by Ed Kovacs
“This looks computer-generated,” stated Frank, with a bit of an accusation to his tone.
“Astrologers like to utilize computers just as much as the rest of us. Even old astrologers like Arabella. What you’re looking at is her birth chart, a map of the heavens for the location, time and date she was born.”
Frank studied the chart. “So by looking in this box to the left of the circle here, it tells me the planet Saturn was at four degrees, fifty-eight minutes, four seconds of Aries at her birth.”
“Yes, and if you look on the wheel at about the one o’clock position, you’ll see the symbol for Saturn at that angle, four degrees fifty-eight minutes, in the piece of pie marked ten—the tenth house.”
“I never did understand astrology, but there must be hundreds of possible code keys among all these charts. Degrees, minutes, and seconds. Or dates, or times. Maybe the code key is her birth date: zero seven, zero three, thirty-seven.”
“Nobody said a treasure hunt was easy.”
“Compadre, get real. If Arabella couldn’t break the code all these years, what makes you think you can?”
Wilder hesitated for just a second. “A funny feeling.”
“Well, I’ve got a funny feeling that if I don’t go home and get some sleep I’ll look like hell in class tomorrow.”
“It’s a sad day when my bro is worried more about beauty sleep than solving a riddle,” teased Sky as they shook hands. “Drive safe.”
“I do it for the ladies,” said Frank, with a smile, as he climbed into his Ford F-150.
“Thank you for your sacrifice,” joked Sky, who gave a wave as Frank drove off toward his Tucson condo.
The smile quickly faded. Although he had come away with more than he ever imagined from his time in Amsterdam with Arabella, Bacavi had echoed Wilder’s unspoken pessimism regarding a breakthrough. Something, perhaps deus ex machina, needed to rear its head for this current quest to avoid becoming another dead end. Although Sky had made a small fortune from his six best-selling books, each an alternative explanation to mysteries of Earth’s past, he desperately wanted to prove one of these theories. He could live with being called “fringe.” The moniker “kook” was a different story.
###
It was the nightlife that they lived for. Dao sat in the front seat with her boyfriend Jimmy Nguyen in his lowered, customized Honda Accord parked on a dark street just off Tenth in the historic neighborhood called the U Street Corridor, a hipster enclave featuring cool shops, bars, and ethnic restaurants.
Jimmy heard Dao’s stomach growl. She'd already told him she wanted a late dinner of Thai food and Singha beer after he finished his business. For now, though, they had to wait. He turned down the V-pop music he'd been bluetoothing from his cell to the car's sound system. He didn't want to attract attention even though the street looked deserted. He felt bored. Dao was great-looking, but except for sex, she wasn’t much of a companion. Sex was their connection. And cocaine. She was just another coke whore to Jimmy, even though she often said he meant everything to her.
Jimmy had helped get her the job at Michel’s and was giving her a thousand dollar bonus for the First Lady’s hair and nails. Since he was being so good to her, he'd demanded she arrange for her best girlfriend to join them in a threesome after all the bars closed later, and she'd agreed without batting an eye.
Dao leaned over to nibble his ear, but he pushed her away when he saw an approaching sedan flash its lights four times. “Man, the bitch is here already.”
###
A dark sedan double-parked across the street from the Accord. Rene Bailey, a slender thirtyish female in a black Nike Windbreaker, black knit cap pulled low, and oversize sunglasses, got out and casually scanned the quiet street. She engaged the stopwatch function on her watch, draped an oversize purse over her shoulder, then purposefully crossed to Jimmy’s window.
“You have it?” asked Rene softly, as Jimmy seemed to study her, trying to get a complete picture of her features. It was a rookie move, a pro would only be watching her hands, but she already knew that Jimmy was nothing but a low-rent joker.
“Yeah, right here.” Jimmy seemed to snap to attention as he reached into his shirt pocket and handed over the small zip-lock bag.
Rene, who wore super-thin black leather gloves, examined the contents briefly with a penlight. “Sure it’s hers?”
“One hundred percent. She clipped ‘em today. Very fresh. Let me know if you need some more... long as you got the juice.” The juice meant five grand.
Rene pocketed the bag. “Oh yes, the money.” But instead of pulling out an envelope of cash she brandished a silenced twenty-two caliber semi-automatic loaded with subsonic ammo. A small bag, a brass-catcher, was attached to the pistol to catch the spent shell casings as they exited the chamber, so no cartridges would be left at the scene or clatter onto the pavement. Jimmy took two rounds to the temple and died almost instantly. It occurred to Rene that a belch would have made a louder sound.
Dao went slack jaw, so stunned she didn’t even scream before taking three rounds to her head, directly into her right eye socket. Rene then dropped five grams of China White heroin onto Jimmy’s lap and sprinkled a handful of ecstasy tabs onto the dead bodies.
As she crossed back to her car, Rene checked her watch. Forty-two seconds had elapsed. Too slow. Rene took pride in successfully completing tasks with haste, yet without taking undo risks. That demanded thorough preparation. Good prep meant everything. As she eased her car forward she thought about tomorrow night’s main event and how, if all went well, the cute, former-Mossad agent she didn’t like would soon be dead.
###
Wilder locked the driveway gate as the Ford’s taillights washed-out into the night. He retrieved mail from the box at the gate. As he rifled through a stack of junk mail, one letter stood out, postmarked Amsterdam.
Dear Dr. Wilder,
I neglected to mention Matthew twenty, verse sixteen, the first ten words. It was to have been kept in mind while considering the matter we discussed.
Your friend,
Arabella Ronhaar
He tucked the letter into his shirt and hurried into his study to retrieve a Bible. He climbed back up the ladder, returning to the wing of the B-25 where he downed the last of the tea from the thermos. He read the first ten words of the Biblical passage out loud to himself. “So the last shall be first, and the first last.”
“Mysterious clues I don’t need. Something concrete would be nice,” he muttered to himself as he referred to the code he kept in a pocket-sized spiral notebook that was quickly becoming dog-eared.
+20 -40 +32 FT
+37 -19 -03 IH
+21 -06 +82 FQ
+01 +03 +05 IH
+68 -20 +42 FQ
-10 -19 -15 IH
The code certainly looked like coordinates—a set of six numbers describing an angle based on degrees, minutes and seconds of the earth’s grid. Wilder surmised the pluses and minuses of the code probably referred to a planet’s angle on one of the star charts and not, as Frank speculated, a time or date. For example, Kaatje’s moon on her natal progression chart was at 6 degrees, 51 minutes, 12 seconds of the 5th house, Gemini. If that angle were Piet’s key, then by adding or subtracting the coded numbers it would be easy to determine the true coordinates of the hidden tablets of Hui.
But did Piet use a single key or more than one? And which ones? Were the coded coordinates in the proper order of degrees, minutes, seconds? And what of the letters IH, FQ, and FT? He assumed they were code for the cardinal directions of north, south, east, or west. Without understanding that, it would be impossible to know whether the reference was to latitude or longitude. A small detail that could send one to the wrong hemisphere.
Arabella’s fish pendant would seem to refer to Pisces. But for whose chart? She and her father were both Pisces. Then he had to consider, “So the last shall be first,” and his head swam as he leaned back on the cool fuselage and closed his eyes.
<
br /> Pieces of boneyard metal gently clattered in the stirring breeze like a poor man's chimes and seemed to gift his collection of aviation militaria with a goodnight kiss. Wilder wearily closed his eyes as if trying to escape the conundrums dogging him and easily drifted to sleep. For his entire life it had only taken moments, once he'd closed his eyes, to reach slumber.
After mere seconds he jerked awake, startled with a revelation that came only moments after drifting off. The hypnogogic zone—the transition from wakefulness to sleep—enabled his unconscious to provide a flash of clarity that had eluded his conscious mind. Some people called it the “ah-ha experience.”
“The four children of Horus, the four cardinal points!” he practically yelled, then scribbled the following on the back of an envelope:
Mestha = south Hapi = north
Taumutef = east Qebhsennuf = west
Wilder felt that as an amateur Egyptologist, Piet Ronhaar quite logically could have used the four names to encode direction. “The first shall be last, the last shall be first. So if I reverse the first and last letters...” He then wrote:
Ma = am = south hi = ih = north
Tf = ft = east qf = fq = west
Excited, he rechecked the code. “It fits. He listed longitude first, not latitude. First last, last first.”
As far as Wilder knew, no researcher had arrived at this conclusion before now. As huge as this breakthrough felt, assuming it was correct, he knew the hardest part, deciphering the numbers themselves, still remained. He reached for the star charts.
The abdju fish pendant. Pisces. Three tablets, three daughters. He sensed that Arabella's father used three code keys, one from each daughter’s chart.
He stared at the complex diagrams in the girls’ charts for the umpteenth time in the last seven days. He held only a slim, layman’s understanding of astrology, a modality he held in skeptical regard, but he certainly comprehended angles of arc. Which angles were the keys? Having gleaned from a book that Pisces was the 12th house, the last house, Wilder found the section of Arabella’s chart wheel marked 12. Two angles of arc were located in the 12th house: her Sun at 10 degrees, 50 minutes 1 second, and Mercury at 4 degrees 28 minutes 24 seconds. Since Mercury chronologically came first, he reversed the two planets and focused on the angle of her Sun in the twelfth house. Continuing Piet’s leitmotif of the last becomes first, he reversed degrees with seconds, and wrote: 1 degree 50 minutes 10 seconds. Was this the one-time pad code key for the location of one of Hui’s tablets? If so, which tablet?
Since Arabella was the youngest or last Ronhaar child, Wilder proceeded to add and subtract the first set of coded coordinates to and from his proposed code key. He wrote out the results on Arabella’s envelope. He followed the same process with the other two daughters’ charts—reversing angles of arc found in the twelfth house and applying them as a key against the remaining coded coordinates.
“Five’ll gettya ten these coordinates are either in the Atlantic or the Pacific,” he muttered to himself. Wilder climbed down from the bomber's wing. Inside the trailer, his study looked like a very unkempt used book store, but he quickly found The Times of London World Atlas. He checked the coordinates, surprised to discover that all three sets were land-based in the northern hemisphere.
“Well, I’ll be, the first tablet of Hui is in southern Greece, thirty-eight degrees, thirty-one minutes, seven seconds north latitude, twenty-one degrees, ten minutes, forty-two seconds east longitude.” He slammed the book shut and walked outside with it.
Not for one minute did Wilder believe what he had blurted out in his study. The fact the coordinates were all land-based must simply be a cruel coincidence. Even if he were correct that there were three code keys, a big if, one could logically deduce hundreds of possible keys from the charts, leading to hundreds of failed search expeditions. After all, scholars brighter than he had been trying to solve this puzzle for decades. He glanced up at the night sky. I need more clues.
He struck a match, lit the envelope on fire and used the flames to fire up an inexpensive panatella. He exhaled disconsolately, watching his calculations char to ash, unaware that he had achieved in seven days what the world’s best cryptologists had failed to do in sixty years. He had broken Piet Ronhaar’s one-time pad codes and unlocked the hidden locations to the three tablets of Hui.
CHAPTER 3
48 hours later
“We’re in position, Dr. Daubert,” bellowed a husky male voice over the ship’s intercom.
Dr. Claude Daubert frowned with irritation as his narrow eyes darted between monitors, oscilloscopes, and the digital readouts of sophisticated electronics in the darkened room. He disliked the frequent interruptions from the ship's captain, a ruffian, whom he considered to be little more than a taxi driver.
He keyed the intercom talk switch and curtly replied, “I’m aware of that, Captain Jaeger.” Daubert was, after all, a refined academique, who earned a PhD in quantum mechanics from the University of Paris. He’d been one of hundreds of elite foreign scientists and researchers who were, some would say, strangely given carte blanche during their years of super secret government work at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Like many other foreign scientists, notably the Chinese, Daubert stole everything that wasn’t nailed down and not much was nailed down due to the lab’s quaint governing notion that scientific thought and discovery should freely flow amongst nations.
Now, as his assistant, Carol Swan stood awash in the green glow from a radar monitor depicting air traffic over the North Atlantic and as he triple-checked the status of the on-board nuclear reactor, Daubert didn’t think of the American taxpayers who helped fund so much of his important research. He could only think of the house he would buy on the Cote d’Azur with the bonus he was about to earn.
“Are you locked-on, Miss Swan?”
“Affirmative, doctor.”
###
Captain Yon Jaeger glanced up at the last quarter moon that skittishly ducked behind puffs of pregnant cloud as he chewed on the end of a cheap ball-point pen. Jaeger commanded the Sven Carlsson, a sixty-one meter-long pelagic freezer-trawler that now knifed insistently through the ebony North Atlantic one hundred kilometers west of the Darwin Mounds cold water reef.
The deep waters ran flush with blue ling, roundnose grenadier, tusk and black scabbard fish, yet while the holds stood empty, no nets or traps would be deployed by the crew this night. The crisp early May day had seen nearly eighteen hours of visible light at this latitude, but day finally fell valiantly and night dropped emphatically; a dark curtain to mask the biggest prize the Sven Carlsson would ever bag.
Captain Jaeger, bearded and barrel-chested, a descendent of Vikings, stood at the helm and executed the final maneuver himself, easing the hulking vessel into the assigned heading.
Efficient yet elegant, the trawler was built of steel in 1985 by Hakvort in Holland. In the nineties, she mainly fished the Barents and North Sea, trolling for coalfish and cod. A few years earlier a little known subsidiary of the international conglomerate S.E.T. bought the ship, and it underwent an ultra discreet overhaul in Vagur, Captain Jaeger’s home port in the Faroes. Trusted workmen reduced the size of the fish hold and constructed secret compartments, including a lead and concrete-lined chamber that now housed a small nuclear reactor. The reactor did not serve as the ship’s propulsion; twin Ulstein 10800 Bhp diesel engines powered the vessel conventionally. The reactor provided a power source for something much more interesting, hidden elsewhere on the ship. Something overseen by the arrogant Frenchman, Dr. Claude Daubert. What exactly Daubert was up to, was not the captain's business, and he knew better than to show even remote interest.
“We’re in position, doctor,” rasped Captain Jaeger.
###
The lieutenant shifted uneasily in his thickly padded leather seat on Air Mobility Command Flight SPAR 87. The snatch in Greece had gone off like clockwork, but until he delivered the package that sat wedged between his ankles, he
simply couldn’t relax. How his old buddy from military intelligence school at Ft Huachuca, Arizona, could sleep like a stone on the seat next to him, he couldn’t fathom.
“Marcetti, you asleep?” No answer, so the man frowned. He wanted to talk, but Marcetti behaved too much like a soldier, capable of sleeping anywhere and anytime, and not enough like a spook.
He wanted to talk because he felt unreasonably nervous. He sensed trouble. He glanced back at Ortega in the rear of the C-37A who looked as comfortable as a vegetarian in a rib joint. Maybe he felt it, too.
The op had gone well. There had been no indication at any time that they were followed or that their covers as Defense Courier Service personnel transporting NATO documents had been compromised. And what could happen on this flight? The C-37A is the military version of the Gulfstream V business jet, but with more advanced avionics, greater performance, and the ability to fly 5,500 nautical miles without refueling, while cruising at 600 m.p.h. as high as 51,000 feet, high above most other air traffic.
The air force pilots in the cockpit of the opulent craft were seasoned pros, accustomed to shuttling cabinet secretaries, congressional delegations, or senior military leaders. The plane, stationed at Chievres, Belgium, had a full-function Heads-Up Display, Ground Proximity Warning System, Microwave Landing System, a military Identification Friend/Foe transponder and other goodies. The seats were plush, the floor carpeted, the ride smooth. Lowly lieutenants seldom got to indulge in such travel comfort. Not exactly a threatening environment.
Still, the lieutenant’s unease persisted. He knew the power of what they were up against—the big picture—so he never let his guard down and pressed the package more tightly between his ankles. Just as he decided he wouldn’t sleep until after the general took delivery in D.C., the sleek plane shuddered violently and suddenly dropped in altitude.
His body whiplashed but his seat belt kept him in his chair. Really bad turbulence, he thought, as the cabin stirred with the shock of fear. He looked for Ortega, but couldn’t see him. Probably got hammered by the... was the last rational thought the lieutenant had in his twenty-eight year-old life. His awareness seemed to shift into slow motion as a horrific roar consumed the aircraft.