III
Croke was catching a few minutes shut-eye in the museum office when Morgenstern knocked and came in. ‘Are we through?’ Croke asked him.
Morgenstern shook his head. ‘Still another hour. But I just had a call about your two fugitives. Thought you’d want to know.’
Croke stood up. ‘They’ve found them?’
‘Not exactly.’ He gave a little grimace. ‘We had people watching the coach station. But apparently there are stops on the way out of town too.’
‘For fuck’s sake. Didn’t they think of that?’
‘There wasn’t enough manpower to cover everything. But they did ask the drivers to report any couples they picked up.’
‘And?’
‘The first driver out picked up a woman at one stop, a man at the next. He didn’t make the connection. But apparently they left Victoria coach station together. And their descriptions match Luke and the girl.’
Croke touched a finger to his temple. He wanted to yell at someone, but he couldn’t see how it would help. ‘Where are they now?’
Morgenstern shrugged. ‘They left on foot. They could have gone anywhere. We’ll try to track them through our CCTV network, but that’s a bitch, believe me. We’re more likely to find them when they break cover again, which they’re bound to do, sooner or later. We’ve put taps on their families and friends, and we’re monitoring the major media groups in case they go that route. And we’ll keep a close eye on Twitter and the Internet too.’
‘Okay. Good. Let me know if they surface. Or when we get through to the chamber.’
‘Will do.’ He nodded and withdrew.
Croke rested his head back against the wall, closed his eyes. Morgenstern should be able to stop Luke and Rachel damaging this operation before he left for Israel. But they could certainly still cause future grief, particularly for Walters and his men. And if those three went down, they’d likely take him with them. At some stage, he’d have to make sure that couldn’t happen. But for the moment they were still too useful.
He called Walters now, briefed him on the Victoria coach station sighting. ‘The NCT are out looking for them,’ he told him. ‘But I’d much rather deal with them in-house if we can.’
‘Too right,’ agreed Walters. ‘We’re on our way.’
TWENTY-FIVE
I
After the big build-up from Luke, Rachel was a little disappointed by Jay Cowan. She’d expected him to stand out in some way, yet he could scarcely have been more ordinary: slight, neat and generally unobtrusive. He had an oblique way about him, too, never facing either of them directly, or looking them full in the eye. He also held himself unnaturally still, as if someone had once told him to stop fidgeting, and he’d taken the words too much to heart. And while his green shirt and black drainpipe trousers and brown brogues were each perfectly fine in themselves, they looked awful in combination. Not ordinary, then, so much as trying his very best to appear ordinary, and falling strangely short.
‘Luke,’ he said, opening his front door. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘We didn’t wake you, did we?’
‘I was working.’
‘Working?’ asked Rachel, giving him her warmest smile. ‘At this time of day?’
He didn’t look at her so much as over her left shoulder. ‘Yes,’ he said. He turned back to Luke. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked again.
‘We need help, mate.’
‘With what?’
‘Can we come in? If I don’t get a coffee soon, I’m going to keel.’
Jay stood there a moment longer, then nodded and let them in. A short corridor led to a dingy stairwell with worn brown carpeting. They went up to the first floor. Boxes stacked against the wall were covered by a white sheet. ‘What’s all this?’ asked Luke.
‘A project.’ He led them inside his flat and into a large, book-lined room that should have overlooked the street, except that the thick crimson curtains were drawn across the windows, leaving it lit by a table lamp and an array of six computer screens stacked in two rows of three, each of which showed a hand from a different online poker tournament.
‘That’s your work?’ asked Rachel. ‘Poker?’
‘This is the best time,’ he said. ‘People who’ve been playing all night are tired by now. They make more mistakes when they’re tired.’ He began cashing out of the games one by one, switching off the screens.
‘And you can make a living from it?’
‘You wouldn’t believe how bad some of them are. They bet in situations where there’s no possible benefit to betting. Then they do it again.’
‘Maybe they’re trying to prove themselves,’ suggested Luke.
‘Or maybe they just want to go to bed,’ said Rachel.
Jay looked directly at her for the first time. ‘Then why wouldn’t they just go to bed?’
With the screens gone black, the room suddenly felt a little spooky. ‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘Good point.’
‘How about that coffee?’ said Luke, setting down Olivia’s laptop. ‘We’ve had one hell of a night.’
‘Of course,’ he said. He led them through to an impeccably neat kitchen, turned on the kettle. ‘What do you need my help with?’
Luke fished his cipher text from Pelham’s pocket. It was badly smudged and crumpled, so Jay found him a fresh pad of paper on which to write it out clean. ‘Rachel and I found this last night,’ said Luke. ‘We think it’s a cipher, perhaps devised by Newton.’
‘A Newton cipher?’ Jay’s eyes opened a little wider. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘I can’t tell you, I’m afraid. I gave someone my word.’
‘You want my help and you won’t tell me?’
‘I’m sorry, Jay. If I gave you my word on something, you wouldn’t want me to break it, would you?’
Jay considered this for a moment, like a boy with a scraped knee wondering whether or not to start bawling. ‘It won’t help me solve the cipher.’
‘You can do it anyway. I’ve been telling Rachel how brilliant you are.’
For a moment, Rachel feared the flattery was too blatant, but Jay only nodded, so she decided to back Luke up. ‘It’s quite true,’ she said. ‘He’s been bragging shamelessly about you.’
Jay’s throat reddened slightly and he squinted at the architrave above the kitchen door. ‘I can’t promise anything.’
‘Of course not,’ said Luke, pouring boiling water into three mugs. ‘Just give it your best shot.’
He nodded and set the pad square in front of him on the countertop.
‘Five rows of five numbers,’ said Jay. He turned to Luke. ‘You’ve already checked for a grid, I assume.’
‘For a what?’
Jay sighed. ‘There are twenty-six letters in the Latin alphabet. If you treat I and J or Y and Z as one letter, you can fit the entire alphabet into a five-by-five grid. Code-makers have been using that for centuries. It would have been old hat to someone like Newton.’ He pointed to the top row of numbers: 2 2 1 0 8. ‘If that’s what this is,
