Once inside his study in the mansion, Lex was too preoccupied with his
thoughts to immediately notice the package on his desk. However, when he
did he was nervous enough to be chary of nicely wrapped packages that
appeared on his desk.
He rang for security.
'Mr. Luthor?
'Darius, has this package been examined?
'Yes, Mr. Luthor, it is your monthly delivery of chocolate from Switzerland.
So he had chocolate delivered to Smallville from Switzerland. The eccentricity was familiar, but the pointlessness was not. He opened the hand-printed paper. Lebrunn chocolatiers, Larosee , Geneve. He remembered the small chalet near one of the boarding schools he had spent a little of his childhood in. Remembered the old frau and her centuries old vats and pans used for making the chocolate in a recipe perfected over two hundred years. All those details were startlingly clear. He opened the package and took out a chocolate. The lab in the castle cellar could use a visit.
By midnight he had tested the chocolate against all known reagents-no alkaloids, allergens, hallucinogens whatsoever. Perplexed but intrigued, he proceeded to examine the packaging. All the postmarks looked valid, he passed his hand over the paper, no undulations, no possible microfilms. He looked at the box, and immediately saw what he was looking for. The expiration date marked on the box in bar code. A clumsy device really, from a chocolatiere who sealed their packages with a seal and lac. He found a scanner in the lab and the information came up on his hand held. He was amazed at the ease with which he found the equipment. Almost as if he did this frequently, almost as if this method of passing information was his own.
The characters appeared on the hand-held, and he forgave himself for the clumsiness of the barcode sticker. The information was genuine-batch number, weight and year, day and time of expiration. Genuine looking, perfectly harmless. He brightened. A cipher. Probably of his own making. He looked forward to cracking it with an enthusiasm he thought had been destroyed at Belle Reve. Then almost with regret, it occurred to him that since the information required electronic transcription in the first place, he probably had the code programmed into the hand held. Sure enough, he found the file posing as a media-editing program. He tried to paste the scanned file into the program and knew that he had guessed correctly when he came up against a password. This was difficult, for if he had used a password, it was probably to keep the information from his father, so large parts of his personal life were useless for providing a secure password, and if he had used something from his immediate life in Smallville, it was likely that he was as much in the dark regarding the password as anyone else. He knew better than to try and hack into the program, for he expected to find it booby trapped against such breaches, and he did not want to lose the information that had been previously deciphered by the program.
His mind wandered into all the strange recesses that were now blank but which he knew held the past two years of his life in them. He was barely skimming over consciousness, when he realized that he had just attained the perfect state of Zen meditation. But with the realization came the plummeting fall, and like a wounded bird his mind refused to soar to those sublime heights again. The hand held went into screensaver mode as he stared sightlessly at it.
Humko maloom hai jannat ki haqueeqat lekin
Dil ke kush rakhne ko Ghalib ye khyaal acchha hai
[AN:Again a very clumsy translation, one knows the truth of Paradise but as a though to keep one amused, Ghalib it is well] Elaborate Arabic calligraphy made to look like abstract patterns, faded in and out on the screen. Language. he remembered that memory loss was selective. In the past two years he had mastered the finer points of Persian and its derivatives, mostly in the quest for the poetry of Ghalib and Momin, but ostensibly to improve his Arabic for Lexcorp's fledgling Middle-Eastern operations. Ghalib? Too obvious. He looked again at the couplet fading in and out of the screen, Slowly and deliberately, he typed in 'jannat'
Immediately the figures started scrambling on the screen.
They had resolved themselves into an Internet address, of a particular part of some kind of discussion forum for Warrior Angel. He smiled at the brilliance of it. Anybody monitoring his Internet activity would be unsurprised by his going to this site. He had already seen that it was marked as a favourite on his laptop.
He went up to his bedroom after destroying the sticker, and decided to check the link immediately, for what was more natural than for the Luthor geek to relax after a hard day of chasing shadows by seeking solace in the exploits of a fictional hero. He took care to take part in the normal activities of the forum and then typed the address of the exact link he had been directed to. It seemed to be a poll about the popularity of the various nemeses of Warrior Angel, and the dates when the various nominations were submitted. A Mr. P Mason of Goodge Street, Metropolis contributed most of the entries. In fact Mr. Mason was the sole contributor, except for an A.E. The first entry dated four months ago, while the last entry was dated three weeks ago. He had no doubt that he was seeing a bank statement of a Swiss account, payments through which had been made to Mr. Mason on the dates of the entries.
He took care to wander all over the forum before closing the window. He was debating whether to use this connection to hack into Metropolis council records, when on a hunch he opened the website of the Smallville Ledger. It even had an archive search function, so he typed in a few random search terms and then Mason. It came up, buried in Megs of digital debris.
Died of heart failure, business traveler from Metropolis.
The person he had secretly employed had died at about the same time he had been confined. A look into the Ledger archives had also confirmed that Lana had been hurt in a riding accident at about the same time give a week or two. On the whole Lex was very glad of the loaded gun under his pillow when he went to sleep.
He decided to concentrate on finding the manner of returning instructions to his agent in Switzerland, for it was obvious the website was a one way channel.
He rang for security.
'Mr. Luthor?
'Darius, has this package been examined?
'Yes, Mr. Luthor, it is your monthly delivery of chocolate from Switzerland.
So he had chocolate delivered to Smallville from Switzerland. The eccentricity was familiar, but the pointlessness was not. He opened the hand-printed paper. Lebrunn chocolatiers, Larosee , Geneve. He remembered the small chalet near one of the boarding schools he had spent a little of his childhood in. Remembered the old frau and her centuries old vats and pans used for making the chocolate in a recipe perfected over two hundred years. All those details were startlingly clear. He opened the package and took out a chocolate. The lab in the castle cellar could use a visit.
By midnight he had tested the chocolate against all known reagents-no alkaloids, allergens, hallucinogens whatsoever. Perplexed but intrigued, he proceeded to examine the packaging. All the postmarks looked valid, he passed his hand over the paper, no undulations, no possible microfilms. He looked at the box, and immediately saw what he was looking for. The expiration date marked on the box in bar code. A clumsy device really, from a chocolatiere who sealed their packages with a seal and lac. He found a scanner in the lab and the information came up on his hand held. He was amazed at the ease with which he found the equipment. Almost as if he did this frequently, almost as if this method of passing information was his own.
The characters appeared on the hand-held, and he forgave himself for the clumsiness of the barcode sticker. The information was genuine-batch number, weight and year, day and time of expiration. Genuine looking, perfectly harmless. He brightened. A cipher. Probably of his own making. He looked forward to cracking it with an enthusiasm he thought had been destroyed at Belle Reve. Then almost with regret, it occurred to him that since the information required electronic transcription in the first place, he probably had the code programmed into the hand held. Sure enough, he found the file posing as a media-editing program. He tried to paste the scanned file into the program and knew that he had guessed correctly when he came up against a password. This was difficult, for if he had used a password, it was probably to keep the information from his father, so large parts of his personal life were useless for providing a secure password, and if he had used something from his immediate life in Smallville, it was likely that he was as much in the dark regarding the password as anyone else. He knew better than to try and hack into the program, for he expected to find it booby trapped against such breaches, and he did not want to lose the information that had been previously deciphered by the program.
His mind wandered into all the strange recesses that were now blank but which he knew held the past two years of his life in them. He was barely skimming over consciousness, when he realized that he had just attained the perfect state of Zen meditation. But with the realization came the plummeting fall, and like a wounded bird his mind refused to soar to those sublime heights again. The hand held went into screensaver mode as he stared sightlessly at it.
Humko maloom hai jannat ki haqueeqat lekin
Dil ke kush rakhne ko Ghalib ye khyaal acchha hai
[AN:Again a very clumsy translation, one knows the truth of Paradise but as a though to keep one amused, Ghalib it is well] Elaborate Arabic calligraphy made to look like abstract patterns, faded in and out on the screen. Language. he remembered that memory loss was selective. In the past two years he had mastered the finer points of Persian and its derivatives, mostly in the quest for the poetry of Ghalib and Momin, but ostensibly to improve his Arabic for Lexcorp's fledgling Middle-Eastern operations. Ghalib? Too obvious. He looked again at the couplet fading in and out of the screen, Slowly and deliberately, he typed in 'jannat'
Immediately the figures started scrambling on the screen.
They had resolved themselves into an Internet address, of a particular part of some kind of discussion forum for Warrior Angel. He smiled at the brilliance of it. Anybody monitoring his Internet activity would be unsurprised by his going to this site. He had already seen that it was marked as a favourite on his laptop.
He went up to his bedroom after destroying the sticker, and decided to check the link immediately, for what was more natural than for the Luthor geek to relax after a hard day of chasing shadows by seeking solace in the exploits of a fictional hero. He took care to take part in the normal activities of the forum and then typed the address of the exact link he had been directed to. It seemed to be a poll about the popularity of the various nemeses of Warrior Angel, and the dates when the various nominations were submitted. A Mr. P Mason of Goodge Street, Metropolis contributed most of the entries. In fact Mr. Mason was the sole contributor, except for an A.E. The first entry dated four months ago, while the last entry was dated three weeks ago. He had no doubt that he was seeing a bank statement of a Swiss account, payments through which had been made to Mr. Mason on the dates of the entries.
He took care to wander all over the forum before closing the window. He was debating whether to use this connection to hack into Metropolis council records, when on a hunch he opened the website of the Smallville Ledger. It even had an archive search function, so he typed in a few random search terms and then Mason. It came up, buried in Megs of digital debris.
Died of heart failure, business traveler from Metropolis.
The person he had secretly employed had died at about the same time he had been confined. A look into the Ledger archives had also confirmed that Lana had been hurt in a riding accident at about the same time give a week or two. On the whole Lex was very glad of the loaded gun under his pillow when he went to sleep.
He decided to concentrate on finding the manner of returning instructions to his agent in Switzerland, for it was obvious the website was a one way channel.