Tallaght: The edge of the City.
The last stop on the metro. 8 housing estates, 1 cinema, 2 schools, 1 adult education centre, 2 bars, 1 betting shop.
There’s an old quarry, the largest scrap yard in the district, an old granary, and then hundreds of miles of soya fields, and grazing land.
Mr Blue hops off the metro and walks.
Blue turned the corner by the old scrapyard and ducked into the back lane, crouching under some old fencing. He crawled alongside a concrete prefab tunnel part protruding from the ground. Rolling back an old van door, he enters the concrete tunnel and closes the sliding door behind him.
Crouching to avoid hitting his head, he makes his way for 50 feet. Parts of the tunnel are prefabricated concrete, other parts are made of corrugated iron, car body parts and scaffoldings. All the crevices are filled with discarded VCRs, computers, and kitchen appliances, until it abruptly stops at the entrance of a large RV trailer completely covered in scrap and sound proofed with a ring of car tyres. Unknown to the world outside, Blue steps into Qwerty ’s secret lair.
"Get in here quick. Were you followed?", Qwerty ushers him into the large room, and examines the numerous monitors as they flick through the hundred or so hidden cameras placed around the scrapyard and for two blocks in all directions.
"Sit, look at this.These charts - they’re not just financial predictions. There’s deposits and withdrawals - I mean exact amounts. Most of them haven’t been made yet. They’re all part of a system, a process."
"I don’t understand," stated Mr Blue.
"Majick! We are talking about bone fide Magick. Being used by a multinational corporation to predict prophecies, weather conditions, war, famines, inventions. All charted with a crossbreed of science, chaos theory and ritual majick."
"Are you serious?" asked Blue.
Qwerty was a brilliant mind, capable of extraordinary leaps of intuition that made him one of the greatest algorithmists since the ancient Druids. Mr Blue looked at his friend, not everything Qwerty saw was there and it was not Qwerty s job to distinguish the two.
"Look for yourself." answered Qwerty .
Qwerty opened a file. It was a list of transactions: incomings and outgoings. He scrolled beyond today's date to over 40 years in the future. 2053 to be exact.
Now look at this date a week before 9/11
And this a week before Enron
Afghanistan
Flight 23 over Ukraine
"Each occasion is linked to a date, see here, and click this, and you get star alignments. Fucking star alignments."
"But they are just random."
"Yep, until you click on this. "
"Dolmans?"
"Ireland, Bulgaria, Arizona. According to these charts on certain dates different dolmans become more important."
"What does that mean?" asked Blue.
"I’m not exactly sure yet but you gotta admit, these are not your average contents of a suit’s laptop."
"No, these are more like the files on your computers."
"Exactly!" grinned Qwerty .
Blue awoke to flashing lights and several black clothed stormtroopers pointing uzis at his face. He’s quickly thrown to his stomach, and handcuffed. You have the right to remain silent…\
Blue was facing 20 years.
He’d be dead if Bonsanto had found out that he had actually cracked the files.
But Qwerty ’s precautionary runes saved both their lives. As it stood, no one knew of Qwerty ’s involvement, and Blue was a minor inconvenience and a lesson to others.
Bonsanto’s work includes military research for the government, and Hacker Blue was being portrayed as a threat to homeland security.
So what’s your connection with the Snowman?
I work for the press,
You’re a hacker
I gather online information for reporters , scientists and academics.
Maybe you're a spy.
Just doin’ my job.
Where is he now
I don’t know
Back in the scrapyard.
"I’m out on bail."
Blue and Qwerty sat at the bar.
Hold on don’t turn that down
Sky News: Documents have been released simultaneously by the Guardian and eNglan and Der Fre in Germany purported to show massive scale surveillance by the NSA…
"It’s out." Says Blue
What about Chandler/? Asks Qwerty
They're saying it was a burglary?
"And the Kid?Chuck?"
"He’ll live. They want to bring him back to America for some kind of cutting edge technology to rebuild his body."
Diarmuid cast an annoying glance at both Mr Blue and Loki.
This has got nothing to do with the spirit of trees or a bleedin road. It's a deliberate attempt to destroy the devil's hole.
The faerie entrance?
"Yes," whispered Diarmuid. "Listen to me now," he beckoned us closer and he spoke as if speaking of a plot. Which he was.
"There's a prophecy. Made by the druids of old. And this prophecy is pretty much the reason behind every secret society's quest for knowledge ever since. There's going to be a time when everything moves so fast that it all starts happening at once. I mean Everything starts happening at once. Things that have already happened, and things that haven't happened yet, and everything that wasn't going to happen. It all starts happenin’.
We call it The Happening.
And when this shit hits the fan, places like the Devil's Mouth are gonna be pivotal in shaping how we deal with the megafuck."
"I don't understand", Blue quizzed," Why would these men in black, I mean the American Government, be interested in a tourist attraction in Wicklow?"
"You know what a Dolmen is, right? But do you know how many there are?
A dolmen— dolmain , cromlech, anta , Hünengrab/Hünenbett, Adamra, Ispun , Hunebed, dös , goindol or quoit : a portal tomb, portal grave
“To the other side?”
“Who knows, but the Devil's mouth is the mother of all portals. Problem is, of course, we don't know how to use 'em."