Trifariam, The Lost Codex (2012) (38 page)

Before James could even respond, she had started to dial his number. She didn’t have to wait long. It hadn’t even rung twice when a loud raspy voice picked up the phone. He seemed surprised.

“Hi, Mary! How are you?”

“Hi, Marcus. Well, I’m a little busy, and you… how are you these days?”

“I see you still miss me. When will you accept my invitation for dinner?”

Mary bristled for a moment. She remembered all those times Marcus had asked her out to dinner, like he did with his other female friends, but she had always politely turned him down. In fact, she knew full well that “dinner” was just a pretext to lure her into bed. Marcus only ever thought about two things: bits and sex. He was like a forty year old man who was stuck in adolescence.

Mary changed the topic completely. “I’m very busy at the moment - I have a little problem. Could you help me?”

“You know I’d do anything for you.”

While she was dialing, Mary had come up with the perfect excuse. He wouldn’t suspect a thing. “I’m working on a dig in Mexico. We think one of our colleagues is passing on private information about our discoveries via e-mail to another archaeologist who apparently wants to beat us to it.” James was sitting on the bed, looking at her amazed. Her facial expressions, her intonation, her way of explaining were all perfect. Anybody would have believed her. “Could you help us and become a hacker for the day?”

After an uncomfortable silence on the other end of the line, he cleared his throat. “So you want me to steal the account from this little friend of yours and hand it over to you.”

“Could you?”

“Maybe, but… what do I get in return?”

“Umm, what if we brought forward that dinner we’re due? But I’m warning you, it will only be dinner. Nothing more.”

Marcus’ cackling was so loud that James could hear it clearly. “Give me a little time, and I’ll let you know when I’ve got it. What’s his e-mail address?”

Mary turned around and again looked at the screen of Richard’s laptop. “[email protected]. I owe you one.”

“No, you owe me dinner,” he said in fits of laughter, then he put down the phone.

“We have to go,” said James once the conversation was over. “Richard has got to be on his way.”

James got back inside the laundry cart, this time careful to put a clean sheet over his face. They opened the door of the room and left as quickly as they could. They turned the corner of the corridor and continued along another which would take them straight to the elevator. They had thought about getting changed inside it and abandoning the cart, but as they were waiting, they saw Richard’s shadow materialize on the staircase which led to that floor.

As quickly as she could, Mary pulled a white cap onto her head, looked at the floor, inserted her earphones and turned up the volume of the music and pretended to crudely chew gum. Although James had a sheet on top of him, he had left a couple of tiny holes through which he could see Mary’s face. Looking at her, something odd was going on.

Richard passed by without realizing she was there, for him she was just another cleaner. He seemed angry and kept muttering words to himself incoherently. It was as if he wanted to speak to somebody over the phone but they hadn’t picked up.

He reached the corner of the corridor in no time at all before disappearing from sight. When the elevator doors opened, Mary had already calmed down. Her breathing had quickened enormously during the last few minutes to the point where she was suffering from a mild attack of tachycardia by the time Richard was passing by right next to her.

Mary stopped the elevator between the third and fourth floors, making it look as if there had been a technical problem. James took advantage of this and got out of the cart, while Mary had taken off all her cleaner’s uniform, standing in just a pair of red panties and matching bra. He couldn’t help but steal a sideways glance at her body while she did up the back zipper of a dress she had selected especially for the occasion, and which showed off her feminine curves.

A certain tension hung in the air, perhaps sexual in nature, until it was broken by some unexpected vibration.

James picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Where were you?! I’ve been looking all over the hotel for you. You weren’t answering my calls.”

“Yeah, well… we had… gone for a walk to get our appetites up.”

Richard wasn’t daft. It had taken James a while to get his words out, but he didn’t seem to care in the least.

“Of course! Don’t expect me at dinner. I have to study the latest details in the book before we go to Teotihuacan tomorrow. I’ll eat in my room.”

“Okay, I’ll see you in the morning.”

James stood frozen with the cellphone stuck to his ear. He had the funny feeling that Richard had hung up before he could even answer. He seemed to be in a real hurry. “He’s up to something,” said James, turning around. “We should escape with the fragment now we’ve got it, before they start to suspect. Plus, they won’t be able to do anything without one of the parts.”

“But James, they’d move heaven and earth to find us. The only option is to complete the
Trifariam
and use it in our favor.”

“And what if we give them the fragment and escape? Maybe in time they’ll stop chasing us.”

Mary remained quiet. She seemed to agree with the idea. But after thinking about it for a few seconds, she took a breath and exhaled slowly. “We don’t know what hides behind
Trifariam
, or what it is used for. What if they use it for evil gains? Think of your daughter. Do you want that kind of future for her? And don’t you think they’ll come after your daughter in order to get to you?”

“You’re right. We have to see this through to the end, however it damn well ends up!”

They didn’t feel like eating even though it was dinnertime. They were expecting a crucial call which would allow them to find out their chasers’ intentions and thus save their lives.

When they reached Mary’s room, James held her tightly against his chest, promising that he would look after her and never let anything happen to her. She in turn gave him a tender smile followed by a heartfelt kiss on the lips. Then she went into her room.

As he watched the door close, James sighed an “I love you”, which went unheard by Mary.

R
ain had fallen during the whole night, sprinkling the dawn with dew which was unheard of at that time of year. The clouds had cleared in the early hours, leaving the sky totally clear. Although he had had a rough night during which he only managed to sleep for a couple of hours, James was completely fresh faced. He hadn’t been able to shake that dreadful idea from his mind; Richard had tried to kill them. Due to the close friendship their parents had enjoyed throughout their whole childhood, they had ended up spending lots of time together, sealing a bond which he had considered unbreakable until the day before.

He walked to the balcony as he finished smoothing his face with his favorite anti-ageing moisturizing cream. The sight of the tropical rainforest in the distance, the singing of the birds and the deep blue sky in the background brought him that moment of peace that he had desperately yearned for over the last few days.

An eagle which was soaring from one side of the sky to another suddenly turned over in the air and swooped towards the ground at startling speed, probably going to pounce on a couple of partridges who had left their nest.
If only we could be the hunter and they the prey this afternoon,
thought James as he yawned and stretched.

He looked towards the door, worried. He thought he had heard a noise.

“James, are you there?” Mary’s sweet voice broke the silence in the room as she softly tapped on the door with her knuckles.

She quickly rushed in as soon as it opened even a crack.

“Has something happened? What’s the matter?”

She sat down in the armchair which adorned the room. She looked tired, but she couldn’t stop smiling. Eventually, she switched on her laptop. “I just called Marcus. He got hold of the password.”

“How?! So soon?! How the hell did he manage that?!”

“From what he said, it was quite easy. He just had to lay the bait and wait for Richard to bite. He was a bit busy, so he didn’t go into great detail, but I do know that from the many options he had available, he decided to start with social engineering. It looks like it gave him good results.”

“Social engineering? What’s that?”

“Yeah, I didn’t know what it was either until he told me. Social engineering can be used as a very efficient tool in discovering passwords for web services. It’s based around finding out the hobbies, interests or personal details of the person in question. For example, by engaging him in a specific conversation and asking him certain questions, you can get to know a lot of things about his private life. You have to bear in mind that lots of people use their personal information as passwords.

James looked thoughtful, giving the impression that he was among them. “But… your friend didn’t speak to Richard, right?”

Mary burst out laughing. Then she kissed him to calm him down. “No, but he used something they call ‘Xploits’.”

“‘Xploits’? What’s that?”

“It’s a software application that again uses social engineering to try and steal the user’s password. They somehow replicate the homepage of the e-mail client used by the victim. The page created looks identical at first glance, but how it works internally is completely different.”

“I’m not understanding any of this,” said James, a little apprehensive and still worried.

“It’s very easy, I caught it straight away. When I spoke to Marcus, I told him that Richard was an archaeologist who was working with us on a site in Mexico. That’s where he first started to deploy social engineering. He sent an anonymous e-mail to his personal account with the title:
NEW DISCOVERIES IN TEOTIHUACAN
. When Richard opened it, instead of seeing the body of the message, he saw the webpage designed by Marcus, which was an exact copy of the one he uses to access his e-mails. Richard must have thought that he had lost his internet connection and that he had been logged out, so he inputted his details again, including his password. Cue the program’s internal code, which stored those details and sent them to Marcus without Richard realizing.”

“Brilliant! I would have fallen for that, too!”

“And me!” smiled Mary.

“What happens after the details are inputted?”

“The program automatically redirects the user to the genuine webpage, but it uses the real information which has already been typed in to log in. That way the victim doesn’t realize that anything has happened.”

“And what if he goes to open the e-mail again?”

“He won’t be able to. It is automatically deleted when it is read for the first time.”

“Incredible!”

“When Marcus gave me the password, I had a look through his e-mails. You’re not going to believe what I found.”

James’ face dropped. His well-defined facial features, which before showed surprise and admiration, were now marred with hesitation and unease at what his friend had said. Deeply saddened, he waited for her to input the address and password into the e-mail client’s webpage. What he was about to see would make his heart skip a beat.

T
he inbox only contained three e-mails - the others had probably been erased. The first two were typical advertisements with which travel agents bombard people. Inside, they named the most important tourist areas of Mexico, as well as giving a detailed list of hotels in which to spend a pleasant holiday.

It seemed that Richard had searched for archaeological information on some website and it had made him register. These pages usually always assault their members with piles of advertisements which end up straight in the wastepaper basket, without even having been read.

The third e-mail had no sender, and in its place appeared “P2.3.45”.

It was a reply to a previous e-mail. Luckily, the sender had chosen to reply to the e-mail itself without creating a new one. This meant that the message thread remained, allowing them to see what Richard had written previously.

Mary spoke nervously. “We can’t tell who wrote the e-mail, but it gives us some very important information. The first one is a reply to an e-mail previously sent by Richard. That one appears written just below.”

James frowned. He wasn’t ready to read it but he had to do it. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with air, and he started reading. The message was as follows:

The body of the message came as a blow to the professor’s cool head. Even though the evidence had been clear, until that moment he had kept a flicker of hope that his friend was innocent. Now, that had vanished. Richard hadn’t only used them for his own ends, he intended to get rid of them so that nobody else would know about the
Trifariam
. It wasn’t the Richard that James knew. He had turned into a mean, ruthless and despicable person.

“What can we do?” asked Mary.