by Tom Clancy
She resisted the urge to sway around the Lincoln now in front of her.
“Rol, everything okay?”
He nodded. “Just thinkin’. Don’t slow down on my account.”
* * *
“Oh. That’s not why—”
“ ‘S’okay, chere.” He patted her shoulder. “You my favorite gal.”
She checked the rearview and passed.
“Those thoughts,” she said. “You feel like sharing them?”
He turned to look at her.
“Guess I better.” He hesitated. “Came to me what happened to the president-elect in Brazil last month. Colon. I was recollectin’ how he took sick, died so sudden. His symptoms… ones we know about… ones his government didn’t cover up…”
He didn’t have to say any more than that.
His symptoms, Megan thought, had been strikingly similar to Gord’s.
She felt her heart clamp in her chest.
“Rollie, UpLink was about to cut a development deal with his administration. Our advance team met with him weeks before he died. You remember us talking about it on the Pomona?”
He made an affirmative sound.
“There’s my thoughts,” he said. “All wrapped in a bundle.”
Megan nodded and jammed down on the Beemer’s gas pedal, shredding over the road like the devil’s black stallion.
* * *
“Megan phoned,” Nimec said. “She’s with Ashley and Rollie at the hospital.”
Ricci’s shoulders tensed almost imperceptibly.
“The boss…?”
“He’s hanging on.”
“Oh.” Ricci breathed. “I didn’t know my arch nemesis was heading over there.”
Nimec was silent a moment. They were in his office. Just the two of them, by his choice. He’d wanted a chance to toss things around with Ricci before calling Vince Scull.
“Megan grabbed him, hustled off.” Nimec paused. “Tom, the docs and lab coats have turned something up. And I’ve got to tell you, it blew me away.”
Ricci looked at him.
“Long and short?” he said.
“Looks like the virus that’s affecting Gord was bioengineered. We’re not talking about something cultured in some Iraqi or Sudanese ‘baby milk factory.’ The bug’s some kind of mutant created with black bag technology.”
“How sure a thing is this?”
“Sure enough for us to run with it,” Nimec said. “I asked Meg to give me a dumbed-down explanation of their testing processes. From what I understood, there are confirmed techniques for scanning plant and animal genes for evidence of modification. Before UpLink sold off its biotech division to Richard Sobel, we were doing it for the ag department and other clients. You take a cucumber that has some superficial difference to all the rest at the green grocer, bring it to the lab, and they do a PCR exam, same as they would on a crime suspect’s genetic material. The DNA doesn’t compare with that variety of cuke, they move on to another level of testing. There are places on the gene string where scientists know to look for… I guess they’re the equivalent of splices.”
Ricci rubbed his neck. “A cucumber isn’t a virus,” he said.
“But the scientific principles behind the tests are identical. Or close to identical. Meg could give you a fuller rundown. All I can tell you is that these are confirmed procedures,” Nimec said. “They’ve only had, what, a day or two to do the lab work, so I don’t know whether the findings meet a standard of proof that would satisfy the scientific establishment. Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s writing any articles for the New England Journal of Medicine. We’ve been given an inside line, and that’s how it stays for now.”
Ricci was still and quiet in his chair.
“Ever miss the twentieth century?” he said after a minute.
“More and more.”
“But here we are in the future.”
“That’s right.”
“If we have to put up with this bullshit, where are the flying cars? And the robots that pop hot food and drinks out of slots in their chests?”
Nimec managed a half smile. “I always looked forward to the jet packs,” he said.
There was a brief silence.
“Where do we go with this, Pete?”
“I was hoping you’d have some ideas. Obviously we’ve got to learn who developed the virus. And how Gord was exposed.”
“The forensics on Palardy might help steer us in the right direction. We’ve also got to know whether there’s anything to his E-mail,” Ricci said. He scratched behind his ear. “You hear from our code-breaking whiz?”
Nimec shook his head. “Not for a while. He stopped picking up his phone.”
“Booted me right out of his office,” Ricci said. “You think we should go knock on his—?”
Nimec’s phone broke in with a twitter. He picked up, grunted, nodded, grunted again, replaced the receiver, and abruptly rose from behind his desk. “Timing,” he said.
Ricci looked at him. “Carmichael?”
Nimec nodded, tapped Ricci on his shoulder as he hastened around his desk. “Let’s move,” he said. “He’s got something big for us.”
“It’s quirky but clever, when you take into account that Palardy may have been on his way out when he devised it,” Carmichael was explaining virtually as they reached his door. “Sort of a cross between a polyalphabetic and geometric cipher.”
What Ricci and Nimec saw on the flat-panel wall monitor facing them was a large graphic:
ROUGH CIRCLE (CLOCK) TABLE
“Palardy did have a thing for clocks, Ricci, and it’s obvious he used one to work out his substitutions,” Carmichael went on. “Sooner or later, the computers would have solved this thing mathematically, even without your having made the observation. Just as they would have if some of those letter combinations hadn’t jumped out at my eye. The GW in particular… How many people don’t immediately think ‘George Washington’ when they look at that letter pair? Once I let my nose follow that clue, I started noticing other bigrams also corresponded to presidential initials. Jefferson, Jackson, and Teddy Roosevelt’s especially popped out at me.”
He paused, motioned them into the office. A trim, blonde woman of about thirty-five was standing near the middle of the room.
“Michelle Franks,” she said, putting out her hand.
Nimec and Ricci quickly introduced themselves.
She said, “We won’t waste precious time with a long explanation…”
Good, Ricci and Nimec both thought at once.
“… but want you to understand how we got this figured, and whipped together the chart in front of you.”
“What Palardy did was take a circle and divide it into sixty equal parts by drawing lines across its diameter,” Carmichael said.
“Sixty parts, as in sixty minutes on the clock, ” Michelle said.
Carmichael nodded. “It was obvious to me in Palardy’s office that each of his character groups were substitutions. But my first guess was that they stood for letters or syllables, when in fact they stood for numerals.”
Right, Ricci thought. Get on with it.
“When Jimmy got his hunch about the groups representing the initials of United States presidents—” Michelle began.
“Every one of them early presidents,” Carmichael cut in. “There were no RRs, as in Ronald Reagan, RN for Nixon, BC for Clinton and so on…”
“When he noticed those things, we chose the first twenty-six sets of initials—”
“One for each letter of the alphabet,” Carmichael said. “Another thing I might’ve mentioned in Palardy’s office is that the punctuation marks looked like probable nulls. And they wound up being just that. Characters that stand for nothing. Palardy used several: an exclamation point, a period, and a question mark, to name a few.”
Which was something both Nimec and Ricci had already discerned for themselves.
“Take the three nulls, add them to the twenty-six initial pairs, and it equals tw
enty-nine substitution symbols,” Michelle said.
“Next you add the double zeros,” Carmichael said. “They always follow a set of repeat presidential initials… belonging to those who would have served their terms later in the chronology of chief executives. Namely Presidents James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and An-drew Johnson.”
“This gives you a grand total of thirty ciphertext characters,” Michelle said.
“Half of sixty, and also half of your total number of points on the outside of the circle… or circumference of the clock dial,” Carmichael said. “After that fell into place, we had to determine which of the letter pairs corresponded to a particular number between one and twenty-six, since that number had to represent a letter in its proper alphabetical sequence. Palardy could have made that part easy by having the numerical order match the order of presidents—”
“Number one being George Washington, two being John Adams, three being Thomas Jefferson, for example…”
“But he didn’t, probably because it was too easy. By randomizing the alphabetical and numerical correspondents… leaving them up for grabs… he ensured that whoever got to the clear would have to do exactly what you talked about before, Ricci. Run all the possible matches through a computer until it came up with ones that enabled the person to compose intelligible sentences. Either that, or work it out on paper, and that would take forever. And again, this presupposes that the would-be code breaker could recognize the bigrams, the nulls, the pattern in general.”
Michelle was nodding. “He must have felt that was unlikely. Felt that we’d have the know-how and experience to swing it, but the laptop thief wouldn’t.”
“So I’m guessing what Palardy did was grab himself a sheet of paper and something like a draftsman’s template, draw a circle, and then draw thirty intersecting lines across its diameter. Then he’d write a bigram on one side and pick a number out of his hat to be its diametric opposite, as you can see from the rough table on our graph. And there you are with—”
Nimec checked his watch, exchanged glances with Ricci. Almost five minutes had passed since they’d entered the office. He decided that was long enough.
“Carmichael,” he said. “You’re coming close to that whump across the head.”
Silence. Carmichael looked embarrassed.
“Shit,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Nimec said. “But we need the clear. Right now.”
Carmichael nodded, went over to his computer console, and tapped at the keyboard.
“I’ve got it in a separate text file, it’ll just take a second to open it,” he said half to himself. “The lines you’ll see on top of the screen show the plaintext as it appears when first deciphered. In the bottom of the panel, I’ve capitalized letters and inserted spaces and punctuation to make it legible to you….”
Nimec and Ricci looked up at the wall.
The uppermost version of the clear read:
enriquequirosgavemethediseaseigavehimrogergordiantherearemenbeyondeitherofuswhoordereditinevermeantforthistohappenforgiveme
The one below it read:
Enrique Quiros gave me the disease. I gave him Roger Gordian. There are men beyond either of us who ordered it. I never meant for this to happen.
Forgive me.
Nimec and Ricci stared at each other.
“Enrique Quiros,” Ricci said. “Pete, that name rings a bell.”
“Sure it does,” Nimec said. “Quiros heads that drug crew down in San Diego.”
“What would he want with the boss? How the hell could he—?”
“I don’t know,” Nimec said. “But we’d damn well better find out.”
TWENTY-ONE
CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 16, 2001
“There it is. About three blocks up ahead of us. That tall office building, see?” Ricci’s contact took a hand off the steering wheel and motioned to his right. “Quiros’s front company’s on the third floor. Golden Triangle Services.”
Ricci glanced out the passenger window.
“Guess it tickles his funny bone,” he said.
The driver crawled the car through rush-hour traffic. He was a guy in his early thirties named Derek Glenn with skin the color of roasted chestnuts, a close-cropped nap of black hair, and a toned, broad-shouldered physique.
“His outfit’s title, you mean?”
Ricci nodded.
“Golden Triangle. The heroin production and trafficking center of the world,” he said. “Thailand, Laos, Burma—”
“Myanmar,” Glenn said.
Ricci gave him a look.
“Is what Burma calls itself these days,” Glenn said. “Anyway, sure, it’s smirky of Quiros. But that’s how developers talk about the area north of the city where all the new Web shops have gone up, you know. Including ours.”
Ricci made a dismissive sound in his throat. Glenn was with a contingent of Sword personnel assigned to a locally based UpLink division specializing in the development of secure corporate and government intranet sites. He knew the territory and was trying to be helpful. But the lightning run of events that had swept Ricci from Palardy’s death room in Sunnydale to this strange city hundreds of miles down the coast within a span of ten hours had left him in an unpleasant and critical mood. He didn’t care whether the dope capital’s name was Burma, Myanmar, or Brigadoon. He didn’t care what sort of pitch the civil boosters were throwing prospective real-estate buyers about the neighborhood. He thought the smoked glass tower where Enrique Quiros was sitting pretty looked like a glassine envelope of heroin blown up to outrageous dimensions.
“Listen,” Glenn said. “My point’s that Enrique isn’t just some slick. Smooth, yeah. But there’s a difference. You have to respect him. He’s got an Ivy League business degree. He’s grounded in his family. And his main thing is to watch out for them. If it wasn’t for his old man asking him to take over the rackets before he died, he might have gone legit. But once that happened, he probably felt obliged—”
“I read his make on the flight over,” Ricci said.
Glenn was looking straight out the front window.
“The company Learjet doesn’t seem like a shoddy way to travel,” he said. “One of these days maybe I’ll get to check it out firsthand. Fly outside coach on a passenger jet. No screeching infant with diaper rash behind me. No bratty older brother popping chewing gum bubbles in my ear.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Glenn shrugged.
“I’ve been in San Diego a long time and figured you’d want to hear what I know,” he said. “You don’t, no problem. I meet your team at the airport, bring you here, job’s done. I can go have a beer someplace nice and quiet. That’s the best part of being an enlisted man.”
“And the worst?”
“Not anything worth a complaint. But it might be sensible for you to remember I went through the same training program as the San Jose glory boys.” He paused. “And maybe some other stuff before it.”
Ricci turned to him, then hesitated.
“Sorry I bit,” Ricci said. “I’m on the wrong side of lousy. Nothing to do with you.”
Glenn kept looking out the windshield.
“There’s been talk the skipper’s pretty bad off,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“He going to make it?”
“I don’t know. I’m hoping to dig up something that can assist the docs.”
Glenn shook his head and inched forward in silence.
“What’s Quiros been up to since I called?” Ricci asked after a minute.
“Not much,” Glenn said. “He left the building maybe three hours ago. Alone. Took a walk around. Then he went back inside and hasn’t gone anywhere since. It’s like he was clearing his head.”
“Think he smells you’ve got him covered?”
“Maybe, maybe not. We’re pretty good at it. Either way, he hasn’t tried to book.”
Ricci considered that. After pulling Quiros’s
file out of the Sword database in San Jose, he’d gotten the phone number of the Golden Triangle front operation and decided to phone him directly. The call had been brief, and Ricci had done most of what little talking there was. It hadn’t crossed his mind for an instant to state his reasons or ask any questions. He had identified himself, told Quiros straight out that he was flying down to see him that afternoon, and strongly advised him to be waiting in his office. Though he’d had awful doubts about putting him on alert, it had seemed better than the alternative of making the hour-long trip by air only to miss him and have to hunt for him around town. Ricci had gambled Quiros would understand it was in his interest to know how much he had on him and what he wanted to say. That he would cooperate at least as far as agreeing to meet. And his thinking proved to be right on.
Still, Quiros knew he was in trouble, and he’d had several hours to guess at how much. Even if Palardy’s message had exaggerated his involvement in what looked like a deeply spun conspiracy to murder Roger Gordian — one that might be part of a broader plan if Thibodeau’s idea about the death of Alberto Colón bore out — it was hard to predict how he would act under pressure. Hard to tell how anyone would act. Ricci had been prepared to hear that he’d dropped from sight, keeper of the family flame or not.
Glenn swung to the right now, provoking aggravated horn honks as he cut across two lanes of heavy traffic to double-park in front of their destination. “Your stop,” he said.
Ricci nodded and reached for the door handle.
“Hey, Ricci.” From behind him.
He glanced over his shoulder.
“You want backup? I can pull this heap into a garage.”
Ricci looked at him a moment.
“No,” he said. “Think this might go easier for me solo. But I’d like to buy you that glass of suds later, if you don’t mind sitting with a Coke-drinking glory boy.”
Glenn grinned a little.
“Company’s company,” he said.
Ricci exited the car and strode toward the office tower, shouldering through a tumult of homebound office workers. In the lobby, an ornamental rent-a-cop asked his name, called upstairs on the intercom, and then waved him to the elevators. Ricci figured he was with the building’s legit security crew. Quiros’s personal bodyguards were certain to be waiting upstairs with him.