“Beta, Alpha. We are in position, over.”
“Roger Alpha. Beta in position.”
There were a few more exchanges, and then a feeling of chaos as the lower and upper floors were secured and cleared. A smattering of workers, mostly the cleaning crew, were handed off and escorted to the warehouse level.
Kotler felt a lot better with the civilians out of the way, but questioned the decision to wait until this moment to do it. He understood that they were attempting to take the target off guard, but having these people here increased the risk of civilian casualties.
He decided to trust that the agents had good intel and a good plan, and that he wasn’t privy to it.
For now, Kotler was focused on finding and rescuing his brother.
Coben had reluctantly briefed him, telling him that Jeffrey was reported missing after he’d failed to show up for a charity event the previous night. Worse, Jeffrey’s car had been found, abandoned but still running, only a couple of miles from the event. There’d been blood, and signs of a struggle.
Kotler wanted to call Christina, to make sure she and Alex were ok, but Coben informed him that they were in a safe house, and that there was currently a communications blackout on the mission. No calls, in or out.
Kotler’s only choice was to accept the situation and do what he could to help. He was being offered a rare opportunity—to aid in rescuing his brother. Of course, he was only being allowed access because Coben needed him to identify the manuscript.
He’d deal with Coben later.
Kotler followed the Beta team as they moved back to the target floor, and when both teams were set, they burst through the door in the same way as they had on the floor above. The agents shouted commands and trained their weapons on anyone they saw, ordering them to the floor. Everyone complied, though Kotler could see panic in their eyes.
They moved now through the offices, rapidly clearing the space, section by section, until they came to the door of a storage room. It was locked but took only one hit from the portable battering ram, splintering into bits and slamming open.
They moved, weapons ready, and after a moment called to Kotler.
He had his own weapon out, and when he moved into the room, he was prepared to open fire, if needed. He stopped short when he saw Jeffrey, hands chained to the wall.
Around his chest was a vest laden with what Kotler assumed was C-4. A device was attached dead-center of Jeffrey’s chest. A light blinked on, steady.
“We have a bomb,” one of the agents reported.
The order went out to clear all civilians from the building.
Kotler heard it all playing out over his earpiece. There was a flurry of activity all around, but Kotler was moving in slow motion, inching toward his brother.
Jeffrey stared at him. He looked a little rough. His chin had a scuff on it, and there was blood drying on the side of his face. His shirt was untucked and stained. Despite all of this, it was good to see that he was not only alive but in generally good shape.
He stared at Kotler, his eyes a little wide, and a little angry, a little frightened.
“Jeffrey,” Kotler started, moving closer.
“Dr. Kotler,” one agent reached out, putting a hand on his shoulder to stop him, but Kotler angrily shrugged his hand off.
“They said if I made any noise, alerted anyone that I was in here, the bomb would take out this entire floor,” Jeffrey said, his voice a bit raspy. “They gave me a message for you.”
Everyone in the room went silent. Kotler approached, slowly, cautiously. “What is it?” he asked.
“Rooftop,” Jeffrey said. “Five minutes. Alone. Or this detonates.”
Kotler looked from his brother to the lead agent, who shook his head. “No sir,” he said.
“I’m going,” Kotler said.
“I can’t let you ...”
“I’m going, unless you’re shooting me,” Kotler said, and pushed past him.
“Keep your radio on!” the agent said, and then started rattling off commands to other agents, ordering them to follow Kotler but to keep back. “Do not follow him onto the roof. Repeat, no one is cleared to go onto the roof but Dr. Kotler.”
Kotler got to the stairs and sprinted up them, two at a time. Five minutes became four, then three, then two. He burst through the rooftop door, lungs and legs burning, in the literal last minute.
He waited, dreading that he might hear the sound of an explosion. He stepped out onto the roof. Out to the horizon, the city stretched like Christmas lights and tinsel.
“Dan Kotler,” a voice said. It sounded small, muted and distorted.
Kotler looked around and spotted a phone resting on top of an air conditioner unit. He picked it up, holding it out. He could see himself in a video preview.
“Who are you? Is this Agent Patterson?”
“No, sorry. Agent Patterson’s task is complete. He’s moved on.”
Kotler took this in. “Who are you?” he repeated.
“Not important. Not right now. What is important is that Jeffrey will die, along with anyone left in the building, if you do not do what I tell you to do.”
Kotler felt his pulse getting out of hand. He took a breath, let it out. “What do you want?”
“I want you to walk to the edge of the roof,” the voice said. “And then I want you to jump.”
“Jump?” Kotler asked. “You went through all this just to get me to kill myself?”
“I want you to jump,” the voice said, the distortion masking any sign of amusement or other emotion.
Kotler turned, looking at the roofline. He walked toward it, came to the edge, and looked over.
The street was several stories below. From this vantage point, he could see that FBI agents were hurrying people out of the building, getting them down the block and to a safe distance as quickly as possible. Lights from police cars, fire engines, and ambulances cast pulsing strobes on the surrounding buildings.
“Not there,” the voice said from the phone. “Other side.”
Kotler stepped back from the edge and went to the opposite side of the roof. He looked over.
Below him, approximately one floor down, was a window cleaner’s platform.
Kotler took a breath, shoved the phone in his pocket and holstered his gun. One more breath, and he jumped.
He landed on the platform with a solid thud and had to scramble to grab onto the handrail as the platform tilted, throwing him off to one side. He found himself hanging out over open air, his legs kicking wildly until he was able to stabilize and climb back up.
He sat, sprawled on the platform and holding the rail with one hand, huffing, his heart pounding. He fished the phone from his pocket.
“Good work,” the voice said. “I was worried about you for a moment there.”
“What now?” Kotler asked.
“Open the window. Climb inside.”
“Open the window?” Kotler looked. The windows for this building were uniform sheets of glass, not sliding or louvered. It shouldn’t be possible to open one, especially from the outside.
Kotler reached out and put his palm against the window, and gave a push.
There was a click, and the window swung inward.
He quickly climbed through, relieved to stand on a solid floor.
Inside, he now found himself in a room with no door or other exits. It seemed the only way in or out was the window—a fact that carried with it some uncomfortable possibilities, about whether or not he was meant to leave this room at all.
The room was a singular space, but in the middle of the open floor was a pedestal. A bright light shone from the ceiling and illuminated an object Kotler didn’t recognize. He moved forward and bent to get a better look.
It appeared to be a cylinder made of bronze, with thousands of protruding knots and burs on its surface. At either end of the cylinder there were teeth, as one would find on a set of gears.
“Impressive, right?” the voice asked.
“I’m surprised you don’t know. You know everything, don’t you?”
Kotler said nothing but studied it further. There was something familiar about it.
After a long moment, he had a spark of recognition.
“Is this some sort of platen? Like from a typewriter?”
“I knew you’d get it,” the voice said.
The cylinder was the exact reverse of what Kotler would have thought of as a typewriter platen—typically a cylinder sheathed in rubber, meant to help feed paper through a typewriter. This one looked like an amalgam of a platen and the type head used to strike a ribbon and make characters on a page.
“Part of some other coding machine,” Kotler guessed aloud.
“Yes,” the voice said. “Only it isn’t quite ready for use.”
“And I can somehow make it ready,” Kotler replied.
“You wouldn’t be here otherwise,” the voice said.
Kotler reached out and picked the object up, feeling its heft in his hands, running his fingers over the raised protrusions.
“Dr. Kotler,” a different voice said in his ear. The agents, listening in on him. He couldn’t respond. He didn’t want to take any chances, give the mysterious voice on the phone any excuse to detonate the bomb on Jeffrey’s chest. “We’re monitoring your situation. You’re in a completely sealed room. Steel casing, all around. We can’t get in. The window is the only entrance or exit, as far as we can tell. Tap your earpiece once to acknowledge.”
Kotler leaned forward, as if studying the platen closer, and allowed the phone to drop slightly, blocking the view of whoever was on the other side. He casually reached up, as if running his hand over the side of his head, and gave the earpiece a quick, single tap.
“What about my brother?” Kotler asked aloud.
The voice on the phone replied, “Solve the puzzle in front of you, Dan, and Jeffrey goes free. The bomb will be disarmed, and I’ll allow the agents to cut his chains and take the vest off.”
Buy time. Kotler felt like he was borrowing time, at the moment. And the cost could be higher than he was willing to pay.
From the earpiece, the agent said, “We haven’t been able to remove the device. We have an explosives expert on his way. We need you to buy us as much time as you can.”
“How do I know I can trust you to keep your word?” Kotler asked.
“Silly question,” the voice on the phone said. “You can’t really trust me, obviously. But I will let him go. I swear.”
Kotler knew he had no choice. He was playing by this person’s rules, and his own moves were limited.
He placed the phone on the pedestal and lifted the platen in both hands.
“You have thirty minutes,” the voice said.
“What happens at thirty minutes?” Kotler asked.
“Let’s not find out,” the voice replied.
27
TARGET LOCATION
Denzel and Ludlum arrived just as a crowd of people was being hustled away from the target building. Emergency vehicles were everywhere, and agents were scrambling. One of them recognized him.
“Agent Denzel?”
Agent Danielle Brown approached from the crowd. She was waving people through, getting them out of the street and handing them off to local police officers, who ushered them to safety. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here, sir.”
“Just got here,” Denzel said, side-stepping to let a man pass. “What’s happening?”
“The raid went off as planned, but there was a complication. There’s a bomb strapped to Dr. Kotler’s brother,” she said.
Denzel blinked. “Tell me that again. Slower.”
She filled him in on everything that had gone down over the past hour, from Kotler’s arrival with Agent Coben to his accompaniment with them on the raid.
“Coben sent Kotler in?” Denzel asked, perplexed.
Brown nodded. “I thought it was bizarre, but they gave him a weapon and a vest. He went in with Beta team. Coben’s orders.”
This made no sense. Kotler was trained, sure, but he wasn’t an agent. Why would Coben send him into a scenario like this?
He was about to ask more questions when Ludlum grabbed his arm.
“Look!” she said, pointing upward.
Denzel looked up to see a figure standing on the edge of the roof, as if preparing to jump.
“Is … is that Kotler?” Denzel asked, a spike going through him.
“That’s him,” Brown said, holding a hand to her ear. She shook her head, as if she couldn’t fully understand what she was hearing. “There’s something going on. He’s being told to jump.”
Denzel watched for a tense moment, waiting, powerless. Kotler hovered on the edge of the building for a beat, then stepped back, disappearing from view.
“Who do we have up there?” Denzel asked.
“Kotler was ordered to go alone,” Brown said. “Whoever is on the other side of that phone has all of this stitched up pretty tight.”
Denzel turned to Ludlum. “Find Agent Coben,” he said, his voice tense. “See if you can find out anything that’s going on here.”
“What about you?” she asked.
He stepped around to the trunk of his car, popping it open and pulling out a vest. He shed his suit jacket and pulled the vest on, tightening it, and then checked his gun.
“I’m going in.”
28
STEEL CHAMBER
Kotler examined the platen, turning it over in his hands, examining the burs and nodules protruding from its surface.
He’d never seen anything like it. There was no hint of a language or symbology that he could decipher. Nothing about it triggered any sort of recognition. To Kotler, it might as well have been merely a series of random squiggles.
He didn’t even know where to start.
“It would help if I had some context,” Kotler said. “What sort of device does this go into? Can you tell me anything about its background?”
“You want to use your thirty minutes on a history lesson?” the voice asked.
“I need to know how it’s used. You’ve asked me to solve it. I have no idea what it is or how it works.”
There was a pause, then suddenly the pedestal in the center of the room rose a few inches and then split along one corner with an audible click. The front and side panels swung open like a bifold gate, slowly revealing a set of steps that sank down into the floor, disappearing into darkness.
“Where do those go?” Kotler asked, inspecting the stairs with caution.
“Step on down, Dan. You wanted context. It’s at the bottom of those stairs.”
Kotler stepped forward, but before he took the first step downward the voice from the phone said, “Oh, and get rid of the earpiece. This next part’s just between us.”
From the earpiece, the agent’s voice spoke up. “Dr. Kotler, do not remove …!”
Kotler never heard the rest. He took the earpiece out and tossed it aside.
“Good,” the voice on the phone said. “Now, down we go.”
Kotler took the first step, and then started his descent.
As he went down, he saw that he was passing through a passage cut into the thick floor of the building. From the looks of things, it had been added after the building’s construction, and hadn’t been cut that long ago. It must have been a real job to get all of this set up, Kotler thought. Whoever was on the phone had resources. Money.
Kotler reached the bottom of the stairs and found himself in a room set up like a workshop. There were tools and other objects all around, filling every darkened corner. Workbenches lined the walls. And on one of these was a machine that resembled a typewriter.
Kotler approached, the phone in one hand and the platen in the other.
“This is a Heisenberg machine,” the voice said, and even through the digitized distortion, Kotler thought he could hear reverence.
“Heisenberg?” Kotler replied. �
�As in Werner Heisenberg?”
“I’m absolutely certain,” the voice said. A beat later, “That’s a joke. It probably didn’t translate well through the distortion.”
“I got it,” Kotler said. “But what is this?”
“It’s an encoding and decoding device. A spy telegraph, you could say. There were only four of them made. I have two. This one, and another, in a secure location. I had to sacrifice one to get what I want, but it will be worth it.”
“Sacrifice?” Kotler stared at the machine. “I’m sorry, I’ve never seen this before in my life. I’m not sure how I can help with this.”
“You’re a resourceful man, Dan. You’ll figure it out in the ...” there was a pause, then, “... twenty-four minutes you have left.”
Kotler nodded. He couldn’t afford to waste any more time. He needed to get to this.
The voice had told him to “solve” the platen. But what did that mean?
Until he’d been shown the Heisenberg machine, he’d never heard of it. How was this tied to Werner Heisenberg, the father of modern quantum physics? Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was famous enough to be part of pop culture, but beyond that …
Kotler had been pacing a bit, the platen in his hand. He stopped, astonished. He turned back to the Heisenberg machine and stepped closer.
Cryptographic Applications of Heisenberg’s Theory.
It was the title of his great grandfather’s paper—the manuscript that had started all of this. The manuscript that Kotler and Denzel had treated as merely a clue, when it was actually the target of whoever had orchestrated all of this.
Dr. Daniel Kotler’s theories weren’t just fodder for a scientific paper. Someone had taken the time to translate them into a physical machine. A machine for encoding and decoding messages using Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
But how?
Kotler shook his head. He was running out of time, which meant Jeffrey, and anyone with him was also in danger.
He looked at the platen again, bringing it up close, examining the symbols protruding from it. He looked for anything that might click, that might spark some inspiration.
For the first time, he noticed the seams—one at about every half-inch on the platen, from end to end.
The Stepping Maze Page 16