King's Ransom

by E H Jennings

  When McManus paused, Carson lost his patience. All he could see was Colton’s dead body floating down the river, empty eyes staring up at the sky. “Who the hell is it, sir?”

  “Agent Xavier Thorsby of the Central Intelligence Agency. Needless to say, Langley’s been contacted and they’re taping mouths shut. If you want any chance of learning the details, you better get somebody down there in the next twenty minutes.”

  “Shit.”

  While Carson was relieved it wasn’t Colton, the news was far from encouraging. Connor had told him Thorsby performed the lion’s share of his covert affairs in Syria and Lebanon. That tied in perfectly with their current hypothesis. The Syrians had tracked Thorsby when he came to Paris. He had been their link, their way in. And once he led them to Colton—once they had their hands on the bait—the massacre had begun. First it was Thorsby, then Lee and Chuck, and eventually Angie LeFleur.

  “Yeah, it’s bad,” McManus admitted. “We were right about the Syrian connection. But don’t forget the good news. Remember the Swiss contact I told you about?”

  “The guy with tier one access?”

  “That’s him. I spoke to him and he’s willing to help out. He can provide the cover you need to sneak into just about any country in the world.” The general paused. “That includes Syria.”

  “That’s excellent, sir, but we’re not done in Paris yet. In fact, we don’t even know if we need to go to Syria. We need more time to figure this thing out.”

  “Take all the time you need. But if and when you need to enter hostile territory, let me know. I’ll set everything up.”

  Carson thanked him and ended the call. He radioed the news to Connor and Mendez. They immediately started up their rental and sped off toward the Seine in hopes of finding something, anything that might lead them to Colton.

  Carson watched them go, and as he did, an image roared into his mind like a speeding train. He sat straight up in his seat and wondered how the hell he hadn’t noticed it before. The image wasn’t actually of something he had seen, but rather of something he had heard.

  He replayed Connor’s voice from earlier in the morning:

  Colton spent the next few minutes bent over the table, frantically writing something down. He then picked up his newspaper and sprinted across the street out of sight.

  Miss Baudin had told Carson she saw Colton writing something on a napkin. He had tucked the napkin inside the folded newspaper and run back across the street. But four minutes later, when he came back to Avenue Montaigne, the newspaper was gone.

  Carson turned the ignition on the Mercury and punched the accelerator. He was headed in the same direction as Connor and Mendez, only he wasn’t going to the Seine.

  He was going back to visit their inebriated friend, Samuel LeFleur.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Carson radioed Sampson as he sped past the Eiffel Tower.

  She had successfully gotten inside Angie’s apartment but found nothing of utility. She planned to stomp around a little more and put out some feelers, but the tone of her voice told Carson she wasn’t hopeful Angie’s murder would lead them anywhere near Colton.

  He filled her in on Thorsby and his chat with McManus. He didn’t tell her about the specifics of his revelation, but he did inform her he was headed back to the bookstore to look into something. They agreed to talk again in an hour.

  Carson parked in the same spot and followed the same route through the alleyways to Livre Grotte.

  He let himself in and found the store unchanged. The lamp was the sole light source and Samuel LeFleur was still passed out on his desk. The flask Mendez had left on the counter, which was now about eight ounces lighter, sat beside the empty bottle of scotch and LeFleur was snoring loudly.

  Without waking him, Carson searched Angie’s desk. He opened and flipped through every book, then rifled through the Rolodex. He opened desk drawers, looked inside every folder, searched every paper in every pocket.

  Nothing. He found absolutely nothing.

  He plopped down in Angie’s chair and willed himself to think. If Colton had gone to the trouble to bring Angie some kind of message, he surely would have taken a moment to tell her about its importance, to give her some clue as to why he was giving it to her. Unfortunately, there were lots of possibilities. Maybe she memorized the message and burned the napkin; which if true meant the secret had died with her. Or maybe she took the note home and her attackers found it when they killed her.

  Carson put his head in his hands and exhaled a long breath. There was something about Colton. Something about the newspaper. He closed his eyes.

  The image of his brother circling letters and numbers, drawing lines between them…it crawled into his mind like a whisper from the past. The answer was there, hidden in his memory.

  And then it came to him.

  Sunday mornings.

  Colton had always been a damn genius. They had all known it from the time the kid was in diapers. When he was seven, he had developed something he called The Sunday Morning Code.

  It started as a game he played and they all wrote it off as typical seven-year old foolishness. But when Connor, who was thirteen at the time, tried to solve it, he got nowhere close. That was when Carson had first attempted it.

  Colton had written a series of numbers on a piece of notebook paper. There were four lines, each line containing a different arrangement of numbers. Carson, like Connor, couldn’t break it. In fact, he didn’t even know where to start.

  Finally, more out of frustration than anything else, Carson and Connor had taken the code to their parents. Their grand plan was to have their parents break the code and then take credit for it. Unfortunately, their plan was thwarted by the fact that their parents couldn’t solve it either.

  Colton, a second grader, had stumped the entire family.

  As if that weren’t enough, on the following Sunday the code changed. And then again the next Sunday and the Sunday after that. When they asked him why it kept changing, he offered a toothless grin and said, simply: “It’s the Sunday Morning Code.”

  After almost two months, their father had declared Colton’s complete and total victory. To Carson and Connor’s chagrin, they, along with their parents, had been forced to bow to their little brother, a symbol of defeat.

  And only then did Colton reveal his secret.

  The Sunday Morning Code was something he called a “simple plus-three cipher”. And the key truly was simple once he showed it to them.

  Somehow no one had noticed that every time Colton created a new code, he wrote it on the back page of the newspaper. He had been handing them the answer every single time and they still missed it.

  The numbers, Colton explained, were organized into tetrads, and each tetrad represented a letter. The only way to figure out each letter was to use the newspaper.

  The tetrads were sequential. The first number was the section, the second was the paragraph, the third was the word, and the fourth was the letter. For example, if the tetrad was 4673, that meant the third letter of the seventh word of the sixth paragraph in the fourth section of the Sunday morning paper. From there, all you had to do was add three letters and you had it. So if the letter was “A”, that meant the code letter was A + 3, which resulted in “D”.

  He updated it with each new issue. The Sunday Morning Code.

  Carson remembered the unabashed pride on his parents’ faces and realized he felt that same pride now. His little brother was brilliant.

  And with that thought, he lifted his head out of his hands. The napkin was still here, in this building.

  It was here because Colton had instructed Angie to hide it somewhere one of his brothers could find it. He had sensed something was wrong the day of the meeting with Thorsby, and knowing Carson and Connor would eventually come looking for him, had left a message for them in a code only they could solve.

  And, he had dropped his pen so they would know where to look.

  Carson ran his gaze o
ver the tiny bookstore. There were several thousand books on the shelves and he wondered if maybe Angie had hidden the newspaper inside one of them, maybe a book that had some special meaning for her and Colton. But he quickly discarded the thought. It was too risky. Colton would have conveyed how urgent the message was, how important it was to keep it safely tucked away until the right moment.

  Somewhere safe…

  Carson shook LeFleur from his liquor-induced coma. “Samuel, you need to get up. Wake up, Samuel!”

  The man’s eyes slowly opened. “Why the hell are you yelling?”

  “Look,” said Carson, holding the man’s face in his hands. “I need you to listen! Did you or Angie ever install some sort of safe, or vault, or locked storage cabinet somewhere in the store?”

  LeFleur looked confused. “I thought you left. I woke up and you were gone.” He grinned. “Thanks for the flask, by the way.”

  “Samuel!” Carson urged, shaking him again. “I need you to answer my question. If you do, I may be able to find Angie’s killers.”

  That got the man’s attention and his eyes opened again.

  “Is there some place here in the store where Angie kept important documents? Maybe cash or other valuables?”

  “If you’re intending to rob me,” said LeFleur. “I don’t intend to help you.”

  Carson fought back profanity and made one last attempt at reasoning with the drunk. “Look, if you’ll get me into the safe I might be able to figure out who killed your sister. And I might even be able to prevent other innocent people from dying.

  “When Colton was here a few days ago, just before Angie died, I think he left something with her. A sort of coded message written on a napkin. If I can solve the code, that message may help us figure all this out. Wouldn’t it be nice if your loss didn’t go to waste? What if it could be used to save other people from a similar fate? Don’t you think that’s what Angie would have wanted?”

  For the first time, LeFleur looked sincerely thoughtful. His head teetered on his shoulders as though attached by a loose string, but he was fighting, forcing his mind to think. Carson didn’t interrupt; he sat back and waited.

  There were a few moments where Carson thought Samuel was going to topple into the floor, but he successfully remained in his chair and eventually looked at Carson. There were tears in his eyes. “She was my only sibling. The only person that ever really gave a damn about me, including my parents.” He nodded to himself. “She was my sister and she was my friend.”

  “I’m truly sorry—”

  “Four-seven-nine-one-two-one-four-zero,” said Samuel. “My birthday backwards.” He then turned and pointed to a small door behind the cash register. “Angie kept the safe in that closet. It’s hidden behind a bunch of old books and magazines. If what you say is true, and your brother gave Angie something she needed to hide, that’s where she would have put it.”

  Carson put a hand on the man’s shoulder and thanked him. He then hurried to the closet and made his way inside.

  It was a cluttered space. There were homemade shelves lining one side, covered in books and other merchandise, and the other side looked much the same minus the shelving. The books were stacked on the floor.

  He looked on the shelves first but didn’t find anything. So he turned to the piles on the floor. It took him nearly five minutes to realize the safe wasn’t technically inside the closet, but rather it was built into the wall and had been painted the same color as the wood. It was a nice piece of equipment, about the size of a microwave and composed of heavy steel.

  There was a square keypad on the front and Carson typed in the numbers LeFleur had recited to him. A green light flashed, he heard the bolt slide out of the lock, and the door came open.

  The safe was stocked full. There were half a dozen leather-bound tomes, one of which he thought might have been a first edition Moby Dick. There were also two neat stacks of paper and several moneybags filled with cash. But the true prize was in the very back, folded and hidden beneath an early publication of The Count of Monte Cristo.

  He had been confident it was here, but when he actually laid his hands on it, Carson’s heart started to pound.

  He pulled out the folded newspaper and carefully arranged the safe the way he had found it. He typed the same numbers back into the keypad and listened as the bolt slammed back into its groove.

  The newspaper was a copy of the La Croix, dated Sunday, October 7th.

  Sunday.

  He turned the first page of the paper and there it was. The napkin.

  He held it up to the light and saw what had been written on it: dozens of seemingly random numbers, all neatly organized into tetrads.

  • • •

  Carson got Samuel’s phone number before leaving the bookstore. He thanked him again and took off back through the alleys, so excited he was almost sprinting.

  He was about to radio Connor with the news when Sampson’s voice came through his earpiece. “I hit the jackpot.”

  “You found something?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “Three things actually. I had almost given up. The apartment was clean and the damn French police were even more clueless than I was. The DGSI had already come and gone and had reportedly found nothing of interest. As it turns out, that was an enormous lie.

  “I was about to catch a cab back to the hotel when my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number and almost didn’t answer, but I’m sure as hell glad I did. One of my old friends at the RG had heard I was snooping around in Paris.” The RG referred to the Renseignements Generaux, the French intelligence service that had preceded the DGSI. “She didn’t say much on the phone, but asked me to meet her as soon as possible. And let me tell you, she made it worth our while.”

  “Did you find out who killed Angie?” asked Carson.

  “Not only that, but we now know who they work for. And it isn’t The Divljak.”

  “Damn, Rachel, great work!”

  Carson filled her in on what he had found at the bookstore.

  “We’re getting closer,” she said.

  Bringing Rachel Sampson along had proven crucial. They had a ways to go before they safely recovered Colton, but like she said, they were getting closer. Carson started to radio Connor when he was interrupted yet again, this time by his phone.

  It was Lucian. And it was the worst phone call he would likely ever receive.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Costinesti, Romania

  The winds had shifted in from the north overnight, plunging temperatures into the forties and burying the eastern coast of Romania beneath dense cloud cover and a constant mist. Docked in the marina outside the Lacul Costinesti was a ramshackle 27-foot Monterey Cruiser; its already-dented sides tapped a rhythm against the wooden slip as the choppy waters of the Black Sea rolled toward shore.

  Inside the cabin of the Monterey sat Mick Travis, a cup of stale coffee in one hand and his Dell laptop on the plastic drop-down table in front of him. The envelope he had retrieved from Istanbul lay beside the computer.

  Mick had grown up in Louisiana and hated the cold, but after spending twenty years in various haunts all across the world, he had gotten used to it.

  That’s how long it had been: twenty years. Twenty years since he found his wife lying lifeless in their bathtub; twenty years since he went into hiding; twenty years since he ceased to exist.

  He zipped up his Carhartt and sipped coffee from a plastic cup. Judging by the taste, he thought it very possible the cup and the coffee were now one in the same.

  For the third time, he took the letter out of the envelope and checked the coordinates. He typed them into Google Earth and watched as the satellite image honed into his desired location. He would be flying out in a few hours and it was important he knew precisely where he was going.

  An hour later, satisfied, he closed his computer and stepped over to the narrow slab of wood he called a kitchen counter. He poured more cold coffee.

  After going off
the grid, Mick had accepted myriad assignments, most with private defense contractors, all under the cover of complete anonymity. And over the course of two decades he had established an extensive network of contacts; they were the undesirables, the type of people the world desperately needed but chose to ignore.

  One of those contacts, and the most important, was Rachel Sampson.

  It was a tip from Sampson that had led Mick to Colton King’s anonymous Gmail account. He had been careful about how much information he divulged, but he wanted to share enough for King to understand how serious the situation was. He had even signed it using his real initials, in hopes that the young analyst could put it all together.

  When he first heard that King had been abducted in Paris, he felt guilty. But a phone call from Sampson assured him it wasn’t his fault. Colton’s abduction had been part of the plan from the very beginning, she said. Nothing Mick did or didn’t do could have kept it from happening.

  It was then that she briefed him on the bigger picture, on what was really going on. The gravity of it all was overwhelming. But when she finished explaining things, she asked him a simple question: “You in or you out?”

  Things had moved quickly since then.

  At Sampson’s instruction, Mick had called one of his contacts, a guy named Bilal he had met on a contracted mission in Afghanistan, and asked a favor. Considering Mick had saved the bastard’s life in Kabul, he readily agreed to help out. Mick then sent Sampson a photograph of Bilal and she fed it to the right people.

  And just like that, Bilal became The Secretary.

  They paid him two thousand bucks to walk into the Best Western Acropol, pretend to take a dump, grab the envelope from Sayid Moussafi, and get the hell out alive.

  Mick had assisted with the last part. The men watching from the hotel across the street didn’t know him, so when Bilal donned his disguise and casually climbed into a cab, they paid no attention to the white guy driving.

  Thirty minutes later, Bilal was on a plane back to Afghanistan and Mick was on his Monterey, speeding north along the coast of Bulgaria.