Michael Walsh Bundle

by Michael Walsh

  “Major Atwater to see you, sir,” she said. “He says it’s extremely urgent.”

  President Tyler had the drink halfway to his mouth, then set it back down. If anybody knew what the hell was going on, it was Atwater. The man was dutiful and smart; if he’d decided to buck the chain of command by coming directly to the White House, it must be pretty damned important. Otherwise, it was Atwater’s ass, but he knew that already.

  Tyler liked moxie. And when you were as fucked as he was, what harm could it do? He glanced over at Manuel, who had gone into statue mode. No help there. He was on his own.

  “Send him in, Millie,” he said.

  The door opened. The major stood in the doorway, holding a salute.

  “At ease, Major,” said Tyler. “Come in.”

  The President rose to greet the analyst. The man had done good work, that he knew, cracking one of the famous unbreakable codes—something to do with classical music, which Tyler couldn’t even pretend to understand. He gestured to an empty chair. “Sit down, Major. Drink?”

  “Yes, sir. No thank you, sir.”

  “Sure about that?” asked Tyler. “You’ve come in here, elided your chain of command, barely just missed seeing your boss, so what you have to tell me is obviously pretty damn important and for my eyes only, so if I were you I’d have me a stiff one because I know I only got one chance to make my case and if I don’t I’ve just kissed my career good-bye.”

  Atwater eyed the president’s whiskey. “No, thank you, Mr. President,” he replied.

  Tyler grabbed the drink and handed it to him. “Drink this. And that’s an order from your commander in chief.”

  Atwater picked up the drink. “Down the hatch,” ordered Tyler. And down the hatch it went. “Feel better now, son?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “Now get to it.”

  Atwater took a deep breath. The fellow had balls, Tyler had to give him that.

  “The codes,” he began. “The ones Director Seelye asked me to interpret.”

  “And so you did, especially that, whattyacallit one, the Elgar thing.”

  “The Dorabella cipher, yes sir. Not a code at all but a blueprint. That was the clue that gave the whole thing away. I’m sorry that I didn’t see that until just now, Mr. President.”

  Tyler had no idea what the man was talking about, or why, if this was some inside-baseball code discussion, he didn’t take it up with Seelye or some other NSA geek. Before he could say anything, Atwater was banging away again.

  “Here they are, sir—notes that came in via e-mail directly to the DIRNSA’s classified inbox. Each one alludes to a famous code, either in literature or reality. The first one reads, ‘DIRNSA Seelye—What are the Thirty-Nine Steps?’ ”

  “ ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps is an organization of spies,’ ” quoted Tyler from memory.

  “Right, sir, the Hitchcock movie. But that line’s not in the book—in Buchan’s book, the steps are just that: steps. They have nothing to do with an organization of spies. It’s a clue—not to the code but to the sender’s intent. You see what I’m getting at?”

  Tyler’s expression told him he didn’t.

  “It’s a signal from the sender that we’re not to take the codes literally, but figuratively. Steps. In other words, taken together, they are sending us one big message. So let’s look at the next one. ‘To Lt. General Armond Seelye or To Whom It May Concern, Edgar Allan POE. (signed) the Magician.’ ”

  Tyler decided he might as well play along. “What the hell does that one mean?”

  Atwater looked the President right in the eye. “Well, this one tells us that the overall message is really for you, sir—which is why I took the liberty of coming directly to you about it. You see, back in 1839, Poe published a couple of cryptograms as a challenge to his readers. The first was deciphered fairly quickly—it was a basic substitution cipher—but the second had to wait for nearly one hundred fifty years and the advent of computer technology. It was a doozy; the letter e alone had fourteen variants. . . .”

  “Get to the point, Major.”

  “Right. So the point is, the cipher was eventually cracked and it turned out to be just crummy poetry, but it’s not so much the codes as the name under which Poe published them: W. B. Tyler. We think Poe did that to annoy President John Tyler, who had ignored his entreaties for a government job.”

  “What’s ‘the Magician’ got to do with it?” asked the President.

  “Ah, that—that comes from a line this ‘Tyler’ wrote in submitting the ciphers, in which he said that the art of concealment by cryptography gave him ‘a history of mental existence, to which I may turn, and in imagination, retrace former pleasures, and again live through bygone scenes—secure in the conviction that the magic scroll has a tale for my eye alone.’ ”

  “So it’s a threat?”

  “Yes, sir. I believe it is, sir. . . . Shall I continue?

  Tyler nodded.

  “The third one everybody knows: ‘UG RMK CSXH-MUFMKB TOXG CMVATLUIV.’ That’s the substitution cipher from Dorothy L. Sayers’s book Have His Carcase, and it means ‘We are discovered. Save yourself.’ Has to do with lovers, I believe. You see where we’re headed?”

  It was clear that the President was still evaluating the veiled threat, so Atwater plunged ahead:

  “The numbers—317, 8, 92, 73, 112, 79, 67, 318, 28, 96, 107, 41, 631, 78, 146, 397, 118, 98, 114—well, they’re the Beale cipher, the one that was deciphered. This one’s a double whammy—the Beale Cipher refers to a still-unlocated buried treasure somewhere in Virginia, which picks up the Poe theme, since Poe’s most famous exercise in cryptography, “The Gold-Bug,” also has to do with buried treasure. But the key to deciphering Beale Cipher No. 2 turned out to be the Declaration of Independence.”

  “Which brings the whole plot right back to this office,” said Tyler.

  “Not quite. Because while the sender is obviously obsessed with exacting some sort of revenge upon you and the United States government, he’s also consumed with sexual jealousy. We see that in the Sayers quote and even more transparently in the Dorabella cipher, which as you know I may modestly say that—”

  “You broke it.”

  “Not by breaking it, but understanding what its true nature was: a blueprint for something else.”

  “Let me see that damn thing again,” said Tyler.

  Eighty-seven characters, squiggles based on the letter E, arranged in three rows:

  “So that’s what love looks like,” he muttered. “And the last one?”

  Atwater brightened. He may have been discussing matters of crucial national importance, but he was still a code breaker, and this was his finest hour. “ ‘Masterman. XX.’ The overt reference is to the British practice of doubling captured German spies during World War Two and using them for disinformational purposes. The Roman numerals stand for the Committee of Twenty, which was run by Cecil Masterman. But, sir, I think as you can now see, they have a more sinister significance. . . .”

  “Death,” said Tyler. “Twin Xs, negating everything that has gone before. A double cross . . .”

  Atwater was impressed—Tyler really was as quick a study as his reputation suggested. Maybe that was why he was president, and Atwater was not.

  “Very good, Mr. President, and not only that . . . look, it’s really quite ingenious. The final clue refers back to the first one, to The Thirty-Nine Steps, both wartime references to German spies. Our correspondent is a creative artist in his own right, a man of immense wealth—that’s what the double image of buried treasure signifies—and one with a tremendous animus toward our country and to you, and also one who is severely suffering in love. This is a very angry man, Mr. President, and an extremely dangerous one.”

  Tyler had never been more ready for another drink in his life. “So he’s closing the circle. Wrapping things up. You missed that, Major Atwater, didn’t you? There’s a ticking clock here, the sands on the hourglass are running out. That�
��s also what the two Xs mean—time’s up, show’s over, the end. All he needs is one more X. Oh Jesus—that’s it!”

  “What’s ‘it,’ Mr. President?”

  Tyler threw an arm around Atwater’s shoulder as he walked him to the door. “Son,” he said, “have you ever heard of an October Surprise? Well, unless you boys do your job, we’re in for a hell of a big one.”

  Manuel appeared. Tyler took the libation, but not before he had shouted to Ms. Dhouri, “Get General Seelye and Secretary of Defense Johnson in here, on the double.”

  Then he had his drink.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Baku, Azerbaijan

  Emanuel Skorzeny settled back onto the plush sofa, his feet up on an ottoman, feeling every inch a prince. They had been here for a while now and he was both at ease and at home.

  For a Muslim-majority country, the Republic of Azerbaijan could have been a lot worse. Officially, it was still secular, as befit its former Soviet pedigree—although with a high concentration of Shiite Muslims, and Iran only about a hundred miles away, how long that would continue was probably just a matter of time. One by one, the “secular” Muslim countries had fallen, been reconquered, along the southern rim of the Mediterranean in what had been for hundreds of years the old Roman empire, up to and including Turkey, the home of Atatürk and his bold Kemalist revolution—now, less than a century on, despised and forgotten.

  Never underestimate the power of religion—or, as he preferred to think of it, deplorable superstition. A powerful, irrational, absurd force—and one that he intended to use to its fullest extent.

  What a fool he had been all these years, fighting religion when he could have been using it. He cursed his childhood, the death—make that the murder—of his parents, his upbringing by one of the heroes of the Reich. The atheist, anti-Semitic and unchristian Reich that had sought to purge the world of such primitive belief and instead return it to an older, purer form of savagery, unleavened by the bread of the Hebrews or the love of Jesus. How right they were, and how wrong.

  For now he could see, as plainly as if Jesus himself were to sail down from the clouds, separating the wheat from the chaff, the blessed from the damned; whether he came alone or at the side of Allah mattered not. To Emanuel Skorzeny, it was all the same totem, a talisman he would never touch.

  But which he could use. “Do you know about the astronauts of Apollo 11?” he asked.

  There were two women in the room with him.

  The first was Amanda Harrington, the City financial whiz who had run his philanthropic Skorzeny Foundation until she had tried to betray him with one of his own men. He had given her a lesson that she would never forget—nearly killed her, in fact, with a dose of tetrodotoxin—but he had succeeded in breaking her in both body and spirit and now here she was, back on the job, back in his arms and in his bed when he desired her, docile as a lamb.

  The second was Emanuelle Derrida, his assistant. That Ms. Derrida was not interested in the male of the species did not bother him in the slightest. She was a beautiful woman, her surname amused him no end, and, of course, he thought her Christian name a thing of beauty, even though she was probably even less of a Christian than he was. Unlike the late M. Paul Pilier, his former aide-de-camp, she was absolutely conscienceless, never blanched at any of his requests, kept the living quarters of his Boeing 707 in pristine condition, as befit a man of his sensibilities. He trusted her—well, he almost trusted her—implicitly and he knew that an order thought was an order carried out.

  He wished she did not so obviously desire Miss Harrington, but he was secure in the knowledge that she dare not cross him again.

  This must be what true love is, he thought. Then again, there was no point in desiring Mlle. Derrida, which was one of the reasons he had hired her in the first place. After all, carnal and emotional pleasure had to take a backseat to the culmination of his life’s work.

  There was no answer about the astronauts, and upon this occasion he was not feeling professorial or instructive. “Very well, then,” he said. “Report.”

  The command was directed at Miss Harrington.

  “Yes, sir,” she began. It was just like old times again, him and her, the recent unpleasantness long since forgotten if not forgiven.

  “Through the timely application of Foundation funds, we have increased the number of safe-harbor sites to which we might repair should the occasion warrant,” she said. “The number of countries willing to give us admittance or to at least turn a blind eye to our presence has increased threefold since last year. And I am very pleased to tell you, sir, that France may soon join their ranks.”

  Skorzeny permitted himself a small smile and a brief memory. “I do miss my home there in the rue Boutarel,” he said, “as I’m sure you do as well, Miss Harrington, Mlle. Derrida. When this is all over, we shall return in triumph and disport ourselves at several of the city’s finest gastronomic shrines. What else?”

  Amanda Harrington swallowed her distaste for the monster sitting opposite her, said a silent prayer of thanks that he was well across the room, and continued.

  “Despite the reversal of fortune that was suffered after the school-hostage crisis in Illinois, the failure of our EMP attack upon the East Coast of America and the considerable blowback after the successful assault on Times Square, the Foundation nevertheless saw its net assets increase, even in the teeth of the ongoing worldwide recession.”

  Skorzeny laughed. “Recessions mean nothing to me, Miss Harrington,” he said. “I can create them, prolong them, or end them as I choose. In ancient times, Croesus actually needed to have gold, silver, and jewelry on hand to display his wealth; later plutocrats demanded specie. All I need is a functioning iPad. Which is why, right now, for financial reasons, it amuses me to prolong this one.”

  He rose. Amanda shuddered. Luckily, he went to the window to gaze out upon the Caspian Sea instead of upon her.

  “How easy it is to make this thing called ‘money,’ once you realize that it isn’t money anymore. Not a storehouse of value. Not even a worthless piece of paper emblazoned with some country’s boastful trappings of sovereignty. Just blips on a computer screen, imaginary numbers rendered temporarily real by equally imaginary flashes of light. And why?”

  He turned. This was one of those Skorzeny rhetorical questions that demanded an answer. “And why?”

  Emanuelle Derrida said nothing, as she usually did. “I’m sure I don’t know, Mr. Skorzeny,” replied Amanda. She hoped her nonresponse would keep him on the other side of the room, lecturing instead of leching.

  “Because people believe in them, Miss Harrington, as well you should know. They believe in the purchasing power of imaginary numbers, the way European peasants once believed in putting pigs on trial for witchcraft. They believe in them because they have no alternative, but the fiction has more power than the reality. Because no one can cart around a storehouse of wealth in precious metals and expect to exchange a tiny sliver of it for a loaf of bread. Because modern life is too complicated, too complex. And so we turn to totems and talismans. To substitution ciphers, representations of reality that obscure more than illuminate. To signs and symbols and portents.”

  He turned away from the sea and looked directly at her. “Do you understand, Miss Harrington?” he inquired.

  “Yes, sir,” she answered. “I think I do, sir.”

  “Very well, then,” he said. “Report. You know whom I’m talking about.”

  Amanda knew whom he meant. Even with the boss on the run, Skorzeny’s private intelligence service was very good, and his immense wealth gave him access to figures well-placed in both the American government and its security services.

  “As far as we can tell, sir—” she began.

  “And as I calculate these things, that ought to be pretty damn far,” observed Skorzeny from his window perch.

  “He’s gone to ground, sir,” she responded, quietly.

  That got his attention. The old anger flashed. At wha
t age did the fires finally tamp down and die? Did the seven deadly sins, particularly lust and greed, finally fade to memory? Perhaps only when they faded to black.

  “What do you mean, Miss Harrington, ‘gone to ground’?” he barked. “There is not my equal on this planet, as you well know, and this bastard surely cannot elude my holy wrath, no matter how fiendish his cleverness.”

  Skorzeny turned his attention back out the window, looking south, watching the ships on their stately progress toward Bandar Anzali in Iran, or one of the Islamic Republic’s other port cities. That was where she would be headed soon, drugged, bound, gagged, a piece of baggage being delivered in the custody of Miss Harrington to her new, er, interlocutors, her last words already written and posted to Washington. From Bandar Anzali, he knew, it was but a short ride into Tehran, through Rasht and Qazvin and then along Highway One to the capital, and Doom.

  Before she could open her mouth, she became aware that he had switched something on—a dirge she recognized at once. Thank God, it wasn’t the Metamorphosen by Strauss, which he had forced her to listen to as he’d poisoned her with the fugu fish toxin back in France. No, not Strauss. Instead, it was the funeral march from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony.

  Skorzeny could feel the vipress’s eyes on him, her thoughts boring into him. But hatred and love were two sides of the same coin, one the obverse of the other; as long as strong emotion was involved, all was right with the world. If Amanda hated him now, it was of no consequence. That hate could easily turn back to the love she had once bestowed upon him. All it would take was continued proximity.

  Besides, it was a challenge, and there was nothing Emanuel Skorzeny loved more in this life than a challenge. Especially one involving a woman.

  “Gone to ground? Impossible.”

  How he had wanted to kill Maryam himself, and how it had pained him to have to let her go—not only for monetary reasons, for the price on her head was quite high, but for geopolitical reasons as well. The Iranians were still not quite sure whether to trust him, not after what had happened to their operative Kohanloo on the East River in New York. On the other hand, they were all in this together now, and they needed him far more than he needed them. So off-loading the devil’s mistress had been a business decision.