by Bob Mayer
“The Poe thing is in the past,” Evie said. “In the present, yesterday they obviously had a common enemy.”
Ducharme nodded. “I think they were worried about their meeting being compromised.”
“What makes you say that?”
“McBride's roses and the bottle were a meeting safe signal,” Ducharme said. “He was probably going to place them on the Milestone. LaGrange would see them and know it was safe to approach. And if McBride had been doing the same thing at Poe’s grave every year, then it was also an annual situational safe signal.”
“Safe from who?” Evie asked.
Kincannon answered. “From whoever killed them.”
“Why cognac and three roses?” Ducharme asked.
“Poe was a heavy drinker,” Evie said. “Alcohol killed him at a relatively young age, although amontillado would seem more appropriate. The roses are thought to represent the three people supposedly buried under his monument: Poe, his wife Virginia, and his mother-in-law, Mary Clemm. You said ‘annual situational safe signal’,” Evie noted. “It makes sense.”
“You know what a safe signal is?” Ducharme was surprised.
“Yes. The Poe Toaster is reported in the news. If he didn’t show up on Poe’s birthday it would be reported in the news. And if the Toaster showed up on a day other than Poe’s birthday and left the roses and cognac that would also make the news. An indirect means of signaling when either side doesn’t want to directly contact each other.”
“I don’t think they teach safe signals in civilian colleges,” Ducharme noted.
Evie sighed. “They do at the Farm. So following the logic, the killer knew they would be meeting at the Zero Milestone ahead of time.”
“Hold on,” Ducharme said. “The Farm? You were CIA?”
“Once upon a time,” Evie admitted.
“What the fuck?” Ducharme said. “Researcher?”
She gave him a look of disdain. “Field operative. I speak Farsi, Russian and German. Spent six years overseas, two in the Middle East, two in Turkey and a year and a half in Russia. They appreciated my memory in the Agency, by the way.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Kincannon said. “How do you go from that to Monticello?”
“Long story for another time,” Evie said. “Not important right now.”
Ducharme ran a hand across the stubble on his chin. “Why do you say the killer knew about the meeting?”
“General LaGrange was killed before he made it to the Zero Milestone," Evie said. "Which means there’s a very good chance they were going there to meet the killer or someone the killer knew. But they were betrayed.”
Ducharme mulled over other aspects of the murders. “What about the head-heart letter by Jefferson? Why would the killer want to infer that letter?”
“I’m not sure the killer wanted to infer the letter,” Evie said. “I think it was a lure.”
Ducharme was confused. “What?”
“The killer couldn’t be sure LaGrange got a message to you or that McBride got one to me. But arranging the head and heart like that, would definitely be sending a message to us. To me at least.”
“I don’t follow,” Ducharme said.
“Perhaps I’m wrong,” Evie said.
“And if you’re right?” Ducharme asked. “What’s the purpose?”
Evie shrugged. “To draw us out into the open.”
“Why?”
“No idea.
Lying once more, Ducharme thought.
She spoke. “Let’s consider the letter itself. It’s a love letter. Sort of. Let me think.” She pulled out her iPhone and played with the screen.
Ducharme looked over at her. She stared unfocused at her iPhone, lost somewhere in her own mind. He glanced in the back seat. Kincannon had his eyes closed. Rest when you can—a mantra of Special Forces.
When Evie spoke, her voice was low as she read. “If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its head, instead of its hearts, where should we be now? Hanging on a gallows.” She looked up. “The thrust of the letter was that one should trust one’s heart over one’s head. Jefferson was in love with Mrs. Cosway. He’d broken his wrist, trying to jump over a fountain in Paris in an attempt to impress her just a month before he wrote the letter.”
Ducharme was surprised. Thomas Jefferson, the one carved into Mount Rushmore, the one whose Memorial looked solemnly over the Tidal Basin, jumping a fountain to impress a woman?
Evie went on. "Jefferson was trying to use his head to discipline what he believed was his misbehaving heart. If you read it closely, there’s also a great deal of Jefferson’s political philosophy in it and his thoughts on how things should be conducted in the United States. A political letter inside a love letter, so to speak.”
Ducharme rubbed the scar under his right eye, trying to alleviate the constant irritation. “If the letter was politics inside love, perhaps what the killer did was politics inside hate.”
Evie looked at him in surprise. “Interesting.”
“Maybe it’s even simpler than that.” Ducharme pulled his hand away from his face. “You really think McBride was this Poe Toaster?”
“McBride was fascinated with Edgar Allan Poe. He had those specific items for a reason.”
“So the killer probably also knows that the flowers and bottle was a signal. What was your relationship with McBride?”
Ducharme watched Evie, expecting anything from a snort to a slap, but there was nothing. Kincannon’s eyes opened to slit.
“He was my mentor when I did an internship at the Post, while I was in grad school,” Evie said. “He was my student at UVA after he retired. When he graduated, he taught part time in the history department. I teach a class there, as part of my curator duties. He was my friend.”
She reached in the briefcase and pulled out a metal rod. “The disks go on this.” She unscrewed one end of the rod and slid her disk on. Then she took Ducharme’s and slid it on. “We have disks one and twenty-six. We need twenty-four more disks.” She frowned. “But—“
“What?” Ducharme asked.
“There should be two ciphers. Identical. If we only have one—“ her eyes got the faraway look for almost a minute before she spoke again. “OK. If there’s only one Cipher, then there are two messages on it. One is an initiating Key phrase once we have all the wheels. The wheels are turned to that 26-letter Key. Then we look at the other rows to find the true message.”
“Ingenious and simple.” Ducharme was used to dealing with encrypted messages. Jefferson had invented a simple, but effective means long before the era of electronic ciphers. It had limitations--you had to have the actual cipher, not something you could carry around in your pocket. And the Key. But still—a metal rod and wood disks cipher that were pretty much unbreakable.
“What kind of message will it yield?” Kincannon asked. “Obviously it’s important, but what twenty-six letter message could be that important?”
“No idea,” Evie said, her eyes sliding away.
Ducharme glanced in the rear view mirror and met Kincannon’s eyes. The Sergeant Major nodded ever so slightly.
“What’s strange,” Evie said, oblivious to everything around her, “is that there are only two original Jefferson Cipher Wheels known to be in existence. One at Monticello and one in the Smithsonian. I checked and the one at Monticello is still there. And if someone had stolen the one at the Smithsonian, I’d have heard about it.”
“These are from a third.”
“Yes. And it’s definitely an original made by Jefferson himself. I can tell from these markings on the rod.”
“That you, the Curator at Monticello, didn’t know about.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment, then spoke. “LaGrange and McBride were meeting this evening at the Zero Milestone, but given they were using a safe signal, they were worried they might be attacked. They wouldn’t have brought their disks, and they sent one to each of us. The quest
ion is why were they meeting now? And here in Washington? Why not in Baltimore at Poe’s grave?”
Logical. Analytical. Always thinking. There was definitely something different from the norm with Evie, Ducharme thought, beyond the fact that she had CIA in her past. It was as if the murders earlier in the evening had not occurred. “LaGrange was assigned to the National Security Council. He lived here. Maybe they were meeting someone else in the area.”
“Why now?” she repeated her first question.
Ducharme shrugged. “I don’t know. Either the meeting was planned a while ago, or they just decided to do it.”
“McBride gave me his briefcase and told me to meet him at the restaurant yesterday afternoon. So it was a short notice thing.”
Kincannon summed that up. “Something happened yesterday that made them decide to meet. So the killer also knew they were going to meet. So—“
Evie completed the thought for him. “—the killer did something yesterday to make them contact each other. Such as set up a meeting.”
“And they were very worried about the meeting,” Ducharme said.
“Why do you say that?”
“They sent us the two disks and sent both of us to that restaurant.”
Evie nodded. “They did. You know, Poe wrote the Purloined Letter and—“ she fell silent and went into one of her states again. “The real question is what is the connection forged by Jefferson, the person from the past who reached out from the grave to bring McBride and LaGrange together.”
“And put them in their own graves.” The beast reared up in Ducharme’s chest. He took a deep breath. Let it out. Forced himself to relax. His head was pounding, a steady drumbeat of pain and anger. “I know the Poe connection, but what is Jefferson’s tie to the two of them?”
“Thomas Jefferson not only founded the University of Virginia,” she said, “but also the Military Academy.”
“You told Burns that, but Sylvanus Thayer was the father of the Military Academy,” Ducharme responded.
“Thayer wasn’t even the first Superintendent,” Evie shot back. “He was the third.”
Kincannon spoke from the back seat. “Don’t fight the lady, Duke. She’s ahead of you in points already.”
Ducharme ignored him. “Washington. He founded West Point. There’s that big-ass statue of him on the Plain in front of the Mess Hall. There is no statue of Jefferson at the Academy. We had to memorize every damn statue at the place as Plebes.”
“Jefferson founded the Military Academy in 1802 when he was President,” Evie said in a calm voice.
The date was right. Ducharme realized he’d never connected the date with the President at the time.
“Few people would think Jefferson founded the Military Academy,” Evie added. “He was opposed to a standing army.”
“So why’d he do it?” Ducharme asked.
“Publicly, because a standing army was a reality of having a country,” Evie said. “Jefferson didn’t want the officer corps to be full of favored sons and sycophants. He felt if they had to have an army, they needed a professional officer corps that swore allegiance to the country, not to a particular party or a particular President.” She took out her cigarette case and in the reflected glow from the streetlight he noticed something was inscribed on the cover.
“What’s that?” he asked, indicating the writing.
“McBride gave this to me.” Evie gave him a sad smile, a surprisingly honest pain in her eyes. Not info-robot ex-CIA agent now, just a hurt woman, missing her friend. “It’s actually a misprint from the inscribers. It says: ‘A blood of patriots and tyrants.’ It should be ‘the blood’. It’s from a famous quote by Thomas Jefferson: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants’.”
“So McBride and LaGrange were patriots.” Ducharme said.
“Yes.” She grabbed another piece of gum, deep in thought. “What are you going to do about the tracking device?”
“Keep it for now.” Ducharme told her. “Throwing it away will just let them know we know. Better we play that card when it’s to our advantage.”
“The killer is headed to Baltimore, of course,” Evie said.
Ducharme glanced at the GPS and drove toward the Beltway and the Interstate north. “Poe’s grave?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“There’s probably something hidden in his grave.”
“The other disks?”
“That would be the logical conclusion.” She turned to him and gave a cold smile. “Except the tyrants are going to make a mistake.”
***********
Deep inside the Anderson House, Lucius stared across the polished desktop as Mister Turnbull walked in. The only thing on his desk was the chess set: on one side George Washington commanded in white versus King George in black on the other.
“May I?” Turnbull indicated the chair across from Lucius.
Lucius nodded.
Turnbull sat down and glanced at the board. “You haven’t started a game?”
“I have not yet found a worthy opponent. Too bad you don’t play.”
Turnbull held up his hands, two slabs of meat covered in old scars, incongruous with the deftness of his cunning. “This was the only game I played.”
Lucius gave the ghost of a smile. “I don’t believe you played when you were in the ring. I saw you fight at the Academy.”
Turnbull lowered his hands. “That was a long time ago.”
“It’s just a different ring now.”
“The contractors took out Admiral Groves’ replacement. The Surgeon is on her way to see the Admiral as we speak.”
“And McBride’s replacement?” Lucius reached out and placed a finger on top of a blue clad pawn.
Turnbull grimaced. “The contractors missed. And—“ he paused.
Lucius toppled the pawn over.
Turnbull continued. “There was someone with her. A Colonel. Named Ducharme. LaGrange, his uncle, was his surrogate father.”
Lucius became still. “Was there a mistake in killing LaGrange’s son?”
“Perhaps. He seemed the obvious successor, but with LaGrange, obvious wasn’t always the way to view things.”
“So Tolliver and this Ducharme are now together.”
“Yes. The FBI picked them up, but released them.”
Lucius reached out and picked up Martha Washington. “Curious. How much do they know?”
“Ducharme—not much. I think Tolliver is more clued in. They had two disks and the cipher rod. And McBride’s computer, which was encrypted.”
“Can you break the encryption?”
“No. A one-time method, which requires a thumb drive with the decrypt. We gave it back to her.”
“In hopes she knows where the drive is.” It was not a question. They’d worked together enough years to be past such questions.
“And they still need to find twenty-four more disks,” Turnbull said.
“Your contractor failed and in doing so united two of our enemies, giving them the chance to succeed in both tasks.”
“Giving us a chance to achieve our original goal of getting the Allegiance,” Turnbull said, “and finding out McBride’s secrets.”
Lucius smiled and Martha Washington back down on the board. “You should play, Mister Turnbull.”
Turnbull stood. “I will make the appropriate move.”
22 August 1848
President Polk figured it had to be a hell of a lot hotter down south for the Mexican President than even Washington in the summer, although some might question that. A bead of sweat dripped off Polk’s nose and onto the copy of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which he had been reading one more time, savoring the terms, as if he could feel the actual growth in the United States that the Treaty decreed.
Polk was staying in the White House, an insane decision for anyone who had survived a Washington August. But there was work to be done and even the specter of yellow fever could
n’t persuade Polk to head to the cooler mountains as most Washingtonians with means had done. He could hear the mooing of cows from the large open pasture to the south of the White House and the occasional rattle of a passing carriage, but otherwise the capitol was still.
Polk turned his chair to a map, his most prized possession since coming into office. He had made four promises when elected to office and the map represented two of them:
-Acquiring some or all of the Oregon Territory.
-Purchasing California from Mexico in order to have access to the port of San Francisco to open trade to the Pacific.
Drawn in fountain pen on the map by his own hand were the successful results of those two promises: the Oregon Territory and a huge chunk of land including Texas and the southwest from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, encompassing all of the California Territory.
It was the second largest expansion of the United States since Jefferson had purchased the Louisiana Territory. It was Manifest Destiny and Polk had done it, stretched the United States from Atlantic to Pacific. That he had done it with blood via a war some considered imperialistic wasn’t something he concerned himself with.
Polk leaned back in his chair and barely noticed as he wiped the sheen of sweat off his forehead. He looked over, irritated, as his secretary cracked open the door and stuck his head in. “Sir, there are some gentlemen here to see you.”
Polk waved. “Send them in.” He stiffened as he saw former President John Quincy Adams leading three men into the room: General Zachary Taylor, who was getting altogether too popular for winning the war Polk had instigated with Mexico. There were more than whispers that Taylor wanted to run for President under the banner of the opposing Whigs.
There was also a tall, rangy freshman Congressman named Lincoln who had been a minor thorn in Polk’s side during the run-up to the war. The press had dubbed him ‘Spotty’ Lincoln for the resolution he had tried to get past Congress, demanding that Polk “show me the spot” where American blood had been spilled that precipitated the War with Mexico, claiming it had happened on Mexican soil, not American. The resolution had failed and Polk was determined to crush Lincoln’s political career.