key I gave you and go to my apartment.' He'd never said that this was the key to the apartment. Bravo turned the key over and over, light glinting off its machined facets. What had he meant, then?
Assuming he'd wanted Bravo to go to his apartment if something happened to him, why was there nothing here? Again, he felt the peculiar pricking between his shoulder blades. Was this a warning of some kind? Bravo remembered the couple outside the bank, shadowing him. What did they want?
As these thoughts rolled around in his head, he was staring at the key, and now he thought he saw something glittering that he hadn't noticed before. Taking it over to the window, he saw etched into it a string of sixteen tiny letters. They seemed to have no rhyme or reason-certainly they formed no known word. Bravo wondered what they signified.
All at once, a familiar thrill raced through him. He was thinking of the grand games he and his father would play-the messages his father would leave for him in code-which would drive his mother crazy because only he and his father could read them.
It was a basic number substitution code that needed to be worked out because some of the letters were used to tell you which letters to substitute for the ones written. Taking out a pad and pen, Bravo wrote down the letter string, then sitting with his back against the radiator, set to work. What would have baffled a cryptographer was laid out for him like a blueprint. Within five minutes he'd broken the code and what appeared before him was a single word: gangplank.
He knew, of course, what a gangplank was, but he had no idea what his father meant or why he had bothered to encrypt the word. Sunlight, filtered through dirty panes of glass, shot repeating patterns across the parquet floor and barren walls, sadly emphasizing the utter emptiness of the space, which had been scrubbed clean of every last vestige of Dexter Shaw's presence.
As Bravo took one last circuit around the apartment, he searched his memory for an instance of the word gangplank, but he couldn't recall his father ever using it. Leaving the apartment was more difficult than he had imagined. He recalled with a painful vividness his mother's illness and felt now as he had each time he'd left her dying in the hospital: heartsick that she was held prisoner by her illness, by the betrayal of her body, when he was fit and free to walk into the cool neon-lit evening air.
At the elevator, he paused and turned back toward the apartment door. If only he could reach inside and extract whatever was left of his father.
On the way through the lobby, he asked the doorman for directions to an Internet cafe, the closest of which, it turned out, was on 17th Street, more or less midway between Dupont Circle and Scott Circle. He called a cab and waited in the cool of the lobby until it pulled up to the curb.
Ten minutes later, he was sitting at a computer terminal, an iced coffee and a roast beef sandwich at his right elbow. He searched gangplank, but so many results came up that he knew he'd have to narrow his search criteria.
As he munched through half his sandwich, he considered the possibilities. Going on his father's principle of hiding in plain sight didn't work with this particular problem, because Dexter Shaw had gone to a lot of trouble to encrypt the word. Why would he do that? Bravo frowned, concentrating. He no longer tasted the sandwich, no longer heard the soft murmur of voices of those around him; he'd entered into that extraordinary private world his father had observed in him even at an early age. His entire being was directed at unraveling the puzzle at hand. And in the silence of his concentration something came to him. If his father had hidden the word, then gangplank was something well known-something in plain sight. Bravo's head came up. He knew he was right-his father had simply applied his 'hidden in plain sight' dictum in a different way.
Putting what was left of his sandwich aside, Bravo returned to the computer terminal, his fingers flying over the keyboard. On one of the many Washington, DC, sites, he typed in the word gangplank. What he came up with surprised him. Gangplank was the name of a marina within walking distance of the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building.
At the marina office, a grizzled old-timer with a cigarette between his bloodless lips told him that there was no boat registered in the name of Dexter Shaw or anyone named Shaw for that matter.
Thanking the old-timer, Bravo walked down to the water and out onto the slips. The day was overspread with a glare of haze that reduced the visible spectrum of light, leveled everything to the dull colors of old laundry. He inhaled the sharp, almost rotten mineral smell of the water as he passed one boat after another. He didn't yet know what he was looking for, but there must be something here-his father's message told him so. Then, on the third slip over, he saw a dark blue and white thirty-seven-foot Cobalt 343. Steffi was stenciled across its stern plate in gold. Steffi, his father's pet name for Bravo's mother. He stood very still, his aspect tense and watchful. It could be a coincidence, but he didn't think so. He didn't believe in coincidence.
He glanced down at the mysterious Medeco key. The more he thought of it, the more it seemed likely that his father would not have kept a boat registered under his own name, especially in light of what had happened to the contents of his apartment after his death. The boat meant something, he suspected, something vitally important, otherwise Dexter wouldn't have named it Steffi, then hidden it so that only his son would find it.
All at once, the marina appeared bleached out, the skyline of DC receding to some other reality. He was alone on the wooden slip, feeling the last remnant of his father he'd been searching vainly for in the apartment. A connection had been established through the boat, a kind of umbilical that drew him ever closer.
It was with this profoundly altered sensibility that Bravo went aboard. He was looking for clues now, the part of his father that remained after his death: an elaborate set of clues and codes that would guide him-and only him-to what his father wanted him to know. He paused, considering this notion for a moment. What if there were others after whatever it was Dexter wanted his son to find, others he was wary of, even afraid of? Bravo thought of the blond couple, the man's incongruous shoes, the woman's feline smile that now seemed to him sinister, a sign not of a flirtation but of a secret she knew and he didn't.
Once again, he felt that peculiar prickling between his shoulder blades, and with an eerie sense of foreboding, he looked around, abruptly fearful that his inattention would lead to sudden disaster. What if they were here, what if he was being watched as he had been in New York? But no, he saw no one suspicious in the general vicinity. The marina was quiet, virtually deserted. Anyone trying to spy on him would have been revealed in an instant. And yet, as he looked farther afield, he saw high-rises whose dizzying banks of windows faced him. Behind any one of them someone could be standing with high-powered binoculars or a telescope, recording his every movement.
With an acute and uncomfortable sense of his own helplessness, he turned and, with equal parts resignation and determination, concentrated on what had to be done now. He began his search in the crescent high-tech cabin with its cream-colored seating-area storage compartment and head, but found nothing there. Returning deckside, he spotted a compartment door just to the left of the wheel, below the array of dials. In its center was set a Medeco lock. With his heart beating fast, he fitted the key into the lock, turned it. The door popped open.
Inside, he discovered a rat-eared address book, a pair of cubic gold cuff links, an enamel American flag lapel pin, a pair of eyeglasses, two packs of cigarettes, a gunmetal Zippo lighter. That was it. Taking this assortment of everyday items, he returned to the cabin, where he slit both packs of cigarettes down the sides, spilled out the contents. To his disappointment, he found only cigarettes. These he slit, too, pawing carefully and vainly through the tobacco.
He held the cuff links in the palm of his hand, as if he could feel in their considerable weight the lingering presence of his father. Flipping open the Zippo, he lit the flame and almost immediately extinguished it. His vision went blurry as he peered through the glasses. They weren't magnifying lenses that could be picked up at any drug or convenience store, they were prescription lenses.
He held the glasses at arm's length, wondering, because so far as he knew Dexter Shaw had perfect vision, he'd never needed glasses.
But perhaps he was wrong, perhaps this was one other thing his father had kept from him. There was only one way to find out. He leafed through the address book, found the number of his father's opthamologist and called him. He was busy with a patient, but when Bravo told his receptionist who he was, she retrieved Dexter Shaw's file.
'Glasses?' she said when she came back on the line. 'Why would Dr. Miller prescribe glasses for Mr. Shaw? His vision was exceptional. He had no need for glasses, even reading glasses.'
And yet, here he was holding glasses with prescription lenses. Another clue? What other hypothesis was
