Last Chance to Die

by Noah Boyd

  She watched as Vail started working his way through the mounds of smoked meat and potatoes. He’d been right about the waitress; she had kept eye contact with him a moment longer than necessary. Kate had seen other women look at him the same way. Although he wasn’t particularly handsome, women sensed something about him that was both primal and protective. She had noticed it as far back as Detroit. The night before, in that secret room with the gunmen closing in and Vail about to set off an explosion of unknown intensity, it had never occurred to her that he wouldn’t get her out. And it hadn’t been any different tonight on that rooftop. The tough times would never be the problem between them. It was the danger, she supposed, that kept them close. But without it, even the simplest date invariably turned contentious.

  9

  When they walked into the observation room at the Sixteenth Street off-site, Vail dropped the DVD into the player and said, “We’ve got to be missing something.”

  “Why are you so sure there’s something to miss? Maybe there are a bunch of clues hidden and Calculus didn’t have time to tie them together.”

  Vail took a few seconds to consider what she’d said. “Good point. Maybe he was waiting to see if we would make the first payment before linking them up. Or maybe the relative at the Chicago bank has the key.” Vail picked up the phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m calling Langston and having him forward the payment for Pollock to Chicago.”

  She took the phone from his hand. “I’m not sure he wants to hear from you just yet. I’ll call.”

  Vail watched her as she argued with the assistant director.

  “I know he’s dead, I was there, remember?”

  She glanced at Vail, and he noted an unusual disdain in her eyes.

  “This is why Calculus set up the alternative, in case something happened to him,” she continued. “We think there’s a possibility that the relative in Chicago may have the key to identifying more of them.” Her voice was gradually becoming insistent, its momentum unyielding. “I think we’ll get the next name if the money is sent. That’s what we were told.”

  She looked at Vail again, and her mouth relaxed into a smile the way it always did when she was about to prevail.

  “It’s not costing us any more than if Calculus were right here handing us the next name. . . . Then this investigation is over, Bill. We’ve got nothing else. . . .” After a few more seconds, she said, “Thank you,” and hung up.

  “It’ll be wire-transferred first thing tomorrow,” she said.

  Vail was smiling.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “How Langston never had a chance,” he said, his voice softening, no longer ridiculing. “How so few of us do.”

  She tried not to blush, and then, to change the subject, she said, “So what now? You’re not going to search Pollock’s house?”

  “If Pollock was in possession of the next name, there would have been no reason for Calculus to try to destroy the disc at the safe house.”

  “So if there is a string tying names together, there’s only one place it can be—on the DVD,” she said.

  Vail turned on the monitor and pressed the Play button.

  Again they watched carefully as Pollock traded documents for money. Then the screen went to static. Wondering if Calculus had hidden something beyond the end of the video, Vail let it run for half an hour before turning it off.

  Finally Kate said, “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Me either,” Vail answered slowly, his voice containing that distracted hollowness that always meant that something beyond the obvious was being considered. He got up and retrieved the disc from the player. Holding it up to the light, he checked both sides, looking for anything that didn’t belong there. He sat down and rolled the disc back and forth between his fingertips. Something along the edge felt irregular, as if it had been scuffed. He went over to the desk lamp and switched it on.

  “What is it?”

  Searching through the desk, Vail found a fingerprint magnifier, the kind used by Bureau examiners. He held it up to the disc’s edge. “There are a bunch of tiny nicks on the edge.”

  She got up and watched over his shoulder. “ ‘Nicks’ as in a pattern?”

  “They’re very slight, but uniform. Evenly spaced. There are two kinds—cuts, like the edge was slashed, and then just points, like they’d been bored straight down to make a tiny round divot. A couple dozen of them.” Vail ran his finger around the disc’s edge again. “They’re hardly noticeable.” He picked up a pencil and put the magnifier up to the DVD again. “Write this down.”

  Kate grabbed a pad of paper and a pen and watched as he ran the pencil point into each one to ensure he didn’t miss any.

  “Line, line, line, line, dot, dot, dot, dot, line, line, line, line, line, dot, dot, line, line, line, dot, dot, line, line, line, line, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Okay, let’s see what we got.”

  Kate gave him the pad and he studied the configuration.

  ||||• • • • ||||| • • ||| • • |||| • • • • • • • • • • •

  “Any idea what it is?” Kate asked.

  “With just two characters, maybe it’s a binary code, ones and zeros.”

  “We’ve got code people. Why don’t we let them take a crack at it?”

  “If we have to. Remember, the director’s mandate: the fewer people the better. But with just two characters, it’s got to be something fairly simple. Let’s try to figure it out ourselves first.”

  Vail sat down at the desk and tore off the page. He copied it and counted the marks. “There are thirty-five characters.” He took the examiner’s loupe and, carefully rotating the disc, studied the edge again. “I see some spaces. It appears to be seven groups of five.”

  Vail rewrote the characters with the spacing:

  ||||• •••|| |||•• |||•• ||||•• •••• •••••

  He showed it to Kate.

  “If this is going to identify or locate an individual, each grouping has to be either a letter or number,” she said.

  “And since the first and fifth groups represent the same thing, as do the third and fourth and the last two, it’s more likely they represent numbers, because there are only ten digits as opposed to twenty-six letters in the alphabet, which would show more variations and less repeating.”

  “Of course,” she said, “seven digits. It’s a telephone number. And since there apparently isn’t an area code, we’ll have to assume it’s local—202.”

  “Very good, Kate. Now all we have to do is figure out the code.”

  Kate said, “Since the last two digits are the same, maybe they’re zeros, like a business phone.”

  Vail stared at the patterns for a long time. Then he went to the couch and lay down, closing his eyes. Kate waited, and after a few minutes she wondered if he had fallen asleep.

  “Maybe it’s some sort of auditory clue,” he said finally. “Could you read them to me?”

  Kate sat down at the desk and read the groupings aloud. “Just keep reading them for a while,” he said.

  Kate read them again, and when he didn’t react, she started over. Vail’s eyes remained closed, his body motionless. On the fourth time through, she let her voice slip into a singsong rhythm.

  Vail jerked up to a sitting position. “It’s so simple. When I heard you repeating ‘dot, dot, dot,’ it came to me. It’s not ‘line, dot’—it’s ‘dash, dot.’ It was easier and more economical to cut a perpendicular line across the edge than a dash. It’s Morse code.”

  He was at the computer now, looking for the symbols of the code. Once they were on the screen, he said, “Write this down. Four dashes and a dot is the number nine. The first and fifth number is nine. Three dots and two dashes is three. Three dashes and two dots is eight. And five dots is five, so the last two numbers are five.”

  Kate said, “It’s 938-8955.”

  Kate picked up the p
hone and dialed. “This is Deputy Assistant Director Bannon. Extension 3318 Tango, please.” She then enunciated the number clearly, as one does when responding to voice prompts. She repeated it. Then, after a few seconds, she smiled, wrote down the subscriber information, and hung up. “It comes back to the Russian embassy.”

  Vail walked over and took the number from her, pointing at the phone on the desk. “Which line has the recorder on it?”

  “Line three.” As he lifted the receiver to dial, she pushed the first button on the row along the bottom of the phone. He leaned toward her and turned the handset so she could listen. After four rings the voice of a middle-aged male with a noticeable Russian accent asked the caller to leave a message. Vail listened to the beep and waited until the line disconnected. “Anything?” he asked her.

  “Think that was Calculus?” she asked.

  “It could be. Did you hear anything out of the ordinary?”

  “You mean like an anomaly?” she teased.

  “Yes, Katherine, like an anomaly.”

  “Nope.”

  Vail looked back at the handwritten dots and dashes. “That’s got to be it. But the message doesn’t say anything.”

  “Maybe you need the access code to get into it—you know, to retrieve a message like on your home machine.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “But those can be two, three, or four digits. I suspect that with Calculus it’s four digits. That’s ten thousand combinations. Then no one can accidentally access it.”

  “Maybe it’s in the phone number, the first four digits or the last four.”

  “Give it a try.”

  Kate pressed the Speakerphone button and then hit Redial. The same message played, and after the beep Vail entered the first four digits of the telephone number: 9388. There was no response. Kate disconnected the line and hit Redial again. The message replayed, and Vail tapped in 8955. Still there was no response. She said, “How about first and last four backward?”

  Vail went through the procedure twice more, entering 8839 and 5598. Neither gave them access.

  “Just nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-six more to go,” Kate said.

  Vail studied the seven digits to see if there was another logical set of four to strip out and try. Finally he turned the sheet of paper over so he couldn’t see it. “It has to be something else. Something we can figure out, something so simple it’s invisible.”

  “Like Pollock being our first fish.”

  Vail smiled. “You’re really getting good at this. This guy isn’t our first fish, but . . . ?”

  “Our second,” Kate said. “Zero, zero, zero, two.”

  Vail stood up and waved his hand at the phone ceremoniously so she could sit down and dial. Once she hit 0002, a message started to play:

  “Hello, it’s me—you know, Preston. I’ve got those infrared facial-recognition schematics you wanted, but the price has gone up. This time I want a hundred thousand dollars in cash, just for me. I’ve been getting the short end while taking all the chances. So this will keep it, you know, level and true.” The voice chuckled briefly before he said, “You’ve got my number.”

  The caller hung up, and Kate started to say something, but Vail held up a finger for her to wait. After a few seconds, they heard the tones of a phone number being dialed. The line went dead. “Another phone number?” Kate said.

  “Sounds like it.”

  “At least this time we got his first name. Preston.”

  “Did you notice that there was a slight emphasis on it? I would guess that’s his code name. It’s traditional cloak-and-dagger stuff to have one for identifying yourself to the other side.”

  “Then how are we supposed to figure out who this guy is? The phone number dialed at the end?”

  “That was done after Preston hung up. I’m guessing Calculus punched in those numbers. Hopefully to help us identify this guy. This time he gave us the evidence first, and the puzzle is to find the name that goes with it.”

  “Let me get the number converted, and maybe we can go from there.” She picked up the phone and called headquarters, asking for a different extension from before. “This is Deputy Assistant Director Kate Bannon. Need a readback on this touch-tone number.” She pressed the phone recorder’s button, and Vail listened to the number being played back. After a few seconds, Kate wrote down the number and hung up. “It reads out as 632-265-2974. Any idea where that is?”

  “No.”

  She turned to the computer and entered the first three numbers. “There’s no such area code. How can that be?”

  “Maybe it’s not a phone number. Maybe it’s some other type of code. The first two clues were different.” He stared at the ten numbers, trying various combinations. “Calculus apparently likes creating puzzles to show how smart he is.”

  “Or how dumb we are.” Kate was also studying the numbers, looking for patterns. “Obviously we’re missing something.” She got a distant look in her eye, which then focused all of a sudden. “That’s it! What’s missing?”

  Vail said, “What? What do you mean, what’s missing?”

  “There are no eights, ones, or zeros.”

  Vail looked at the line of numbers. “I still don’t get it.”

  “Look at your cell phone.”

  At first he didn’t understand but then examined the keys more closely. “There are no letters on the number one and zero keys. He’s telling us to convert these numbers into letters from the phone.” She picked up a pen, rewrote the numbers and then, underneath, the corresponding letters from the phone dial:

  She said, “It must be a ten-letter clue—one from each of the groups?”

  “Very nice, Katie.”

  “Do you think it could it be a name?” she asked.

  “With all the variations and spelling combinations, a name would be difficult to decode. And these clues are getting more difficult. A name seems a little too direct after all the work we had to do to get the embassy phone number and access code. Chances are it’s something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, but let’s listen to it again.” He played the recorded message back. Vail struck slashes between the letters. “There are three hesitations between the groups of letters dialed. He showed her:

  mno def / abc abc mno jkl / abc wxyz / pqrs ghi

  “So it’s a two-letter group, then four letters, a two-letter, and another two. Do you think it’s four words?”

  “Let’s assume it is. Try the two-letter words first, since there are fewer possibilities.”

  Kate said, “Okay, with a letter from each group, the only possibilities for the first group are ‘me’ and ‘of.’ ”

  “And the third word could only be ‘ax’ or ‘by.’ ”

  “The last one has just one vowel, i, and that doesn’t match up with p, q, r, or s.”

  Vail, listening intently, played the recording again. “No, that’s definitely the way they’re spaced. Let’s try the four-letter word.”

  They both took a sheet of paper and wrote at the top:

  abc abc mno jkl

  Then they started writing down letter combinations, one from each group. After a couple of minutes, Kate said, “Have I got this right? There’s only one word that you can make out of it?”

  “ ‘Bank’?” Vail asked.

  “That’s what I got.”

  Vail rewrote all the letters with the second group decoded:

  mno def / BANK / abc wxyz / pqrs ghi

  “ ‘Of bank’ or ‘Me bank’? Neither one makes any sense,” he said.

  Kate said, “He’s directing us to a bank. The first two letters must be an abbreviation for the name of the bank.” She was up and started pulling open desk drawers until she found a phone book. Once she located bank listings, she ran her finger down the page and then stopped, smiling. “OD—Old Dominion Bank.”

  “I might as well go for coffee while you finish this.”

  Kate flashed him a brief grin of appreciat
ion. Vail rewrote the name on another blank sheet of paper:

  OLD DOMINION BANK / abc wxyz / pqrs ghi

  “And what were the two words—‘by’ and ‘ax’?—for the third word? If the bank was by something, he wouldn’t need the word ‘by.’ In a ten-letter message, he wouldn’t waste two of them on an unnecessary preposition. So it’s probably another abbreviation.”

  Kate wrote everything on her pad of paper again. After looking at the options for only a second, she said, “How about a combination of ‘by’ and ‘ax’—‘bx’? Box. It’s a bank box.”

  Vail laughed. “How about giving us common laborers a chance?”

  “And the last two are not letters—they’re the original numbers from the message. The bank-box number.”

  “Old Dominion Bank, box 74. Very impressive, Bannon. For upper management—extraordinary.”

  She noticed him looking at her somehow differently, as if rediscovering something he had forgotten or never known.

  “In the morning we’ll have to figure out which branch has box 74,” he said.

  “I’ll call Langston and let him know.”

  “How are you going to tell him we found this?”

  Kate said, “He’s going to have to get a court order, which means probable cause, which means we’ve got to tell him about the clues Calculus has left. It’s urgent that we get into that box so we can identify any other spies.”

  “Which means he may want first crack at everything from now on.”

  “Yeah, Vail, like you’ll let that happen.”

  10

  Vail was sitting at the kitchen table with his injured hand unwrapped, trying to cut away the stitches with a small pair of scissors when Kate came in. Without a word, she took them from him and turned his hand over so she could see the sutures better. With tiny, careful snips, she cut them loose and then pulled each one out slowly. “It looks pretty good.”

  He flexed his hand into a fist and then pressed the injured edge against the table. “It feels fine. What did Langston have to say last night?”

  “In a very official monotone, he thanked me for the information and said he would have Kalix get to work on it. On the way over here, John called and said that after a discreet call to a contact at the Old Dominion Bank he was told that box 74 was at their Vienna, Virginia, branch. He is meeting with the prosecutor at eleven and will meet us at the bank at one o’clock unless we hear otherwise.”