A Conspiracy of Faith Read Free Page B

caught in a trawl and had glinted slightly, though time and the sea had dulled its sheen, and the youngest man on board the
Brew Dog
had seen right away there was something special about it.
    “Chuck it over the side, Seamus,” the skipper had shouted when he discovered the message inside. “Those things are bad luck. Wreckage in a bottle, we call them. The Devil’s in the ink and waiting to be let loose. Don’t you know the stories?” But young Seamus didn’t, and he decided to take it ashore.

    When Bell finally got back to the station in Wick, one of the local drunks had trashed two of the offices and the duty staff were rather weary of trying to keep the idiot pinned to the floor. That was how David Bell came to remove his jacket, whereupon Seamus’s bottle fell out of its pocket. And it was how he came to pick the bottle up and put it down again on the windowsill so he could concentrate his attention on planting his full weight on the chest of this drunken oaf in order to squeeze some of the air out of him. But anyone treating a full-blooded Viking descendant in such a fashion is liable to get more than he bargained for. And so it was that the drunk delivered such a blow to David Bell’s testicles that any recollection of the bottle was engulfed by the blaring sirens and flashing blue lights his nervous system frantically emitted as a consequence.
    And so the bottle remained undisturbed in the sunny corner of the windowsill for a very long time indeed. No one paid it any heed, and no one worried that the paper it contained might be damaged by the sunlight and the condensation that with time appeared on the inside of the glass.
    No one bothered to try to read the collection of semi-obliterated letters that appeared uppermost, and for that same reason no one gave a thought to what the word “HJÆLP” might mean.

    The bottle did not come into human hands again until a young man who felt himself unreasonably treated on account of a measly parking fine swamped the intranet of Wick Police Station with a veritable tidal wave of viruses. In such a situation, the routine was to get in touch with a computer expert called Miranda McCulloch. When pedophiles encrypted their filth, when hackers covered up all traces of their online banking transactions, and when asset-strippers wiped their hard disks, it was Miranda McCulloch they kneeled before.
    She was given an office. The staff were moved to tears and treated her like royalty, filling up her thermos with scalding coffee, throwing open the windows, and making sure the radio was tuned in to Radio Scotland. Miranda McCulloch was indeed a woman appreciated wherever she went.
    Because of the open windows and the billowing curtains, she noticed the bottle on her first day.
    What a fine little bottle, she thought to herself, and wondered at the shadow inside it as she dredged through cipher columns of malicious code. When on the third day she got to her feet feeling well satisfied, her job complete, and with a reasonable idea of what kind of virus might be anticipated next time around, she stepped across to the windowsill and picked the bottle up. It was a lot heavier than she had thought. And warm to the touch.
    “What’s that inside it?” she asked the secretary next door. “Is it a letter?”
    “I’ve no idea,” came the answer. “David Bell came in with it a long time ago. I think maybe it was just for fun.”
    Miranda held the bottle against the light. Was that writing on the paper? It was hard to tell because of the condensation on the inside.
    She turned it in her hands. “Where is this David Bell? Is he on duty?”
    The secretary shook her head. “No, I’m afraid he’s not. David was killed not far out of town a couple of years back. They’d given chase to a hit-and-run driver and it all went wrong. It was a terrible thing. David was such a nice chap.”
    Miranda nodded. She wasn’t really listening. She was certain now that there was writing on the