“Yes, I think so. Only saw his phone for a moment,” I said, closing my eyes and calling up the scene. “I’m pretty sure it was an iPhone.”
“Great. I have a zero day in my pocket. Friend from Mossad told me about it. Interactionless exploit.”
“A friend from Mossad?”
“Yes. Not the kind of friend you know IRL Justin. The kind you meet on the dark web. And by ‘told me about it’ I mean gave it to me after I paid for it. Paid a lot of money for it.”
“I have a feeling you have a whole secret life going on that I know very little about.”
“You’re one to talk. Remember when you spent years secretly being a master cat burglar without even your closest friends knowing anything about it?”
“Fair enough.”
“Anyway, what was Jutting’s phone number? I wasn’t planning on using the big guns but I want to know what that rat fucker is saying.”
Victoria Butler had given me Jutting’s private number to pass on to Ortoli. I found it and read it out to Ashna. She pulled up another window then quickly typed a command that included the digits.
“He doesn’t even have to answer the call,” she said. “I can capture audio from his phone’s mic. I can do a lot of other unsavory things too but I just want to hear what he’s saying right now.”
On the screen, we could see Jutting look down as if glancing at his phone. Output started to flow in the terminal window—lines of green text on a black background, moving by too fast to read.
“Got him!” Ashna exclaimed.
“…afraid it’s out of the question.” Haggis face shook his head back and forth forcefully.
“Matthews is coming.” Jutting smiled. His voice seemed flat with a tinge of robotic echo chamber to it.
“Archibald?” Haggis face asked, obviously surprised. The name Archibald Matthews was familiar but I couldn’t remember where I’d heard it. I put it aside to think over later and focused on the conversation.
“Yes. He’s in London on vacation. The fool told Benderick about my cryptographer and Benderick thought he could threaten me. That’s another story though, for another time.”
I turned to Ashna. “Benderick? How is he mixed up in this?” She shook her head and we both turned back to the screen.
“Philpot and Gentry too,” Jutting continued. “You are losing your hold, Richard. They are defecting.”
“Fine. Tell me what you’re planning, Jutting. I might consider it.”
“I have the grimoire handed down from my father, who found it in a storeroom, in a box of personal items left behind by Lorenzo Conti who was the last in a long line of successors all the way back to the author, Benvenuto Cellini.”
“Yes, we’ve been over this, Jutting. I have no reason to believe the book is authentic.”
“No reason not to, either. Sir Edward Elgar was an intimate of Lorenzo Conti when he was the music master in my father’s sanatorium and Conti was an inmate. The director of the sanatorium at the time left a note in his journal, mentioning the relationship and noting that the two often read together from an old manuscript.”
“You’ve told me all this before.”
“Never know how much you retain, Richard.” Jutting seemed to take pleasure in calling the other man by his first name. He drew the syllables out, bringing gleeful attention to his transgression. "Well, I do know that you are familiar with the dark saying encoded into Elgar’s Enigma Variations and the probability that it is, in fact, an incantation such as the one Cellini must have learned from the Sicilian priest who helped him call up the armies of the underworld.”
“So some believe.”
“Yes, some. Including you when I first discussed this with you years ago.”
“I never thought you would go so far with this charade.”
“Well, I have. And now, a cryptographer in my employ has finally broken the enigma. And his solution points to a particular passage of the grimoire. It names the chapter and the page. The chapter is titled Negomanzia.”
Haggis face looked shaken. “But you can’t be serious about trying this, Jutting.”
“Of course I’m serious,” Jutting broke off, exasperated. “Of course I am. This is what I have devoted my life to finding. You put up a great facade but when it comes down to brass tacks you are afraid, Richard. You fear the power so you don’t deserve it. That’s why your followers are deserting you. Deserting your faltering order. If you decide to join us, the ceremony will begin at midnight. I have nothing more to say.”
I watched Jutting’s pointer move across the screen and click the End Call button. Ashna and I looked at each other.
“Is this guy for real?” Ashna asked. “He thinks he’s going to call up some demons and use them to become a powerful dark wizard? This is the real world, not Harry Potter land.”
“I don’t really care much about whether he tries out some dark incantation. He can sacrifice a goat for all I care. Maybe he will. What we need to do is get the enigma solution and send it to Wolhardt before Jutting makes it public. If Wolhardt is the first to go public with it, Jutting will have to pay the reward, even if he already figured it out. He won’t be able to argue that he found it first because he’ll have to admit that he stole the method from Wolhardt.”
“True. We have a good opportunity here. Jutting and his crew are going to be distracted by the preparations for their big black magic party. There are probably a lot of details to nail down. They need to find some virgins, get a lot of candles, maybe some blood to drink out of golden chalices.”
“I’m going to go in. I need to get the notes and St. Martin’s new laptop. I’ll have to wait until after dark though. What time is sunset?”
Ashna ran a quick search. “Looks like around nine fifteen.”
“Okay. I need some sleep.”
“Not
