Early Warning (28 page)

Manhattan

Something was nagging at Devlin, just as it had at Edwardsville. It was too easy.

Not the killing; that was hard. No matter how good you were at it, it was always hard. He was up against trained killers, and although they were not in his class, and he was armed with superior intelligence and firepower, each of them had presented a different challenge.

Once he had blown his own cover to the Iranian, things happened exactly as he expected them to. There had been one last message, blasted from the hotel to the operatives still in the field, which is exactly what Devlin had hoped would happen. That would be the stand-down message, or the save-yourself message, or the await-further-instructions message, with maybe a verse of two of the Koran thrown in for good measure. The boys and girls back at Fort Meade would know. All that mattered to Devlin was that Arash Kohanloo had just burned his entire operation.

The face-recognition software at NSA is the best in the world, and the little UAV had done its job well. Within five minutes The Building had processed the visual information and had relayed it back to him via a series of cutouts:

KOHANLOO, ARASH. Iranian businessman, with many financial interests in the West. At home, he professed to be a devout Muslim and was tight with the mullahs, but once outside the
dar al-Islam
he could be as much a party animal as any Saudi princeling. He was a familiar type in all religions, a hypocrite, but why he wanted to involve himself in something like this—well, that was the mystery. Actually, it was not all that big of a mystery; in Devlin’s experience, Money and Love, or her naughty sister, Lust, pretty much explained everything.

Devlin opened up his netbook and logged onto a secure, encrypted channel to Seelye:

KOHANLOO—WHAT’S THE CONNECTION?

TO WHOM? came the immediate reply.

DON’T BULLSHIT ME, DAD.

TO SKORZENY YOU MEAN?

EXACTAMUNDO

WORKING ON IT

WORK HARDER. WHAT’S TYLER’S PLAY IN THIS?

A pause, then:

NO PLAY. HE’S LETTING NYPD HANDLE IT. DOESN’T WANT TO PANIC THE COUNTRY

LETTING ME HANDLE IT, YOU MEAN

SAME THING

LIKE BLOWING UP TIMES SQUARE HASN’T ALREADY PANICKED THE COUNTRY. IT’S ABOUT THE ELECTION, RIGHT?

IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT THE ELECTION. HASSETT HAD A MEETING WITH SINCLAIR, AND HE’S BEATING TYLER’S BRAINS OUT 24/7

So that was the play. Tyler didn’t want to panic America, as he had the last time with his dumb stunt of practically negotiating with the terrorists, so he was letting the cops deal with it. With the information Devlin could give them, they’d be able to run them down and wrap things up pretty easily. He could see it now, as Tyler saw it: a bunch of dead people followed by a slew of yellow ribbons, some official boo-hoo, and then Jeb himself standing at the center of the Square, promising New Yorkers and the American People that a new Times Square would rise gloriously from the ashes, better and cleaner and safer than before, a place for families to disport themselves in freedom from fear.

And, of course, that this would never happen again. If Devlin could link Kohanloo to the Iranian government, there’s no telling what Tyler wouldn’t do to win the election. The President not only had a bully pulpit, he had the combined weight of the American armed services behind him, and taking on, or even taking out, Iran would satisfy the public’s bloodlust. Plus there was a big swath of his constituency that had been wanting payback for the hostage crisis since the Carter administration. Even Sinclair’s media empire would have to look the other way, as long as he did it quickly enough.

So he’d sealed off the city, but hadn’t sent in troops. Not bad. Devlin would have played it the same way, especially with himself as his ace in the hole. But the discovery of Kohnaloo had just ramped up the stakes. If this was an operation financed by the Iranians and executed by Hamas, there was no way Tyler was going to be able to keep the lid on it.

Seelye read his mind: SO GET THIS OVER WITH PRONTO

ROGER THAT, POP he wrote, and signed off.

Thus the operation had fallen silent, the shooting had stopped as the enemy regrouped. Depending on how well they had canvassed the city, and how long they had planned, the surviving shooters would have gone to ground by now, each to a separate bolt-hole while the Iranian plotted the next move. And, if past experience were any guide, his next move would be to get the hell out of New York and leave his team to its fate.

Which meant things were working out exactly the way Devlin expected them to. Which was another thing that worried him.

Things never went according to plan: the first rule of warfare was that if they did, your plan wasn’t working. He had lived long in the worlds of violence and deception, so long that not only could he tell them apart, he had long ago realized that deception was superior.

Which was why he had blown his surveillance. By sending the shooters scurrying—by forcing them into Plan B—he had accomplished two objectives. The first was to put the heat on Mr. Big and make him do something either expected or stupid, which amounted to the same thing. The second was to force the NYPD SWAT units to stand down; he didn’t need to bump into them while he was carrying out his orders, to run the risk of exposure if one of the cops happened upon him. He needed the fuzz out of the way, and so he relied on the dead-solid-certain fact that when there was trouble, New York wanted an immediate and overwhelming response, but the instant the shooting stopped, the residents demanded flowers in the barrels of the guns and cue the defense lawyers. It had to be the most suicidal city in the nation, professing “never again,” but inviting it constantly.

He had taken out six more of the shooters since his encounter in the New Victory. Three of them came before the cell phone security alert had been raised.

The first was a woman, and that always made it difficult for him. He could not control his sentimental streak, or whatever it was, because killing a woman reminded him of his mother’s death in the Rome airport, when a group of very bad men, convinced of the rightness and morality of their cause, had robbed him forever of her smile, her laugh, her presence, her spirit, her soul.

Well, perhaps not forever. On the subject, the afterlife, religion, however you named it, he was agnostic. Certainly, he had never seen any evidence of its power at the moment of death, when the Angel of Death inhabited him and he did his duty by country, if not God.

He shot her from a distance, as she was leaning out a window of the Brill Building. He hoped she had a song on her lips, but if she was like her fellow Muslims, she probably didn’t; the Brill Building was Tin Pan Alley and the heyday of New York showbiz in brick, steel, and mortar, home to hundreds of music and entertainment companies. In the old days, everybody who was anybody in the music business was headquartered in Lefcourt’s Brill Building. Firing from across the street, the MRP took her out clean with a single shot to the head, and she fell eight stories down, landing on Broadway with a sickening thud that he could hear two hundred yards away, although of course she didn’t feel a thing.

The next man the Angel visited was more up close and personal. Moving in the shadows, Devlin had found him in a storeroom of one of the many pizza places that inhabited the square. Pretending to be a looter, he had easily disarmed him and then eviscerated him with his own kukri knife. He left the body on the pizza counter,
pour encourager les autres
.

The third was another man. At least, Devlin thought it was a man, but the only good look he got was at the back of his head lining up a night-sight shot on 47th Street as he ran east. Devlin had been triangulating his GPS signal, watched the hinky behavior, and when the guy tossed the cell phone in a trash can, he put one through the back of his skull.

The other three he had already forgotten about. Track and kill. Track and kill. The only trick to it was for him to stay invisible, but there was no place for invisibility like a battlefield that had been emptied of civilians: the only bodies moving out there were either cops, who were easy to spot, even in plain clothes, or the bad guys, who were even easier to spot. You could say a lot about the NYPD, but one thing you could never say was that the front-line men and women were cowards.

In a sense, he had been fighting this enemy since 1985, although he didn’t realize it at the time, and had made it his life’s work to understand how he thought and, more important, what he feared. Forget all that crap about pig’s blood and ham sandwiches and unclean women and women in general; what he most feared was humiliation, especially humiliation in death. In this he was not unlike the great hero of the Trojans, who had begged Achilles that, however their battle ended, humiliation should not be a part of it. But, of course, Achilles had spurned that offer as a sign of weakness, killed Hector, and dragged his body around the walls of the city with his chariot.

In Devlin’s opinion, Achilles had gotten exactly what was coming to him, divine karma, when he was killed by the coward Paris with a lucky shot to the one unprotected area of his body, his heel.

Would that be his fate? Would his pride eventually bring him down? Since his conquest of Milverton, there was no man who could take him, no man that he knew about at least. But he also knew that there were hundreds of them out there, thousands, all itching for the chance to take him on. They would not know him by name, or even by reputation, but they would all be animated, as all the best young fighters were, by the notion that there was somebody out there older and better than they, and that they would not be warriors until they had tested their mettle against his.

Very well, then: bring them on. There was only one thing he feared.

The lucky amateur. The 21st-century Paris.

Fort Meade, Maryland

Major Atwater sat at his desk, puzzling over the material his chief had assigned to him. Of all the things to have do at this time, when the country was riveted by what was going on in New York City, this scut work was the worst. Sifting through ancient ciphers—what a waste of time. Stuff that had been gone over and gone over for decades, centuries even, with no one the wiser. Useless crap.

The
Thirty-Nine Steps
? Not even the figment of a screen-writer’s imagination, since in the original novel by Buchan the thirty-nine steps were exactly that—thirty-nine steps leading down to the sea; it was only in the Hitchcock movie that the steps were “an organization of spies” revealed by the mentalist. How lame was that?

The second message obviously referred to the Poe Cryptographic Challenge, which had been driving amateur cryptologists crazy since the 19th century. It took until 1992 for someone to crack the first substitution cipher, and until 2000 for the second one to be solved. And these were ciphers dreamed up by a drunk living in the Bronx and Baltimore.

Substitution cipher—maybe that was the clue, and not the cipher itself. Substitution ciphers were among the oldest and easiest to crack: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had used one in
The Adventure of the Dancing Men
, and for some reason they were much favored by fugitive lovers, furtively communicating by means of crude stick figures. As if anybody couldn’t figure out in a heartbeat that the most recurring stick figure would stand for the letter “e,” and figure the rest out from there. It was nearly impossible to compose an English sentence—or a sentence in any Western language, for that matter—without using the letter “e,” and even though that Frenchy Perec had managed the feat in
La Disparition
and Ernest Wright had pulled off the lipogram even earlier in
Gadsby
thirty years before.

The things that occupied the human mind. Substitution ciphers, mirror writing, inverted mirror writing…those damn mystery writers never knew when to leave well enough alone.

The third was a bit more complex: It was unsigned.: UG RMK CSXHMUFMKB TOXG CMVATLUIV. Any first-year student at the Wyoming Cryptography School, where he had gone as an undergraduate, could spot that:
Have His Carcase
by Dorothy L. Sayers, the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey. “We are discovered. Save Yourself.” Piece of cake.

The fourth was a series of numbers: 317, 8, 92, 73, 112, 79, 67, 318, 28, 96, 107, 41, 631, 78, 146, 397, 118, 98, 114.

Beale Ciphers, not that that was much of a help. The three ciphers, first published in a pamphlet in Virginia in 1885, were said to show the way to a great treasure, but only the second cipher had ever been cracked—it turned out to be a numerological correspondence to the wording of the Declaration of Independence which, when read
en clair
, said:

Lots of luck with that. No one—not even the finest minds at NSA or CIA, just screwing around in their spare time, had broken the other two; if they had, they might have found the buried treasure and retired very wealthy men. So wealthy, in fact, that they might even have been able to afford their houses in Potomac and Great Falls.

The fifth was the familiar series of 87 characters, squiggles based on the letter “E,” arranged in three rows:

Again, every first-year student knew this one. It was the secret message sent by the famous composer, Sir Edward Elgar, to his inamorata, Miss Dora Penny—“Dorabella”—one of the recipients of a dedication in the great
Enigma Variations
for orchestra. This one was tough, because most cryptographers were not musicians and most musicians were not cryptographers, although come to think of it their disciplines had a lot in common, since each was based on writing in a language that bore no resemblance to the meaning, except by fiat.

But the
Enigma Variations
were tricky, even by musical standards. Elgar had composed a series of variations on a theme that, he claimed, was never actually heard in the piece itself. That is to say, the “theme”—angular and descriptive, which led some to suggest that it was nothing more than the topographic outlines of the Malvern Hills that Elgar knew so well, expressed in music—was only the counterpoint to the Unheard Melody. Scholars had spent most of the last century trying to identify the hidden tune.

Well, Major Atwater was no musician, so he didn’t much care about the mysterious melody. What he had in front of him, the famous “Dorabella” set of squiggles, was much more interesting.

For a century, amateurs and professionals alike had been trying to break the code, mostly in expectation of discovering some Victorian-Edwardian raciness secreted within, like one of the “snuggeries” that so feverishly occupied the Victorian pornographic imagination. And that the fact that Elgar had further memorialized Ms. Penny in the great orchestral work itself indicated that his affection for her ran very deep. “These are deep waters indeed, Watson,” as Sherlock Holmes famously said in some adventure or another. Despite the fact that a very high percentage of intelligence professionals were Sherlock Holmes fans, Major Atwater had never quite managed to see the charm of a world in which it was always 1895.

And then there was “Masterman XX.”

Work backward. Whoever assembled these ciphers had meant for that to be the punch line. It had to have some meaning. The reference was obvious—the famous “Double-Cross System” developed by the British during World War II. It was essentially a method of doubling captured German agents, returning them home, and then using them to spread disinformation. The XX stood both for the double-cross itself and for the Committee of Twenty, which oversaw the operations. Crude by contemporary standards of HUMINT tradecraft, to be sure, but there was always a first time for everything, and after the war, as the Allies split apart to become antagonists, it became the template for every doubled and re-doubled agent, every disinformation and false-flag operation that the American and the Soviets ran against each other.

He ran his hands through his hair. Already, it was thinning, he had to admit that. Life just wasn’t fair. Time to think this through again.

A series of ciphers, each one famous. Some easily solved, like the substitution ciphers, and others the object of countless efforts to crack them by amateur and professional alike. What was the common thread?

There wasn’t any. Literary references, imaginary ciphers, real ciphers, love-letter ciphers…what were the common themes?

Love and money, unless you counted the double-cross. But weren’t double-crosses always about either love or money? He felt like he was living in some kind of wacky film noir, a modern-day Philip Marlowe transplanted to suburban Washington, but with exactly zero chance of a hot blonde walking through the door with a big problem and a little piece of money.

Hang on. Follow your own damn logic.
Think.
That’s what they pay you do.

No, not just think.
Associate
. That’s what code-makers did, and it was up to him to reverse-engineer the damn thing, like the Japanese after World War II, trying to figure out how Western technology worked, and how they could do it better.

A code consisted not only of the actual cipher itself, but the overall concept behind it. In the Beale cipher, for example, the clues to the location of the buried treasure were hidden behind the referential numbers, but the real key was the Declaration, which obviously meant something to the code-maker. This is where it got tricky.

The Declaration might have had a primal, emotional resonance for the man calling himself Thomas Jefferson Beale—his very name would suggest that—but it also might,
might
be totally coincidental. His real name might not have been Thomas Jefferson Beale, and the use of the Jefferson’s great call to arms might simply have reflected its ubiquity in American culture at that time. Correlation is not causation.

But, like master bomb-makers, master code-makers saw their work as a higher calling, an art form so special that they could not resist leaving some clue to their identity, or to the code’s purpose. Like the medieval artisans who would sneak signatures onto their work, in the hopes of living forever in stone or wood, the code-writers each had a style that spoke to their purpose.
This is why I am doing this
was, at root, the code behind every code, and if the applause came decades or centuries down the road, then so be it.

So why was he doing this?

Love and money. Money and love. That the code-writer was a man was a safe assumption. Most code-writers were men, and even if it was politically incorrect, it was a safe assumption that a woman had not sent these missives to Seelye—or, if she had, she was merely a courier. Men loved numbers, codes, statistics, hidden meanings, conspiracy theories. Not every man, of course, nor was every woman automatically ruled out as a participant. But every now and then you just had to play the odds, and the hell with the feelings of some female professor at Harvard.

He looked at the assemblage again, and again. Waited for it to fall into place. Waited for it to assume shape and form and meaning. Waited for it to reveal itself, to expose itself, naked, to his gaze. It was almost erotic.

Suddenly, he saw it. What a fool he had been. What fools they had all been.

Love. The Dancing Men were about love, the kind of mad love that careers out of the past to curse the present.
Have His Carcase
was about the Playfair cipher—hell, it was practically a “how-to” guide to the damn thing—but it was also a story of discovered lovers. And who was more emblematic of the 19th century than the tortured, malevolent genius of Edgar Allan Poe?

Line them up: prelude, theme, development, deceptive cadence (the Beale cipher, although it too must have resonance), climax, and coda. And what was the climax?

Dorabella.

It wasn’t about sight at all. It was about
sound
.

It was all about Elgar and Dorabella.

This was what the culture got and deserved for ignoring one of its principal senses—hearing—in favor of its default mode, sight. What if the squiggles really were what some had suggested, just a bunch of jocular shit, a goof by an older man impossibly in love with a younger woman, who had hidden his real message, his declaration of love
inside the music
?

Knowing that, even in the 19th century, when the standard of education was infinitely higher than it was today, Elgar might have counted on the once-remove that music gave him. After all, he lived in the days of the fictional My-croft Holmes, Sherlock’s arguably smarter elder brother, who often
was
the British government when he was not successfully masquerading as a civil servant. At the apogee of British society, in the days before credentialism, that quintessentially American disease of bureaucrats and apparatchiks, Sir Edward would have had a panoply of cultural and linguistic references available to him. No wonder it was in this period that Britain reached its zenith; culturally confident, a synthesis of classical civilization and Anglo-Saxon ferocity, able to subjugate the native Celts and harness their scientific and literary genius in the service of the Empire.

Morse code:
I am. Am I?
A phrase and then the reverse. A yearning, strange and ineffable. Hesitant, coy and coquettish by turns, masterful and manly by others. Everyone assumed that the work was as Elgar said: portraits of various friends. Program music, the scholars called it.

But what if that, too, was all misdirection? What if the central enigma of the
Enigma Variations
wasn’t so enigmatic after all, but hiding right there in plain sight? There, hidden away in one of the lesser variations—not the magisterial “Nimrod,” which had come, like the
Pomp and Circumstance
March No. 1, to symbolize the very spirit of Victorian Britain itself, but the one that
immediately followed it
.

The “Dorabella” variation.

The squiggly “eeees.”

The squiggly, ornamented melodic line of the “Dorabella” Variation, supposedly meant to express the girl’s slight hesitancy in her speech patterns. But listen closer: the variation does not simply depict one person, but two. The strings twitter, but the woodwinds answer.