Philippe shushed him. This wasn’t a good time to appear aggressive. He needed to get free first.
“Let’s go back to the diary. You have it and you’ve looked at it, right?”
“Yes. Much of it is simply row after row of numbers. It’s some kind of code, I figure. Before the first set of numbers appears, there’s a line talking about how important the Fuhrer’s book is to Grandfather. I think somehow that old copy of Mein Kampf that’s been in the safety deposit box for years is the key to decoding the diary.”
“Where are those two books?”
“Adriana has the Hitler book. I think it may be in her hotel room. I have the diary. I brought it here and put it in a locker at the train station for safekeeping. The key’s in my pants pocket.”
“And where are the bars of gold you stole?” Paul knelt and reached into the pocket of Philippe’s pants still lying gathered around his ankles. Suddenly the bound man lashed out his feet, catching Paul under the chin and knocking him backwards. He lay on the floor for a moment, rubbed his chin and caught his breath, then stood.
Dammit! Why the hell did you do that? That was unintentional – the Bad Man had acted on his own, ignoring the consequence. Philippe couldn’t free himself. All he’d done was make things much, much worse. He hadn’t wanted to piss off his old partner, but the Bad Man couldn’t have cared less.
“That was an intelligent move,” Paul said sarcastically. “You kick me when you’re tied to the pole.” He picked up the cable and roughly attached the connector back onto his prisoner’s scrotum.
“Shit!”
“Oh my, does it hurt? You haven’t seen anything yet! Wait until you feel this!” He turned the hand crank slowly.
Without emotion Paul watched his prisoner twist about, writhing and screaming. Rotating the crank faster, he said, “I don’t think you’ve told me yet where the gold bars are.”
“Stop! Stop and I’ll tell you! For God’s sake, this is killing me!”
Paul stopped. “Really? I’m finding this very entertaining. You’re quite a dancer, you know. You should go into theater.”
When the voltage stopped, Philippe’s head hung down on his chest. Waste and urine ran down his legs. He took a breath and slurred, “I traded in the gold bars at the bank in Vienna and received unregistered bearer bonds. The total is over six million dollars. They’re in the locker with the diary. You can have them…”
“I’m touched. How generous of you, offering to give me all that money. Of course I can have them. And I will take you up on your kind offer. And now, as much as I’ve enjoyed our time together, it’s time to bring our little visit to a close. I hope you don’t think I mistrust you, but given our history I need to verify what you’ve told me. It will take me a little while, so here’s what I’ve planned for you until I’m back.”
He explained what was going to happen next. Philippe cried and begged for mercy, but Paul merely smiled. He unhooked the clamp briefly, then hooked it back in another place.
Before he left, he gave the crank a couple of turns so his prisoner would experience the pain.
Although there would be no voltage surging through the cable while Paul was gone, the connector was securely clamped around Philippe’s left testicle, squeezing it so tightly he screamed for mercy.
But there was no mercy.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The locker in Amsterdam’s Central train station held exactly what Philippe had said. Paul took out a manila envelope and opened it. Inside were seven bearer bonds that had been issued by Stadt Privatbank of Vienna, Austria. Bearer bonds were a unique asset – they weren’t registered to any named individual or company. They were completely private and amazingly simple to convert – whoever presented them for redemption at the bank would receive the proceeds, period. No proof of ownership, no identification, no questions asked. It made things even better that these bonds were denominated in US dollars, the world’s primary currency. Six of them were issued for $1,000,000 each, and the seventh was in the amount of $182,677.
He picked up the diary and saw the bright red swastika glistening on its cover. Thumbing through a few pages, he came to the ciphers Philippe had described. Paul already had a good idea what they were. Later he’d try to prove it. He put everything in his valise and took a cab back to the warehouse district. Now it was time to finish things with his old partner.
Still tied to the center post, Philippe had passed out and slipped to the floor, sitting naked in his own waste. His left testicle, the one to which Paul had clamped the connector, was swollen to the size of a golf ball.
——
When Adriana heard the knock, she stopped packing and let Paul in. He glanced at the bed and saw her half-filled suitcase.
“Are you running away again?”
Enraged, she pounded on his chest with her fists. “What I do is none of your business! Where’s Philippe – did you kill him? Who are you? I felt secure with you and I took a chance trusting you. You’re some kind of wealthy adventurer, you said. I just begin believing you, and suddenly I learn that you two once tried to kill each other. Then you pull out a gun with a silencer and shoot him, right here in my hotel room. Thank God no one heard it. I want to know who you are, what you want with me, and exactly what’s going on.”
“So do I, Adriana. I want to know exactly what’s going on too. You see, Philippe told me everything. You weren’t Nicu’s friend and confidante at all. You’re a criminal just like Philippe. You were working for him the whole time, helping him steal from his grandfather and his siblings.”
She broke down in tears. “I didn’t do that! He only wanted the diary, and Nicu had given it to me by then anyway. I didn’t steal from Nicu. He gave me everything in his safety deposit box. His grandchildren didn’t know about it, he said. He told me to empty the box soon, before he died, so they wouldn’t get it first. All I did was what he wanted. I’m telling you the truth! You have to believe me!”
“How much gold did you take?”
“All there was – twenty-three bars. Nicu gave them to me. I already told you that.”
“But understand this. I don’t believe you. Philippe stole over a hundred and fifty bars. They were in a safety deposit box, just like you say yours were. Here’s what I think really happened. Nicu had only one box. The gold bars you got came from Philippe. They were part of the hoard he stole from his own brother and sister. It makes total sense that he gave you some of the gold. After all, you were his lover and his partner in crime. According to him, you were even screwing his brains out today, just minutes before I knocked on your door. Deny that, Adriana! It happened, didn’t it?”
She screamed, “Stop it, Paul! Stop it! Yes, that happened, but it’s not like you think. I hate him! I hate him! You’re all wrong about this. Please believe me.” She embraced him, but he pushed her away roughly.
“Prove it, Adriana. Prove I’m wrong. Give me the other book. I know you have it.”
“First him, now you! What the hell is it about that old book? You’re as bad as he is!”
She ran to her suitcase, furiously dug to the bottom and pulled out Hitler’s manifesto. She threw it across the room and yelled, “Here! Have fun reading how Adolf intended to rule the world. Get out, Paul! Go to hell! I never want to see you again!”
As he walked into the hallway, she slammed the door behind him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
For the better part of two days Paul had worked on the diary. His original theory had been correct: the numerals were words, encoded using a process called a book cipher. It was a remarkably simple but extremely effective way to encrypt a message. In fact, it was one he had used himself in the days when he worked as an assassin for the CIA. The sender and receiver each had identical books. Words were then encoded using page numbers and word counts in that book. Since both parties had exactly the same edition of the book, the code could easily be decrypted. In Nicu’s case, there was no receiver; he was simply encoding things he didn’t
want people to see. He therefore needed only one book as his decryption key.
As soon as he heard how important Hitler’s book had been to Nicu, Paul was sure that Mein Kampf would solve the puzzle. Once he got into it, he expected to find that Nicu had encoded certain words using the book as his key. The old man had instructed Adriana to guard the book until she needed it. In its flyleaf he had even written the words, “This is my most important book.” The final clue – the icing on the cake – was the sentence Nicu had written in the diary, just before the first numbers appeared.
For understanding I turn to my Fuhrer’s famous book. It will guide me.
It wouldn’t take long to determine if these numbers constituted a book cipher code. Paul knew exactly where to start. He turned to the end of the book and saw that there were 913 pages. Next he counted the words on a random page, getting a rough idea how many words there were per page. The page he’d counted had 527 words, so he knew that a typical page would have somewhere around that number. Now he was ready to test his theory that this was a book cipher. He looked at the first numeric line, Nicu’s entry for January 2, 1944.
89889 88380 89448 86244 04801 67018 80094 04004 89889 57216
If he was correct, these ten sets of numbers actually were a ten-word sentence. The first number was 89889. The first two or three numbers, 89 or 898, would be the page. The last two or three numbers, 889 or 89, pointed to a certain word on that page. Since the book had 913 pages, the first numbers could be either page 89 or page 898. The last number, indicating which word to use, was either 889 or 89. Since an average page had 527 words, Paul knew it had to be 89. He turned to page 898 and counted words. The eighty-ninth word was das – in English, the. That was the first and also the ninth word of the sentence.
It was a slow process because every word required a different page and a sometimes long word count. That was the beauty of the book cipher. It was impossible to decode without knowing which exact book to use, and it was incredibly simple if you knew. Ten minutes later his theory was confirmed. He had decoded a complete sentence of ten German words. In English there were eleven.
The Reich is building a secret tunnel for the Ghost Train.
He shuddered with anticipation. This was exactly what he’d hoped for. He worked on a few more sets of numbers, every line of which became a complete sentence.
Paul skimmed the book, roughly counting how many numeric sequences there were. There were so many that he knew the decoding project would take days. He flipped back to check the last entries, the ones for August 20 and 21, 1944. He found it interesting that the diary ended on August 21 but the train log from Bucharest Station continued. Its last entry was ten days later, a day before the Red Army entered Bucharest.
When the Ghost Train left Nicu’s station on August 21, the Nazi’s mission was obviously complete. He’d have confirmed it arrived in Sinaia, Paul knew, but presumably there was nothing more to write in the diary. He knew his beloved Reich was going down in defeat. He must have chosen to end his journal on a success, not the looming failure he could see coming.
As he read Nicu’s last two entries, he noticed something intriguing. Both days talked of Operation Geist, the Ghost, and the last notation said that the Ghost Train was coming to Bucharest that very day. From what little Paul had seen in the journal so far, all earlier references to the Ghost Train had been encrypted. Now when things were almost over, there was no code anymore. The Ghost Train was there in German for anyone to read. Did it no longer matter? Was the mystery train a secret no longer? Or was the train on August 21 not the real one at all, but just a decoy? Was the real train already hidden away in the mountains?
There was something else strange about these last two diary entries. He had written more code, but this was different. Several times the numerals appeared, but now they were separated by periods or a slash. Whatever this was, Nicu wasn’t using the book cipher code anymore. This was different.
27843.47747.08012.47747.92001/48286
Paul tackled this enigma by looking up the six words that corresponded to the numbers. That didn’t work. The German words were provident manifest boy manifest concern modern. Because of the number of pages and words per page, the second and fourth words could also be pardon, the third could be wheel and the last could be castle. Why did Nicu encrypt these differently? What did the four periods and the slash mark mean?
It was obvious from reading the entries that the coded numbers stood for a place. The German words preceding each use of the sequence mentioned proceeding to, or supervising a project at, or building a tunnel under whatever the coded sequence meant. He had only that tiny morsel of information to guide him.
He played with the words, rearranging them and using their first letters to make a new one, but it didn’t work. He stared at them in hopes he’d find the meaning. Maybe Nicu had used another book to encode this entry. Paul dismissed that as unlikely. If it were true, there would have been a clue to guide whomever Nicu intended to be the one who deciphered his journal.
Paul kept at it for two hours straight. Sore and tired from sitting, he wrote the numbers and the words on a scrap of paper and took them to a nearby coffee shop. He gazed at the page, moving the numbers around in his head. Nothing made any sense, no matter what he did with them. What was Nicu trying to say?
But wait! These numbers were different from all the others – they were separated by periods and a slash. Suddenly he got it! He rushed back to try his theory.
What if the first five numbers, the sequence 27843, represented a single letter instead of a word? He turned to page 278 and counted forty-three letters. He wrote down an S. This method of decoding was more difficult than before. Because there were so many individual letters on a page, each code number could have two, maybe even three possible meanings. The number 27843 could refer to the forty-third letter on page 278, or the eight hundred forty-third letter on page 27.
He pressed on, ignoring the final sequence of numerals for now. It was unlike the rest, separated by a slash mark instead of a period. If that one was a word, it was either modern or castle. Maybe when he was finished, it would make sense.
The letters didn’t help, but could this be an anagram? There were so many combinations of letters that he couldn’t do this on his own. He searched the Internet and found a computer program that would sort anagrams and provide every possible solution. He entered the letters and soon had a confusing list of jabberwocky. Except for one word. There was one exciting possibility, one that could make sense. Using the last number as the word castle, he added the computer-generated word peles.
Paul had heard of Peles Castle, the most famous royal residence in Romania. Fired up, he did a quick search to find out about it.
Peles Castle was a massive 150-year-old building situated in the remote Carpathian Mountains ninety miles northwest of Bucharest. It had been taken over by the Nazis from 1943 until 1945. The family was forced to move out and the grounds were put under heavy guard, but records showed no war-related use of the huge facility. The Nazis appropriated it but did nothing with it. Why was that? Why had Hitler wanted Peles Castle but then did nothing there?
That old feeling, the familiar rush of excitement when he’d made a breakthrough, was everywhere inside him once again. Paul had solved this mystery.
There actually had been activity at Peles Castle. The Nazis didn’t record it because it was top secret.
The lonely mountain retreat was a perfect location to build a tunnel that would hide a train.
At the same time he was on fire with the thrill of discovery, he had to face a problem. He couldn’t do everything himself. He had to have help.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The Reich is building a secret tunnel for the Ghost Train.
Those first tantalizing words Paul decoded had fueled the passion he’d felt so many times before. The anticipation of a discovery, the adrenalin-rushing possibility of treasure, the enthusiastic desire to focus on nothing but this – a
ll of this put Paul on an emotional rocket to the moon. He couldn’t focus on the numbers any longer. He couldn’t concentrate on the diary. He couldn’t think about anything except a castle in the countryside, a tunnel beneath it, and a 1940s freight train with thirteen loaded boxcars sitting on a track deep inside the hidden passage.
The decoding process was critical; there had to be far more information about the Ghost Train in Nicu’s cryptic numerals. There could be instructions and clues that he’d require. But there was a major logistical issue. Paul had glanced at every page in the diary, counting over a hundred that contained numbers. Some pages had a lot, some only a few. The fact was, this was no simple deciphering project. Untangling each number would take days – days he didn’t have.
The time was up. He had to let the minister know exactly what he’d found. He couldn’t keep this information to himself even a few more days, despite how much easier it would have made things. Once Herr Deutsch became aware of what Paul knew, this cat could never be put back into the bag. Things would be out of his control. There would be jurisdictional considerations. The Ghost Train was a Nazi issue, but Nicu’s diary revealed that it was sitting under a castle in Romania. Two governments would be vying for control, publicity and the inevitable fifteen minutes of fame that would accompany the announcement.
He had to wait one more day to call Herr Deutsch so he could get his problem solved. That afternoon Paul flew to Amsterdam, and by evening he was standing outside Adriana’s new flat, carry-on bag in hand.
Adriana was preparing dinner in the comfortable apartment she’d lived in for only three days. Using cash from the black card, she’d set up a bank account and rented her new place. That little card was remarkable – whenever she ran low, she simply went to an ATM and got more. Unless someone ever asked questions, she was in a perfect situation. She intended to keep a low profile. When her doorbell rang, it gave her a chill. No one was supposed to know she was here.
The Crypt Trilogy Bundle Page 63