Bio-Strike

TWENTY

“Something like this, one look at it tells you almost as much as it doesn’t,” James Carmichael said without elaboration. He was seated behind Palardy’s computer, studying the enigmatic series of letters and punctuation marks in his E-mail.

Nimec and Ricci exchanged glances from where they stood, bookending him. His statement itself struck them as a bit mysterious, but that was almost expected. Before Roger Gordian lured him into his employ, Carmichael had been a third-generation National Security Agency analyst, his grandfather having worked for the crypto-logic intelligence organization from the time of its Cold War inception by secret presidential memorandum — back when the government was still mum about its existence, and Washington insiders cheekily referred to the NSA acronym as standing for No Such Agency.

“How about you walk us through,” Nimec said. “Starting with whether we’re all on the same page about it actually being a code, and not what happens when somebody’s out of his skull with fever and doesn’t know what he’s typing.”

A thirtyish man in shirtsleeves with sharp blue eyes and a bumper crop of wavy black hair, Carmichael looked over his shoulder at Nimec.

“Sorry,” he said. “The minute I start to sound condescending, permission’s granted to whump me across the back of the head.”

Nimec smiled a little. “We’ll allow you one free pass.”

“Deal.” Carmichael turned back to the screen. “Okay, first, I think we can rule out that it’s the product of an incoherent mind. It’s too systematic in its construction. I also think what we’ve got in front of us isn’t strictly speaking a code but a cipher. People use the terms as if they’re interchangeable, but there’s a distinction, and it’s important for more than semantic reasons. Codes substitute whole words with letters, numbers, symbols, phrases, or other words. Ciphers create substitutions for independent letters or syllables, and they allow for more complex communications. They’re the basis of modern electronic encryption. A good way to keep them straight might be to compare codes to ancient hieroglyphics or pictographs, ciphers to the alphabet. Imagine Shakespeare trying to write Hamlet using pictures on the wall, and it’ll be apparent why ciphertext is more refined and efficient.”

“You can tell the difference right off?” Ricci said.

“Usually, yeah.” Carmichael said. He indicated several spots on the lines of characters. “Frequent recurrences of letter groups are a fair giveaway that they’re replacing small linguistic units. See the letter pair, or bigram, ‘BH’? It appears ten, eleven times. You wouldn’t expect the same word to be repeated that often within a relatively short message… but a letter or syllable, sure. And then there’s the back-to-back use of the polygram ‘JM00’. That probably equals a double-letter combination in plaintext—”

“Plaintext being…”

“The words you’re trying to conceal,” Carmichael said. “As opposed to ciphertext, which would be the characters you’re using to conceal them.”

Ricci was nodding his head. “That’s all there is to this nut, it should be easy to crack,” he said. “The regular… the plaintext… alphabet has twenty-six letters. Which means you’d have an equal amount of ciphertext groups, right? One group for each letter, A through Z. Run all the possible matches through a computer, how long would it take to kick out the one that lets you form real words that add up to real sentences instead of nonsense? Simple math, there are only so many possibilities.”

Carmichael looked at him. “Your logic makes sense as far as it goes, but leaves us with a couple of big problems,” he said. “One, let’s assume Palardy’s ciphertext groups correlate to letters in the English alphabet, and not some other with a greater or lesser number of characters. Figuring out that part might just be the first step toward getting to the clear — the hidden message — since we don’t know that there aren’t added levels of encryption. And two, any cipher worth the thought and effort needed to create it incorporates nulls. These could be letters, digits, symbols, maybe punctuation marks that don’t fit the system and can complicate things.”

“Wouldn’t your computers be able identify them for that very reason?” Nimec asked. “Exclude them because they don’t fall into the pattern?”

“With time,” Carmichael replied tersely, looking at him in a way that conveyed he was all too aware of its desperate shortage.

Silence hung a minute. Then, from Nimec: “It’s crazy. Palardy composes a secret message before he dies, E-mails it here. He must want us to be able to get at it. I can’t see why else he goes to the trouble.”

Carmichael nodded. “Agreed. Even if his purpose was to frustrate us, put us through our paces… and we don’t know it was… I still bet he’d provide a key. Either separately or hidden within the cryptogram.”

“You think you can do it?” Nimec asked Carmichael. “Find the key, whatever Palardy’s intentions might’ve been?”

“I’ll have my people go over every bit of data on this terminal’s hard drive. And any removable storage media he might have left behind. See what we learn from them.” A sigh. “I know we can do a successful cryptanalysis. Break the system without a key. But truthfully, I can’t estimate how long it would take. Could be hours, days, even weeks.”

“Goddamn it.” Ricci frowned. “If Palardy wasn’t playing games with us… wanted to tell us something… what the hell was he thinking? Why bother encrypting his message?”

“The only reason I can figure would be to keep it from whoever got into his apartment and carried away his notebook,” Nimec said.

“If that’s it, he could have sent the message in plain language and then wiped it from his notebook’s memory,” Ricci said. “Reformatted his hard drive to be positive it couldn’t be recovered.”

“Unless he was worried about somebody being able to pull it from our mainframe.”

“If our security’s been compromised to that extent, Pete, we’d both better turn in our resignations.”

Carmichael had been listening quietly, his eyes narrowed in contemplation as they spoke.

“Any objections if I toss a hypothesis of my own into the pot?” he said.

“None,” Nimec said.

Carmichael looked from one man to the other.

“Maybe Palardy wanted the person who got hold of the computer to know he’d sent us a message but have to sweat about what information it contained,” he said. “In other words, maybe he wasn’t playing with our heads, but his.”

By Wednesday afternoon, Enrique Quiros’s eyes were so familiar with the message in the Sent column of Palardy’s E-mail program that it might have been burned into their retinas. He had spent hours trying to make sense of it. Long, futile hours.

Quiros switched off the notebook computer that had been brought to him from Palardy’s condominium, closed its lid, and reached for the tumbler of scotch on his desk. It was not his usual habit to drink before sundown, but his nerves badly needed steadying. One by one, his recent problems had compounded. Felix’s idiotic stunt, Felix’s murder, his forced hand in setting up tonight’s appointment with Salazar. And now everything he’d feared from the moment he had climbed aboard the carousel with that blonde had come about. She had sucked him into the conspiracy to kill Roger Gordian, made him an instrumental participant, and he had known that he would live to regret it.

Palardy had been cringing and manipulable, but Enrique had never thought he was stupid. He had felt all along that Palardy might be prepared for treachery, that once he realized he was a doomed man, he would want to expose the people he knew had used and discarded him. And he would find a way to do it before he could be stopped.

Quiros lifted the glass to his mouth and took a good, deep swallow. He didn’t know how to decode the message. Didn’t have the slightest clue. Perhaps the great and inviolable El Tío would possess the means, but Enrique was not anxious to commit suicide by sending it up the line to him. If its purpose was what Enrique believed it to be, no good could come of that. Not for him. Although El Tío’s whereabouts and identity were protected by blind upon blind, Palardy would have surely implicated Enrique, pointed the way to his door… and that was where El Tío would quickly cut the trail to his own.

Quiros tossed back the rest of his whiskey. It was out of his hands now. Completely out of his hands. The fucking heavens were about to rock.

He could only go about his plans for tonight, deal with Salazar, and wait to see whether there would be someplace to take cover when the sky came tumbling down in a million pieces.

Her hair golden in the California sunlight, she strode toward the airline ticket office with a shopping bag on her arm, drawing glances of uniform appreciation from the males she passed on the street. She was aware of each look — the discreet, the boorish, the passively speculative, the aggressively gaming. As a runway model in Paris and Milan not many years ago, she had learned that some women could trade upon beauty and sex as some men did on wealth and power. The terms of exchange, the boundaries, were what one chose to make them.

In Europe, at the parties in the clubs and aboard the yachts where she was invited after the shows, she had found it was often the truly dangerous men who had been able to provide the things she most desired. It was the oldest of understandings: Take of me, and I will take of you. She had accepted it without hesitation from a succession of lovers and been introduced to circles of hidden influence and inestimable fortune. The lifestyle attracted her, fascinated her, thrilled her.

Eventually she had come to do favors that went beyond the physical, although that was a constant part of the bargain. Sometimes enjoyable, sometimes less so. But no man had ever forced anything upon her. Made her do anything against her will. The assignments she ran across borders, moving from one country to the next under a variety of identities, gave her a wonderful feeling of value and importance, and it only heightened her excitement to know the international laws she had broken while using any one of those assumed names could have put her in prison forever. She had passed under the eyes of authorities, hiding in full view, and it exhilarated her.

Having lived among the dangerous, enjoyed the spoils of their illicit traffic, she in due time acquired a taste for the danger itself.

Siegfried Kuhl was by far the most dangerous man she had ever met. Once she had been with him, none of the rest had interested her, and she knew no other would again. He had satisfied her with a fullness she had never dreamed might be experienced. What sensual delights could be greater than those he lavished on her? What crimes more damnable than those she’d committed for him?

Now he had finally sent word. Although his affairs in Canada had not yet concluded, he would have the opportunity to leave for a few days and had made plans for them to be together. Where he had promised. In the place that was special to him and would become special to her.

She turned into the ticket office, waited on a short line, then walked over to an available clerk.

“Hello,” he said, smiling at her from behind the counter. He looked like a sheep, soft and penned. “How may I help you?”

“I would like a reservation for a flight to Madrid,” she said and gave him the date she wished to leave.

He nodded, tapped his keyboard with one finger.

“How many passengers will there be?”

“Just myself,” she said.

He glanced up at her.

“A lovely city, one of my favorites,” he said amiably. “Have you traveled there before?”

“Only for a brief stopover,” she said. “But I’ll be joining someone who is very well acquainted with it.”

“Ahh,” he said. “Business or pleasure?”

She looked at the clerk and mused that his entire bleating existence was not worth the most transitory and unremembered of her many disposable aliases.

“Pleasure,” she said and smiled back at him. “Strictly pleasure.”

“Carmichael.” Ricci leaned into the room in the crypto section. “How’s it going?”

“The same as it was when you asked fifteen minutes ago,” Carmichael said. He turned toward him in his swivel chair. “And when Megan Breen and Vince Scull stopped in ten minutes ago. And when Pete Nimec buzzed me just bef—”

Ricci held up his hand.

“Don’t uncork.” he said. “I just asked a question.”

“Listen, I’m not the one who needs to stay cool,” Carmichael said and gestured toward the computer he’d carried out of Palardy’s office, now on his gray steel desk. “I’ve already told you I’d report any progress. I’ve made multiple copies of the hard drive, and my team’s sifting through it all, sector by sector, file by file. That’s at the same time we’re trying to determine whether the message might precisely conform to some classic model of encipherment. We’re hitting the books. Researching the Freemasons, Vigenère, Arthur Conan Doyle for God’s sake…”

He let the sentence fade, blew air out of his mouth.

Ricci looked at him.

“Okay, I read you,” he said. “Anything I can do to help?”

“Keep the distractions away. This came at us damn fast. I know everybody’s stressed, but you’ve got to give us a chance. Let us do our work.” He paused, settled. “I’ve got a few hunches to check out. If they amount to anything, you’ll be the first to know about it.”

Ricci nodded. He stood quietly looking into the room a moment. Carmichael had connected Palardy’s CPU to a large, wide, flat panel display mounted on the wall above his desk, and clocks were winging across it. With the screen saver’s teal blue background, the effect was more than a little surreal, as if they were flocking in the air outside a window.

“There they go again,” he said. “Up and away.”

Carmichael at first looked as if he hadn’t understood Ricci’s meaning, then he realized where his eyes had gone and swiveled halfway around in his chair.

“I have to get rid of that,” he said, glancing at the panel. “Pops into my face every five minutes.

Ricci remembered the antique dugout clock in Palardy’s bedroom, then the eerily musical call of the cuckoo in the death-house silence of his living room.

“A thing for clocks,” he snorted.

Carmichael turned to him.

“What did you say?”

Ricci noted the cryptographer’s sudden look of interest.

“Clocks,” he said. He heard himself take a breath. “Palardy had some kind of goddamned thing for clocks.”

At her desk, Megan Breen had been thinking constantly about the boss, and she told everyone that her eyes were red because of allergies. Some visitors to her office even fell for it.

She heard her private line buzz now and picked up, tossing a crumpled Kleenex into the trash.

The caller was Ashley Gordian.

“Ashley, hello. How is—?”

She stopped. Waited for Ashley to say something at the other end of the line. How to balance the need to tackle reality against her fear of what it might be?

“Gord’s condition hasn’t changed in the past couple of hours,” Ashley said. Megan almost sighed with relief; at least he wasn’t worse. It was strange how the definition of good news became relative once the ground started to slide. “He did open his eyes for a little while around lunchtime. The nurse couldn’t be sure how alert he was, and I wasn’t in the room. I can’t… they won’t let me stay with him. But I’ve already told you that, haven’t I?”

“I think so, yes,” Megan said. In fact, Ashley had told her, and more than once. She sounded lost. “Are you at the hospital right now? There’s nothing pressing at the office, and it would do me some good to get away. We could have coffee—”

“That’s why I was calling,” Ashley said. “I think you should come down here. And that you’d better bring along Pete or one of the others. I’ve heard from Eric Oh, the epidemiologist. There’s been some word about Gord’s illness, and I don’t know exactly what to make of it. Except that it’s important.” She paused. “I’m sorry I’m being disjointed…”

“Don’t worry about that, Ashley. My guidebook’s open in front of me, and it says it’s allowed under the circumstances.”

Megan heard Ashley move the receiver from her mouth and clear her throat.

“Thank you,” she said after a moment.

“Thank the writer.”

Another brief silence. When Ashley spoke again, her voice was a bit steadier. “Eric’s heading over to meet me,” she said. “And Elliot Lieberman, Gord’s regular doctor. Eli has an office at the hospital…”

“Yes.”

“Someone from Richard Sobel’s genetics lab is also coming. The tests are still inconclusive, and I’m sure they wouldn’t be willing to disclose anything if they didn’t trust us to be discreet. Not yet. Not until they had more proof. People would jump all over them. Attack their reputations, lump them with flying saucer theorists—”

“Ashley… what is it they’ve found?”

Ashley took an audible breath. The words weren’t coming to her lips easily. “They think that the virus was manufactured,” she said at last. “That someone may have specifically designed it to kill… to murder… Roger.”

Megan held the phone a moment, stunned. “I’ll be right over,” she said.

Ten minutes after ousting Ricci from his office, Carmichael sat at his desk with the door locked behind him, his telephone unplugged, and his intercom and corporate cellular turned off. Before severing these contacts with the outside world, he had instructed the group of analysts working on Palardy’s secret communication to call him on his personal cell phone if they shook anything loose.

He needed to be alone. To think. And puzzle out what appeared to be a simple — even primitive — cryptogram that he was sure Palardy must have known would be decipherable to UpLink’s specialists, experienced pros who were used to making and breaking messages generated with the most sophisticated methods of algorithmic encryption.

There was something about the bigrams and poly-grams… something that kept tickling Carmichael’s mind right below the uppermost level of consciousness, trying to burrow up to the surface like an insect through a thin layer of soil. It had been about to emerge before the flurry of interruptions from Ricci and company startled it away. Now, absent distractions, he hoped to coax it back out of its hidey-hole.

To help him focus, Carmichael had added a clip-art icon from his word processor to the string of ciphertext transmitted by Palardy, and the image on his wall panel looked like this:

He sat at his computer console and stared at the cryptogram. It reminded him a lot of the type that might have been incorporated in an old-fashioned potboiler, circa the 1890s, meant to amuse and challenge the astute reader with a basic knowledge of encipherment techniques. And he had a feeling Palardy had wanted it that way. Wanted it to be just difficult enough to buy him time to retract it unbroken, should that become advantageous, and simultaneously rattle whoever might steal his laptop in the event he was harmed beyond retracting it.

Carmichael stared at his monitor. It almost was as if he’d stepped into a Holmes novel. Or one of Poe’s prototypical mystery stories. And the damnedest thing, the thing he would never have admitted to anyone outside his crypto section, was that getting to the clear might have actually entertained him were the stakes not so terribly high.

“Give it to me, Palardy,” he muttered into the silent room. “Give me something.”

A thoughtful expression on his face, hands poised over his keyboard, Carmichael decided to remove the punctuation marks from the character string. They had almost jumped out at him as nulls on first impression, and that feeling had only grown stronger as he studied it.

He typed, repeatedly tapping the delete key. The image in front of him was now:

Carmichael stared at the monitor. Trying to stay mentally loose and limber, slip into what athletes liked to call “the zone,” a space where you didn’t second-guess yourself, where you let yourself be guided by the automatic cognitive and sensory processes that equaled instinct.

“Come on. Give it up.”

He typed again. Letting his thumb give the space bar some action. Splitting up the obvious letter groups to leave him with:

Carmichael stared at the monitor. All right, he thought. Getting somewhere. And here it came again, that tickle of a thought in his brain soil. Some of those discrete letter pairs… What was it about them that seemed to bait it out?

Carmichael did a quick cut and paste to put the combinations that kept drawing his eye onto a separate screen:

He stared at them.

“Come on, come on, let’s see you. Come on ou—”

He straightened in his chair and sat very still for about five seconds. Then he abruptly reached into his pocket, activated his cellular, and called one of his section mates.

A woman answered.

“Michelle?” he said.

“Jimmy, hi, what’s up?”

“Better head over to my office. I think I’ve got something figured.”

Her tone was crisp. “Be right with you.”

“Thanks.” Carmichael’s finger paused over the disconnect button. In his excitement, he’d almost forgotton to ask for what he wanted her to bring along. “Michelle, still there?”

“Yeah, Jimmy, I was just putting back the phone.”

“A favor. It’s no big deal, I suppose. We can get the info easily enough on-line or something—”

Impatience: “Jimmy— ”

“Sorry, Michelle, I’m a little hyped,” he said. “Since you’re passing the reference library anyway, would you see if you can find that book on the American presidents?”

The highway’s posted speed limit was sixty-five miles per hour. The jet black Beemer’s speedometer had ticked up near ninety. This was the Bay Area. Megan Breen was at the wheel. She was in a rush to get to the hospital and hadn’t bothered with the radar detector.

Belted into the passenger seat, Rollie Thibodeau gripped his assist handle as she wove in and out of the left lane to pass a Suburban snailing along at a mere seventy-five miles per hour.

She snapped a glance at him through her sunglasses. A deep crease had established itself across his brow. He was very quiet. It occurred to her that six months was not very long ago when someone was recovering from the kind of internal damage he’d suffered in Brazil.

She resisted the urge to sway around the Lincoln now in front of her.

“Rol, everything okay?”

He nodded. “Just thinkin’. Don’t slow down on my account.”

“Oh. That’s not why—”

“ ‘S’okay, chere.” He patted her shoulder. “You my favorite gal.”

She checked the rearview and passed.

“Those thoughts,” she said. “You feel like sharing them?”

He turned to look at her.

“Guess I better.” He hesitated. “Came to me what happened to the president-elect in Brazil last month. Colon. I was recollectin’ how he took sick, died so sudden. His symptoms… ones we know about… ones his government didn’t cover up…”

He didn’t have to say any more than that.

His symptoms, Megan thought, had been strikingly similar to Gord’s.

She felt her heart clamp in her chest.

“Rollie, UpLink was about to cut a development deal with his administration. Our advance team met with him weeks before he died. You remember us talking about it on the Pomona?”

He made an affirmative sound.

“There’s my thoughts,” he said. “All wrapped in a bundle.”

Megan nodded and jammed down on the Beemer’s gas pedal, shredding over the road like the devil’s black stallion.

“Megan phoned,” Nimec said. “She’s with Ashley and Rollie at the hospital.”

Ricci’s shoulders tensed almost imperceptibly.

“The boss…?”

“He’s hanging on.”

“Oh.” Ricci breathed. “I didn’t know my arch nemesis was heading over there.”

Nimec was silent a moment. They were in his office. Just the two of them, by his choice. He’d wanted a chance to toss things around with Ricci before calling Vince Scull.

“Megan grabbed him, hustled off.” Nimec paused. “Tom, the docs and lab coats have turned something up. And I’ve got to tell you, it blew me away.”

Ricci looked at him.

“Long and short?” he said.

“Looks like the virus that’s affecting Gord was bioengineered. We’re not talking about something cultured in some Iraqi or Sudanese ‘baby milk factory.’ The bug’s some kind of mutant created with black bag technology.”

“How sure a thing is this?”

“Sure enough for us to run with it,” Nimec said. “I asked Meg to give me a dumbed-down explanation of their testing processes. From what I understood, there are confirmed techniques for scanning plant and animal genes for evidence of modification. Before UpLink sold off its biotech division to Richard Sobel, we were doing it for the ag department and other clients. You take a cucumber that has some superficial difference to all the rest at the green grocer, bring it to the lab, and they do a PCR exam, same as they would on a crime suspect’s genetic material. The DNA doesn’t compare with that variety of cuke, they move on to another level of testing. There are places on the gene string where scientists know to look for… I guess they’re the equivalent of splices.”

Ricci rubbed his neck. “A cucumber isn’t a virus,” he said.

“But the scientific principles behind the tests are identical. Or close to identical. Meg could give you a fuller rundown. All I can tell you is that these are confirmed procedures,” Nimec said. “They’ve only had, what, a day or two to do the lab work, so I don’t know whether the findings meet a standard of proof that would satisfy the scientific establishment. Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s writing any articles for the New England Journal of Medicine. We’ve been given an inside line, and that’s how it stays for now.”

Ricci was still and quiet in his chair.

“Ever miss the twentieth century?” he said after a minute.

“More and more.”

“But here we are in the future.”

“That’s right.”

“If we have to put up with this bullshit, where are the flying cars? And the robots that pop hot food and drinks out of slots in their chests?”

Nimec managed a half smile. “I always looked forward to the jet packs,” he said.

There was a brief silence.

“Where do we go with this, Pete?”

“I was hoping you’d have some ideas. Obviously we’ve got to learn who developed the virus. And how Gord was exposed.”

“The forensics on Palardy might help steer us in the right direction. We’ve also got to know whether there’s anything to his E-mail,” Ricci said. He scratched behind his ear. “You hear from our code-breaking whiz?”

Nimec shook his head. “Not for a while. He stopped picking up his phone.”

“Booted me right out of his office,” Ricci said. “You think we should go knock on his—?”

Nimec’s phone broke in with a twitter. He picked up, grunted, nodded, grunted again, replaced the receiver, and abruptly rose from behind his desk. “Timing,” he said.

Ricci looked at him. “Carmichael?”

Nimec nodded, tapped Ricci on his shoulder as he hastened around his desk. “Let’s move,” he said. “He’s got something big for us.”

“It’s quirky but clever, when you take into account that Palardy may have been on his way out when he devised it,” Carmichael was explaining virtually as they reached his door. “Sort of a cross between a polyalphabetic and geometric cipher.”

What Ricci and Nimec saw on the flat-panel wall monitor facing them was a large graphic:

“Palardy did have a thing for clocks, Ricci, and it’s obvious he used one to work out his substitutions,” Carmichael went on. “Sooner or later, the computers would have solved this thing mathematically, even without your having made the observation. Just as they would have if some of those letter combinations hadn’t jumped out at my eye. The GW in particular… How many people don’t immediately think ‘George Washington’ when they look at that letter pair? Once I let my nose follow that clue, I started noticing other bigrams also corresponded to presidential initials. Jefferson, Jackson, and Teddy Roosevelt’s especially popped out at me.”

He paused, motioned them into the office. A trim, blonde woman of about thirty-five was standing near the middle of the room.

“Michelle Franks,” she said, putting out her hand.

Nimec and Ricci quickly introduced themselves.

She said, “We won’t waste precious time with a long explanation…”

Good, Ricci and Nimec both thought at once.

“… but want you to understand how we got this figured, and whipped together the chart in front of you.”

“What Palardy did was take a circle and divide it into sixty equal parts by drawing lines across its diameter,” Carmichael said.

“Sixty parts, as in sixty minutes on the clock, ” Michelle said.

Carmichael nodded. “It was obvious to me in Palardy’s office that each of his character groups were substitutions. But my first guess was that they stood for letters or syllables, when in fact they stood for numerals.”

Right, Ricci thought. Get on with it.

“When Jimmy got his hunch about the groups representing the initials of United States presidents—” Michelle began.

“Every one of them early presidents,” Carmichael cut in. “There were no RRs, as in 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 we’d have the know-how and experience to swing it, but the laptop thief wouldn’t.”

“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:

The one below it read:

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.”