led to a utility house adjacent to the steps leading to the Château’s lakeside entrance. But that was not going to be his means of entry. There was another way into the dungeons of Château Dugan.

A few meters before he reached the shore, he ducked under the dock and maneuvered himself through the support beams, struggling at times to maintain control of the agents’ bodies. He came to a steel-barred door, similar to those found in old-fashioned jail cells. The cold lake water flowed freely through the iron bars. He pulled from the pocket of his wetsuit a brass key. But when he pressed on the door’s handle, he found it unlocked. Returning the key to his chest pocket, he opened the door and pushed the bodies through the doorway before entering the dark tunnel himself. He took out his PCD and attached it to his left wrist, pressing buttons until the body suit he was wearing began to glow, providing ample light. He pressed more buttons on his PCD, and the image of a hand-drawn map was displayed. He’d been warned that the secret tunnels under the estate were like a rat’s maze, where a person could easily get lost. He shut the iron door and proceeded.

After a series of left and right turns, the man stood in front of a brick wall spanning the width of the narrow tunnel. The man reached down and ran his hands along the lower portion of the wall below the water line. He took a deep breath and submerged himself. A moment later, he popped out of the water on the other side of the wall. He cleared his eyes and saw that he was at the bottom of the Château’s well. He intensified the light from his suit until he could see the top, which he ascertained was twenty meters above him. A narrow spiral staircase ran up the interior. Using the wall as a support, he carefully climbed
the slippery, mold-covered steps. After about three minutes, he reached the top of the well and slung himself over the edge. He had made it unnoticed into the dungeons.

The luminosity from his suit filled the large circular area, where eight iron doors lined its circumference; the handles of each door had been removed. There was security tape across each doorway, indicating that the WCF had searched them all.

The man projected another hand-drawn map from his PCD. He zoomed in on the configuration of the eight doors and the nearby staircase. A red marker indicated that the room he was interested in was three doors to the right of the staircase. He walked over and ripped off the security tape. He pushed the door open, its hinges squeaking as he entered. There was a musky, damp smell in the air.

The man walked across the stone floor, past a couple of metal buckets and a metal chair, toward the northeast corner of the room. Once there, he took a magnet out of his pocket. Starting at the floor, he slowly ran it up the corner of the wall until it was drawn to a particular spot one meter off the ground. He pulled back the magnet, and the stone it attracted slid from the wall, causing a hidden door to his left to open. The man left the magnet in place and walked through the doorway, causing lights to come on. A table was at the center of the room, and the walls were lined with stainless-steel shelves and boxes and other items. The man grabbed a Gore-Tex bag from beneath the table and squatted down in front of one of the shelves. On the lower shelf, he saw ten stacks of electronic bearer bonds, EBBs. One by one, he placed each stack of forty in the bag. After the Great Disruption, paper money became less popular, but everyone agreed on the need for some form of currency that could not be manipulated by unscrupulous governments. The result: EBBs, palm-sized pieces of glass that could be micro-encoded with any desired amount of Universal Credits by sanctioned central banking authorities. The EBBs could not be tracked, and whoever possessed them held claim to them without question.

After the man had put all of them into the bag, he went over to another
shelf, where he found a large silver case with a security keypad attached to it. He grabbed the case and placed it on the ground. The man typed a series of numbers on the keypad, and the case opened. Inside was the prize he was looking for: nine leather-bound books and a blue journal. Satisfied, he closed the lid, put the case into the bag alongside the EBBs, and zipped it closed. He pulled from his chest pocket a small aerosol can and sprayed it all over the bag, paying special attention to its zipper. The green foam quickly dried into a rubber-like coating, making the bag waterproof. He returned the can to his chest pocket, swung the bag over his shoulder, and left the hidden room. He pushed the dislodged stone back into place, watching as the door to the hidden room closed. Then he removed the magnet from the wall.

The man made his way back to the well and down the slippery stone stairway. Once again, he ducked through the opening in the well wall to the other side. The waterproof bag floated alongside him as he backtracked through the tunnels and returned to the iron-barred door. He pushed aside the bodies of the two dead agents, then closed the barred door and this time locked it with the brass key. He quickly waded to the end of the dock and swung the large bag into the boat before climbing in himself. He started the motor and sped onto the lake, disappearing into the thickening fog. He heard coyotes howling in the distance.

8

You will never be bigger or smaller than what you do.

—THE CHRONICLES OF SATRAYA

NEW CHICAGO, 6:10 P.M. LOCAL TIME, MARCH 20, 2070

Mr. Perrot waited anxiously for an update on Jamie’s condition, but neither he nor Jasper had heard from Logan or Valerie in the last hour, and his PCD calls to them hadn’t gone through because of a disruption of the communication network in Mexico’s Central Plateau. All they could do was wait and continue diligently to prepare for the commemoration to keep their minds occupied, something Mr. Perrot was clearly still struggling with. The news of Jamie’s injury, the rash of earthquakes, the unexpected emergence of Madu Shata—it seemed strange, if not ominous, for them all to happen at once.

“Jamie will be fine,” Jasper said, alert to Mr. Perrot’s consternation. “No sense worrying about something we can’t control.”

“Agreed,” Mr. Perrot replied. He put the lid back on a box that he’d been rummaging through. “I haven’t found anything in these boxes that is worth sending to the commemoration. Does Logan have any more of Cassandra’s possessions here?”

“Yes, there’s much more in the vault, along with his mom’s mosaics.”

Jasper walked to a solid metal door near the corner of the work room, typed a series of numbers onto a keypad, and then placed his eye in front of the retina scanner. An extended beep sounded, and the lock on the door disengaged. Mr. Perrot followed Jasper into a neatly organized cement-fortified vault, which was half the size of the work room.

“We moved all of Mrs. Ford’s stuff from Logan’s house a few weeks ago. Art stuff in front of us. Files, books, and other office stuff over to the left. Jewelry, trinkets, and other valuables are in the secondary safe to the right. But you’ll need Logan to get into that. He is the only one with access.”

Mr. Perrot walked straight ahead. A smile came to his face. “These are Cassandra’s mosaics. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them.”

“Aren’t they gorgeous?” Jasper said. “Three of them are headed to the commemoration. It’s going to be a mosaic extravaganza! Logan plans to display the rest here at the studio.”

Mr. Perrot chuckled at Jasper’s exuberance, then turned to the mosaics, set up on eight easels. One depicted three dolphins swimming in the ocean. Another showed a woman gazing into a mirror. Mr. Perrot moved closer to a third mosaic, which was roughly half a meter tall and the same wide. “This one is my favorite. It took Cassandra more than a year to make it.” Two trees stood on top of a hill in some far-off imaginary land. One was tall, the other much smaller and situated in the foreground. “I just love how majestic these trees look,” Mr. Perrot said, running his fingers over the many small, multicolored tiles. “This scene is from one of the
Chronicles
stories, you know.”

Jasper shook his head. “Which story is that?”

Mr. Perrot turned to Jasper with an incredulous look. “You young people really need to bone up on your history. The world rose from the ashes of the Great Disruption because of the
Chronicles
and all the wonderful stories in the books.” Mr. Perrot turned back to the mosaic, shaking his head in mock disgust. “Everyone should read the fable of the Golden Acorn. What are they teaching you in school these days, if not that?”

Jasper walked over and stood in front of the seventh and most
abstract mosaic of the group, which was just more than half a meter tall and approximately three times as wide. “Logan told me that his mother never explained to him what this mosaic depicted,” Jasper said, tilting his head from side to side and stepping back to try to figure it out. “It looks like a broken dish or something.”

Mr. Perrot looked at the mosaic. “Yes, that one is a real head scratcher. Cassandra always taunted me for not being able to discern its meaning. As far as I know, she never told anyone, except perhaps Camden.”

Jasper shrugged, giving up on interpreting the mosaic. “So what are we looking for?”

“Ideally, items from the days of the first Council,” Mr. Perrot said. “Anything that might shed new light on the experiences or accomplishments of the original Council members. We can start with those,” he added, motioning to a set of boxes stacked against the wall.

They were filled with file folders, books, art supplies, and other knickknacks. Jasper started rummaging through plastic containers that held an endless supply of arts-and-crafts materials. Mr. Perrot uncovered a sturdy, heavy metal box that contained a trove of mosaic tiles of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Jasper found a box with some thin circular objects that shone when they caught the light. “What are these?” he asked, holding one up.

“Those are DVDs,” Mr. Perrot answered with a chuckle. “That is how the world once distributed its music and movie entertainment.”

Jasper gave the disk a quizzical look and tossed it back into the box.

“Here we go,” Mr. Perrot said, pulling out a box of newspaper articles. “These are from the
New Chicago Broadcaster
, dated May 15, 2037, a few months after we came to Chicago.” He leafed through a stack of clippings. “After the Great Disruption, paper publishing was the only
way to disseminate information. All the years of converting paper to digital went out the door in ten short months. It looks like Cassandra kept everything she could find on the activities of the Council.” Mr. Perrot looked at the dates on another set of clippings. “These are more recent, from August 2052.”