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After reading Sullivan’s email, I decided that it might not be best the best idea to inform him about my abbreviated conversation with Alvin. I didn't want a new client who had just spent thousands of dollars on me and could spend thousands more, to believe that I was a victim of too many spy movies. My gut feeling aside, there was no reason to believe that Alvin’s death had been a deliberate act. Proof would only come with an autopsy, but I wouldn’t be privy to that report. I told Sullivan that I had no concrete evidence of a direct threat to EBG Inc. and promised to update him if the situation changed.
The Secret Service aspect was intriguing, but it was only a hunch and a pretty flimsy one at that. I didn’t even know if the men in black were Secret Service agents. Maybe the cufflink flash drive would shed some light on Heskett’s death. I plugged it into a USB port on my laptop and opened the file manager. There were two file folders. One folder was named Denbigh. But it was the other file folder, War Games, that got my immediate attention.
That folder contained a set of numbers I recognized as latitude and longitude coordinates. Opening Google Maps, I entered N40°58' E126°35' into the search bar. The map pinpointed buildings near woods at the base of a mountain. At first glance, it appeared to be somewhere in California. But two minus sign presses on the keyboard began to paint a different picture. The narrow focus gave way to a wider view of the surrounding area. This was not California. On the third keystroke, a map label appeared that sent chills down my spine. It was Kanggye train station in North Korea!
Normally, a train station in the ‘hermit kingdom’ wouldn’t have moved the needle on my personal interest meter more than a couple of clicks. But this train station was no ordinary train station. Kanggye is home to the largest underground military armaments facility in North Korea. It manufactures everything from missiles and rockets to land mines.
The Denbigh folder contains photographs of a dilapidated brick building that appeared to have been deserted for some time. Playing a hunch, I searched on Opacity.com, a treasure-trove of abandoned buildings from around the world. It didn't take long to find the same photos as the ones in the folder. They were of the long-abandoned Denbigh psychiatric hospital, built in 1848 in north Wales. A little more research led to an article in the London Daily Mail.
Psychiatric care had been the Frankenstein’s monster of medicine and more an exercise in trial and error than anything else. People in psychiatric asylums were the discarded ones, the broken ones, the forgotten ones. They were relegated to rooms or cages where they couldn’t hurt themselves or anyone else. Some of these throwaways became human guinea pigs.
In the early 1940s, patients were routinely subjected to lobotomy treatments where connections to the brain’s prefrontal lobe were severed. The prevailing medical knowledge of the time believed that this surgical procedure would help curb the effects of schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and other mental illnesses. One patient died as a result of this treatment. They locked the more violent patients up in cages before giving them lobotomies.
The hospital was earmarked for closure in the early 1960s and officially closed in 1995. Since then, it had suffered multiple fires and overall decay. Despite this, the dilapidated buildings and surrounding grounds have continued to exist as a silent memorial to a time best forgotten.
It hadn’t been difficult to locate photos of the hospital complex and grounds and that’s what didn’t make sense. Why did Heskett download these photos to a flash drive? Why a treasure hunt when he could have created a text file with the name and address? But there was an even bigger question. The Secret Service is primarily responsible for two things, protection of politicians and the investigation of threats against our monetary system. What did a missile plant in North Korea and an abandoned psychiatric hospital in Wales have to do with either of those things?
I took another look at the photos in the file. They were identical. After downloading the photos from the website and positioning the two sets of photos next to each other, I noticed an almost imperceptible difference between them. The flash drive photos seemed slightly murkier than the downloaded photos. It wasn't something that would have been noticeable without a side-by-side comparison. Upon enlarging one of the file photos, I noticed a set of numbers clumped together. That was when I realized that there might be more to Heskett’s death than I originally thought. The treasure hunt wasn't to find the photos. The treasure hunt was to find the data that hidden within the photos! I never considered that Alvin would use steganography, embedding a message within an image, to conceal information. It was time to unravel the code and find out what exactly I had gotten myself into.
I ended up with 15 sets of letters and numbers. Although some were slightly longer than others, I immediately knew what they were. I remembered using them with one of my European writing clients. These were international banking codes that were used to transfer money between banks. The U.S. dollar is the primary currency of international monetary exchanges. If anything threatened the security of these exchanges, the Secret Service would have a mandate to investigate.
But Heskett was investigating a building in Wales, a factory in North Korea, and a possible attack on the United States power grid system. Those first two countries couldn’t have been more different from each other and, according to him, the U.S. power grid system was too vast to bring down. There had to be a connection but going to North Korea and asking questions about a state-run weapons factory would probably only end up with me being arrested. Granted, I would be home before they could get me to a prison; but I didn’t see any sense in giving the hermit kingdom leader a reason to start trouble.
That left an abandoned asylum in Wales for clues to whatever was going on. Since its closure, the only visitors were occasional vagrants, gang members, and urban explorers. I reasoned that the latter would be my best excuse for being where I shouldn’t be if someone were to ask questions.
“Victoria,” I had to yell to be heard over whatever movie was currently being viewed on the living room television.
“Would it be possible to book another flight on Alien Airlines?”