by Alex Archer
"I'm surprised that you remember me," Pietro said.
"I've got a good memory," Annja said. "Plus, as I recall, you and I were both uncomfortable in the madhouse."
Pietro chuckled. "Yes. The inmates haven't gotten appreciably better. Only now some of the loudness is caused by the three children Francesca and I have been blessed with."
Annja retreated to the bathroom and turned off the water. She sat on the edge of the tub, feeling the heat soak into her and enjoying the fragrance. It seemed to lift some of the heaviness.
"Are you guys doing all right?" Annja asked.
"Things are crazy around here. I think Dante and I are going to come for Mario's body. It would be too hard for anyone else."
"If there's anything I can do, please don't hesitate."
"I appreciate it, but there's not much to do at this point. This is just a very sad thing."
Annja silently agreed. She'd put off her own sadness by working, but that wouldn't last forever. Even though she and Mario hadn't seen each other in years, knowing he was gone forever hurt.
"How are you doing?" Pietro asked.
"I'm okay. Sad. But it had been a long time since I'd seen Mario."
"That's what he'd said. His sister always teased him about you. They told him he shouldn't have let you get away."
Annja chuckled. "I think we got away from each other. On purpose. Mario and I weren't exactly looking for anything permanent. We had a good time. It was nice to be friends. Simple."
A child screamed in the background.
Pietro sighed. "I think that was one of mine. You don't get simple after you have kids. I think kids were what made Mario finally want to settle down. He'd been around so many nieces and nephews that he started wanting to have kids of his own."
Annja hesitated just a moment, feeling bad about what she was doing, then forgave herself and said, "I'd heard Mario had someone in his life. Erene?"
"That's right. Erene Skujans. It's a strange last name."
"Not in Latvia. I'm assuming that's where Mario met her."
"Yes. He was over there researching something he was very excited about."
"Do you know what it was?"
"No. Mario liked being mysterious. He was always doing those puzzles – showing the kids how to make cipher keys so they could write messages to each other that their parents couldn't read."
"Playfair ciphers," Annja said, remembering Mario's instruction to "play fairly" with her authentication. She and Mario had whiled away some of the boring hours out at the dig site playing with the idea of codes. Mario had been fascinated by them, and his favorite had been the Playfair ciphers.
"I think that's what they were called," Pietro agreed. "Whatever he was doing, it consumed him."
"What do you mean?" Annja got up and went back to the living room, back to the mosaic and the pieces she'd pried from the background.
"He worked on this project for two or three years off and on. It was hard watching him sitting thinking about it, then not telling you about it."
Annja began turning the tessera over one by one, working through the rows.
"Whatever it was," Pietro went on, "Mario found out about it while working in Vatican City. That was one of the reasons he quit there."
"He left me a message and told me he was bored." Annja started on the second row.
"That was part of it. I know he said they were too restrictive there. Too many secrets, I suppose."
"Every culture has them." Coming up empty again, Annja started on the third row.
"After leaving Vatican City, Mario worked in Venice for a while."
"Doing what?" Annja started on the fourth row.
"He was a gondolier, if you can believe it."
"I can't."
"He was. Francesca and I went down there to see it for ourselves."
"Why would he take a job like that?" Annja moved on to the fifth row.
"He couldn't find anything else and he wanted to stay there. Whatever he was working on, it had him by the throat." Pietro was quiet for a moment. "He always wanted to be famous."
"I remember. So how did he get to Riga?" Annja asked.
"A few months ago, he told everyone he was moving there for a while. To sort some things out, he said. But you could tell he thought he was on to something."
"But no one knew what."
"No. Then he started seeing Erene."
"She lived there?"
"I believe she still does. One of the things that seemed to captivate Mario most about her was that she was a witch."
"A witch?"
"Yes. Mario seemed quite enamored of her because of that. She was supposed to be something like a hedge witch or a midwife. He said Erene knew a lot of things about plants and herbal remedies." Pietro paused. "Now we don't think we'll ever get to meet her."
"No one has a way of getting in touch with her?"
"No. We contacted Mario through his cell phone. If we don't find a way soon, she may miss the funeral. The most upsetting aspect about this is that Mario's killers are still on the loose."
Nearly halfway into the eight row of tessera, Annja turned over a cube and found a letter. Excitement surged within her.
"You never know," she told Pietro. "That could change at any time."
****
Annja sat looking at the back of the mosaic, at the secret that had been hidden beneath the surface. There was a message on the back of the tessera. The letters were painted on backs of the tiles. If she hadn't taken the tiles off one by one and placed them in the same order, she'd have lost the message.
If anyone else had taken the tiles off, they would have destroyed what Mario had left behind for her to find. There was no doubt that the message had been intended for her.
The message said, "Hi, Annja. I have no secrets from you. Remember, no Selgovae!"
"All right," Annja said quietly. "That's a no-brainer, Mario. What do you want me to see?"
The Selgovae were a Brythonic tribe from Scotland, and one of the main reasons the Romans had built Hadrian's Wall. It made sense that Mario would use that as a linchpin to get a message across.
But what was the message?
The first part consisted of six letters: "ESIREF."
The second part, on a line four rows down from the first, had twelve letters: "JVLPHNJEMXJW."
Annja took her digital camera from her backpack, then stood on a chair over the table to focus on the tiles. After adjusting the flash and the lens, she took three close-up shots. Then she put the camera away and tried to wrap her mind around what the letters meant.
At first glance the coded message didn't tell her much. Then she remembered what Pietro had said about the ciphers Mario had taught his nieces and nephews.
The Fairplay cipher had been Mario's favorite. Without the key and by keeping the message simple, without a lot of text, the cipher was incredibly hard to break.
Mario hadn't included the key.
Hadrian's Wall is the key, Annja told herself. She got a graph-paper pad and a pen from her backpack. Paper and pencils were still an archaeologist's best mechanical tools. But it was the mind that did the brunt of the work.
Annja checked her memory and discovered that she'd been right about the Playfair cipher. It consisted of five rows of letters by five columns of letters.
Usually a code word or phrase was written across the top, without a break and without repeating letters. X was used for the first time double letters – like EE or SS – were used. The rest of the letters were put in order from left to right, from top to bottom.
Annja wrote "HADRIAN'S WALL" down, then took out the apostrophe and the repeated letters. She was left with "HADRINSWL."
Since "WALL" had double Ls, she added an X. Her final tally was ten unique letters: "HADRINSWLX."
Once she had those, she worked swiftly, slipping the letters into the five-by-five grid. Traditionally Q wasn't used, or I and J were used in the same space. The cipher key took shape quickly.
>
H A D R I
N S W L X
B C E F G
J K M O P
T U V Y Z
Then she started substituting letters. The rules were simple.
Whenever letters were on the same row they were substituted for the ones immediately to their right, wrapping back around to the front of the row as needed.
If letters were in the same column, they were substituted with letters just below them, wrapping back to the top of the column if necessary.
Letters that were in different rows and columns were used as anchors to form rectangles. Then the letters in the opposite corners of the rectangles were substituted out, staying within the same row, not the same column.
The first coded message – "ESIREF" – became "CWHIFG."
Since that didn't look like any answer she recognized, Annja knew something had gone wrong. Her frustration came rushing back. The cipher idea had sounded so much like Mario, she was certain that had been the answer.
Okay, Annja thought, the answer can't be wrong. Therefore the cipher key had to be. She'd missed something. Another clue Mario had to have left.
She stood up from the table and stepped back from the mosaic. What else had been hidden? She knew it had to be on the back of the mosaic.
Or on the front.
She was just about to give up and flip the tiles back over when she noticed a faded line made up of discolored stones. Taking the mini-Maglite she habitually carried from the backpack, she shone the light on the tiles, exploring the discoloration more closely.
Upon dedicated inspection, she saw that the stones had been intentionally discolored. A gentle wash of some kind of stain had lent them a faint yellowish tinge.
At first she'd thought there were only ten discolored tessera. The correlation between the number of tiles and the number of unique letters in the code word didn't escape her.
In the end, she saw that there were twenty-five discolored tiles. The discoloration on fifteen others was less, but it was still there. Not only that, but they were laid out in a five-by-five square.
The center nine tiles were discolored the same shade. That shade matched the fourth tile down in the last column.
Pulse quickening, Annja knew she was close to the answer. The letters in the code word had to be in sequential order. The only orders could be two rows of three followed by a row of four.
Or Mario had begun on the outside and worked his way into a spiral.
"Yes," Annja whispered as she put pen to paper on a clean page.
Chapter 17
"Wolfram, go to your room and clean up. I've had a clean suit laid out for you."
Temples throbbing, Schluter stared at his grandmother and started to argue there in the grand ballroom with the portraits of family members looking down from the high walls. For all of his life, those faces had looked down on him, painted with his grandmother's disdain.
He knew arguing with her wouldn't do any good. His grandmother would have her way. Only the price for his defiance would go up.
As gracefully as he could, he made his exit, then ascended the winding staircase to his rooms. Because his grandmother could no longer go up and down the stairs due to her increasing infirmity, all the rooms on the upper two stories were his to do with as he pleased. He didn't need the space, but he enjoyed having it all the same.
His footsteps echoed in the empty hallway as he entered his bedchamber. A huge round bed was flanked by two wide wardrobes and chests of drawers that had been in the family for generations. All of the decor was antique, and Schluter cared for none of it.
No one had ever seen the room. There was no one he would bring back to the castle. Instead, he spent time with his friends and his women in Vienna, crashing through the nightclubs where he conducted his business.
He looked at the suit his grandmother had chosen for him, then went to his wardrobe and selected a pair of tailored khakis, a silver pullover that hugged the trim and athletic body he'd built in the gym he'd had installed on the third floor and a pair of running shoes.
As a further insult, he added a Heckler & Koch Mk 23 in an expensive Italian shoulder holster. He knew how much his grandmother hated it when he wore a weapon inside the castle.
Maybe she was afraid of him these days. It made Schluter feel good to think like that. The fear in a family shouldn't go only one way.
He took out a pale gray and blue leather jacket he'd had specially made as an accessory to his car.
Stepping into the large bathroom, he walked past the sauna and hot tub to take a shower. His grandmother wouldn't like it that he was making them wait, but he didn't care about that, either.
She wouldn't always run things, he reminded himself.
****
"Did your father talk fondly of me, Herr Braden?" Kikka Schluter asked.
Garin stood in the well-appointed study and looked at the old woman. Her age had been the biggest shock for him. Even though it had been sixty years since he'd seen her, and he'd known she'd age, the change in her appearance had astounded him.
When he'd first met Baroness Kikka Schluter, she had been a vibrant young woman willing to explore her own passions away from her cuckolded husband. She'd been blond and beautiful, full figured and filled with energy. A single look from her blue eyes could break a man's heart.
She'd broken his.
And, maybe, he'd broken hers.
Now she was a dried-up old prune of a woman who had turned mean and hard over the years.
Perhaps coming here was a mistake, he thought. But you couldn't stay away, could you? He hadn't needed to see her – he'd wanted to. His wants had always outweighed his needs. If they hadn't, he'd have been able to live a much calmer, quieter life these past five hundred years.
"Please," Garin said, putting on a smile he didn't feel, "call me Garin."
Kikka sat in a tall-backed French chair that might have come from Louis XIV's court.
"That was your father's name," she said.
He'd told her that the Garin Braden she'd known had been his father.
"My mother named me for him."
"It's a good name. A strong name."
Garin nodded. He stood near the fireplace. A dozen ships of various designs occupied bottles on the mantle. A portrait of her grandfather hung above the bottles. He stood regal and erect in full army uniform, sword at his side. He'd been a general in the First World War but had been killed in the Second. The general rank had been added posthumously because Kikka Schluter had insisted.
"Thank you," Garin said. "Father did speak fondly of you. Of course, he never talked fondly of you when Mother was around." He smiled again, and this time he let her see a little of the devil that was in him.
Kikka put her head back and brayed, a full-throated roar of amusement that almost took Garin back sixty years.
"You have a sense of humor about you," she said. "That must have been a gift from your father."
"To my mother's everlasting horror," Garin agreed. He was surprised at how good it felt to talk to her like this. Over the centuries, it seemed as if he was constantly meeting new acquaintances. Precious few of them had left lasting impressions.
Back then records hadn't been kept as neatly as they were today. Garin had had no problem disappearing and reappearing as someone else every few years.
But now, it was harder keeping the fact that he hadn't aged from people he came in contact with.
These days he managed his business through corporate executive boards, rarely meeting any of the people who worked for him. Having to transfer over all his estate, while showing a legal reason for it, wasn't easy. More layers had to be added to invent himself over and over again. Law firms actually allowed him to disappear and reappear more readily.
But the attorneys he hired kept their distance. It was hard to get to know anyone anymore. He missed the human touch.
Sometimes he wondered how Roux, his one-time mentor, dealt with the isolation and loneliness. Then he rememb
ered how it had been during those days when they'd been on the road, before Joan of Arc had lost her life, and after they'd been cursed to find the sword's fragments. Roux had always been content to be by himself, lost in the study of things in which Garin had never found an understanding or an interest.
"How did your father die?" Kikka asked.
Garin grinned broadly. "In the arms of the new maid. She was barely twenty years old."
Kikka laughed so hard she had to wipe tears from her eyes. Her honest amusement had an effect on Garin, and he found himself laughing with her. Just like the old days when a stolen kiss had set fire to his blood. It was always strange talking about his death. He feared it but at the same time had come to expect it would never happen. Whenever he did talk about it, he always made it interesting.
"That sounds like the man I knew," Kikka said when she'd regained control of herself. "There was a fierceness, a hunger for life I saw in him that I've never seen in any man since."
Garin took pride in that.
"What about your mother?" Kikka asked.
"Gone soon after, I'm afraid. I think Father would like to have thought she died of embarrassment over the way he had been found."
"Didn't your father love her?"
After a brief consideration, Garin said, "He did. But it was in his own way. He wasn't made to be faithful, I'm afraid."
"Then it's a good thing I didn't leave my husband for him."
"Probably," he said. But Garin could remember how much he'd missed her when she'd told him she could no longer see him.
"I have to admit, I was very tempted to leave my husband for your father," she said.
That caught Garin's attention and caused an old ache to flare unexpectedly. "Life would have been very different if you had," he said.
"I know. But in the end I couldn't leave because of my father. He had no male children to carry on the Schluter name, but he could at least leave the title to me. If I had left, there would have been no one. That was very important to him."
"Was it important to you?"
"Not as much then, but in time it came to be." Kikka looked at him. "A man – a person – must leave a legacy. Something to mark the fact that he or she once existed. Your father had you. I have my grandson." She paused and nodded to herself as if confirming something she doubted. "Wretch and wastrel though he can be, I have hopes that he will harden and become a man one day."