Biowar

25

The taxi pulled away before Johnny Bib could ask about being picked up again. He stood at the edge of the hilly driveway, momentarily paralyzed.

Attend to your business, whispered one of the voices in his head.

“Yes,” said Johnny Bib, and he began walking up the driveway. Johnny kept exactly twenty-nine voices in his head — twenty — nine was a particularly beautiful and useful number — and while he did not always take their advice, he did in this particular instance, following along to the back of the house and looking around for a garden. A number of tomatoes grew on stakes in a raised bed about twenty feet from the house; there were cucumbers as well and a few stunted pieces of spinach suffering in the summer heat. None of the plants had been watered now in several days, and the tomato vines had begun to yellow.

The fact that Kegan kept a garden did not mean that Johnny’s hunch of a substitution code was wrong, but he nonetheless felt disappointed. He wanted Kegan to be using a substitution code. Not because he’d thought of it, but because there was something archaic and romantic about the idea. Modern-day encryption had moved too far from the personal, Johnny Bib thought; it had become simply a mathematic problem to solve. Oh, there were still beautiful wrinkles to be discovered, surely, and untangling a scrambled fractal embedded in an encrypted video stream — well, there were still things that could thrill a mathematician’s heart. But the real romance and intrigue were gone from the profession. The heady atmosphere of the days of World War II and Enigma, the Japanese wind codes — where was that glory now?

The use of a simple substitution code — simple and yet, if properly executed, nearly impenetrable — surely that was a thing even Turing himself might have appreciated.

Johnny Bib had come here not hoping to break the code Kegan was using (if it even was a code he was using, as opposed to an encryption). What Johnny really wanted to do was get a glimpse of the romantic era of genius, to touch it and in that way partake of it. What more could a mathematician really ask for? Johnny Bib had reached the age when a mere solution to pi no longer thrilled him. No, he wanted not to solve Fermat but to understand why a right triangle was in fact right. He longed to cross the mystic threshold.

Had Kegan? The man worked with microbes and DNA. What was DNA but a marvelously effective and powerful encryption? Surely the intersection of math and biology would yield something stupendous, something soulful, something… Godlike was the only word.

And so now, directed by another of his inner voices, Johnny went to the back of the house. He avoided the crime-scene tape on the porch and tried a rear window, which he found unlocked. Johnny stepped through, nearly tripping on the curtain but finally maintaining his balance enough to hop into the center of the small room, a sort of den at the back of the house opposite the kitchen.

The house had a central hallway running down the middle, dividing it perfectly in half — an excellent condition, Johnny thought, walking to the library at the right side. He noticed that the wainscoting in the corridor divided the wall precisely at the three-sevenths spot; if this was significant he couldn’t decide, but it certainly felt like a good omen, and he practically bounced into the library. He knew from the photos that there were over 10,000 volumes here, but his immediate interest was confined to a small section of the third shelf from the window on the right side. Johnny walked to it now, tilting his head slightly to survey the titles on the spines. He was just pulling the book out when his voice directed his attention to the right.

The shelves at the bottom, said the voice.

Johnny had heard this voice before. It had a slightly French accent; he thought of it as Descartes, though of course he was not so crazy as to believe it was really the great French philosopher and mathematician.

One of his students, perhaps.

“These shelves?” Johnny asked aloud.

At the bottom, repeated the voice.

Johnny bent down, then realized that the voice was referring him to a small section of books one case over. There were three books on cancer and its various forms. Next to them were much older texts, collectors’ items from the looks of them. He slid along the rug and started to tug one out; when he did he realized there were several books behind them, along with a three-ring binder.

The books were battered. One was an old herbalist encyclopedia. Two were written in French and appeared to be alchemy texts. The last was a book by Aleister Crowley on magic spells.

“Superstitious garbage,” said Johnny Bib. “What do we make of this?”

None of his voices responded. He opened the notebook and began to read.