by Tom Clancy
“You asked me to jump, and I did,” Nimec said. “Your turn.”
Ricci regarded Nimec another moment, then nodded again. He told him about the marks he’d seen on the door to Palardy’s condo, about the odd positioning of his body given the presumed cause of death, about the cables he’d noticed under Palardy’s desk.
“I looked everywhere for a computer before the cops showed, Pete. And I can tell you there wasn’t one in the place,” Ricci said. “No computer, not a single diskette, either. And that bothered me. Bothers me even more now that we know Palardy sent an E-mail from some machine at a time we can assume he was at home.” He paused. “Another peculiar thing caught my eye before I left. Palardy’d installed one of those floor bolts behind the front door. Lets you open the door to see who’s outside when there’s a knock, and not have to worry about a robber pushing his way through. You trigger it with your foot from inside. Know the kind I mean?”
“Sure.”
“Well, it wasn’t locked. You figure somebody goes to the trouble and expense of having something like that installed, he’s going to shoot the bolt while he’s home at night.”
“So you think somebody opened the door with a credit card, reached inside to disengage it, let himself in. That it?”
“Wouldn’t take a master thief,” Ricci said.
Nimec looked curious. “Okay, say it happened. What’s next? The intruder lifts Palardy’s computer and data storage media for some reason?”
“Yeah,” Ricci said. “Or maybe he kills Palardy first, then takes off with it—”
“Hold on. You’ve told me yourself that Palardy was obviously sick.”
“Sick isn’t dead, Pete. Sick can still talk.” He nodded at the screen. “Or send coded messages to his office.”
Nimec didn’t comment for a while. Then he said, “Give me your theory.”
“There are poisons that aren’t easy to detect or might be overlooked by a coroner if the vic’s already on his way out and somebody wants to speed along his exit. You used to be on the job same as me. How many times you respond to a sudden death call, take one look around, another at the DOA, and know on account of what you saw that it was a murder disguised as something else? An accident. A routine suicide. A heart attack. I’m telling you, Palardy’s body was arranged for viewing.”
“You got that from the appearance of the scene, okay. I’m not doubting your eye. But where’s the connection to Gord in this? They’ve found virus in his blood specimens, so we know he wasn’t poisoned.”
Ricci shot him a look. “We’re in thin air together, right? So just between us, Pete, what if the boss and Palardy were both infected with the virus? On purpose. If that’s the case, we don’t know what Palardy could have told us about it or who’d want to stop him from talking.”
Nimec took a deep breath.
“The cops and public health investigators are rushing Palardy’s autopsy. I’ll stay close to them. Make sure they conduct a toxicological exam for anything that could mimic or speed up the symptoms of the disease.”
“Sounds good.”
Nimec thought a minute. “Okay, then what? Let’s suppose they find Palardy and Gord were exposed to the same germ. Or turn up some forensics that would bear out your suspicions about the circumstances of Palardy’s death—”
Ricci interrupted him. “There’s no reason we should wait for them to get that far. Wait for any of their results to gain ourselves a head start. And we goddamn well know there’s something funny about Palardy’s message. Why not have the people in our crypto unit put on their decoder rings?”
“That’s already occurred to me,” Nimec said. “I can have them on it right aw—”
He noticed the computer display unexpectedly go blank, and out of habit checked the power light to see whether it had lost current or gone into a sleep mode. Then cartoonish winged clocks and watches began floating across it in random patterns, satisfying his interest.
“Screen saver,” he said, voicing his minor realization aloud. “Time flies.”
Ricci glanced at the display. “Fits,” he muttered.
TWENTY
VARIOUS LOCALES
NOVEMBER 16, 2001
“SOMETHING LIKE THIS, ONE LOOK AT IT TELLS YOU almost as much as it doesn’t,” James Carmichael said without elaboration. He was seated behind Palardy’s computer, studying the enigmatic series of letters and punctuation marks in his E-mail.
Nimec and Ricci exchanged glances from where they stood, bookending him. His statement itself struck them as a bit mysterious, but that was almost expected. Before Roger Gordian lured him into his employ, Carmichael had been a third-generation National Security Agency analyst, his grandfather having worked for the crypto-logic intelligence organization from the time of its Cold War inception by secret presidential memorandum—back when the government was still mum about its existence, and Washington insiders cheekily referred to the NSA acronym as standing for No Such Agency.
“How about you walk us through,” Nimec said. “Starting with whether we’re all on the same page about it actually being a code, and not what happens when somebody’s out of his skull with fever and doesn’t know what he’s typing.”
A thirtyish man in shirtsleeves with sharp blue eyes and a bumper crop of wavy black hair, Carmichael looked over his shoulder at Nimec.
“Sorry,” he said. “The minute I start to sound condescending, permission’s granted to whump me across the back of the head.”
Nimec smiled a little. “We’ll allow you one free pass.”
“Deal.” Carmichael turned back to the screen. “Okay, first, I think we can rule out that it’s the product of an incoherent mind. It’s too systematic in its construction. I also think what we’ve got in front of us isn’t strictly speaking a code but a cipher. People use the terms as if they’re interchangeable, but there’s a distinction, and it’s important for more than semantic reasons. Codes substitute whole words with letters, numbers, symbols, phrases, or other words. Ciphers create substitutions for independent letters or syllables, and they allow for more complex communications. They’re the basis of modern electronic encryption. A good way to keep them straight might be to compare codes to ancient hieroglyphics or pictographs, ciphers to the alphabet. Imagine Shakespeare trying to write Hamlet using pictures on the wall, and it’ll be apparent why ciphertext is more refined and efficient.”
“You can tell the difference right off?” Ricci said.
“Usually, yeah.” Carmichael said. He indicated several spots on the lines of characters. “Frequent recurrences of letter groups are a fair giveaway that they’re replacing small linguistic units. See the letter pair, or bigram, ‘BH’? It appears ten, eleven times. You wouldn’t expect the same word to be repeated that often within a relatively short message ... but a letter or syllable, sure. And then there’s the back-to-back use of the polygram ‘JM00’. That probably equals a double-letter combination in plaintext—”
“Plaintext being ...”
“The words you’re trying to conceal,” Carmichael said. “As opposed to ciphertext, which would be the characters you’re using to conceal them.”
Ricci was nodding his head. “That’s all there is to this nut, it should be easy to crack,” he said. “The regular ... the plaintext ... alphabet has twenty-six letters. Which means you’d have an equal amount of ciphertext groups, right? One group for each letter, A through Z. Run all the possible matches through a computer, how long would it take to kick out the one that lets you form real words that add up to real sentences instead of nonsense? Simple math, there are only so many possibilities.”
Carmichael looked at him. “Your logic makes sense as far as it goes, but leaves us with a couple of big problems,” he said. “One, let’s assume Palardy’s ciphertext groups correlate to letters in the English alphabet, and not some other with a greater or lesser number of characters. Figuring out that part might just be the first step toward getting to the clear—the hidden message—since
we don’t know that there aren’t added levels of encryption. And two, any cipher worth the thought and effort needed to create it incorporates nulls. These could be letters, digits, symbols, maybe punctuation marks that don’t fit the system and can complicate things.”
“Wouldn’t your computers be able identify them for that very reason?” Nimec asked. “Exclude them because they don’t fall into the pattern?”
“With time,” Carmichael replied tersely, looking at him in a way that conveyed he was all too aware of its desperate shortage.
Silence hung a minute. Then, from Nimec: “It’s crazy. Palardy composes a secret message before he dies, E-mails it here. He must want us to be able to get at it. I can’t see why else he goes to the trouble.”
Carmichael nodded. “Agreed. Even if his purpose was to frustrate us, put us through our paces ... and we don’t know it was ... I still bet he’d provide a key. Either separately or hidden within the cryptogram.”
“You think you can do it?” Nimec asked Carmichael. “Find the key, whatever Palardy’s intentions might’ve been?”
“I’ll have my people go over every bit of data on this terminal’s hard drive. And any removable storage media he might have left behind. See what we learn from them.” A sigh. “I know we can do a successful cryptanalysis. Break the system without a key. But truthfully, I can’t estimate how long it would take. Could be hours, days, even weeks.”
“Goddamn it.” Ricci frowned. “If Palardy wasn’t playing games with us ... wanted to tell us something ... what the hell was he thinking? Why bother encrypting his message?”
“The only reason I can figure would be to keep it from whoever got into his apartment and carried away his notebook,” Nimec said.
“If that’s it, he could have sent the message in plain language and then wiped it from his notebook’s memory,” Ricci said. “Reformatted his hard drive to be positive it couldn’t be recovered.”
“Unless he was worried about somebody being able to pull it from our mainframe.”
“If our security’s been compromised to that extent, Pete, we’d both better turn in our resignations.”
Carmichael had been listening quietly, his eyes narrowed in contemplation as they spoke.
“Any objections if I toss a hypothesis of my own into the pot?” he said.
“None,” Nimec said.
Carmichael looked from one man to the other.
“Maybe Palardy wanted the person who got hold of the computer to know he’d sent us a message but have to sweat about what information it contained,” he said. “In other words, maybe he wasn’t playing with our heads, but his.”
By Wednesday afternoon, Enrique Quiros’s eyes were so familiar with the message in the Sent column of Palardy’s E-mail program that it might have been burned into their retinas. He had spent hours trying to make sense of it. Long, futile hours.
Quiros switched off the notebook computer that had been brought to him from Palardy’s condominium, closed its lid, and reached for the tumbler of scotch on his desk. It was not his usual habit to drink before sundown, but his nerves badly needed steadying. One by one, his recent problems had compounded. Felix’s idiotic stunt, Felix’s murder, his forced hand in setting up tonight’s appointment with Salazar. And now everything he’d feared from the moment he had climbed aboard the carousel with that blonde had come about. She had sucked him into the conspiracy to kill Roger Gordian, made him an instrumental participant, and he had known that he would live to regret it.
Palardy had been cringing and manipulable, but Enrique had never thought he was stupid. He had felt all along that Palardy might be prepared for treachery, that once he realized he was a doomed man, he would want to expose the people he knew had used and discarded him. And he would find a way to do it before he could be stopped.
Quiros lifted the glass to his mouth and took a good, deep swallow. He didn’t know how to decode the message. Didn’t have the slightest clue. Perhaps the great and inviolable El Tío would possess the means, but Enrique was not anxious to commit suicide by sending it up the line to him. If its purpose was what Enrique believed it to be, no good could come of that. Not for him. Although El Tío’s whereabouts and identity were protected by blind upon blind, Palardy would have surely implicated Enrique, pointed the way to his door ... and that was where El Tío would quickly cut the trail to his own.
Quiros tossed back the rest of his whiskey. It was out of his hands now. Completely out of his hands. The fucking heavens were about to rock.
He could only go about his plans for tonight, deal with Salazar, and wait to see whether there would be someplace to take cover when the sky came tumbling down in a million pieces.
Her hair golden in the California sunlight, she strode toward the airline ticket office with a shopping bag on her arm, drawing glances of uniform appreciation from the males she passed on the street. She was aware of each look—the discreet, the boorish, the passively speculative, the aggressively gaming. As a runway model in Paris and Milan not many years ago, she had learned that some women could trade upon beauty and sex as some men did on wealth and power. The terms of exchange, the boundaries, were what one chose to make them.
In Europe, at the parties in the clubs and aboard the yachts where she was invited after the shows, she had found it was often the truly dangerous men who had been able to provide the things she most desired. It was the oldest of understandings: Take of me, and I will take of you. She had accepted it without hesitation from a succession of lovers and been introduced to circles of hidden influence and inestimable fortune. The lifestyle attracted her, fascinated her, thrilled her.
Eventually she had come to do favors that went beyond the physical, although that was a constant part of the bargain. Sometimes enjoyable, sometimes less so. But no man had ever forced anything upon her. Made her do anything against her will. The assignments she ran across borders, moving from one country to the next under a variety of identities, gave her a wonderful feeling of value and importance, and it only heightened her excitement to know the international laws she had broken while using any one of those assumed names could have put her in prison forever. She had passed under the eyes of authorities, hiding in full view, and it exhilarated her.
Having lived among the dangerous, enjoyed the spoils of their illicit traffic, she in due time acquired a taste for the danger itself.
Siegfried Kuhl was by far the most dangerous man she had ever met. Once she had been with him, none of the rest had interested her, and she knew no other would again. He had satisfied her with a fullness she had never dreamed might be experienced. What sensual delights could be greater than those he lavished on her? What crimes more damnable than those she’d committed for him?
Now he had finally sent word. Although his affairs in Canada had not yet concluded, he would have the opportunity to leave for a few days and had made plans for them to be together. Where he had promised. In the place that was special to him and would become special to her.
She turned into the ticket office, waited on a short line, then walked over to an available clerk.
“Hello,” he said, smiling at her from behind the counter. He looked like a sheep, soft and penned. “How may I help you?”
“I would like a reservation for a flight to Madrid,” she said and gave him the date she wished to leave.
He nodded, tapped his keyboard with one finger.
“How many passengers will there be?”
“Just myself,” she said.
He glanced up at her.
“A lovely city, one of my favorites,” he said amiably. “Have you traveled there before?”
“Only for a brief stopover,” she said. “But I’ll be joining someone who is very well acquainted with it.”
“Ahh,” he said. “Business or pleasure?”
She looked at the clerk and mused that his entire bleating existence was not worth the most transitory and unremembered of her many disposable aliases.
“Ple
asure,” she said and smiled back at him. “Strictly pleasure.”
“Carmichael.” Ricci leaned into the room in the crypto section. “How’s it going?”
“The same as it was when you asked fifteen minutes ago,” Carmichael said. He turned toward him in his swivel chair. “And when Megan Breen and Vince Scull stopped in ten minutes ago. And when Pete Nimec buzzed me just bef—”
Ricci held up his hand.
“Don’t uncork.” he said. “I just asked a question.”
“Listen, I’m not the one who needs to stay cool,” Carmichael said and gestured toward the computer he’d carried out of Palardy’s office, now on his gray steel desk. “I’ve already told you I’d report any progress. I’ve made multiple copies of the hard drive, and my team’s sifting through it all, sector by sector, file by file. That’s at the same time we’re trying to determine whether the message might precisely conform to some classic model of encipherment. We’re hitting the books. Researching the Freemasons, Vigenère, Arthur Conan Doyle for God’s sake ...”
He let the sentence fade, blew air out of his mouth.
Ricci looked at him.
“Okay, I read you,” he said. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Keep the distractions away. This came at us damn fast. I know everybody’s stressed, but you’ve got to give us a chance. Let us do our work.” He paused, settled. “I’ve got a few hunches to check out. If they amount to anything, you’ll be the first to know about it.”
Ricci nodded. He stood quietly looking into the room a moment. Carmichael had connected Palardy’s CPU to a large, wide, flat panel display mounted on the wall above his desk, and clocks were winging across it. With the screen saver’s teal blue background, the effect was more than a little surreal, as if they were flocking in the air outside a window.
“There they go again,” he said. “Up and away.”