Sensible assumptions, I reckoned. If I was wrong, then I was in trouble. The Oxford foursome might well have sat in a cozy college room, sipping sherry, deciding that they’d chuck all sensible assumptions out of the mullioned window.
The code had to be good enough to give an expert the runaround. Without a key text, codes were pretty much impossible to translate, but someone with time and a computer could perhaps do it: spot the repetitions, build a profile, the kind of shit statisticians like to go onabout. If there was enough material to work with, a techie could do it.
Withthe key text, a techie could probably hack it in no time. But even then, some tricks could be built in to make life difficult.
Anyway, I was no expert, no techie. And I hadn’t studied at Oxford.
My principal assumption was that the numbers related to letters in “Gemini.” The words of “Gemini” would be sequenced and then maybe the first letter of the word would be a letter of the code. A cunning bastard might make it the second letter, or even make it the first letter for the first ten letters and then shift it to the second, or even the previous letter. That would reduce repetition and panic the unwary.
But that would fly in the face of my first assumption: Keep it simple.
Start at the beginning? The first letter of the first word in “Gemini” isA?No, I reckoned. Too simple. The start point would be somewhere else. Maybe predetermined or embedded in the code itself.
I began to work, looking for patterns, matching, rematching, comparing. Guessing, mostly guessing.
An hour later and I was nowhere. This was a crossword that didn’t want to get filled in.
I pulled Carlstein’s e-mails in front of me, scared now that these too would defeat me, but I drew comfort from their neatness, a spur to neat thought.
More assumptions were needed.
There were letters mixed up in the numbers.
If numbers were letters, then why not the other way around? Letters were numbers.
I scanned the e-mails, looking for patterns. A few showed. There were breaks, which maybe mirrored normal paragraph breaks.
Most of the numbers seemed to have one or two digits, a few with three. But there were some that had dots above or below them or, in a few cases, belowandabove.
Why the dots? Fucking dots again. I remembered Ernie’s remark: Dots can place you in the frame, give you bearings. Every e-mail started with a number that was followed by a single dot. Dots as bearings, as coordinates. Maybe the first number showed the location within “Gemini” from where the translation should start. It couldpoint to a word or a line or a paragraph. Or something else. Hell’s teeth. Just keep calm.
I needed to try out a few permutations to see where I got.
I’d try the line approach first.
I picked an e-mail at random. The first number was sixteen. I counted sixteen lines into the text of “Gemini” and tried to apply the code.
It didn’t work. There was no meaning; only random letters emerged.
I put the e-mail aside. It was jinxed, like Ernie’s letter.
Now for the paragraph approach.
I took the shortest e-mail.
22 . 36 .. 28 8 16 31 4 18 3 10 29 44 23 19 19 37 36 173 19 5 50 44 106 41 31 .. 19 18 3 36 . 9 2 76
First number: 22. I counted to paragraph twenty-two of “Gemini.” It started:
Then Ram Narian who has his carpet spread under the jujube-tree by the well, and writes all letters for the men of the town. . .
Nice. I tried to imagine what a jujube-tree looked like. It sounded pretty. And the name Ram Narian, the addressee of the e-mail. There was an internal logic at work here.
But was a jujube-tree one word or two words for the purposes of the code? I’d have to try both.
I assumedjujube-treewas one word. I wrote a number against each word. All the way up to 173, the highest number featured in the e-mail. The page looked like an unholy mess.
The result was even worse. D, something—this number had dots on it—S, W, T, W, W, N . . .
There was no point in continuing. If this was right, then it meant there was a code within a code, and I wasn’t sure I had the stamina or the gray cells to tacklethat.
I then assumed thatjujube-treewas two words. D, something, SAIWANTSDOLLSDALHIDGSI, something, LAND, something, URCH.
It didn’t look great, but words were starting to form. A beginning of sense, a shade of meaning.
WANTS, DOLLS, LAND. Statistically, it was bordering on the impossible that these words could appear by coincidence. I’d found the starting point, but I still didn’t have any real sense of what the e-mail was going on about.
I looked at: “D, something, SAI.” How about DESAI? An Indian name. An Indian guy WANTS something. DOLLS? Surely not. LAND, maybe. And maybe DOLLS was simply short for DOLLARS.
An Indian wants dollars for land.
URCH, what wasthat?Church, lurch.
Purch. Short forpurchase.A land purchase.
An Indian called Desai wants dollars for a land purchase.
I tipped back in the chair and stared at the picture ofJulia I. I was sweating with excitement, almost euphoric.
Hold on. I hit the brakes. There were seven e-mails here, this one was the shortest, and I’d covered just one sentence. It would be Christmas before I put the pencil down. I could finish the job in jail or whichever quarter of the afterlife I wound up in.
I needed rules, not guesswork. Guesswork would take too long. I looked at my watch. Twelve-thirtyP.M.Yeah, far too fucking long.
An hour later, I had my rules. I knew that the letter E was statistically one of the commonest letters. I also went back through the passage in “Gemini” carefully and noted that there were no words beginning with E. That explained the nonstandard cipher for the E in DESAI. But it didn’t repeat anywhere else. For good reason: If E was the commonest letter, then it would show up like a beacon if the same cipher were employed throughout. It would give too much away. But the code writer also wouldn’t want E to be too difficult for the informed reader to find.
Where was E, then?
The three-digit numbers, that’s where. These were random red herrings. No matter what the number, they always meant E. Ofcourse, in another e-mail, the paragraph chosen for the code breaking might contain words starting with E. In that case, the three-digit ploy wouldn’t be necessary, unless there were only one or two words starting with E and the beacon problem would arise again.
I checked the other e-mails. Some had three-digit numbers and some didn’t. That made sense.
Something else I realized. There were no numbers between fifty and one hundred. If the letter E was designated by any number over one hundred, that meant everything else was covered by one through fifty.
I decided that the numbering was done in blocks of fifty. It made things more manageable. I liked it.
What about the dots? These I figured out to be variants on the E problem. Some letters didn’t feature as first letters of words in the chosen “Gemini” passage. K, G, and V were examples. So the code writer finds a word with the letter in it and the dots signify how many letters the reader has to count into the word before he finds the right letter. So when faced with “. . . 43,” I counted to the forty-third word—“six”; three dots, so third letter in.
X.
Piece of cake. Bearings, coordinates. Thanks, Ernie.
But there were dots above some of the numbers too. This took a while, but the fact that the code was built in blocks of fifty gave me the clue. The top-line dots told you which block to look in. Another bearing.
So with “. . . 9,” I knew I was looking for the third letter of the ninth word in the second block of fifty.
V. Too right. V for Victory.
I allowed myself one minute to reflect on my progress. I looked at my watch: 2:00P.M.I realized that I still had seven e-mails to translate in just under two hours, assuming I was to follow the new timetable that had half-formed in my mind, among the swirl of numbers, l
etters, and dots.
And I could feel my hip throb. Fingering my pants, I groaned as I found a sticky damp patch around the pocket. I sensed that the wound was infected. My sweating wasn’t just euphoria; it was fever.
Before attacking the remaining e-mails, there was one more thing I had to do.
I picked up the phone on the desk, a shiny blue model motor cruiser with an earpiece, mouthpiece, and keypad.
I tried to get Carol. Voicemail again, but a different message. She was tired, she said, drained from what she’d done. She was sick of everyone, me included. She wanted to be left alone for a while, would call later. Maybe.
I tried to analyze the voice, as if it were another version of the “Gemini” code, susceptible to a single interpretation, that it could yield unmistakable meaning. I listened to the message twice more. But I got more confused on each hearing. Perhaps she simply meant what she said. She was tired, needed sleep. Perhaps that was all it meant. Butsick of everyone. You included.
Time didn’t allow a St. Cecelia–style analysis.
I called Mendip’s direct line, the one that would sound in the cubicle near reception. A secretary picked up. I didn’t recognize her voice.
“He’s out,” she told me curtly. A polite inquiry as to when he’d be back was met with a similarly brusque response.
“Who are you?” she asked.
I am the guy who has had his life trashed by that respectable, slightly ruffled old gentleman whose name appears at the top of the letterhead. That’s who. “It doesn’t matter,” I said and hung up.
To say that I had been relying on Mendip to pick up the phone was an understatement. However difficult the conversation would have been with him, there were the tracks history had laid down for us. Talk had familiar rails to follow; we both knew where the curves were, where the points played tricks.
There was no history with Jim McIntyre. He was right off the rails.
“He’s in a meeting,” McIntyre’s secretary announced smoothly. Lovely voice. A bit like Paula’s. Old habits died hard with McIntyre, it seemed.
“Could you tell him it’s urgent?”
“Who shall I say is calling?” There was a touch of skepticism in her voice, like the name I would give her couldn’t possibly pullMcIntyre out of whatever he was doing, even if he was just filing his nails.
“Bill Gemini.”
“Sir?” Maybe she wasn’t such a good secretary after all. My father always said that no secretary should ever sound fazed at the name of a caller. His favorite example was a client called Jerkov.
“Gemini. G-E-M . . .”
“I got it, thanks.” There was a click on the line as she put me on hold.
“Who is this?” A voice, bursting with impatience and confidence. Unquestionable authority expressed in three words. Quite an achievement.
I hadn’t settled on a first line. So I started with the facts. “I understand that the merger is wrapping up at five,” I said. I could hear the slightly shrill timbre of my voice.
“Who is this?” It looked like we were still at square one.
“I thought your secretary gave you my name.” This time I managed a slightly lower register.
There was a pause. “Border,” he said. My name came out as a disgusted whisper, something found rotting between two teeth to be pulled out.
“I know about the NRIs,” I said. “I know about your little club at Oxford, I know about “Gemini,” and I have plenty of hard copy material.”
“You don’t know anything, you piece of shit.” The man had studied the wavelengths of the human voice and isolated the frequency that transmitted pure nightmare into the mind of the listener.
I didn’t answer. Let him speak, see what comes out. Basic interview technique. He’d know that, though.
“And what’s this garbage about Gemini?” It had been worth waiting; same nightmare coming over the line, but one now tinged with caution, perhaps. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Then why did the name get you out of an important meeting?”
McIntyre laughed. “Cap Gemini is a longstanding client of this firm. So if I hear the name of an important client then I attend to it. Perhaps if you had paid more attention to such basic rules-of-thumb,you wouldn’t have wound up in this mess. You’re finished, Border. Not that I give a fuck.”
He was a quick-thinking bastard, I’d give him that.
“That’s interesting,” I said. “I was one of the foot soldiers serving on the Conflicts Committee for the merger. I went through every client you have with”—I couldn’t resist it—“that fucker Ellis Walsh. And Cap Gemini didn’t show up anywhere. It’s a big company, it would register on the radar screen if it was a client.”
McIntyre started to say something, but I hadn’t finished. “Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning, at this point, your client Reno Holdings and its interest in a rather dubious Turkish company called Saracen Securities. Drill down some more and you find Huxtable BV. And its illegitimate brother, Huxtable Trust Company. Are these clients of yours as well? You should get a better client list. But I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know.”
The pause lasted so long I wondered if he might be up to something on another line. But I’d gone this far and wasn’t going to hang up now.
“What do you want?” he asked finally.
“To talk. Face-to-face.”
“Why the fuck should I be prepared to do that?”
“Because if you don’t, there won’t be a merger at five o’clock.”
Again the mocking laughter. “You’re nothing. You’re less than nothing. You can’t threaten me.”
I tried to picture him. He was small, a brittle plaster Napoleon with beard and mustache. The image gave me strength. “Of course I can threaten you, Iamthreatening you. I can beset you, you weasel. I’ve had people fall about me like bowling pins, and a few attempts made on my own life. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it has weakened me. It hasn’t.”
“So you’re a big guy now. So why, Mr. Big Guy, don’t you simply go to the authorities with this truckload of shit you’ve stepped in?”
There were plenty of answers to choose from. “Apart from the fact that I’d be likely to spend some time in jail, I want certain things from you, and it doesn’t suit me to have the leadership of Clay & Westminster, Schuster Mannheim, and Askari & Co. rounded up and ruined.”
“Blackmail,” McIntyre said smoothly. “And for some reason I thought you might be a man of principle. That makes things easier.” He paused. “So let’s say we meet; how are you going to arrange things so that you don’t get pulled in after five seconds? I don’t fancy a rendezvous in Central Park either. It’s too hot and, anyway, I’ve got a merger in a few hours.”
“Your office,” I said. “In two hours. Have a security pass waiting for me, in the name of Colin Brown. Nice easy name, you should be able to remember it. I expect you have your own special arrangements for elevators, don’t you? Use them.”
“Go to Rockefeller Center, enter the GE Building from the Plaza side, and head for the elevator banks . . .”
“I know where to go,” I snapped.
“Suit yourself, Jesse will see to you.” I heard a sigh. “Border, you’re crazy. I’m going to blast you into outer fucking space.”
He hung up.
There was no time to reflect on the call; it had taken up too much time already. I needed translations of the e-mails if I had any chance of remaining earthbound.
Jesus, the hip hurt badly. I could feel it pulsate, a power drill burrowing its way through from the inside. And my back, ridged by what felt like molten lava. I was sweating like a burst pipe.
FORTY-EIGHT
My pockets were crammed. Inside my jacket: e-mails and their translations—six out of seven, at any rate. Ganesh lurked heavily in my right pocket—I wanted to present Ganesh to McIntyre, as if it was evidence of something, see what response it elicited.
> As I marched down the boutique-lined Promenade of Rockefeller Center, I toyed with Pablo’s cell phone in my sweaty hand. He reluctantly accepted that borrowing it didn’t entail too much of an ethical breach, even though it was Schuster Mannheim property.
I gazed onto its screen. A globule of sweat obscured it for a moment. I could see a shadow in front of my eyes as another blob aimed for critical mass on the rim of my glasses.
The glasses had been Paula’s idea. A pair of black-rimmed, half-frame reading spectacles borrowed from Pablo. Geeky, but I supposed they might add another layer to my now rather tired disguise. They were certainly an efficient conduit for sweat.
I wiped the screen clean. Plenty of signal. It was time to ring Pablo. Skirting the sunken section at the end of the Promenade, I wasalmost blinded by the giant golden figure of Prometheus as he hovered majestically against his waterfall backdrop. A Rockefeller security man was watchful above him while a uniformed maitre d’ to the diners in the restaurant laid out over the mothballed ice rink strutted about below. Was Ganesh a match for him?
Before I’d left Pablo’s, he and Paula were experiencing problems. The domain name Numberland had been taken; either that, or the site wouldn’t take with that name. And it appeared that Paula and Pablo couldn’t see eye-to-eye about anything. Maybe Paula was projecting some of her hatred for McIntyre onto Pablo. And maybe Pablo was . . . I didn’t know what Pablo was doing.
I had left them squabbling, each maintaining that, if they hadn’t been saddled with the other, they could figure it out.
Pablo took my call.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Fine.” It sounded as if Pablo was speaking through clenched teeth.
“Is it done?”
“Nearly, nearly. I hit a few dead ends on the way, but I think I got it licked.” He paused. “Paula’s smart, I’ll give her that. She helped. A little.”
“You’ve got a substitute domain for Numberland?” I asked.
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