Day 89 - Darwin's Game - Chapter 38 (3536 words)

©Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

DARWIN'S GAME

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 38

“How could a building of that size, burn to the ground and no one notices it?”

The old man shrugged and made an odd movement with his mouth, laughing without making a sound in a way that Jacob thought was from years of irony or bitterness, with no results. Jacob pulled out a second wad of cash, counted it out, folded it and handed in to the man patting the top of the receiving hand while doing so. “Grazie, grazie, Signor.” he added, eliciting a widening of the eyes and a rush of Italian to Jacob's guide, the mechanic brother of the hotel clerk in Roma.

“He says you should be more careful, more discrete with your money. You never know what unsavoury characters may be watching.” the Mechanic had a grin on his face, Jacob knew why.

“By 'unsavoury' does he mean you by any chance?”

“Yes, I think he must do.” The old man threw up his hands and laughed, this time out loud, let the foolish American waste his money, it was no skin off his nose.

The mechanics name was Alessandro, and he had been intrigued by the vague yet urgent business that Jacob was undertaking. His brother had called him with a story of a man, with too much money and wanting very little attention looking for something, big and important, but unknown in Italy. An American man, with American money.

It was harder for Jacob to buy information here, there was a natural suspicion about the foreign man wanting to ask all sorts of questions. After Jacob had taken the car to his house, just over the Arno and out of the city, they got to talking about extending the lease on the car and maybe some extra services. Alessandro was his own boss, he could put off whatever he was working on, have his boy do the work while he followed the American for a modest fee and expenses.

Jacob was clear that he was not going to offer up any details, that what he was doing was none of his business, but by extension it also meant it was none of any one else's business either. He had paperwork for certain items, large deliveries they needed to track down, some of it maybe done 'off the books' once it was in Italy, and that was where Alessandro and his contacts came in handy. He had sent him off on a few errands and had his people using Facts Alone resources to track down more of the online, officially available records for land and building permits.

There were no records of the acquisition and no permits signed by any local body that fit the description of the Darwin Town, but the smaller pieces of the puzzle did leave some footprints behind. They all were for jobs in one area, further up and towards the coast from Florence, near the town of Lucca. Not all of the items went directly there, but some of the ones that went south, were turned around and routed there. If you knew what to look for you could trace the pieces and slowly figure out the location, but each on it's own was an innocuous order for a part of a building project, sometimes a double up or an over order, sometimes just a consignment on it's own.

Though he had already seen the latest episode of the Game from his uplink to the office, he politely sat through Alessandro and his family catching up with it as if it were the first time he had seen it. They were mildly amused by the antics, claiming that this kind of thing could only happen in America, half convinced that the US government is somehow connected and involved. They spoke about his home country like it was a naughty child that was somehow incorrigible but still loveable in other ways, like he was not even in the room.

A few days later they were on their way to Lucca to find out what more they could. After all an undertaking of that size must have left a footprint, a mark that someone would have noticed. In an area like Lucca, unlike the open wilderness of Montana, was small and compact with plenty of greenery to hide behind, but twisting and torturous roads, where the deliveries and installations would have undoubtedly attracted attention.

It was on the journey there that they pulled into a café/restaurant in the countryside hills when Alessandro broached the subject of what he was looking for.

“Are you expecting to find him there?”

“Who? Find who, where?”

“This Darwin person, or whatever he/she/they are. It is who you are looking for, this must be what you are looking for, whatever you have found, you have followed it here Mr Edgerton. Your picture has been on the news before you know, we watch the Darwins from the very first one. It took me a few days to place you but now, now I know is you. And this all this... is... well. You expect to find him?”

Jacob knew this time would come, it had only been a few days and they had hardly forged a very strong bond in that time, but at least they had not fallen out, there was no sign of exploitation of contempt, just a business arrangement that was mutually beneficial, at least for now. He had little choice but to accept that, in a car in the middle of the Tuscan countryside, and there was no indication that it would go any other way as far as he could ascertain.

“No, no I don't actually. I expect to find more clues, more leads to follow and I expect to find... well I'm not sure what I expect to find, I just doubt that he'd still be there. He's been too clever by half, this is not a race even though it feels I'm running one.” Jacob relaxed a little in the comfortable leather seats. Alessandro had wisely swapped the beat up but untraceable lease car for his own Mercedes saloon, which was a much better experience for the long driving and searching ahead of them.

“You see maybe it is this Darwin man, he wants you to find him. I think this is true. He finds you, he gives you the discs, he gives you the clues, he takes you and lets you go, and here you are where you can find him.” Alessandro is keeping his eyes on the road while Jacob muses on what he had shared, not for the first time as Blake and he had the same thoughts, in various guises from excitement to paranoia over the preceding weeks.

“Of course, though like Nietzsche says when you look into the Abyss, the Abyss also he looks into you. Maybe you're not looking for him, but he is looking for you?”

They spent a few days chasing down leads but getting nowhere, though the process was aided by having Alessandro on his side. He told Blake all about him, had him checked out thoroughly by the Dragon Ridge team and found that he was as trustworthy as they were going to get. He was a fence for stolen cars, parts and accessories but hardly a kingpin. Just a man with a local business, supplemented in the black market, not someone who stole directly but someone who enabled the criminal element. Dragon Ridge offered to source some local security, bus them in from Rome or Milan where they had contacts, but Edgerton turned them down. In this part of the world subtlety and local knowledge trumped brute force and persuasion.

Blake had news that was unsettling for Jacob though, and it was about their financial situation. Jacob was wondering when the plug was going to be pulled out on their funds, they had burned through quite a lot with security, hotels, travel, site hosting and danger bonuses to staff (they paid those before they were in any danger of running out, it seemed like the best move to let everyone share in the spoils while they could) had eaten through a lot of cash. They also bribed and paid off a bunch of people for information, and the higher up they were the more they cost.

But the problem was the very opposite of that and that was the truly unsettling part, their funds were rising not falling. Someone was giving them money, wire transfers from multiple sources funnelled through non profit organisations were flowing into their company accounts every day. They were in small denominations and mixed in with support from the public at large who wanted to contribute to keeping the site going as the only way to guarantee the free access to Darwin instalments. That did not add up to even ten percent of the funds coming in from their site and that was again dwarfed by significant private donations that did not seem to match reality.

Alessandro was right, it might well be that he was not looking for Darwin at all, but that Darwin was trying to find him, and bring him to see him. That thought was terrifying and reassuring at the same time. He did not share that detail with his new assistant, but if anything it made him a little more generous with expenses and reimbursements, and that then paid off as he was greasing local wheels to get information with he extra cash he had on his person.

On the Friday of that week after seeing the Darwin Town consumed in fire, and yet no records of any fires were on local books and computers or even news papers. They examined screen shots of the building, focussing on the exterior glimpses through the glass door, where it had represented freedom and escape to the players, it gave context and (potentially) location to the watchers. There was little to see in the background except grass and over the small rise a few tree tops, by now the Bureau would know that they were not native American trees, but Olive Trees, as Alessandro immediately recognised.

The problem was that they were as ubiquitous here as they were almost anywhere that they were grown in Orchards for the oils extracted. California, South Africa, New Zealand and Italy were all places where the tree had been transplanted to, but it gave them some hope that they were in the right place. It was not as definitive as they had wanted of course, but it was something and with the clues few and far between that actually lead anywhere, no one wanted to look this particular gift horse in the mouth.

They were in a café in the Village on the edge of the Orrido di Botri state park, hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest and hills, almost anything could be hidden in there and it was a natural suspect. It must have been a huge endeavour to hide such a massive structure and there was no concealable access that would have hidden the trucks, the cranes and the massive amount of materials it would have taken to produce the Darwin Town.

“We may have something, it's to be taken with a grain of salt.” Alessandro sat down and crooked his finger and a chair was brought over to their table, and a few painful minutes later an older local man slowly eased himself into the newly placed chair.

“Buongiorno Signor?” Jacob raised an eyebrow at his driver and new friend.

“He knows this places, he knows where it is.” Alessandro tapped the photo of the cars outside the glass exit to the town, and then another one from a similar angle with the men showing in frame.

Jacob kept his cool, used to playing his hand close to his chest and so he just nodded. Within a few minutes he got excited and shortly after that it was a struggle to maintain his cool. He peeled off an amount of money and handed it to the old man and asked for him to guide them to the spot.

He and his friends sat on the corner, day after day and while they did not know about any building, they had calculated that the son of the late Barone, who no one bothered giving the honorific title to due to his less than complimentary nature, was deeply in debt and spending much more money on the Estate than was being done. They saw truck after truck driving through the town to the house, sometimes with things that made no sense when it was all added up. Given the amount of extras, rework and overkill that was being undertaken for the estate, they figured that he would be bankrupt in no time, but that never happened.

In isolation each truck, crane, lorry and van that made it's way through the forest to the estate added up to approximately five times the amount of work that was being done up there. They suspected black market or some kind of fix by the builders, and their denials about certain loads and times only focussed more attention on them. No one reported it, there was nothing to report and who would you tell it to anyway? The new Barone, he knows how to waste money? So he's just like his grandfather that way, the estate won't last for long and the government will claim it back in taxes, it'll be made into a museum or a tourist hotel, something good for the locals and a removal of a giant pain in the ass Barone, who thinks he owns the village and the forest and all within.

So they watched and waited and planned what they were going to do with the estate when it came back to the hands of the people, whom they would be voting with, they assumed. It never happened and eventually the work on the estate stopped and the Barone, he never came back from the Riviera one year, a boating accident left him heirless and in a coma. So the estate sat in Limbo, it had been for a while now.

Jacob had two questions, how long was this for (the trucks and the extra shipments) and when was the fire?

“The fire? What fire?”

“The building we are looking for caught fire recently, it was a big fire there would have been a lot of smoke.”

“No, there has been no fires here this season.” The old man shook his head and was walking to the car.

“How could a building of that size, burn to the ground and no one notices it?”

Again the shrug and the walking to the car, a drive to the state forest park is going to have to start soon before they lose the light. Jacob pays him a second time, the fee for taking them to the place where they think the trucks would have gone off the road, in to the woods and to an area that could hold such a building. A cave system in the hills, some parts open like a caste mine others in deep crevices and sink-hole big enough to build a small town in.

Caves, caves would be a perfect place to hide the buildings, and the excavation work would be minimal, it would all be building and assembling. This was the strongest lead they had so far, the signs were all pointing to the Darwin Town, recently ravaged by fire but somehow not alerting the locals? It was conceivable that the cave system could have put the smoke and ash from the fire into the ground, piped it out like a chimney further up the country or out to the coast. That would explain the lack of attention and alerting of the locals. That had to be it, the other option would be to think that this, like Montana was not the alpha site, but a Beta or even Gamma site which was too depressing to even think about.

They drove for a long while and the light still favoured them when they went off road into the hills, Alessandro had prepared for the off road with a set of chains front and back when they got to the dirt section, but they knew they were in the right direction as some heavy equipment had left a well worn and wide enough track for the merc to pass through.

Then they rounded a corner and found it, a clearing a huge open space with a manicure lawn and a flat, obviously engineered plateau that went up to the edge of a rock face with a huge tarpaulin type structure in front of it. Jacob got out of the car and had his camera ready, there was no cell service out this far and with no line of sight but he recorded it all for viewing later. He marked the GPS coordinates and wished he brought the sat phone out today, but it was in the Pensione charging as they did not expect to be out this far today.

He handed the camera to Alessandro and even the old man managed to look stunned and surprised at the suddenly discovered engineering in the middle of the forest. He came out and walked around the screen, calling the others over to him as Jacob is making notes on his tablet, and taking shots all about the clearing before heading to the stretched taro in front of the cliff face.

As he came around he saw that the sheet of canvas was metallic on the surface, it was a projection screen with an active coating that was reflective to bounce the light off of it and make it look a little more real, but underneath that coating was a picture. A picture of four cars, and a slight hill and driveway in a life size scale. When he looked what was behind the scree, he saw the doorway the one that the players had stared outwards off at their freedom. There was no freedom at all, there was a fake and a scam. They looked like they had a chance, but did they really? It was hard to know for sure but getting out would not have netted them a car necessarily, just the picture of four.

The door was just as interesting but for a more frustrated reason, as behind the door, on the other side of the glass was concrete. Solid and floor to ceiling there was a concrete in fill that took up the entire corridor, at least as far as he could see. Alessandro had no sledge hammer in his car, so it was not like they could easily break it open and get inside to see how far it went. If the old man was to be believed, he and his friends had counted a few hundred tons on concrete coming to the estate, and here was why.

He recorded everything he could examining the ground and the surroundings for clues, even taking hi-res photo castings of the tire tracks, knowing that they would be dead ends, but trying anyway. The light was fading rapidly now and the interest in staying in the cold darkening forest was waning with it. The old man was already in the car when Jacob finally packed it in. Who would he report it to? Should he even bother, it's not like the FBI could do anything about it from the US, and the Italians would say what? We need to dig up our own national forest on a hunch? They rolled up the screen and put it in the boot of the car, tying it down with bungee cords.

As they drove away Jacob recalled that the man had not answered his second question.

“How long did you say this has been going on? When did the Barone, the knew one start work on his house and when did it stop?”

“Oh not long, not long it was quite recent.”

Jacob pressed for an answer, “This year then?”

“Young people you're all the same, it happens now or it doesn't happen at all.”

“So not this year?”

“They started seven, no eight years ago and they stopped, the year before last.” Jacob was stunned, the implications of that were staggering.

The old man nodded to himself, the year before last did seem like yesterday at times, it reminded him of his mortality.

Jacob thought about it all the way out of the forest in silence, except for the fact that Darwin had obviously wanted to be found, there was no way that the paper trail matched the building dates. He had left breadcrumbs for him to find and follow, it would only be a matter of time before another trail presented itself now, he was sure. Would he actually want to meet a man so meticulous so far thinking to plan for this long, to stand in front of him?

He no longer knew.