Simple Genius

by David Baldacci

  time with your wife. The American people will understand.”

  Whitfield glanced over at Valerie, who shrank back. “So you’re a marriage counselor now? I thought you were just an incompetent private investigator.”

  “Just trying to do my job.”

  “Your job includes seducing my wife?”

  “I didn’t seduce your wife. And your wife keeps brushing me off because I think she loves you. Why, I don’t know. So maybe instead of playing the heavy with me, you and she might want to find some place private and talk it out. It’s up to you, big guy.”

  Whitfield took a step back. Sean glanced at Valerie. “You want me to stay?”

  She shook her head and mouthed the word, “No.”

  Sean looked back at Whitfield. “Don’t blow it.”

  Sean marched off leaving Whitfield and Valerie looking at each other as the beach wind swept over them.

  CHAPTER

  70

  MICHELLE SAT ON THE FRONT PORCH steps of Alicia’s cottage. Horatio had left and Viggie’s sobs could still be heard from inside the house. Finally, Michelle rose, stepped inside and spent a minute plunking a nameless tune on the piano. The sobs finally stopped. Michelle took a deep breath and headed up.

  She didn’t bother to knock on Viggie’s door, she just went in. Viggie was lying on the bed on her stomach, her head underneath a pillow. Her body was still shaking with grief. Michelle gently lifted the pillow off. Now Michelle could hear that Viggie was reciting numbers, very long numbers.

  Michelle thought to herself, She lost her father and I’ve treated her like shit. Never really bothered to understand how much she’s hurting.

  She sat down on the bed, put a hand out and laid it on Viggie’s back. The girl immediately tensed.

  “Viggie, I am so sorry for what I did. I had no right to do it. I hope you can forgive me. I’ve, well, I’ve not been doing all that good lately. I have some issues, like we talked about before. Some days, well, some days are better than others. I guess this was just a bad day. But I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I know you were just trying to help.”

  Michelle was looking at the wall and didn’t notice that Viggie had turned over and was staring at her. When Michelle did see her she reached out and took the girl in her arms, sobbing almost as hard as Viggie had been earlier. Now it was Viggie who comforted her.

  “It’s okay, Mick. I have bad days too. I… I get crazy sometimes. I can’t seem to understand anything, which makes me so mad.”

  Michelle cried harder and Viggie tightened her grip on the woman. “It’s okay. I’m not mad at you. I… really like you. You’re my friend.”

  Michelle squeezed Viggie and whispered in between sobs, “You’re my friend too, Viggie. I’d do anything for you. I will never hurt you again. I promise. I promise.”

  When Sean got back home he found a red-faced Michelle sitting in the living room of the cottage.

  “You okay?” he said quickly. “Anything wrong with Viggie?”

  “She’s fine. I’m fine.”

  “You sure?” he said doubtfully.

  She nodded slowly as though talking required an energy she simply didn’t have.

  He sat next to her. “Well, I’m not doing fine.” He relayed to her what had happened on the beach.

  “God, Sean, he could’ve killed you.”

  “He still could.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “Go to sleep. Something tells me it’s going to be a busy day tomorrow and a good night’s sleep will do us both good.”

  Unfortunately, neither one of them would get it.

  Michelle, always a light sleeper, slid her hand under her pillow and gripped her pistol as the door to her room slowly opened. Michelle eased her eyes to slit-wide until she could make out the person coming at her. Viggie was in a long T-shirt that hung past her knees. She was holding something in her hands.

  She stood next to the bed for a moment and then slowly placed the item she was carrying on top of the bedspread. A few seconds later Michelle heard the door close. Moments after that Michelle heard Viggie’s door close.

  She immediately sat up in bed and turned on the light on the nightstand. Grabbing up the item Viggie had left for her she saw that it was a large manila envelope. In it were two articles: a letter in a regular envelope and a photograph. She was so excited that she slipped out into the hall still wearing only what she’d been sleeping in, panties and a short tank top. She quietly knocked on Sean’s bedroom door. There was no answer. She rapped again, a little harder.

  She pressed her lips against the door. “Sean? Sean?”

  Finally she heard a grumble, some muttering followed by the squeak of a mattress. Then a light was switched on, footsteps came her way, and the door opened.

  He was sleepy-eyed and wearing striped pajamas.

  “What is it?” he demanded.

  A smile twitched across her lips. “You wear pajamas to bed?” she said, staring at him. “For real?”

  He said nothing for a moment as his eyes cleared and he focused on her half-naked body. “And you wear nearly nothing when you go to bed? For real?”

  She appeared startled, looked down at herself and quickly put a hand across her chest, holding the manila envelope in front of her even more private areas.

  Now Sean was smiling. He said, “No, really, Mick, not on my account. Having been woken out of a dead sleep, it’s hard for me to focus on things like breasts and…” He glanced down at the manila envelope. “Well, you get the picture.” When she didn’t say anything, and just stood there looking awkward, he added, “Is there something you wanted, other than to ridicule my choice of sleeping apparel?”

  Michelle slipped past him and into his room, sat on the bed and motioned him to join her there. “Hurry up. I’ve got something to show you.”

  “I can see that!”

  “I’m not horny, okay? I’m talking about something else. It’s important.”

  He sighed, walked over and slumped down next to her. “What is it?”

  She told him about Viggie’s visit and showed him the items.

  All weariness was now gone from Sean’s features. He studied the letter and then the photo.

  “Where did Viggie get these?”

  “They had to come from her father. Wouldn’t they?”

  “So Viggie gave them to you; the music and now this. Why?”

  “She likes me. I saved her life. She trusts me.”

  Sean looked at her curiously. “I think you hit it on the head, Michelle. She trusts you.” He put the items back in the manila envelope. “You need to go and talk to Viggie, right now. This letter mentions something else, another piece of information, that we need to make sense of all this. She gave you this much, she should give you the rest.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Michelle returned to her room, put on a bathrobe and went to Viggie’s room. Ten minutes later she returned to Sean’s room looking disappointed. “Not only would she not tell me anything else, she wouldn’t even acknowledge what she had given me.”

  They spent the next hour trying to make sense of the letter and the photo. Finally Sean said, “Okay, not that I mind having a nearly naked woman in my bed, but you need to get dressed.”

  “What?” Michelle said, startled.

  “You woke me up, now we’re going to wake Horatio up. I want his opinion on something.”

  As she rose and left the room, Sean looked down at the envelope. Maybe this was finally the key they needed. He desperately hoped so, because they were running out of options. And he didn’t want their only remaining option to be going over the fence at Camp Peary.

  CHAPTER

  71

  THE SUN WAS STARTING TO RISE as Sean and Michelle walked over to see Horatio in his room at the mansion. They checked in with the dour guard at the front security desk and then headed upstairs.

  Sean had called ahead and Horatio opened the door immediately. The psychologist was fully dres
sed although he hadn’t bothered to put his hair in its customary ponytail with the result that it was curled upward like a wave about to crash on the beach.

  He started to say something.

  “Not here,” Sean said. “Let’s take a ride.”

  Twenty minutes later they were standing next to Michelle’s truck where it was parked under some trees near the banks of the York. The sunlight crept across the surface of the water as Sean and Michelle watched Horatio study the letter and the photo.

  “Okay, the return address on the letter is Wiesbaden, Germany. Thankfully it’s in English although the physical writing is that of a very old person whose first language is not English. And it’s addressed to Monk Turing from…” Horatio squinted at the signature and adjusted the reading glasses he was wearing.

  “Henry Fox,” Michelle said helpfully.

  Sean explained, “Basically Fox is thanking Monk for helping him get back home to Germany.”

  Horatio looked at the top of the letter. “Dated nearly a year ago. So before Monk went to England and Germany.”

  “At least the last time he went. Now check out the last two lines of the letter,” Sean said.

  Horatio read, “ ‘Now that you’ve helped me, I will, as agreed, return the favor. I have it. And it is yours when you come for a visit.’ ” Horatio looked up. “So Fox had something he wanted to give to Monk Turing in return for him helping Fox get back home?”

  “Looks that way,” Michelle said. “And Monk went to Germany to get it. And on the same trip he went for a jaunt through his family history with Alan Turing in England.”

  “So what did Monk get from Fox?”

  “We don’t know that yet,” Michelle admitted.

  Horatio said, “So Monk helped Fox back to his homeland, but Henry Fox doesn’t sound like a German name.”

  “I have a theory about that,” Sean said mysteriously. “But I have to wait for confirmation.” He picked up the photograph. It showed three people sitting on steps in front of a large building. One person was Monk Turing; a younger Viggie was sitting next to him. The third person was a smallish, very elderly man with a white beard and shrewd, blue eyes. There was a date at the bottom of the picture.

  “This was taken over three years ago,” Michelle said. “Viggie told me that she and her father lived in an apartment in New York City then. She said they had no friends except for a very old man who talked to her father about old stuff. She also said he talked funny.”

  “Probably meaning with an accent, a German accent,” Sean filled in.

  “So presumably the old guy in the photo is Henry Fox?”

  “Right,” Sean said. “This explains a lot but it doesn’t tell us what Fox gave Monk.”

  “Viggie said that the old man would write letters down on a piece of paper and challenge Monk Turing to, I guess, decipher them,” Michelle added.

  Horatio broke in. “Wait a minute. South Freeman said that one reason the military was keeping the presence of those German prisoners secret is because some of them might have had knowledge of the Enigma code. I did a little history reading after I talked with South. Each of the German military branches had different networks of the Enigma they used. The naval code was thought to be the toughest of all. The folks at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing included, couldn’t make a dent in it. And the Germans and their U-boats were murdering the Allies in the Battle of the Atlantic. That is until some German naval codebooks were successfully obtained by the Allies. With that information the folks at Bletchley Park worked their magic and the tide began to turn.”

  “How does that help us?” Michelle asked.

  “South also told me that the war in the Atlantic began to turn in favor of the Allies after those German POWs were taken to Camp Peary. And those POWs came from boats and subs that had been sunk. That means the POWs at Camp Peary could’ve had German naval Enigma codebooks and other intelligence the Allies could use.”

  “So you’re thinking that this Henry Fox might have been one of the POWs?” Michelle said slowly.

  “He’s the right age, speaks with presumably a German accent, writes codes down on a piece of paper and talks about the war. Yeah, I think the probability lies in that direction.”

  Sean said, “And that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Because we need to find out what Fox gave Monk Turing, the thing that’s referenced in the letter.”

  Horatio looked puzzled. “Me? How should I know what Fox gave him?”

  “Viggie slipped this letter and photo to Michelle while she was sleeping. I think she did it because she trusts Michelle.”

  “Okay, but where do I come in?”

  “Might Turing have left all these clues with his daughter and told her to only give them out to someone she comes to trust?”

  Horatio nodded. “That’s entirely plausible. Viggie is highly intelligent, but quite capable of being manipulated. She’ll sometimes give you whatever answer you put in her head. I saw that quite clearly in my talk with her.”

  “But Michelle spoke to Viggie after she gave her these items and the girl just clammed up. She wouldn’t even acknowledge that she’d given Michelle anything. Why would she do that?”

  Horatio didn’t speak for a bit. When he did his words came slowly. “As funny as it sounds, I believe that Monk Turing hasn’t simply manipulated his daughter but programmed her.”

  “Programmed her?” Michelle exclaimed.

  “I’d suspected this before, but what you’re saying now makes me think I’m closer to the truth than not. I think that brilliant father gave brilliant but naive daughter information, and he trained her to release that information only under certain circumstances. Viggie played the song for Michelle because she was nice to her and Viggie felt she could trust her. Then Michelle risked her life to save Viggie, so Viggie went a step further and gave her more information.” Horatio looked at her. “It’s curious though that she would give you this after what happened with the truck.”

  “Truck, what are you talking about?” Sean asked.

  “Viggie and I worked it out,” Michelle said hastily, averting her gaze from Sean’s questioning look. She plunged on. “I doubt I’ll be saving her life again, at least I hope I won’t have to. So what else do I have to do to get her to give up the rest?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that.”

  Sean mulled this over. “So we’re at a dead end for now, until Joan comes through, or Alicia decrypts that song.” He put the articles away in his pocket, stretched and yawned. “Well, since we’re up early we might as well go eat.”

  Michelle checked her watch. “Let’s make it quick. Champ is picking me up at nine for our flight.”

  “You’re still going?” Sean said harshly.

  “I’m still going.”

  “But he doesn’t have an alibi for the time Rivest was killed.”

  “I doubt we’re going to get any good information from innocent people. So it makes far more sense to go after the ones we think might be guilty.”

  “My gut tells me to leave this guy alone.”

  “Yeah,” Michelle said. “Well, my brain tells me we can’t afford to do that.”

  Horatio glanced over at Sean. “Your turn unless you want to concede to the lady.”

  “Shut the hell up,” Sean snapped as he climbed in the truck.

  Horatio turned to Michelle. “Geez, could the guy be any more obvious?”

  “More obvious?” she said, puzzled.

  Horatio rolled his eyes, sighed deeply and got in the truck.

  CHAPTER