Time Bandits

(This story won 2nd place in "The Bard's Hall Contest" )

TIME BANDITS

"Looks like Chinese writing." Jack was referring to the symbols on the piece of paper in my hand.

白浜剣鬼

"Kanji," I answered absently.

"What?"

"Kanji. Japanese writing using Chinese characters. Literally means 'Han characters'."

"Oh." Jack scratched his balding scalp. "Don't suppose you know what it says, do you?"

I nodded, still studying both the characters on the paper and the paper itself. "Shirahama Kenki. 16th century Japanese pirate, raided the coast of Viet Nam."

"Think it might be the treasure the Time Bandits' Map sent us looking for?"

"Considering that Shirahama Kenki operated about 8,000 miles from here, I seriously doubt it."

Jack just grunted in that endearingly annoying way he had.

For some reason, I was thinking about my Mom. She and Dad had retired in a small Arkansas town two hundred miles from the hinterlands of the national park that Jack and I were wandering around. I wondered if I might get the chance to see them on my way home, and what kind of lie I would tell my Dad about what his librarian daughter was doing out in the middle of nowhere. (Mom had worked with the U.S. State Department at one time, and would be smart enough not to ask).

"So, Doc, any idea what a clue about She's-his-Mamma---"

"Shirahama---"

"Yeah, that guy---is doing in a cave in the middle of the Ozarks?"

That was the question of the hour.

* * *

The story actually starts more than forty years ago, but my part began about six months ago. I was the twenty-eight-year-old assistant to the Cultural Affairs Officer of the American Embassy in Rome, who incidentally worked for the C.I.A. on occasion. It actually sounds more exciting than it really is, even though I have been shot at on one occasion.

First of all, unlike in all the spy movies, the Cultural Affairs Officer is sort of the trash-bin job in any embassy, regardless of nationality. Anything that can't fit neatly into a specific pigeonhole gets shuffled over to culture. If a small town congressman comes to Rome and feels his position entitles him to an audience with the Pope, the Ambassador's staff sloughs him off to Culture to explain why that can't happen. Or if a local aspiring prima ballerina assoluta wants to know why she hasn't been invited to perform at the Lincoln Center, Culture is the one who handles it. That's not our only job, mind you. We're there to promote cultural and educational exchange between the U.S. and the host country. But somehow we also end up being the embassy's unofficial complaint department for the cultural fringe.

I had arrived in Rome at the tender age of twenty-three, having just earned my master of library science degree and passing the foreign service exam. Within a couple of months of arriving, I had gotten shuffled over to the legal attache's office. The international crackdown on illegal antiquities trafficking had just started gathering steam, and legal wanted somebody tagging along who could tell Elgin Marbles from a terra cotta krater.

For the most part, this entailed me sitting through boring meetings and fending off passes from over-aged Deputy Ministers at intergovernmental mixers.

Then I got recruited by the CIA.

Really, it wasn't that exciting. There was some talk about some of the profits in the illegal antiquities market being funneled off by terrorist organizations, and the CIA observer in a Guardia di Finanza raid wanted his own expert on hand. When the police hit the warehouse, they met no resistance. Inside were counterfeit terracotta warriors and horses of Shi Huang Di. I recognized this fairly quickly, which impressed my CIA escort and the Italians to no end, particularly when I was able to explain why in fluent Italian (my Mom's postings moved us around a lot, and I have an uncanny knack for languages).

So anytime the CIA and other intelligence agencies in Southern Europe needed a cultural expert, they always called me. You would think they would have someone on staff to help them out, but I guess spies don't go to art museums very often.

Most of these outings were probably fairly boring to my spy escorts, though they were thrilling to me. I did get shot at once. Well, the bullets were fired in my general direction, and one hit three feet away from where I was crouched. But the excitement was enough that I kept up my personal studies, to make myself as useful as possible to my 'handlers.'

Then six months ago I found myself in a room full of young cultural experts like myself, along with their spy handlers.

My 'handler' was a man named Jack Warren. Jack looked like something out of 1930's pulp fiction novel. He had a chiseled jaw, hard eyes and features that said a bout of cirrhosis was somewhere in his near future. He had little imagination for things outside of his line of duty and had a tendency to call subject experts (like myself) "squints."

On the other hand, the one time I got shot at, Jack had immediately positioned his body between me and possible harm. So go figure. He called me 'squint' and I called him 'spook.'

We were in a nondescript conference room in a mid-range hotel in Lucerne. Unofficially, I was to discover. There were eight pairs of us, a 'squint' with his 'spook' handler. One pair each from the U.S., China, Russia, France, Brazil, England, Japan and India. The subject experts were all my age and, between us, covered the entire spectrum of human knowledge. Their handlers were of different heights, genders and builds, but there was something about them all that made them Jack Warren clones.

We 'squints' were confused. Our handlers looked grim.

Jack nodded at his Chinese counterpart. "You want to start this off, Deng?"

Deng gave Jack a polite nod then started his PowerPoint presentation. I was impressed with the fluency of his English.

"Three years ago there was a major earthquake in the province of Shaanxi. As is common with earthquakes of this scale, there were numerous aftershocks. One of these aftershocks was not caused by the original earthquake, but from an advanced device utilizing cold fusion."

I whistled. I didn't know much about cold fusion (i.e., room temperature fusion), but I thought it was the stuff of science fiction and conspiracy theories. It caught everyone by surprise, including Deng's subject expert, who asked him something in an excited whispered. Deng grunted something back that at least made his subject expert keep quiet, if not calm him down.

"What trace evidence was left was surprising, not only in the advanced technology it represented, but with the ease in which it had been placed in a very sensitive area." I didn't know it at the time, but among the representatives of the intelligence agencies present, it was considered an article of faith that Chinese internal security was second to none.

"Over the next few months, demonstrations of a similar nature were made in the countries represented here. They were made in such a way that the populace was not alerted to their nature. The authorities, though, were presented with irrefutable proof of their artificial and unprecedented advanced scientific nature."

"The next step of our unknown adversary was to inform all eight nations present of where a larger device of a similar nature was located within their respective borders. The nations in question were offered the opportunity to disarm said device, if they could."

"The security protocols around said devices were such that they could not be breached within the alloted time of our unknown adversary. The devices were revealed to be inert, but placed in a location that again circumvented the security of very sensitive areas. If the devices had been real, the consequences to the economic and industrial infrastructures of each of our nations would have been devastating."

"It was then that our unknown adversary made himself known. Unfortunately, that information was of little use to us. He has been dead for the last three years."

* * *

The man who had set all this in motion was Dr. Harold Lawson. Until his incursions into top secret areas were so dramatically revealed, very few people had ever heard of him. He was a tenured mathematics professor in a small, liberal college in the Midwest U.S. He attended all the conferences, went to all the seminars, and had even submitted a few technical papers, the most notable one being on the dynamics of a minor asteroid.

Further research into Doctor Lawson found that he had been a minor contributor on a number of some very major projects. More of a footnote, really, but if you knew where to look, you could always find him in the background. Sort of a scientific Waldo.

Dr. Lawson had provided the intelligence communities of each of the nations represented around the table a DVD that was lengthy, somewhat pompous in a Victorian supervillian sort of way, but eventually made its point.

Somehow Dr. Lawson had access to technology that was at least a century ahead of what anybody else had. He also had set up devices in areas where he had never visited, and which he couldn't possibly have access to. And he showed that, if he wanted to, he could resist the brute force of each nation to overcome his secretly placed devices, even if he did so from beyond the grave.

Each nation now knew that if he set off the real devices, wherever they were, the panic alone would drive their economies and political structures into the dark ages.

And drag the rest of the world screaming and kicking with them.

So what did the doctor want?

In a nutshell, the doctor wanted each nation to show that they were indeed superior to the barbarians that were at the gate, whether those barbarians were militiamen in the Northwestern United States or separatists in Western China.

The doctor was disgruntled by the suppression of creativity that each of the nations here represented. Suppression that had thwarted his colleagues from working with each other freely. So Dr. Lawson had told the nations represented in the room that he would give them one last chance to prove their worth. Or, as he put on the DVD,

"I'm not only going to let the barbarians at the gates in; I'm going to roll out the red carpet for them."

That's where the Time Bandits' map came in.

* * *

Included with his DVD was an old map of the globe. I mean, it was modern (well, at least as modern as it could have been up until a year before Dr. Lawson died; there were a few new borders drawn between now and then), but it looked like one of those maps drawn in the fifteenth century; you know, the ones with sea serpents drawn in the South Pacific and warnings of "Here There Be Dragons" and such. Superimposed on it were the constellations, though connected in a fashion that no one had ever heard of. The map supposedly held the location of clues where the final devices were hidden, as well as hints on how they could be disarmed.

Of course, each nation immediately set its intelligence community on it. Which produced a flock of positions and counter-positions and carefully hedged projections. All the things that Dr. Lawson had predicted on the tapes. Warrants were issued and anybody who had ever been in anyway associated with Dr. Lawson was detained and questioned.

No luck.

But among the individuals working on the problem in each nation's intelligence community, there was one type who was working on it at a different angle. The "Jack Warren" type. They were considered dinosaurs by their more modern colleagues, who couldn't wait to see them farmed out to retirement. But the Jack Warrens were the ones who somehow got things done, dinosaurs though they be.

And these Jack Warrens knew who their counterparts were in each of the eight nations affected. It is an adage in all spy novels that field agents have more in common with their enemy counterparts than with their superiors. In this case, the old saw was true.

So the Jack Warrens started trading information. The one thing they discovered was that no one had found a solution for the Time Bandits' Map. Dr. Lawson had warned the nations that he would soon be dropping hints to their homegrown enemies on how they could prematurely activate the devices to bring down their respective enemies. And, lest some nation wanted to bring down another nation with Dr. Lawson's device, he'd warned them that when one device went off, they would all go off. There were only two camps in this war: civilization and barbarian. No fence sitting here.

So the Jack Warrens decided on their own solution. Each had their own 'consulting genius' on a wide range of topics that they consulted with from time to time. What if they brought all of them together to work on this problem, free from bureaucratic oversight?

It so happened I was Jack's consulting genius. And now I and seven other consulting geniuses had to save the world. No pressure here.

It was actually one of the spy guardians who inadvertently gave us the answer.

You see, it was our handlers who had designated Dr. Lawson's map the Time Bandits' map. It seemed that all eight of our handlers were big fans of the 1981 cult classic Time Bandits. Who knew spies liked Monty Python?

But it got me to thinking when I looked at the constellation sitting over the mid-U.S. I didn't quite recognize it until I remembered a book on astronomy I had gotten from my Mom when she went to a conference in Tokyo.

"Byakko!"

My Japanese counterpart looked up and grinned at me. "It IS the White Tiger!"

We excitedly started exchanging information among the eight of us (the eight 'consulting geniuses', that is). It was rather funny that, although the eight of us spoke a number of languages, none of us shared one in common. It didn't matter though. Somehow, everything got translated as the ideas flowed back and forth. Our handlers watched us and nodded at each other, vindicating their idea and their own general competence.

A number of things looked a bit odd to me, until I thought about the fact that our handlers called this the Time Bandits' Map. Then it hit me. What if the clues not only represented places, but times as well? The constellations were meant to indicate a particular time. That bit of information would help us unravel the mystery of the Time Bandits' Map.

And so, what our governments had not been able to solve with months of teams working around the clock, aided by supercomputers and the best minds available, eight 'squints' had solved within eight hours, with the assistance of a laptop, connection to the Internet, continuous room service, and eight intelligence agents' quirky addiction to Terry Gilliam movies.

Deng looked at Jack. "We should probably report this to our superiors. Including our contact with foreign intelligence."

Silence immediately took hold of the room. My seven new colleagues and I looked at our handlers, suddenly aware that we hadn't worked late into the night solving a modern day Da Vinci code.

Jack nodded in agreement. "Absolutely. Our government definitely needs more paper work to shuffle and get lost."

Deng smiled. It seemed an odd feature on his face, and I suspected not a pleasant one if that smile was focused on you.

"Jack, I'm not sure how it's going to be working with you instead of against you, but I think it might make for a pleasurable change of pace."

The agents immediately made plans among themselves, as we squints watched in silent expectation. With a nod to each other, they escorted their consulting geniuses out of the room.

Within 48 hours, I found myself climbing out of a rented SUV on a fire road somewhere on the Missouri-Arkansas border. Officially, I was still back in Europe on detached duty; unofficially, Jack obviously knew somebody in customs on both sides of the Atlantic who never asked to see my passport.

I was a little grouchy, though I had slept a good deal of the time. As far as I knew, Jack hadn't slept a wink, but looked no less for wear. Using a hand held GPS unit, we found ourselves at the entrance of a cave.

The map had given us the coordinates, though in a roundabout way. First, we had to decipher the patched up star map overlaid on the global one, which gave us the clue to what type of coordinates were used (you've got Cartesian, polar, prolate spheroidal...do I need to continue?). And then we had to decipher clues on the map to determine the time frame that was referred to, to further define the coordinates. I'm really, truly hoping that Dr. Lawson used a team of experts to create this map, because if it took eight 'consulting geniuses' to match wits with one obscure mathematics professor, the world was in serious trouble.

Jack had thought to bring along a metal detector, which was a good thing, since it immediately found a metal tube containing the scroll with the Kanji script.

"So who was this Shirahama?"

"Late 16th century Japanese pirate. He was inadvertently responsible for cordial relationships between Japan and Viet Nam for most of the 17th century."

"Think Dr. Lawson might be trying to send us a message?"

Sometimes Jack isn't as shallow as I give him credit for.

As I was making this internal paradigm shift, a bullet ricocheted just inches from my head.

"Shit! Inside the cave now!" With that, Jack pulled/dragged me into the cave, firing shots at the direction the rifle fire had come from.

Either we had run across someone's illegal stash of something, or the barbarians had gotten Dr. Lawson's clues. And Dr. Lawson hadn't been planning on making them work for it like he had us.

As more rifle shots fired outside the cave, I had a sinking feeling that it was definitely barbarians at the gate time.

"Don't suppose there's a back way out of this cave, is there Squint?"

I looked around the cave we had hustled into. There were a couple of shafts overhead, letting in sunlight, but otherwise nothing. The cave itself only went back about fifteen feet. It was fortunate that the cave bent around a little, providing us protection from the increasing rifle fire we were coming under.

"Nothing here but...clam shells?"

"Long way from the beach," Jack grunted, as he fired his revolver out the cave opening.

It was a long way from the beach. But the cave floor was littered with clam shells the size of my open hand. And on the wall...on the wall, I would swear there were clam-shaped indentations.

On a whim, I picked up a clam and placed it in an indentation. It stuck.

"Doc, I appreciate you sprucing up the place, but I think this is the wrong time to worry about interior decorating."

"There was a cave found in Henan Puyang, with a mural in it, circa 4,000 BCE. Clam shells were used to depict Pinyin, the Northern Dipper. Or what we call the Big Dipper."

"That's all and well, Doc, but---hey, how're you getting them to stick up there?"

"They're sticking by themselves."

Jack was about to add something else when he was distracted by an unusually heavy barrage of rifle fire.

I felt compelled to put all seven clams up in their proper position. When I put the last one up, the clam/stars began to glow.

"What the---"

Jack wasn't able to finish his sentence. The stars glowed a blinding white, and then the cave disappeared.

* * *

When the world came back into focus, Jack and I found ourselves staring at the seven guns of the seven spies we had left in Switzerland. The seven quickly holstered them.

"It looks like we each solved the puzzle and staved off the barbarians, at least for the moment," Deng noted.

We quickly exchanged stories. It seemed that each team had found their objective, only to be attacked by unknown forces at the time they discovered it. The triggering device was different, but each time had activated some device that had somehow transported all eight teams to...

"Where are we, anyway?" Jack asked.

Deng shook his head. "No idea. Some kind of underground bunker, though we haven't found an exit yet. Plenty of ventilation, food, water, electricity...and another Time Bandits' Map."

Jack nodded. "It looks like whatever transported us here closed up as soon as we arrived."

Deng nodded. "We were concerned that one of the teams might not have beaten the barbarians to their objective. The barbarians still might find a way to...wherever we are."

Jack shook his head. "I don't think that's how Doctor Lawson wrote the rules of his game. Still, it might be best to keep someone on guard at all times, while the rest of us get some downtime when we're not looking for an exit. And it probably would be a good idea to get our experts working on the new Time Bandits' Map."

Deng gave that 'smile' of his again. "Yes, I believe our young geniuses have a world to save."