The Labyrinth Key

by Howard V. Hendrix

  About two-thirds of the way from the Rodin to Logan Circle, a long white car pulled up to the curb and a young man climbed out. He carried an opened, dark green umbrella in one hand and a folded umbrella in the other. As the fellow came closer, Don recognized him as the docent from the art museum.

  “Hello,” said the man, handing Don the folded umbrella, which was the same color as his own. “We thought you might need this. I’m Palmer Colbeth.”

  Confused, Don took the umbrella and opened it, then shook the man’s proferred hand.

  “We’ve met.”

  The newcomer gestured, and they stepped toward the long white car.

  “I noticed your interest in the Dossi, Mister Markham,” Palmer Colbeth said. “Or is it Sturm? Or Obololos? That last sounds a lot like Ouroboros, you know?”

  “Actually it’s Solo Lobo—‘Lone Wolf’—in reverse.”

  “Well, whichever—my employer would like to speak with you.”

  “Your employer?” Don asked, and he slowed his pace, confusion spiralling downward toward suspicion. “The museum?”

  Colbeth laughed as he opened the door to the car.

  “Not exactly,” he said, indicating that Don should get in. When Don hesitated, a lanky, bushy-haired older man in a dark suit stuck his head forward, into the rain.

  “We won’t bite you, Markham,” said the man in a matter-of-fact way. He shielded his head by putting on a charcoal gray homburg hat. “We might even be of some assistance. Inside now, before we both catch our death of cold.”

  Responding to the reassuring tone in the older man’s voice, Don folded the umbrella and got inside, nonetheless wondering if he was about to be kidnapped. Colbeth got in front on the passenger side, and the car’s uniformed driver pulled the vehicle back into traffic, its tires moving over the wet road surface with a soft sizzle.

  “Nils Barakian,” said the bushy-haired man in the hat, shaking Don’s hand as the car drove around the Eakins Oval and headed back toward the city. “Palmer here tells me you lingered a good long time in front of Item Number 251. Why the interest in that rather obscure painting, Mister Markham?”

  “Why should I tell you?” Don said. “You could be Homeland Security, CIA, Tetragrammaton—anybody.”

  Barakian laughed.

  “If I were, I’d hardly admit it, now would I? You’ll just have to trust me when I say I work with a group of people who prefer to be anonymous. Ah, Tetragrammaton. Named from Hebrew Kabbalah, you know, but grown rather too fond of soft-Nazi superscience. I can say that we are rather the opposite of that.

  “With your more-than-passing interest in Item 251, Mister Markham, you’ve passed a test of sorts. Oh yes, we know about the Kwok holo-cast, and the captioned image, as well. Those organizations you mentioned also know about it, but we seem to have beaten them to you. We could keep it that way, if you wish.”

  “What do you mean?” Don asked, uncomfortable despite the plush comfort of the limo’s seats. “Why should I trust you any more than I trust them?”

  “Well, to begin with, we will pay you extremely well to work with us. And don’t disdain fouling your fingers a little with the ol’ filthy lucre. Money makes it easier to slide over life’s little razor blades. Besides, unlike my employers, those agencies you mentioned won’t let you decide whether or not to work with them. They’re rather more inclined to help you ‘vanish,’ I think. And they’re already waiting for you at your hotel.”

  “What?”

  Barakian nodded toward the driver, who gave a sotto voce command. Small, flat screens swung down from the ceiling. Surveillance images appeared, showing men in dark suits moving through areas Don recognized as the parking garage and lobby of his hotel—and the corridor on the floor where his own room was to be found. For a moment he thought it might be some elaborate hoax Barakian and Colbeth were perpetrating on him, but he quickly dismissed the idea. He had seen this sort of footage before, and the security-cam images appeared too real—and real-time—to be staged.

  “I don’t get it. Why would they be after me? Why now?”

  “I think we both know the answer to the first question. As a result of disseminating your Prime Privacy Protocol through the infosphere—without State Department license, I might add—you’ve been charged as an illegal arms dealer.”

  “But I’m not—”

  “Powerful encryption technologies, like your P-Cubed creation, are considered munitions under American law, and under the international Wassenaar Arrangement that limits arms exports.”

  “Oh, God. The Zimmerman precedent.”

  “Exactly so. You created a very user-friendly cryptographic protection system based on prime factors. One which subverts key-escrow protocols and is unbreakable by anything short of a quantum computer. As a result, you are now an international terrorist. Congratulations!”

  “But my encryption program has been available for more than six months!”

  “Yes. That makes all the more interesting your second question: Why now?”

  As they approached his hotel, Don Markham could see low-profile state police cars and blocky government sedans circling or parking around the block. Barakian nodded to the driver, indicating that he should pull over.

  “What are you doing?” Don asked, nervousness cracking his voice.

  “You can walk to your hotel from here, if you’d like,” Barakian said. “The rain seems to have let up, but you can keep the umbrella Palmer gave you.”

  “Wait—you said it was my choice, right? To get out, or stay in this car and go with you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Well, are you crazy? Of course I’m going to stay with you. Even if I don’t know who the hell you are. It’s not as if I have much choice.”

  Barakian indicated to the driver that he should pull out and drive on.

  “I told you ‘who the hell’ we are. My name is Nils Barakian, and he’s Palmer Colbeth.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Don said, looking back over his shoulder as they left the vicinity of his hotel. “I meant who do you work for?”

  “We work with an organization known as the Kitchener Foundation, of course. Palmer said you enjoyed our museum installations.”

  Palmer nodded and smiled, but Don could only shake his head.

  “Any other questions?” Barakian continued calmly.

  Don gave an odd little laugh.

  “Yeah. When did I fall down the rabbit hole? When did I slip through the looking glass? Maybe Karuna was right. Maybe I am crazy. Maybe I’m seeing patterns that aren’t really there.”

  Barakian placed a hand on Don’s shoulder, in an awkward attempt to comfort him.

  “The human brain has always held the ability to recognize patterns,” Barakian said, “since long before that ability was applied to symbols—to recognizing patterns in things that weren’t, in fact, really there. You’re a very pattern-sensitive individual, Donald, but I haven’t seen a clock-watching rabbit, nor a young girl with a looking glass—at least not recently.”

  Barakian smiled at him, and the smile seemed genuine.

  Don nodded, feeling numb. The future was unfolding all too fast.

  FISHING EXPEDITION

  GUNPOWDER RIVER

  Deputy Director Brescoll had many reasons to appreciate the beauty of Gunpowder Falls State Park. Most of them centered around the Gunpowder River itself, as it meandered through the dense Eastern forest between the dam and Falls Road. Since everything flowing down from the Pretty Boy reservoir was tailrace water, the Gunpowder’s upper reaches never exceeded a temperature of fifty-five degrees. Its flow, too, was consistent—excellent for sustaining naturalized populations of brown and rainbow trout. Its smaller waterfalls, plunging over great flat boulders to create long clear pools edged with cobblestones, made it his favorite Maryland trout stream.

  Brescoll had other reasons for appreciating the locale. The clear blue sky above the tree canopy was off most flight paths. The burbling of the stream and the
river-basin acoustics tended to defeat recording devices and parabolic microphones. No law enforcement agency, fortunately, had yet found it worthwhile to put up surveillance cameras for monitoring these stretches of trout stream labored over by dedicated fishermen.

  Dressed in fishing vest, breathable waders, and felt-soled wading boots, Jim read the water as he worked his way upstream, stripping float-line and casting ahead of him into riffles as he went. He was using artificial black, brown, and cream midge flies, in the #22–#26 range. They were so tiny they completely disappeared into the surface turbulence of the riffles, and only became barely visible once more when they came alongside.

  Jim didn’t expect much this late in the morning, and this late in the year. Wondering whether he should try caddis fly larvae instead, he was surprised when, almost immediately, he saw trout rising after his artificial midges, a bit sluggish with the cold, but still active enough. After a particularly well-placed cast and long float over just the area Jim was shooting for, the rainbow broke surface.

  With a quick upward flick of the wrist and forearm, Jim set the hook and reeled in a shimmering fish that, in its several leaps out of the water, looked to be at least ten or twelve inches long. Gripping his catch with a fine mesh “landing hand” glove, he saw that the trout was surprisingly thick in the belly.

  With his free hand he unclipped a pair of hemostat clamps from his vest and used them to remove the tiny hook from the trout’s upper lip. He looked at the fish proudly once more, estimating its length at closer to thirteen inches, before releasing it back into the river. As he watched the rainbow swim off and disappear in the current, he studied the way the river ran against a particularly large boulder in the middle of the stream. As he had before, he thought again of the paradoxical immortality of rivers.

  The Gunpowder had probably been running against that rock in just that way since before the river had been named. Odds were that it would still be flowing against that rock a thousand years from now. Even after the dam that lay upstream had broken down or silted up. Perhaps when human civilization on Earth had changed completely, or humanity itself had gone extinct.

  What was it Thoreau said in Walden?

  Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.

  What Thoreau didn’t see, Jim thought, was that the river remains alive by always passing away. It only dies when it stops passing away.

  That was what Jim Brescoll appreciated most about Gunpowder Falls. Getting away from the city and man-made spaces helped to put things into clearer and broader perspective.

  He proceeded upstream, so caught up in his thoughts, in reading the water and stalking the trout, that he almost forgot the other reason he was on the river today. Until he reached a particular spot, which happened to be just downstream of his favorite fly-fishing pool. There he found a young man dressed in shorts, river-guide sandals, and heavy jacket.

  The young man, with his short, spiked blond hair and no hat, was clearly trying to look experienced about his fishing, and failing. Brescoll took out his pipe, tamped in some tobacco, lit up, and watched the fellow cast—poorly—for a time.

  “Been fly-fishing long?” Jim asked at last. The young man smiled awkwardly.

  “Actually, this is my first try at it,” he admitted. “I watched an instructional video, but that doesn’t seem to be helping very much.”

  “Mind a suggestion?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Don’t beat the water with the fly. You’re working a little too hard. Too many false casts.”

  “Okay,” the young man said hesitantly. “How do I fix that?”

  “Where you’re standing, you probably don’t need more than eight or ten feet of float-line stripped out beside you—if that—before you cast. And you don’t need to reel everything in to the end of the float line. Leave your leader in the water and leave a few feet of float line off the end of the rod. You’re right-handed, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thought so. Then keep your right elbow in close to your body. Most of the back and forth motion should come from your hand, wrist, and no further up your arm than the elbow. No need for much shoulder or upper arm action. The motion of the rod pulls out the line by making a sort of lazy figure eight.” He demonstrated the motion. “Got it?”

  The young man looked at him with some confusion. Jim was glad he hadn’t referred to the “lazy eight” the way he usually thought of it—as the fly fisherman’s infinity sign.

  “I think so,” the young man replied. “I let the stripped line feed through my left hand?”

  “Correct. When the last curve of that figure eight is feeding out, let it go. You don’t so much throw the fly on the water as lay it on the surface. As the fly floats down the current into the pool, remove the slack by stripping in enough line. That way, if you get a strike, you can flick back your wrist and set the hook without much trouble.”

  The young man looked at him expectantly, awaiting further instruction.

  “Go ahead. Try it.”

  Brescoll watched as the young man worked on his casting technique. His progress went in fits and starts, with ample cause for frustration, and the need for more coaxing and instruction from Jim. It wasn’t long before the novice fly fisherman was showing improvement, however, and the two men relaxed.

  “Taking a day off from work?” Brescoll asked.

  “Yeah. How about you?”

  “The same. What do you do, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Nothing special. I work for a foundation. Yourself?”

  “Federal government.”

  The young man laughed.

  “Sounds tedious. You must be glad to get away from it for a day.”

  “The fishing here is good,” Jim said with a shrug, “especially when you consider that two million people live within driving distance. But yeah, my job can sometimes be mind numbing, especially when it turns political.”

  “I know all about politics,” the young man said with a nod. “Hey, you know what the difference is between conservatives and liberals?”

  “What?”

  “Conservatives love people as individuals—it’s humanity in general they can’t stand,” said the young man. “Whereas liberals…”

  “Liberals love humanity in general—it’s people they can’t stand,” Brescoll said. That confirmed it. Time to make the exchange.

  “You still don’t seem to be having much luck. Here,” said Brescoll. “Let’s see what fly you’re using.”

  The young man reeled it in and showed it to him.

  “Hmm. Looks like a brine fly—#16, or maybe #18. Give me a couple of those. I’ll trade you two of these midges. They seem to be working today. Put a dab of this flotant on the one you’ll be using.”

  They exchanged flies, and thereby files. If this exchange was like the others, then in among the feathery hackle of each dry fly there were tiny but highly encrypted data needles and a onetime pad—a random key as long as the encrypted data itself. Brescoll’s informants always included the datafiles redundantly, over several flies, with a different onetime pad for each. That was what he did, as well. Standard operating procedure. Not unusual to lose a fly or two—especially when his contact was such a fly-fishing neophyte. Be a shame to lose all the data.

  He tried to interest the young man in barrel casting, but the neophyte was more interested in working upstream using those techniques at which he was already becoming minimally proficient. When the young man finally caught and landed his first trout, Jim applauded enthusiastically, despite the fact that the young man had taken it from Jim’s favorite pool.

  Before long they parted company, going their separate ways along the stream. Though he didn’t show it, Jim was eager to learn what his discreet informants had pulled together for him. More analys
is on that painting embedded in the Kwok holo-cast? Or on the importance of the Sun Yatsen Memorial? That was what he had hinted he wanted, last time he made contact.

  His benefactors had always been a big help whenever they’d surfaced in the past. They’d been popping up more often lately, too. Something about the Kwok incident and its aftermath clearly interested them. He had few qualms about providing them with hints about his agency’s investigation, in exchange for whatever info they could offer. Their recent inquiries, however, had begun to center around the Forrest documents. In today’s exchange he had passed along some suggestions for directions their investigations might take, based on NSA’s own discoveries.

  After catching and releasing three more fish in the ten- to fourteen-inch range, he headed downriver. Leaving the stream to return to his car, Brescoll pondered again just who his secret benefactors might be.

  The young man today had said he worked “for a foundation,” which fit Jim Brescoll’s best guess as to the source of his unnamed tipsters. He had been sure, almost from the beginning, that they weren’t agents of a foreign power. As to why they had chosen him, however, he still wasn’t certain. Maybe it was because he was the highest ranking civilian in the agency.

  Breaking down his rod and stowing it in an aluminum tube, Brescoll shook his head. In truth, when his benefactors had first contacted him, he hadn’t been the highest ranking civilian employee of NSA. The insights he had gained from them had helped propel his career. It might even be said that he had been “groomed” by them. But he also got the sense that his benefactors were somehow aligned against the CIA’s Tetragrammaton connections, too.

  Jim put the rod away in the trunk and closed it. He stood a moment, checking his fly-box, making sure both of his newly acquired flies were safe inside. He got in on the driver’s side of the car, catching a glimpse of his face in the mirror.

  “Why did they choose you?” he asked the face in the mirror. “Because you’re black? Was it some kind of anonymous affirmative action program?”

  Brescoll laughed a wry laugh and started up the Volvo. Putting it in gear, he began the trip back into daily life. Not far, in time and space, but a great distance nonetheless.