Midnight Mass with some friends.”
“If you’ll jot down your phone number I’d like to ring you up after New Year’s.”
“Fine,” she agreed.
He’d intended to phone Leila after he left Daphne, but back at the Double-C office, Parkinson was in a state of dejection. “We’ve run every possible substitution of the letter E and there’s still nothing. We’re going down the letter-frequency list now, working on T, A, O, and N.”
“Forty characters without a single E. Unusual, certainly.”
“Any luck locating St. Ives?”
“Not yet.”
Rand worked with them for a time and then dozed on his office couch. It was long after midnight when Parkinson shook him awake. “I think we’ve got part of it.”
“Let me see.”
The younger man produced long folds of computer printout. “On this one we concentrated on the first six characters—the repetitive MPPMPM. We got nowhere substituting E, T, or A, but when we tried the next letters on the frequency list, O and N, look what came up.”
Rand focused his sleepy eyes and read NOONON. “Noon on?”
“Exactly. And there’s another ON combination later in the message.”
“Just a simple substitution cipher after all,” Rand marveled. “School children make them up all the time.”
“And it took us all these hours to get this far.”
“St. Ives didn’t worry about making the cipher too complex because he was writing it in invisible ink. It was our good luck that the box warmed enough so that some of the message began to appear.”
“A terrorist network armed with plastic explosives, and St. Ives is telling them when and where to set off the bomb. Do you think we should phone Hastings?”
Rand glanced at the clock. It was almost dawn on Christmas morning. “Let’s wait till we get the rest of it.
He followed Parkinson down the hall to the computer room where the others were at work. Not bothering with the machines, he went straight to the old blackboard at the far end of the room. “Look here, all of you. The group of letters following
As he worked, he became aware that someone had chalked the most common letter-frequency list down the left side of the board, starting with E, T, A, O, N, and continuing down to Q, X, Z. It was the list from David Kahn’s massive 1967 book,
The message became clear at once: NOONO NTHIS DAYCH ARING CROSS STATI ONTRA CKSIX. “Noon on this day, Charing Cross Station, Track six,” Rand read.
“Noon on which day?” Parkinson questioned. “It was after noon yesterday before he distributed most of the boxes.”
“He must mean today. Christmas Day. A Christmas Day explosion at Charing Cross Station.”
I’ll phone Hastings,” Parkinson decided. “We can catch them in the act.”
Police and Scotland Yard detectives converged on the station shortly after dawn. Staying as unobtrusive as possible, they searched the entire area around track six. No bomb was found.
Noon came and went, and no bomb exploded.
Rand turned up at Leila’s flat late that afternoon. “Only twenty-four hours late,” she commented drily, holding the door open for him.
“And not in a good mood.”
“You mean you didn’t crack it after all this time?”
“We cracked it, but that didn’t do us much good. We don’t have the man who sent it, and we may be unable to prevent a terrorist bombing.”
“Here in London?”
“Yes. right here in London.” He knew a few police were still at Charing Cross Station, but he also knew it was quite easy to smuggle plastic explosives past the tightest security. They could be molded into any shape, and metal detectors were of no use against them.
He tried to put his mind at ease during dinner with Leila, and later when she asked if he’d be spending the night he readily agreed. But he awakened before dawn and walked restlessly to the window, looking out at the glistening streets where rain had started to fall. It would be colder today, more like winter.
The bomb hadn’t gone off at Charing Cross Station yesterday. Either the time or the place was wrong.
But it hadn’t gone off anywhere else in London, so he could assume the place was correct. It was the time that was off.
The time, or the day.
He went to Leila’s telephone and called Parkinson at home. When he heard his sleepy voice answer, he said, “This is Rand. Meet me at the office in an hour.”
“It’s only six o’clock,” Parkinson muttered. “And a holiday.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But I’m calling Hastings, too. It’s important.”
He leaned over the bed to kiss Leila but left without awakening her.
An hour later, with Hastings and Parkinson seated before him in the office, Rand picked up a piece of chalk. “You see, we assumed the wrong meaning for the word ‘this.‘ If someone wants to indicate ‘today,‘ they say it— they don’t say ‘this day.‘ On the other hand, if I write the word ‘this’ on the desk in front of me—” he did so with the piece of chalk “—what am I referring to?”
“The desk,” Parkinson replied.
“Right. If I wrote the word on a box, what would I be referring to?”
“The box.”
“When St. Ives’s message said, ‘this day,‘ he wasn’t referring to Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. He was telling them Boxing Day. Even if they were foreign, they’d know it was the day after Christmas here and a national holiday.”
“That’s today,” Hastings said.
“Exactly. We need to get the men back to Charing Cross Station.”
The station was almost deserted. The holiday travelers were at their destinations, and it was too soon for anyone to have started home yet. Rand stood near one of the newsstands looking through a paper while the detectives again searched unobtrusively around track six. It was nearly noon and time was running out.
“No luck,” Hastings told him. “They can’t find a thing.”
“Plastique.” Rand shook his head. “It could be molded around a girder and painted most any color. We’d better keep everyone clear from now until after noon.” It was six minutes to twelve.
“Are you sure about this, Rand? St. Ives is using a dozen or more people. Perhaps they all didn’t understand his message.”
“They had to come together to assemble the small portions of explosive into a deadly whole. Most of them would understand the message even if a few didn’t. I’m sure St. Ives trained them well.”
“It’s not a busy day. He’s not trying to kill a great many people or he’d have waited until a daily rush hour.”
“No,” Rand agreed. “I think he’s content to—” He froze, staring toward the street entrance to the station. A man and a woman had entered and were walking toward track six. The man was Ivan St. Ives and the woman was Daphne Sollis.
Rand had forgotten that the train to Hastings left from Charing Cross Station.
He ran across the station floor, through the beams of sunlight that had suddenly brightened it from the