Aislin and Garai begin sending all of the information they gather. It’s not clear whether they’re just refusing to triage the information out of laziness, or if they’re intentionally trying to overload us, but the volume of reports we receive is staggering. I take it all and retreat to Capon Springs, where Brill gives me a comfortable little one-room log cabin. It must be at least three hundred years old, but it has a direct connection to Four’s private database and multiple screens for displaying everything. I want to call it “The Think Tank,” but Martha names it “The Outpost.”
“We have nothing useful from Aislin,” I say. “There’ve been no unusual personnel or resource requests anywhere near Israel, nor have there been any high priority shipments of cargo out of the area. They could have hidden it in a shipment of grapefruit and nobody would be the wiser. On this end, there’s nothing to report either. No additional reassignments from NASA or the Department of Energy. Oh, but look at this. There’s a request to increase the flow of fresh water to some government facility in Tennessee by an extra ten thousand gallons per month.”
“How useful,” Martha says. “Garai’s report isn’t much better. Surveillance camera production is up fifteen percent and seventy percent of the nation’s hover buses are now upgraded to detect passengers without coms. Los Angeles is getting an unexpected upgrade to its power grid; a large shipment of South American hemp was received in New Orleans; Kansas is getting a new tornado detection system-”
“Hemp?” I ask.
“Yeah. In New Orleans.”
I smile.
“So, what?”
“In the twentieth century, mankind was consuming resources faster than new sources could be found and were polluting most everything in sight. In the United States, the government created an agency called the “Environmental Protection Agency” - or EPA for short - as a watchdog to keep the environment clean. By about the year 2040, the EPA had stopped all tree cutting on public lands. At the same time, the states were legalizing a narcotic plant called cannabis or marijuana. With no trees being cut down, the paper industry had no choice but to convert to the fibrous part of the cannabis plant in order to make paper. That fiber was known as hemp.”
“Why would you think the hemp shipment is for paper?”
“Let me continue. One of the primary places for hemp paper production was in Tennessee, and the process requires a steady amount of clean water. Sound familiar?”
“But only Christians use paper, so that we can communicate without worrying about electronic eavesdropping-”
She stops herself mid thought and then finishes.
“Except now it’s Four that’s eavesdropping on the government - not the other way around.”
“That’s why we haven’t been able to pick up on anything useful electronically,” I say. “High security items must have gone back to paper. Your parent’s generation blinded the government by leaving the electronic world; so now that Four has turned the tables, the government is returning the favor.”
“I’ll send messages to Garai, and Aislin. If we’re lucky, maybe one of them can intercept some of those papers and we can find out where the time machine is hidden.”
“I hope so,” I say.
I sit and begin rubbing my temples.
“Because right now we have nothing.”
Martha walks across the room and picks up the staff that came back with me through time.
“Maybe you should try the whole Moses thing with the staff after all.”
She lifts it high in one hand like the pictures of Moses.
“Or now that you’re so good with a staff, maybe you could just beat Henry over the head with it.”
“Do I get a shot at Zip too?”
She starts to handle it more like a weapon and as she plays with it, she runs her hand down the shaft and feels the groups of carvings left there two thousand years ago: XXIX LVIII XXXI and XXXI VIII XVI.
“Did you ever figure out why the shepherd boy carved these Roman numerals?”
“I don’t think it was him. Nobody in his family could read or write; so it’s not likely he would know Roman numerals. It’s more likely it was done by the two Romans who saved me from Egyptian robbers. Even so, what do the numbers 29, 58, 31, 31, 8 and 16 mean?”
“Enemies killed? Days away from home?” Martha suggests.
“Women bedded?”
I immediately regret my reply.
“Maybe one day you’ll get to add a number one of your own,” she says, “but it’d better be the last number you ever add.”
****
I stay at Capon Springs for a few days. I want to be alone as I sort through the mounds of data, but Martha visits daily to bring me all the new information from Garai, Aislin and the Bethany House staff. If there’s a clue here that will lead me to the location of the time machine, it’s lost among all the other puzzle pieces.
“Any luck?” asks Martha as she enters the log cabin outpost. It’s become a daily ritual.
“Not a bit. If there’s any pattern in the chaos, then I’m not seeing it.”
“It’s hard to solve a puzzle when nobody gives you the pieces.”
“How about you? Any luck figuring out Henry’s new tracking program?”
“Same as yesterday. It’s clearly a tracker of some sort and it originated from Colorado Springs, but still we have no idea what the numbers mean. Whoever created it, I don’t think they work for the government.”
“What makes you say that?”
“It’s hard to define. There’s just a creativity to it that you don’t normally see from government types.”
I mull that for a moment.
“Want to trade projects?” I ask.
“Technology isn’t exactly your thing,” she says, then hesitates. “But maybe we need someone who doesn’t dig in too deep.”
“Are you saying I’m shallow?”
“No, I’m just thinking that not all technological problems have technological solutions. Maybe I’m missing the forest for the trees.”
I cross the room to her pile of papers and start to rummage through them, while she starts to look through mine. She’s carefully leafing through my piles while I’m taking her piles apart.
“Do you have to mess up my stacks?” she asks.
“Yes. I need to see the whole forest.”
The computer lingo is a foreign language to me. I can speak Aramaic, Latin, and Greek, but this stuff might as well be a page a muddy chicken walked across for all the sense it makes. I decide to focus on the numbers instead.
There are three sets of numbers: 4035061050503, 4404491031351, and 4546591083002. Each is a thirteen-digit number. In each case, the first digit is 4 and the seventh and eighth digits are 1 and 0 respectively. Otherwise, they’re random. Martha has a report from a fancy computer algorithm that confirms this obvious fact.
I lean back in the chair and close my eyes to picture the scrolling numbers on the screen.
“Giving up already?” Martha asks.
I don’t answer. Something about the way the numbers locked is on my mind.
I stick my com in my ear.
“Computer, replay my last lecture on this screen.”
My face appears on the screen, just as the world saw it as I lectured.
“Mute the sound.”
I watch the replay twice just to be sure.
“Did you notice that the digits didn’t lock individually?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” she asks and crosses the room.
“They lock in groups. The first two digits lock together, then the next two. The pattern in each case is 2-2-2-3-2-2, for a total of thirteen digits.”
“So?”
“Each time the final digits locked, my image blinked. What happened at that moment?”
“Just a routing glitch.”
I give her a blank stare.
“Remember, Four doesn’t send messages over the air directly to the computer we want to reach. We use ancient fiber optic lines. The lines are connected by small computers that read the message and send it to the right place. It’s like your nervous system. Let’s say you stub your toe. The signal has to travel from the nerve ending in your toe up to your brain, but it isn’t a direct connection. The signal travels through a number of nerves by jumping from the end of one to the beginning of the next. Each jump is sort of a gateway where the signal is re-transmitted. Routing computers are kind of like those gateways. They receive the signal; then re-transmit it down the correct path.”
I’m happy she kept the tech stuff simple for me.
“So a routing glitch is when one of those gateways messes up?”
“Right. For a moment, a computer in the line either lost the signal or forgot where to send it.”
“And it happened at the exact moment the last digits locked?”
“Of course it did. Henry doesn’t know we use ancient fiber optics but he does know we’re bouncing the signal through multiple computers to hide the origin. The tracker program is back-tracking the source of our signal from one computer to the next until it finds where the signal originates.”
“If they can see that the signal is bouncing here and there, won’t they see that you’re using ancient technology?”
“Probably not. Fiber optic lines installed in the early 2100’s operated at nearly the speed of light and we installed some modern enhancements to disguise what we’re doing.”
“So how does a tracker eventually give them a physical location where they can find us?” I ask.
“Normally, all computers have a number assigned to them and a physical location is tied to that number. Our computers are not part of the registry: so the best they could do is try to guess at a general location based on the last registered routing computer in the line - but it would be a shot in the dark, at best. Our initial tap could be into a computer next door or halfway around the world.”
A shot in the dark?
“Have you ever studied bats?” I ask.
“Bats? No.”
“But you understand echolocation, right? The bat emits a sound and listens for the echo to judge the direction and distance of objects in the dark. I think they’re trying to echo locate your unregistered computers. They know the speed of the incoming signal and can track the incoming route. That should give them an approximate physical location. What’s the physical location of the last unregistered computer the signal hit before it went to Colorado Springs?” I ask.
“Northern Colorado. We have a member of Four, who houses it in Fort Collins.”
“Then the number 4035061050503 should somehow correspond to the physical location of that computer, and I think I know how. We’ve used the UGC system for pinpointing locations on earth for about a century now. Before that, we used a satellite system called GPS, but that was based - in part - on an even older system known as latitude and longitude.”
“How do you know this stuff?” she asks.
“I’m a religious historian. Some ancient texts list the location of various religious sites using those systems; so I learned how to use them.”
I turn back to the screen.
“Computer, using the latitude and longitude system, display a map of the coordinates north 40 degrees 35 minutes and 6 seconds by east 105 degrees 5 minutes and 3 seconds.”
The map comes up with a prominent dot on a building in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Martha stands with her mouth open for a moment.
“Marry me,” she says; then clamps her hand over her mouth and blushes.
“I thought you’d never ask; but right now we have to get word out to the people housing those computers. They’re in serious danger.”
We stand to leave the cabin and I grab a metal water bottle to fill with the cold Capon Springs Water that bubbles up in a fountain not far away. Martha holds the door for me and I glimpse my staff in the corner. The water bottle slips from my hand and hits the floor with a loud metallic clang, as I stare at the staff and Martha stares at me.
“What is it?” she asks.
“We’ve already failed.”
“What are you talking about? Understanding even this much about the tracker is a huge breakthrough.”
“We’ve already failed to destroy the time machine.”
Martha stares at me.
I pick up the staff and take it to the screen. Reading the Roman numerals on the staff, I say: “Computer, using latitude and longitude, display the location for the coordinate north 29 degrees 58 minutes and 31 seconds by east 31 degrees 8 minutes and 16 seconds.”
The computer displays a map of Giza, Egypt.
“Zoom in.”
The dot is on the Great Sphinx.
“They didn’t use latitude and longitude two thousand years ago, Martha. I don’t know how or why, but someone went through time to give us the location of the time machine.”
Why Giza? Why not just bring the machine to the States?
****
By the time we told the elders the time machine had been moved, Aislin and Garai already knew. When we told them the government was making paper to avoid Four’s electronic eavesdropping, they yawned. When I tell them we know the new location of the time machine, I finally get the exploding bombshell I expected the first two times. At first it seems to be the fact that I possess information which they don’t that’s bothering them; but it’s more than that. I think, on some level, they’re fine with the idea of Henry getting rid of me.
It saves them the trouble.
“We can’t help you, Dr. Paulson.”
“So you’ve already forgotten the ringing church bells?” I ask. “You’re both fine with me being assassinated and the timeline changing?”
“You have no proof of Henry’s intentions,” Aislin replies.
“You’re right. It’s just an educated guess.”
“You know more than you’re saying, Dr. Paulson,” Garai adds.
“Don’t we all?” I reply.
“Not good enough to warrant the risk you’re asking me to take,” Aislin says. “Even with my connections, I can’t just get you onto a high speed government flight to an undisclosed destination in Africa. There would be too many questions; too many loose ends to explain.”
“I thought you and your power team claimed the ability to do anything,” Garai says.
“You’re the one always claiming millions of members,” Aislin replies. “Why don’t you have Cephas walk across the ocean on their backs?”
“Garai? Can you help us?” I ask calmly.
“If I choose to. I can get you to Africa in complete secrecy and have friends house you when you arrive, but I would need a week and it would be in a cargo vessel.”
“Perhaps if you told us the exact location of the time machine and how you obtained the information, we could be of more assistance,” Aislin says.
I just smile.
“Then I guess we’re done here,” I say. “I’ll end by saying it’s been a great couple of months, but I’m afraid it’s all been for nothing. If they succeed in killing me, nobody will remember these months even happened. That should suit all of you very well since, without the memories, you won’t have to feel any sense of responsibility or guilt.”
I shut off the screens and rotate my chair so I’m no longer facing the screens or Martha.
“This isn’t how I wanted to go. After my years of being The Cult Hunter, I’d hoped to build a different legacy. Even if just one person could think of me and say they were a better person for having known me, it would have been worth it. If this can’t be stopped, then my testimony will be erased from history and, in the eyes of the world, I’ll die as The Cult Hunter.”
I feel Martha’s warm hand on my shoulder.
“To think that even you’ll remember me that way, Martha - well, it’s enough to break a man’s heart.”
I turn the chair and see that tears are starting to well up and roll down her cheeks; so I stand and hug her.
“I’m not gone yet.”
“We can’t lose you, Cephas. We just can’t.”
Why does it always have to be ‘we?’ Why can’t it be that YOU don’t want to lose me?