Ixeos: Book One of the Ixeos Trilogy

by Jennings Wright

  Indeed, the page began to make more sense to Marty now that he saw the machine. The left side was numbered 1 through 50, with the three letter starting sequence in a column next to it. Beside that column, there were the numbers 51 through 100; a column of three letter sequences followed. There were four sets of columns across the page, going from 1 to 200.

  “Wow. So if this isn’t the first message of the day…” Marty said, staring at the two hundred possible starting positions for the rotors.

  “Then this is going to take a long time,” Clay finished. “But you checked all the emails and this was the first, right? At least the first on August 16?”

  “Yeah. Man. This is intense.” He continued to stare at the code book, flipping through pages. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss any. If I found one on any given day, I did a check through everything, plus the day before and the day after.”

  Clay shrugged. “Okay, then let’s give it a try.”

  “Does it print a page out or what?” Marty asked.

  “No, a tape, like those ticker tapes on a stock market machine. I guess we should check that there’s paper. I didn’t even think about that at the house.” He opened the top again and was relieved to see a full three inch roll of thin white paper. He blew out a sigh of relief. “Good! But I don’t know how we’ll replace this when it runs out.”

  “Cutting paper strips seems like a fun job for sitting around the fire, kind of like stringing popcorn,” Marty said. “For someone else. I don’t want to do it!”

  Clay looked at him and laughed. “Let’s hope we find Darian before that. I don’t want to draw the short straw either!”

  He began entering the groupings of letters exactly as Marty had written at the bottom of the page. As he typed, the tape began to emerge from the machine, containing groups of five capital letters.

  CSLOJ WVFTD WNOTS PAHYT CHTMI HUTIC NCPIA MWAUT SKLMR

  “Well,” said Marty, holding out the tape. “That’s very helpful.”

  Hannah and Abacus emerged from the Opera house and turned west, walking quickly and quietly down the silent streets. Turning south, they continued on towards the Royal Palace. There was a light drizzle and the sky was completely covered with low hanging clouds, the darkness thick about them. Neither spoke.

  It took them an hour to get to the Palace. They skirted the main entrance, going instead to a nondescript service door that had once been used for deliveries. Shaking off their jackets and clicking on flashlights, they made their way to a small office off the restaurant-caliber kitchen. Sitting on the hard wooden chairs, they still didn’t speak.

  A half hour later they heard the slight snick of the latch as the service door was open and shut, then very soft footsteps down the hallway. A figure stood in the double doorway of the kitchen, then walked to the office. Abacus stood.

  “Rod,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “Abacus,” Rod said, shaking it, then shedding his wet sweatshirt and shaking the water from his hair like a dog.

  “So, tell me.” Abacus sat back down and rested his ankle on his knee, keeping his eyes on the young man in front of him.

  Rod gestured to an empty chair and Abacus nodded. He sat. His light brown hair was wet and plastered to his head. It was overlong, curling around his shoulders and looking black from the rain. He had lines around his mouth that were too deep for his age and a permanent vertical slash between his brows. Dark circles rimmed his brown eyes and his cheeks were sunken and hollow.

  “I want to come back. I… I screwed up. I didn’t understand what I was doing here, why I should sacrifice for people I didn’t know, what the whole deal with the Firsts was really all about.” He shrugged. “Alec offered me freedom. What I thought was freedom.” Cutting his eyes to Hannah, he smiled ruefully. “It wasn’t. I might as well have been a slave for the Firsts; I probably would have eaten better.”

  “Did something particular happen to make you realize this?” Abacus asked, his voice carefully neutral. He was staring intently at Rod, his dark eyes trying to see into the younger man’s heart.

  “There were a lot of little things all along the way, but lately there’ve been some big things. Alec was taken by the Firsts one night when we were walking back from a party. We were down by the river, drunk,” he glanced at both Abacus and Hannah. “A couple of gangs had gotten together to celebrate hijacking a truck and everybody was messed up. This was last summer. Anyway, he and I were walking down the Seine and probably not being very careful. Out of nowhere this van pulls in front of us, and four of them step out. They all had tasers. I dove into the river and stayed under as long as I could, just let the current take me. Alec… he was really drunk. I think he’d done some meth, too. Last I saw of him, he was lying on the ground in the headlights of that van getting wailed on by those guys. I guess they tazed him first, but then they brought out clubs.” He sighed. “Apparently they didn’t think he’d make a good slave but he would make a good example. Three days later, a few of us were goofing off and we went to the Eiffel Tower. Alec was hanging there by a noose, fifteen feet off the ground. The birds…” He cleared his throat. “I couldn’t cut him down; he was too high. The other guys didn’t even want to. It was like nothin’ had happened. They walked by him laughing and joking and Pierre even threw some rocks up to see if he could hit his nose. Those kids in the gangs… They’re not Firsts, but they might as well be.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Abacus continued to stare at Rod, trying to root out any deception. Hannah sat quietly with her hands folded in her lap; her knuckles were white from tension.

  “That was a long time ago,” Abacus said into the silence.

  Rod agreed. “Yeah. After that, things were quiet for awhile. In the gangs, it’s every man for himself unless we’re fighting another gang. But with the food from the hijacked truck, everyone was pretty chill for a while. I mostly stopped drinking and I never did drugs. With Alec dead, there was a lot of talk about who was gonna lead us. There was a girl, Olivie. She’d kinda been Alec’s girlfriend. She was okay, older than most of them, and her parents were rebels. Seemed like she had a little more common sense, maybe a little more feeling, than the rest. I thought she’d end up running the gang and that was okay with me. She was tough but fair and she was good at holding people together. Then a younger punk, Yves—we had to call him Boucher, for butcher, because he said he’d cut up a bunch of Firsts one time, although nobody saw it—he decided he was going to be the leader. Most of us, we rallied around Olivie, and for a few months after Alec died it was quiet. Nice. Like a family.” He stopped talking and stared out the small window at the rain coming down outside.

  After a full minute, Hannah said, “What happened?”

  “We ran out of food. Then Boucher told us he had a line on another truck to hijack. He said he had it all figured out, that he’d gotten the info from a young slave he saw sometimes in a back yard who worked for the driver. He had a lot of intel: schedules, times, a description of the driver, where the truck was kept when it wasn’t running. He said it was going to have fresh food on it, like beef and vegetables and fruit, even a few cases of wine. He talked it up for weeks. Finally Olivie agreed to set it up. We were going to ambush the truck when it was coming into the city from the east, on some two-lane country road. Took us forever to get out there.

  The night of the op, Boucher says that he and Olivie are taking point. The rest of us had jobs—tearing up part of the road, piling up debris, making a blind next to the road where we were going to pull it over.” He paused again, then rubbed his eyes. “I was helping with the blind, and the two of them, they were pretty far down the road. It was pitch dark out there and we were working hard to be quiet, and then all the sudden there’s a scream. It went on for a couple seconds and then just stopped all the sudden. Everyone knew it was Olivie, but nobody knew where she was. Boucher had ru
n the whole thing and kept us in the dark.

  We waited an hour and no truck came. I guess there was never any truck. Finally, Boucher comes up to the blind and says we’re going, the op is blown. I asked him where Olivie was and he said she’d had an accident, she was in the woods, dead. He had a big knife strapped to his belt… I couldn’t see very well in the dark, but I could see there was blood on it and on his jeans. We never saw Olivie again; we just left and went home like nothing happened. Except now Boucher was the leader.”

  He stared at Hannah for a long time, then shifted his gaze to Abacus. “After that, I just wanted out. But Boucher, he knew I suspected he’d killed Olivie, and he made sure I was never by myself. I didn’t want to lead him to Hannah or the tunnels so I didn’t run. I kept my nose clean, didn’t cross him, and tried to do him favors to earn his trust. A few weeks ago, he asked me to go scavenge for something by myself. We’ve been short on supplies since he took over and we have to go farther away to find things. He doesn’t have the manpower for us to be doubled up all the time. After he’d sent me a few times and I came back with what he wanted, he seemed to relax a little. So a few days ago, I decided to risk talking to Hannah at the Depot. I know he didn’t follow me; he’s got a girl now, and she keeps him busy.”

  “Would he send someone else to follow you?” Abacus asked.

  Rod shook his head. “We don’t have enough people. The other gangs don’t like him so they’re not sharing supplies anymore, and definitely wouldn’t help him. We had a couple that we shared stuff with before, when Alec and Olivie were the leaders. Now they’d be more likely to try and recruit us away. Anyway, there are only nine of us now. The rest are either dead or went out scavenging and never came back. Boucher stays at the house with Natalie, so that leaves seven of us to get enough food and supplies. Nobody would care if I left. They all want to leave.”

  “Boucher would care,” Abacus said.

  “Yeah, but he can’t find me if I go with you. He can look all he wants. He’ll just think I got caught or killed, or maybe that I finally took off.” Rod sat back in the chair and spread his legs out in front of him.

  “I know I screwed up. I’ve done some things… Well, there are things I’ll never forget, and I don’t know if I can forgive myself for. But I never gave y’all up, I never told them where I came from, and I would never, ever do anything to put Hannah’s life in danger up here. I’ve made sure we stay away from the Opera House, the vault…” He leaned forward, his eyes pleading with Abacus. “Help me. Please. I’m sorry. I’ll do whatever you want, go wherever you want. Just please help me.”

  For five minutes, Abacus didn’t say a word. Hannah knew that Rod was looking at her, but she didn’t raise her eyes from her clenched hands. Abacus studied Rod, and, to his credit, Rod sat still and took it. Finally, Abacus stood up from this chair and clapped his hands together.

  “Right. Let me tell you what I told Hannah. Vasco and I don’t feel we can make a final decision without Landon. In fact, we have decided to defer to Landon’s decision completely since only he knows the purpose you were to fulfill while you were here.” Rod opened his mouth to speak, but Abacus held up his hand for silence.

  “However, it’s obvious that your life is in danger, and it’s also obvious that our own lives will be in danger if we continue to risk meeting with you here in Paris. So we did come up with a plan…” He glanced at Hannah, who gave a small smile and looked at Rod.

  “We’ll take you with us now, today, back to the tunnels.” At Rod’s elated expression, he hurried on. “But we will not endanger the lives of the other three hundred, and we don’t know when Landon will be coming back. He was just here a couple of days ago, before we knew your situation, and it might be a while. What we will do is take you somewhere else. Somewhere you don’t know and where you don’t know your way back to the tunnels. We’ll put you with a group helping a rebel cell and let you work. As soon as we have either spoken with Landon and he’s given us his verdict, or else he requests you to return to the tunnels, we can reevaluate. That’s the best we can do.”

  Rod sat speechless, gaping up at Abacus. He glanced over at Hannah, then back at the older man. Tears pooled in his eyes and spilled over to run down his cheeks. All he could say was, “Thank you!”

  Chapter Forty

  “Did we use the wrong rotors?” Marty asked.

  “Not if they’re using this code book and using it correctly.” Clay skimmed the tape and the groups of letters. “My theory is that Lockwell is encoding the message before he gives it to that scientist… What’s her name?”

  “Verestyuk,” Marty said. “Alexandra Verestyuk.”

  “Right. Her. I think he’s encoding it and either giving her that group of letters to make the crazy email, or else he’s writing the email himself. So for now, let’s assume that Lockwell has encoded the original message with a more normal code. Substitution, key, something like that. All I have to do is figure out the code he used and we’ll get the original message.”

  “Oh, that’s all…” Marty said. “How many ‘normal’ codes are there?”

  Clay grinned. “Thousands. But the good news is that apparently the Firsts aren’t very creative.”

  “How will you figure it out?” Marty asked.

  “The way code breakers have done for centuries—a pencil and lots of paper.” He stuck the tape in his pocket. “We’re headed back to the tunnels in the morning. As soon as we get back, I’m taking over the library.”

  “You still need me?” Marty asked.

  “Once we figure out the code, we’ll have to decipher all these emails. I could really use your help, and Neahle’s. I hope I can crack the code before you have to come back here. I wish there was some way to get information from here back to the tunnels quicker—if you come across an email with urgent information, we’re not going to be able to do anything about it.”

  Marty perked up. “Oh, hey, that reminds me. Two things. One, since you got two, you could leave an Enigma machine here so I can decode right away. That way I’ll know what’s important and what’s a weather report. And two, I actually had a thought about communication. Not with the tunnels directly; since they’re so far underground, that’s not possible without laying cables. But I think I can hijack a number from the comm center if we can find a couple of cell phones.”

  “Really? How would we use them?”

  “Someone would have to come to the surface every day at the same time and check in. But it wouldn’t have to be at the Opera House. There are lots of places that the tunnels come up in the city, like manholes and basements. I think I can clone two phones and get us connected. If we keep it to under three minutes—or even two, to be safe—I don’t think they’ll figure it out. It’s not like someone’s studying their phone bill every month. ”

  “Clone?” Clay asked, confused.

  “Yeah. I find two numbers that are hardly ever used. There are dozens of them. Then I clone it, make a second phone that uses the same number. The risk, of course, is one side or the other trying to make a call when the number is in use. But if I pick it right, that shouldn’t be a problem. And if it does happen, we just ditch the phone and start over. Obviously we’d only use it to pass vital info, not a have daily gossip session, but at least we wouldn’t have to wait days or weeks for someone to show up.” Marty smiled at his cousin.

  “That’s brilliant!” Clay said. “Where’d you learn that stuff?”

  “Burn Notice. The Bourne movies. Wikipedia. It’s amazing what you can find out these days.”

  They approached the side door of the Opera House just as it was getting light. The drizzle that had been falling for days continued and there were pools of standing water throughout the city, making their travel miserable. Clay hunched over the duffel bag he held, trying to make sure the Enigma machine stayed dry. With his head down and hi
s hood pulled low, he didn’t see Vasco stop and ran into his back.

  “What?” Clay said irritably. He wanted to be inside and dry.

  “Someone’s been here recently,” Vasco said, pointing at wet footprints on the otherwise dry concrete near the door. The overhang protected the entrance unless there was a strong wind, and there were three definite sets of shoes leading in the door: two large, one small.

  “Is anyone else topside now?” Marty asked.

  Vasco cocked his head, thinking. “My brother and Hannah had a job. I would have thought they’d have gone back by now, but it’s possible the weather slowed them up.” He put his foot over one of the men’s prints, then the other, and shrugged. “The right size. I’m not sure…”

  “Who else would it be?” Clay asked.

  “Gangs. Firsts. Junkies. Rebels…”

  Chastened, Clay shifted the heavy bag and waited. Vasco studied the door and the tracks a bit longer then spoke. “Three of us, three of them. One’s obviously a girl. Not that around here there are many girls I’d like to meet in a dark alley.” He reached out to the handle. “In, and be quiet. I have a knife and a flashlight… Marty, do you have a weapon?”

  Marty looked confused, then patted his pockets like someone had secreted a weapon in them. “Um, no, sorry.”