Blown Circuit

by Lars Guignard

  The noon sun was just high enough in the sky to shine over the roofline and into the alley. It lit the imperfections in the quarried rock wall revealing the decaying mortar. I shelved the message and turned my attention to the exterior wall of the building containing the ironworks. There was an exhaust fan on the far end of the wall, the hiss of welding torches audible from within. The rock wall itself was in much better shape than the worn brick of the alley wall or the mottled plaster of the adjoining building. It was maybe thirty stones high by sixty wide. Good, solid stones, twelve inches long and nine high. The building was built to last.

  My thoughts drifted back to the coordinates of my father’s ship. I had memorized the digits upon seeing them in Hanoi:

  4101643329008169

  Broken out into latitude and longitude they would read like this:

  41.016433 NORTH

  29.008169 EAST

  Those coordinates had directed me to the ship in the Bosphorus, but I supposed there was no reason they couldn’t do more. With appropriate planning, they could harbor a code. And my father was a planner. He always had been.

  I stepped back through the thorns and grass until I was flat against the opposite building. It gave me a little more perspective on the wall I was staring at. Numeracy had always been a priority of my father’s. He wanted me to be literate, sure. Nothing wrong with being able to read. But he also wanted me to be numerically literate. When the other kids were learning to add, he pushed me to learn to multiply. When they moved on to multiplication, I started algebra. I thought about the problem from my father’s point of view. From a numerical perspective. Then, instead of a rock wall, I saw a grid of stones.

  I counted them. My initial estimate had been close. With a little legwork, I discovered that the building was fifty-eight stones wide. I began to count upward, but ran into a problem There was no way I could properly count to the top of a three-story building. Again, I could estimate, but that wouldn’t be accurate. And I’d need accurate numbers if I wanted to apply any kind of logic to the coordinates he had left me. Back to square one. I looked down in frustration, kicking at an old Coke bottle on the cracked, dried ground. Focus. This was my father. He wouldn’t have left a problem that couldn’t be solved. Not if he could help it. I stared back up at the wall.

  That’s when I saw it. The line. The thin mortar crack that ran between the first and second stories of the structure. It hadn’t seemed significant before, but it did now. Because I needed a hard limit—somewhere I could accurately count to, and the crack provided that. I counted down from the crack to the bottom stone. The grid was now twelve stones high. Twelve by fifty-eight. Six hundred and ninety-six stones to work with.

  The grid could represent a map of Earth, but I didn’t think so. To plot the coordinates on such a roughly defined space would be too imprecise. No, my father would want each stone to represent a point on the grid. So I decided to treat the digits in the coordinates as though I was making a graph. The bricks were offset, so I knew that I’d have to establish a rule for vertical movement. I made the decision to stick to the right while counting upward and to the left while counting downward. It was an arbitrary designation, but there was no way to follow my hunch without establishing some simple rules.

  I began with the X-axis, the horizontal. Four. I counted four stones along the bottom of the building.

  One. I counted one stone up.

  Zero. I did nothing. One. Another up.

  Six. Six more stones to the right.

  Four. I counted up again.

  I counted through the whole sequence that way. When I hit the first nine, it got tricky, but I treated the crack as a barrier and doubled back on myself.

  I counted all the way until I ended with a stone a couple feet below the crack.

  If my reasoning had been anywhere near correct, if my line of inquiry was going to lead anywhere, it was to there. To that single stone. The most likely explanation was that it was a dead drop. I felt it with my hand. The stone was rough to the touch. But it was solid. I hit it with a rock to be sure. The stone was as solid as it got. No markings. No secrets. Nothing. Another dead end.

  I thought about the coordinates again. They were the position of the ship. What was a ship? A vehicle. A transport system. It moved goods. The location of the ship itself was ever-changing. One thing was certain, my father would have to have known where the ship would be moored. And in a busy channel like the Bosphorus, the ship wouldn’t drop anchor, it would be tied up to a permanent mooring buoy. But even then, there would be room for error, depending on the current, and the tide, and where the stern was fastened. If my father wanted to send me a message, even with a stationary mooring buoy, he would need to discount the exact position of the freighter—he would need to throw away the last two digits. So I counted again, ignoring the final two decimal values in both the northern and eastern portion of the coordinates.

  I came upon a stone that was roughly quarried like the other one, but it didn’t sound the same when I hit it with the brick. It sounded hollow. And it moved a fraction of an inch. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my Swiss Army knife. I hadn’t upgraded to the new version of the knife with the integrated USB drive and I was happy for that, because what I needed in this situation was a good strong lever. I found one in the serrated saw. I could already see the hairline cracks in the mortar around the stone, and when I inserted the saw blade, more of it broke away. It looked like paste or dirt had been rubbed over the cracks in the mortar to cover them up.

  I felt my heart beat a little faster as I dug the blade farther into the crack and levered it out, slowly working my way down. About two-thirds of the way down the crack, I had enough purchase to feel the entire stone shift. I pushed the knife in a little more and the stone broke loose from the others. Really it was only the top layer of the stone that broke free. The face of the rock had been cut, sheered off. And behind it was a cavity that contained the object that was about to make my life a living hell.

  Chapter 11

  THE OBJECT WAS a book. A slim, leather-bound book. There was no plastic bag or protective cover over it. Nothing to indicate its value. I reached into the cavity and removed it, opening the worn cover. I had to be careful because the pages were damp. It rained in Istanbul and that rain moistened stone buildings. I immediately saw handwriting in the book, written with a fountain pen in elaborate cursive. It wasn’t my father’s hand, I knew that. But it was a journal of some kind. It looked like it was written in Cyrillic.

  The journal contained technical drawings. Very old technical drawings in black ink. But there was also a second set of drawings. In addition to being in a completely different style, they were in a different color ink, from a different pen. It looked as though someone had doodled in somebody else’s journal. Except they weren’t doodles. They were sketches. Very good sketches of sculptures and pastoral scenes. Some had Cyrillic phrases below them. But some of the sketches weren’t so bucolic. Some featured scenes of torture and mutilated body parts. Some were downright frightening.

  It was utterly confounding. Why the elaborate drawings? The sketches of sculpture? I was fairly certain, I had even seen a line or two in English from Shakespeare. The entire thing was bizarre. Until I got to the last page. That’s when I recognized one of the technical drawings. It was a drawing of a wooden-framed tower with a sphere on top. It was a well-known drawing, at least in technical circles. A sketch of a famous installation. It was then that I reconsidered what my father was trying to tell me with his message:

  TelD CaNtIVE OON SHEPs

  He wasn’t saying that he was “HELD CAPTIVE ON SHIP.” He was too precise, too careful for that. I should have known that right away. That meaning was a decoy. He was actually saying something else. I saw it as clear as day. If the letters were rearranged, the lowercase spelled “tesla” and the uppercase spelled “DEVICE.” If the unused letters were rearranged only slightly they spelled “NOT ON SHP.”

  He was trying to s
pell out:

  tesla DEVICE NOT ON SHP

  True, there was a single letter missing—“I,” and I had no idea how he had been able to compose it, but the message made sense. And I knew that I was right beyond a shadow of a doubt, because the technical drawing on the last page of the journal was a representation of Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe tower.

  NIKOLA TESLA WAS a Serbian-born, American scientist responsible for more patents and inventions and downright breakthroughs in the field of electricity than anybody before him. In the early twentieth century, he was considered the Einstein of his day. Edison got the credit, but it was Tesla who walked the walk. His inventions were too numerous to list but they included: alternating current, radio, the electric generator, the spark plug, and a fancy energy beam that sat atop a wooden-framed structure on Long Island, New York called Wardenclyffe Tower.

  That I knew any of this, was a result of the work I’d done interning at the archaic technology lab during my time in college. The mission of the lab was to combine the best of archaic technologies with modern ones with sometimes surprising results. The notion was that a lot of old technology still revolved around a good core idea—an idea that could be leveraged if it could be adequately integrated with modern systems. We worked with all kinds of old stuff, from steam engines to vinyl record players, with the guiding notion that some part of the preceding technology could be saved and played to its strength, even if the entire system was no longer viable.

  Tesla was much more than the namesake of a fancy electric car. He was a man whose technologies had transformed the world and might well continue to do so. I knew I had found something big, but I needed to regroup. I had killed a man in my unit, and I didn’t know whom I could trust, if anyone. I pocketed the journal and shouldered my backpack, returning to the door of the ironworks. Then I stopped, because I was staring at exactly the person I didn’t want to see.

  “Hey, Mike.”

  “Crust,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “You know, just checking in.”

  Crust stepped over the high sill and into the alley. He stood on my right, not more than a few feet away, a big friendly smile on his face. But my radar was all the way up.

  “Keeping tabs on me, are we?”

  “They don’t equip us with GPS devices just because they like the flashing lights.”

  Backup beacon. I had been a fool. I had crushed the primary, but the boys at the CIA had equipped me with more than one tracking device. Under the circumstances, I should have ditched my gear, all of it, immediately. But that’s what happens when you get discombobulated. You make mistakes. And now I had to pay the piper. Crust turned to close the door, securing it with the rusty barrel bolt. I had no quandary about what I had to do next. I silently reached into my pocket and pulled out the gleaming yatagan with my right hand.

  Chapter 12

  YATAGAN IN HAND, I swung around with my left arm, ready to put Crust in a quick headlock. But it didn’t go like that. Because before I could turn in to position, Crust turned revealing the heavy wrench he held in his hand. I stood ready with the blade. We were very close. Our bodies were within a couple feet from each other. Sure, I could slash his throat if I had to. But I didn’t want to. I knew a strike to the solar plexus would be just as effective if I wanted to get to the truth. So I dropped the blade, the yatagan falling to the rocky ground below.

  Crust didn’t take his eyes off me. He was too much of a professional for that. But his body relaxed. I saw it in his shoulders. That’s when I placed a firm hand on his shoulder and punched him hard in the abdomen. A lightning-fast jab, no warning, no pity. I knocked the wind right out of him. He gasped and bent over. It was reflexive, he needed to catch his breath but I didn’t let up. I stepped toward him, slipping my left arm over the arm he held the wrench in. I pulled tight to my side and applied a good strong arm-bar forcing him to drop the wrench. It also put me into position to snap his arm.

  “Bend your knees,” I said.

  Crust bent his knees.

  “On the ground. Slowly, or I break your arm.”

  Crust complied. To his credit, I didn’t sense that he was angry or even flustered. It seemed as though it was all in a day’s work.

  “Are we done yet?” Crust asked.

  “We’re just getting started,” I said. “Hands on your head.”

  Crust gingerly lifted his big meat-hook hands and placed one on top of the other atop his head. I didn’t have a gun. But Crust did. I could see the bulge poking out from the back of his khakis. I reached down and removed it. A Browning Hi-Power 9mm. Nice weapon. I chambered a round. Then I kicked the yatagan out of his reach and stepped around so I could see his face.

  “What are you up to, mate?” Crust asked.

  “Staying alive,” I said.

  “Don’t you need a flair for disco and a love of old movies for that?”

  “Cut the shit,” I said. “The question is, what are you doing here?”

  “I got a tip from an asset to meet an agent from Montreal here. That’s Jean-Marc’s cover, but he’s gone dark. Where is he?”

  “Well, that’s a spiritual question isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean by that?” Crust asked.

  “I mean Jean-Marc is dead.”

  I watched Crust’s eyes. It was a surprise to him. I could see that. He was a professional, but he couldn’t keep the shock from showing.

  “How?”

  I saw no point in beating around the bush.

  “I killed him,” I said.

  “Why?” Crust replied.

  “You tell me.”

  “How on God’s green earth am I supposed to know that?” Crust said.

  So this was the way it was going to go. Full circle. The exhaust fan on the far end of the wall sparked to life blowing out the garlic odor of the welders’ acetylene gas. Crust was directly in front of me, kneeling on the rocky ground in front of the door, his hands on his head. I held the gun. It was my show now.

  “Jean-Marc asked me two questions,” I said. “Then he tried to slice my throat. I didn’t like the idea. So I sliced his.”

  Which wasn’t technically true. But it got the point across.

  “Did anybody see you?” Crust asked.

  “Yeah. Some old guy in a towel. He’s dead too.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Jean-Marc did.”

  Crust sighed deeply. After my announcement that Jean-Marc was dead, it was obvious he wasn’t surprised by anything else I had to say. He was concerned, resigned even, but not surprised, I saw that right away.

  “Why did he attack me?” I asked.

  “That’s a complicated question, Mike. And my knees are starting to hurt.”

  I could see where this was going and it wasn’t good. I was the new guy on the block, the green guy, the guy that gets taken for a ride. I decided I wasn’t going to be that guy.

  I stepped ahead and put the barrel of the Browning to Crust’s head. Then I grabbed Crust’s right thumb and stepped forward again, twisting my body and pulling his arm around so I could lever it against my own. I held his hand in a secure thumb-lock. It wasn’t a perfect position, but it wasn’t bad either. I could snap his thumb that way and, more important, it allowed me to keep my other hand on the gun.

  “We haven’t known each other long, Crust. One mission. I don’t even know your real name. Or why the CIA has you talking with a half-baked Scottish accent. So it’s truth or dare time. Tell me what I want to know or I blow a hole in your skull.”

  Crust coughed. A loud, squeaky cough.

  “Blair, my real name’s Blair,” Crust said, his accent as flat as a prairie snow. “The Scottish accent was mission protocol back when we were targeting Kate Shaw.”

  Like that, Crust had completely lost the brogue. One minute he was from the Highlands and the next he simply sounded American, neutral, nothing identifiable about his accent at all. I applied a little more pressure to his thumb, bending it the way
it wasn’t supposed to go.

  “So why keep up the Scottish thing, Blair?”

  “I don’t know. I got into it, I guess. Look, you’re a badass, Mike. I get it,” Crust said. “If you’re telling me Jean-Marc attacked you, I have no idea why, all right? Not a clue. He was supposed to debrief you, that’s it. Did he say anything? Did he give you any kind of idea why he wanted to cut your throat?”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “So what did he tell you?”

  “He asked me what I had found.”

  “And?”

  “And I told him.”

  There was a loud knock from the other side of the door. I was going to have to bring our little Q and A session to a close before we drew unwanted attention. But I still had nothing.

  “Look,” Crust said. “Cards on the table. I didn’t send Jean-Marc to kill you.”

  “Why should I believe you?” I said.

  “Because it’s the truth.”

  “So what aren’t you telling me?”

  There was another bang at the door, this one accompanied by loud talk in Turkish. I applied more pressure to Crust’s thumb. I was debating breaking it. I didn’t want to do it, because I wasn’t sure how effective it would be as an interrogation technique. Then again, there was a chance he wasn’t taking me seriously. It was a fine line. As it was, Crust spoke before I needed to decide.

  “The mole,” Crust said. “I’m not telling you about the mole.”

  I played it cool. I saw no reason to portray any reaction at all. Not until I had the facts.