by Paul Sussman
'It's all there,' said Ben-Roi. 'Everything that happened last night. All recorded, all admissible in a court of law. So no fucking lies, you understand? No bullshit about how you just happened to be walking past, how you've never dealt drugs in your life. Because if you do bullshit me I'll damage you. I'll really fucking damage you.'
He reached out and grasped the man's wrist, squeezing, fingers biting into the flesh, then released his grip and sat back.
'Now start talking, you pathetic piece of shit.'
LUXOR
By the time Khalifa got back from Edfu, Mahfouz had spoken to Chief Hassani and filled him in on the situation.
He took it surprisingly well. Better, certainly, than Khalifa had been expecting. There were a few muttered expletives when he first came into his office, and the usual Hassani glare, but the anticipated yelling and hammering of fists on desk, for which Khalifa had been preparing himself throughout the journey back, singularly failed to materialize. On the contrary, the chief was uncharacteristically subdued about the whole thing, accepting the reopening of the case with barely a murmur of dissent, as if he no longer had either the energy or the will to resist it. Khalifa even thought he caught the vaguest flicker of relief in his eyes, like a man who is finally able to lay down a burden he had never wanted to pick up in the first place.
'Let's get one thing clear,' said Hassani, staring out of the window of his office, his toupee clinging to his head like a clump of brown candyfloss. 'You're on your own on this. I'm short on manpower as it is. I can't spare anyone else. Understood?'
'Yes, sir.'
'I'm moving Sariya on to another case. Until you've got this thing sorted he'll work out of a different office.'
'Yes, sir.'
'And I don't want you mouthing off around the station. You keep it to yourself. If anyone asks, just say some new evidence has come to light and you're looking into it. Don't go into details.'
'Yes, sir.'
There was a loud clip-clopping as a horse-drawn caleche clattered past along the street below, its driver whistling at tourists, importuning them to take a ride. Hassani stared down at it for a moment, then turned and came back to his desk.
'So, what are you going to do?' he asked.
Khalifa shrugged, taking a swift puff on the Cleopatra he had clasped between his fingers.
'Try and find out more about Jansen's background, I guess. See if I can turn up anything to link him with Schlegel. Some motive for killing her. Everything we've got at the moment is circumstantial.'
Hassani nodded, opened his desk drawer, removed Jansen's keys and threw them over.
'You'll be needing these.'
Khalifa caught the keys and put them in his jacket pocket.
'I'll have to contact the Israelis at some point,' he said. 'See if they've got anything on the woman.'
Hassani grimaced but said nothing. He held Khalifa's gaze for a long moment, then, slowly, pushed himself away from the desk, got to his feet again, crossed to a filing cabinet in the corner, squatted and unlocked the bottom drawer, removing a slim red file. He came back to the desk and handed the file to Khalifa. On the front was written '2345/1 – Schlegel, Hannah. March 10, 1990'.
'I expect the leads are all cold by now, but you never know.'
Khalifa stared down at the file.
'Mahfouz said you'd burnt it.'
Hassani grunted. 'You're not the only one round here with a fucking conscience, you know.'
Again he held Khalifa's eyes, then, with a wave of the hand, dismissed him.
'And I want regular updates!' he shouted to his back. 'Which means regular updates.'
JERUSALEM
After the fund-raising lunch was finished and he had seen Har-Zion back to his office at the Knesset building on Derekh Ruppin, Avi Steiner took a bus up to Romema to check the mail box, his eyes roving suspiciously over his fellow passengers, less for potential suicide bombers – God, what an irony that would be, to end up on a bus with one of al-Mulatham's people! – than on the off-chance he was being followed. It was an off-chance, minuscule – the whole thing was such a closely guarded secret most of those involved didn't even know they were involved – but you could never be too careful. That's why Har-Zion trusted him, had nicknamed him Ha-Nesher, the Eagle – because he was so careful, saw everything. Ha-Nesher, and also Ha-Ne-eman – the Loyal. He would have done anything for Har-Zion. Anything. He was like a father to him.
He got off the bus at the top end of Jaffa Street and, again glancing suspiciously around him, walked up the hill into the heart of Romema, a drab residential suburb of yellow-stone apartment blocks interspersed with clumps of pine and cypress trees, taking the odd sudden turning, doubling back on himself, confirming and reconfirming he wasn't being tailed before eventually ducking into a shop with a sign over the door announcing GROCERIES, STATIONERY, PRIVATE MAIL BOXES.
He didn't check the box on a regular basis – regularity meant routine, and routine aroused suspicion. Sometimes he would come only a couple of days after his last visit; sometimes he would leave it a week, a fortnight, even a month. You could never be too careful.
The boxes were along a wall at the back, out of the eyeline of the shop owner, an elderly Sephardee woman who in the three years he had been coming here never once seemed to have moved from her armchair behind the low plywood counter. He took one final look around, then, producing a key, went over and opened box number 13, removing a single envelope which he slipped into the pocket of his jacket before locking the box again and exiting. He had been inside for less than a minute.
Back on the street he zig-zagged around for a while, then opened the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of paper on which was written, in uniform capital letters so that the hand could not be traced, a name and an address. He memorized them, then tore the sheet into small pieces, mixing them in his hand and depositing them in four separate bins before returning to Jaffa Street and catching a bus back across town, content in the knowledge that what he was doing was ultimately for the greater good of his people and his country.
JERUSALEM
Come five p.m., Tom Roberts was still hunched over the desk in Layla's study, surrounded by pieces of scrap paper, seemingly no nearer to deciphering the cryptic document than he had been six hours earlier when he had first started looking at it.
The two of them had walked back from the American Colony Hotel together and, having made him a cup of coffee, Layla had handed over the photocopied sheet, which she had detached from its covering letter (like most journalists she made a rule of never giving out more information than she had to).
'And you've no idea where it's from?' he had asked, staring down at the document, fiddling distractedly with his tie.
'None at all. Someone sent it to me in the post. You know as much as I do.'
He had turned the sheet over, glanced at its blank reverse side, then turned it back again, eyes squinting behind his glasses. With his spare hand he had scratched at a small blotch of eczema at the back of his neck, just above the line of his shirt collar.
'Well, it's hard to be certain without looking at the original, but my guess is it's medieval – early medieval if the palaeography is anything to go by.'
He caught the sceptical look on Layla's face.
'I studied the period for my Ph.D.,' he explained. 'You get a feel for these things.'
She smiled. 'I never knew you were Doctor Roberts.'
'It's not something I make a point of advertising. Early medieval Latin jurisprudence tends to be a bit of a conversation killer.'
She had laughed, and for a moment their eyes had caught before he looked away again, embarrassed.
'Anyway,' he went on, 'assuming it is early medieval, it shouldn't be too hard to work out what it means. Encryption was pretty rudimentary in those days. No Enigma machines or anything. Let's see how we go.'
Layla had installed him at the desk in her study where he had removed his jacket, loosened his tie and got to work, sta
rting by transcribing the sequence of letters onto a separate sheet of paper so that he could read them clearly.
'We don't know what language has been encrypted,' he had said, 'although if it's medieval it's a fair guess it'll be Latin, or possibly Greek. For the moment we'll leave that to one side and concentrate on the algorithm.'
She raised her eyebrows questioningly. 'That being?'
'Basically, the method that's been used to encode the message. Like I said, early medieval encryption was a pretty unsophisticated science. Or at least it was in Europe. The Arabs were streaks ahead, like they were in most things in those days. Anyway, chances are we've got a fairly simple algorithm here, either a substitution cipher, or possibly transposition.'
Again Layla had raised her eyebrows. 'Speak to me in English, Tom.'
'Sorry.' He smiled. 'One of my many faults – always assuming people are interested in the same things as me. Basically, a substitution cipher is when you generate a new alphabet by substituting the letters of the existing alphabet either for other letters or symbols.'
He wrote out an alphabet on a piece of paper, and then beneath it a second alphabet in which all the letters had been shifted one space to the right, so that A was twinned with Z, B with A, C with B, etc.
'You then rewrite your original message, or plaintext, replacing each letter with its equivalent letter in the new alphabet. So, "cat" comes out as BZS, for instance. Or Layla as KZXKZ. Transposition, on the other hand, is when you simply rearrange the existing letters of the plain-text according to some prearranged system, effectively generating a giant anagram. Any clearer?'
'A bit.' Layla had laughed. 'Although not much.'
'A bit's good enough for the moment,' he had said, arranging the transposed message in front of him and staring down at it, tapping at his spectacles with the end of his pencil. 'So what we need to do is pin down the algorithm, and then try and work out the key, or the precise formula that's being used to generate the cipher text. It might simply be a matter of a basic Caesar shift, or it could be something more opaque, in which case we're going to have to get into frequency analysis.'
This time she hadn't bothered asking what he was talking about. Instead, with an amused shake of the head, she had patted him on the shoulder and left him to it, heading into the kitchen to prepare a simple lunch of stuffed peppers, cheese and salad. They had eaten an hour later, by which point he still hadn't made any progress.
'I'm pretty sure it's a regular monoalphabetic substitution cipher rather than transposition,' he had said, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. 'Unfortunately I'm no nearer to finding the key. It's looking more complex than I thought.'
They had talked about his work at the consulate, her journalism, the current situation in the Middle East – nothing too heavy, just chatting. At one point he had asked about the framed photograph of her father hanging above her desk, but she had closed off the conversation quickly, moving on to another topic, not wanting to get drawn into a personal discussion, to reveal anything of herself. Within forty minutes he had been back at the desk wrestling once again with the mysterious code.
And now it was four hours later, and the Old City clocks had just chimed five, and still he hadn't cracked it. He let out a deep sigh and sat back in his chair, hands locked behind his neck, the desk in front of him half hidden beneath a snowdrift of scribble-covered sheets of paper.
'For God's sake!' he muttered, shaking his head.
Layla, who had spent most of the afternoon curled up on the sofa working on an article about the Palestinian aid conference she had attended in Limassol, came through and stood beside him.
'Leave it, Tom,' she said. 'It doesn't matter.'
'I just can't understand it,' he complained, removing his glasses and polishing the lenses with the end of his tie. 'Ciphers from this period are always child's play.'
'Maybe it's not monoalphabetic substitution after all,' she joked, not really understanding the term, simply trying to lighten his mood.
He said nothing, just finished polishing his glasses. Then he picked up the sheet with the transcribed code on it and held it away from him, staring at it, his left knee bouncing up and down beneath the table.
'It's going to be something simple,' he muttered to himself. 'I know it's going to be something simple. I just can't see it. I just can't bloody see it.'
He threw the sheet back on the table and, leaning over, picked up a handful of other sheets, flicking through them, tapping his rubber-tipped pencil on the chair-arm. One sheet in particular occupied his attention for almost a minute, his eyes scanning back and forth along the rows of seemingly random letters scrawled thereon, before he laid it aside again, only to return to it a moment later, staring at it even more intently than he had done before. His pencil tapping gradually slowed and stopped, as did the jogging of his knee. He held the sheet away from him, teeth biting at his lower lip, then placed it flat on the table and, taking a blank sheet from a pile on the floor, began writing on it, slowly at first, then faster, eyes darting to the sheet he had been looking at and back to the one on which he was scribbling. After thirty seconds he started to chuckle.
'What?' she asked.
'Layla al-Madani, you're a bloody genius!'
She leant over his shoulder, trying to read what he was writing.
'You've worked it out?'
'No, Layla, you've worked it out. You were right. It wasn't a substitution cipher. Or rather it wasn't only a substitution cipher. Whoever encrypted this used transposition and substitution. On its own each system would be simple to decipher. Taken together, they make the whole thing that bit more confusing. Especially when the original message is in medieval Latin, as I suspected.'
He had continued scribbling as he spoke. Now he sat back and showed her what he had written.
G. esclarmondae suae sorori sd temporis tam paucum est ut mea inventio huius magnae rei post maris transitum sit narranda. nunc satis est dicere per fortunam solam earn esse inventam; nec umquam inventa esset nisi nostri labores latebram caecam illuminavissent. quam ad te mitto ut in C. tuta restet. hic autem tanta est stultitia et fatuitas ut necessario peritura sit; quod grave damnum esset, nam res est antiquissima ac potentissima ac gratissima. ante finem anni ierusalem exibo. cura ut ualeas. Frater tuus. GR
'What they did,' he explained, 'was firstly to encrypt the message using a simple Caesar shift cipher.'
He grabbed another blank sheet of paper and wrote out the alphabet, as he had done earlier, missing out the letters J and W (they didn't use them in the early medieval alphabet, he explained). Beneath that he wrote a second alphabet with all the letters moved five spaces to the right.
'That gave him – I'm presuming it was a him – his primary level of encryption. The first couple of words thus change from G. esclarmondae to b znxfumgihyuz.'
He sounded excited, pleased with himself, like a scientist explaining a new discovery.
'What he then did, however, and what threw me off the scent, was to transpose the first and second letters of the coded message, and the third and fourth, and the fifth and sixth, and so on and so on right the way through the text. So b swaps with z, n with x, f with u, etc. It's transposition in its most simple form, but if you're working on the basis that they've only used substitution, it can make things somewhat confusing. It was only when you said that maybe they weren't using substitution that I got to thinking maybe I'd missed a trick.'
He looked up at her, smiling. His excitement was infectious and, leaning down, she kissed him on the cheek.
'Oh, the joys of decryption!' He chuckled.
'So what does it mean?' she asked, picking up the sheet with the deciphered text on it. 'Or was translation not part of the deal?'
His brow furrowed in mock contemplation.
'Well, normally I'd charge extra for that sort of service. But seeing as it's you . . .'
She laughed and handed the sheet back to him.
'Go on then, Dr Roberts. Do your stuff.'
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He took the sheet from her.
'I should say that my medieval Latin is a bit rusty. It's been a while since I last used it.'
'I can assure you it's a lot better than mine,' she said. 'Go on.'
He sat back, adjusted his glasses and started to translate, slowly, stopping every now and then to consider an unfamiliar word, interjecting frequent comments along the lines of 'I think that's what it means', or 'I'm paraphrasing slightly here', or 'I could be wrong'. Layla took a blank sheet of paper and, leaning over the desk beside him, wrote down what he said.
'G., to his sister Esclarmonde, greetings,' he began. 'S.D. stands for salutem dicit – "says hello". Time is short, so the tale of how this great thing came to me must await my return from across the sea. Suffice to say that it was found quite by chance, and might never have been found at all had our work not happened to reveal its secret hiding place. I send it to you now in the knowledge it will rest safe at C. Here there is such ignorance and foolishness it must surely be destroyed, which would be a grievous loss, for it is an ancient thing, and one of great power and beauty. I shall leave Jerusalem before the year's end. I trust and pray you are in good health. Your brother, GR.'