Chaos Theory

by Graham Masterton

  He jabbed every single bell. After a while, a man’s voice came over the intercom. ‘Deirdre? That you?’

  Without waiting for a reply, the man pressed the door-release buzzer, and Rick pushed the door open.

  They took the elevator up to the fifth floor. The apartment block was hushed except for the muffled sound of Friends on somebody’s television, with intermittent bursts of laughter. They walked along the dull green carpet until they reached apartment 5C at the very end, next to a hammered-glass window with dead flies on the sill.

  Rick knocked. Then he pressed his ear against the door and listened.

  ‘I can hear something. Sounds like a faucet running.’

  He knocked again, and called out, ‘Mr Rudge! Mr Wallace Rudge! Friends of Bill Pringle’s here!’

  Still no reply. He pushed the door and it swung open, silently. The lock was broken and the security chains had been cut, so that they were dangling loose.

  Rick drew back his windbreaker and tugged out an M9 semi-automatic pistol.

  ‘Where the hell did you get that?’ asked Noah.

  ‘Phil lent it to me. Precautionary measure.’

  Rick dodged into the hallway, with Noah crouching well behind him. The Rudges’ apartment was cramped and old-fashioned, with red sculptured carpets and tapestry-covered armchairs and couches. On the walls hung amateur oil paintings of rivers and forests and local churches, all of them signed Nora Rudge.

  Noah walked across the living room and picked up the fallen telephone receiver. He held it up to show Rick, but he didn’t have to say anything.

  ‘Mr Rudge!’ Rick shouted again. They could hear a faucet running, maybe in the bathroom, but nobody answered.

  Noah said, ‘They killed my friends in their bathroom, Mo Speller and his wife. Maybe you’d better take a look.’

  Rick scuttled crabwise across the corridor. He nudged open the bathroom door with the muzzle of his M9, and then pushed the door wider and looked inside.

  ‘Well?’ asked Noah.

  Rick stiffly stood up, leaning against the door frame for support. ‘Looks like the same thing’s happened here, man. It’s wall-to-wall blood.’

  ‘Oh, Christ.’

  Rick took a quick look in the bedroom, and the kitchen, but there was nobody there. Whoever had murdered Wallace and Nora Rudge, they were long gone. He pushed his M9 back into his belt and came back into the hallway.

  ‘Time to call in the cops?’ asked Noah.

  ‘Uh-hunh, Not yet, man. These guys seem to know what we’re going to do even before we do. So don’t let’s rule out some tip-offs from the CIA, or the FBI, or the local law enforcement agencies.’

  Noah nodded his head towards the bathroom door. ‘Were they—?’ he asked Rick, and made a throat-cutting gesture with his finger.

  Rick nodded.

  ‘Shit, that’s terrible. That’s terrible.’

  ‘How do you think I feel? If I hadn’t called Bill Pringle, and asked him to look into it—’

  ‘He must have found out something important,’ said Noah. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t have—Shit.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Rick, gripping his arm. ‘We need to get out of here, quick. We’ve probably left a shit load of forensic as it is.’

  ‘But don’t you think we ought to, like, search the place? Look for any notes that this Rudge guy might have left?’

  ‘You think the guys in grey suits wouldn’t have done that already? They’re trying their damndest to keep a secret here, Noah. Besides, I think that Bill left me a clue already – even before he went to see Wallace Rudge at The Watergate.’

  ‘So, what clue?’ asked Noah, as they walked back into the living room at Phil and Grace’s house.

  ‘Don’t you remember? Bill was promising those guys that he was going to keep quiet about the medallion, only a few seconds before they shot him. He said, “This gentleman here says he’ll forget it . . . so long as he doesn’t forget the other number I gave him.”’

  ‘I don’t get it. What other number?’

  ‘He must have meant the number he gave me last night, the Auburn number.’

  ‘Maybe you should try calling it,’ said Phil, and handed him the phone.

  ‘I did. But as far as I can work out, it isn’t a telephone number at all. The code for Auburn is 315, not 102, and it’s not a cellphone number, either.’

  ‘He didn’t give you any other hints, apart from that number, and the name Auburn?’

  ‘That was it. And he was very specific that it was Auburn, New York.’

  ‘Maybe we should call Leon,’ Noah suggested. ‘He could check it out on the Internet for us.’

  ‘Leon?’

  ‘He found that Prchal character for us, didn’t he?’

  ‘Well, OK . . . maybe it’s worth a try.’

  Rick called Leon at the Bel Air, on the conference phone.

  ‘Leon? It’s Rick. You online?’

  ‘Sure. I’ve been trying to find out who that guy is with Professor Halflight. I think I’ve identified the location. It’s the Manchester Grand Hyatt, on Market Place, in downtown San Diego. But I haven’t been able to identify the guy yet.’

  ‘Who’s there with you?’

  ‘Adeola, and Silja, and Adeola’s new bodyguard.’

  ‘She has a new bodyguard?’

  ‘Erm—’

  Adeola broke in. ‘Rick, don’t worry about that for now. Alvin Metzler assigned me some extra protection, because of the Peace Convention.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure I’m sure. I’ll talk to you about it when you get back.’

  ‘OK,’ said Rick. ‘I need to talk to Leon. Leon, that Professor Halflight stuff . . . can you drop that for now, and see what you can find re Auburn New York . . . related to the number – here it is – 1029190.’

  There was a pause, and then Leon said, ‘Not too much. All I have here is like New York stock market numbers.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Rick. ‘Bill said 1029190 – extension 1. Try an extra 1 on the end.’

  Leon typed in the extra 1, but it produced nothing more than a grave-marker number in St Mary’s Cemetery, Auburn.

  ‘St Mary’s Cemetery?’ said Noah. ‘Maybe we should find out who’s buried there. Maybe that’s the connection.’

  Leon tried to access the cemetery’s grave-marker listings, but 10291901 could only give him the family name Robbins.

  ‘Looks like we’ll have to fly to Auburn and dig ’em up,’ said Noah.

  ‘Hmm – sounds like a pretty obscure clue to me, even for Bill,’ said Phil.

  ‘Bill? I wouldn’t put it past him,’ said Rick. ‘He was a cryptologist, as well as being a security analyst. He used to work for the code-breaking section.’

  Over the phone, Adeola said, ‘You mentioned a famous prison in Auburn, didn’t you, Rick? Maybe that number he gave you was the identity number of one of the inmates.’

  Leon typed in Auburn Prison but there was no Internet record of prisoners’ identity numbers.

  ‘In fact, it says here that the governors of Auburn Prison did everything possible to take away their inmates’ individuality. They weren’t allowed to speak, and they all had to dress in identical black-and-white striped uniforms, like those prisoners in the old silent movies.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Rick. ‘Could be it’s an account number, at one of the Auburn banks.’

  More keyboard-rattling. Then, ‘Tompkins Trust Company, HSBC – that’s just about it. And neither of their account numbers starts with 102.’

  ‘Wait up a second,’ said Noah. ‘My bank registration number, the one I use for online banking, it’s the same as my birthdate, right, that’s how I remember it. Oh-nine-oh-nine nineteen-seventy. Look at this number. This could be a date, too. October twenty-ninth, nineteen-oh-one.’

  Leon typed ‘Auburn, October 29 1901’. Almost immediately, he said, ‘This could be it. “October 29 1901. The execution at Auburn Prison of Leon Czolgosz, for the assassina
tion of the president, William McKinley.”’

  ‘Rick – you have to read this,’ said Adeola. ‘I’ll bet you this is what Bill Pringle was trying to tell you about.’

  Leon typed at the keyboard some more. ‘There’s even a prison mugshot of him. Leon C-z-o-l-g-o-s-z, however the hell you pronounce it. And there’s some biographical stuff underneath.’

  ‘Read it,’ said Rick.

  ‘OK . . . “Leon Czolgosz was of Polish origin” – yeah, he sure looks Polish. “He was born in 1873, in Detroit. He suffered a nervous breakdown when he was twenty-five years old, and quit his job.

  ‘“In the summer of 1901, he rented a room above a saloon in Buffalo, New York, and bought himself a .32 Iver-Johnson revolver for $4.50.

  ‘“On September 6 1901, he approached President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and shot him in the abdomen at point-blank range.

  ‘“President McKinley died a week later, of shock. Leon Czolgosz was given a trial that lasted only eight hours and twenty-six minutes, and was found guilty in thirty-four minutes. He was electrocuted on October 29 1901, with three jolts of 1,700 volts each.

  ‘“His last words were, ‘I killed him because he was the enemy of the good people – the good working people.’

  ‘“Sulphuric acid was poured into Czolgosz’s coffin before it was sealed.”’

  ‘I don’t think I know a damn thing about President McKinley,’ said Noah. ‘Was there any special reason why this Show-gosh guy should have wanted to assassinate him?’

  ‘Who knows?’ said Adeola. ‘But just like General Sikorski, McKinley was a very skilful diplomat. A great compromiser. He was the first president who really dragged the United States out into the big wide world. Up until McKinley, Americans had been very inward-looking, very isolationist. But McKinley got us involved in foreign trade and international politics. It was McKinley who annexed Hawaii, and the Philippines.’

  ‘See what it says here?’ put in Leon. ‘“He might have survived, if his doctors had managed to get the bullet out. There was one of the very first X-Ray machines at the exhibition where he was shot, but nobody thought to use it.”’

  ‘If Czolgosz has any connection to Prchal,’ said Rick, ‘that means this terrorist organization goes way back to the beginning of the twentieth century. And maybe even further. And who knows who else they’ve assassinated.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Noah. ‘But how are we going to prove it?’

  ‘Wallace Rudge must have known of some material evidence. Maybe we should pay a visit to the Secret Service Archives, see what we can find.’

  ‘Will they let us in?’

  ‘Are you kidding me? Absolutely not. We’ll have to find our own way in.’

  Twenty

  They waited until the last employee had left her desk at the First Columbia Insurance building and click-clacked on her court shoes to the elevator.

  ‘OK,’ said Rick, as they heard the elevator whine. He led Noah down to the end of the shiny marble-floored corridor, until they reached the window. Both of them were wearing blue overalls from the Potomac Office Cleaning Company and matching blue baseball caps, which they had found in the super’s storage closet in the basement.

  The First Columbia Insurance building stood right next to the Secret Service Library and Archive at 948 H Street. It was set slightly at an angle to the Secret Service building, and a few feet further back, and its window ledges were six or seven inches higher. All the same, it was so close that they could see a Secret Service librarian sitting in his shirtsleeves, sorting through two folders of filing, and they could almost read the label on his file.

  At the rear, the two buildings were less than ten feet apart. The windows of the Secret Service building had been painted over in solid grey gloss.

  ‘That’s the archive section, in back,’ said Rick. ‘Hardly anybody ever goes in there. I mean, it’s just like historical stuff. Cardboard boxes with Sirhan Sirhan’s bloodstained T-shirt in it. James Earl Ray’s forged Canadian passport, stuff like that.’

  ‘There have to be alarms on those windows, surely.’

  ‘Of course there are. But they’re not activated until the library closes for the night. And somebody’s almost always working late, like that guy there.’

  They walked further along the corridor until they reached the last window. Rick opened the black canvas bag that he had brought with him and took out a broad-bladed chisel. He rammed it into the side of the bronze window frame, and levered the frame backward and forward. The catches had been permanently screwed into place, but it didn’t take him more than two or three minutes to bend the screws until they snapped. The window swung inward, and they felt the warm draft of traffic fumes rising up from the street below.

  Noah leaned over and looked down seventy-five feet to the narrow triangular space between the two buildings. A high wall with metal spikes on top of it separated the space from the H Street sidewalk, and the space itself was cluttered with trash cans.

  ‘Hmm. Usually I have a mattress to fall on, or packing cases.’

  ‘Hey – you’re not counting on falling, are you?’

  ‘No. But, you know, accidents happen.’

  ‘Think you can do it?’ Rick asked him.

  ‘Well . . . it won’t be easy. But, yes.’

  ‘Don’t do it just to prove something to me, man. This isn’t a pissing contest.’

  ‘I wouldn’t. I’m doing this for Jenna, and Mo Speller, and Trina, and your friend Bill. Not to mention Wallace Rudge and his wife.’

  Rick took a Capewell retractable grappling hook out of his bag, unfolded its four claws and handed it to Noah. Then he unwound a coil of nylon climbing rope, tying one end of it to the grappling hook and the other end around his waist.

  ‘There’s thirty metres of rope here, so you can rappel to the ground if you need to.’

  Noah climbed up on to the window ledge. Rick held his legs to balance him while he swung the grappling hook around and around, and then threw it up to the parapet of the Secret Service building. He missed the first time, and the grappling hook clattered back down.

  He swung it again, faster, and let out more rope. Then he hurled it upward and it caught on the guttering. He tugged it two or three times to make sure that it was firm, and then he turned to Rick and said, ‘OK, let’s go for it. You only live once.’

  Rick handed him the chisel, which he tucked into his belt. He leaned back as far as he could, and then he swung himself across the gap between the two buildings, and landed with a complicated thud on the ledge of the window opposite.

  The ledge was barely wide enough for Noah to kneel on, and there was only the narrowest rim across the top of the window frame for him to get a grip. For one long, vertiginous moment he was sure that he was going to lose his balance and fall. He didn’t even dare to look back at Rick, because he could feel his centre of gravity teetering from one side to the other, and it was a long, nasty drop to the ground.

  ‘You OK?’ called Rick.

  He didn’t answer. Gripping the rope with his left hand, he edged himself a few inches backwards so that the sole of his right foot was wedged against the window frame. That steadied him, and allowed him to shift his right knee a little closer to the window, and make him feel more secure.

  ‘OK now,’ he said. ‘Just give me a second, and I’ll try to get this window open.’

  Fortunately, it was a sliding window, which opened upwards. Still gripping the rope to keep himself from falling, he lifted the chisel out of his pocket and worked it into the gap underneath the frame. He managed to push the chisel in about an inch, but when he tried to pull the window up, he found that it wouldn’t budge.

  ‘What’s the problem, man?’ Rick asked him.

  ‘Damn thing’s jammed solid. Wait up.’

  Inch by inch, he pulled himself upwards into a crouching position. He couldn’t believe that he was so afraid of falling. In movies, he was always toppling off buildings and trampolinin
g himself off cliffs. But in movies, he knew that he was going to land softly and safely, in a stack of packaging. As the old saying went, it ain’t the falling you need to worry about, it’s hitting the goddamned ground . . .

  The top of the window frame was too low for him to stand up completely straight, but he was able to lift his left foot and place it on top of the chisel handle. Then he bore down on the chisel with all the weight he could muster without losing his balance.

  At first, nothing happened. He twisted the rope around his hand so that he could hold on to it more tightly, and then he stamped down on the chisel handle again. There was a splitting sound, and then a loud creak, and the window opened a half-inch. The chisel dropped out and fell into the darkness.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, but the window was open now. Carefully, he knelt down again and insinuated his fingers into the gap. It took three hard tugs, but at last the window slid upwards, and he was able to climb inside.

  He looked around. He was in a long, gloomy storeroom, with rows of cardboard boxes and box files arranged on grey metal shelving. There was a strong smell of old paper and lavender floor wax.

  He turned back to the window. ‘Everything OK?’ Rick asked him. He gave the thumbs-up. Rick pulled the rope tight and then swung himself across, clumsily grabbing at the window ledge.

  ‘Jesus! Ouch! And you do this for a living?’

  Noah helped Rick to clamber in through the window, and then Rick immediately slid it shut. ‘Just in case somebody decides to switch on the alarms before we’ve found what we’re looking for.’

  Taking a small flashlight out of his pocket, Rick checked the boxes closest to them. ‘These are recent. Look – Francisco Martin Duran, 1994. He was the guy who took twenty-nine potshots at the White House, trying to kill President Clinton.’

  He slid the long cardboard box off the shelf and opened the lid. Inside was a trench coat in a plastic bag, a stack of dog-eared notebooks, a collection of Polaroid photographs, a wristwatch, a cheap brown wallet, and a Chinese SKS assault rifle.

  ‘See? The Secret Service keep pretty much everything that characterizes any particular case.’