by Tom Clancy
“If our security’s been compromised to that extent, Pete, we’d both better turn in our resignations.”
Carmichael had been listening quietly, his eyes narrowed in contemplation as they spoke.
“Any objections if I toss a hypothesis of my own into the pot?” he said.
“None,” Nimec said.
Carmichael looked from one man to the other.
“Maybe Palardy wanted the person who got hold of the computer to know he’d sent us a message but have to sweat about what information it contained,” he said. “In other words, maybe he wasn’t playing with our heads, but his.”
* * *
By Wednesday afternoon, Enrique Quiros’s eyes were so familiar with the message in the Sent column of Palardy’s E-mail program that it might have been burned into their retinas. He had spent hours trying to make sense of it. Long, futile hours.
Quiros switched off the notebook computer that had been brought to him from Palardy’s condominium, closed its lid, and reached for the tumbler of scotch on his desk. It was not his usual habit to drink before sundown, but his nerves badly needed steadying. One by one, his recent problems had compounded. Felix’s idiotic stunt, Felix’s murder, his forced hand in setting up tonight’s appointment with Salazar. And now everything he’d feared from the moment he had climbed aboard the carousel with that blonde had come about. She had sucked him into the conspiracy to kill Roger Gordian, made him an instrumental participant, and he had known that he would live to regret it.
Palardy had been cringing and manipulable, but Enrique had never thought he was stupid. He had felt all along that Palardy might be prepared for treachery, that once he realized he was a doomed man, he would want to expose the people he knew had used and discarded him. And he would find a way to do it before he could be stopped.
Quiros lifted the glass to his mouth and took a good, deep swallow. He didn’t know how to decode the message. Didn’t have the slightest clue. Perhaps the great and inviolable El Tío would possess the means, but Enrique was not anxious to commit suicide by sending it up the line to him. If its purpose was what Enrique believed it to be, no good could come of that. Not for him. Although El Tío’s whereabouts and identity were protected by blind upon blind, Palardy would have surely implicated Enrique, pointed the way to his door… and that was where El Tío would quickly cut the trail to his own.
Quiros tossed back the rest of his whiskey. It was out of his hands now. Completely out of his hands. The fucking heavens were about to rock.
He could only go about his plans for tonight, deal with Salazar, and wait to see whether there would be someplace to take cover when the sky came tumbling down in a million pieces.
* * *
Her hair golden in the California sunlight, she strode toward the airline ticket office with a shopping bag on her arm, drawing glances of uniform appreciation from the males she passed on the street. She was aware of each look — the discreet, the boorish, the passively speculative, the aggressively gaming. As a runway model in Paris and Milan not many years ago, she had learned that some women could trade upon beauty and sex as some men did on wealth and power. The terms of exchange, the boundaries, were what one chose to make them.
In Europe, at the parties in the clubs and aboard the yachts where she was invited after the shows, she had found it was often the truly dangerous men who had been able to provide the things she most desired. It was the oldest of understandings: Take of me, and I will take of you. She had accepted it without hesitation from a succession of lovers and been introduced to circles of hidden influence and inestimable fortune. The lifestyle attracted her, fascinated her, thrilled her.
Eventually she had come to do favors that went beyond the physical, although that was a constant part of the bargain. Sometimes enjoyable, sometimes less so. But no man had ever forced anything upon her. Made her do anything against her will. The assignments she ran across borders, moving from one country to the next under a variety of identities, gave her a wonderful feeling of value and importance, and it only heightened her excitement to know the international laws she had broken while using any one of those assumed names could have put her in prison forever. She had passed under the eyes of authorities, hiding in full view, and it exhilarated her.
Having lived among the dangerous, enjoyed the spoils of their illicit traffic, she in due time acquired a taste for the danger itself.
Siegfried Kuhl was by far the most dangerous man she had ever met. Once she had been with him, none of the rest had interested her, and she knew no other would again. He had satisfied her with a fullness she had never dreamed might be experienced. What sensual delights could be greater than those he lavished on her? What crimes more damnable than those she’d committed for him?
Now he had finally sent word. Although his affairs in Canada had not yet concluded, he would have the opportunity to leave for a few days and had made plans for them to be together. Where he had promised. In the place that was special to him and would become special to her.
She turned into the ticket office, waited on a short line, then walked over to an available clerk.
“Hello,” he said, smiling at her from behind the counter. He looked like a sheep, soft and penned. “How may I help you?”
“I would like a reservation for a flight to Madrid,” she said and gave him the date she wished to leave.
He nodded, tapped his keyboard with one finger.
“How many passengers will there be?”
“Just myself,” she said.
He glanced up at her.
“A lovely city, one of my favorites,” he said amiably. “Have you traveled there before?”
“Only for a brief stopover,” she said. “But I’ll be joining someone who is very well acquainted with it.”
“Ahh,” he said. “Business or pleasure?”
She looked at the clerk and mused that his entire bleating existence was not worth the most transitory and unremembered of her many disposable aliases.
“Pleasure,” she said and smiled back at him. “Strictly pleasure.”
* * *
“Carmichael.” Ricci leaned into the room in the crypto section. “How’s it going?”
“The same as it was when you asked fifteen minutes ago,” Carmichael said. He turned toward him in his swivel chair. “And when Megan Breen and Vince Scull stopped in ten minutes ago. And when Pete Nimec buzzed me just bef—”
Ricci held up his hand.
“Don’t uncork.” he said. “I just asked a question.”
“Listen, I’m not the one who needs to stay cool,” Carmichael said and gestured toward the computer he’d carried out of Palardy’s office, now on his gray steel desk. “I’ve already told you I’d report any progress. I’ve made multiple copies of the hard drive, and my team’s sifting through it all, sector by sector, file by file. That’s at the same time we’re trying to determine whether the message might precisely conform to some classic model of encipherment. We’re hitting the books. Researching the Freemasons, Vigenère, Arthur Conan Doyle for God’s sake…”
He let the sentence fade, blew air out of his mouth.
Ricci looked at him.
“Okay, I read you,” he said. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Keep the distractions away. This came at us damn fast. I know everybody’s stressed, but you’ve got to give us a chance. Let us do our work.” He paused, settled. “I’ve got a few hunches to check out. If they amount to anything, you’ll be the first to know about it.”
Ricci nodded. He stood quietly looking into the room a moment. Carmichael had connected Palardy’s CPU to a large, wide, flat panel display mounted on the wall above his desk, and clocks were winging across it. With the screen saver’s teal blue background, the effect was more than a little surreal, as if they were flocking in the air outside a window.
“There they go again,” he said. “Up and away.”
Carmichael at first looked as if he hadn’t understood Ricci’s
meaning, then he realized where his eyes had gone and swiveled halfway around in his chair.
“I have to get rid of that,” he said, glancing at the panel. “Pops into my face every five minutes.
Ricci remembered the antique dugout clock in Palardy’s bedroom, then the eerily musical call of the cuckoo in the death-house silence of his living room.
“A thing for clocks,” he snorted.
Carmichael turned to him.
“What did you say?”
Ricci noted the cryptographer’s sudden look of interest.
“Clocks,” he said. He heard himself take a breath. “Palardy had some kind of goddamned thing for clocks.”
* * *
At her desk, Megan Breen had been thinking constantly about the boss, and she told everyone that her eyes were red because of allergies. Some visitors to her office even fell for it.
She heard her private line buzz now and picked up, tossing a crumpled Kleenex into the trash.
The caller was Ashley Gordian.
“Ashley, hello. How is—?”
She stopped. Waited for Ashley to say something at the other end of the line. How to balance the need to tackle reality against her fear of what it might be?
“Gord’s condition hasn’t changed in the past couple of hours,” Ashley said. Megan almost sighed with relief; at least he wasn’t worse. It was strange how the definition of good news became relative once the ground started to slide. “He did open his eyes for a little while around lunchtime. The nurse couldn’t be sure how alert he was, and I wasn’t in the room. I can’t… they won’t let me stay with him. But I’ve already told you that, haven’t I?”
“I think so, yes,” Megan said. In fact, Ashley had told her, and more than once. She sounded lost. “Are you at the hospital right now? There’s nothing pressing at the office, and it would do me some good to get away. We could have coffee—”
“That’s why I was calling,” Ashley said. “I think you should come down here. And that you’d better bring along Pete or one of the others. I’ve heard from Eric Oh, the epidemiologist. There’s been some word about Gord’s illness, and I don’t know exactly what to make of it. Except that it’s important.” She paused. “I’m sorry I’m being disjointed…”
“Don’t worry about that, Ashley. My guidebook’s open in front of me, and it says it’s allowed under the circumstances.”
Megan heard Ashley move the receiver from her mouth and clear her throat.
“Thank you,” she said after a moment.
“Thank the writer.”
Another brief silence. When Ashley spoke again, her voice was a bit steadier. “Eric’s heading over to meet me,” she said. “And Elliot Lieberman, Gord’s regular doctor. Eli has an office at the hospital…”
“Yes.”
“Someone from Richard Sobel’s genetics lab is also coming. The tests are still inconclusive, and I’m sure they wouldn’t be willing to disclose anything if they didn’t trust us to be discreet. Not yet. Not until they had more proof. People would jump all over them. Attack their reputations, lump them with flying saucer theorists—”
“Ashley… what is it they’ve found?”
Ashley took an audible breath. The words weren’t coming to her lips easily. “They think that the virus was manufactured,” she said at last. “That someone may have specifically designed it to kill… to murder… Roger.”
Megan held the phone a moment, stunned. “I’ll be right over,” she said.
* * *
Ten minutes after ousting Ricci from his office, Carmichael sat at his desk with the door locked behind him, his telephone unplugged, and his intercom and corporate cellular turned off. Before severing these contacts with the outside world, he had instructed the group of analysts working on Palardy’s secret communication to call him on his personal cell phone if they shook anything loose.
He needed to be alone. To think. And puzzle out what appeared to be a simple — even primitive — cryptogram that he was sure Palardy must have known would be decipherable to UpLink’s specialists, experienced pros who were used to making and breaking messages generated with the most sophisticated methods of algorithmic encryption.
There was something about the bigrams and poly-grams… something that kept tickling Carmichael’s mind right below the uppermost level of consciousness, trying to burrow up to the surface like an insect through a thin layer of soil. It had been about to emerge before the flurry of interruptions from Ricci and company startled it away. Now, absent distractions, he hoped to coax it back out of its hidey-hole.
To help him focus, Carmichael had added a clip-art icon from his word processor to the string of ciphertext transmitted by Palardy, and the image on his wall panel looked like this:
RHJAJA00BHJM00WHRH!JM00WHBHJA00
TJAJ00?!CAJBJTRH
GWRHMVGCRHUGBHAJ00RHJBAJ00.RHBH
CAJBJTRHGCBHGWJA00TJ: CARHJA00
CATJJA00UG?!BHJBJAMVGCRHJA00RHJB
JA00RHGW!!RHJA“”ALRHMFTJJAUGRHBH
:MVGCRHJA00TJJGWH!AJ00JPGCTJTJJA
00UGRH!?JA00RHUGBHMVBHJARHJTRH
JA00GWRHJB.JAMVJGTJJA00”“MVGC
BHAJMV,TJGCJBJMJMRHJAJGTJJA00!
CA!BHJTRHGWRH.
He sat at his computer console and stared at the cryptogram. It reminded him a lot of the type that might have been incorporated in an old-fashioned potboiler, circa the 1890s, meant to amuse and challenge the astute reader with a basic knowledge of encipherment techniques. And he had a feeling Palardy had wanted it that way. Wanted it to be just difficult enough to buy him time to retract it unbroken, should that become advantageous, and simultaneously rattle whoever might steal his laptop in the event he was harmed beyond retracting it.
Carmichael stared at his monitor. It almost was as if he’d stepped into a Holmes novel. Or one of Poe’s prototypical mystery stories. And the damnedest thing, the thing he would never have admitted to anyone outside his crypto section, was that getting to the clear might have actually entertained him were the stakes not so terribly high.
“Give it to me, Palardy,” he muttered into the silent room. “Give me something.”
A thoughtful expression on his face, hands poised over his keyboard, Carmichael decided to remove the punctuation marks from the character string. They had almost jumped out at him as nulls on first impression, and that feeling had only grown stronger as he studied it.
He typed, repeatedly tapping the delete key. The image in front of him was now:
RHJAJAOOBHJMOOWHRHJMOOWHBHJAOO
TJAJOOCAJBJTRH
GWRHMVGCRHUGBHAJOORHJBAJOORHBH
CAJBJTRHGCBHGWJAOOTJCARHJAOO
CATJJAOOUGBHJBJAMVGCRHJAOORHJBJA
OORHGWRHJAALRHMFTJJAUGRHBH
MVGCRHJAOOTJJGWHAJOOJPGCTJTJJAOO
UGRHJAOORHUGBHMVBHJARHJTRH
JAOOGWRHJBJAMVJGTJJAOOMVGCBH
AJMVTJGCJBJMJMRHJAJGTJJAOO
CABHJTRHGWRH
Carmichael stared at the monitor. Trying to stay mentally loose and limber, slip into what athletes liked to call “the zone,” a space where you didn’t second-guess yourself, where you let yourself be guided by the automatic cognitive and sensory processes that equaled instinct.
“Come on. Give it up.”
He typed again. Letting his thumb give the space bar some action. Splitting up the obvious letter groups to leave him with:
RH JA JAOO BH JMOO WH RH JMOO WH BH
JAOO TJ
AJOO CA JB JT RH
GW RH MV GC RH UG BH AJOO RH JB AJOO
RH BH CA JB JT RH GC BH GW JAOO TJ CA
RH JAOO
CA TJ JAOO UG BH JB JA MV GC RH JAOO RH
JB JAOO RH GW RH JA AL RH MF TJ JA UG
RH BH
MV GC RH JAOO TJ JG WH AJOO JP GC TJ TJ
JAOO UG RH JAOO RH UG BH MV BH JA RH JT
RH
JAOO GW RH JB JA MV JG TJ JAOO MV GC BH
AJ MV TJ GC JB JM JM RH JA JG TJ JAOO CA
BH
JT RH GW RH
Carmichael stared at the monitor. All right, he thought. Getting somewhere. And here it came again, that tickle of a thought in his brain soil. Some of those discrete letter pairs… What was it about them that seemed to bait it out?
Carmichael did a quick cut and paste to put the combinations that kept drawing his eye onto a separate screen:
GW JA TJ JM AJ
He stared at them.
“Come on, come on, let’s see you. Come on ou—”
He straightened in his chair and sat very still for about five seconds. Then he abruptly reached into his pocket, activated his cellular, and called one of his section mates.
A woman answered.
“Michelle?” he said.
“Jimmy, hi, what’s up?”
“Better head over to my office. I think I’ve got something figured.”
Her tone was crisp. “Be right with you.”
“Thanks.” Carmichael’s finger paused over the disconnect button. In his excitement, he’d almost forgotton to ask for what he wanted her to bring along. “Michelle, still there?”
“Yeah, Jimmy, I was just putting back the phone.”
“A favor. It’s no big deal, I suppose. We can get the info easily enough on-line or something—”
Impatience: “Jimmy— ”
“Sorry, Michelle, I’m a little hyped,” he said. “Since you’re passing the reference library anyway, would you see if you can find that book on the American presidents?”
The highway’s posted speed limit was sixty-five miles per hour. The jet black Beemer’s speedometer had ticked up near ninety. This was the Bay Area. Megan Breen was at the wheel. She was in a rush to get to the hospital and hadn’t bothered with the radar detector.
Belted into the passenger seat, Rollie Thibodeau gripped his assist handle as she wove in and out of the left lane to pass a Suburban snailing along at a mere seventy-five miles per hour.
She snapped a glance at him through her sunglasses. A deep crease had established itself across his brow. He was very quiet. It occurred to her that six months was not very long ago when someone was recovering from the kind of internal damage he’d suffered in Brazil.
