ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
'Now we can read off and see what we get.' Her finger scanned along the line, then she started scribbling.
ULLG IFMH
'Shit,' Will hissed. 'I am getting so tired of these fucking games. What the hell does this mean?'
'We're not thinking logically. Not many people send text messages by phone like this.'
'Brits do.'
'Yeah, but most Americans don't. And it would have been just as easy to communicate by email. But they didn't do that. Why not?'
'Because they know that we can trace their emails. They must know that I worked out where their last one came from.'
'Sure, but that might not be a bad thing from their point of view. They might want you to know it was a message from them. No, I reckon they chose a different method for a reason.
Can you pass me your phone?'
She grabbed it eagerly, instantly finding the messaging programme. She hit 'Create message' and began typing with her thumbs. Will had to huddle even closer to see what she was doing. He could smell her hair and had to fight the urge not to breathe deeply: in an instant, her scent had carried him back to those long hot afternoons together.
That in turn jogged another sense memory, the perfume of Beth. He liked it best when it was strongest: when she dressed up to go out for the evening. She might have got her outfit just right; he would want to rip it all off, to ravish her there and then. Later, at the party, he would spot her across the room and find himself looking at his watch: he wanted to get her back home. He was suddenly flooded with memories, of TO and of Beth, and they were arousing him. He felt confused.
TO was typing the word foot. Now her thumbs searched for the button; she pressed it twice, and a smile began to form around her lips. The display changed, showing the word foot, then font then don't, then enou, then emot, then donu and finally ennu before going back to foot. TO wrote down the word don't.
Next she keyed in runs, which showed up on the screen as sums, suns, puns, stop, rump, sump, pump, as well as stor, sunr and quor. She wrote one of those down, too.
'There,' she said, with the satisfaction of a bookish schoolgirl who had just completed her algebra homework in record time. The two-word nonsense of foot runs now appeared as a clear message of encouragement. don't stop.
It was not really a code at all, thought Will. Just a neat use of the 'predictive' language function on most cell phones: every time you tried to punch in a word, the phone offered possible alternatives using the same combination of buttons. You pressed 3,6,6,8 to mean foot, but you might have meant don't so the machine cleverly offered you that option. Whoever sent this message had found a novel use for the function.
The satisfaction of TO's handiwork was brief. True, they had decoded the message, but they hardly knew what it meant and they still had no idea who had sent it.
'So who the hell is Bill Gates?'
'Let's have a look,' said TO, picking up the phone again.
'Well, B could be C or A.' She keyed in the word gates. 'And that could be hates or haves or haver or hater.'
'So what would that mean?' said Will. 'A hater? A hater of what? Or is it B Haves as in 'behaves'?'
'Or maybe it's the opposite of 'a hater',' said TO, suddenly excited.
'The opposite?'
'The opposite of a hater. A friend.'
'But it doesn't say that. It's just gates or hates or haves or hates.'
'Or haver. Haver is the word for friend in Hebrew. B Gates is A Haver. This message says, 'Don't stop, a friend.'' She began circling, staring at the floor. 'Who would want to stiffen your resolve now? Who would think there was a chance you would give up?'
'The only people who even know about this are you, my father, Tom and the Hassidim themselves.'
'You're sure there's no one else. No one who's aware this is happening?'
With a stab, Will thought of Harden and the office: he would have to do something about that eventually.
'No. No one knows. And since neither you, nor Tom, nor my Dad need to contact me anonymously that leaves the Hassidim. I think we may have a bit of a split on our hands.'
'What do you mean?'
Will enjoyed the novelty of TO being a pace behind him for once. Politics never was her strongest suit.
'A split. A split in the ranks of the enemy. The only person who could have sent this would be somebody who heard the Rebbe, I mean the rabbi I spoke to yesterday, telling me to back off. They must want me to ignore that advice. They must disagree with what the rabbi's doing. This person doesn't want me to stop. And I think I can guess who it is.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Saturday, 8.10am, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
These days he came down to check only once a week. The Secret Chamber now seemed to run itself, needing only the lightest supervision. These visits of his were less practical than sentimental: it gave him pleasure to see his little invention working so well.
He had designed things before of course. Down at the docks, he had come up with a new roll-on, roll-off method for unloading the boats that came in from Latin America and went on to the US. He had not planned it this way, but his new system was said to have revolutionized the country's drugs trade. He had only been trying to improve the efficiency of import-export. But thanks to him, cocaine could come in from Colombia and be bound for Miami with the shortest possible turnaround. From there, and in a matter of hours, the parcels of white powder would spider out to America's cities — Chicago, Detroit, New York. Haiti's drugs bosses boasted that if ten lines of coke were snorted into the nostrils of a US citizen at any given moment, it was certain that at least one had passed through Port-au-Prince.
In his social circle, that gave Jean-Claude Paul prestige.
Among the well-heeled dollar millionaires of Petionville, each in their armour-fenced, high-walled villas, no one fussed too much as to the ethical origins of one's wealth. That you could drive a Mercedes and send your wife to Paris to replenish her wardrobe and re-tint her highlights was enough. When the Americans invaded in 1994 they called the mansion dwellers of Petionville MREs — morally repugnant elites — and Jean-Claude was classed among them.
Maybe that was why his brain had come up with the Secret Chamber, as a way to make amends. He could not imagine where else the idea could have come from: it seemed to arrive in his head fully formed, nothing to do with him.
The chamber was, in fact, a single-storey building, painted white. It looked like a glorified hut, no more noticeable than a bus shelter. Crucially, there were entrances on all four sides which were open at all times.
The system was simple. At any moment, the rich could come in and leave money inside the chamber. And, also at any moment, the poor could come in and take what they needed.
The beauty of it was its anonymity. The doors operated on an automatic-locking system that ensured only one person could be inside the chamber at any one time. That way a giver and a receiver were guaranteed never to meet. The wealthy would not know who had benefited from their largesse; the deprived would not know who had helped them.
Port-au-Prince's well-off would not get the chance either to lord it over their beneficiaries or to judge them insufficiently needy. And the city's impoverished would be spared the sense of indebtedness that can make charity so humiliating.
