Kaparis almost suffered a seizure.
A dog?
A dog?
A dog with a supernatural sense of smell that had successfully traced its 9mm master before? A dog idiot enough and faithful enough to follow that scent for three thousand miles?
“Get me a picture of Infinity Drake’s dog!” snapped Kaparis.
An image flashed up on the screen array. Yo-yo. A vision of joyous furry idiocy.
“Was it, by any chance … this dog?” asked Kaparis.
The Abbot gulped. It was a thousand times cleaner than the one they’d found, but it was the same dog.
“We thought he must have picked it up along the way …” the Abbot tried to explain.
“WHERE IS IT?”
The Abbot’s mind was blank. He dimly remembered someone kick it aside. He scrabbled around for some consolation. “Perhaps the Carrier children have it? They have value as rat catchers. We will have the whole complex searched! If there is a dog – if there is a girl – we shall slay them!”
The Siguri chief beside the Abbot was nodding vigorously, but Kaparis slammed on the brakes—
“NO! Don’t you see what this means?”
His mind was a spinning Catherine wheel. If the dog was there, then Drake was there. If so, where? If Baptiste had brought the girl with him then was Drake somewhere on the girl? But where was the girl? On the mountain? In a bear?
“Find the bears, slice them open. The Salazar girl has to be somewhere—”
“Or Santiago found her!” exclaimed the Abbot.
“Santiago?”
“The idiot boy. The trapper.”
“The hunchback?” said Kaparis, vaguely remembering the wretch.
“Sometimes he finds lost souls. He was out late on the mountain – we questioned him. But not about a girl …”
“Brilliant!” gasped Kaparis.
“Really?” said the Abbot.
Kaparis’s voice fell to a rasping conspiratorial whisper. “If Drake is hidden somewhere in the monastery, we’ve caught him, with or without the girl.”
No one was dumb enough to ask the obvious question: how? How do you catch someone 9mm tall in a complex the size of a cathedral? Nobody asked, because they knew the Master always came up with an answer more fiendish than they could ever conceive.
Nano-radar4, thought Kaparis. They could scour the buildings, scour the mountain. But Drake could hide from it behind steel, behind rock. But why would he? If he didn’t know they were looking for him, he would have no reason to hide. We must do it by stealth, thought Kaparis, we must lure him out into the open.
“We must set a trap, we must bait it …” Kaparis thought aloud.
What did Infinity Drake want more than anything in the world?
His father …
With a blink, Kaparis wiped the image of Yo-yo from his screens and directed his optically controlled cursor to retrieve a file marked ARCHIV23874378KAP-ENCRYPT. The title read: “Intel. report 498090bb – Drake, E.”
It was the report Kaparis had commissioned thirteen years before into the mysterious disappearance of Ethan Drake, father of Infinity, during an experiment at a lab in Cambridge. He opened it across the screen array. Kaparis knew it almost by heart, though it had always posed more questions than answers, always deepened the mystery.
Ethan had built a machine – the forerunner of the Boldklub machines – a machine that proved his genius. It was not just a masterpiece of science and engineering, it was a work of art. It was more than the sum of its parts, more than all it was designed to be. It reached out beyond the boundaries of physical laws into the unknown. Kaparis had been furious. How could he compete? First he had lost the love of his young life to Ethan, now he had lost the future. Why? It made no sense. Kaparis considered himself the supreme applied human intelligence. Perhaps you could be too perfect?
Or did Ethan Drake simply have all the luck? If he did, it ran out the day he attempted an unwise experiment in quantum teleportation. He had thrown himself into the subatomic magnetic vortex at the heart of his machine … and disappeared without a trace. Not an atom of him remained. No one understood why.
Kaparis had taunted Infinity Drake with the existence of this report when their paths had crossed in Shanghai, taunted him too that Ethan had chosen suicide over life with his wife and newborn child. The boy had been enraged; he was clearly obsessed with his father’s disappearance.
Here was the bait.
Now for the trap. If the boy was in the monastery, then …
Then out of nowhere it finally happened.
Luck.
As Kaparis turned his rational mind from nano-radar to all the practicalities and complexities of designing a trap, and a miniature jail, his eyes and his subconscious mind drifted across Ethan Drake’s original notes. The notes were rough – fast, shorthand equations, sketches like cartoons, thoughts caught and set down as they happened. Numbers and letters and symbols that danced down the page, all the way down to the final mysterious biro scribble: L = Place? Mysterious because, in conventional physics, L represented locomotion. And “Locomotion = Place?” was an impossible and perplexing statement. But because on this occasion he wasn’t concentrating, Kaparis suddenly saw with his subconscious what the scribble really was: Ethan Drake had written the L lopsided. Because the L was actually not an L at all. The two lines of the L were in fact the crudely drawn hands of a clock—
Time! In Ethan Drake’s hand, the cockeyed L was Time.
L = Place? became Time = Place?
Kaparis convulsed. His mind overloaded. Suddenly Ethan’s notes began to come to life, growing and taking shape in three dimensions and glorious Technicolor. The whole system sprang to life in his head, the genius of Ethan Drake, dancing for him, only him …
Time = Place? The fabulous conclusion changed everything.
It had been
