Flight of the Fox

by Gray Basnight

  For a moment, he listened with envy to the Bacchanalian revelry. The idea of an orgy always seemed alluring, but listening to it took the fun out of the fantasy. It sounded like torture, like men and women suffering a violent fate. It was easy to imagine that the groans were actually coming from the famous image, the Basque civilians and livestock being slaughtered in northern Spain. For a moment, he imagined that he, Coconut, Billy Carney, and Kendra were in the painting, moaning with agony along with the tormented horse, the man on fire and the decapitated human head flying through the air.

  This time, he didn’t think it, he said it aloud.

  “Oh, brother!” He rubbed again at the curious feel of his newly naked face.

  It sounds like a whole platoon of people in there bumping and grinding. How many can even fit into these tiny rooms?

  He’d had enough. He pulled on his jeans. In the corridor, he locked his door and trotted down the hallway past room 411, the orgy room that made Guernica vibrate. In the single bathroom he took his time, washing his face, showering, and studying his image without the beard he’d had for nearly three decades. On the return trip, the orgiastic racket in 411 had stopped, but noise still raged on the other side.

  And—that—was room 413, where the abrupt receptionist lived.

  Before unlocking his door, he leaned toward hers. There were a number of voices, but they were not the sounds of humans in the throes of sexual ecstasy. They were the sounds of humans being angry, arguing, whining, imploring. He recognized the Eastern European voice of the receptionist rising above the others, speaking in Russian, or what sounded like Russian, but could have been any of a dozen languages from that general region of the world.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised at the subject of argument. But he was.

  Hearing only snippets of broken English, he made out the words: “Serpico…eight ball…Tuesday…snowbird…two kilos…Colombian nitro…Metro-North…seven hundred dollars…Tuesday…brown meth…two grand…Tuesday…daddy in Westport…forty-five thousand…Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday!”

  Great.

  There was an orgy happening in one adjacent room, and a noisy drug deal in the other. It meant the irritable Eastern European woman was making her way in America by earning more than a humble income as a receptionist in a tourist hostel. It was her voice repeating the word “Tuesday” over and over again.

  He guessed she was telling her guests that Tuesday was to be her payday. Pay up on Tuesday, or no more dope, or no more free rooms, or no more protection from the Bureau of Immigration, or whatever it was she was brokering on their behalf.

  Teagarden remembered that the NSAID container he bought at the pharmacy on the Lower East Side had a cotton ball stuffed into the top. He opened the lid and pulled the cotton into two parts, inserting one into each ear. He put two NSAID tablets on his tongue and washed them down with warm, stale beer from the bottom of the bottle.

  Returning to the single bed, he curled his arms around his ears and pulled his knees into a fetal position. Behind his head in room 411, multiple male and female voices were again beginning the slow, rhythmic groans of sexual ecstasy.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  He was still in a fetal position when the antique white radio awakened him.

  Apparently pre-set by the previous guest, it clicked to life with a local newscast at 6:00 a.m., startling Teagarden from a fitful sleep. Worse than being startled, he learned from the newscast that—he—was the lead story:

  A massive manhunt is underway in our area this morning for a suspected murderer.

  Columbia math professor Sam Teagarden is wanted in the shooting death of an eleven-year-old boy in the upstate town of Bethel, where he has a summer home.

  Officials say he may have suffered an emotional breakdown linked to the recent death of his wife, Kendra Teagarden, the well-known author of the best-selling biography, “The Greatest American,” about Ben Franklin. She was killed in a wrong way crash on the New York State Thruway that severely injured her husband, who is now a fugitive.

  He’s forty-nine, six-foot, a hundred and eighty pounds, and may or may not have facial hair.

  He is believed to be armed and dangerous.

  If you see Sam Teagarden, police urge you to call nine-one-one immediately.

  The next story in the newscast was about the latest underground nuclear test conducted by Iran, and that nation’s vow to destroy all of Europe, Israel and the United States in a single massive pre-meditated thermonuclear assault committed in the name of Allah.

  “Oh, what an honor.” He jumped to turn off the radio. “They’ve put me ahead of the end of Western civilization.”

  He leaned to the window providing an angled view of Madison Square Park, the Flatiron Building and surrounding streets. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Though trendy, it was an unusual part of town not known for much of anything, except the conversion of massive old office buildings into overpriced condo units. There was a pre-dawn lull just ahead of the morning crush of people and cars. No NYPD patrol cars could be seen. More importantly, there was nothing that looked like Harry’s Heating and A/C Repair truck.

  He had two choices. He could stay put in the house of orgies and druggies, which bore risk if they were somehow tracing his movement and purchases despite his zigging and zagging. Or he could strike out for new, safer digs. Now that a physical description had been issued, taking to the streets in pursuit of deeper cover seemed to carry greater risk than ever. Besides, staying put would allow him to research what may be his best weapon of defense—those thirty-four pages of encrypted data.

  That settled it. He would stay put for the time being. With that resolved, he turned to two basic human needs: food and coffee.

  Teagarden pulled his belongings together and shoved them all into his backpack. He put on his green army cap and military-style sunglasses and headed outside. This time, the receptionist who lived next door was nowhere to be seen. That was good. Now that he’d shaved his beard, it was best to avoid her. He’d read somewhere that in a post 9/11 world, hotel workers were trained to notice anyone who radically altered their appearance.

  The person at the front desk was a drowsy overnight security guard who nodded politely as he passed through. Teagarden nodded back.

  And he was right. There were no police cars anywhere. He looked for Harry’s truck. Nothing. He looked for black Ford vans with smoked windows parked at the curb. Again, nothing suspicious. As for the people, they were mostly dog-walkers, joggers and harried workers headed for the early shift. In the park, there was the usual assortment of the homeless and sleepless. But he knew that during the day, Madison Square Park was a magnet for all kinds, especially at lunchtime.

  One great thing about New York City is that within a single block’s walk, decent carryout can be had at any time of the day or night. He quickly found a bustling deli where he bought a large coffee and a sesame bagel, toasted with fried egg, ham, and butter.

  Not worrying about calories may be the only good thing about being a wanted fugitive. Besides, I’m starving.

  The shift change happened while he was out. The night watchman was gone and—she—was back. It was their third encounter, but their first with him clean-shaven.

  “Good morning, Mr. Samuels,” she said, recognizing him immediately without the beard and sounding far less curt.

  “Morning,” he said, with a sticky-sweet North Carolinian twang. He wondered if she was miffed because he turned down her invitation the previous evening.

  Back in his room, he attacked the thirty-four pages. He logged onto his laptop using Dan Jones’ ID, and researched the words: spiral, code, decode, encryption, circles, rotate.

  It immediately kicked back with a number of possibilities.

  Caesar Cipher: simple method of substituting one letter or number for another to encode or decode secret messages. Named after Julius Caesar who communicated in code.

  ROT13: variation of th
e Caesar cipher that replaces a letter with the letter that comes thirteen letters after it in the alphabet. Developed in Rome after Caesar.

  Cipher Disk: invented in 1470 Italy, utilizing two round plates and marked with letters and numbers for the purpose of encoding and decoding messages.

  The Jefferson Disk: cipher system utilizing multiples of disks, each marked with letters that are rotated to encode messages and turned back again by the same pre-determined number of rotations for decoding. Invented by Thomas Jefferson and used by the United States Army into the early twentieth century.

  Enigma Machine: multiple series of mechanized rotor-ciphers for blind encryption by a typist, most notably used by Nazi Germany.

  Of course, that’s it!

  Teagarden instinctively knew it was the solution. The pages held nothing more complicated than a simple number for letter substitution. It was some sort of disk rotation system. He should have seen it earlier. The history he’d just read was more fanciful truth than real truth. The story that Caesar invented rudimentary ciphering was probably encouraged by some Roman PR guy wearing wingtip sandals. Fact is, basic number substitution had probably been around since the ancient Sumerians. The infamous Enigma Machine used by the Nazis was nothing more than a simple letter-substitution system, but multiplied a thousand times over to make it more complicated and, presumably, more secure.

  There was nothing secure about Enigma. Not really. It was ahead of its time, and very complicated. But complicated encryption equals complicated decryption, which the great Alan Turing proved. It really doesn’t matter how many layers of letter-for-letter or number-for-letter encoding are packed on. Somebody will eventually figure it out. It wasn’t until mainframe computers existed that real and virtually indecipherable code was possible—and that was only as strong as the weakest employee with a security clearance.

  He looked at the first of the thirty-four pages: 10906010.

  Followed by: 44, 55, 11, 18, 99, 15, 77, 14.

  If he could learn the code for those eight letters, he could apply them to the corresponding numbers within every entry on that particular page. Knowing eight of the twenty-six letters in the alphabet would be a giant leap forward.

  He wished he could logon to one of the algorithm websites available to him at Columbia. It would make the job go a lot faster. The university’s math and computer science departments had machines that helped crack the human genome, and had recently proved that the speed of light was not the ultimate speed limit of the universe. He knew better than to try those sites. The police and maybe Harry would surely find him in a matter of minutes if he did.

  Instead, Teagarden tried three encryption programs available to the public. In this case, the public amounted to the unfortunate Dan Jones who was running away from home and hearth in Missouri. The programs were all mediocre. But he stayed with deepdecipher.com, which seemed the best of the lot. When he entered the first eight numbers—44, 55, 11, 18, 99, 15, 77, 14—the website kicked back with thousands of possibilities.

  That was stupid. How many eight-letter words are there in the English language that do not repeat any letters? Answer: a lot.

  He keyed-in the instruction to search for pairs of four-letter words without repeating letters and again it came back with too many options.

  He modified the command to search for standard pairs of words known to be used in beginning formal communication or informal salutation. That didn’t work. The computer seized-up and the webpage froze. It came back looking like an anagram game for idle entertainment.

  Well, that’s no help.

  The general consumer website was nowhere near sophisticated enough to figure pairs of four-letter words with specific meanings.

  Teagarden was about to reboot the laptop when he looked closer. There were blanks in the jumbled pairs for a reason: the instruction asked for no repeated letters. There were thirty-two places, but only twenty-six shown, because there are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet.

  He stared at the anagram.

  I may be a fox on the run, but I’ve got no interest in “stir foxy,” or “foxy stir.”

  Then he saw it.

  Teagarden stared at the frozen computer screen. That silly, rudimentary website had done it. It found the first, vital clue.

  Every entry on every page began with the words: “Dear John.”

  Oh—my—God.

  At that moment, there came a loud banging on his door.

  “Open up!” the voice shouted. “Emergency. Open up!”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Like the computer screen in front of him, Teagarden froze.

  For a second time he felt an icy jolt shoot up the center of his spine.

  What now?

  He considered performing a control-alt-delete to unfreeze the laptop. Looking at his room door, he worried that whoever was on the other side was prepared to perform a similar function on him, except that would be more like a control-alt—decease.

  Then it came again, working back from the other end of the corridor.

  Bam-bam-bam!

  “Open up!” the voice shouted. “Emergency!”

  “Okay,” Teagarden shouted back.

  He quickly loaded his backpack with his three most important possessions—his cash, the laptop and the Dear John document. When he opened the door, there was no one in the corridor. No Harry. No Sheriff Klumm. He squinted toward the staircase. At the far end of the hallway there was a single firefighter and one other hostel guest standing in his open doorway. The firefighter was clad in a yellow-glow, fire-retardant uniform and helmet.

  “Exit immediately,” he shouted. “Everybody out.”

  Teagarden left his door open and hurried to the stairwell. The odor of smoke relieved his anxiety because it meant there was a real fire somewhere in the building. As he hurried through the small lobby he stopped beside the two-seater couch, dumbstruck at twin images being broadcast at that moment on the flat-panel television. It was a side-by-side wanted poster.

  They were dual images of his own face.

  One was his New York driver’s license photo with a full beard. The other was the same photo, altered by computer program to display his face as clean-shaven.

  Then it got worse. The words under the photos read $50,000 Reward for Fugitive Wanted for Murder of New York Boy.

  Several firefighters noisily descended the steps behind him, their radios blaring with updates from other firefighters knocking on doors and ordering full evacuation. Teagarden pulled the brim of his cap over his eyes and stepped to the street. The Eastern European receptionist/drug dealer was standing at the front of the evacuated crowd. After seeing his image on television, he was uncertain if he should speak to her or simply hurry off as casually as he could manage.

  “Westport, Connecticut,” she said, stopping him.

  “Sorry?”

  “The rich boys from up there. They come down to city on commuter train. They book rooms, go out to party, buy drugs, come back here.” She pursed her lips scornfully. “Cocaine, heroin, crack. They cook, they boil, they smoke, they snort, they mainline. Sometimes they pass out. And that’s when their little candles start fires.”

  “Oh,” Teagarden said. He couldn’t help but admire her instincts for playing both sides of the street, enabling the druggies and blaming them too.

  “Then we have this.” She gestured at a front room on the second floor where the smoke was pouring from an open window. “This group has been in that room since Friday. Today is Monday. So the fun-times weekend for them turns now to fire.”

  Teagarden wondered if the firefighters were going to break glass in the adjacent window of the same room.

  “It looks bad,” she said. “But it is really just a mattress. The repairman will now come and clean, plaster, paint. Is always problem like this. Always big problem with the rich kids.”

  “Thank goodness it’s not too serious. I suppose their parents will bai
l them out of jail.”

  “Jail? Hah! You think just because this is America it works like that? Perfect all the time? Maybe in your North Carolina. But let me tell you, when white boys make trouble here, they are not taken to gulag. This does not happen for them. Cops know these are not black kids. Look,” she said. “Look around. Do you see police?”

  “No.”

  “No. That is right. But firefighters come.” She nodded with respect at them. “That is good. They come fast. In America, it is the fire department that works—the best!” She was genuinely appreciative.

  “Well, I’m glad for that,” Teagarden said, continuing with his southern drawl.

  “Besides,” she continued, “the druggies ran away already. And when police arrive, they find nobody. The druggies, you know, they don’t give real name. None of them. They all have fake cards, fake license, fake this, fake that. Fake, fake, fake. But I hear them talk about their wonderful Connecticut. Westport, Bridgeport, Southport. All the ports up there.” She sighed as she finished speaking, then turned to Teagarden, crossed her arms under her breasts which pushed them higher for his benefit. She gave him a searching look. “Mr. Samuels, like all men, you are better with clean shaved face.”

  He tried to say thank you, but only stuttered.

  “I know what you are thinking,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes. You wonder why I am here.” He nodded. “Mr. Samuels, I am manager of this tourist lodge for one year. With the money I make here, my children in Chechnya eat good breakfast every day.”

  I apologize for accurately guessing your story.

  It was apparent that she had not seen his wanted poster on television. That is, not—yet. The news networks must have just begun airing it as the firefighters arrived. She didn’t realize it, but by displaying her breasts for his consideration, and telling him about her personal situation, she was also telling him that he had to depart her company. Now. Immediately before she returned to the lobby. He knew that the moment she saw his broadcast wanted poster, she’d do everything possible to claim the $50,000 as her own and consider it a happy American-style jackpot.