Riptide

Chapter 11

At 2:00 P.M. precisely, the Plain Jane, moving slowly in the calm water, pulled free of the last tendrils of mist surrounding Ragged Island. Ahead, Hatch could see the white outlines of the Cerberus riding at anchor, its long, sleek superstructure low in the water. Near the waterline, he made out a boarding hatch, with the tall, thin shape of the Captain silhouetted within it, awaiting his arrival.

Cutting the throttle, Hatch angled in alongside the bulk of the Cerberus. It was cool and still under the vessel's shadow.

"Quite a little boat you've got here," Hatch called out as he came to a stop opposite the Captain. The ship dwarfed the Plain Jane.

"Biggest in Thalassa's fleet," Neidelman replied. "She's basically a floating laboratory and back-office research station. There's only so much equipment we can off-load to the island. The big stuff—the electron microscopes and C14 particle accelerators, for example—will stay on the ship."

"I was curious about the harpoon gun up in the bows," Hatch said. "Do you spear a blue whale every now and then, when the deckhands get peckish?"

Neidelman grinned. "That betrays the ship's origins, my friend. It was designed as a state-of-the-art whaler by a Norwegian company about six years ago. Then the international ban on whaling happened, and the ship became a costly white elephant even before it was fitted out. Thalassa got it for an excellent price. All the whaling davits and skinning machinery were removed, but nobody ever got around to dismantling the harpoon gun." He nodded over his shoulder. "Come on, let's see what the boys are up to."

Hatch secured the Plain Jane to the side of the Cerberus, then ran the gangplank across to the ship's boarding hatch. He followed Neidelman through the hatch and into a long, harrow corridor, painted a light gray. The Captain led him past several empty laboratories and a wardroom, then stopped outside a door marked COMPUTER ROOM.

"We've got more computing power behind that door than a small university," Neidelman said, a trace of pride in his voice. "But it's not just for number crunching. There's also a navigational expert system and a neural-net autopilot. In emergencies, the ship can practically run itself."

"I was wondering where all the people were," Hatch said.

"We keep only a skeleton crew on board. It's the same with the rest of the vessels. It's Thalassa's philosophy to maintain a fluid resource pool. If necessary, we could have a dozen scientists here tomorrow. Or a dozen ditchdiggers, for that matter. But we try to operate with the smallest, ablest team possible."

"Cost containment," Hatch said jokingly. "Must make the Thalassa accountants happy."

"Not only that," Neidelman replied, quite seriously. "It makes sense from a security perspective. No point tempting fate."

The Captain turned a corner and walked past a heavy metal door that was partially ajar. Glancing in, Hatch could make out various pieces of lifesaving equipment attached to wall cleats. There was also a rack of shotguns and two smaller weapons of shiny metal he couldn't identify.

"What are those?" he asked, pointing to the stubby, fat-bellied devices. "They look like pint-sized vacuum cleaners."

Neidelman glanced inside. "Flechettes," he said.

"Excuse me?"

"A kind of nail gun. It shoots tiny, finned pieces of tungsten-carbide wire."

"Sounds more painful than dangerous."

Neidelman smiled thinly. "At five thousand rounds per minute, fired at speeds over three thousand feet per second, they're plenty dangerous." He closed the door and tested the handle. "This room shouldn't be left open. I'll have to speak to Streeter about it."

"What the hell do you need them around for?" Hatch frowned.

"Remember, Malin, the Cerberus isn't always in such friendly waters as rural Maine," the Captain replied, ushering him down the corridor. "Often, we have to work in shark-infested areas. When you're face to face with a Great White, you'll quickly come to appreciate what a flechette can do. Last year, in the Coral Sea, I saw one shred a shark from snout to tail in a second and a half."

Hatch followed the Captain up a set of steps to the next deck. Neidelman paused for a moment outside an unmarked door, then rapped loudly.

"I'm busy!" came a querulous voice.

Neidelman gave Hatch a knowing smile and eased open the door, revealing a dimly lit stateroom. Hatch followed the Captain inside, tripped over something, and looked around, blinking, as his eyes became accustomed to the low light. He saw that the far wall and its portholes were entirely covered by banks of rackmounted electronic equipment: oscilloscopes, CPUs, and countless pieces of dedicated electronics whose purpose Hatch couldn't begin to guess. The floor was ankle-deep in crumpled papers, dented soda cans, candy wrappers, dirty socks, and underwear. A ship's cot set into one of the far walls was a whirlpool of linen, its sheets strewn across mattress and floor alike. The smell of ozone and hot electronics filled the room, and the only light came from numerous flickering screens. In the midst of the chaos sat the rumpled-looking figure in flowered shirt and Bermuda shorts, his back to them, typing feverishly at a keyboard.

"Kerry, can you spare a minute?" Neidelman said. "I've got Dr. Hatch with me."

Wopner turned away from the screen and blinked first at Neidelman, then Hatch. "It's your party," he said in a high, irritated voice. "But you need everything else done, like, yesterday." He pronounced the word yestidday. "I've spent the last forty-eight hours setting up the network and haven't done jack shit with the code."

Neidelman smiled indulgently. "I'm sure you and Dr. St. John can spare a few minutes for the expedition's senior partner." He turned to Hatch. "You couldn't tell from appearances, but Kerry is one of the most brilliant cryptanalysts outside the NSA."

"Yeah, right," said Wopner, but Hatch could see he was pleased by the compliment.

"Quite a rig you've got here," Hatch said as he closed the door behind him. "Is that a CAT scan I see there on the left?"

"Very funny." Wopner pushed his glasses up his nose and sniffed. "You think this is something? This is just the backup system. They shipped the main rig off to the island yesterday morning. Now that's something."

"Are the on-line tests complete?" Neidelman asked.

"Doing the last series now," Wopner replied, shaking a lock of greasy hair from his eyes and swiveling back to the monitor.

"A team's completing the installation of the island network this afternoon," Neidelman said to Hatch. "Like Kerry said, this is the redundant system, an exact duplicate of the Ragged Island computer grid. Expensive way of doing things, but a real time saver. Kerry, show him what I mean."

"Yassuh." Wopner tapped a few keys and a blank screen winked to life overhead. Hatch looked up to see a wireframe diagram of Ragged Island appear on the screen, rotating slowly around a central axis.

"The backbone routers all have redundant mates." A few more keystrokes, and a fine tracery of green lines was superimposed on the rendering of the island. "Linked by fiber-optic cables to the central hub."

Neidelman gestured at the screen. "Everything on the island— from the pumps, to the turbines, to the compressors, to the derricks—are servo-linked into the network. We'll be able to control anything on the island from the command center. One instruction, and the pumps will fire up; another command will operate A winch; a third will turn off the lights in your office; and so forth."

"What he said," Wopner added. "Totally extensible, with thin OS layers on the remote clients. And everything's tweaked up the wazoo, believe you me, miniature data packets and all the rest. It's a huge net—a thousand ports in one collision domain—but there's zero latency. You wouldn't believe the ping time on this bad boy."

"In English, please," Hatch said. "I never learned to speak Nerd. Hey, what's that?" He pointed to another screen, which showed an overhead view of what appeared to be a medieval village. Small figures of knights and sorcerers were arrayed in various attitudes of attack and defense.

"That's Sword of Blackthorne. A role-playing game I designed. I'm dungeon master for three on-line games," He stuck out his lower lip. "Got a problem with that?"

"Not if the Captain doesn't," said Hatch, glancing at Neidelman. It was clear that the Captain gave his subordinates a fair amount of freedom. And it seemed to Hatch that—however unlikely—Neidelman was genuinely fond of this eccentric young man.

There was a loud beep, then a column of numbers scrolled up one of the screens.

"That's it," Wopner said, squinting at the data. "Scylla's done."

"Scylla?" Hatch asked.

"Yeah. Scylla is the system on board the ship. Charybdis is the one on the island."

"Network testing's finished," Neidelman explained. "Once the island installation is complete, all we have to do is dump the programming to Charybdis. Everything is tested here first, then downloaded to the island." He glanced at his watch. "I've got some odds and ends to attend to. Kerry, I know Dr. Hatch would like to hear more about your and Dr. St. John's work on the Macallan codes. Malin, I'll see you topside." Neidelman left the stateroom, closing the door behind him.

Wopner returned to his manic typing, and for a minute Hatch wondered if the youth planned to ignore him completely. Then, without looking away from the terminal, Wopner picked up a sneaker and hurled it against the far wall. This was followed by a heavy paperback book entitled Coding Network Subroutines in C++.

"Hey, Chris!" Wopner yelled. "Time for the dog and pony show!"

Hatch realized that Wopner must have been aiming at a small door set in the far wall of the stateroom. "Allow me," he said, stepping toward the door. "Your aim's not so good."

Opening the door, Hatch saw another stateroom, identical in size but completely different in all other ways. It was well lit, clean, and spare. The Englishman, Christopher St. John, sat at a wooden table in the center of the room, pecking slowly away at a Royal typewriter.

"Hello," Hatch said. "Captain Neidelman volunteered your services for a few minutes."

St. John stood and picked up a few old volumes from the desk, a fussy expression creasing his smooth, buttery face. "A pleasure to have you with us, Dr. Hatch," he said, shaking his hand, not looking at all pleased with the interruption.

"Call me Malin," said Hatch.

St. John bowed slightly as he followed Hatch back into Wopner's stateroom.

"Pull up a seat, Malin," Wopner said. "I'll explain the real work I've been doing, and Chris can tell you about all those dusty tomes he's been lifting and dropping in the back room. We work together. Right, old chum?"

St. John compressed his lips. Even out here on the water, Hatch sensed a certain air of dust and cobwebs about the historian. He belongs in an antiquarian bookshop, not on a treasure hunt, he thought.

Kicking aside the detritus, Hatch pulled a chair up next to Wopner, who pointed to one of the nearby screens, currently blank. A few rapidly typed commands, and a digitized picture of Macallan's treatise and its cryptic marginalia appeared on the screen.

"Herr Neidelman feels that the second half of the journal contains vital information about the treasure," said Wopner. "So we're taking a two-track approach to break the code. I do the computers. Chris here does the history."

"The Captain mentioned a figure of two billion dollars," Hatch said. "How did he arrive at that?"

"Well now," said St. John, clearing his throat as if preparing for a lecture. "Like most pirates, Ockham's fleet was a ragtag collection of various ships he'd captured: a couple of galleons, a few brigantines, a fast sloop, and, I believe, a large East Indiaman. Nine ships in all. We know they were so heavily laden they were dangerously unmaneuverable. You simply add up their cargo capacities, and combine that with the manifests of ships Ockham looted. We know, for example, that Ockham took fourteen tons of gold from the Spanish Plate Fleet alone, and ten times that in silver. From other ships he looted cargoes of lapis, pearls, amber, diamonds, rubies, carnelian, ambergris, jade, ivory, and lignum vitae. Not to mention ecclesiastical treasures, taken from towns along the Spanish Main." He unconsciously adjusted his bow tie, face shining with pleasure at the recital.

"Excuse me, but did you say fourteen tons of gold?" Hatch asked, dumfounded.

"Absolutely," said St. John.

"Fort Knox afloat," said Wopner, licking his lips.

"And then there's St. Michael's Sword," St. John added. "An artifact of inestimable value by itself. We're dealing here with the greatest pirate treasure ever assembled. Ockham was brilliant and gifted, an educated man, which made him all the more dangerous." He pulled a thin plastic folder from a shelf and handed it to Hatch. "Here's a biographical extract one of our researchers prepared. I think you'll find that, for once, the legends don't exaggerate. His reputation was so terrible that all he had to do was sail his flagship into harbor, hoist the Jolly Roger, and fire a broadside, and everyone from the citizens to the priest came rushing down with their valuables."

"And the virgins?" Wopner cried, feigning wide-eyed interest. "What happened to them?"

St. John paused, his eyes half closed. "Kerry, do you mind?"

"No, really," said Kerry, all impish innocence. "I want to know."

"You know very well what happened to the virgins," St. John snapped, and turned back to Hatch. "Ockham had a following of two thousand men on his nine ships. He needed large crews for boarding and firing the great guns. Those men were usually given twenty-four hours, er, leave, in the unfortunate town. The results were quite hideous."

"It wasn't only the ships that had twelve-inchers, if you know what I mean," Wopner leered.

"You see what I have to endure," murmured St. John to Hatch.

"Terribly, terribly sorry about that, old chap," Wopner replied in a travesty of an English accent. "Some people have no sense of humor," he told Hatch.

"Ockham's success," St. John continued briskly, "became a liability. He didn't know how to bury such a large treasure. This wasn't a few hundredweight in gold coin that could be slipped quietly under a rock. That's where Macallan came in. And, indirectly, that's where we come in. Because Macallan kept his secret diary in code."

He patted the books under his arm. "These are texts on cryptology," he said. "This one is Polygraphiae, by Johannes Trithemius, published in the late fifteen hundreds. It was the Western world's first treatise on codebreaking. And this one is Porta's De Furtivus Literarum Notis, a text all Elizabethan spies knew practically by heart. I've got half a dozen others, covering the state of the cryptographic art up to Macallan's time."

"They sound worse than my second-year med school textbooks."

"They're fascinating, actually," St. John said, a flush of enthusiasm briefly coloring his tone.

"Was code writing common in those days?" Hatch asked curiously.

St. John laughed, a kind of seal bark that gave his ruddy cheeks a brief jiggle. "Common? It was practically universal, one of the essential arts of diplomacy and war. Both the British and Spanish governments had departments that specialized in making and breaking ciphers. Even some pirates had crewmen who could crack codes. After all, ships papers included all kinds of interesting coded documents."

"But coded how?"

"They were usually nomenclators—long lists of word substitutions. For example, in a message, the word 'eagle' might be substituted for 'King George' and 'daffodils' for 'doubloons'—that sort of thing. Sometimes they included simple substitution alphabets, where a letter, number, or symbol replaced a letter of the alphabet, one for one."

"And Macallan's code?"

"The first part of the journal was written with a rather clever monophonic substitution code. The second—we're still working on that."

"That's my department," said Wopner, pride and a trace of jealousy mixing in his voice. "It's all on the computer." He struck a key and a long string of gibberish appeared on the screen:

AB3 RQB7 E50LA W IEW D8P OL QS9MN WX 4JR 2K WN 18N7 WPDO EKS N2T YX ER9 W DF3 DEI FK IE DF9F DFS K DK F6RE DF3 V3E IE4DI 2F 9GE DF W FEIB5 MLER BLK BV6 Fl PET BOP IBSDF K2LJ BVF EIO PUOER WB13 OPDJK LBL JKF

"Here's the ciphertext of the first code," he said. "How did you break it?"

"Oh, please. The letters of the English alphabet occur in fixed ratios, E being the commonest letter, X being the rarest. You create what we call a contact chart of the code symbols and letter pairs. Bang! The computer does the rest."

St. John waved his hand dismissively. "Kerry is programming the computer attacks against the code, but I am supplying the historical data. Without the old cipher tables, the computer is hopeless. It only knows what's been programmed into it."

Wopner turned around in his seat and stared at St. John. "Hopeless? Fact is, big mama here would have cracked that code without your precious cipher tables. It just would have taken a little longer, is all."

"No longer than twenty monkeys typing at random might take to write King Lear," said St. John, with another brief bark of laughter.

"Haw haw. No longer than one St. John typing with two fingers on that Royal shitwriter back there. Jeez, get a laptop. And a life." Wopner turned back to Hatch. "Well, to make a long story short, here's how it decoded."

There was a flurry of keystrokes and the screen split, showing the code on one side and the plaintext on the other. Hatch looked at it eagerly.

The 2nd of June, Anno D. 1696. The pirate Ockham hath taken our fleet, scuttled the ships, and butcherd every soull. Our man-of-war scandalously struck her colours without a fight and the captain went to his ende blubbering like a babe. I alone was spared, clapped in chaines and straightaway taken down to Ockham's cabin, where the blackguard drewe a saber against my person and said, Lete God build his owen damned church, I have ye a newe commission. And then he placed in front of me the articalls. Lete this journal bear witnesse before God that I refused to sign...

"Amazing," breathed Hatch as he came to the end of the screen. "Can I read more?"

"I'll print out a copy for you," said Wopner, hitting a key. A printer began humming somewhere in the darkened room.

"Basically," said St. John, "the decrypted section of the journal covers Macallan's being taken prisoner, agreeing on pain of death to design the Water Pit, and finding the right island. Unfortunately, Macallan switches to a new code just when they began actual construction. We believe the rest of the journal consists of a description of the design and construction of the Pit itself. And, of course, the secret for getting to the treasure chamber."

"Neidelman said the journal mentions St. Michael's Sword."

"You bet it does," Wopner interrupted, hitting the keys. More text popped up:

Ockham hath unburthened three of his ships in hopes of taking a prize along the coast. Today a long leaden coffin trimmed in golde came ashore with a dozen casks of Jewells. The corsairs say the coffin holds St. Michael's Sword, a costly treasure seized from a Spanish galleon and highly esteemd by the Captain, who swaggerd most shamefully, boasting that it was the greatest prize of the Indies. The Captain hath forbidden the opening of the casket, and it is guarded by day and night. The men are suspicious of each other, and constantly make stryfe. Were it not for the cruell discipline of the Captain, I feare every one would come to a bad end, and shortly.

"And now here's what the second code looks like." Wopner tapped on the keys and the screen filled again:

348345902345823944389234923409234098569023467890234905623490839342908639981234901284912340049490341208950986890734760578356849632409873507839045709234045895390456234826025698345875767087645073405934038909089080564504556034568903459873468907234589073908759087250872345903569659087302

"The old boy got smart," Wopner said. "No more spaces, so we can't go by word shapes. All numbers, too, not a character to be seen. Just look at that fucker."

St. John winced. "Kerry, must you use such language?"

"Oh, I must, old thing, I must."

St. John looked apologetically at Hatch.

"So far," Wopner continued, "this puppy's resisted all of Chris's pretty little cipher tables. So I took the matter into my own hands and wrote a brute-force attack. It's running as we speak."

"Brute-force attack?" Hatch asked.

"You know. An algorithm that runs through a ciphertext, trying all patterns in the order of likelihood. It's just a matter of time."

"A matter of a waste of time," St. John said. "I'm working up a new set of cipher tables from a Dutch book on cryptography. What's needed here is more historical research, not more CPU time. Macallan was a man of his age. He didn't invent this code out of thin air; there must be a historical precedent. We already know it's not a variant of the Shakespeare cipher, or the Rosicrucian cipher, but I'm convinced some lesser-known code in these books will give us the key that we need. It should be obvious to the meanest intelligence—"

"Put a sock in it, willya?" Wopner said. "Face it, Chris old girl, no amount of hitting the history books is gonna break this code. This one's for the computer." He patted a nearby CPU. "We're gonna beat this puppy, right, big mama?" He swiveled around in his chair and opened what Hatch realized was a rack-mounted medical freezer normally used for storing tissue samples. He pulled out an ice-cream sandwich.

"Anybody want a BigOne?" he asked, waving it around.

"I'd as soon eat takeaway tandoori from a motor stop on the M-l," St. John replied with a disgusted expression.

"You Brits should talk," Wopner mumbled through a mouthful of ice cream. "You put meat in your pies, for Chrissake." He brandished the sandwich like a weapon. "You're looking at the perfect food here. Fat, protein, sugar, and carbohydrates. Did I mention fat? You could live on this stuff forever."

"And he probably will, too," St. John said, turning to Hatch. "You should see how many cartons he has stored away in the ship's kitchen."

Wopner frowned. "What, you think I could find enough BigOnes in this jerkwater town to satisfy my habit? Not likely. The skidmarks in my underwear are longer than the whole main street."

"Perhaps you should see a proctologist about that," said Hatch, causing St. John to erupt in a string of grateful barks. The Englishman seemed glad to find an ally.

"Feel free to take a crack, doc." Wopner stood up and, twitching his behind invitingly, made a gesture as if to drop his trousers.

"I would, but I've got a weak stomach," said Hatch. "So you don't care for rural Maine?"

"Kerry won't even take rooms in town," St. John said. "He prefers sleeping on board."

"Believe you me," Wopner said, finishing the ice-cream sandwich, "I don't like boats any more than I like the damn hinterland. But there are things here I need. Electricity, for example. Running water. And AC. As in air-conditioning." He leaned forward, the anemic goatee quivering on his chin as if struggling to retain a foothold. "AC. Gotta have it."

Hatch thought privately that it was probably a good thing Wopner, with his Brooklyn accent and flowered shirts, had little reason to visit the town. The moment he set foot in Stormhaven he would become an object of wonder, like the stuffed, two-headed calf brought out every year at the county fair. He decided it was time to change the subject. "This may sound like a stupid question. But what, exactly, is St. Michael's Sword?"

There was an awkward silence.

"Well, let's see," said St. John, pursing his lips. "I've always assumed it had a jeweled hilt, of course, with chased silver and parcel-gilt, perhaps a multifullered blade, that sort of thing."

"But why would Ockham say it was the greatest prize in the Indies?"

St. John looked a little flummoxed. "I hadn't really thought in those terms. I suppose I don't know, really. Perhaps it has some kind of spiritual or mythical significance. You know, like a Spanish Excalibur."

"But if Ockham had as much treasure as you say, why would he place such an inordinate value on the sword?"

St. John turned a pair of watery eyes on Hatch. "The truth is, Dr. Hatch, nothing in my documentation gives any indication of what St. Michael's Sword is. Only that it was a carefully guarded, deeply revered object. So I'm afraid I can't answer your question."

"I know what it is," said Wopner with a grin.

"What?" asked St. John, falling into the trap.

"You know how men get, so long at sea, no women around, St. Michael's Sword..." he let the phrase fall off into a salacious silence, while a look of shock and disgust blossomed on St. John's face.