The Apkallu Protocol 2
Chapter 2
Dodd Norton stood naked on the tile floor, studying himself in the full-length mirror. He was disappointed, but only mildly. At 58, no one could deny the obvious: he was a fine specimen of a man.
Of course the six pack had long gone, and his buttocks had begun to scrunch up into his lower back, but these were the inevitable ravages of time. In New Haven he worked on the buttocks twice a week at the Yale gym. As for the six pack—well, he loved fine food too much to have much hope of ever seeing it again.
The mirror fogged up slightly as a man came out of the sauna to the left. Norton considered the sauna unsanitary, and didn’t use it. But the pool, which he’d been visiting since arriving two weeks earlier, was clean enough. So he came here to swim. Religiously.
Decades earlier he’d decided never to quit swimming. He swam three times a week, no matter where his work took him. It was this that kept him lithe and muscular, at least for a man nearing sixty.
He often thought about how he’d ended up swimming out of fear. Growing up in Louisiana, from a young age he’d had an irrational terror of the forest, a deep phobia, and ended by taking refuge in lakes and pools. Almost as a way of hiding.
In high school he was on the swim team, and was considered one of the best young competitive swimmers in the south. He’d have easily gotten a swimming scholarship if it weren’t for his other skill: languages.
Norton had begun French first year in high school, mastering the grammar and vocabulary at lightning speed. In fact he had memorized the whole textbook before the class was on chapter 3. By second year he was reading Balzac. Nothing like it had ever been seen.
He went on to Italian, then Latin, all through books borrowed from the library. Then German, ancient Greek, and from there he hit a brick wall. In his small town, and even in the larger town nearby, there were no other grammars to be found.
So he started reading. At first he read everything. Eventually he settled on anthropology and history. On the symbolic structures that defined eras and peoples. He began to memorize these in the same way he’d memorized grammar and vocabulary.
By graduation at age 18 he knew more about world history, in more languages, than most young professors. It was true he didn’t have any theoretical approach, or even much theoretical interest, but he had all the content at his fingertips. He was admitted to the University of Chicago on scholarship, and defended a PhD. six years later. It was published as his first book: Cataclysm and Architectural Form in the Caribbean.
Norton looked at his toes in the mirror, wriggling them. Mirrors had always fascinated him, and at the same time, unaccountably, confused him. He understood why things were reversed in mirrors, but couldn’t accept that they actually were. For instance, shop signs. In a mirror, or reflected in a window, the letters were all in reverse. It shouldn’t be allowed.
As usual, both his toes and his mustache began to itch simultaneously. That mustache that many identified as fake. He’d stood in the locker room too long. It was always like this after swimming. To be a swimmer is to never be completely free of athlete’s foot. To be Tom Hanks is to never …
He didn’t finish the thought, but went to dry himself and blow dry his nagging feet.
He dressed slowly. His watch told him it was 3:42 p.m. He had plenty of time to make it to the airport.
He began to wonder again about the call from Claude Falaise, the sudden visit. His old friend seemed odd on the phone. Norton couldn’t figure it out.
Falaise had said he was coming to Budapest with a former student, a woman, and that he hoped to be able to meet up immediately upon landing. He sounded upbeat, as if it was a surprise vacation and Norton needed to help make it work. But why? It was totally unlike Claude.
Leaving the Ludovika pool, Norton immediately got a taxi to the airport rather than go home. He certainly could have gone home first, as he lived nearby. Still, he saw no advantage in depositing his small duffel bag.
The Józsefváros district was perfect for his work. It was near the library archives, it was quiet, and it had the pool. He’d taken the surprisingly spacious older apartment for the five weeks he’d be here. My routine was set. And now this visit.
As the taxi headed out on the Via Üllői út, Norton scanned the passing city, half lamenting all the buildings going up. So much money pouring into Hungary.
He weighed possible reasons for Claude’s odd visit. Could it really be one of those twilight romances with an ex-student? Falaise was over 80. Unless he’d gone mad, it was unthinkable.
His cell phone buzzed, a message. He looked.
It was his Yale secretary, Amanda Penny. Huh? In Italian?
Norton read: Perché accettare di incontrarlo all'aeroporto? È il tuo rivale. Non sai che ti detesta, Dodd?
In short: “Why pick him up at the airport? He’s your rival. Don’t you know he detests you, Dodd?”
It made no sense. Mandy wouldn’t message him such a thing. And she didn’t know Italian.
He rang her phone.
She picked up.
“Mandy, how are you? It’s me.”
“Oh, Dodd. How is everything? I was just heading over to the office. It’s morning here.”
“Mandy, I just got a very strange message from you on my phone.”
“What? From me?”
“Yes. Just now. It’s a message in Italian. It tells me that Professor Claude Falaise, who will soon be meeting me here in Budapest—well, it tells me that Claude hates me. In Italian!”
“I didn’t send any such message, Dodd.”
“Yes, I suspect you didn’t. But what’s odd is, it comes from your number. Can you look at your phone to see if it’s there in your sent messages?”
“Sure. Just a second.”
“Oh, wow,” she came back. “Perché assettar di ...” she began to mispronounce the Italian. “It’s in my outgoing messages! What does it mean?”
“Well. Just what I said. That Claude hates me.”
“No, Dodd, I mean, how could it happen that my phone sent you this message? I can’t even read Italian.”
“I know you can’t. Has anyone been near your phone?”
“No! I’m at home. My phone was in my purse. I’m getting ready to go out.”
“That means it’s some kind of hacker. It’s obvious. I’m just surprised we got hacked. Or you got hacked. Listen. I suggest you turn off your phone. Then go to your telecom provider before you go to the office.”
“I will! This isn’t good.”
“It’s not something to mess around with. And please, call me later when you find out what’s up. Or email me.”
“Who could have sent you this message?”
“I’ve no idea. I just think it’s odd they somehow know I’m meeting Professor Falaise this evening. And then they got to your phone. It doesn’t make sense.”
After the exchange Norton almost deleted the message, but stopped himself in time. He realized he might need it later for evidence.
He put his phone back in his bag.
And it buzzed again.
Another message, this one from his brother in Illinois. In French!
He read it: Il te déteste il te déteste il te déteste. Mais t'inquiète pas. Tu ne le verras pas aujourd'hui.
“He hates you he hates you he hates you! But don’t worry. You won’t be seeing him today.”
He rang his brother’s phone. He didn’t pick up. He left a voice message, giving roughly the same advice he’d given his secretary.
He scanned through his recent messages, to see if there might have been others he’d missed. None. The hacking was just starting now. But how could they hack both his secretary and his brother?
Wait. Maybe it’s my phone that’s hacked.
Did that make sense? Could someone hacking his phone cause messages sent to it to register in the senders’ phones?
He didn’t know.
Who was doing it? On the one hand it seemed juvenile, on the other—something about it made Norton uneasy. He suddenly realized what. It wasn’t just the hacking, but the larger context. The combined facts of the hacking and the oddness of Falaise’s speech on the phone the night before. The weirdness of this sudden visit, plus the hacking, plus the glib way his old friend had sounded when he called from California.
Something was up. He was just about to turn off his phone when it buzzed again.
A message from his mother’s number. He felt a jolt of panic spread through his body. The message was even labelled as coming from “Mom”.
His mother had died four years earlier. And her phone account, of course it was defunct. What’s more, he knew her name was no longer in his contacts list.
The message: “Okay. You got lucky this time, Sully.”
So they were playing hardball with him. Whoever they were.
He shut down the phone just as the taxi driver began to mutter in English.
“At the airport. Look!”
They were nearing the Ferenc Liszt International Airport, probably three kilometers away, and Norton could see the smoke ascending into the sky. A thick brown column.
“Is it the airport?”
“Yes,” the driver said. “Airport.”
A thought flitted through Norton’s mind, but he quickly dismissed it as absurd.
As they approached, traffic ground to a halt. The driver had turned on the radio, but as yet there was nothing about the airport. Whatever was happening had just happened.
* * *
Professor Claude Falaise and his ex-student Sophie Collins had an uncomfortable flight. It wasn’t that they were seated in economy, but rather that they had so much they needed to discuss, but couldn’t. The flight was full flying into Amsterdam, then full again once they caught their connection to Budapest. Passengers next to them would overhear, and the topics they needed to dig into were esoteric if not borderline insane.
Falaise had managed to sleep during part of the Atlantic crossing, but Sophie couldn’t. She felt what was happening wasn’t merely a disaster, but was a disaster in which she was implicated. If only for being part of the tech subculture that had made it possible.
Worst of all, she was seated next to the man who’d tried to warn her.
As the plane began its descent, they were both awake and discussing mythology. They’d been discussing Levantine religion and the Greeks, a topic Falaise knew well.
Sophie had just finished off two glasses of wine, trying to keep herself together.
“The cylinder seals found in Thebes didn’t prove anything,” Falaise was saying. “They likely arrived there through trade, or were brought there later by a trader. Certainly far later than the founding period.”
“Was it the layer they were found in?”
“Not that so much as the varied provenance of the seals. They were Mesopotamian, but from widely divergent periods. Almost like collector’s items.”
“Okay.”
“But that doesn’t mean there’s good reason to doubt the city was founded by Phoenicians,” Falaise went on. “The Cadmus story may well have a historical basis. Why not?”
“I always remember one of your principles,” Sophie said. “Because honestly, it just seemed so reasonable.”
“What principle?”
“You always insisted that historians were right to doubt the content of legends, but they were going too far if they assumed the named figures never existed.”
The plane was tilting, the engine speed shifting.
“Yes,” Falaise raised his voice over the sound. “It’s always seemed obvious to me. So the Odyssey is legend, myth. Of course. But likely there was at one point a sailor named Odysseus. And he had a story of one sort or another, which then was added onto and developed over generations.”
“Over hundreds of years.”
“Over hundreds of years in an oral culture—which makes all the difference,” Falaise added. “The accretion of new elements is all the easier, because there are no authoritative texts.”
The plane was approaching the ground. The landing gear began to descend.
Suddenly there was a muffled BOOM and something shook the plane. Sophie jumped to attention.
The people behind them began to scream, then shout: “Fire! The wing!”
Claude and Sophie craned their necks to see, but couldn’t. The plane rattled, the screaming increased.
The pilot’s voice came over the intercom: “Stay seated. Stay seated. We’re landing.”
In the following seconds the howling in the cabin only increased.
Sophie’s eyes had already begun to fill with tears. Claude reached over, gripped her hands.
“God save us,” he prayed.
“I’m so sorry, I’m—” she began.
The plane hit hard, slamming them into their seats with sledgehammer force, knocking their jaws together—the fuselage hit the runway and began to slide, the screaming of metal on concrete and the half-broken landing gear folding underneath.
The air was full of screaming, the shriek of the fuselage speeding along the cement. It seemed to go on forever, that shrill barreling down the runway, passengers howling in terror or frozen stiff, breath held tight, waiting to see if this was the end.
The plane was now veering sideways, they could feel the new direction of pull, another landing module caved in with a further jolt downwards—then it stopped.
The plane was still, but women’s voices continued to wail.
A flight attendant began shouting through the intercom, another hobbled down the aisle screaming: “Quiet! Quiet!”
A door popped open six or seven rows ahead of them—people began to scramble out of their seats, blocking the way. The door that had opened was on the right side, they were seated against the window and aisle on the left, a crowd of people and seats between them and the door.
“IN LINE! IN LINE! GET IN LINE!” shouted the flight attendant’s voice over the intercom. Then: “Do you all want to DIE? I said GET IN FUCKING LINE!!”
That did it. People started to jostle each other into order, slightly cooler heads yelling “Calm!” to the panicked people nearby.
“IN LINE! IN LINE! IN LINE!”
The knot of people was finally loosening at the front, though they still couldn’t see the open door. Looking out the window to his left, Claude glimpsed the reflection of flames cast over the ground. The fire was behind them.
The line began to move quickly.
“NO BAGS!” one man shouted at another, raising his fist. “What the fuck!”
The guy had been trying to retrieve his carry on.
They could finally get up. A woman was clawing her way to get past Sophie, who was on the aisle side. Sophie let her, but not the man behind her.
“Don’t even think about it!” she jabbed him, twisting her way in ahead.
Falaise had grabbed his slim bag from under the seat as he stood. He’d stuffed it into his jacket against his side and hobbled forward with Sophie, holding the bag against him with one arm.
They were at the door, approaching the edge of the yellow slide. Sophie leapt first, then Claude, the panicked flight attendant shouting “Go! Go!” slapping them each on the shoulder as they passed through the door.
At the bottom, two flight attendants pulled each to their feet, one after the other. They began to run from the plane, following the others, all in the same direction. A fire truck was already there, spraying the fuselage with white foam. Ambulances had pulled up, medics were already sprinting forward.
After running a few hundred meters, Claude slowed to look back. People were still coming down the slide rapidly, the whole opposite side of the plane in flames, black smoke pouring up.
“Sophie!” he shouted, and she slowed and turned back.
They proceeded out of breath, now at a walk, then stopped.
“I’m so sorry!” she began to wail. “I’m so sorry I didn’t listen, I almost got us killed, I’m such a fool. I …”
“No! Stop!” Claude shouted. “It’s not your fault. A plane accident! Are you alright?”
“Yes, I’m alright,” she cried. “I’m a moron, but I’m not dead. My God, Claude, what is this?”
She was still in shock.
“Let’s keep walking,” he said, reaching his arm around her. “Everything will be alright!”
They continued forward with the others, airport security guiding them farther away from the plane.
[On to Chapter 3. »»]