Blood Relation (Arcane Casebook Book 6)
Page 26
“And what might that be?” Harcourt demanded.
“To sabotage that radio equipment,” Alex said.
“Why?”
“I assume to listen in on whatever top-secret things are being talked about over that radio,” Alex said.
Harcourt scoffed at that.
“What makes you think anything that equipment would be used for would be some kind of secret?”
“Because Alice Cartwright worked on top secret things — for you,” Alex said. “Well not you, strictly speaking. You said she usually dealt with someone else in your office. That wouldn’t be William Masters, now would it?”
Harcourt opened his mouth to reply but Alex went on.
“So you’ve got a woman who was privy to government secrets, who’s writing coded letters to someone, and then her contact at your department orders radio equipment expropriated for the government. Equipment that I’m pretty sure was sabotaged.”
“That could all be a coincidence,” Harcourt stammered. He seemed worried, but Alex got the distinct impression he was worried about his job, not the possibility of spies and saboteurs in his office.
“There is one more interesting fact,” Alex said. “Several people saw me at Alice Cartwright’s office, then the next day somebody took a shot at me. That shooter smoked a German brand of cigarette.”
That got Nicholson’s attention.
“So Alice gets information from Masters, then passes it on to some Nazi?”
Alex shrugged and nodded at Harcourt.
“As he said, it might just be a coincidence. But that’s one hell of a coincidence.”
“This is paranoid nonsense,” Harcourt declared. “Now if you don’t mind, I have to get someone working on this code right away.”
He turned to go, and Alex stepped up close to Nicholson.
“Stall him for a couple minutes,” he whispered.
“Just a minute, Harcourt,” the detective said, giving Alex a discrete nod. “You need to fill out the property receipt for those documents.”
Alex didn’t wait to hear Harcourt’s response; he quickly walked away, heading for the row of offices along the back wall. When he reached the one belonging to Danny, he ducked inside.
“Alex,” Danny said, surprised to see him. He sat behind his desk filling out paperwork with a bored expression on his face. “Anything new on our mutual friend?”
“Later,” Alex said, making for the desk. “I need to use your phone.”
Danny chuckled but pushed the phone across the desk in Alex’s direction. Picking up the receiver, Alex dialed the number for Sorsha’s office.
“This is Alex Lockerby,” he told her secretary. “I need to talk to Sorsha urgently.”
“I’m sorry,” the secretary said in a halting voice. “Miss Kincaid is out and I don’t have any way to reach her.”
“When will she be back?”
“Not until tomorrow,” the secretary said.
Alex stifled a swear.
“If she calls in, tell her that her security job is compromised and that German agents are onto her.”
The secretary read the message back and then Alex hung up.
“Nazis are after Sorsha?” Danny asked, a look of incredulity on his face. Going after a sorcerer was usually only the purview of the suicidal.
“Can’t be sure, but it makes sense,” Alex said. “Something important is happening and Sorsha has a top-secret protection job at the same time. It’s a cinch they’re connected, and if they are, the Germans know that Sorsha will be there.”
“They’ll bring spellbreakers,” Danny said, following Alex’s train of thought. “You need some help?”
Alex thought about it. Having someone he could trust back him up would make what he had planned safer, but it would put Danny’s job at risk, so he shook his head.
“I need you on the outside to bail me out if this goes south,” he said, turning and heading back toward the bullpen. “But thanks,” he added.
Heading back toward Detective Nicholson’s desk, Alex caught sight of Harcourt storming away toward the elevators.
“I don’t think he believed you,” Nicholson said as Alex stepped up next to him.
“No,” Alex agreed. “And if he doesn’t tell someone that the radio equipment has been compromised, people could die.”
“You’ll get no argument from me,” Nicholson said. “Those Germans wanted you out of the way pretty bad, and that means whatever is going on, it’s big.”
As Harcourt disappeared into the hallway, Alex turned to Nicholson, grabbing his arm in firm grip.
“I need you to do something for me, and you’re just going to have to trust me,” he said.
Nicholson wavered for a moment, then nodded.
“If you’re right, we need to do something. What do you have in mind?”
“I need you to go down to the motor pool and grab a squad car,” Alex said. “Then you need to come meet me.”
Two minutes later, Alex burst out of the stairwell into the lobby of the Central Office. He caught sight of Harcourt as the man pushed through the glass doors at the far end of the room, heading for the sidewalk.
Since running through the lobby of police headquarters was likely to draw the kind of attention Alex didn’t want, he hurried across the vast lobby as quickly as he dared. When he reached the street, he found Harcourt waving down a cab.
Alex reached inside his coat as he moved up behind the government man, waiting until the cab had stopped and Harcourt opened the door. At that moment Alex stepped up behind him and jammed the muzzle of his 1911 into the surprised man’s ribs.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Alex whispered. “Just get in the cab like you’re going to share it with your old pal Alex.”
Harcourt spluttered for a moment, but Alex pressed the gun against him harder and he winced. Without a further word, he climbed into the cab and slid over so Alex could get in.
“Where to?” the cabbie asked as Alex awkwardly closed the door with his left hand.
“The Navy Yard,” Alex said, keeping the 1911 under his left arm and pointed at Harcourt. “And step on it.”
26
Codes & Consequences
The guard at the Navy Yard took Alex’s name along with Harcourt’s and waved the cab through. A few minutes later, Alex was standing in front of the ramshackle building that housed the Admiral’s offices. A bored Shore Patrolman stood beside the door, but he wasn’t paying Alex or Harcourt any mind.
“You realize they’re going to shoot you as soon as you go in there,” Harcourt sneered.
Alex had thought about that, so he stepped behind Harcourt and prodded him forward with the barrel of his 1911.
“Just keep walking,” he said.
As soon as Harcourt started up the path that led to the door, Alex dropped his 1911 into the outside pocket of his jacket. It would be found there once Harcourt raised an inevitable ruckus, but it wouldn’t be pointing at anyone.
The waiting room in the office was much the way Alex remembered it. A small desk manned by a Lieutenant JG was to the right with an open area to the left. Several closed doors occupied the left-hand wall, with the admiral’s door being straight past the Lieutenant at the desk.
“Is the Admiral in?” Alex asked the man at the desk. He was younger than the last man had been, but he probably wasn’t a murdering thief, either.
“The Admiral is quite busy today,” the man said. “Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but he’s going to want to see me. Tell him Alex Lockerby wants a few minutes of his time.”
“I don’t care who you are,” the Lieutenant said in a gruff “go away” voice that his youthful throat couldn’t quite manage. “The Admiral has asked not to be disturbed and that’s what’s going to happen.”
Alex sighed. There really wasn’t time for this. He had a fleeting thought of pulling his gun out again, but he remembered the armed Shore Patrolman just outside the door. He didn’t want to get s
hot before he could explain himself.
“Is Lieutenant Commander Vaughn in?” Alex persisted.
“The Commander is busy too,” the lieutenant said without looking up.
“Get him,” Alex growled. “Or when I do finally get to speak with him, I’ll make sure he puts you on kitchen duty for a month.”
The lieutenant looked up with the expression of a man who was about to tell Alex where to go, but Alex just held his gaze until the young man looked away.
“Fine,” he said, picking up the phone on his desk. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Sir,” he said after a moment. “There’s an Alex Lockerby out here who insists on speaking with you.” The man’s bored expression disappeared like a soap bubble on a needle and he sat up straight. “Yes, Sir. I’ll let him know, Sir.”
Alex suppressed a grin as the young man hung up the phone.
“The Commander said to wait here,” he reported. “He’ll be out in a minute.”
Alex thanked the young man politely. No sense in making unnecessary enemies. He had enough of those already.
“And what will you do when the officer gets here,” Harcourt mumbled over his shoulder. “Going to take him hostage too?”
“Shut up, Harcourt,” Alex whispered back. “If you had an ounce of sense, we wouldn’t have had to do this the hard way.”
Well, maybe one more enemy.
“Alex,” Commander Vaughn’s booming voice emerged from his office a moment before he did. “It’s good to see you. What brings you out here?”
Vaughn was Admiral Tennon’s second in command and, despite his being overweight and soft, he had a brilliant mind and a spine of steel. He had a round face with large eyes that always reminded Alex of a basset hound he’d tracked down once. The only difference was that Vaughn’s eyes could go from harmless to intimidating in a heartbeat.
“You look good, Dave,” Alex said as Vaughn crossed the open reception area. “You’ve lost a few pounds.”
Vaughn smiled and nodded.
“My wife wants me to get promoted,” he started to explain.
“Are you in charge here?” Harcourt suddenly demanded in a loud voice. “Because this man,” he bobbed his head in Alex’s direction, “brought me here at gunpoint.”
Vaughn’s smile evaporated and he stopped dead in his tracks. Next to Alex, the young lieutenant at the desk stiffened as well.
“Are you armed, Alex?” Vaughn said in a carefully neutral voice.
Alex held up both his hands so that the Commander could see them, then he nodded.
“My gun is in my right-hand coat pocket,” he said.
Vaughn nodded at the lieutenant, who stood and moved behind Alex before reaching carefully into his pocket.
“Gun, Sir,” he said, pulling the weapon out.
At the same moment, Harcourt stepped away from Alex as if he’d received an electric shock.
“You see?” he said to Vaughn. “I demand you arrest this man immediately. In addition to kidnapping, he’s been investigating government secrets.”
Vaughn actually chuckled at that, eliciting a surprised look from Harcourt.
“Yes,” the Commander said. “He has a habit of that.”
Alex had met Vaughn when a secret Navy smoke machine had been stolen and turned on in the city.
“You want to explain all this, Alex,” Vaughn said as the lieutenant passed him Alex’s pistol.
“You’re not going to indulge this lunatic,” Harcourt yelled.
“Please be quiet,” Vaughn said, indicating one of the hard chairs in the waiting area. “You sit there while I get this sorted out.”
Harcourt’s face went from outraged to angry to chagrined in the space of a few seconds, then he slunk to the chair and sat down.
“Kidnapping is a serious charge, Alex,” Vaughn said, dropping the pistol into the pocket of his uniform coat. “Maybe you’d better tell me what’s going on.”
“This is Earnest Harcourt,” Alex said, indicating the government man. “He works for the War Department. Last week one of his contractors was killed and, when I investigated with the police, we found coded messages in a hidden safe.”
“You think the contractor was a spy,” Vaughn guessed.
“We don’t know,” Alex admitted. “The letters were coded using something the police have never seen.”
Vaughn looked at Harcourt, who was still clutching the folder containing Alice Cartwright’s letters.
“May I?” he said, holding out his hand to Harcourt.
The government man looked as if he’d rather chew off his own hand than relinquish the letters, but he did want Vaughn to arrest Alex, so he reluctantly passed them over.
Commander Vaughn opened the folder and flipped through the letters slowly.
“It looks like they used a different code for each one,” Alex said.
“They didn’t,” Vaughn said, indicating the four-letter signature on the bottom of each page. “This is a complex shift cypher.”
Alex exchanged a confused look with Harcourt.
“Whoever did this used a numerical sequence to shift each letter up or down the alphabet,” Vaughn explained. “Each subsequent letter is shifted by a different number until the code repeats.” He closed the folder and handed it back to Harcourt.
“So you can break it?” Alex asked, hopefully.
Vaughn shook his head.
“This kind of cypher would take a team months to break,” he said. “The only reliable way to read them is to have the code. So what do you suspect this spy of doing?”
“I had another case,” Alex continued his explanation. “I was investigating several warehouse robberies that I now believe were cover for an act of sabotage.”
“What do you think was sabotaged?” Vaughn asked, his eyes going hard. Sabotage was a dirty word in the Navy.
“Radio equipment.”
“So how does that connect to a dead government asset?”
“The radio equipment that was tampered with was also, coincidentally, expropriated for government use a few days later,” Alex explained. “The orders came from one of Mr. Harcourt’s underlings, the same man who was working with the dead woman who had the coded letters.”
Vaughn rubbed his chin for a moment, then looked at Harcourt.
“Is what he says true?”
“I don’t know anything about any radio equipment,” Harcourt said. “But the expropriation order did come from William Masters, one of the men in my office, and he did have contact with Miss Cartwright, the murdered woman.”
Vaughn looked as if he were exercising a great amount of restraint not to roll his eyes.
“Well that sounds like quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“I suspect it’s exactly that,” Harcourt said. “My office doesn’t choose what equipment the government takes. We get a call and then fill out the forms, but the orders come from higher up.”
“But if this Masters fellow decided to write out that order himself, no one would know,” Vaughn pointed out. “It’d be just another order coming from your office, right?”
“Well,” Harcourt stammered. “I…I suppose.”
Vaughn swore and shook his head.
“All right, Alex, I admit this thing stinks, but why grab him?” He jerked his thumb at Harcourt. “And why bring him here?”
“He knows what the radio equipment is for,” Alex said with a shrug. “The only reason I could think of to sabotage a radio transmitter is to listen in on top secret radio transmissions, and I figured that might involve the Navy. Also a man who smoked German cigarettes tried to kill me right after I found the coded letters.”
That got Vaughn’s attention and he looked at Harcourt.
“What, exactly, was this dead spy working on?” he demanded.
“I can’t tell you that,” Harcourt said, some of his previous bluster creeping back into his voice. “Everything my office does is classified.”
This time the Commander did roll his eyes.
“There might not be time for that,” Alex interjected as the young man picked up the phone.
“Keep going,” Vaughn waved at the lieutenant, then turned to Alex. “Why not?”
“Because I happen to know that Sorsha Kincaid and the FBI have been busy all last week putting together a security detail for some bigwig. Now I can’t get hold of Miss Kincaid, which probably means that they’re with said bigwig right now. If some bad guys have been listening in on their communication thanks to the sabotaged radio…” Alex let the thought drift off, suggestively.
“Well you’re wrong about the radio,” Vaughn said. “Anyone with a receiver can intercept a radio transmission. That’s why we don’t send secret information that way. Secret orders here are delivered to our captains in person before they sail to prevent exactly that kind of listening in. The FBI is sure to take the same precautions.”
Alex chewed his lip. He’d been so sure the radio parts had been tampered with, why else would their shipping crates be broken open? And whatever this whole thing was about, Sorsha was right in the middle of it, possibly with a compromised operation.
“I still think you’re right,” Vaughn said, rubbing his chin, thoughtfully. “But it all depends on who took those radio parts and what they wanted them for.”
Harcourt shrunk back in his chair as if he expected Vaughn to press him, but instead, the Commander turned back to the lieutenant who was waiting on the phone.
“Hang that up,” he said. “Is someone in with the Admiral right now?”
“No,” the flustered officer said. “That is, no, Sir.”
“Come on,” Vaughn said, motioning for Alex to follow him. As he passed the chair where Harcourt was sitting, he grabbed the man by the back of his coat and hauled him to his feet. “You too.”