Like the other, it had been written on a computer and was untraceable.
“So anyone could have done it,” Sean said. He, Michelle and Horatio were standing outside the grounds of Babbage Town. The psychologist had joined them in the search for Viggie. They had just scoured the area with Sheriff Hayes and a group of volunteers and turned up not a single clue as to what had happened to the girl.
As they were standing there a black sedan pulled up.
“Oh, shit,” Sean exclaimed. “Not him. Not now.”
Special Agent Ventris climbed out of the car and walked over to them.
“I understand you lost the girl. Again!”
“What do you want, Ventris?” Sean demanded.
“I want you to get out of here. Your presence here is counterproductive.”
“What exactly have you produced? Other than confusion?”
Michelle put a warning hand on Sean’s shoulder. “Just stay cool, he is a federal agent,” she muttered.
“Better listen to your friend,” Ventris said, who’d overheard her warning. “If the girl has been kidnapped, we’ll find her. It’s a Bureau specialty.”
“Would that be dead or alive?” Sean said bitterly.
Ventris got back in his car and drove off as Sean stared angrily after him. “You son of a bitch,” he screamed after the departing FBI agent.
Horatio said, “Okay, I think we all need to take a deep calming breath.”
Sean snapped, “I don’t want to take a deep calming breath. I want to kick the shit out of Special my ass Agent Ventris.”
“Okay, venting violent thoughts can be positive,” Horatio said awkwardly.
All three turned their heads toward the road as a line of passenger buses rumbled up, stopped at the front gate and then were allowed through.
Sean and Michelle hustled over to the guard stationed there. “What’s going on?”
“We’re clearing out Babbage Town, at least for now.”
“Why?” Michelle asked.
“Two mysterious deaths and now a little girl’s gone missing. The people working here and their families are scared. They’re being transported to Williamsburg until things get cleared up.”
“Who ordered this?” Sean demanded.
“Actually, I did,” a voice said. They all turned to see Champ Pollion striding toward them. “Do you blame me?”
“Can we stay?” Sean asked.
“No! I’m not going to be responsible for anyone else getting hurt.”
He turned to leave.
“Where are you going?” Michelle asked.
“I’m leaving too. Not even the discovery of quantum computers is worth my life.”
Chapter 75
Two hours later Babbage Town was empty except for a few guards. Michelle and Sean had continued to walk around the grounds looking for any clue to Viggie’s disappearance, while Horatio had gone to his room to get his things together.
While they were at Alicia’s cottage packing to leave, Merkle Hayes called Sean with news that was hardly surprising. “It’s like the girl’s vanished from the face of the earth.” Then Hayes made a comment that caused Sean to nearly drop his phone. “Even the CIA pitched in, but they couldn’t find her either.”
“The CIA!”
“Yeah. Ian Whitfield said he’d heard about Viggie being missing and offered to send resources to help in the search. But they found nothing.”
“Wow, who knew the CIA had such a big heart,” Sean said. He clicked off and tossed his phone onto his bed in disgust. He went to Michelle’s room and relayed to her what Hayes had said.
“We need to go get Horatio from his room and clear out of here,” she reminded him. In response, Sean turned and headed off. “Where are you going?”
“Down to the dock. To think. Come on. We’ll get Horatio in a little bit.”
They walked through the forest path to the boathouse and sat on the dock.
“Where could Viggie be?” Michelle asked miserably. “Where?”
Sean looked across the river. “I think she’s there,” he said, pointing at Camp Peary. “I think she’s in the same place where her father was killed.”
“And Whitfield offering to help was just a cover?” He nodded. “So you think she’s dead?”
“It doesn’t look good.”
“But why, Sean? Why Viggie?”
“Because her father told her things, Michelle. She told us things and somebody found out. And they didn’t want her telling us anything else.”
“But how could they know?”
“Between Babbage Town and Camp Peary no secret is safe apparently.”
She stared across the calm water. Calm at least for now. “I know they’re the CIA, Sean. I know that. But killing a little girl?”
“You’re kidding, right? In the interests of national security they’d kill their own grandmothers.”
She said, “What could Monk Turing have found out that would make the CIA come after him? And then kidnap Viggie?”
“I don’t know enough and I’m apparently not smart enough to figure it out from the little I do know. But this I’m certain of: Monk was murdered, and so was Len Rivest. I don’t know the motives yet, and they might have been killed by different people or organizations and for different reasons but murdered they were. And Monk Turing knew an old man who it seems probable was a prisoner over there, and who told him something about that place. Something that led Monk to go there. And die.”
“So Henry Fox escaped the place, but Monk didn’t. That’s ironic.”
“Seems that way,” Sean said miserably.
“And now Viggie.” Michelle choked back a sob and Sean put his arm around her.
“I’m sorry, Michelle. I’ve really messed things up on this one.”
“We both left her alone, Sean,” she replied. “Both of us.”
Sean looked thoughtful. “We left the cottage this morning around six. It was still mostly dark. Alicia was at Hut Number One working on the code. So basically anyone could have come and taken Viggie after that. In a fast boat she’s across the river to Camp Peary in minutes.” The tears trickled down Michelle’s cheeks as he was speaking.
He handed her his handkerchief and she dried her eyes. “Now what?” she asked.
He stared across the river. “Now I go over the fence.”
She pulled away from him. “What?”
“It’s the only way, Michelle. I messed up and left Viggie unprotected. I can’t sit by and not do anything. I have to try and save her.”
“Okay, when do you want to go?”
“You’re not going.”
“Then neither are you.”
“Michelle, I can’t let you do it. Hell, I could be wrong about the whole thing. I can’t let you throw your whole life away.”
“What life, Sean? I don’t even know who I am some days. The only life I care about right now is Viggie Turing’s. So if you’re going over that damn fence, so am I.”
He stared at her, partly with pride over her refusal to abandon him. And partly with fear as Joan’s and Horatio’s warnings came back to him.
“Sean,” she said, “the CIA flight will be coming in tomorrow night. Do you think they may try and get Viggie out that way? Maybe they’ll keep her alive until then.”
He didn’t answer. Sean looked out at the river. Did he really want to mix it up with the likes of Ian Whitfield? Did he really want to take it to this guy? The answer was no. And, of course, yes.
An idea suddenly interrupted these thoughts. He jumped up. “Come on!”
Chapter 76
Toby Rucker called Horatio back while he was packing up. He’d been successful, he’d told the psychologist.
“Around the time you’re talking about, a car was found abandoned about an hour’s drive from here, up in the Smoky Mountains. I was just a freelance reporter at the time, but after reading the story from the archives I remember it fairly well.”
“Who was the car registered to?�
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“A William Joyner, sergeant in the Army. He was assigned to the recruitment office they used to have down here. This was back in the late Seventies.”
“And what happened to him?”
“Nobody knows,” Rucker said. “They found the car, but not him. Local police investigated, and the Army sent its people down, but they never did uncover anything.”
“Was Joyner married?”
“Nope. He was in his late twenties. Joined the Army at eighteen. Fought in Vietnam, stayed in the military and had been back in the States about six years when he disappeared.”
Horatio said hesitantly, “Any romantic involvement? Girlfriend?”
“Nothing in the archives about that. Why, you know different?”
“No,” Horatio said quickly.
“Can I ask what your interest in this is? South didn’t fill me in on that.”
“Just call me a curious soul. So the investigation simply hit a dead end?”
“It often does when you can’t turn up a body. Maybe Joyner got tired of the Army and found a better opportunity somewhere else and went AWOL. It happens.”
Horatio thanked the man and clicked off. It looked like William Joyner had had an affair with Frank Maxwell’s wife and then disappeared. His body, assuming he was dead, had never been found. What had Michelle seen all those years ago that had damaged her so badly? Horatio knew the only place he would get those answers was from Michelle herself. Even if her conscious mind had long since buried the memory, he also knew her subconscious would never forget it.
Sean and Michelle pinched some tools from the garage and hid them in a bag. They walked up to the mansion and explained to the guard there that they had come for Horatio. “We’re clearing out, like Champ said to.”
The guard let them through and Michelle and Sean raced up the stairs to the top floor and down the hall toward the room that Sean had first stayed in. Going inside the room, they stopped in front of the wall where Viggie had calculated the secret room, if it existed, would be located.
Sean said, “There has to be a door somewhere, but we don’t have time to find it.” Attacking the wall with their tools, they methodically cut a large hole in it. Shining a flashlight through Sean peered in the hole. “Damn!”
“What is it?”
“You’ll see,” he replied. “Hurry!”
With renewed vigor they attacked the wall. Soon they stepped through a large hole and stared at walls of electronic devices. On the other side of the wall there appeared to be a door. Sean pointed at it. “It’s accessed from the other room, the one that was dead-bolted.”
There was a bank of TV screens against one wall that was showing the interior of all the huts.
“That’s Hut Number One,” Sean said, pointing to one screen.
“And Champ’s Hut Number Two,” Michelle said, pointing to another screen.
She motioned to a bank of computer screens against another wall. Streams of numbers were flowing across all of them.
“They’re secretly recording the data on the computers in Champ’s hut,” Sean exclaimed.
“So Len Rivest was right. There is a spy at Babbage Town, an electronic one,” Michelle said. She glanced up at a red light blinking on a device on one wall. “Oh, shit, is that what I think it is?” she cried out.
They plunged through the hole and ran toward the stairs as the silent alarm burned red.
“What about Horatio?” Michelle called out.
Sean stopped dead, turned back and raced down another corridor. He pounded on Horatio’s door. When Horatio opened it Sean grabbed him and hustled him down the hall.
“Why are we running?” Horatio puffed.
“Avoiding death,” Michelle snapped.
At that, the little psychologist put on an enviable burst of speed.
“How are we getting out of here?” Michelle asked. “The front entrance is guarded.”
“By boat,” Sean answered. “Come on!”
The three made their way quickly down to the boathouse catching only two glimpses of guards along the way and neither one seemed to know about the break-in at the secret room.
“Are we sure that silent alarm was even working?” Michelle said.
“Should we call Sheriff Hayes?” Horatio suggested.
“I’m not trusting anyone right now,” Sean replied firmly.
They reached the boathouse and Sean broke open the storage shed, grabbed the keys for the Formula boat, lowered the lift and they were soon in the water and drifting down the York on idle throttle with their running lights off.
“Keep a lookout,” Sean warned.
Michelle seemed puzzled.
“What’s the matter?” Sean asked as he looked at her from the captain’s chair.
“Why did Viggie come down to the boathouse, get in a kayak and paddle out into the river?”
“You said she didn’t say why.”
“We’d come down here once before and gone out on the kayak. She said it was one of the best times she’d ever had. Then we raced back to the house after making a bet: If I beat her she had to talk to me about codes and blood. I did win, she got a little ticked off and started playing the song crazy, but she did play it.”
“So?”
“So why did she come back to the river?” she asked again.
Horatio warned, “It’s a little dangerous to try and figure out what Viggie was thinking, Michelle.”
“Why do I think she was trying to tell me something? Why do I think she was trying to get me to come down to the dock?” Michelle stood there looking across the water at Camp Peary. “Something else was really odd. Viggie told me this story out of the blue.”
“What story?”
“That she knew that Alan Turing had killed himself by eating a poisoned apple. She told me how it reminded her of the Snow White story. You know the wicked old queen turns into a hag, takes a boat down the river and tricks Snow White into eating the poisoned apple and Snow White almost died. Like Viggie almost died on the river. She said something like whoever holds the apple is definitely powerful. Why would she tell me that?”
“I don’t know, but how does that help us?” Sean said.
Michelle suddenly exclaimed, “Omigod! Boat? Apple?” She raced to the Formula boat’s stern, leaned over and stared down at the name stenciled on the transom: “The Big Apple,” she read.
“The Big Apple as in New York,” Sean said.
“No, the apple as in Snow White,” Michelle corrected. “Come on, we have to tear this boat apart.”
“Why?” Horatio asked.
“Just help me! Help me.”
An hour later, the three of them sat in the stern seats staring at it. The rolled-up paper had been hidden in the enclosed head of the boat, behind spare rolls of toilet paper in a storage compartment.
Michelle said, “She must’ve come down here that day to hide the document. She probably planned to leave me another clue or maybe just bring the document to me like she did the others if I said the magic words. Only she never got the chance.”
Horatio added, “And the fact that she thought she needed a hiding place suggests she was afraid.”
“Well, her fears turned out to be well founded, didn’t they?” Michelle said bitterly.
“It’s old,” Sean said, as he held the document. “Second World War old. This must be what Henry Fox aka Heinrich Fuchs gave to Monk Turing when he visited him in Germany.”
“It’s a map,” Horatio said, studying it.
“Of Camp Peary or what it used to be when the Navy ran it. I recognize the topography from the map in South Freeman’s office,” Michelle added.
Sean pointed at a line that ran from near the river’s shore into the heart of the facility. “The only thing is there’s no inlet there. The map must be wrong.”
“It’s not wrong if the line isn’t delineating an inlet of water,” Michelle countered.
“A road then.”
She turned the document over.
There was written the initials “H.F.”
“Heinrich Fuchs,” Horatio said.
“And there’s writing down here, but it’s in German.”
“Look over there,” Sean said, pointing to fresh writing done in another hand.
Michelle added, “It’s in English. Maybe Monk Turing’s. Look, there are compass points, directions, everything.”
“Right, but to what?”
Michelle flipped the map back over. “To that line, it has to be. Wait a minute. Sean, if you’re right, Fuchs escaped from Camp Peary.”
“Okay.”
“So how did he do it?”
“I don’t know. I guess the best way was to get to the river. If he went by road or even through the fields and forest the scent dogs could follow him. Water nearly always makes a clean escape, but you have to get to it first. And I’m sure they had a lot of guards back then.”
“I’m sure they did, above ground,” she said.
“Above ground?”
“Sean, that line may represent a tunnel, right into Camp Peary. Or in Heinrich Fuch’s case, a tunnel right out of Camp Peary, and freedom. A tunnel is a pretty popular way of breaking out of prison.”
“But why would Monk go to all that trouble to get a map of a tunnel leading into Camp Peary? He was killed.”
“They didn’t kill him in the tunnel. They must have caught him after he got out of the tunnel. They might not know anything about it.”
“That doesn’t answer why he would risk going in the tunnel in the first place.”
Horatio spoke up. “Maybe Fuchs told him about something there. Something located at Camp Peary. Something, I don’t know, something valuable.”
“This all sounds crazy, Michelle, but the discovery of this map provides us with one very critical thing: a way to get into Camp Peary.”
“So you really do think Viggie’s there?”
“Even if she isn’t, we might be able to find out something important. Important enough to use it as leverage with those people so they’ll release Viggie.”
“But what if I’m wrong and they do know about the tunnel?”
Sean looked at the other two solemnly as he carefully folded up the map. “Then I’m afraid we’re dead.”
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