by Jack Gardner
But at the moment, he was lying in a hospital emergency room with a hole the size of a quarter in his knee. The way it all looked, even if the wound was stitched in the next few hours and he could walk, he wouldn’t be able to drive. And without wheels, it would be difficult for him to stay in the picture. He had no intention of being treated like someone who was temporarily out of the game. He was wounded, and in all probability would be in horrible pain once the painkillers wore off, only that pain was not foreign to him and he believed in his ability to make it tolerable by the force of his willpower.
Apart from the serious injury in his knee, Eddie suffered from dry wounds all over the right side of his body, the side that he fell on. These would probably not bother him too much in the next few hours, and he could solve the problem later with painkillers. In any case, at the moment what he needed most was his head, and that was unharmed.
If he wanted to stay in the picture, he had to update them about the phone call and demand to attend the meeting himself, if such a meeting ended up taking place.
He would ask them to provide him with someone who could drive him. That way, he could keep on being involved. And if they refused him—well, in that case, he would have no other option but to tell Ram the truth about his disengagement from the situation and allow him to consider his next moves. Undoubtedly, his bosses must also think about the possibility that the target would not agree to change middlemen that easily. He called Sammy, who was still in his office, updated him about the call from Ram, and requested permission to continue talking to Ram.
“You’re calling from the ER, right?” Sammy did not sound amused.
“Yes.”
“So how do you think you’ll go on?”
“I assume that I will be out of here in two hours or so.”
“And functional?” Sammy wondered.
“That depends on your definition of functioning. I can meet him and hear what he has to say.”
“I don’t know…”
“I don’t think he’d be willing to meet anyone else.” Eddie had the winning hand.
“And you’re sure you are capable?”
“Yes,” Eddie replied shortly.
There was a brief silence as Sammy was considering his options. ‘Damn it, what can possibly happen? This time we’ll be watching his every move and can walk in at any stage. It’s not that bad actually…’
“Alright. Make a date with him and report to me about the exact directions. And no misunderstandings this time,” Sammy ended with a slight threat.
Eddie decided to avoid the hint. “One more thing,” he said.
“What?” Asked Sammy.
“I’m going to need a car and a chauffeur who can drive me.” A pause.
“But you said you were capable…”
“I am capable of fulfilling the mission, I’m incapable of driving.” Eddie was silent and decisive.
Sammy was thinking quickly. ‘That, too, could be good,’ he thought to himself. “Give me at least an hour. Let me know what plans you’ve made with the target. The driver will pick you up at the hospital.”
“Thank you,” Eddie said as he hung up.
He smiled bitterly and left the phone near him. This time he would not be able to get out of their sight, he thought. He buzzed the nurse, who showed up instantaneously asking what he needed. He pointed to the open wound on his knee.
“I need this fixed,” he said in a nice but confident tone. “I have to be discharged within thirty minutes,” he added.
The nurse looked at him, embarrassed. She heard that this patient was unusual. The instructions were not to ask any questions but do everything in order to satisfy his demands.
“Dr. Pick, the orthopedic surgeon, is in surgery right now. I’ll go and check whether she can come.”
“Please do that,” Eddie said quietly, resting his head on the pillow and feeling, for the first time, the shots of painkillers injected to his knee. This was not going to be easy.
***
Ram worked according to the schedule. Thirty minutes later, the phone rang. Eddie prepared himself for it already. “We can schedule a meeting, but I have to inform you of a certain development.”
“What exactly?” Asked Ram, and Eddie could feel a certain anxiety in the usually calm voice.
“I was injured earlier this evening and my mobility is compromised. Someone is going to have to drive me.” There was a silence that lasted for a few seconds.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Ram. “I’m not sure I can afford a meeting that would be under their control. That’s what we are talking about, right?”
“I am afraid so,” said Eddie.
“Let me offer another possibility.”
“As you please,” said Eddie.
“I will write down the information I have for you. In two hours, I’ll let you know where to send someone that will bring it to you.”
“I understand, but…”
‘He might as well give it in a number of copies,’ thought Eddie.
“Yes, I know what you’re thinking,” Ram read his mind. “I thought about that, too. The letter will be encrypted and I will give you the code word only after you’ve receive it.”
“And the encryption system…” Eddie said, even though he felt it was superfluous.
“Do you know the Vigenère cipher?” Ram asked.
The Vigenère cipher was an encryption system every operational Bureau employee was familiar with. Reading Vigenère message was impossible without a code word.
“Of course,” said Eddie.
“Okay, then we have it. And I assume you’ll thank me for not forcing you out of the hospital injured, right?”
“Wait, I said nothing about a hospital.” Eddie was a professional.
“That’s true, and I hope you forgive me for allowing myself to follow you after our meeting…I had to know where you stood, at least considering what seemed to be you evading the surveillance they had placed on you.”
For a brief moment, Eddie was furious with himself for not noticing that he was followed.
“So you saw the accident,” Eddie said.
“Yes, and I must admit that you got me a little worried there at first. I have some experience with motorcycles and in the speed it all happened, I wouldn’t have wanted to be in your place. But I assume that considering the somewhat slight injury you’d consider it an enriching experience. By the way, if you need someone to testify that the accident was not your fault, I am at your service.”
“So you saw the evacuation and everything?” Eddie was interested.
“Yes. And if I may add, the next chance you have you should thank the ambulance driver. The speed at which they came and evacuated you was quite impressive.”
“So I assume you got your proof,” Eddie was suddenly angry. He was tired of being constantly examined.
“I already apologized for it. I had to know,” Ram said softly.
“And had I not mentioned the accident?” Eddie asked even though he knew the answer before he even posed the question.
“I fear that would have been the end of our little romance,” Ram said peacefully, adding, “I want to clarify something. It is highly possible that at some point my life will be in your hands. Now I feel like I have a better life insurance policy. But this conversation is getting too long. You’ll hear from me.”
He hung up.
Eddie found himself staring at the phone in his hand. He was starting to like that guy more and more. Such a shame they were on different sides of the tracks. He heard the curtain move and saw a beautiful female doctor with glasses and a statoscope hanging down her neck standing next to him, her face showing no expression.
“Dr. Pick, I presume,” Eddie said in a friendly voice.
Her face did not change. “They pulled me out of an operation room to come here. I presume the matters of the State could not wait…”
‘How vain,’ Eddie thought to himself. On the other hand, he appreciated the
little woman for her insistence on stating her opinion about all sorts of VIPs.
“Just stitch me up and I won’t bother you anymore.” Eddie’s voice was calm and the doctor softened a bit. At the end of the day, there was a bleeding, wounded person in front of her.
“Let’s see,” she said and looked at the wound as she put on rubber gloves. The terrified nurse had just joined her, carrying a tray full of equipment, waiting for her orders.
“I am going to anesthetize your knee again,” said the doctor. The nurse immediately handed her a needle and the doctor injected him around the open wound. Eddie looked at the process, trying not to make a sound.
The anesthesia worked quickly and Eddie was quickly feeling no pain. The doctor put her gloved fingers into the hole in his knee, trying to locate any objects that may have infiltrated the wound, like pieces of asphalt, glass, and so forth. In the meantime, a short and slim male nurse joined them holding a bottle of disinfectant. As she was pulling out bits and pieces of asphalt from the open wound, the doctor signaled the nurse with her head, who then opened the bottle and told Eddie, “You’re going to see stars...”
The nurse started pouring the liquid into the wound without waiting for an answer. Eddie, who was biting his lips awaiting pain, discovered that it wasn’t all that bad. Maybe he was naturally less prone to pain, or the double anesthesia worked very well. He went on looking at the doctor’s trained fingers as they were working inside his body—it’s not the kind of image one sees every day.
After a few minutes, when the wound was sanitized again and again, the doctor seemed satisfied and declared that she would begin stitching. The wound required two layers of stitches, being that the tear was deep into the muscle tissue that wraps around the kneecap: one interior layer would patch the muscle tissue, and the second, exterior layer, would be for the wound itself.
She explained and then went straight to work: she sewed the muscle tissue with a white suture that reminded Eddie of a nylon fishing rod. Once she was done with the interior layer, she started stitching the exterior, the wound itself, using a black suture. The exterior layer would have to be taken out in ten days, once the wound healed, she told Eddie.
Eddie was interested in knowing when his leg would return to functioning regularly. The doctor looked at him, her brown eyes expressing doubt, and told him that he should not expect a short healing process, maybe even two to three months. The muscle injury was quite bad, and beyond the fact that the muscle tissue must heal, it would also have to regain its elasticity. Only then would he be able to move his knee fully. The doctor noted that Eddie was lucky; had his kneecap or his collateral ligaments been harmed, the healing process would have been much longer and it would have been impossible to know whether his knee would ever go back to function normally. To end things, she gave him a tetanus shot against infections and had the nurse get him an IV of antibiotics in order to improve his immune system’s ability to deal with what it had to go through in the next few days. Then she bid Eddie goodbye, saying that she had to return to the operation from which she was taken away, and left accompanied by Eddie’s sincere expressions of gratitude.
As the skinny nurse dressed his wound, Eddie’s thoughts already wandered to the Vigenère cipher. He felt a sense of tense anticipation filling him as he awaited Ram’s message, which could cast some light on the whole affair.
39
The Vigenère cipher was over 250 years old, and even though the way to crack it has been found, it was still quite safe for the purpose of sending urgent messages, as it takes some time to crack and read these.
I had no doubt that the courier who would take the message from the place where I’d leave it would drive to the Bureau first, where they’d open the envelope without leaving a trace and start decoding it right away. I wasn’t going to make it too hard on them. I decided to use a short keyword, which would allow them to use a standard decoding system and discover it quite easily.
Using a standard Vigenère table, I sat down to encrypt the message, which I took great efforts to write shortly and to the point. At the end of the day, all I needed was to get Eddie’s attention. I was convinced that if that happened, if he wanted to understand what really was behind all this, then between the two of us we could fill in the blanks of the missing details later.
As I was encrypting the message, I had another idea. I picked up the phone and called the hospital emergency room. The receptionist listened to my request politely. Yes, she would be happy to fax me a blank release form so that I could take it to my family doctor and send to the insurance company. I had a phone line not listed under my name, which had a voicemail that received fax messages. I thanked her politely and she promised she would send the form right away. Indeed, five minutes later there was a new message on that line. I printed the form and went on with my plan.
Suddenly, I thought that maybe I should use two ciphers. The first part of the message I would do in Vigenère, so that they could read it quickly using their computers. The second part, the one with the important information, I would do in a “book cipher,” which is something they cannot crack as long as they have no idea what text I used for the encryption. That way, I’d win some time and allow Eddie to do his research uninterrupted.
The first part of the message would prove to them that I was on the right track—at this point I completely convinced I was—and make them reconsider just how much damage I could do to them if this war went on. At least that was what I was hoping for.
Twenty minutes later, I finished my work and put the message in an envelope without a name on it. In fact, I didn’t write anything on the envelope, I simply sealed it with tape and five staples so that Eddie, who would not be surprised, could know that the message was tampered with before it was brought to him.
It took me another forty minutes or so until I got back from the beach, where I placed the envelope between two rocks, right where Eddie and I had our first meeting. I was ready to go. I called Eddie and he picked up right away.
“Remember where we met?” I said without any introduction.
“At first or where we ended it?” Eddie asked, proving to me that his head was just fine after the accident.
“Where we ended,” I said.
He asked me to go on.
“In the line of rocks, in the crack between the first and second rocks, a brown envelope.”
“Got it.”
I looked at my watch. “I’m giving you an hour, and then I’ll give you some necessary information.” We both knew what it was about.
“Alright,” he said, and I knew he was looking at his watch and calculating the time.
I hung up.
***
Eddie called Sammy right away, asking that someone go fetch the message for him. Sammy listened, didn’t ask any questions, and approved the request. “Someone will go right away,” he said.
Eddie clarified that time was of the essence. If he didn’t have the message within forty-five minutes, the target might avoid all further communications. Sammy sighed angrily as he hung up. Once he briefed the Bureau’s courier and made sure the communications and decoding teams were ready and alert, Sammy leaned his head on his hands and sank into deep thoughts. The target would not agree to meet Eddie again because he was not willing to expose himself to the driver. That was clear. Instead, he was sending a written message. Clearly, it’s an important message, meant to change Eddie’s approach to the target to be more sympathetic to him. Actually, at the moment, it was not clear that his approach wasn’t sympathetic. Is it possible that this was the message where the target would reveal all that he knows? Reveal his suspicions? Does he even know anything?
If it is, indeed, important information, it’ll be encrypted; the answers will have to be given by the decoders—that is, assuming that they manage to crack the cipher. Sammy was sure they would be able to. Some of the people who sat in that communications room were plain and clear geniuses. But if the cipher was complex, it might ta
ke time to crack. In the meantime, the message would reach Eddie and with it, the code words. The simplest thing would be to send someone to Eddie in order to help him decode the message; but what if Eddie was under the target’s surveillance? Maybe this whole thing was only another test to win the target’s trust. And if so, the message itself might be meaningless. They would have to do the decoding behind the scenes, even Eddie couldn’t know about it.
At that point, an inevitable headache hit him. Sammy, who was prepared for this kind of situation, pulled a pack of Advil out of his drawer and took two. Now, all he had to do was wait for the news. And he was hoping for good news.
***
Beyond the curtain surrounding his bed, Eddie could hear the sounds of the ER. An ambulance would come every few minutes and leave behind an injured or sick person who was then received by a staff member and directed, in a short series of orders, to an open space. Later, he would hear the wheels of the bed screech as it was moved to its place and an authoritative voice giving directions for primary diagnosis or treatment.
In the bed next to him, a young doctor was questioning a patient who arrived with serious stomach aches. The doctor suspected that the matter was linked to some kind of liver disease, and his questions focused on the man’s drinking habits. According to the man’s answers, Eddie could reach the conclusion that the young doctor was on the right track to diagnosing the problem.
From the opposite wall, he heard the moans of an older woman who slipped in the bathroom. The doctors thought she may have broken her hipbone. The woman’s son, who sounded very young, walked around constantly asking the staff member when his mother would be taken to the x-ray rooms, until one of the nurses got tired of it and notified him assertively that he better sit down and wait patiently. “Nagging everyone will not help,” she told him. “Once an x-ray machine becomes available, your mother will be taken there. We also want to know whether it’s a fracture or not so that we can put her in the right department as soon as possible. Let us do our work.” Eddie heard him mumbling something about the service and attention and smiled. Suddenly, Eddie heard energetic steps that did not seem to belong at a hospital. A minute later, the curtain was drawn, and a guy with a motorcycle helmet revealing only his eyes nodded his head in a friendly way, told Eddie he worked for the Bureau and asked to see Eddie’s ID. Eddie never met the man, but he had no time to test him and so he handed him his ID.
