Free Pentecost by J.F. Penn Page A

himself with scissors now and then, when hunks of it began falling down over his eyes. His glasses had thin wire rims, the lightest he could stand to have on his skin.  
    “Jake, welcome back. What do you need?” he said briskly.  
      There was no small talk with Martin: he moved in a linear fashion across the face of the world, he needed a problem to solve and didn’t waste time. Jake liked him and felt a kinship with his loner status. The other ARKANE workers didn’t socialize much with Jake because he worked mainly outside the office, on secret missions for the Director, while they did the real research beneath the teeming city.
      “It’s about the stones of the Apostles and relates to that death in Varanasi you were looking at a few weeks back. I need to know what else you’ve found, and I’ll need your backup from here while we try to retrieve the other stones.”
      Martin sat down at the desk again, tapped out a staccato rhythm on the keyboard and pointed out the data on four monitors arrayed in front of him.
      “After Varanasi, I set the ARKANE search engine into gear on the stones and the Apostles to try and triangulate mentions of them in historical record and myth. These are just some of the results I’m compiling for you with the topography of the regions mentioned. It narrows down the potential search possibilities at least. I’ll have it finished before you leave.”
      The search engine was powerful, unique to ARKANE and had been programmed by Martin himself as one of his first jobs when he was recruited from Cambridge with his Doctorate in Computer Science and Archaeology. Director Marietti had charged him with making sense out of the chaos of data so he had built super character recognition scanners and software, tying texts to multiple translations. He triangulated ancient legends with online maps and images, enabling patterns to emerge from the riot of information. With access to scanned data from all the libraries in the world, his empire was a digital powerhouse of knowledge, untouchable and unfathomable by most people. He drove the system like a well-oiled machine, knowing when to coax and when to use heavy handed programming tactics to get the information he needed. He was always adding more linkages, more ways to find related data, and continuously improving the algorithms. Jake examined the screens, seeing how far the ancient missionaries had roamed in their sacred quest. They had indeed reached the ends of the known earth at the time and there were some new locations that weren’t included in the notebooks they had been given.  
    “That’s a great start. What about the location of Everett?”
    “We have his house under surveillance in Arizona but there’s no sign of Dr Sierra’s family. He has a complicated system of shell companies which the forensic accountants are sifting through. It may be that he’s holding them in a place owned by one of them. Marietti has ordered surveillance only though.”  
    Jake understood the stones were the primary objective but he felt an edge of unease that ARKANE was less concerned with the lives of Faye and Gemma Price. Even if the location was found, he knew Marietti wouldn’t authorize their rescue unless the stones had been taken out of circulation. They also needed the leverage to get Morgan Sierra to work with them. What did Marietti see in her?
    “I need to find out some other information as well. Can I use the pod?”
      Martin grinned at him. “Sure, go ahead. I just added some new features. I think you’ll like them.”
      Jake stepped over to a device that looked like a tanning booth squashed between Martin’s desk and the back wall. It was a prototype user interface for the vast libraries of digital knowledge that ARKANE held. The environment put people inside a virtual library where they could physically interact with the information. Martin had created it based on the Radcliffe Camera of the Bodleian Library in Oxford,