Choe Jae-Min had knocked it out of the park. Perfect Immortality with a single spell. Nobody knows how he discovered it, but nobody could deny the results. He had the body of a twenty-three year old, and would go on to keep it for sixty years.
In addition to his youth and fitness, he maintained his ability to practise magic. It was so extraordinary that the then-ruling Japanese tried to conscript him. He fled to the West. But in the process of escaping arrest, took a bullet to the thigh.
Three days after his escape the bullet wound had healed. Two weeks later, even the scar had vanished.
We slept in the upstairs salon, on a couch that folded out into a bed. When I woke the next morning, Sam was already sitting at the table with the binder of bank statements open in front of her. She had a small notebook open on the table that she was making periodic notes in. "Morning," she said. "Caroline has coffee on its way."
"Frglgm," I said.
"Agreed. It is too early for this nonsense. But you seriously expect me to sleep with this just lying here?"
I sat up and rubbed some of the sleep from my eyes. "Anything interesting?"
"She had two bank accounts, three credit cards, and a chequebook."
Of course. This was Sam. I had to adjust my frame of reference for 'interesting' to compensate for someone who had voluntarily pursued a degree in accountancy. "Anything criminal?"
"Nothing so far. She did some travelling. Bought a lot of travellers' cheques. Hey, remember travellers' cheques?"
"Not personally. My family tended to move their wealth using gold bullion."
"You notice these phone numbers aren't real?" she asked, gesturing to the day-planner.
"The ones for Chloe, Charles and Cody?"
"Yeah. The local codes aren't real. There's no '81' or '31' phone prefixes, and Chloe's has none at all. It can't be a Dublin number; they never begin with a '9'."
"Did you shower? Where's the shower?"
Sam pointed to the long sofa under the window facing the beach. "Go on, look!"
I got out of bed and lifted the seat of that sofa to reveal another staircase heading down. Even though it was adjacent to the stair we had used to climb up, the room below was not the ground floor of the van that should have been there. I could see the corner of a shower and bath-tub.
I looked back to Sam who was watching my reaction with a wide smile. She asked, "Is this not the best holiday ever?"
We met Cormac and McGinnis on the beach a short time later. They were walking a large circle, periodically stopping to lift and pour handfuls of sand, monitoring the results.
"Any change?" I asked.
"It's not got any wider," Cormac said, "but what you would call its 'depth' is increasing."
"Sort of," McGinnis added.
"What's that mean?" I asked.
"It's fluctuating," McGinnis said. "Deeper, then shallower, but an overall increase in depth with each 'pulse'. I think it's linked to the tide coming in and out."
Sam walked to the demarcated edge of the incursion, and surveyed it with her hands on her hips while McGinnis dug into the beach for a deeper handful of sand. Cormac did the same, then watched it trickle through his fingers.
"We should have a few more days, at least," he said. "Nothing before the weekend."
"But if this isn't natural?" I asked. "If this isn't just some weak spot, but something pushing through from the other side?"
Cormac stood again. "Then it could pop sooner. Or whatever is pushing may simply grow bored and give up."
"It looks pretty normal," said Sam. "What would happen if I just walked over there?"
"Probably nothing," I said. "But please don't."
"I'll be good," she said. Then she looked around and asked, "Where's the nearest shops? I'll do a coffee run." She produced her car keys and spun them around a finger.
"About a half-mile that way," I said, pointing eastwards. "Follow the road back towards Tramore."
"So, coffee?" She asked us. "And anyone else need anything?"
"Americano," said Cormac.
"Same. And cigarettes?" said McGinnis, proffering a half-empty pack to show Sam his brand.
"I didn't know you smoked," said Cormac.
"Only when I drink, or have to work 18-hour days," said McGinnis, as my mind reeled with a revelation.
"You?" Sam asked me.
"Just regular coffee, black," I said. "And a tiny scissors or maybe a craft knife?"
A half-hour later, my coffee sat cold and untouched next to my elbow as I worked a jigsaw puzzle at the table in the salon. Sam had somehow located a very fine craft knife in a local newsagents and I had used it to delicately eviscerate the hand-rolled cigarettes Kathy Quinn had left behind.
I'd dumped the old stale tobacco into a glass tumbler and stacked the papers into a tidy pile once I'd determined they were blank on the inside. I had expected them to be. My attention was on the cardboard filters.
They were mostly white with differing amounts of red. They were rough squares, each with one straight edge and three ragged ones. I mushed each one of them flat and did my best to pair them by their uneven shapes.
I felt a presence behind me and looked up to see Sam watching.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"At some point, soon before she died, Kathy Quinn tore the edge off a long piece of cardboard and used it for roaches - for filters in her cigarettes." I rearranged the pieces to demonstrate. "I'm trying to reassemble them. It might tell us where she went. The name of her hotel in Rome, say."
“They just look like card to me,” she said, taking one up and peering intently at both sides of it.
“Some of them have writing,” I said. “Little r’s. Here and here.” I pointed to two of the pieces. “And is that an E? There, where this one is torn?”
She lifted it and examined it closely. “Could be an e or an f.”
“Know any Italian words ending in ‘fr’?”
“It’s not Italian,” she said. “It’s French. This is the right-hand side of a menu, listing prices in francs.”
“Well, shit,” I said. “Why would someone go to France but tell everyone they were in Italy?”
Sam squeezed onto the seat next to me. “She had a secret lover? She was a spy?”
“She had a secret lover who was a spy?”
“Jesus Christ, she’s Jason Bourne!” She thought for a moment. “Though the menu might not have come from France. Belgium and Luxembourg also used francs back then. Switzerland still does.”
I mentally conjured a map of Europe and did some calculations. “If you wanted to go to Switzerland in secret, a flight to Rome or Milan then a train north would be the way to do it. And tearing up a train’s food menu and hand-rolling a stash of cigarettes seems a fine way to spend a few hours on a train when you can’t smoke.”
She nodded and said, “I bet the red and white on the menu match their national trains. But the question remains: Why go to Switzerland secretly?”
“If she had business there, it would certainly have to be secret. The Swiss don’t have the same attitude to magic that we do.” I rummaged in the evidence box again and pulled out her bag, before digging into that for the scarf and gloves and oversized sunglasses I’d seen the day before. “Definitely travelling incognito.”
“So if magic is illegal in Switzerland, won’t that make it easier to find who she was visiting? The community will be smaller. More close-knit.”
I made one of those so-so gestures. “If you have an ‘in’ in the community, sure. But the only insider I know from the Swiss magical community won’t be doing me any favours for a while. Long story. I could ask around the campfire tonight, but I wouldn’t be optimistic.”
Sam picked up Quinn’s old day-planner and leafed through it. “Any Swiss or French names in here?”
Damn, that’s a good idea, I thought. “Damn, that’s a good idea,” I said. “You’re smart.” I slid the address book over to me and started leafing through it.
“I’m also pretty,” she said.
”Oh, I noticed,” I said. “Believe me.”
I felt her shoulder lean away from mine, almost imperceptibly so.
“But,” I added, “I really fell for your mind and your personality and all that other stuff.”
“‘Other stuff’?” she asked, but I could tell she was grinning.
“You know,” I said, as I flicked through the names and addresses in the book. “Your sense of humour, and eyes and your… your… Interior decorating skills.” My eyes alighted on the three names written in ink and their accompanying phone numbers.
She leaned back into me. “What else?”
“Your arcane knowledge of criminal banking practices. See how two names begin with ‘ch’? Isn’t that the banking code for Switzerland? Are these phone numbers actually a bank code?”
She looked at them again and counted silently under her breath. “Wrong number of digits. There’s four too many.”
“Oh, she liked her puzzles,” I said, and covered the names with a finger. “Ever meet an Irish person named Cody? It’s a code. She made it into a damn pun. 908914488 is the bank code. 48849381 is the account number and 8162 is her PIN. I bet you a steak dinner at that posh place you like.”
“You call any place posh that has tablecloths made of actual cloth,” said, as she pulled out her phone. She typed for a moment or two, then said, “Shit. That's the sort code for a bank in Zurich.”
“Sweet, free steak. It’s been thirty years; are they still in business?”
“They’ve operated since 1850. They’re still in business.” She dialled.
“You’re calling them?”
“This is what I do. Shush.” She set the call to speakerphone.
The phone rang twice before a female voice answered in French.
“Bonjour,” Sam said. “Do you speak English?”
“I do,” the voice replied, not unfriendly.
“Excellent,” said Sam. “I am calling with regards to an account that was in operation about thirty years ago. I was just going through some old records and I was wondering if I ever got around to closing this.”
“Certainly. Do you have the account number?”
“Four double-eight four, niner three eight one,” she said.
“And your PIN code?”
“Eight one six two.”
“Thank you. Can I ask you for your name?”
Sam hesitated until I pointed to the book again. “Chloe Charles,” she said. “My name is Chloe Charles.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone before the voice said, “I have to transfer you through to one of our accounts managers. One moment, please.”
Sam raised her eyebrows to me as another female voice came on the line. “Good morning, Ms Charles. You are calling about an old account?”
“That’s right,” Sam said. “I understand it wasn’t closed out?”
“It was not,” said the voice. “But you have to understand that banking regulations have changed a lot since the account was opened. The type of account you had is no longer permitted. With money-laundering regulations and the focus on the funding of international terrorism in the years after September 11th, our anonymous numbered accounts had to be discontinued. We did try to notify anyone who had given us contact details, but after a certain number of years, any funds on deposit were forfeited. This was a government act, you must understand, and out of our hands. We can put you in touch with the relevant government department if you would like to contest this or pursue legal action.” The whole speech seemed rehearsed, or at least a disclaimer she had read out countless times before.
I opened my mouth to speak, but Sam waved me into silence.
“Could you tell me the closing balance? How much money was forfeit?”
I heard some brief typing from the other end. “Just a little over two million francs,” the voice said.
“Thank you,” said Sam. Her eyes were wide, but she managed to keep the surprise out of her voice. “Do you still have the records from the account? Could you email me a statement of all of its transactions?”
“Certainly, but there were only four. Three cash deposits and one electronic transfer.”
“Whatever you can send will be fine,” she said, and gave her email address. Even before she ended the call, her phone pinged with the sound of an incoming email.
“Efficient,” I said.
“Their clocks and their trains have nothing on their banks,” she said.
“I’m surprised they gave up all that information based on an account number and a PIN.”
“The double-edged sword of anonymous numbered accounts,” she said, as she read through the email that she had received. “When you wanted to hide almost eight hundred thousand pounds in stolen money, they’d take it right off you without asking inconvenient questions, like ‘did you pay tax on this?’ or ‘Why are these banknotes covered with blood’ but anyone with the account number and the PIN can access it.”
“That explains why she wrote it disguised as phone numbers. Anything incriminating in the transaction history?”
“Four deposits. One for a hundred and sixty thousand pounds, to open the account. Then three more of two hundred thousand each. The third deposit was an electronic transfer, and… oh…”
She had that look on her face. “What?” I asked.
“It came from an Irish bank.”
She kicked me out of the van at that point, ostensibly so she could ‘work in peace’, but I suspected some of the calls she was making were going to stray well outside official channels.
I returned to the beach to check on any progress being made charting the sinkhole. Someone had found six plastic road cones somewhere and had set them up in a wide semi-circle abutting the tideline. As I walked up, McGinnis and Cormac were connecting stripey plastic tape between two of them.
“Very tidy,” I said. “But what if CThulhu comes through and doesn’t respect the authority of a tape line?”
“Then the world truly is doomed,” said Cormac. “This is mostly to stop people wandering into the incursion, though the symbolic demarcation may actually help contain it.”
As he spoke, an uneven mound of sand the size of a small car lifted from the centre of the fenced-off area. It rose about six feet up, then collapsed back with a deep whomp sound that shook the beach.
Everyone froze. In the silence that followed, you could have heard a pin drop, were the floor not made of sand and next to a noisy ocean.
“Was that...?” said McGinnis.
“Looked like a fist, yeah,” said Cormac. “A big one.”
We moved towards the tape but stopped when several members of Containment, armed and armoured, stepped in front and gestured at us to stay back. Symonenko was leading the morning shift and she raised an eyebrow towards me.
“Was that a hand?” She asked, incredulously.
“Seems like it,” I said.
“There is a giant coming through?”
Cormac one one of the maybe-maybe-not gestures. “Could be anything. Testing the limits of our realm, perhaps. Trying different shapes and sizes to see what works.”
“Or it could be a giant,” I said. “It wouldn’t be the first time. Google ‘the Fomorians’ when you get a chance. McGinnis, when is high tide?”
He checked his watch. “Just twenty minutes ago. Next one is tonight.”
The rest of the beach’s visitors had emerged from their various tents and campers at that point and were forming a looser circle around the one made by Containment. Some of them had wands or staves out and were intoning low chants to power them up with spells. The summer party atmosphere of the night before had evaporated and each face had a look of grim determination about it. I saw Weber adjust Buck’s fingers on his wand, life a tennis coach teaching someone the correct way to hold a racket.
I did a quick circuit to check in on everyone, and let them know to stand down until later in the evening, and returned to Cormac and McGinnis. Murtagh was with them and Sam was there with her laptop held open in front of her.
“I found info on that account,” she said with a beaming smile. Then she awkwardly turned her laptop around to show me a document of financial jargon I had no way of deciphering. “It was registered to an LLC, not an individual, and has been dormant for years. Though it had a lot of large payments moved into and out of it in the nineties and noughties.”
“How do you open a bank account, or an LLC, anonymously?” asked Cormac.
“Open it through the right solicitor. One who’s incompetent and loses some key documents, or who’s crooked enough to pretend to be incompetent. In this case, the solicitor died in 2002, so we can’t ask.”
“You found all of this in fifteen minutes?” I asked.
“It actually took months of work, about five years ago.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a man named Liam Feeney. He was a freelance enforcer for some West Dublin gangs. Killed a few people and got arrested six years ago. After he was sent away, we took his bank accounts apart to try and trace his funding. A few payments were made to him from this account,” she tapped the screen, “so we’ve been watching it ever since.”
“And about the time of Quinn’s death?”
“Only two transactions in the whole of 1993. The two hundred thousand pound payment to Kathy Quinn's Swiss account, and then thirty thousand to Feeny. The Feeny payment was six days before Quinn was murdered.”
“This seems like it will be quiet until tonight,” I said, gesturing to the Incursion. “Let’s say we take a trip to Portlaoise Goal and speak to Feeny. See what he has to say about the situation. We can pop up and be back by high tide this evening.”
Sam closed the laptop and bounced a little on her heels. “Great. Gumshoe work.” She stopped and a puzzled look moved over her face. “How do you know Feeny’s even in Portlaoise?”
Murtagh barked a laugh. “Vic’s the one who put him there.”
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