by David Wood
“My time is yours,” he insisted. He beckoned them to sit and settled back into his own swivel chair. “Anything that I can do to help find the…” He paused as if trying to find the right word. “The monsters who did this.”
Tam decided to start with that. “We were hoping that you could shed some light on that. Is it possible that this was meant as an attack against you?”
“Possible? I think it is a certainty. The young man who survived—his name is Garza—swore to me that the killers were not members of a drug gang. He told me the killers were police.”
This was not news to Tam. Both the Mexican government and the Juarez municipal police department had denied involvement in the strongest possible terms, claiming that the perpetrators had impersonated police officers and established a bogus checkpoint. That was a plausible enough explanation, but it was equally likely that actual, sworn officers had succumbed to the appeal of easy money. Neither scenario however answered the next question. “Why? What did these enemies hope to accomplish?”
Esperanza ducked his head. “They wish to destroy everything I have built. This terror attack, aimed at students, will frighten the young people away from university, making them easy prey for the gangs.”
“You said this wasn’t the gangs.”
“There are many in my country—and in yours—who profit from the way things are. You know this is true.”
Tam gave an ambiguous nod. “Anyone in particular? I’ve heard that you’ve been very critical of President Mendoza?”
Esperanza’s expression darkened, and his tone became grave. “Even if he is not directly responsible for this incident, he has led Mexico to ruin.”
The abrupt shift in Esperanza’s demeanor caught Tam by surprise. Her intent had been to keep her questions vague, gently probing him to get a sense of the degree of his involvement in the conspiracy, but she sensed an opportunity and decided to take a more direct approach. “Juan Garza, the survivor, overheard one of the killers making a phone call. ‘The time for destiny has come.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
Esperanza shook his head, the question seeming to skip off his consciousness like a stone across the surface of a pond, but a moment later, it sank in and his eyebrows drew together in consternation. “I did not know of this. Destiny, you say?”
Tam watched him, saying nothing as she weighed his response. The man knew nothing about Destiny, she was certain of that, but the word clearly meant something to him. She glanced at Greg, who had been silent thus far, waiting to step in as the ‘bad cop’ if the situation warranted.
He returned a faint nod then rephrased Tam’s question with more assertiveness. “It does mean something, doesn’t it? You’ve heard that word before.”
Esperanza shook his head, but the uncertainty was still there. “I don’t understand what it means.”
“I think you do.”
Tam raised a hand, signaling Greg to back off, and then leaned forward, gripping the edge of his desk. “Mr. Esperanza, we believe that this attack is just the beginning of a terror plot that will threaten the security of both Mexico and the United States. If there’s anything you can tell us, even something that might seem insignificant, I urge you to share it.”
Esperanza’s jaw worked as if chewing over an answer, but then he shook his head again. “I am very sorry, but I know of no terror plot.” He sat back in his chair. “You must forgive me. My schedule has been full of late. I’m leaving for Mexico City within the hour. I will be addressing congress and asking for the removal of President Mendoza. I’m afraid I’ve given you too much of my time already.”
So much for “my time is yours,” Tam thought, but let it go without comment. Esperanza was not going to say any more on the subject, not to her at least. His sudden about-face was answer enough.
She stood and extended her hand again, this time proffering a business card embossed with the logo of the State Department. “If you think of anything else, please give me a call.”
Esperanza accepted the card but instead of pocketing it, simply placed it on the desk. “Of course. Now if you will excuse me.”
The dismissal was absolute, and Tam made no further attempt at conversation. She exited the room with Greg in tow and returned to the elevator where they found the car waiting. As soon as the doors closed, she took an ear bud from her pocket and slipped it into place.
“Think he’ll bite?” Greg asked.
“If he does, he better do it soon.” She did not need to explain the reason for this to Greg. He was well-acquainted with the limitations of the miniaturized transmitter she had planted in the businessman’s office. The bug had a range of just a few hundred yards and only about half an hour of battery life, but Tam had a feeling they would know something long before either was a factor. “I don’t think he knows what’s going on, but he knows something is going on.”
For several seconds, she heard only creaks and scratches in the earpiece, the sounds of a person sitting by himself in a room. Come on, she thought. Make the call. You know you want to.
The elevator car made an unexpected stop on the second floor. The doors opened with a faint whooshing sound that almost eclipsed the electronic tones of someone dialing a number on a telephone.
Because she was so intently focused on her electronic eavesdropping, Tam did not even notice that no one had gotten on the elevator.
“Ah, Tam?”
She raised a hand to silence Greg. “He’s calling someone.” She pressed her hand to her ear so that she wouldn’t miss a word. The bug wouldn’t allow her to hear the other side of a phone conversation but she had a pretty good idea who he would call first and what he said would reveal the extent of his knowledge, even if the replies were inaudible.
Electronic music, something with a samba beat, filled the air. A ringtone.
For a fleeting instant, she thought Esperanza might have put his phone in speaker mode, but then she realized the noise wasn’t coming from the ear bud.
She looked up, the coincidence triggering alarm bells in her head, but it was already too late.
More than a half-dozen men stood in front of the elevator doors. Their ethnicity was not immediately apparent. All were Caucasian, but determining whether they were Mexican, American or Russian, would take more than a glance. Two were wearing what looked like police uniforms, security guards probably, while the others were in plain clothes. Their attire was a hodgepodge, as was the variety of firearms—pistols, rifles, a pump-action shotgun—aimed at the pair exiting the elevator.
A man in the middle of the group, wearing a rumpled suit, was conspicuously unarmed. The musical ringtone was issuing from his breast pocket. Even if Tam had not recognized him from a photograph she had seen only a couple hours before, she would have known immediately that he was the most dangerous of the lot.
She mustered a smile to hide her anxiety. “My goodness, if it isn’t Mr. Roger Lavelle.”
Surprise flickered across Lavelle’s face, quickly replaced by a look of cool contempt. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I was about to say that you have me at a disadvantage, but I guess that’s not really true.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that.”
“I was told that you might be a problem.”
“Who told you that? Your Russian pal, Samsonov?”
There was another ripple of astonishment followed by a tense silence in which the only sound was the phone in Lavelle’s pocket.
Figuring the situation couldn’t get any worse, Tam decided to dig deeper. “I’ll admit, the Dominion and the Russians working together threw us a little. You do know that they’re playing you, right?”
Lavelle’s face twisted into a sneer. “You have no idea what’s really going on.”
“No?” Tam shrugged. “You might want to answer that. I think your friend Esperanza has some questions about Destiny.”
CHAPTER 18
Washington D.C.
The pattern, Stone thought, was proving damn
ed elusive.
The numbers were a code. The Spear of Destiny was somehow the key to cracking it, but the Spear was gone. A discreet inquiry by phone had confirmed their worst fears. The hotel had been robbed at gunpoint, the safe and several rooms—the rooms that would have been theirs—ransacked.
The loss of their single advantage over the Dominion had left them all stunned and Stone was struggling to reorient himself. The attack on Avery had left him shaken. He should have anticipated the Dominion’s response, should have taken steps to ensure her safety, as well as protecting the Spear better. It had all been so predictable, yet he had missed the signs and Avery had nearly paid a very dear price for his mistake.
He closed his eyes, tuning out the hum of activity in the pub on the airport concourse where, in the absence of a better destination, they had gathered to plan their next move. Tuning out his dining companions was a problem of a different stripe. Hardly a word had been spoken since their arrival, but their thoughts were anything but quiet. Stone was no mind-reader. He didn’t need to be to pick up the none-too-subtle cues of body language.
Sievers was easy, not surprising since Stone had spent the better part of a year dissecting his behavior. The contractor was struggling to understand the significance of what was happening, but because he was following orders and dealing with compartmentalized directives, the uncertainty of the situation did not bother him as much as the possibility that he might have made the wrong call. The obvious course of action, the one Sievers knew he should take, was to simply grab Stone and head for the nearest EmergInt office. He wasn’t ready to do that, not yet at least, but if Stone could not show him that they were making progress, the gravity of that option would eventually be impossible to overcome.
Kasey was harder to read. She was the product of a culture where displays of emotion were regarded as a sign of weakness. Compounding that, she had chosen a career where keeping secrets was the essential life-support system. Yet, he had spent enough time with her to identify her self-control mechanisms. Kasey shielded herself with sarcasm and a self-assuredness that bordered on arrogance. He took her present silence as an indication of how frustrated and out of her depth she now felt. Nevertheless, she sat up straight in her chair, sipping a Coke and surreptitiously checking for any signs of Dominion surveillance, as if she might, by sheer willpower, bring about order out of chaos. Stone sensed that the success of their mission was of less importance to Kasey than not being solely responsible for its failure. She was not, of course. They were in an impossible situation, constrained by too little information and facing an enemy who held all the cards, but to someone like Kasey, that was no excuse.
Avery, who had neither formal military training nor any particular cultural programming, was about as hard to read as a neon sign, but the message was not at all what Stone would have expected from someone who had just narrowly escaped a kidnapping. Rather than retreating into herself, Avery’s brain was in overdrive as she wrestled with the mystery of what Patton had called the Devil’s gift. Her brute force attack had not yielded any fresh insights, but Stone was impressed with her resiliency. She was made of tougher stuff than she appeared.
“I don’t get it,” Sievers said, breaking the long silence. “Why try to kidnap her if they already had what they wanted?”
“They didn’t have it,” Stone replied. “And they weren’t certain that we had it. They were waiting for us at the airport. It wouldn’t have been difficult to figure out which plane we were on or to get our flight plan. When we landed, they followed us, first to the hotel, then to the Library. Trading Avery for the Spear was the preferred option because they couldn’t be sure where we were keeping it. When that didn’t work, they had to go with Plan B. Unfortunately for us, it worked.”
“We have to get the Spear back,” Kasey declared. “We’re dead in the water without it.”
“What about the kidnappers?” Sievers suggested. “We know what they look like. Shouldn’t be too hard to put names to the faces. We track them down, sweat them until they give up their accomplices.”
Kasey brightened at this idea, but Stone shook his head. “That will take time that we don’t have. We need to get ahead of them.”
“And how are we gonna do that if we don’t know where they’re going?”
“By cracking the code,” Avery declared.
“Without the Spear?” Kasey made no effort to conceal her doubtfulness.
Avery caught Stone’s gaze and held it. “A code is just another pattern, right? If we start with what we already know, then all we have to do is fill in the blanks.”
“We don’t know anything,” Kasey said, irritably.
Avery grabbed a napkin and a pen and started writing. “This is how you do it, right? List everything you know and figure out what the connections are?”
Stone couldn’t help but smile as Avery’s list took shape.
Patton
Code
Spear of Destiny
Devil’s gift.
“What else?” she asked, her pen hovering above the napkin.
“The Devil,” Sievers suggested. “Sounds like it was his nickname for someone. A real person.”
“Good.” Stone was pleased that Sievers was taking an interest. He needed the man to be engaged in their current effort, rather than scheming to return Stone to the black site. “But the code is the important thing. It’s a message, hidden in those numbers.”
Kasey rolled her eyes. “Duh.”
Stone smiled. Kasey’s sarcasm was also a good sign.
Avery wrote down the code on another napkin.
29 33 13 108 10 8
“Wasn’t that Patton’s high school locker combo?” Kasey said with a wink to Sievers.
“I’ll try Googling it.” Avery tapped the digits in, then shook her head. “Nothing. A lot of basketball scores. A substitution cipher would make sense. It’s short, but if that’s what it is, we should be able to crack it even without the key.”
“I doubt it will be that easy. Patton would have known a thing or two about encryption.” Stone drummed his fingers on the table. “What did he say? ‘Let him that hath understanding count the number. The Spear will point the way.’”
“The first part is from the Bible,” Avery said. “Revelation thirteen. ‘Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man, and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.’ Maybe the numbers are Bible verses? Or Bible page numbers? What if we start with that verse, then count letters.”
She navigated to an online edition of the King James Version and looked up the passage. “All right, if I start with the word ‘let’, counting forward to twenty-nine gives us the letter ‘O.’ Then ‘T.’” She continued counting and writing letters, then frowned at the final result.
O H A A T H
“Maybe I should start at the beginning of the verse.”
“Or maybe it’s a math problem,” Kasey said. “Try adding the numbers up?”
Stone couldn’t tell if she was serious, but Avery shrugged and then did just that.
“201?” She looked up to see if that number had any significance to Stone, the shrugged. “Well, I suppose that would be too obvious.” She tapped the pen against the sum. “There’s a Latin inscription on the Spear. Maybe we’re supposed to convert this into Roman numerals. Or maybe the number itself is significant, like in numerology?”
Stone turned to Sievers. “You’re the closest thing we have to a Patton scholar here. Was he interested in esoterica?”
“Not from what I’ve read.”
“It’s a joke,” Stone declared. “Subterfuge. He’s got us chasing our tail.” He closed his eyes trying once more to focus on the important details and separate out the extraneous. “‘The Spear will point the way.’ The way to what? Are we looking for a physical location?”
“That would make sense,” suggested Avery. “X marks the spot. Go here and find the Devil’s gift.”
&nbs
p; “The numbers could be map coordinates,” offered Sievers.
Stone opened his eyes. “Latitude and longitude? Okay, let’s try that. Twenty-nine degrees, thirty-three minutes, thirteen seconds, by one hundred eight degrees, ten minutes, eight seconds. That would narrow it down to an area less than a quarter of a mile across. Without cardinal directions, there are four places on earth that match those coordinates.”
“I’m on it.” She tapped the phone a few times, then studied the results. “First location, roughly twenty-nine north, one-oh-eight east, is in China, about a hundred miles east of Chongqing. There’s a massive limestone karst formation there. Caves, sinkholes, natural bridges.” She glanced over at Sievers. “Did Patton ever go to China?”
“I don’t think so.”
“We can’t discount it,” Stone said. “Based on the surrounding text, I don’t think Patton ever laid eyes on this ‘gift,’ whatever it is, so it could be at any of these locations.”
“Not this one. Twenty-nine south is in the Indian Ocean, about four hundred miles west of Australia. Deep water, not much else. Same story in the western hemisphere. Smack dab in the middle of the… oh.”
“What?”
“Those coordinates are less than two hundred miles south of Easter Island.”
Stone considered this. There were few places on earth more remote than Easter Island. “A good place to hide something. Where’s the last one?”
Avery’s excitement reached a new peak. She turned the phone to show them all the results. “Mexico! That can’t be a coincidence.”
Stone nodded, but the discovery was not a surprise. This was the connection he had known would be there. All this did was confirm that they had correctly identified the numbers as coordinates. But did they hide another secret?
“It’s in the Sierra Madre mountain range, in the state of Chihuahua,” Avery continued. “That’s the same area where Patton hunted Pancho Villa.”