The Camelot Code

by Sam Christer

  Ambassador Gwyn is shown into the cool, darkened room by a Whitehall aide and takes a seat next to the deputy PM.

  The Home Secretary acknowledges his appearance, ‘Good afternoon, Sir Owain. I had only just started.’ He stands in front of a giant screen playing mute video footage from the blast scene. ‘The latest figures we have are fifty-four dead and forty injured. The prime minister is in Scotland but in the next half hour will helicopter down to Ashford and hold a press conference at the scene. The bomb squad is checking the remains of the train for secondary devices and, of course, the track is being inspected as well. The railway operator has contingencies to bus people around the derailment, but they’ve been told there’s no chance of trains running through the tunnel for at least the next twelve hours.’

  The police chief, a tall, thin man in his late fifties, throws a question across the table. ‘Have we got confirmation it’s al-Qaeda behind all this?’

  ‘They plan to post a video,’ answers Owain. ‘It will be uploaded to an Al Jazeera server in the next few minutes. It will warn travellers in the West to expect more bombs and deaths.’

  No one asks how the ambassador knows this. He does, after all, have special responsibilities for counter-terrorism and everyone in the room has been present at other meetings where he’s been more reliably informed than they were.

  ‘What are we facing, Owain?’ asks the Deputy PM. ‘A specific campaign of terror aimed at the UK? Or is this a wider strategy linked to the US bomb?’

  ‘It’s wider. And not just America. I expect there to be further attacks, and on soil less used to bloodshed than ours.’

  The Defence Secretary knows what he’s alluding to. ‘Italy?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Sir Wesley explains to the rest of the group. ‘We’ve been hearing the same thing. Possibilities of attacks on Rome as a response to the Pope’s condemnation of what he called ‘maliciously misguided Muslim fundamentalists.’

  Owain adds a little more depth to the comment. ‘Al-Qaeda is thought to have a new, three-pronged strategy – firstly, business as usual; that means bombing the hell out of Britain and America. Secondly, as Sir Wesley just said, attacking soft Christian targets, such as Rome. This hasn’t been done before and has the Spaniards just as worried as the Italians. We also believe they intend to use a new generation of highly trained assassins to kill high-profile VIPs.’

  The door swings open and a young civil servant steps in and whispers discreetly to the home secretary, then leaves.

  Charles Hatfield fingers the remote control and points it at a screen. ‘Al Jazeera just ran this. It’s exactly as Sir Owain said.’

  The man who appears on screen doesn’t fit the traditional stereotype of the Muslim terrorist. There’s no straggly beard. No loose white robes. No Koran in hand. For once the video doesn’t look like it’s been shot in a school hall, with a dark curtain behind. There are no masked soldiers in the background with rifles across their chests. Instead, a calm young man in his late twenties, with neat hair and beard looks straight into camera. He is dressed in a charcoal-grey suit and, despite the rugged sandy backdrop of an Afghan hillside, he looks as calm as a foreign correspondent.

  ‘Citizens of the west,’ says a steady voice in excellent English. ‘When you see this, it will be because I have killed and injured many people. Many innocents who did not deserve for such a thing to happen to them.’ His tone is flat and without a trace of rage. ‘I regret their deaths and injuries. But most of all, I regret that their governments made it necessary for them to die. As you watch, listen and read of the deaths, ask yourself this: what does al-Qaeda want? Why are they doing these things? Why are they killing so many people?’ He takes a pause and lets the seeds of the questions he scattered germinate in the fertile minds of those who might listen.

  ‘There has to be a good reason, doesn’t there? Such as the belief that your own country should be free of your enemies. That every person should have their own home, their patch of land, their personal base in life – because that’s what the words al-Qaeda mean – “the base”. Ask yourselves this, if foreigners tried to occupy your country, change your government and kill your friends, family and parents, what would you do?’ His soft dark eyes hold the camera before he continues, ‘I think I know. You would fight. You would fight to the death. As you count the bodies of today and the bodies of tomorrow, think beyond the rhetoric of your leaders, think about my words. When would you surrender?’ Now the gentle eyes narrow and the camera shot tightens. ‘Never. You would never surrender. Nor will we.’

  The video stops on a freeze frame.

  Owain Gwyn points at the screen. ‘This is a new breed of terrorist. And the start of a new campaign of terror. Fought by new leaders in new ways.’

  ‘I think you’re wrong,’ says the Defence Secretary. ‘New faces perhaps, but it’s the same old game. They bomb. They run. They hide. They have limited resources and limited support. We’ll find them soon enough and this time we’ll wipe every one of them from the face of the earth.’

  Owain bites his tongue. Sir Wesley couldn’t be more wrong. A storm is coming. One unlike any seen before.

  74

  NORTH BETHESDA, MARYLAND

  A soft summer shower falls as the handsome delivery driver juggles the cardboard box in his arms and struggles to lock the back doors of his van. The neighbourhood he’s in looks decent, but you can never be sure. Leave the vehicle unlocked and you’re as good as asking for some scumbag to climb in and steal stuff. Maybe even the van itself.

  As far as he’s concerned, they’re welcome to it. It’s a piece of shit. The engine’s slower than a constipated snail and it stinks of sweat and cigarettes. Still, he’ll be shot of it soon.

  He checks the name and address on the package, then climbs the short stack of steps to the apartment block. Dark marks appear on top of the box where raindrops hit and get blotted by the cardboard.

  He knocks on a tatty door and waits.

  There’s a noise on the other side. The sound of someone pressing against the door. He sees a little fisheye lens in the middle of the wood and guesses the occupant is on the other side peering through at him.

  ‘Who is it?’ The voice is female and hesitant.

  ‘Amazon. I’ve got a package to be signed for.’

  The door opens a chink and a chain pulls tight. He pushes the box forward so she can see the smiley river logo.

  It closes again and opens fully.

  He extends the parcel in his hands. ‘Careful with this; it’s a little heavy.’

  The woman takes it from him.

  He lunges forward and pushes her so she staggers back and falls. The heavy parcel bangs painfully against her chest as she hits the floor and cracks her head.

  The delivery man kicks the door shut and stands over her. He leans down and pushes the end of a silenced handgun into her mouth. ‘You really should have asked for some ID, cupcakes.’

  75

  AMERICAN EMBASSY, LONDON

  Less than two miles from the Cabinet briefing in Whitehall, Mitzi Fallon and Jon Bronty set up base in an FBI office inside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

  Intelligence officers have been working from here since the days when the country’s second president, John Adams, had a home in the picturesque square.

  Two doors away, field officers are getting up to speed on the Eurostar bomb blast and working out how it fits with the attack on Grand Central in New York.

  Mitzi watches bigwigs come and go as she passes over the water bottle she took from Gwyn’s office. She completes all the necessary chain-of-evidence paperwork and asks how long she’ll have to wait to get the DNA profile.

  The answer comes from a young clerk being run ragged by all the sudden activity. She’s mid-twenties, with frizzy brown hair and hard black spectacles that sit on an aquiline nose amid a pale, freckled face. ‘Within the week. Maybe sooner if the labs are at full strength.’

  ‘How about tomorr
ow?’ There’s a hint of annoyance in her tone. ‘I’m only here for a couple of days and this is linked to a homicide back in the US.’

  ‘Homicides aren’t priority.’ She pushes the bagged evidence into her tray and starts fresh work on her computer.

  Mitzi takes it back out and drops it in front of her. ‘Then what is?’

  The young Chicagoan gives her a scornful upward glance. ‘If you don’t know don’t ask, ma’am.’

  Mitzi bends low over the computer and lifts the nametag on the lapel of the clerk’s black jacket. ‘Please don’t screw with me, Annie Linklatter. As you see from my currently less than pretty face I’m in a bad place at the moment and people in bad places do bad things. So how about you cut me a break and save us both a lot of pain?’

  The girl’s face reddens. ‘I’ll try for tomorrow – or the day after.’

  ‘Tomorrow would be real good.’ She wanders away. ‘I’ll be by first thing.’

  Bronty is on the phone when she gets back to their temporary office. ‘I’ve got Vicks on the line,’ he says.

  ‘Put her on speakerphone.’

  Bronty obliges. ‘Vicks, Mitzi has just walked in – you’re on speaker.’

  ‘Hi, Lieutenant! I’ve got some good and bad news for you. Which would you like first?’

  ‘I only do good news, Vicks. Keep the bad to yourself and go fix it. What you got?’

  ‘Okay. I’ve done the extra digging you asked for on Owain Gwyn. I’m just mailing it to you.’

  ‘Great. I’ll log on while we’re speaking.’ She flips open her computer and powers up.

  ‘And the cryptologists have made progress on the data you sent over. It’s really weird. Seems to be a story about King Arthur and his knights.’

  ‘Codex,’ whispers Bronty to Mitzi in a triumphant told-you-so tone.

  Vicky continues her update, ‘The file directory they decrypted is entitled “The Camelot Code” and it contains four parts – The Fallen, Avalon, Modern Prophecies and The Arthurian Cycle.’

  Mitzi writes the names down on a pad next to the computer, which is still running start-up security programs. ‘So, what is this, a kind of Arthurian Twilight Saga?’

  ‘They’ve only transcribed the first page – apparently the code is problematic.’

  ‘They say what kinda code it is?’ asked Bronty.

  ‘Yeah, they call it Random Revolver. Every letter of the alphabet is represented by a number – that’s the simple part, like a kid’s cypher – but then the numbers and the letters related to them don’t stay the same, they keep changing. So for example, say the letter A is represented by 1, N by 2 and D by 3. The word AND would be coded 123. You get that?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s easy to follow.’

  ‘Right, but in the next sentence, the letter A is represented by 2, N by 3 and D by 4, so AND now becomes 234.’

  Mitzi gets it, ‘So everything just moves down a number.’

  ‘No, sometimes letters and numbers are randomly matched. Hence the name. The cryptologist I spoke to said the only way they cracked it was to create two virtual circles – the outer one had twenty-six letters on it, the inner one had twenty-six corresponding numbers. The letters got a new number every sentence. But this didn’t make sense when they hit the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first and twenty-eighth lines. At those points, the whole sequence reset and sometimes would go backwards or start skipping odd or even numbers.’

  ‘Days of the week,’ observes Bronty. ‘It reset because there are seven days in a week. Monks used to write what were called Calendar Codes, where every week or every month they changed the key to the code they wrote secret messages in.’

  ‘Enough,’ says Mitzi. ‘You two are making my head pound. Vicks, just tell me what this damned Camelot Code said.’

  The young researcher gets excited. ‘It’s wonderful, weird gothic stuff. You have to read it to make sense of it. I’m sending a transcript of what they’ve cracked so far. It’s from a section called The Fallen.’

  ‘Can’t wait to read it,’ says Mitzi sarcastically. ‘Anything else to brighten my day?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘You said there was bad news.’

  ‘I did, and you told me to keep it to myself.’

  ‘I know, but as well as being a lying bitch, I’m nosy as hell. So tell me.’

  Vicky braces herself for a verbal backlash. ‘The data you sent to me – it started to self-corrupt as soon as I opened it. I lost a lot of the files and —’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Please – before you holler – the cryptologists say it wasn’t my fault. They say it was primed with a suicide bug.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It means that when copies are made on software or hardware that doesn’t belong to the originator the code corrupts. You must have the original authorized copy.’

  ‘So how come it didn’t corrupt instantly when I sent it to you?’

  ‘It would have done on any other system but ours. The FBI computers locked the first digits, that’s all. Everything else died within that split-second. The techies say the coding and technology behind all this is super smart – as in intelligence agency smart.’

  Mitzi glances at the small memory stick lying free in her purse. ‘Good job I took high security measures to protect the original, then.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ says Vicky, unaware of the irony.

  There’s a ping on Mitzi’s computer. She glances at the screen. ‘Just got your stuff. I’ll go check it with Bronty and one of us will get back to you. Thanks, Vicks.’

  She kills the call and Bronty comes round behind her to look over her shoulder.

  Mitzi opens her mailbox and clicks on a document marked The Fallen.

  It has been decreed that in each kingdom the knight’s place of rest must be sited no more than a day’s strides on a beast from water and no deeper than the height of the tallest man.

  The ground that holds the sacred bones of the fallen must forever be in the protection of his brothers and the soil that covers his blessed skin must be touched in equal measure by the sun and the moon.

  Once every turn of harvest, those who live and serve will visit and tend the land of those who fell. They will light great fires and speak richly of the deeds of those who have passed. In the Ritual of the Eternal Flame, they will reignite the Spirit of Goodness that forged the great sword and served the only king.

  And it is hereby decreed that in the homeland the place of rest will forever be where the great Celts cross and where the bards stand alone to deliver their eulogies.

  The two investigators exchange glances of bewilderment.

  Mitzi shrinks the mail and looks for the other document that Vicky promised. ‘Let’s read what she found out about Owain Gwyn before we start trying to work out what all this means.’

  The next attachment is a series of factual points. It lacks the lyrical narrative of the decoded transcript but the contents are every bit as dramatic.

  FULL NAME: Owain Richard Arthur Gwyn

  AGE: 42

  NATIONALITY: British.

  PLACE OF BIRTH: Wales.

  CURRENT POSITION: Ambassador-at-large, with responsibilities for defence and counter-terrorism.

  PREVIOUS POSITIONS: British Ambassador to USA. British Ambassador to Germany. British Ambassador to France. Special Adviser to HRH Prince of Wales.

  EDUCATED: New College Oxford. BA, History.

  MILITARY SERVICE: Commissioned officer in the Welsh Guards (Gwarchodlu Cymreig). This is an elite infantry regiment in the British army, of which HRH the Prince of Wales is the regimental colonel. Gwyn served in Afghanistan as lieutenant and captain. Awarded CGC – Conspicuous Gallantry Cross for bravery in battle and the Victoria Cross for inspirational leadership on the battlefield (this is the UK’s premier award for gallantry).

  FAMILY STATUS: Married 18 years. Wife: Lady Jennifer Gwyn (née Degrance). No children.

  HONORS: UK – Knight of the British Empire. Knigh
t of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (*). Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (**).

  USA – Medal of the Legion of Merit for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services and achievements.

  * Membership of the Garter is limited to the sovereign, the Prince of Wales and no more than twenty-four members.

  ** The Order of St Michael and St George stretches back to 1818 when the prince regent set it up in the name of the great military saints to honor men and women who render extraordinary non-military service in a foreign country.

  BUSINESS INTERESTS: Gwyn owns eighty per cent of the stock and acts as non-executive chairman of Caledfwlch Ethical Investments. The firm acts as an ‘angel’ for emerging companies across the globe and will only bankroll businesses that meet its stringent ethical standards. CEI last year turned over £2.48 bn ($4 bn) and has 32 offices in 27 countries. It recorded net profits of £200 m ($322 m) and made charitable donations in 21 countries totalling £150 m ($241 m). CEI is a family-owned company dating back more than 300 years and is believed to have been one of the original investors in Lloyds of London.

  Mitzi finishes Gwyn’s biog and types a note to Vicky asking her to dig deeper into the history of the ambassador, his family and his business. She hits SEND, pushes her chair back on its wheels and turns to Bronty. ‘Why, oh why, did I never find a guy like Owain Gwyn? On paper, he’s everything a girl could ask for. A man with almost as many medals as millions.’