White Death

by Daniel Blake

  On arriving, he went straight down to Unzicker’s cell. He didn’t bother asking Unzicker how he’d slept. By the look of him, Unzicker could have joined Patrese to form the steering committee of Insomniacs Anonymous.

  ‘Thomas, I’m going to ask you a question. I want you to answer it truthfully. I don’t want you to think about anything other than that. I don’t want you to think about what happened yesterday, or what you think I might want to hear, or what you think Nursultan or MIT or anybody else might want. All I want is for you to tell me the truth. You got that?’

  Unzicker nodded.

  ‘Did you kill Glenn O’Kelly?’ Patrese asked.

  He was prepared for Unzicker’s usual silent stare; but Unzicker answered instantly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Chase Evans?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Darrell Showalter?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you like to retract your confession?’

  ‘Yes.’

  48

  Anderssen was incandescent, as was the DA. Patrese spent half an hour mollifying the pair of them, and another half an hour pointing out how they could not only salvage something from all this, but actually make it work to their advantage.

  They were going to let Unzicker go, but on three conditions. One, he allowed them to set up traces on his e-mails so they could see if and when Kwasi got in contact. They’d no longer have to take Unzicker’s word that Kwasi had or hadn’t done so. The police would return the computers they’d confiscated; Nursultan would doubtless return the ones he’d taken from Unzicker’s office in the Stata Center. Normal service would soon be resumed.

  Two, if Kwasi did get in contact, Unzicker would do exactly what Patrese told him to. The idea was that they would gradually draw Kwasi out; he’d have to think that Unzicker wasn’t being monitored, and only then might he let down his guard. It was hardly a foolproof plan, but it was by a long way the best they had. And if Unzicker so much as began to think about trying to warn Kwasi, they’d have him back inside on charges of accessory after the fact and obstruction of justice quicker than he could say ‘MIT’.

  Third, twenty-four-hour physical surveillance would be maintained on Unzicker – no screw-ups, this time – and he was still not to know anything about it. Patrese was sure that Unzicker hadn’t killed the three Boston victims – surer than Anderssen was, put it that way – but he reckoned that Unzicker was involved one way or another, even unwittingly. Where he went, who he saw, what he did: they needed this information in minute detail.

  Patrese personally explained the first two of these three terms to Unzicker. Unzicker said he understood, and he agreed to them. He had nothing to do with any of this, he said. Patrese signed his release forms, took him out the back entrance of the station to avoid any lurking reporters, and then went to the Bureau’s Boston field office and told a press conference that Unzicker had been released without charge, that the investigation was still ongoing, and that they’d please excuse him because he had work to do.

  He wondered whether Kwasi would see this on the news. He sure hoped so.

  Kwasi did see it, of course. He’d been watching the news ever since Unzicker had been arrested. And now they’d released him. Foolish, Kwasi thought. Patrese, the Bureau, the cops: all of them blundering around like blindfolded children trying to stick the tail on the donkey. Sure, they’d be monitoring Unzicker from now on, and they’d have his computers bugged to kingdom come, so Kwasi would have to be careful. Careful, but no more. There were ways to get to Unzicker the cops would never have thought of.

  He’d already sent Patrese one communiqué, but he hadn’t expected Patrese to work it all out from that alone. He wasn’t giving Patrese all the information at once, and the information he was giving, he wasn’t making too obvious. But if he was going to keep things exciting, he’d have to give him some more.

  Nothing about himself this time, Kwasi thought. Something a little more appropriate to a game between two people. A puzzle. A puzzle on a chessboard, though not strictly a chess puzzle.

  He spent an hour or so composing it, taking his time, and then put it in an e-mail, checked that all the remailers were in place, and looked at his watch. The clock would be running from the moment he sent it.

  Patrese was back in New Haven when the message arrived. Inessa was still in the incident room; she’d been going through pretty much everything of Kwasi’s that was in the public domain – interviews, appearances, games, news stories – and trying to find some hidden, subtle clue which she, with her chess knowledge, would recognize as being germane to the investigation.

  She’d had no luck so far, and Patrese could tell that she was beginning to get pissed off with it all. She wanted to go back home to Harvard. Patrese might be putting his life on hold for this case, but that was his job. Her job was nothing to do with this. And he was just about to say sure, thanks for your help, we’ll call if we need you, when Kwasi’s e-mail arrived. He read it, raised his eyebrows, printed a copy out and took it over to her.

  It consisted of two sentences and a diagram:

  Time for 40. You’ll find a Rotting Husk.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said.

  ‘I think this is going to stop me from going home.’

  ‘I’m sorry. But you know him better than I do.’

  Inessa sighed, rolled her eyes, and looked at the message for a few moments.

  ‘Well, that’s clearly a chessboard. White square in bottom-right-hand corner, dark squares colored brown.’

  ‘Even I got that bit. The letters? Any chess reference?’

  Inessa scanned them quickly, up and down, left and right. ‘Not an obvious one. There are only a few genuine words there: “her”, “of”, “I”, “oar”, and a couple of “do’s”, “and’s”, “he’s”, “the’s”, “it’s”, and “an’s”. It looks like a code of some sort.’

  ‘You any good at cracking codes?’

  ‘I like puzzles. A lot of chess players do. I’ll give it a go. How long have I got?’

  Patrese pointed to the first sentence. ‘Time for forty?’

  ‘Forty what? Minutes? Hours? Days?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It can’t be that simple. It must mean something – well, something chess.’ She clicked her fingers. ‘Time: time control. Forty moves is the cut-off point in tournament chess. You get a certain amount of time to reach move forty, and then the clock starts again.’

  ‘How long is that time?’

  ‘Classical time control is two hours.’

  ‘Two hours. Till we find a rotting husk. Come on. We’re going to New York.’

  ‘Why New York?’

  ‘That’s where Kwasi’s killed all his victims so far. Why change now?’

  ‘New York’s a big place.’

  ‘I know. That’s why you’re coming with me. You’re going to decipher that thing while I drive, and it’ll give us a clue as to where.’

  ‘You sound very sure.’

  ‘Why else would he have sent it? Come on. We’ve got two hours, and we might need every minute of them.’

  49

  He knew better than to keep asking her how she was doing: questions were only going to break her concentration and make her irritable. So Patrese kept his eyes on the road. The only time he spoke was when Dufresne called, and they discussed what they were going to do. Wasn’t much they could do in a city the size of New York, not until they knew a little bit more.

  Inessa sat with her feet on the dashboard, using her thighs as a makeshift board on which she could press as she wrote. She covered sheet after sheet of paper in scribbles as she tried to make sense of the random letters on the chessboard. Nothing worked across the rows, nothing down them, nothing on the diagonals. White squares only; nothing. Dark squares only; still nothing. She tried reversing the letters within their squares, and got more gobbledygook. Going round in circles from the outside in didn’t work; nor did going round in circles from the in
side out.

  Heavy traffic, even with the siren to blast people out of the way. An hour gone.

  ‘Reading in the car makes me feel ill,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me if you’re going to be sick.’

  ‘I’m going to be sick.’

  He glanced across, saw she wasn’t joking, and wrenched the car toward the hard shoulder. Inessa flung open the passenger door, parked the contents of her stomach on the asphalt with as much grace as could be expected in the circumstances, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and closed the door again. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  It wasn’t everyone who could make barfing look cool, Patrese thought.

  Forty-five minutes left. The signs for New York were coming more frequently now. Inessa looked up at one, craning her neck as they passed it – and she suddenly shrieked.

  ‘Rotting husk!’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s got capitals, right? Rotting Husk. Like a proper name. Like New York.’

  ‘There’s no place called Rotting Husk. Not that I’ve ever heard of.’

  He handed her his BlackBerry so she could Google it. No, she confirmed after a minute or so: no place called Rotting Husk. But the name must mean something. Those words must mean something. Something more than a simple description of, well, a rotting husk.

  ‘An anagram?’ Patrese suggested.

  ‘Could be.’

  She wrote down all the letters, vowels on one side, consonants on the other. ‘Chess,’ she said, half to herself. ‘Think chess. King?’

  She crossed out the letters K, I, N and G from the list and rewrote what was left: ROTTHUS. She made ‘trust’, ‘truth’, ‘tort’, ‘host’, ‘hurt’. None of it made sense. If it was an anagram, it was nothing to do with King.

  ‘Move on,’ Patrese said. ‘Come back to it later if you need.’

  ‘Queen’ didn’t fit. ‘Rook’ was nearer, but had one too many ‘o’s. ‘Bishop’, no way. ‘Knight’? ‘Knight’ fitted. Pull the letters out again, see what was left. ROTUS.

  ‘Tours,’ she said instantly. ‘Knight Tours.’

  ‘Company name.’

  ‘No, no. Move the “s”. Knight’s Tour. It’s a Knight’s Tour. That’s what he means.’

  ‘What’s a Knight’s Tour?’

  ‘You know a knight moves, yes? Two squares one direction, one square at right angles. A knight’s tour is a problem where you have to get a knight to visit every square on an empty board in turn, without ever visiting the same square twice.’

  ‘Sounds impossible.’

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s very easy.’

  ‘Great!’

  ‘No. Not great. The opposite. There are so many ways of doing it.’

  ‘How many? Tens? Hundreds?’

  ‘No. For closed tours, when the knight ends on a square attacking the one from which it began – so it can start all over again on the same path – something like twenty-six trillion.’

  ‘You’re shitting me.’

  ‘Well, half of those are reflections of the other half.’

  ‘That makes me feel a whole lot better.’

  ‘For open tours, when the knight can’t close the circle on himself, the number’s unknown. More than twenty-six trillion. And we don’t even know which square to start from.’

  ‘We’re fucked.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? You’ve got forty minutes to analyze trillions of possibilities, and you don’t think we’re fucked?’

  ‘I don’t have to analyze trillions. I’m not a computer. I have to be smart. If we didn’t have a chance of solving this in the time available, he wouldn’t have sent it, no?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Let’s assume not. Otherwise, what would be the point of him sending it at all? So if we find the right tour, it’ll spell something out. Probably in plain English, else again it’s going to be too difficult in the short timespan. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So I just have to look for words. He’s broken them up into little bits; I just have to put them together again. If any line stops making sense, I scrap it and start again.’

  ‘But where do you start? Where’s the starting square?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s been considerate enough to tell us that.’

  ‘Begin at the beginning. Start of the game. What first move does he usually play?’

  ‘Pawn to e4. That’s good thinking, Franco. I’ll start there.’

  ‘Knight’s Tour,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘Yes. We established that.’

  ‘Knight. Knight tarot cards were found by the bodies of Dennis Barbero and Chase Evans. Ivy League students, the both of them. Columbia’s the only Ivy League place in New York.’

  ‘He’s not going to hit Columbia again.’

  ‘Why not? Huge place.’

  ‘Everyone will be on alert.’

  ‘No, they won’t. They’ll have worried about it for a few days afterwards, and then they’ll have gone back to normal because that’s what everyone always does.’ He jabbed a finger at the paper. ‘You get on with working it out.’

  He dialed Dufresne. ‘Bobby? We think he’s going to try and hit Columbia again.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Too long to explain. Can you seal it off?’

  ‘The whole university? Are you nuts?’

  ‘Probably. We’ve got little more than half an hour.’

  ‘You are nuts. The main campus alone is six blocks. It’s Friday afternoon, it’s gridlock heading out of town as it is. Even if I could get the manpower in time, we’d get crucified by City Hall. And anyway, what’s to say he’s not already there?’

  ‘Good point. OK. Get all the men you have, get some more off the other precincts, and flood the place. Get campus police on alert too. Bullhorns on cars, telling people to watch out. Let’s see if we can spook him. Anyone you see looks vaguely like Kwasi, arrest their ass.’

  ‘Anyone black, you mean.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Malcolm X. You know that statue of the goddess?’

  ‘The one opposite that big-ass library?’

  ‘That’s the one. I’ll see you there.’

  ‘You got it.’

  They were heading against the worst of the traffic, but it was still pretty thick. Patrese had the siren on all the way in from New Rochelle, and even then it was slow going; but they made it to Columbia with fifteen minutes to spare. Dufresne was by the statue of Athena as promised, directing uniformed officers as though conducting an orchestra.

  ‘I hate to ask you this,’ Patrese said to Inessa as they pulled up, ‘but …’

  ‘No. I haven’t done it yet. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve tried every likely starting square, every possible first move: e4, d4, c4, f4, the two knight moves to f3 and c3. Nothing on any of them.’

  ‘Top left?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Top left-hand corner. Start there. As though you’re reading a book.’

  Inessa thought for a moment. ‘No. If you’re going to do it like that, you have to start bottom left. That’s square a1.’

  ‘OK.’

  The letters on a1 were ‘BU’. From there, the hypothetical knight could only move to two squares, b3 (second column along, three from the bottom) – or c2 (third column along, second from the bottom). Square b3 was ‘AYS’, and ‘BUAYS’ wasn’t any word, part of a word or combination of words they’d ever heard of. So it had to be c2: ‘THE’.

  Twelve minutes.

  Five possible squares now: a3, b4, d4, e3, e1. Not d4: ‘BUTHEOAR’. The other four were all in contention; ‘BUTHEL’, ‘BUTHEN’, ‘BUTHEB’, ‘BUTHELP’.

  Choice of four, and with false starts and retracing steps, Inessa probably only had time to pursue one line to its end. Which one?

  ‘BUTHELP’ had ‘help’ in it. Seemed as good as any. Call it.

  ‘BUTHELP’ it was.

  She looked back at the pattern so far: a1-c2-e1. The next logical step w
as g2: ‘LE’. ‘BUTHELPLE’. ‘Helpless’? There was an ‘S’ on h4, and now the line was going up the side rather than along the bottom. She started to get faster and faster as she pieced it together: up the right-hand side, along the top, down the left-hand side and in, tracing pretty patterns as it spelt out its message:

  BUTHELPLESSPIECESOFTHEGAMEHEPLAYSUPONTHISCHECKERBOARDOFNIGHTSANDDAYSHITHERANDTHITHERMOVESANDCHECKSANDSLAYSANDONEBYONEBACKINTHECLOSETLAYS

  ‘But helpless pieces of the game he plays upon this checkerboard of nights and days. Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays; and one by one back in the closet lays.’

  ‘You’re a genius,’ Patrese said. ‘A stone-cold genius. What does it mean?’

  ‘Omar Khayyam. Very famous chess quote. From the Rubaiyat.’

  ‘Who the hell’s Omar Khayyam?’

  ‘Twelfth century. Persian polymath: poet, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher.’

  Patrese turned to the nearest campus policeman. ‘There a Persian faculty?’

  ‘Persia?’

  ‘Iran,’ Inessa said.

  ‘Oh. Yeah. There’s a Center for Iranian Studies up on Riverside Drive. Number 450. The Brookfield.’

  ‘Where’s that at?’

  The campus cop pointed in the direction of the Hudson. ‘Couple of blocks that way.’

  Dufresne was already radioing it in: All units to 450 Riverside Drive. Patrese leapt back in his car and fishtailed his way out of the campus pedestrianized area. Athena watched him go, stonily unimpressed.

  It took him two minutes to get to the Brookfield building. He left the car in the road, prompting a furious volley of horns from those drivers behind him, and raced for the entrance. A maintenance man in fluorescent orange was going in; a cycle courier with helmet and pollution mask was coming out. Patrese barged between the two of them and into the lobby.

  There was an announcements board with movable white letters on the far side. IN SEARCH OF OMAR KHAYYAM; A NEW APPRAISAL. PROFESSOR KARL MIESES. PURCELL ROOM, 6 P.M. ALL WELCOME.

  It wasn’t yet five. If Mieses was here in this building, he’d most likely be in his office. There was a list of the research center’s occupants on one wall. Patrese scanned it.