Codex

  Codex

  Adrian Dawson

  Published by www.lastpassage.com,

  Smashwords Edition

  © Copyright Adrian Dawson, 2010

  Copyright © 2010 Adrian Dawson

  The right of Adrian Dawson to be identified as the Author

  of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First Published in Great Britain in 2010 by

  LAST PASSAGE

  www.lastpassage.com

  Apart from any use permitted in under UK copyright law, this publication may not be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licenses issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Codex is a work of fiction inspired in part by documented events.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (Digital): 978-0-9565770-0-9

  ISBN (Physical): 978-0-9565770-2-3

  Typeset in Bembo by Last Passage Studios, Nottingham UK.

  Cover Design and Illustration by Adey@d3-design.com.

  Last Passage Publications,

  Nottingham, UK.

  www.lastpassage.com

  Available soon by Adrian Dawson:

  SEQUENCE

  in Print and Digital Editions (all formats)

  codex - (kõ’deks)

  n. an ancient manuscript of a book

  esp. of the bible [L. codex, a book].

  code/x

  an unidentified code embedded within the above

  ‘There was a certain man, Simon by name,

  which beforetime in the city used sorcery,

  and amazed the people of Samaria,

  giving that himself was some great one;

  to whom they all gave heed,

  from the least to the greatest, saying,

  this man is that power of God which is called Great.

  And they gave heed to him,

  because that of long time

  he had amazed them with his sorceries.’

  from the Acts of the Apostles - 8:9

  exodus

  The chess board is the world.

  The pieces with which we play are the natural phenomena of

  the universe into which we have been placed, and the game,

  like life itself, is governed by a set of rules;

  ‘the Laws of Nature’.

  We assume that we play white; that we make the first move,

  but we cannot be sure because our opponent, whoever He may be,

  is permanently hidden from view. And whilst we are aware that play,

  forced to reside within the rules, is always fair, just and patient,

  we must never forget that He will never overlook a mistake or

  make even the smallest allowance for our inherent ignorances.

  And in life, as in chess, retreat is usually nothing more

  than a carefully concealed preparation for attack.....

  At some distant point in a history too full of uncertainties to recall irrelevancies, Lara’s father had spoken those words. Softly, but with clear purpose. She remembered warmth. Fire, rich colour and better times, all sitting comfortably within her memory. All long gone. All proved horribly wrong. They were little more than shallow now, part of a past tucked quietly aside by an intelligent subconscious - one that understood the need for retention of hidden pearls should there come a day when they have reason to come crashing to the fore. But whilst each and every syllable, delivered in a better place and time, had stayed silently within her, their promise of consolation and justification for what she had been forced to leave behind right now was still little more than that; a promise. Her father, for all she still loved him desperately, had already shredded more of those than she could care to remember.

  As a player in whatever game this had now become, Lara had been pushing forward for over three years, trying to find her God - her misguided assumption being that He had been the hidden opponent - and, though she had been unable to find Him, she knew now with a certainty that ate away at her from inside that He existed. She knew because scientists throughout the ages had helped us - the sacrificial pawns - thoroughly understand the Laws of Nature; the unbreakable rules that govern the game. Laws which demonstrated to all intelligent creatures that every action has an equal and opposite reaction; that every positive has a negative and that every deity to which people are drawn like magnets possesses its polar antithesis. Equal and opposite.

  Its sole purpose to repel.

  Lara, for all she had not found God, knew that she had undoubtedly stared hard into the eyes of His dark alternate. She had looked into those bottomless chasms and seen the soul of a man who had been granted equal and opposite power to that which had created us all. His sole purpose; destruction. She had fallen for his charms because there, in this global chess game, was God’s tactical mistake; his ability to lay a blanket over us all, come what may, whilst his adversary was willing to make the extra special effort required to seduce each of us separately.

  Her thoughts had never been clearer. She must run; escape; fall back. Retreat.

  As she settled into the window seat and flopped wearily against the thickened window, her heart pounding and her breath tight, her eyes were drawn to a priest immersed within the other passengers boarding the plane. For a time she observed with disgust how those same others seemed to go out of their way to accommodate him. Each took their turn to back reverently and allow him entry to the aisle before them. To them, blindly it seemed, he was their conduit with a higher power, as close to divine as they might ever come. They treated him with respect so that in some inconsequential way they might clear themselves a path for the moment when their own time on earth was at an end. Lara felt so very differently. She knew the path that the fragments of her soul would take when her breaths reached their end because she had spent the last three days reliving the mistakes of the last three years. Nothing she could do now could alter the descent her spirit would take when her time on this earth was over.

  As he passed her seat, the priest felt Lara’s hand reach out and grab desperately at his wrist. He turned, pinhole eyes framed by wire-rimmed glasses looking innocently toward her. His initial shock at the state of the girl – as filthy, ragged and torn as any stray dog- slowly crawled toward to a gentle smile, one that he knew his position would demand he project. His eyes were filled with care, consolation and compassion; all the things his God demanded that they be. His expression was as fake as the girl who had handed Lara her boarding card.

  It was not long before the smile had scurried away again. Lara asked the man just one question – one simple question - and without excessive consideration he had offered his truthful answer. As he did she turned away from him and spoke with quiet venom. His eyes widened and a moment later he shuffled hurriedly along the aisle, trying not to think too deeply about what she had said.

  Somehow he just knew he would.

  In a Boeing 747, weight and space are valuable commodities which must be guarded as stringently as the millions in revenue which an airline can expect to earn. It is because of this that a fully efficient air-conditioning unit, when placed in such a financially conscious environment, is only ever referred to on expenditure sheets as being ‘hungry’; an item whose implementation harbours no promise of profitable return. Like the passengers it should serve, it is seen only to consume. From the damp, slippery, processed food downward, airlines are astutely aware that economy has no room for consumption. So they bite a cheap bullet and fit a desperately weak air-con unit instead.

  Which is why, as she took her steerage seat next to La
ra on the 8:52, the overtly fat German lady scowled, rooted inside an imitation Gucci handbag and sprayed a blast of cheap perfume as surreptitiously as she could. She knew that she would not just be breathing the stale, noxious air which surrounded the young girl now, she would be breathing it for the entire flight; over and over. Re-badged and repackaged by a system whose hunger was acutely disproportionate to the meal that two hundred and forty five exhalating passengers now placed like a sacrificial offering before it.

  Lara felt almost as dirty as she looked, inside and out. She had been running for a number of long days and cold nights, and yet outer appearances were no longer of any consequence to her. She knew that just one more night would finally deliver her to the place she needed to be. After three long and painful years, Lara was finally going home. At least, she hoped she was, though she took nothing for granted. Not any more. Not when there was still every possibility that somehow, in a manner she had yet to calculate, she would die en-route.

  Lara carried enough fear inside her emaciated frame to fill many people’s lifetimes, yet she held no fear of death. To die now would be the easy way out she reasoned; a blessed release from the consequences her naiveté now threatened to unleash. Deep down she was aware that she would even have taken her own life in the days that had passed, had she thought that it might help make anything in this world right again. Perhaps suicide would have brought peace to her mind and allowed her to do the one thing she had wanted to do for so very long now; close her eyes. To the horror of the past; to the greater horror of the future. The things that might happen, unless she made it home.

  Not a fear of death. She knew that much. Only of living.

  Living with the consequences of what she had done.

  She knew that He knew; both that she had been in Germany for the preceding three days, and that she had now - somehow - managed to shuffle aboard the flight to New York. He would know because He always knew. What she did. What she was attempting to do. What she thought and, more often than not, what she felt. He would have followed her every step of the way. He would have watched every futile move she had made and sneered at her attempts from the shadows. She had not seen Him, of course, not once. But then she wouldn’t have, would she? Why would He have bothered to create the shadows that spread like plague across this world unless He could immerse himself completely within them? But He was there alright; He was in everything. Watching. Waiting. Planning.

  And nobody else even knew.

  With eyes narrowed and desperate, she looked back through the first flakes of January snow and stared at lights blazing from the terminal. Slowly and carefully she scrutinised every silhouette formed in every window, wondering if He was cursing Himself for letting her escape. She smiled gently, hoping so.

  She caught her breath. Letting her escape. Of all the words, why had she selected those? Her smile disappeared, fell back to earth as though leaden weights had been attached to her jaw. Letting her… Allowing her… As though somehow this entire escape was delivered with His express permission; to His end. Was she still, even now, kidding herself that she wasn’t well and truly fucked?

  She tipped her head back and sighed. Her arms burned and she clenched her fists and teeth, knuckles white as polished enamel, teeth nothing like. Releasing her hands, she rubbed each of her inner elbows in turn. Even now she had no idea exactly what it was that they had systematically pumped into her, only that they had done it purely to control her mind, to influence her feelings. To keep her calm. Malleable. Was it possible then that even now the drugs were acting to accentuate her fears? Should she dismiss the paranoia she was feeling inside and finally make some attempt to cleanse her thoughts? After all, she was finally on her way. She was free. Surely she would not even have made it this far if she was not going to make it all the way? Wasn’t the fact that she was actually aboard the plane proof enough that she had somehow escaped His grasp?

  No, she decided, not yet. Paranoia aside she would definitely have been followed. She must have been. He planned for every eventuality; that was what He did. In reality that was all He did. He planned, and that was how He managed to operate with such unbelievable efficiency. Which only left her wondering what plan He might be following now, and why it was that He had allowed her to get this far.

  As the engines started to build and the terminal finally disappeared from view she breathed a sigh of hope and relief. If this was ‘it’ then ‘it’ was her final journey; the one that would form the immovable barrier she needed between her mistakes and her one and only chance to rectify them. She hoped. She started to pray, then stopped herself when she realised that she no longer knew exactly who it was that she was praying to.

  The unknowing world which sheltered beyond the glass fell under the shroud of darkness and Lara was presented with an image she had been quite unprepared to see; an image she no longer felt comfortable with. She saw, for the first time in over eighteen months, her own reflection. The window had framed her face into an unwelcome portrait, that of an older self, and she realised for the first time that she would never be viewed as what she had been at the point she had left her home; a child. Somewhere along the line she had become a woman, but without the certainty of knowing when that most important of changes had occurred. From the darkened glass this new Lara stared intently back at her; her face little more than a hollow, soulless shell. It made her feel uncomfortable just to be seated in her own company.

  The long mousy hair that had once danced around her face with loose curls had been replaced with close shaven black stubble, her pathetic attempt at disguise. Fine lines spread from cracked lips to sallow cheeks like cracks in glass and the eyes; the windows to a lost soul, had been boarded up with cold reserve. There was no shine left, no hope or excitement and certainly no clear vision of a future. She could not believe that she had changed so much in such a short space of time. Where was the fresh-faced girl she had always assumed that she still was? The girl whose smile, in photographs added to flesh-out mundane body copy, had brought life to numerous newspaper stories of her father in days gone by. Days she had hated.

  Days she missed.

  When the plane finally lifted from the white satin runway, climbing steeply into the contrasting black of a winter sky, she finally understood that the Lara she had once been, had been and gone. Possibly forever. What worried her most was that she had yet to discover who it was that would ultimately be taking her place.

  Craving fragments of normality, she picked the headphones from the elasticated holder of the seat in front and began to unravel the wires in quiet therapy. A previous passenger, no doubt in their excited hurry to leave the plane, had left them tangled in a complex web and she realised that it would take her a long time to get them straight.

  A long time. Like the last few days of her life it would take a lot of patience and a desire not to be beaten.

  She just had to believe she could do it.

  Though she was unaware at the time, and though she would never be granted the opportunity to learn, the instant Lara placed the plugs in her ears and turned on the radio was, coincidentally, the instant that the plane reached eight thousand feet and the pressure inside the cabin finally stabilised.

  Flight 320 flying Frankfurt to New York was fully laden but, like all commercial flights, accurate manifests ensured that everything on board was accounted for. Everything. According to the personnel manifests there were three members of the flight crew, two pursers and eleven flight attendants serving two hundred and forty five passengers. Similarly; the hold and baggage manifests for the flight showed that on this occasion the Boeing 747 was carrying almost twenty tons of cargo including military mail, over one hundred bags of commercial courier mail and 340 passenger suitcases.

  One of those manifests was wrong.

  There were actually 341 suitcases. It might only be a slight error, but the harsh truth was that manifests possessed no sliding scale. Wrong was wrong. Wrong indicated a breach. A dangerous breach.


  Unknown to anyone on board, least of all to Lara, as the required altitude was reached another piece of technology inside that single undocumented suitcase had activated a switch, one with much darker intent than the one controlling in-flight entertainment. A barometric trigger - activated simply by the surrounding air reaching the desired pressure level - clicked into place with a quiet, mechanical lack of remorse.

  The switch started a digital timer which immediately began to count downward from 45.00 minutes. Had it been necessary, that setting would have allowed the suitcase to pass through Frankfurt’s thirty minute security pressurisation chambers unchallenged. After which it would simply reset. To those sitting many feet above the hold the innocuous click was inaudible. There would be no warnings. As was the case with people who operated with unbelievable efficiency there would be no clues, no prints and no trace.

  As she finally felt the confidence to succumb to a deep sleep, its pull was so great that Lara felt as though she might never awake. Settling in for the long flight ahead, nobody aboard Flight 320 could have envisaged the irony of such thoughts.

  In her mind as she drifted, the words of her father, still repeating: Retreat. A carefully concealed preparation for attack... And with every cycle, the phrase became shorter, ultimately condensing itself into the only word that really mattered. She realised that it was no longer the voice of her father. It was Him; her Nemesis, attacking her in a thousand diverse voices. She tried in vain to convince herself that the tones He used were not displaying an increasing sense of delight in the futility of her actions.

  Retreat. An appropriately dirty word for what Lara had somehow forced herself to do. Retreat was not any form of attack, no matter how hard she tried to convince herself. Retreat was retreat. It was the act of running away. She had not ‘retreated’ from school on numerous occasions as a child any more than she had ‘retreated’ from home three years ago. She had run away. And now, in whatever ragged clothes she might choose to dress it up, that was what she was doing yet again. She was running. The only real difference was that this time she was leaving behind the one person in this world that she felt she had ever loved unconditionally.