She spoke to them with the voice of the dead: “There is a plague coming. For forty days and forty nights fear shall savage the streets. Those steeped in sin shall burn. The dying begins now.”
“Who is this? Who am I talking to?” a second voice asked.
“I don’t need to tell you my name. Before the day is through you will know everything there is to know about me apart from one important detail.”
“And what’s that?”
“Why I did it.”
Sir Charles played it again.
And again.
Her final sentence hung in the air.
“Do we know who she is?” Orla Nyren asked. She leaned forward in her chair. The woman had a habit of coming alive when things around her became interesting. Most people did, but it was her definition of interesting that set her apart from “most” people.
“Mister Lethe? Would you care to share your discovery?” Sir Charles inclined his head slightly.
Lethe noddded, and rather self-consciously fiddled with the black rim of his glasses. “We ran facial recognition software, looking for a cross-match for our Jane Doe in various databases. IDENT1 struck out. Likewise there was nothing on the Server in the Sky, so we’re not talking FBI’s Most Wanted here. That meant we had to look closer to home. We got hits from the DMV down in Swansea along with one from the IRIS system at Heathrow. Those helped us find out all the not-so-nitty-gritty details.
“Our fiery female is one Catherine Meadows, age 39, graduate of Newcastle University, with no romantic entanglements. Ms. Meadows was, at the time of her combustion, a relatively well regarded forensic archeologist. Most recently she had testified at the Radovan Karadzic war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Her resume reads like a Who’s Who-or Where’s Where, I guess-of archeology. But that’s it. That’s her life. She was obsessed with the past. She didn’t live in the here and now.
“Reading between the lines, she was a lonely woman more likely to end her day cuddling up with her cat, a cup of Horlicks and the latest episode of Eastenders, rather than locking lips with some gorgeous Lothario. There’s nothing here to suggest she might be typical terrorist material, or even atypical terrorist material,” he said with a shrug. “Indeed, right up to her going out in a blaze of glory I would have said Ms. Meadows was, for want of a better word, boring.”
“It’s amazing what you can find out with Google,” Noah joked.
“Actually, to be honest, half of this was out there in the public domain. Given her name and her picture, any one of you could have found it. She had a Facebook page that’s littered with pictures of her ginger tom, that links her up with the class of ’91 at Newcastle Uni, and had some rather unfortunate photographs dating back to her time as a Cure fan.” Lethe raised a wry eyebrow behind his glasses. “You would think an archeologist ought to have known that some things are best left in the past, wouldn’t you?” He chuckled at his own joke. “She’s written for a number of academic journals. The articles are likewise online for people with insomnia to peruse at their leisure.”
“So why burn herself like that? I mean, that’s a pretty extreme way to go,” Ronan Frost asked, his accent a soft burr now.
“In my country we would be looking for the invisible men,” Konstantin said, rather cryptically.
“Precisely,” the Irish man agreed with him. “Something about this stinks. A boring woman doesn’t just suddenly decide to set fire to herself on a whim. So who is hiding in the shadows? Who are the invisible men?”
“Sir Charles?” Lethe said, indicating the old man should pick up where he’d left off.
The single image on the plasma screens fractured into twelve seemingly identical ones. No, not identical, Noah realized, just remarkably-disturbingly-similar. The center of each screen was dominated by a burning figure. The time-stamp on each read 1500Z. But that was all they had in common.
Working his way around the screens he recognized Dam Square and the white stone pillar of the National Monument in Amsterdam, the glass pyramid of the Palais du Louvre in Paris’ first arrondissement, the red brick facade of Casa de la Panaderia in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, the towering majesty of the cathedral in Stephansplatz in Vienna, the obelisk in the heart of St. Peter’s Square in Rome, the Vatican hidden behind the flames, and the glass monstrosity of the Sony building in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. There were more cities and more monuments he didn’t recognize. Noah counted them, even though he knew full well there were twelve screens.
“Well now it is starting to get interesting,” Orla said. An errant strand of hair curled over her brow and across her left eye.
“Thirteen people set themselves alight in very public places all across Europe at exactly the same time? I’d say we’ve moved way beyond interesting,” Noah said. Interesting really wasn’t the word he would have chosen though. The whole thing had a fatalistic simplicity to it.
“Oh, it gets better than that, or worse, depending upon your perspective,” Jude Lethe told them.
“Don’t tell me, more of that Google-Fu?”
“Something like that,” Lethe said. He leaned forward and started rapidly manipulating the images on the screen, zooming each one in until the display was filled with their screaming faces. The detail and precision of the digital images was nothing short of horrific. The images were hideously sharp. Noah had seen enough death to last him a lifetime, but something about this, as Frost had said, was different. Wrong.
“Italy, France, Spain, Germany, England, Greece, Switzerland, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Russia,” Lethe reeled off the countries where thirteen martyrs had self-immolated. “You can’t really tell the ethnicity from the faces now, too much damage, but the facial recognition software picked up hits for all thirteen here in the UK.”
“You’re telling me they’re all English?”
Lethe nodded. “Passports issued by the UK and Commonwealth Office.”
“This is nuts,” Noah said, trying to take in the logistical nightmare of forcing thirteen people to commit suicide in public, and in such a violent manner. “What’s the news reporting? I presume it’s all over every channel in the world.” He found himself thinking about the old Smiths song “Panic,” though his imagination took it way beyond the streets of London and Birmingham.
“At the moment truth is rather fragmented,” the old man said. “As one would expect, the initial reports were very insular. Then within an hour of the event, the scope of the actual event began to come clear. Regional television stations were broadcasting identical CCTV images of the suicides. It’s difficult to deny the evidence of your own eyes, of course. No one wants to believe it. The reporters are playing down any connection, for now, but it is obvious for anyone to see.
“The actual content of the telephone calls hasn’t been broken yet, but that is only a matter of time. And when it does-and people hear that promise of forty days and forty nights of terror-then as the Americans like to say, everyone will just be waiting for the other shoe to drop. That is the kind of world we live in, I am afraid.”
“Thankfully, no one seems to have picked up on the fact that the victims are all British. But that only puts us a few hours in front of the press. Some enterprising soul will put two and two together soon enough.”
“We can’t worry about that,” the old man said. “Right now the only thing we need to concern ourselves with is the facts. What we know from monitoring the newswires is that the major broadcast networks in each respective country received a call precisely one minute before the suicides. In all but two the message was the same.”