And the Tide Turns

by Timothy Dalton

  Patient: 3944 | T. Keane 4/17/1972

  So Tobias had visited St. Jeremiah’s – or at least someone signed in under his name. He examined the signature. It certainly looked like his uncle’s handwriting. Although Tobias’s visit had probably been just as unfruitful as the one Ethan just had, he was sure it wasn’t as dramatic.

  He slammed the book closed and rose stiffly from the chair. He left the room and went back to the front office where he pressured the head nurse to borrow the phone. It didn’t take much effort. He was a cop, after all. She pushed the phone toward him and he punched in the number to the station.

  “Maznicki,” came the terse answer.

  Crap. Ethan suppressed a groan. He’d forgotten Art was off for the day. “Deac, it’s Ethan.”

  “Yeah, whadda’ ya want?” No wisecracks came from the man this time. Ethan knew why, but he couldn’t let on now.

  “Has there been any update on my uncle’s case?” he asked.

  “Contrary to popular belief, Tannor, we got more important fish to fry. If you’d quit being so self-absorbed you’d know that. Fredericks was killed early this morning.”

  “What? How?” Ethan forced shock into his voice. It didn’t sound convincing, but Deacon didn’t appear to notice.

  “Got shot to pieces down at Jo Ann’s. Everyone’s been called in, including Hansen; he’s still at the scene. Now that I got you on the phone, maybe you should bring your happy ass in too.”

  Ethan hadn’t even bothered to make a phone call in to the station after the shooting, opting instead to go straight to the morgue. His selfish motivations to prove Tobias had not killed himself were no doubt beginning to tarnish his character. Art could cover for him for only so long. Information would get out soon that Ethan had been sitting at the same table when the Captain was killed. Despite Dr. Cunningham’s comment about the fallibility of eyewitnesses, he preferred not to take any chances by interviewing people from the restaurant and getting himself identified on the spot.

  By now Ethan was convinced there was more than just his uncle’s death to consider and he was barely scratching the surface. The Russian presence signaled an ominous front moving in, like a lurking black cloud in the distant horizon. Instinct told him that time was running out. “I can’t make it, Deac. I’ve got a lot on my plate just dealing with my uncle’s death.”

  A loud scoff burst through the phone. “You need to hurry up and wipe the sadness out of your eyes.” Deacon’s tone was like a knife’s edge. “Stop nursing Mr. Keane’s suicide like a toddler on the tit. The teams working on that were pulled off; we were wasting resources with that shit anyway, and you can’t stop skirting the issue like a little girl. He killed himself, plain and simple. It happens every day. Get with the fucking program.”

  “Look, jackass,” Ethan snapped. “Just tell Art I called when he gets in.”

  “Sure, I’ll let big old Walking Midnight know,” Deacon sneered. “Oh, and call your dumbass lawyer back. He’s driving us crazy with all the damn calls. They’re coming in like clockwork, every hour on the hour. Like I said, we’ve got more important shit to do than be your personal answering service.”

  Ethan hung up, not bothering to end the conversation in a civil manner. Screw him. But then he considered Deacon’s final words and wondered again why J.B. Wilcox seemed so enthusiastic about having a face to face with him.

  That thought made him uncomfortable and Ethan began to suspect that Mr. Wilcox wasn’t just vying for a lawyer of the year trophy. He must have been compromised in some way. He imagined a similar group of soldiers like the ones at his uncle’s house tearing through the man’s office and forcing him to lure Ethan in for an easy catch. The promise of unknown millions in inheritance would have normally been a great incentive for anyone. Yet the forces after Ethan hadn’t counted on his being more guided by the strange circumstances involving Tobias’s past rather than claiming any inheritance, no matter how sizeable.

  His thoughts drifted back to Patient 3944 and in an unconscious movement, he slipped a hand into his pocket, rubbing his fingers along the rough, green cover of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. He pulled it out and looked down at it with renewed focus. This strange book had been directly connected to his uncle and somehow as well to the code on the wall of the dead man from St. Jeremiah’s.

  Now he just needed to crack the damn thing.

  ***

  April 23, 1986, 9:22 PM

  The latest sleazy hotel he chose as a hideout was aptly named The Knotty Beaver. The manager sat in a fog of smoke behind the desk and barely looked up when Ethan came in. The transaction for a room was quick, and shortly he was given a room key which boasted a placard in the shape of a beaver’s tail. Ethan cringed at the sight of the man’s crusty fingernails.

  He rode the elevator to the fourth floor. The Cozy Clam was like the Ritz compared to this place. When he let himself into Room 408, his throat tightened at the smell of stale cigarette smoke and musty fabric and he knew a headache would be forthcoming. Ethan deposited his items on the grime encrusted table, draped his coat across the chair, and walked to the window. Maybe some fresh air would help. But the window was stuck. Of course it was. He went back to the table and sifted through the contents, assuring himself that nothing had been lost or misplaced.

  The strange looking watch caught his eye again and he picked it up for further examination. He took more time with it now, carefully studying the switches and dials and the various lighting sequences they initiated with each press. As before, the word ‘LOCKED’ appeared on the front display without moving and the sharp hooks on the four corners remained motionless. Still, he maintained caution around the hazardous looking barbs, half expecting them to spring around and latch onto his flesh.

  He fiddled with the knobs some more and the blue light over the twelve position illuminated. It was strange that the light didn’t shine out on the entire clock face, and Ethan still couldn’t understand the purpose of the feature. From what he could see there also didn’t appear to be a way to open the watch from the bottom to change a battery. More random ideas emerged, but he dismissed them for lack of a clear answer. He lacked a lot of answers lately.

  Ethan sighed and set the timepiece aside, allowing the glow to keep radiating from the tiny bulb just to see what would happen, if anything. Maybe it had to stay lit for a certain length of time. Like a self-charging function. It sounded ridiculous, but he was willing to try anything at this point.

  His eyes found The Rubáiyát and he picked it up, staring thoughtfully at the book as his mind returned to Patient 3944’s suicide and the strange coded wall message.

  Ethan pulled his notebook out of his coat. The man’s ranting had been near incoherent, but whatever damage had been done to his brain in the past hadn’t destroyed everything. What had he said again? “It’s all letters and numbers, quatrains and words. There is a message … a message that needs to be delivered. It’s for me and me alone to know. The code is the key, and the key is the code.”

  He shook his head at the jumble of words that had spilled from the crazy man and opened the notebook to look at what he’d copied down from the patient’s wall. He focused on the first string of the cipher:

  C-10 F-16 B-5 E-3 D-D-5

  “Quatrains and words,” Ethan muttered to himself. Perhaps this coding was different from the one associated with the “Tamám Shud” case. Maybe an alphanumeric one?

  “Quatrains,” he said again. Each grouping was broken up with either one letter and a number or two letters and a number. He contemplated the options. ‘C’ would be three in the first grouping and then ‘F’ would be six, and so on. So the ‘D-D’ could be forty-four instead of just four-four.

  Ethan ripped an unused page from his notebook and busied himself with parsing the number and letter combinations, mumbling his thoughts aloud in the silent room.

  So immersed was he in cracking the code, that he didn’t notice when the small light on the watch face changed to red and beg
an to blink.

  24 Knight Glider

  April 24, 1986, 2:07 AM

  Under the cover of darkness and a full moon, far above the New York cityscape, rudders from a nondescript helicopter held the flying beast aloft above murky clouds. Inside the chopper, a gloved hand grasped the lever of the cargo door and slid it back in preparation for the LALO – low altitude low opening – jump.

  Moments later, six bodies leapt from the safety of the chopper and fell one by one toward the twinkling lights of a tireless city. Chutes deployed in near silence as the squad descended upon their target. Less than six seconds from the initial release of the parachutes, tactical boots were making contact with a pebbled roof.

  Jackman touched down hard, rooftop pebbles crunching under his weight, and simultaneously pulled on the PCU-4P quick release rings. He was already tucking into a roll as the parachute disengaged from his back, the wind carrying it away in billowing folds. By the time the last of Jackman’s troopers had landed at the intended mark, he was in position for the final huddle.

  Each of the commandos had full face coverings, including Jackman. The silver metal skull of his tactical helmet shone in the moonlight. The emblazoned image was his trademark, contributing to his call sign: “Reaper”. When his men were in a more talkative mood, they referred to him as “Jack the Reaper”. But now, they were silent as they strode to their lieutenant and hunched down in a circle formation.

  Jackman put a hand to his ear, pressed the transmit button, and checked his watch. “COM check,” he whispered.

  It was always necessary to assure no one’s equipment was damaged during a hard breach at an insertion point. Jackman listened with satisfaction as five ‘affirmatives’ came into his COM device.

  “Sync up at zero two ten, in five, four, three, two, one.”

  That routine task completed, they stood with purpose, ready for their next directive.

  Jackman glanced down, his skull mask bathed in the luminescent blue that emanated from the apparatus strapped to his forearm. The glare of the light on his face gear made it look even more menacing. “This is simple snatch and grab,” he said. “Let’s make it quick and quiet. Our target is priority one.”

  “Zodiac and Hex, you take the east fire escape, split up and check levels five and four. Priest and Tinman, go to the first floor and climb up – make sure he doesn’t double back on us.” Jackman jerked his head in the direction of the last team member, “Worm, you’re with me.”

  A hiss came through Jackman’s earpiece. “Reaper, this is Overlord. We’re pulling out. Extraction zone is in the alley behind the lot; ETA ten minutes.”

  “Alright, it’s ten minutes to extract.” Jackman repeated the message he’d just been given. “You know your jobs, move out. No mistakes.”

  In seconds, each two-man team arrived at their designated locations. Jackman stood by the junction box as Worm opened the electrical panel. “Take his eyes, Worm.”

  The commando positioned himself at the ready to flip the breaker.

  Jackman transmitted over the COM, “We’re dark in three, two, one.”

  He looked at Worm and they nodded in unison as the countdown concluded. Jackman twisted a knob on his helmet, and the lenses over his eyes changed, morphing everything into a hazy emerald glow.

  25 Room Raider

  April 24, 1986, 2:13 AM

  The wall heater struggled to stay alive, thunking and heaving along in its duty to keep pumping warm air. The lodging at this latest motel boasted an even more uncomfortable bed than The Cozy Clam – if that was possible – and a semi-working bathroom. Ethan had yet to sleep in the beds of the rooms he’d rented over the last couple days, opting instead to doze in the chairs. The consequent neck and back aches were the cost to be paid for anonymity and no questions asked. Thank God it was dirt cheap, because his immediate cash flow was beginning to run dry.

  After several hours of attempted code cracking, Ethan had barely make progress on the combinations that lay before him. The trashcan was filled with failed attempts at the decoding process. But he kept going, feeling the importance of the alpha-numeric sequence. There were always one or two letters accompanied by a number. The first letter or two were the starting point, which according to his gut instinct represented a numbered quatrain. The following number represented a number as well, but perhaps that number designated which word on the page. If that was the case it would be a simple enough code, but the problem for anyone else who held the code was that no ground could be covered if they didn’t know which book was its partner.

  The last few days of pouring through countless unsolved mysteries worldwide that shared similarities to the Somerton Man case were beginning to reap dividends – albeit small ones. He still had yet to figure out what ‘TAMAM SHUD’ meant in correlation with the original coded lines. The only information he’d learned so far was that Tamám Shud, translated to ‘The End’. The end of what? And it was curious to him why someone would keep a torn page from an old book in a hidden trouser pocket.

  But none of that mattered right now, because Ethan felt like he was close to cracking the latest code he’d found at St. Jeremiah’s. He paged once more through the aged copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, circling the indicated word and searching for the next.

  A message was finally beginning to take shape. He jotted down the words: ‘Red’, ‘Hand’, ‘Is’, ‘Victorious’. The next letter was ‘M’, which would equal thirteen on the numerical scale. After another quick glance through The Rubáiyát, he was staring at the thirteenth quatrain. He checked Patient 3944’s code; the number ‘21’ followed the ‘M’. He scanned the page in search of the twenty-first word.

  And then the room went dark.

  Ethan sat frozen in the black and placid silence, blinded by the sudden loss of light. He waited for his vision to adjust, hoping that the meager light seeping through the edges of the drapes would be enough to guide him. Out of habit he searched for the bedside clock to check the time, only to remember a second later that the power outage meant the clock was useless. When he’d last seen the time, it had been closing in on 2 a.m. and the hourly renters had long since left for the night; which explained the significant lack of outraged patrons in the hallway.

  Where had he put his gun? Still unable to see, Ethan felt along the surface of the table and eased out of the chair. He’d probably left the gun over by the bed. The power outage was no coincidence, of that he was sure. The events of the past few days – the attack at his uncle’s estate, the undercover saplings at his downtown apartment and the firefight that ensued there, Fredericks being shot down right in front of him, his uncle’s missing body – wouldn’t allow him to draw any other conclusion.

  He couldn’t waste time fumbling for a gun when precious seconds were ticking away. Ethan stood up, moving carefully along the wall for the door where he’d left his boots. He put them on, not bothering to tie the laces. Then he pulled open his door and peered out into a hallway that was scarcely brighter than his room. There was only one window at the end of the corridor, but it didn’t provide sufficient lighting to illuminate his path well. On the opposite end was the loud and ancient elevator that had given him little confidence it would make the rise to the fourth floor when he came up earlier.

  Ethan took measured steps toward the elevator and by the time he was halfway there, his eyes were beginning to adjust. Near the elevator doors, he could see that just to his right was a door for the stairs and roof access. He moved to cross the void when the door squeaked open, and he jumped back behind the wall.

  A red laser light split the blackness, the beam jerking with dangerous movements as the handler scanned the area. Ethan held his breath, feeling the pressure build in his lungs until he saw the barrel of a machine gun emerge from around the corner.

  He launched himself at the wielder of the weapon, smashing into the mystery commando and grabbing onto the body and barrel of the gun – which felt like an M16 beneath his touch. He struggled fur
iously to lay claim to the weapon, but the man pulled back and they both grappled for more leverage on the firearm.

  The man was covered from head to toe in a thick military looking Kevlar suit: chest, shoulder, knee pads. And then there was the helmet; Ethan had seen it before at his uncle’s house, but up close it broke the steel reserve of his usual calm. It wasn’t a helmet in the normal sense of the word, more like a complete face covering made of solid metal or something similar, with screws holding it in place. It was the eyes that unnerved him the most: circular insect-like sockets emitting a dull green glow.

  Ethan squeezed his eyes shut, forcing the view from his mind and straining to overpower the man. After wrenching and pulling at the weapon, he realized it was slung around the commando’s shoulder and torso and couldn’t be pried away with brute force.

  Ethan’s opponent pushed back, slamming him into the wall. His lower back collided against a metal railing, and he gritted his teeth against the shock to his spine. He managed to smash a knee into the man’s inner thigh and felt grim satisfaction at the muffled grunt of pain it produced. This slight advantage wouldn’t last long, and Ethan’s own body was still throbbing from the pain in his back.

  He shifted his right hand from the stock of the gun and pressed the magazine release. The cartridge clanged to the floor and Ethan managed to push the barrel away from his body. He got his thumb on the trigger and pushed, firing off the remaining bullet in the chamber. The man’s grip released on the now useless weapon and he reached for his side arm instead.

  Ethan held on to the empty rifle, twisting it underneath the commando’s right arm. He kicked the back of the man’s leg, bringing him to his knees. This gave Ethan the opportunity to yank the M16 up behind the man’s back, spinning it again, and cinching the commando into a choke hold with his own weapon. He kept squeezing and pulling, grimacing with effort. This man was no lightweight, and it had been years since Ethan trained for hard combat. He was almost surprised he’d made it this far.