The Atlantis Scrolls

Chapter 14

Agatha knocked on Nina’s door just after midnight.

Purdue and his sister had persuaded Nina and Sam to stay on at the Thurso house until they had figured out where to begin searching. Sam and Purdue were still drinking down in the billiards room, their alcohol-induced discussions escalating in volume with every match, and every glass. The subject matter between the two educated men ranged from football scores to German recipes; from the best angle to cast a line at fly fishing to the Loch Ness monster and its relation to bi-location. But when the stories of naked Glasgow hooligans came up, Agatha could stand no more and she quietly went up to where Nina had escaped the rest of the party after her little disagreement with Sam.

“Come in, Agatha,” she heard the historian’s voice chime from the other side of the thick oak door. Agatha Purdue opened the door and to her surprise she did not find Nina Gould lying on her bed with tear-reddened eyes, pouting about what assholes men were. As she would also have done, Agatha saw Nina delving into the Internet to research the background of the tale and trying to ascertain the parallels between the hearsay and the actual chronological run of similar tell during that estimated era.

Very pleased with Nina’s zeal on the case, Agatha slipped past the drapery on the doorway and closed the door behind her. When Nina looked up she noticed that Agatha had smuggled some red wine and cigarettes in. Under her arm, of course, a packet of Walkers ginger cookies was tucked. Nina had to smile. The eccentric librarian certainly had her moments, when she was not insulting, correcting, or annoying anyone.

Now more than ever Nina could see a resemblance between her and her twin brother. He had never discussed her in all the time he and Nina were involved, but after reading between the lines of their remarks to each other she could gather that their last parting was not amicable — or perhaps just one of those instances where a quarrel became bigger than it should have been due to circumstances.

“Any joy on the starting point, dearest?” the astute blonde asked as she sat down on the bed with Nina.

“Not yet. Does your client not have a name for our German soldier? That would make things so much easier, because then we could track his military record and see where he settled, check census records and such,” Nina said with a resolute nod as the laptop screen reflected in her dark eyes.

“No, not as far as I know. I was hoping we could take the document to a graphologist and get his handwriting analyzed. Perhaps, if we could clarify the words it might give us a hint as to who wrote the journal,” Agatha proposed.

“Yes, but that will not tell us whom he gave it to. We need to discover the identity of the German who brought it here after he returned from Africa. Knowing who wrote it won’t help one bit,” Nina sighed, tapping her pen against the sensual bend of her lower lip as her mind sought alternatives.

“It could. The writer’s identity could tell us how to find out the names of the men in that field unit where he died, my dear Nina,” Agatha explained, crunching whimsically into a cookie. “My goodness, it is rather an obvious deduction I thought someone of your intellect would have considered.”

Nina’s eyes pierced her with a sharp warning. “It’s a fucking reach, Agatha. Actually tracing existing documents in the real world is quite a bit different than it is to conjure up fantastical procedures from the safety of a library.”

Agatha stopped chewing. She leered at the bitchy historian with a glare that quickly had Nina regretting her retort. For almost half a minute Agatha Purdue remained static in her place, inanimate. It made Nina terribly uneasy to see this woman, already resembling a human porcelain doll, to just sit there and act like one too. Suddenly Agatha started chewing and moving, startling Nina within an inch of a heart attack.

“Well said, Dr. Gould. Touché,” Agatha mumbled enthusiastically through her cookie. “What do you suggest?”

“The only idea I have is… sort of… illegal,” Nina winced, taking a drink from the wine bottle.

“Ooh, do tell,” Agatha grinned, her reaction taking Nina by surprise. It seemed after all that she possessed the same affinity for trouble as her brother.

“We’d have to gain access to home affairs documents to investigate immigration of foreign nationals at the time, records of men enlisted with the Foreign Legion also, but I have no idea how to do that,” Nina said in earnest, helping herself to a cookie from the pack.

“I’ll just hack in, silly,” Agatha smiled.

“Just hack in? Into the German consulate archives? Into the Federal Ministry of the Interior and all its archived records?” Nina asked, deliberately repeating herself to make sure she completely fathomed Miss Purdue’s level of insanity. Oh Christ, I already feel the tingle of prison food in my gut after my lesbian cell mate decided to cuddle too much, Nina thought. No matter how she tried to stay out of illegitimate activity, it just seemed to take another route to catch up to her.

“Yes, give me your machine,” Agatha said suddenly, her long thin arms lashing out to take Nina’s laptop. Nina reacted quickly, jerking the computer away from her enthusiastic client.

“No!” she shouted. “Not on my laptop. Are you nuts?”

Again the chastisement provoked an odd momentary reaction from the obviously slightly mad Agatha, but this time she snapped out of it almost immediately. Impatient with Nina’s oversensitive approach to things that could be thwarted at a whim, Agatha relaxed her arms, sighing.

“Do it on your own computer,” the historian added.

“Oh, so you’re just worried about being traced, not that that it should not be done,” Agatha told herself out loud. “Well, that is better. I thought you saw this as a bad idea.”

Nina’s eyes widened at her amazement of the woman’s nonchalance while she waited for the next bad idea.

“I’ll be right back, Dr. Gould. Hang on,” she said and jumped up. Opening the door, she looked back briefly to inform Nina, “and I am still going to take it to a graphologist, just for good measure,” she turned, flying out the door like an excited child on Christmas morning.

“No fucking way,” Nina said softly, hugging her laptop protectively against her chest. “I can’t believe I’m already snugly tarred with shit, just waiting for the feathers to rain down.”

A few moments later Agatha returned with a tablet that looked like something from an old Buck Rogers episode. The thing was basically transparent, made of some sort of fiberglass, about the size of a piece of writing paper with no touch-screen facilities for navigation. Agatha pulled a small black box from her pocket and from it, used the tip of her index finger to dab at a small silver button. The little thing sat like a flat thimble on her fingertip until she stuck it to the left top corner of the strange tablet.

“Watch this. David made this, not two weeks ago,” Agatha boasted.

“Of course,” Nina scoffed and shook her head at the efficiency of the far-fetched technology she was privy to. “What does it do?”

Agatha shot her one of those patronizing stares and Nina braced herself for the inevitable don’t-you-know-anything? tone.

Finally the blonde replied plainly, “It’s a computer, Nina.”

Aye, there it is! her annoyed inner voice announced. Just let it go. Let it go, Nina.

Slowly succumbing to her own inebriation, Nina elected to calm down and just take it easy for once. “No, I mean that thingy,” she told Agatha and pointed to the flat, round, silver object.

“Oh, that is a modem. Untraceable. Let’s say invisible, in fact. It literally picks up satellite bandwidth frequencies and piggybacks the first six it can locate. Then, with three-second intervals, it switches among those chosen channels so that it bounces, collecting data as it feeds off various service providers. That way it looks like a dip in connection speed, instead of an active log. I have to give it to the idiot. He is quite good at fucking the system,” Agatha smiled dreamily as she bragged about Purdue.

Nina laughed out loud. It was not the wine that prompted her to do so, but rather the sound of Agatha’s proper tongue saying “fucking” so gratuitously. Her small body slumped against the headboard of the bed with the wine bottle as she watched the science fiction show in front of her.

“What?” Agatha asked innocently as she swiped her finger across the top edge of the tablet.

“Nothing, madam. Do carry on,” Nina chuckled.

“Okay, here we go,” Agatha said.

The entire fiberoptic system lit up the hardware in a pastel violet that reminded Nina of a light saber, only not as sharp in hue. Her eyes beheld the binary that came up after Agatha’s trained fingers punched in code in the center of the rectangular screen.

“Pen and paper,” Agatha ordered Nina without peeling her eyes from the screen. Nina grabbed her pen and some loose pages from her notebook and she waited.

Agatha read out a link of indecipherable ciphers, which Nina penned as she spoke. They could hear the men coming up the stairs, still bantering about absolute rubbish just as they were almost done.

“What the hell are you doing with my gadgets?” Purdue asked. He should have been more defensive in his tone, Nina thought, for his sister’s audacity, but he rather sounded interested in what she was doing, not what she was doing it with.

“Nina needs to know the names of foreign legionnaires who entered Germany in the early 1900s. I’m just getting that information for her,” Agatha explained, her eyes still darting over several strings of code, of which she selectively dictated the right ones to Nina.

“Fuckin’ hell,” was all Sam could muster, since he spent most of his physical ability on staying on his feet. Nobody knew if it was awe directed at the high-tech tablet, the number of names they’d retrieve, or the fact that they were mostly committing a federal crime as he watched.

“What do you have so far?” Purdue asked, not too coherent either.

“We’ll download all the names and identification numbers, maybe some addresses. And we’ll present it at breakfast,” Nina told the men, trying to sound sober and in control. But they bought it, and agreed to go on to sleep.

The next thirty minutes went into a tedious downloading of seemingly countless names, ranks, and stations of all men enlisted in the Foreign Legion, but the two ladies kept their focus as much as the alcohol permitted. The only disappointment of their research was running out of Walkers.