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(David Farnell, 2000)
Agent Laura buried her face in her hands. Tired, so tired. She'd received the email while flying in from Hawaii &endash; Luke told her that Linus had been attacked in the course of his investigation, that he was in critical condition. She never could sleep on a plane, and this didn't help. Not that she slept much these says, anyway.
Luke hadn't known how bad it was. When Laura had arrived, the doctor told her that Linus' abdomen had been slashed open with a serrated blade, and his intestines taken out and, by the look of it, purposefully twisted together. But that was only the worst of it. Linus had been found by a couple of Friendlies who had gone to check on him when he didn't answer their calls. They had found him crucified to the wall in his little Motel 6 room, shards of porcelain from the shattered toilet through his wrists, his intestines hanging down and knotted, and his eyes bugging out of his pain-wracked face. It had turned out that his eyelids, upper and lower, had been carefully sliced off. He was moaning incoherently; they later found his tongue had been used as a placeholder for the book Linus had been reading before the attack. The eyelids had not turned up.
The Friendlies were there with her. Ahmed Shah, a security guard at the University of Texas, and Derek Williams, a UT anthropology student, were comforting a librarian, Ruth something-or-other, who seemed to have developed some kind of romantic attraction to Linus in the days she'd been hunting up other leads. As usual, Linus had struck it rich &endash; the man seemed to have a magic touch for recruiting local assistance.
Derek approached her, took her aside. "Listen, Agent Verde," he said, his voice low, "I didn't want to talk about it before, with Ruth listening, but, uh, whatever did this to him, I think maybe it was giving us a message." He hesitated. They were having trouble adjusting to suddenly having her, someone Linus had mentioned but who they'd never met before now, in charge.
"What message, Derek? And call me Dolores, okay? We're all in this together now."
He nodded, scoped out her eyes, checking to see if she meant it. He was obviously worried about her reaction. "Well, see, my main area is South American tribes. And, uh, last year, I took a class on pre-Columbian writing. There was a tribe, the Quechua, and they had a unique system of recording numbers and such, using knotted ropes. Some people even think the knot-records were more complex than that, and were a sort of writing, complex enough to record short passages, geneologies, even poetry. Well, the knots in Alan, uh, Agent Smalls' intestines...they looked just like those Quechua knots."
Laura looked down, and rubbed her eyes slowly. Oh god, she thought. Like the rest wasn't enough. "So, do you know what the message is?" she said.
"No, not really. I mean, nobody can read that knot-language, except for numbers. Anyway, hardly anybody thinks they record anything other than numbers. Only crackpots think they actually recorded words &endash;"
"Numbers are important, too, Derek. Coordinates, code words &endash; could be a lot of things."
"So," he said, looking a bit less apprehensive, "you don't think I'm nuts."
She chuckled dryly. "No, I don't think you're nuts. I've seen a lot of weird shit, and your idea might be near the top of the list, but it's not beyond believability. Now, if the police took some good pictures &endash;"
"Actually, I took some." He pulled out a compact Olympus camera. "After we got him down, while we were waiting for the ambulance. I thought it might be important." He smiled grimly.
She smiled back, equally grim. "Good man. Can I have the film? I'll send it by courier to one of our labs, have it analyzed. I don't want to risk it getting screwed up by some one-hour developer. Anyway, the pictures might upset the civilians."
"Yeah, well, some of the pictures at the beginning of the roll are me and my girlfriend, and they're, uh, kind of private...."
She stifled her laugh, and put her arm around his shoulders as they both shook with suppressed laughter. He slipped an arm around her waist, and then they hugged, still laughing, breaking through the ice and suddenly finding themselves comrades if not friends. When they parted after a moment, she saw Derek's eyes full of tears. The sight of it started tears in her own. He stepped away and wiped his eyes with the ball of his thumb.
"Sorry," he said. "It's just that, Alan, he's a good man, God, what happened to him is just, it's all wrong &endash;"
"It's okay, Derek." She gripped his arm. "I've known Alan a long time. He's strong. He'll pull through all right. They'll fix him up the best they can, and he'll...he'll do the rest himself. He's going to be okay."
She got the film from him, and sent him back to his friends. She went into a phone booth and took out her customized mini-notebook computer, popped in the CD-ROM hand labeled "Family Pictures," and started the computer. It booted from the CD into a small, special-purpose OS that did nothing but support her Delta Green email program &endash; a program designed by her cell leader, Luke. She typed in her regular password, then checked her much-used copy of the latest issue of Newsweek. Today was August 26...eight plus twenty-six is thirty-four. Page thirty-four was an ad for Bose speakers. This was her second use of the program today, so the second five words...she typed in "butwhichoneasyou," and got "User Laura, Welcome to Secure Comm v23.5" and a list of options. She chose one and wrote her report, telling Luke the situation with Linus, Derek's theory, and telling him to expect a package. She sent it out &endash; the computer chewed on it for a while, encoding it, steganographing it into some photo on her CD, not one of her family photos but rather something she wouldn't be able to find no matter how had she looked for it. She'd asked Luke about that once, and he'd said it was porno that then got sent out to a mailing list; he received it from there. She wasn't sure if he was kidding, and was vaguely disturbed that her family album shared space with hidden pornography, bits from some floozy's beaver spreads mixed up with photos of Mom and Dad together on the beach, Danny's graduation, her own birthdays...Loi.
She thought about Loi for a moment, then shook it away and connected the short phone wire to the jack in the pay phone, dropped in a coin, and sent the message. It went quickly &endash; whatever the picture was, it must have been small, or very low-rez. She hoped that meant Luke wasn't getting off on looking at them. Then she wondered if Luke was even a man. She'd never met him, after all, or even heard his voice except through an obvious voice filter.
As she walked back to the lobby, she thought of Loi again, and of Linus. They merged in her mind and she stopped, leaning against the wall, her eyes closed. She didn't want to think of either of them. She just wanted to get the package together, the film and the book Linus had been reading, some yellowed, bloodstained French play, and send them off to whichever lab Luke would tell her to address it to.
She had lied to Derek. Linus would never be all right again. He'd read the wrong book, opened the door for the wrong person, and seen too deeply into the Outside. The investigation had gone rhino, and Linus would never be the same. Scarred horribly, inside and out. Like Loi.
