communications center yet, and this is probably the information we’ve been waiting on.’
As a monotone voice recited numbers and letters in clusters of three – ‘A-O-seven – Niner-Double L – Zone- four’ – Volta wrote them down. Daniel noticed Volta was taping the message, or at least had the
As the voice settled into a drone, Daniel glanced around the barn, nearly half of which was a communications center – phones, CBs, shortwave radios, tape decks, two computer stations, a row of locked filing cabinets, and a long worktable. A huge bank of solar-charged nickel-cadmium batteries lined the far wall.
The transmission abruptly ended and Volta sent a brief response, also in code. When he clicked off the shortwave, the tape deck stopped.
‘That must be a secret channel,’ Daniel said, avoiding a direct question.
‘No,’ Volta said, ‘we use legal frequencies: 21.000 to 26.450 Megahertz in the daytime, 7.000 to 7.300 at night. The CIA has computerized scanners that monitor unauthorized frequencies. If it picks up an illegal signal, it can easily triangulate the point of origin.’
‘But if it’s on a legal frequency, anyone can listen.’
Volta shrugged. ‘Let them. All they’ll hear is the code, and code is fairly common on the air – smugglers, amateur cryptographers, paramilitary groups. We use what’s known as a shift-cipher code, which means it shifts from one code set to another – we use nine – at intervals that can also be changed. It’s extremely difficult to crack it by frequency-of-occurrence methods. We use one set of nine for a year, and to our knowledge we’ve never been cracked or compromised. And besides, the band we use has over a thousand frequencies available. So first someone would have to find it, monitor it continuously, and then break the code. And they still might not understand the message. Here, let me show you.’
Daniel watched as Volta transcribed: OBJAY THIRTY K CARROT C CRUSH ZROW GLO DFORM U HIRNOW XTR CBR 1BLT T GO CECIL.
‘I don’t get it all, but I think I caught the important part.’
Volta read it aloud, explaining the shorthand: ‘The object is a thirty-thousand-carat diamond – “C Crush” being crushed carbon – a zero being round or, in our case, a sphere. This one glows. However, DFORM is our standard phrase for “the defense is formidable,” so I should go there and confer – “you here and now.” XTR is again standard, meaning further information – usually nothing more than where to meet – is available through the CBR station, which it might please you to know is the
‘What about the “1BLT to go Cecil.”’
‘That’s Smiling Jack’s signature. In the unlikely case the code gets broken, a signature phrase makes it far more difficult for the codebreaker to transmit disinformation back to us. Everybody has a signature phrase; the names are nulls, dummies. So a transmission with a name but no signature phrase indicates the code has been compromised in some way. Even so, it probably would have been judicious to switch to a new set for this project. We’ve been using this set almost eleven months. I just hate to make the change at a critical juncture, since it takes a while to get fluent in the new set.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ Daniel said. ‘You just got it confirmed that it is a large spherical diamond that glows – exactly like your vision. Right on the money. You should be pleased, or grateful, or at least vaguely happy.’
‘I am,’ Volta said. ‘I’m also worried.’
‘Why?’
‘Because when I’m not having visions confirmed, I have to make decisions, the right ones I hope. And when you have to be hopeful, you should be worried.’
‘What do you have to decide right now that couldn’t wait on a few minutes of satisfaction?’
‘Whether to leave you here to practice by yourself or take you to New Mexico for the meeting.’
‘Take me. I can practice anywhere.’
‘At this point, only one other person knows you’ll be involved – that’s Smiling Jack. If you attend the meeting, six more will know.’
‘But they’re trustworthy, right?’
‘Daniel, it’s not a question of the knowledge being safe with them, but of them being safe with the knowledge.’ Volta paused, then added more forcefully, ‘You
‘I haven’t been dwelling on it.’
‘You stay,’ Volta decided. ‘I’ll be taking the truck, so you’ll be without a vehicle. Unless, of course, you can imagine one. Now, if you’d do me the favor of cleaning up the kitchen, I’ll send some routing messages and gather my gear.’
Daniel was rinsing out the sink when Volta called him into the living room. He was standing near the door, looking at himself in the oak-framed mirror under the cuckoo clock. A Bulgarian anarchist had given Volta the clock for helping him during an illegal stay in the U.S. It kept excellent time, but the cuckoo appeared randomly.
Daniel thought Volta was referring to the cuckoo clock when he said, ‘I should have warned you about this earlier.’ But he took the mirror down, tapped the exposed nailhead as if it were a telegraph key, then pulled outward and up, lifting a veneered panel out of the wall. The panel was about half the size of the mirror that had concealed it. There was a narrow vault behind the panel.
Daniel had never seen a safe so skinny, six inches wide and two feet high. Nor did it appear to have a lock. ‘What’s the point of a safe without a lock,’ he said.
‘The lock’s inside.’
‘Well, that’s certainly a provocative approach to security.’
Volta opened the safe door and removed a small black cubical box with a short aerial mounted on one
