Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Dwayne Carlisle: My Enemies' Enemies

I thought it was all over, and it was kind of a relief. These guys said they were government agents, and I had no reason to doubt them. Because their explanation was the only thing I'd heard so far that gave a sane reason for anyone being willing to go as far as breaking into a room for the Box, much less threatening to shoot people. They'd take it, or destroy it, or whatever they wanted to do, and then the madness would be over. The only situation where I'd still have to do anything was if they just took the materials they were interested in, in which case I'd have to make doubly sure that a certain DVD didn't go back to campus with the rest of the stuff.

I was distracted from my musing by a bleep from my phone. I looked down and saw a text message from an unfamiliar number. That was right about the time text spam was becoming really big, so I almost assumed it was just another scam and deleted it unread. But I noticed the first word in the preview; 'Spenser'. The name of a company we had almost gone to visit, that was almost too much of a coincidence, so I decided to see what the mysterious sender had to say.

"Kids these days," one of the spooks sighed theatrically, "Can't go two minutes without looking at your phone."

I shook my head and looked down at the device in my hand. I wasn't going to try to reply, there was no way of knowing what the CIA might take offense to. They certainly wouldn't want their presence here to be known until they'd finished what they came for. But I felt like I could just read a message without worrying them. It said 'Spenser and Sons smugglers. Drugs ect. Dont trust them'. Well, I could easily imagine something like that. Every man on the site had been heavily built, and some of them had what could have been prison tattoos. Kris had said they owed him a favour, but they were still just a friend of a friend, and we didn't have a real reason to trust them. In a way, I was kind of glad we wouldn't have to pick an alternative now.

The second distraction was a regular mechanical ticking. It wasn't loud, kind of like the old grandfather clock in my granny's hallway, slicing an interminable visit into seconds whenever there's a pause in the conversation. I didn't even realise I was hearing it while I read my message, the first few ticks must have been quieter and built up slowly. I didn't realise what it was at first, and a couple of the CIA guys were looking around confused as well. To them, I guess, a mysterious ticking sound could quite easily have been a bomb.

"It's the Box!" one of them spoke loudly to be heard over the hubbub, but he didn't shout, "Where's Walker?" Men were running, and then the guy who was presumably Walker knelt next to where the Box was lying on the asphalt.

I could see the gears inside the Box turning now, some kind of mainspring unwinding. I thought maybe all the commotion had knocked something loose, started one of the gear trains turning between the metal layers. Walker came to the same conclusion, said the same thing to some of the men around him a second after I thought of it. That was kind of a relief, because a couple of the other agents were proposing that we'd done something to the Box, a booby trap or something.

The key was certainly turning now, easy to see because of the scraps of wood stuck to its head. It wasn't just turning, though, it seemed to me it was moving down the length of the coffin at the same time. As I watched, the first of the asymmetrical array of metal panels started to fold back gracefully, like a flower opening. Maybe it was a safeguard, I thought, a time lock to make sure the Box ended up open even if its current bearers could resist temptation. Maybe it was just time that had set it off, or maybe it was the jostling. It was hard to tell, but the complexity of that mechanism looked incredible. I really wanted to study it more, but I could tell now that it wouldn't be so easy to open the Box without the others seeing, even if we were allowed to keep it.

"Somebody stop that!" Halett barked. One of his men grabbed the key, and struggled to hold it in place. He couldn't get a grip though, and I think I saw blood running across the man's palm from the rough edges of the split timber. Walker brought out a bolt cutter, and closed it around the protruding bit of wood. He must be the rational one in a crisis, the CIA team's equivalent of my role. He even waited for the ponderous turning to make the broken fragment perpendicular to his cutter before he applied full pressure. The wood splintered and flew away, and he carefully looked for somewhere to put the tool down before gripping the head of the key.