The Camelot Gambit

by A. J. Scudiere

  She’d put so many security measures into place, she thought, surely no one could untangle this. But then again, they hadn’t been able to untangle Marat’s murder either. Eleri sighed and dialed.

  Luckily, GJ answered right away: "I cracked the code."

  40

  In a huff of excited breaths, Eleri relayed to Donovan what GJ had told her. It was the first good news in the case.

  She told him how GJ had sent her pictures—snapshots messaged to the burner phone—which Eleri had looked at before turning the phone off, so it couldn’t be traced back to this house.

  Once she'd memorized what was there, she smiled. Now she relayed it to Donovan. "It's hexadecimal."

  "No, it's not," he replied. "We considered that. We considered standard alphabet transposition codes."

  Simple codes, Eleri thought, the kind smart kids played at in grade school, where numbers represented a letter and you simply wrote out the number, or where you took the alphabet and counted down ten spaces, so you'd have a key somewhere at the top of the page where you would write the number “10.” Then your A would become a J—the tenth letter—and so on, following down the alphabet.

  "You're suggesting it's a simple transposition code, but we already checked for that," Donovan insisted with a frown.

  "GJ cracked it," Eleri said. "I've actually been reading some of the pages."

  "But how is that hexadecimal?" He pointed to the open notebook in front of him.

  "That’s the kicker. It is a simple transposition code—”

  “Is it in Russian?" he asked.

  "No, it's in English. The secret is that Rychenkov used his own version of Hexadecimal. He also transposed the numbers and letters in the system, so instead of zero through nine, it goes A through J, and only uses digits one through six. Look," Eleri pointed.

  "No digit above six," he mused. "And no zeroes."

  "Right. Just to throw off anyone trying to crack it," she said. "GJ told me it was one of Walter’s comments that spurred her to figure it out. They were talking about that issue—that no digits went beyond six—and Walter had said it reminded her of some military coding—and boom, all of a sudden it happened. She figured it out!”

  He smiled and Eleri felt it in her bones. Yes! A crack in this case that had been a headache, a crazy puzzle, and a challenge to every intellectual ability they had. “And that's it, Donovan. Once we know what the code is, we just read it. It's in English and it’s number-for-letter."

  "So what are the notebooks about?"

  "Okay. Big shock here," she told him. "They’re about his drones."

  Donovan merely raised an eyebrow at her as though she needed to come up with a better answer, but she shrugged. "That's it. It's about his drones. It's about his drone system and which drones he's flying on which day. A lot of it reads like a lab notebook. He records data from the flights. I think one entry correlates to one of the files we saw on the video, but I'm not sure yet. I really only just got started before you got home."

  She gave Donovan the code sheet she'd written out, placing it in between them and scooting one of the other notebooks his way as though he would just grab a pencil and a stack of paper and join her.

  He did.

  Once again, they could have done this on computer, but paper wasn't hackable. It was steal-able, but not hackable. As they went along, they took pictures on a camera they had that was not linked to the web and loaded images into the FBI-secured emails.

  They ordered sandwiches from the Yellow Submarine, because it delivered. It was hours later that Donovan threw down his pencil. "This is killing me. My brain is fried."

  "Are you working tomorrow?" she asked. She could tell by his expression that he was afraid she would insist he keep working if he said “no.” But that wasn’t her intention.

  "No, I'm off for the next five days. And if I'm lucky, I'll never go back."

  "Holy shit. That bad?" Her own pencil stopped moving and she set it on the table as she tilted her head. While that actually helped him hear better, for her it was just an old gesture that likely hadn’t evolved out.

  "I had a sixteen-year-old who had a positive pregnancy test."

  Ugh, Eleri thought. "Geez. Smart kids, you'd think."

  "Smart kids do it, too," he said. "I guess the upside was that she caught it about a week and a half into the pregnancy."

  "Damn, that's fast."

  "Smart kids," Donovan reiterated with a half-smile, and this time with a better tone than Eleri had used.

  "So it wasn't just strep and flu this time."

  "No, but I had someone with the flu, too. He wanted a full-scale explanation—he was a mathematician, mind you—of why antibiotics didn't work. And then he wanted to discuss how chaos theory applied to random mutation and viral load."

  "Oh, dear God."

  "I know." He leaned back in the chair, the notebooks now ignored, and he looked at her. "Can I tell you something?"

  "Sure, anything."

  "I loved it."

  "But you never want to go back?" Eleri was confused now.

  "Well, I never want to go back because of the pregnant sixteen-year-old. I mean, I hope I helped, but dear God, that's worse than being a parent." Eleri laughed at him, "But damn, I don't think I've ever had a discussion of chaos theory as it applies to viral load. He pulled out Monte Carlo distributions and we discussed the statistics of antibiotics failing and leading to resistance."

  "But you don't want to go back," she repeated.

  "I loved it, El. But I had less than twenty minutes to see him. Despite the fact that we live in Curie, it’s still a business, and as he discussed his mathematical theories and tried to carry a sequence out into the five thousandths place—just as an example of a very small culture of bacteria—I had to leave. I had patients waiting. Also, as a physician I can't ask him what his address is or see if he wants to meet up for coffee. He seemed excited to discuss the nature of ‘P does not equal one’ with someone in the medical field. He was really excited about the physical application of it."

  She laughed at him. "I've had the same thought. I feel like a stupid fool half the time. But I really like it here. What does that make me?"

  "A snobby elitist," Donovan told her with a sharp grin.

  "Ugh, that sounds terrible. But I love it."

  "I like it here, too," he told her, and then his expression turned downward. "But there's nowhere to run."

  "Oh." She felt her mouth form a small, O. It wasn't something she'd thought about since they arrived. "Do we need to get you out?"

  "Not yet, but honestly, another week and I'm going to get squirrely."

  And here, she'd been reveling in the relative normalcy of this case.

  As crazy as Curie was, Keyoor Vergheese had been the only odd type, unknown to the public, that they encountered. All of these people with their crazy high IQs, they told other people about their weirdness. It wasn't anything they hid. It wasn't like with Donovan—something others would come after you for or lynch you for. It wasn’t the kind of thing that created a mob of hunters who would kill whole families and systematically destroy records. The thought turned her somber.

  She'd been sitting here, complacent in her relative normalcy—“relative” being the key word—and forgetting that Donovan needed places to run, spaces to change. She suspected his physical body felt the urge to shift every once in a while. Probably it was driven by the same basic factors that gave her the urge to eat chocolate ice cream directly from the carton sometimes.

  It was 6:30, she saw looking up at the clock. "Let's go see a movie," she said. "Let's do something crazy, disturbingly normal. Maybe we'll run into people and we'll have a conversation and we'll find out something wild about Marat Rychenkov, or about Johanna."

  "Actually," he told her, "hopefully we won't run into anybody we know, and we'll see a movie and we'll like it."

  "Valid point," she agreed, "but we're going to tell Westerfield it was a fact-finding mission."
/>   "Anything," Donovan agreed, wadding up the wax paper the sandwiches had come in.

  As they headed out to the small local theater, Eleri finally began to relax. When they stopped at a light, she began to laugh. “Look at that license plate, Donovan.”

  “Troilus?”

  She grinned and pointed at the back of the car. “It’s on an old Toyota Cressida.”

  But he didn’t seem to get it. So she added, “Chaucer? Shakespeare? Didn’t you read Troilus and Cressida in high school?”

  He only shook his head at her like she was crazy. Maybe she was. Maybe his high school hadn’t gone beyond the most obvious classics. Many didn’t. “Well, Shakespeare eventually made a play out of it, but you weren’t missing much. Chaucer’s version was the Twilight of the 1300s.”

  Donovan snorted and Eleri kept her mouth shut until they made it to the theater. They picked an action flick, which Eleri analyzed regarding how both the good guys and the bad guys held their guns incorrectly. On the way out, she heard a couple actively complaining about the way the man had bled.

  "It was all wrong. That's not what it looks like when you hit an artery!"

  She almost laughed. She almost reached out and said something and made a new friend because he was right. But she didn't. She and Donovan managed to pretend they were normal for several hours. Once back in the house, though, when she saw it was late and said goodnight, she texted Avery, grateful when her phone buzzed back quickly. His game had ended. They'd won. Everyone was happy.

  But she started to wonder when she would have to tell him the truth about herself. Though she hadn’t hidden anything from him per se, she hadn’t told her boyfriend the whole truth, either. By not doing so, she’d built a hurdle for herself. Had she thrown it at him earlier, she would have been able to share her surprise at the ancestry Donovan had dug up on her and what it meant. She could have told him about her hunches, and a little of what had happened with Echo and Ember. How she’d really found her sister…

  She didn’t like dwelling on those thoughts, so she turned her mind to better ones. She had the key to the notebooks now.

  Eleri woke up the next morning ready to eat cereal next to Donovan and translate more. But the more she translated, the more disturbed she became. "I don't know if these have any value at all, Donovan. They're lab notebooks, but they just described the same things we saw in the video."

  "I know, Eleri," he said, "but I have to tell you, I feel it. We're missing something right in front of us. I know you’re the one who gets the feelings about things, but I have it this time. I’m telling you, we’re holding the key. We just can’t see it."

  41

  Donovan could feel it under his skin, almost like an itch just beneath the surface. He felt that familiar squirm—the need to go for a run.

  They had translated all of the notebooks Rychenkov left, and—as Eleri had initially found—they read more like lab notebooks than anything else. There was no page titled “secret formula” and nothing that was obviously worth killing for.

  As Donovan read along, he saw that Marat had installed a program he simply labeled “A” on the small black drones. Then he placed them in formation inside the room and had them fly certain patterns. The drones went around the room, with some landing cleanly at the end, some falling. Marat recorded which ones did what and then he did it again. And then again. And the last time, the little drones didn't run into anything. As best Donovan could tell, that was all that had happened.

  It didn’t look like anything worth even hiding the lab notebooks for.

  Donovan kept reading. Marat installed program D.12 in the large, white drones. This set had only twelve drones, not like the more numerous army of the small black ones. This set resembled a small herd rather than a swarm, like the other. In fact, each of these had been given a mark and a name that Marat used to keep track of them.

  In the lab notebooks, Rychenkov recorded in detail how he’d taken these out into the park and flown them around from his central controller. The man always meticulously noted which controller he used, which program he’d installed, which sub-programming he was using, and which pieces of code he had changed.

  But none of it meant anything to Donovan. As Eleri had said, what was recorded in the notebooks looked very, very much like the five videos that had surfaced from the USB.

  "Eleri," Donovan said, grabbing her attention as she was now flipping through her own set of translated pages, rather than the original notebooks. "Let's go do something today."

  "Like what?"

  "It's been a full day of nothing. GJ cracked the code well over twenty-four hours ago, and still nothing happened yesterday. I know I did nothing of value. We talked to Jivika, and we can go back tonight to talk to her again."

  Eleri had shown up with Donovan the night before, once again sitting there when Jivika got home. That had remained the plan, and Eleri seemed worried by it. "What if we miss her? What if we're out and she comes home? Will we be back in time?"

  "Then we miss her. So we’ll visit her later in the evening. It will startle her, keep her on her toes."

  Eleri seemed to turn the idea over for a moment and Donovan was glad when she seemed to let it settle. "Okay, what do you need to do?"

  "I need to run."

  "Ah. Do you need me to go with you, or do you want me to hold down the fort?" He appreciated that she didn't ask anything more than that, that she didn't even bother to question whether he really needed it, or if he could wait a few more days. She simply asked how she could help.

  "Why don’t you go with me? You had talked about seeing McKenzie Burke's family when you were here."

  "Yes." She nodded, once again frowning slightly as a problem occurred to her. "Is it okay to have both of us out today?"

  "Wade's in town, and no one has gone back into the Rychenkov-Schmitt home."

  She nodded her head, conceding to the truth. "And if we're out and away, I can keep one of the burner phones on, because it won't matter. It won't let anybody track back to this house or us."

  "Good point."

  "So, then, let's go out. Do you have an idea on where to run?"

  While he’d been pretty sure there was no forest land nearby, he’d double-checked. There wasn’t. He’d believed that running through the cornfields was a bad idea, but Donovan was now fully on board, and he told her so. "My only other option is to find a random patch of trees, and I think even that is too far away. It's so flat here. There's nowhere to really hide."

  "You think you can go out in someone's cornfield and they won't see you?"

  "I think it will be okay. Things run through the corn all the time, as best I can tell. I'm more concerned about what I might run into that's not human."

  She laughed at him and said, "So you need me to drop you off? Take your clothes, bring them back?"

  "That seems kind of dangerous. We’ll just leave them there. As long as no one finds me, they probably won't find my clothes. We’ll bring a back-up set in case something goes wrong."

  It took a while for them to get ready. Eleri messaged Wade on the secure connection. Donovan wanted to change into clothes that were easy to get in and out of.

  He had Eleri hook a tracker to a piece of elastic. Once he changed, he would shove his foot down into it. They’d done this more than once, and he really was not up for a collar. Though he didn't particularly embrace the idea of being traced wherever he went, having had accidents before when he was out, he appreciated having a partner who could come and find him if the need arose. He'd been through broken ankles, human discovery, and more.

  Eleri was excellent back up, and if it meant he had to wear a tracker, he'd wear the tracker. Keyoor Vergheese was the only person out here that he might run into like himself. If anyone spotted him, they might be more likely to shoot than anything else. The tracker was a necessity, like it or not.

  Eleri changed clothes, too. She was wearing a suit, trying to be more professional for the visit, although she’d opte
d to look like a relaxed FBI agent and slung the jacket over her arm and undone the top button on her blouse. She also wanted to be accessible while she did a little research of a more personal nature. She was hoping that during Donovan’s exercise, she could meet with McKenzie Burke's family.

  Donovan called Wade and asked if he had any recommendations, but Wade had not been running yet. "In a few days, I'll be asking you for recommendations for somewhere to run."

  Donovan wondered why Wade seemed to be able to hold out longer. He seemed to have better control on his need for shifting. Was that because Wade had been raised in a community of people like them, and Donovan had been left mostly alone to discover it by himself?

  It took them an hour to get on the road, pull up a map, and find a reasonable spot to let him out. While the urge was still there, he started relaxing, just from knowing that a run was coming.

  Eleri drove, of course, and eventually they found an old gravel road with no homes on it, just fields as far as the eye could see. She would leave him here and head off on her research mission: to see the family of a girl who'd been murdered. A girl with links to the disappearance of Eleri’s sister, Emmaline, links that she was interested in diving into a little more, if she could.

  Donovan wanted to go with her, but more than that, he needed to run.

  Discreetly, they pulled the car to the side of the road. Climbing out quickly with his bag in hand, he slipped into the cover of the field even as Eleri drove away. A tall man, he found it hard to completely disappear, but he ducked down and pushed his way between the stalks.

  Donovan struggled for a little while to find a spot where he could remove his clothing, stuff it down in the bag, and leave it. The stalks had itched as he passed by, and removing his clothing only made that worse, but he rolled his shoulders, feeling the bones slide across each other and stop in new positions.

  He flexed each arm out, first his shoulders, then his elbows and his wrists. Then he curled and opened his fingers, watching as each one curled back into a new position, tendons sliding, muscles tightening, bones shifting. His rib cage changed compression slightly, the intercostal muscles breathing and loosening just a little. He rolled his neck and jutted his jaw until the middle of his face pushed out.