Blood Pact

EPILOGUE

Back in their suite after dinner Otto spent a couple of minutes on his computer and then headed out the door. “Be back in a flash,” he said.

McGarvey, his arm in a sling, was on the balcony watching the night traffic. It was just about eleven in the evening and Seville was coming alive. Party hour here usually didn’t get into full swing until around midnight, and the riots seemed to have come to a sudden end for no known reason, and Spain was ready to have some fun again. At least for now.

The CNI had cleared them to leave first thing in the morning after forty-eight hours of intense questioning. Montessier had carried no identification, the flash drive they’d retrieved from his body was blank, and his encrypted phone had been sent to headquarters in Madrid for examination.

Major Prieto had cleared their release with someone very high in the government. No one wanted the politically embarrassing situation to continue to spin out of control. Crimes had been committed by the CNI on American soil, and by Americans on Spanish soil. Never mind Cuba, and no one was willing to talk about the so-called Voltaire Society. Spain wanted the problem to disappear.

No cipher key existed, because the diary that was supposedly stolen from a bank vault in Bern was a myth. The entire operation had been a failure from the start; intelligent men chasing after a will-o’-the-wisp, so intently that lives had been lost for no reason.

“Do not come back to Spain, señors,” Major Pietro had said to them at the end.

Otto had first called Louise to tell her that everything was fine, that he and Mac were okay. She would have Audie brought up tomorrow, and in the meantime Otto arranged for a CIA aircraft to pick them up. It was at this moment over the Atlantic inbound for Seville’s San Pablo Airport, and would be touching down around 7:00 A.M.

McGarvey went to the minibar for another beer, when Otto came back, a big smile on his face. He was carrying a small leather-bound book that looked very old.

“No one who knew that Montessier was staying here under the name of Paul Harris was left alive,” he said. “No ID on the body, no hotel key card, nada.”

“You got in?”

“Four-oh-seven. I hacked the hotel’s computer, switched our room number with his, then called the front desk and told them that I had lost my key, so they made me a new one.”

“To four-oh-seven.”

“Bingo,” Rencke said, and he began to hop from one foot to the other like he used to do in the old days when he was excited. “I was there two minutes ago and found this tucked in a pocket of his suitcase.” He held up the book. “The arrogant bastard didn’t think that anyone would find him and come looking.”

“Jacob Ambli’s diary?”

“Yup.”

“No good without the key.”

Otto’s grin widened. “I figured it out on the way up in the elevator,” he said. He opened the diary to the first page, and began to read, slowly, but in English:

“For the Sanctified, Caesarean, Catholic Pontiff, the Bishop of Rome, his holiness Gregory XVI, our Sacred and Blessed Pope.”

Otto looked up. “And it goes on for an entire page and a half about grace, and peace and that kind of crap, along with a list of all of Vatican’s holdings, including those most recently saved souls in the New World — all of it in his name, of course.

“Then there’s a couple of more pages about Mexico City, about the Spanish military expedition to Northern Mexico under the orders of the SMOM, and signed Yr. Most Obedient servant Father Jacob Ambli.”

Otto looked up again. “From there it’s mostly sketch maps and daily logs. I haven’t read it all.”

“Is it in plain text after all?”

“No, it’s Latin, but encrypted. Easy enough to sight read if you know the trick and go slowly. Two keys. First is that it’s a substitution cipher based on the Fibonacci chain of numbers. Our military used to use it for their crypto machines back in the sixties.”

“Never heard of it.”

“No reason, unless you’re a geek like me. A mathematician by the name of Leonardo Fibonacci came up with it just as a curiosity — though it’s been used for lots of stuff — especially in the past forty or fifty years in electronics. It starts out with the number one, then one again, then two, then three, then five, then eight then thirteen. You just have to add the previous two numbers to come up with the next. Add three and five to get eight. Add eight and five to get thirteen.”

McGarvey was following him. “What’s the second key?”

“Figuring what number in the chain to start with — it’s a different starting point for each sentence, and then always subtracting just enough so that the resultant number never gets above twenty-three — that’s how many letters are in the ancient Latin alphabet.”

McGarvey had never seen Otto happier, except when he and Louise were with Audie.

“You just have to do the addition and subtractions in your head as you go along, and then figure out a few of the substitutions, and after that it’s a piece of cake. So now what? Do we take this home with us?”

McGarvey had known the answer almost from the beginning, and he shook his head. “Photograph the pages on your iPad, and include the explanation of the two keys and send it to everyone. The Vatican and SMOM, Spain, Cuba, our people — Callahan will want to know if all of this was worth something — and the Voltaire Society.”

Otto held up Jacob’s diary. “What about this?”

“We’ll have the hotel deliver it to the Archives after we’ve left Spain’s airspace,” McGarvey said. “That’s where it belongs.” He got the Heineken and opened it. “And then we’re finally done.”

“Yeah, right,” Otto said. “Until the next time.”