Like the infinitely slow movement of the hour needle on an old timepiece,
Lex savored with anticipatory baited breath the turn of events so that they
favored him, rather than obsessively, compulsively, unerringly battering
him down. He felt it in the chair before the fire in Larosee, and he took
note of the moment, cherishing it like the finest vintage ever brewed.
'For that I would need to know what exactly you have with you. My situation is such that it prevents me from knowing what nature of information it was that I kept with you, what affairs you handled for me.'
Celine relaxed in her chair, and typed something on the laptop.'Our most frequent channel of communication was your open blog entry made at this address.' She showed him an unremarkable blog entry hosted on an unremarkable server.
'But I have not been updating the blog, and yet it is remarkably current.' said Lex as he scanned the open page.
'Yes, I believe the brilliance of the scheme lies in that the blog is written and maintained by someone on your staff, which you hijack to convey your messages.' She scrolled back to an entry several months old. 'Here for example, the characters are slightly uneven, and the characters that have moved form your instructions in our prearranged code. In certain other cases, you create invisible hyperlinks on the original text that then carry your instructions in code. I imagine that the source computer for the blog is one you can connect to using the local network of your home, and one for which it is an extremely usual activity to create blog entries, and hence does not yield anything on an electronic screening, and the person concerned is unaware of your hijacking of his blog. I presume this makes the TCP/IP address of the computer untraceable to you. Through this you were able to instruct us regarding the management of your accounts that we administered, payments to individuals etc. statements of these accounts were sent to you through the chocolate that is posted from this post- office. These accounts are not listed in any official survey of your holdings. Your returning cheques sometimes bear physical data, microfilms mostly, that I regularly screen them for. That is why I work part time at the post office and at the chocolatiere, although ostensibly it's for my health-as a move away from the fast paced life of international finance.'
Lex watched in fascination, and not a little smugness, at this cleverly woven safety net that he had constructed in his paranoid past. He saw after a little reading, that the blog entry that he used as a vehicle belonged to his mechanic, Hans.
Celine walked to a locked drawer and pulled out some folders. 'I rent this parlor, and the bedroom upstairs from Mrs. Oertle; she gives it to me cheap for help at the post office.'
'These are the statements of you accounts that our consultancy manages. As you can see, even if you were to lose everything else, these assets would still let you remain a very wealthy man.'
'The microfilms you sent us are in storage in the bank. We can go into Geneva today to retrieve them, and I can get you copies of the files here. I would suggest you let me do the retrieving and we should meet later in the evening in Geneva.'
'Yes, that sounds like a plan.' Lex acquiesced. 'I shall see you at 5 at the Le Suquet bar. Meanwhile, I shall work out a new security plan as this one has been compromised, and I cannot be seen coming to this village very often. I will also visit LeBrunn and the Chateau to cover the real purpose of my visit.' He got up, suddenly feeling young and vital again.
' Thank you for the excellent manner in which you have done your work so far.'
'You pay me very well for the work Mr. Luthor,' said Celine as she shook hands.
The Le Suquet bar stood overlooking the lake and had been the scene of many discreet assignations for more than half a century. It was close to the banking district and yet part of many gourmet guides to city. Lex was seated in its stark Modernist interior, with its subtle lighting nursing a drink, when Celine came in. She wore her hair loose in perfectly set layers and a tweed coat and dress outfit with matching two-toned slingbacks. He acknowledged the mastery of cut and subtlety-- he did pay her well, if the head-to-toe Chanel was any indication.
She slipped into the seat opposite with grace, as she smiled in greeting. They ordered a few drinks and talked about everything from the situation in Iraq to the Turner prize. In the course of one of the visits by the waiter he nudged her knee with the CD Rom that he had compiled with new security instructions. There was no change in her expression as she continued to order, but she accepted the disk and he felt a corresponding pressure and palmed in turn another disk and a small Perspex case with the microfilms. After a while they finished there meeting amicably and parted on excellent terms.
Lex gathered his belongings and moved along the embankment and checked into a new hotel, one that had an all night rave in the hotel club, and got his things transferred to his new room.
When he had closed the curtains, and locked the door behind him, he set up the portable mf reader he had acquired during the day and started to look at the all the valuable artifacts from his lost life. One of the films dealt with the details of his investments that were unknown even to Celine's firm, details of undisclosed understandings with Waynetech, secret funding to Cadmus labs. He was impressed with his business far-sightedness.
The second microfilms dealt with names and addresses of people who undoubtedly were or had been useful in certain interesting capacities over the past years and details of their equally interesting lives. He saw Nixon there, Sam Phelan, Toby McKendick, his half-brother Lucas? It was a long list of names, some remembered, others new.
The third microfilm was even more fascinating. It showed images of one of his cars, which had apparently been in an accident. It was cross-referenced with engineer reports about the various aspects of a collision on the bridge across the river in Smallville. A collision at sixty miles and hour with his best friend Clark Kent.Close-ups of the roof that seemed to have been ripped off like the top of a takeaway carton. Details of his acquisition of a complex of caves and the tug of war for control for the same with his father. A parasite of extraterrestrial origin found in the said caves. A strange octagonal artifact referred to as the Rosetta stone. The report of a Dr Walden on the attempted translation of the writing in the cave.
Journal entries. His journal entries; the subject of which was predominantly Clark Kent. They started two weeks after his first visit to Smallville and lasted till soon after Helen moved in to the mansion. He could only assume that his hobby was no longer safe once she had taken up residence with him. And this film had further references, to the case number and the relevant code name at Cadmus labs for research into the phenomenon that was Clark Kent.
As Lex dressed for the rave, the attraction of which had made him change his hotel so suddenly, he felt almost whole, and his brain took solace in a past that could now be reconstructed almost instance-by-instance. He knew what his next steps would be, and also that the vulnerability that memory loss entailed could now be used as strength. He had read in one of his own journal entries on the occasion of the return of Lucas:
Father seems to have been pretending to be blind for the past few
weeks. I can only assume that he regained use of his eyes after
Smallville's esteemed sheriff shot him and left him for dead. It was a
low trick, but admirable in its lowness.
As he settled the soft black leather around his shoulders and looked at his reflection in the full-length mirror in the dressing room of his suite, his eyes were no longer vulnerable.
'For that I would need to know what exactly you have with you. My situation is such that it prevents me from knowing what nature of information it was that I kept with you, what affairs you handled for me.'
Celine relaxed in her chair, and typed something on the laptop.'Our most frequent channel of communication was your open blog entry made at this address.' She showed him an unremarkable blog entry hosted on an unremarkable server.
'But I have not been updating the blog, and yet it is remarkably current.' said Lex as he scanned the open page.
'Yes, I believe the brilliance of the scheme lies in that the blog is written and maintained by someone on your staff, which you hijack to convey your messages.' She scrolled back to an entry several months old. 'Here for example, the characters are slightly uneven, and the characters that have moved form your instructions in our prearranged code. In certain other cases, you create invisible hyperlinks on the original text that then carry your instructions in code. I imagine that the source computer for the blog is one you can connect to using the local network of your home, and one for which it is an extremely usual activity to create blog entries, and hence does not yield anything on an electronic screening, and the person concerned is unaware of your hijacking of his blog. I presume this makes the TCP/IP address of the computer untraceable to you. Through this you were able to instruct us regarding the management of your accounts that we administered, payments to individuals etc. statements of these accounts were sent to you through the chocolate that is posted from this post- office. These accounts are not listed in any official survey of your holdings. Your returning cheques sometimes bear physical data, microfilms mostly, that I regularly screen them for. That is why I work part time at the post office and at the chocolatiere, although ostensibly it's for my health-as a move away from the fast paced life of international finance.'
Lex watched in fascination, and not a little smugness, at this cleverly woven safety net that he had constructed in his paranoid past. He saw after a little reading, that the blog entry that he used as a vehicle belonged to his mechanic, Hans.
Celine walked to a locked drawer and pulled out some folders. 'I rent this parlor, and the bedroom upstairs from Mrs. Oertle; she gives it to me cheap for help at the post office.'
'These are the statements of you accounts that our consultancy manages. As you can see, even if you were to lose everything else, these assets would still let you remain a very wealthy man.'
'The microfilms you sent us are in storage in the bank. We can go into Geneva today to retrieve them, and I can get you copies of the files here. I would suggest you let me do the retrieving and we should meet later in the evening in Geneva.'
'Yes, that sounds like a plan.' Lex acquiesced. 'I shall see you at 5 at the Le Suquet bar. Meanwhile, I shall work out a new security plan as this one has been compromised, and I cannot be seen coming to this village very often. I will also visit LeBrunn and the Chateau to cover the real purpose of my visit.' He got up, suddenly feeling young and vital again.
' Thank you for the excellent manner in which you have done your work so far.'
'You pay me very well for the work Mr. Luthor,' said Celine as she shook hands.
The Le Suquet bar stood overlooking the lake and had been the scene of many discreet assignations for more than half a century. It was close to the banking district and yet part of many gourmet guides to city. Lex was seated in its stark Modernist interior, with its subtle lighting nursing a drink, when Celine came in. She wore her hair loose in perfectly set layers and a tweed coat and dress outfit with matching two-toned slingbacks. He acknowledged the mastery of cut and subtlety-- he did pay her well, if the head-to-toe Chanel was any indication.
She slipped into the seat opposite with grace, as she smiled in greeting. They ordered a few drinks and talked about everything from the situation in Iraq to the Turner prize. In the course of one of the visits by the waiter he nudged her knee with the CD Rom that he had compiled with new security instructions. There was no change in her expression as she continued to order, but she accepted the disk and he felt a corresponding pressure and palmed in turn another disk and a small Perspex case with the microfilms. After a while they finished there meeting amicably and parted on excellent terms.
Lex gathered his belongings and moved along the embankment and checked into a new hotel, one that had an all night rave in the hotel club, and got his things transferred to his new room.
When he had closed the curtains, and locked the door behind him, he set up the portable mf reader he had acquired during the day and started to look at the all the valuable artifacts from his lost life. One of the films dealt with the details of his investments that were unknown even to Celine's firm, details of undisclosed understandings with Waynetech, secret funding to Cadmus labs. He was impressed with his business far-sightedness.
The second microfilms dealt with names and addresses of people who undoubtedly were or had been useful in certain interesting capacities over the past years and details of their equally interesting lives. He saw Nixon there, Sam Phelan, Toby McKendick, his half-brother Lucas? It was a long list of names, some remembered, others new.
The third microfilm was even more fascinating. It showed images of one of his cars, which had apparently been in an accident. It was cross-referenced with engineer reports about the various aspects of a collision on the bridge across the river in Smallville. A collision at sixty miles and hour with his best friend Clark Kent.Close-ups of the roof that seemed to have been ripped off like the top of a takeaway carton. Details of his acquisition of a complex of caves and the tug of war for control for the same with his father. A parasite of extraterrestrial origin found in the said caves. A strange octagonal artifact referred to as the Rosetta stone. The report of a Dr Walden on the attempted translation of the writing in the cave.
Journal entries. His journal entries; the subject of which was predominantly Clark Kent. They started two weeks after his first visit to Smallville and lasted till soon after Helen moved in to the mansion. He could only assume that his hobby was no longer safe once she had taken up residence with him. And this film had further references, to the case number and the relevant code name at Cadmus labs for research into the phenomenon that was Clark Kent.
As Lex dressed for the rave, the attraction of which had made him change his hotel so suddenly, he felt almost whole, and his brain took solace in a past that could now be reconstructed almost instance-by-instance. He knew what his next steps would be, and also that the vulnerability that memory loss entailed could now be used as strength. He had read in one of his own journal entries on the occasion of the return of Lucas:
Father seems to have been pretending to be blind for the past few
weeks. I can only assume that he regained use of his eyes after
Smallville's esteemed sheriff shot him and left him for dead. It was a
low trick, but admirable in its lowness.
As he settled the soft black leather around his shoulders and looked at his reflection in the full-length mirror in the dressing room of his suite, his eyes were no longer vulnerable.