by Orca Various
“Okay.” I was looking up the page for the poem when Felip suddenly swerved off the road into a rest area and braked hard. I was thrown against Laia.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Sorry,” Felip said, but he was staring back at the highway. I looked out. There wasn’t much traffic; a couple of large trucks and a few cars. As I watched, a black SUV with dark tinted windows sailed past in the slow lane. I couldn’t see inside, but I had the odd impression that someone was watching us.
“We’re being followed,” Felip said.
SEVEN
“I’ve been followed before,” Felip explained matter-of-factly. “A lot of people in Spain don’t want the past dragged out into the open.”
“The black SUV?” I asked.
“Yes,” Felip said. “He was behind us in the traffic in Seville, and he’s stayed there ever since. I’ve slowed down and speeded up, but he’s always kept his distance. I pulled off to see what he would do.”
“Who is it?” Laia asked, a trace of nervousness in her voice.
“Someone with a history they don’t want uncovered,” Felip said. “It happens quite often to those of us who are looking into the past—the lawyers, the investigators, even the forensic archaeologists we call in to identify the remains in old mass graves. We’ve all been followed at one time or another.”
“What do they do?” Laia asked.
“Nothing much. There have been a couple of cases of investigators having their car tires slashed and one break-in that I know of, but those are rare. Mostly, it’s just following.”
“They’re not very good at it,” I said, thinking of all the spy films I had seen and the mysteries I had read.
“They’re not trying to stay hidden,” Felip said. “Quite the opposite. The point is to intimidate the investigators. To discourage us from digging too deep into something.”
“What does this guy want to stop you doing?” I asked.
“That’s what’s confusing. This sort of thing usually happens when we’re in the middle of a case and close to making a breakthrough. It’s always been obvious which case the surveillance relates to. Right now I’m working on a number of cases, but either they’re not controversial or we’re in the very early stages.
“Of course,” Felip added with a smile, “we mustn’t overthink this. The people we’re talking about are not noted for their intelligence. Are we ready to go on and brave the mysterious black SUV? I thought we’d stop for coffee and stretch our legs at Granada. It’s about halfway.”
Laia and I agreed, and we pulled out into the traffic. For a while, we both kept glancing nervously at the surrounding traffic, but finally we settled into our books. I looked up “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” and began reading. About halfway through, I made our first breakthrough in cracking Grandfather’s code.
I flipped back to the beginning of the poem and excitedly recited out loud:
At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A basket of lime made ready
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death and only death
at five in the afternoon.
“I see you have developed a taste for our poetry,” Felip said over his shoulder.
“What happens at five in the afternoon?” I asked.
“That’s the traditional time for the bullfight,” Laia said. “The time Mejías was killed. That’s why Lorca repeats it so often.”
“Federico García Lorca,” I read from the cover of the book. Laia looked oddly at me. “That line at the top of the page—FGL@=5pm—it means Federico García Lorca at exactly five in the afternoon.”
Laia’s mouth dropped open. “The key!” she exclaimed. “Your grandfather picked ‘Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías’ as the key to his code. It makes sense. Anyone who knows about the war in Spain would know about Lorca, and the lament is his most famous poem.”
“I guess so,” I said.
Laia grabbed the printout of the pages of the notebook. “But how?” She ran her finger along below the top row of number groups.
1155 1761 4314 3123 3261 2214 3925 4331 2535 3141
“Every group begins with one, two, three or four,” she said thoughtfully. “Let me see the poem.” I passed over the book, and she thumbed rapidly through pages. “The poem’s in four parts,” she said, her voice rising. “What if the first number of the four tells us the part?”
“The second is the line,” I contributed, being drawn along by Laia’s excitement.
“The third is the word,” she said, almost shouting now.
“And the fourth is the letter,” I said. “Each group of four numbers represents a letter.”
“Let’s see,” I went on. “One one five five. Part one. Line one—At five in the afternoon. Word five—afternoon. Letter five—R.”
“One seven six one,” Laia said. “Part one. Line seven—The rest was death and only death. Word six—only. Letter one—O.” Laia rummaged in her bag for a pen and began writing letters down below the number groups.
The more letters she wrote, the more our enthusiasm waned. The letters didn’t mean anything. We had the whole first line—rotoflecha. “It’s gibberish,” I said miserably. Then I had another idea. “Lorca wrote in Spanish, right? Grandfather probably used the original, not the English translation.”
Laia stayed silent.
“We’ll pick up a copy in Spanish and try again,” I suggested.
“He used the English translation,” Laia said eventually.
“But it doesn’t mean anything,” I said.
“He used the English translation, but he wrote in Spanish. Roto flecha means broken arrow.”
I was excited and confused. “What does broken arrow mean?”
“I don’t know, but at least it’s words. Let’s try the next line.”
We worked together in silence for a few minutes. The second line also revealed some words, but they were equally obscure.
“Cupola de cromo means chrome dome,” Laia explained, “but what a chrome dome is, and how it relates to a broken arrow, I have no idea.”
“I do,” Felip said, easing the car onto the access road leading to a gas station and a generic motorway restaurant. “This is as close as we come to Granada on this drive. Let’s stretch our legs, have a snack and I’ll explain.”
“Chrome Dome was the name of a Cold War defense program in the 1950s and ’60s,” Felip said as we sat drinking coffee out of plastic cups in a burger joint that wouldn’t have been out of place beside the 401 highway in Ontario. “Back in those days, the Americans were paranoid about the Soviet Union launching a surprise nuclear attack. The only way they could see to respond fast enough to deter such an attack was to have B-52 bombers in the air at the edge of Soviet air space at all times.”
“All the time?” I asked.
“Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year,” Felip said. “Every moment, there were dozens of bombers in the air ready to attack. They flew from bases in America but were refueled from bases around the world. As soon as a fresh wave arrived, the previous wave headed for home. Each one of those B-52s carried four M28 thermonuclear bombs, each one hundreds of times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.”
“Like the ones that fell on Palomares?” Laia asked.
“Yes. And Broken Arrow was the code name for an accident involving nuclear weapons.”
“So Grandfather’s talking about the Palomares incident?” I said excitedly. “The Spanish passport would support that.”
“If the passport and the notebook pages are related,” Felip said, pouring cold water on our enthusiasm. “You don’t know that, and there were a lot of Broken Arrows.”
“A lot of accidents!” I exclaimed.
“Oh, dozens,” Felip said with a calm I didn’t feel. “Mostly in the United States, b
ut in 1950, a nuclear bomb fell and exploded—not a nuclear explosion—over the St. Lawrence River in Canada. The worst two accidents that we know about were the Palomares incident and a similar accident near the Thule Air Base in Greenland in 1968, when a B-52 with four bombs on board crashed on the ice off the coast.”
“I didn’t know any of this,” I said, suddenly feeling that the world was a much more dangerous place than I had thought. “What did Grandfather have to do with nuclear accidents, whether it was Palomares or not?”
“It was Palomares,” Laia said. While Felip had been explaining Broken Arrows, she had been thumbing through Lorca’s poem. “The next line of code is Palomares, and I think the line after isn’t code at all. It’s a date.”
Laia showed us the page where she’d written Palomares under the code. The next line was simply two groups.
1701 1966
“The first group is the only one that has a zero in it, so it can’t be part of the code we’ve worked out, but it could be the seventeenth of January, 1966, the date of the Palomares accident.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “Grandfather must have been involved in some way with Palomares, and he came to Spain as Pedro Martinez. The entry stamp on the passport says he arrived in Madrid on January 10, 1966, plenty of time to get to Palomares by the seventeenth. But why?”
“Perhaps the rest of the code will tell us,” Laia said.
“Well, that will give you two something to do on the second half of the journey,” Felip said, standing. “We should be heading off.”
We gathered up our stuff and left. I walked across the parking lot, deep in thought. On the one hand, I was thrilled at the progress we had made decoding the numbers from the notebook, and wished I could boast to DJ about it, but on the other hand, what did it mean? We still didn’t know why Grandfather had taken the dreadful risk of going back to Spain while Franco was still in power. If anyone had worked out his real identity and realized that he had fought for the International Brigades in the war, he would have disappeared forever into a Spanish jail. And did any of this have anything to do with the accusation that he was a traitor? Laia and I walked quickly, both eager yet nervous to see what the notebook said next.
We piled back into Felip’s car and merged back onto the highway. I looked back at the parking lot and spotted three black SUVs. I was becoming paranoid.
EIGHT
As we wound past the Sierra Nevada mountains, Laia and I worked on the notebook pages. It was slow going, decoding the message one letter at a time, and it took us a while to recognize that Grandfather had reverted to English, but we eventually ended up with a collection of seemingly unrelated phrases.
moron saboteur
could not stop
the fifth unknown
hid so gorky would not find
must stay hidden
too dangerous
finding would be a larger betrayal
rock fall fourteen
“Does any of this mean anything to you?” Laia asked after we had stared at the phrases for a few kilometers.
“No,” I replied. “It almost seems as if Grandfather is speaking in riddles. What makes the saboteur a moron? Are they stupid because they didn’t do something Grandfather wanted?”
Laia shrugged. “Okay. Let’s write down the question—”
“Or questions,” I interjected.
“—or questions that we have for each phrase.” She turned over the printout and wrote, moron saboteur. Beside it she wrote, Who is the moron saboteur? Why a moron?
“And what did he or she sabotage?” I added.
We went down the list and ended up with:
• moron saboteur—Who is the moron saboteur? Why a moron? What sabotaged?
• could not stop—Stop what? Himself?
• the fifth unknown—Fifth what? What are the four knowns? Or four unknowns?
• hid so gorky wouldn’t find—Hide what? Who or what is gorky?
• must stay hidden—What must stay hidden? Why? From gorky?
• too dangerous—What is too dangerous? The thing that must stay hidden? Gorky?
• finding would be a larger betrayal—A larger betrayal than what? Betrayal of who or what?
• rock fall fourteen—A fall of fourteen rocks? Are there thirteen other rockfalls?
“That’s a lot of questions,” Laia commented when we had finished.
“At least we have a focus now,” I said, trying to sound positive although I thought it was a depressingly long list.
“Several focuses,” Laia said, “and we still don’t know what the ten lines of numbers mean.”
“Let’s look at them again,” I said.
372490
17798
372437
18120
372478
17911
371893
17021
373559
18601
“There does seem to be a pattern in the length of the numbers,” Laia mused. “It’s like one of those puzzles where you have to find the next number in a sequence. I can never do them.”
I had an idea. “Maybe we shouldn’t think of them as ten sequences of numbers. Maybe they’re pairs: 372490/17798, 372437/18120 and so on. That would make five pairs and that might relate to the fifth unknown.”
“Interesting,” Laia said, “but we still don’t know what they mean. 372490 and 17798—are they weights or numbers of…something?”
“Are those the numbers on the pages you showed me in the café?” Felip asked over his shoulder.
“Yes,” Laia and I said at the same time.
“Read them out to me, slowly,” Felip asked.
We had only managed the first four when Felip interrupted. “I know what those are.”
“What?” we shouted from the backseat.
Felip picked his handheld GPS off the dash and tossed it back to us. “Plug them into this,” he said. “Your numbers are locations—latitude and longitude—37 degrees 24 minutes 90 seconds north and 1 degree 77 minutes 98 seconds west.”
“Five locations,” Laia shouted triumphantly. She hunched over the GPS and punched numbers in while I peered at the screen, holding my breath. The machine sat for what seemed an age and then a map appeared with a tiny red cross on it—right beside the village of Palomares.
“It’s in Palomares,” Laia said breathlessly.
The next two locations formed a line right through Palomares. “There must be a mistake,” Laia said when the fourth location showed nothing but a red cross on a blue background. “There’s nothing here.”
“Can you change the scale on this?” I asked. Laia pressed some buttons and a coastline appeared. The red cross was about eight kilometers offshore. “Those must be the locations of the four bombs from the B-52. Three landed around Palomares and the fourth fell in the sea and took months to find. Where’s the last location?”
Once more Laia’s fingers worked. The final red cross was in the hills, a few kilometers inland from Palomares. “The four known and the fifth unknown?” I speculated.
“I’m sure it’s the four known bombs,” Laia said, “but there wasn’t a fifth one. Felip, could there have been a fifth bomb on board the B-52?”
He shook his head. “No. Throughout Chrome Dome, every B-52 carried four bombs, each of which had a specified target inside the Soviet Union if they were ordered to fly in.”
“What if it’s not a complete bomb but the plutonium core from one of the four that broke apart?” I asked.
“It’s possible,” Felip said, but he sounded far from convinced. “The Americans found three bombs in the first twenty-four hours. It would have been obvious if something as large as the plutonium core was missing, and they would have found it. It was the size of a soccer ball, and they searched everywhere—photographs from the time show lines of men in masks, shoulder to shoulder, walking over the landscape. They would have found it.”
“Unless it was hidden,” Laia said. “Hidden so
that ‘gorky’ couldn’t find it.”
“Now you’ve been reading too many mystery stories,” Felip said with a laugh. “There weren’t spies running all over the hills like in one of your James Bond movies.”
“You said there was a Soviet spy ship and probably spies on land,” I pointed out. Felip nodded slowly. “And why did the Americans spend such a long time searching around Palomares if they found the first three bombs on the first day and the fourth was underwater?” I asked.
“They wanted to clean up everything,” Felip said, but he didn’t sound quite so certain. “There were many pieces of the two planes that had to be cleaned up as well.”
“But they could have been looking for a fifth bomb,” I said.
“It’s possible, I suppose. But why then did they leave without it?”
“Maybe they took it with them and didn’t tell anyone,” I said. “Maybe they thought someone else had found it, or maybe they just didn’t want more of a fuss. They didn’t want to look even more stupid after it took them so long to find and bring up the fourth bomb. Perhaps they thought if they couldn’t find it, no one could.”
“It’s all a bit of a stretch,” Felip said.
“Okay,” Laia joined in, “but can we go and look while we’re in Palomares? It won’t take long with the GPS.”
Felip sighed. I suspected this wasn’t the first time Laia had talked him into doing something unplanned. “If there’s time,” he said.
Laia turned to look at me, smiled and winked broadly.
“I saw that,” Felip said. I glanced at the rearview mirror. I could tell from Felip’s eyes that he was smiling too.
“So,” Laia said, “the fifth unknown is part of a bomb…”
“Possibly,” Felip said from the front.
Laia grimaced, but she continued, “Possibly, the fifth unknown is part of a bomb. The four knowns are the four known bombs at Palomares.” She waited and looked pointedly at the back of Felip’s head. He said nothing, fixing his eyes on the road ahead.
“The fifth bomb landed in the hills and was hidden from gorky because it was too dangerous.”
“And the bomb was hidden behind the fourteenth rockfall,” I said, worried that we were building too much of our story on speculation. “We’re guessing at an awful lot. And how does the stupid saboteur fit into this?”