The manager of the hotel in Rome was more interested in who was going to settle Martin Schubert's bill than he was...

Originally shared by Hank Johnson

The manager of the hotel in Rome was more interested in who was going to settle Martin Schubert's bill than he was in the whereabouts of his delinquent guest. Fortunately, I had some walking around money from Ilya (Visur Technology has expressed interested in funding the development of future NOMAD episodes), so I paid the bill in exchange for the key. 

The room still reeked of cigars and cerebral intrigue. It was a still life. Several sheets of paper scrawled and doodled upon that reminded me of an artless take on Carrie Campbell's Voynich-like pages. A computer open to a dead Hangout with Stein Lightman and Yuri Alaric Nagassa, both also absent. A couple of old books in German, what I would guess was a Slavic language and a middle eastern script I couldn’t identify.

From what I could decipher of his extremely cryptic scribblings, he was answering some academic question Nagassa had put to him and Lightman was probably helping with the translation and contextualization.  Of course, I didn’t have much time to read thanks to the hunger with which various corporations and intel agencies are trying to obtain these troves of knowledge.  

A disembodied voice interrupted me. It was coming from a device hidden underneath the desk. 2 way radio. Whoever was using it couldn’t have been that far. I was told, calmly, that I was going to assist them by interpreting some of Schubert’s paper lying on the desk. If I chose not to help, there would be consequences. I’m not sure who this person was... Hulong Transglobal? NIA? Lorazon and IQTech Research?  Or some other entity...  

I told the disembodied voice what I knew.  It said it had analyzed me for voice stress and told me to leave the paper in place and leave, probably in case someone more informed than me decided to pay a visit in the future. I left the electronic ‘catch and release’ trap unharmed. There wasn’t much margin for them in killing me, and, well… as for me, I have my own problems to deal with. Besides, it would’ve messed up the ‘in situ’ of Schubert’s room.