Ronald Reagan, RN for Nixon, BC for Clinton and so on…”
“When he noticed those things, we chose the first twenty-six sets of initials—”
“One for each letter of the alphabet,” Carmichael said. “Another thing I might’ve mentioned in Palardy’s office is that the punctuation marks looked like probable nulls. And they wound up being just that. Characters that stand for nothing. Palardy used several: an exclamation point, a period, and a question mark, to name a few.”
Which was something both Nimec and Ricci had already discerned for themselves.
“Take the three nulls, add them to the twenty-six initial pairs, and it equals twenty-nine substitution symbols,” Michelle said.
“Next you add the double zeros,” Carmichael said. “They always follow a set of repeat presidential initials… belonging to those who would have served their terms later in the chronology of chief executives. Namely Presidents James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and An-drew Johnson.”
“This gives you a grand total of thirty ciphertext characters,” Michelle said.
“Half of sixty, and also half of your total number of points on the outside of the circle… or circumference of the clock dial,” Carmichael said. “After that fell into place, we had to determine which of the letter pairs corresponded to a particular number between one and twenty-six, since that number had to represent a letter in its proper alphabetical sequence. Palardy could have made that part easy by having the numerical order match the order of presidents—”
“Number one being George Washington, two being John Adams, three being Thomas Jefferson, for example…”
“But he didn’t, probably because it was too easy. By randomizing the alphabetical and numerical correspondents… leaving them up for grabs… he ensured that whoever got to the clear would have to do exactly what you talked about before, Ricci. Run all the possible matches through a computer until it came up with ones that enabled the person to compose intelligible sentences. Either that, or work it out on paper, and that would take forever. And again, this presupposes that the would-be code breaker could recognize the bigrams, the nulls, the pattern in general.”
Michelle was nodding. “He must have felt that was unlikely. Felt that
“So I’m guessing what Palardy did was grab himself a sheet of paper and something like a draftsman’s template, draw a circle, and then draw thirty intersecting lines across its diameter. Then he’d write a bigram on one side and pick a number out of his hat to be its diametric opposite, as you can see from the rough table on our graph. And there you are with—”
Nimec checked his watch, exchanged glances with Ricci. Almost five minutes had passed since they’d entered the office. He decided that was long enough.
“Carmichael,” he said. “You’re coming close to that whump across the head.”
Silence. Carmichael looked embarrassed.
“Shit,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Nimec said. “But we need the clear. Right now.”
Carmichael nodded, went over to his computer console, and tapped at the keyboard.
“I’ve got it in a separate text file, it’ll just take a second to open it,” he said half to himself. “The lines you’ll see on top of the screen show the plaintext as it appears when first deciphered. In the bottom of the panel, I’ve capitalized letters and inserted spaces and punctuation to make it legible to you….”
Nimec and Ricci looked up at the wall.
The uppermost version of the clear read:
enriquequirosgavemethediseaseigavehimrogergordiantherearemenbeyondeitherofuswhoordereditineve rmeantforthistohappenforgiveme
The one below it read:
Enrique Quiros gave me the disease. I gave him Roger Gordian. There are men beyond either of us who ordered it. I never meant for this to happen.
Forgive me.
Nimec and Ricci stared at each other.
“Enrique Quiros,” Ricci said. “Pete, that name rings a bell.”
“Sure it does,” Nimec said. “Quiros heads that drug crew down in San Diego.”
“What would he want with the boss? How the hell could he—?”
“I don’t know,” Nimec said. “But we’d damn well better find out.”
TWENTY-ONE
“There it is. About three blocks up ahead of us. That tall office building, see?” Ricci’s contact took a hand off the steering wheel and motioned to his right. “Quiros’s front company’s on the third floor. Golden Triangle Services.”
Ricci glanced out the passenger window.
“Guess it tickles his funny bone,” he said.
The driver crawled the car through rush-hour traffic. He was a guy in his early thirties named Derek Glenn with skin the color of roasted chestnuts, a close-cropped nap of black hair, and a toned, broad-shouldered physique.
“His outfit’s title, you mean?”
Ricci nodded.
“Golden Triangle. The heroin production and trafficking center of the world,” he said. “Thailand, Laos, Burma—”
“Myanmar,” Glenn said.
Ricci gave him a look.
“Is what Burma calls itself these days,” Glenn said. “Anyway, sure, it’s smirky of Quiros. But that’s how developers talk about the area north of the city where all the new Web shops have gone up, you know. Including ours.”
Ricci made a dismissive sound in his throat. Glenn was with a contingent of Sword personnel assigned to a locally based UpLink division specializing in the development of secure corporate and government intranet sites. He knew the territory and was trying to be helpful. But the lightning run of events that had swept Ricci from Palardy’s death room in Sunnydale to this strange city hundreds of miles down the coast within a span of ten hours had left him in an unpleasant and critical mood. He didn’t care whether the dope capital’s name was Burma, Myanmar, or Brigadoon. He didn’t care what sort of pitch the civil boosters were throwing prospective real-estate buyers about the neighborhood. He thought the smoked glass tower where Enrique Quiros was sitting pretty looked like a glassine envelope of heroin blown up to outrageous dimensions.
“Listen,” Glenn said. “My point’s that Enrique isn’t just some slick. Smooth, yeah. But there’s a difference. You have to respect him. He’s got an Ivy League business degree. He’s grounded in his family. And his main thing is to watch out for them. If it wasn’t for his old man asking him to take over the rackets before he died, he might have gone legit. But once that happened, he probably felt obliged—”
“I read his make on the flight over,” Ricci said.
Glenn was looking straight out the front window.
“The company Learjet doesn’t seem like a shoddy way to travel,” he said. “One of these days maybe I’ll get to check it out firsthand. Fly outside coach on a passenger jet. No screeching infant with diaper rash behind me. No bratty older brother popping chewing gum bubbles in my ear.”
