The Post

by Kevin A. Muñoz

  “Thank you, Mikhail.” I release the chain links and flex my fingers. “And give Amy my regards,” I say, referring to Barkov’s wife.

  “You know I will do no such thing,” he says, barely managing a smile. “She would leave me for you given half a chance. You Americans. Always so—what is the word?”

  “Fickle?” I answer, laughing.

  “Experimental,” he replies with another smile. But his face quickly regains a serious expression. “Americans. Russians. It is the children who will teach us how to think now. Some of them do not even know what a Russian is. Or an American. Do you remember when all we could say was ‘globalization?’ Now it is something else. Ah. Well, Chief Edison, I am talking again. I will say hello to Amy, and you will say hello to someone who likes me, yes?”

  “No one likes you, Mikhail.”

  Barkov laughs and wanders off, whistling to himself.

  By the time I return to the main street of the Little Five, it is almost noon and the caravan is well ensconced on Moreland, north of the tunnel wall, which had to be swung aside to let the trucks and bus pass. The citizens of the Little Five clamor around the dozen or so visitors to gather news and gossip from the other communities.

  The leader of the Clarke County trading group is a gray-haired man in his late sixties, wearing dark sunglasses, by the name of Norm Ithering. I spot him coordinating the delivery of two heavy plastic barrels of some substance or other onto Braithwaite’s hand truck. Mayor Weeks is speaking to him, but when he notices me he interrupts his conversation and waves me over. Mr. Ithering shakes my hand when I come into range.

  “You remember Sam?” Weeks asks the older man.

  “I do,” he says. “Semper Paratus,” he adds: the motto of the Coast Guard, “Always Ready.” I am reminded that Mr. Ithering was once a member of the Army Reserve.

  “Yes, sir,” I reply. “It’s good to see you again.”

  The mayor says, “Norm is leaving two of his people here for a few days, to help Belinda and Ernesto with some of their equipment. I don’t know all the details, but you know how it is. Geeks and their toys. I thought you should know, considering—”

  Weeks doesn’t have to finish the sentence. I nod, understanding. “As long as they check their weapons at the door,” I say, “it’s not a problem for me. I’ll let Luther and the others know, so there isn’t any confusion.”

  “Yeah,” Ithering mutters. Then, a little more loudly, “I’m sorry to do this to you, Sam.”

  “It’s not an inconvenience. It’s Belinda who’s going to have to herd the cats, not me.”

  I look over to the farm where Vargas is talking to two men beside one of the Volvos: a black man with a bald pate and a Hispanic man with curly hair. Neither one looks a day over twenty. “Is that them?” I ask, pointing in their direction.

  “Sure is,” says Ithering. “It’s Randall and Banderas. We’ll swing back around in a week and pick them up. If they cause you any trouble, you let me know, all right?”

  “Of course,” I say, watching Braithwaite maneuver a blue plastic barrel over the curb. One of the men with Vargas, the one who must be Banderas, scurries to her aid for a moment, helping to keep the barrel from tipping onto the pavement. Braithwaite takes a step back, looking momentarily spooked.

  I take my leave and wander over toward the farm. Vargas introduces me to Randall and Banderas, but the three of them seem to be more interested in the engines of the Volvos than they are in talking to the Little Five police chief. So I leave them to their work and move on to help Braithwaite with her supplies.

  She thanks me for the assistance, then adds, “I’m sorry if I was irritable the other day. It’s one of those things.”

  “You don’t have to explain,” I tell her. “You’re doing better today?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve been waiting for this stuff for a while. It’s easy enough to get potassium hydroxide. That’s really just quicklime and potash, which isn’t hard to produce. Just burn down a few forests, and you can make as much of the stuff as you want.” She laughs abruptly. “See, you use a lime kiln to make quicklime out of limestone. Then you slake the quicklime to make calcium hydroxide—”

  She continues, but I tune her out until she finishes, “We can’t do it all ourselves, here. So we trade for it.”

  “What do we give them in exchange?” I ask absently, my attention more on the visitors in the street.

  “In exchange?” Braithwaite stops, sets down the hand truck, thinking. “Fuel, obviously. Parts, if they need them. The usual.” She tips the hand truck back again. “We got too big to be able to do it ourselves. I didn’t have a choice but to make these deals.”

  I help her lift the hand truck over the container threshold. “Well, I’m glad you found a solution,” I say, not wanting to go down the rabbit hole of Braithwaite’s strange guilts. I don’t need to know the inner workings of her moral economy.

  Phoebe intercepts me as I step into the street. “Can I talk to you, Chief?” When I stop, she adds in a whisper, “But I don’t want my parents to know I’m talking to you. Mom would squirt blood from her ears.”

  I lead Phoebe across the plaza to the station, taking care to stay in the crowd, away from the mayor’s eye. We go inside, and I offer her my chair, which she takes as if it belonged to her. She props her feet on the edge of my desk. She is putting up a good front, that’s clear enough: Phoebe doesn’t usually display such a brash, nonchalant attitude, especially with me.

  “What did you want to talk about?” I ask.

  “I know you were talking about Abby yesterday, with Mom. I could hear you.”

  “What did you hear?” I sit down on the edge of Luther’s desk, watching the girl’s expressions for signs of dissembling.

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Did she say anything about Abby’s scars?”

  “She didn’t, but I knew about them. What did Abigail tell you?”

  She shrugs, protecting herself with a manufactured ignorance. I resist the urge to push her to answer directly. Instead, I say, “There was something specific you wanted to tell me. Am I right?”

  Phoebe nods. “She told me that they were probably going to leave soon. She said Owen didn’t think it was safe.”

  “Wait,” I start, surprised. “He said it wasn’t safe? Why? Was Owen afraid of someone in particular?”

  Again the shrug, but this time it’s an honest one. “I don’t think she knew.” Phoebe wraps her arms across her chest. “It’s not like Owen was creepy or anything, but he made me nervous. I only saw him a couple of times, at the apartment, but he was always so intense. Typical scout, I guess.”

  “What?” I say, taken off the track. “What do you mean?”

  “You know how they get. Twitchy and weird after they come back, for days, like they’re still looking over their shoulders.”

  “Did he say he was a scout, or are you just guessing?”

  “He didn’t have to say anything,” Phoebe answers, slightly offended. “And I’m not just guessing. He had a map.”

  “He had a map,” I repeat to Luther, standing in the doorway to Owen’s apartment. “But you’re sure you didn’t find anything yesterday.”

  “I didn’t find anything,” she says, the petulance in her voice almost like Phoebe’s. “I know how to do my job, Chief.”

  “I’m not implying anything,” I say. “She said it looked like a scout’s map. A real pre-collapse map, with pencil marks all over it. She didn’t get a good look at the marks, but she said there were numbers and circles. He was marking locations.”

  “Were we marked?” Luther asks, stepping inside. She goes through the motions of checking every cupboard and drawer, though I can tell she doesn’t have her full attention in it. She’s done this already, and she’s confident she didn’t miss anything.

  “Phoebe didn’t know. But if it was a map of Atlanta, and if Owen was a scout, was that why he was here?”

  L
uther pulls the shade off the lamp on a side table and looks within. “You don’t scout places where people are. You scout where they’re not. For food and supplies.”

  “You’re right,” I admit. “They don’t go into towns. They don’t try to cross fences. That’s just asking for trouble. And you don’t bring a pregnant girl with you on a scouting trip.”

  “If he was expecting to leave, maybe he was making a route. Planning it out.” Luther throws up her hands. “I don’t see anything here. Really, Chief, I checked every corner. There’s no map.”

  I enter the apartment, heading for the back bedroom where Luther found Abigail’s body. The scene is as I left it, with blood soaking the sheets and streaked across the floor into the hallway. Luther stays back, arms folded, leaning against the open door, while I lift the mattress and feel underneath. Then the dresser and the remains of the side table. Luther’s irritation at my distrust of her is beginning to show in the set of her mouth, so I halt and nod with defeated approval. “Agreed. There’s nothing here.”

  But a sudden realization snaps my attention back to the dresser. Then to the closet, also empty. “There’s literally nothing here,” I say. “Not even clothes. Not even the clothes she was given after they arrived. She was dressed when you found her?”

  Luther’s expression is quizzical, and her answer delayed. But she recovers as she realizes what I’ve just noticed. “Yes,” she says.

  “She slept with her clothes on?”

  Luther says, “It’s not that strange, is it? If you’re on the run, or if you’re twitchy from being on the road for who knows how long, wouldn’t you sleep in your clothes, too?”

  “Except our assumption has been that she was attacked in the bedroom by someone who broke in. But a break-in is loud. And the kind of person who sleeps in her clothes is the kind of person who wakes up when something nearby makes that much noise, like a gunshot from the street below. She wouldn’t be caught in the bed. But if she knew her attacker, maybe she let the person in. Fully dressed. Killed, fully dressed. And then the killer could take his time making the place look like it was broken into. The blood in the hallway isn’t from when she was taken out. It’s from when she was brought in, after she was attacked.”

  “But she didn’t really know anybody here,” Luther says. “Maybe she knew Phoebe, a couple others. And what the fuck, Chief? Why would any of us want to kill a pregnant girl?”

  We go down to the street as the trading excitement is dying down. The trucks have been moved off Moreland and the bus is parked in the biodiesel lot. The dozen-plus visitors are mingling with the people of the Little Five, making conversation and finding partners for all the drinking, dancing, and screwing that will happen after the sun goes down tonight.

  Knowing that later the place will be too busy to hear myself think, I step into Cassidy’s Bar, so I can get something to eat and continue to grind the gears in my head.

  I sit down at the bar and the bartender offers me fresh meat from the traders. Grilled turkey with a side of tomatoes, green peppers, and olives. I lose myself in the meal for a time. After I finish, I pull out Owen’s encrypted pages and flatten them on the bar. The top sheet is the most daunting: the six-letter combinations are spread across from margin to margin, daring me to decipher them.

  The man beside me leans closer when he sees what I’ve spread out. Leonard Furness is a long retired high school math teacher, so I’m not surprised at his curiosity. But his reaction rocks me back in my seat. “Now that’s a strange thing to see all these years later. That looks like a numbers station transcript. Where did you get it?”

  Before I can answer, he slides the top sheet closer to himself. “These aren’t printed. They’re typewritten. How old are they?”

  I admit that I don’t know, but they must be new: the paper is fresh enough to have come from a recently opened ream. “You said it looks like a numbers station transcript. What do you mean?”

  “Well, that can’t be right, can it?” Furness puts the page up to his nose, scrutinizing it in the weak light. “There aren’t any stations left. They went down when everything else did. And what would be the point?”

  I don’t have an answer to that. If I did, I might have seen what is now so obvious. Numbers stations were the conspiracy theorists’ unicorn, back before the world changed: they existed, but they were rare and inscrutable. I knew about the ones sourced in Cuba, in part because they were once or twice mentioned during briefings about drug interdiction. Beyond that, though, they had little to do with me and my work, so I paid no attention to them.

  But I knew what they were, or at least what was claimed about them. They delivered messages via unsecured radio transmissions, using virtually unbreakable encryption that had its origins in the Second World War or earlier. Communication between spies and the handlers in their home countries could be made out in the open, and no one listening in would be able to understand a word of it. But with the death of nations after the collapse, any spy still alive was out of a job. Furness is right: there shouldn’t be any numbers stations still broadcasting.

  His fingers move across the pages as if he were reading three lines at once. “Maybe it’s not a numbers station. Of course, it can’t be. It must be passed from person to person by hand. But then why in groups of six? There’s no point to the groups of six unless you’re doing on-the-fly manual error correction. And six is right on the edge. Most of the ones I used to see were four or five.”

  “Can you read it?” I ask, trying to disrupt his momentary solipsism.

  “Of course not,” he says, looking up, responding just as I expected him to. “You’d need the companion text that goes with it.” Furness takes a drink of weak beer and licks his lips with a distant memory. “Back when I was in the CIA—did you know I was CIA? Hah. Those were the days. One of the problems they gave us was to help secure the communications of our spies in Russia. One-time pads were my favorite because they are information-theoretically secure. Perfect secrecy. Unless you have access to the companion pad, it is one hundred percent impossible for you to decrypt those pages.”

  “So I’m wasting my time,” I mutter.

  “Those pages are either the ciphertext or the pad of a one-time pad system. As I said, they’re information-theoretically secure. What that means, though, is that in practice they’re not as useful. You have to have a key that’s at least as long as the message. Without computers to do the heavy lifting, making a random pad long enough for what you’ve got there would take days. More likely, though, the pad is an existing text, probably a book, shared between sender and receiver. Something rare that you won’t be able to identify or find in any old bookstore.”

  Then, rolling back to his first question, Furness asks, “Where did you get them?”

  I begin to explain the events of the last two days, until Furness interrupts with a new question: “Who was this Owen person?”

  I start to offer what little I know of him, then realize that’s not the question Furness is asking. I stop, look at the remains of my food, and say, “I don’t know who he was. Was he a spy? I don’t think that’s why he was here in the Little Five. But that map he had and this encryption. Was he looking for someone?”

  “He only had these pages?” Furness asks, sliding them along the counter. I say yes, but he doesn’t respond for a while, only scrutinizes the gibberish again. “It all looks like one side of the encryption. But you can’t do anything with just one side. You need both the key and the ciphertext. You have to add the letters together from the two sides to get the plaintext message.”

  “Owen couldn’t have used it as it is.” I slap the table with an open palm. “Damnit. This has to be important. But how, if it’s unreadable?”

  Furness thinks it over, then nods. “I suppose he could be a courier, but the security of a one-time pad depends on certain practical considerations. Numbers stations used them because you only had to worry about the physical copy of one side of the
system. Anyone who knows anything about cryptography would know never to send ciphertext to a recipient in physical form. Using a courier isn’t smart. Did he have a shortwave radio with him?”

  I shake my head. “No. Those aren’t very portable anymore, without batteries, and those are rare now. You’d need a hand crank or a generator, and he didn’t have—anything like—”

  The rusty gears finally begin to turn, scraping against one another and stripping the cobwebs from my eyes.

  “You’ve thought of something?” Furness asks.

  “Braithwaite,” I whisper. “The trading network radio. Belinda Braithwaite has a shortwave. It’s the only one in the Little Five, and it’s right there in the lab where Owen was on the night he died.”

  My chest burns with the embers of missed opportunities and the fear that I’m coming to the answers too late to do me—to do anyone—any good. Walking the Little Five at midday is not usually so precarious, so fraught with potential.

  “What are you thinking?” Luther asks after I fill her in at the police station. “You can’t believe Vargas and Braithwaite had anything to do with it.”

  “I don’t know yet,” I admit, drawing her across the plaza to the biodiesel farm. “If Owen got to the shortwave while he was with Belinda and sent a message out, where did it go? Did someone pick it up and discover where he was?”

  Vargas and two of the trading group’s mechanics tinker with the engine of their bus while the rest of the group waits aimlessly by the trucks. Luther and I intercept Braithwaite as she is crossing the street to the old gas station where the underground tanks of biodiesel fuel are kept.

  “I have some more questions,” I tell her, but her acknowledgment is terse and dismissive. When I press on, she stops and turns in frustration.

  “I don’t have time for this right now. Can’t you see we’re busy?”

  Luther takes the woman’s arm gently, preventing her from continuing on her way. “Are the trucks fueled up? Yeah? Then you can spare a few minutes. The boys are going to be a while, I’m sure.”