Woodpecker

Chapter 5 / Ben 1 / 2 x 2 x 83 Days Left

Ben Erwin is standing in the middle of a field in Somerset unsure what exactly he's supposed to be looking for. Five minutes earlier he had vaulted the farm gate having parked his car in the lane running the length of the field. Looking down he checks his GPS. Bar a third decimal place this is exactly the spot. He stamps one foot hard on the ground but there's nothing unusual. It feels just like grass and baked earth should feel, firm, uneven, rubbery. Looking around, it appears to be just a normal field. A thick hedgerow marks the perimeter and the only way to see into the field from the lane is through the gap where the gate stands. The grass, about ankle high is browning at the tops, it had been a warm dry start to the summer. There aren't any animals in the field, but it is spotted with dry circular cowpats suggesting pastureland.

"How can this place be significant?", he says out loud to himself in frustrated puzzlement. Nothing that he can see piqued his interest in the least. Just a normal field and yet it must have a meaning beyond what he can see. He tramps further away from the gate as far as the hedgerow on the far side of the field, which is a hundred or so meters across. Peering through the tangled twigs into the next field all he can see is more of the same. Another field, and beyond that another. A fractal landscape of identical boxes spawning identical boxes. A farmhouse with barns stands maybe eight hundred meters away. Maybe that's important in some way, he thinks. He looks at his GPS again but now he's off the spot that he was looking for and the farmhouse would be even further astray.

This had all started four weeks earlier when a brown envelope had arrived, hand delivered in the night, at Ben's office. A journalist, Ben is well known in newspaper circles for writing longer investigative pieces. Exposing wrongdoing and double standards in political life was one of his areas of expertise, as were complex financial crimes. His last big piece had exposed a massive VAT fraud perpetrated by a group of businessmen who were claiming tax back on fake transactions. Ben had managed to get his hands on a trail of forged invoices that led back to a factory in Spain that was supposedly producing steel ingots. Ben worked out that the ingots they were producing were hollow, about 90% lighter than they should have been. They were importing these into the country and then melting them down and converting them into solid ingots for sale. For every ten kilograms sold they were claiming VAT back on the full hundred. It was a fraud stretching into the hundreds of millions of pounds and Ben had put a stop to it. That investigation too had begun with the arrival of an anonymous brown envelope. This sort of thing was not so unusual in Ben's line of work.

On that day nearly a month ago he sat at his desk with the letter in front of him. Picking it up he could feel how light it was. There couldn't be much inside. The envelope accounted for most of its weight. When he tried to open the letter with his fingers it was difficult. It had been sealed up at both ends with thick plastic tape and the envelope itself was made of a waxy almost plastic paper that was difficult to tear. He had to use the sharp pointed end of one blade of a pair of scissors to slice the plastic tape open. Spreading the sides of the envelope with two fingers and peering in he could see a single sheet of pinkish paper, which he carefully coaxed out.

Placing it on the table he could see that it was a type of paper that he had come across before. It looked to his eye to be the kind of paper that confidential and secret government memorandums were written on. These pink papers were not meant to ever leave the halls of power. If this was what it appeared to be it was very interesting indeed.

To begin with he had treated it with a degree of suspicion. It could after all be something other than it seemed. A fake. He had since had it looked at by a professional acquaintance, a document specialist, and it was definitely the real deal. Either that or a flawless forgery, the type of thing that only another foreign government could produce. Everything from the watermarks to the weaving of the paper was right and Ben had no reason to think it was anything other than a bone fide secret government document.