Ixeos: Book One of the Ixeos Trilogy (28 page)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

V
asco and Clay stayed the
night at the vault. Marty had come across several more emails from the scientist to the anonymous recipient at LRTD which he had added to his growing file.

“I’m going back with you—I want to see how this Enigma machine works,” he said.

“I’m not sure we can spare you,” Vasco said, flipping through the nonsensical messages. “The comm center op is coming up and we’ve got some other things brewing.”

“I’ll come back with Hannah or Monkey in a few days, whenever their next assignment is. I promise.” Marty turned to Marissa, who was chewing a slice of bread dipped in oil. “You can spare me, right?”

Marissa smiled around the mouthful of bread. “All you’ve been working on is this Enigma stuff anyway. We won’t even miss you.”

“Oh, thanks very much,” Marty said, but he reddened, knowing she was probably right.

Vasco laughed. “Okay, you can come back with us for a few days. But once you’re back here, you’re going to have to move this stuff to the back burner. We’ll send a list of other things we need to be looking for; we’ll expect you to work on those most of the time.” He looked at Marty with a raised eyebrow.

“Aye-aye, captain,” Marty said, saluting. “Your wish is my command. Now let me see the machine.”

Clay pulled out the heavy machine that was filling up his duffle bag, along with the code book. He opened the book on the table and flattened the old paper out.

“It goes by date. If they’re not using the correct dates we’re screwed. But if we assume they are, then we take the date of the first email…” He looked at Marty, who fumbled through the printed pages looking for the oldest.

“August 16,” he said.

“Okay, we go to August 16,” Clay said, flipping through the well-worn book. He stopped and looked at two pages with row upon row of tiny red writing. Running his finger across the top, he stopped and tapped. “Here. This page is August 16.”

“But there are fifty rows for that day,” Marty said, examining the four columns.

“Right. You start with the rotors, here.” He pointed to a grouping of Roman numerals. “That tells you which rotors to use for that day, and in what order.” Pulling open the drawer he looked at the eight metal gears, turning them over in his hand. “For August 16, we use II, VI and VII. I guess in that order.” He took a metal shaft and threaded the three rotors onto it. There were letters along the curved outside of the shaft, and the rotors slotted into each other when pushed together. Opening the machine, they peered inside.

“It goes here,” Clay pointed. There was an opening with a fixed wheel on either side. Sliding the shaft into the wheel on the right, he slid it down into a slot in the wheel on the left. Once it was seated, he closed and latched the lid. The rotor gears were visible through three slots above the keyboard.

“So then we just type?” Marty said, fingering the round letter keys.

“No, now we set the rotors.” He pointed to the first row in the code book. After the number 1, the letters D F J appeared in a second column. Clay manually turned the rotors until the letters D F J appeared in the slots. “The first message of the day uses the rotors in this starting position. For the second message, you’d change it to L P W.” He tapped the second row then ran his finger down the long list of tiny red characters. “See, you can send two hundred messages a day, all with different starting codes.”

Indeed, the page began to make more sense to Marty now that he saw the machine. The left side was numbered 1 through 50, with the three letter starting sequence in a column next to it. Beside that column, there were the numbers 51 through 100; a column of three letter sequences followed. There were four sets of columns across the page, going from 1 to 200.

“Wow. So if this isn’t the first message of the day…” Marty said, staring at the two hundred possible starting positions for the rotors.

“Then this is going to take a long time,” Clay finished. “But you checked all the emails and this was the first, right? At least the first on August 16?”

“Yeah. Man. This is intense.” He continued to stare at the code book, flipping through pages. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss any. If I found one on any given day, I did a check through everything, plus the day before and the day after.”

Clay shrugged. “Okay, then let’s give it a try.”

“Does it print a page out or what?” Marty asked.

“No, a tape, like those ticker tapes on a stock market machine. I guess we should check that there’s paper. I didn’t even think about that at the house.” He opened the top again and was relieved to see a full three inch roll of thin white paper. He blew out a sigh of relief. “Good! But I don’t know how we’ll replace this when it runs out.”

“Cutting paper strips seems like a fun job for sitting around the fire, kind of like stringing popcorn,” Marty said. “For someone else. I don’t want to do it!”

Clay looked at him and laughed. “Let’s hope we find Darian before that. I don’t want to draw the short straw either!”

He began entering the groupings of letters exactly as Marty had written at the bottom of the page. As he typed, the tape began to emerge from the machine, containing groups of five capital letters.

CSLOJ WVFTD WNOTS PAHYT CHTMI HUTIC NCPIA MWAUT SKLMR

“Well,” said Marty, holding out the tape. “That’s very helpful.”

Hannah and Abacus emerged from the Opera house and turned west, walking quickly and quietly down the silent streets. Turning south, they continued on towards the Royal Palace. There was a light drizzle and the sky was completely covered with low hanging clouds, the darkness thick about them. Neither spoke.

It took them an hour to get to the Palace. They skirted the main entrance, going instead to a nondescript service door that had once been used for deliveries. Shaking off their jackets and clicking on flashlights, they made their way to a small office off the restaurant-caliber kitchen. Sitting on the hard wooden chairs, they still didn’t speak.

A half hour later they heard the slight
snick
of the latch as the service door was open and shut, then very soft footsteps down the hallway. A figure stood in the double doorway of the kitchen, then walked to the office. Abacus stood.

“Rod,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Abacus,” Rod said, shaking it, then shedding his wet sweatshirt and shaking the water from his hair like a dog.

“So, tell me.” Abacus sat back down and rested his ankle on his knee, keeping his eyes on the young man in front of him.

Rod gestured to an empty chair and Abacus nodded. He sat. His light brown hair was wet and plastered to his head. It was overlong, curling around his shoulders and looking black from the rain. He had lines around his mouth that were too deep for his age and a permanent vertical slash between his brows. Dark circles rimmed his brown eyes and his cheeks were sunken and hollow.

“I want to come back. I… I screwed up. I didn’t understand what I was doing here, why I should sacrifice for people I didn’t know, what the whole deal with the Firsts was really all about.” He shrugged. “Alec offered me freedom. What I thought was freedom.” Cutting his eyes to Hannah, he smiled ruefully. “It wasn’t. I might as well have been a slave for the Firsts; I probably would have eaten better.”

“Did something particular happen to make you realize this?” Abacus asked, his voice carefully neutral. He was staring intently at Rod, his dark eyes trying to see into the younger man’s heart.

“There were a lot of little things all along the way, but lately there’ve been some big things. Alec was taken by the Firsts one night when we were walking back from a party. We were down by the river, drunk,” he glanced at both Abacus and Hannah. “A couple of gangs had gotten together to celebrate hijacking a truck and everybody was messed up. This was last summer. Anyway, he and I were walking down the Seine and probably not being very careful. Out of nowhere this van pulls in front of us, and four of them step out. They all had tasers. I dove into the river and stayed under as long as I could, just let the current take me. Alec… he was really drunk. I think he’d done some meth, too. Last I saw of him, he was lying on the ground in the headlights of that van getting wailed on by those guys. I guess they tazed him first, but then they brought out clubs.” He sighed. “Apparently they didn’t think he’d make a good slave but he would make a good example. Three days later, a few of us were goofing off and we went to the Eiffel Tower. Alec was hanging there by a noose, fifteen feet off the ground. The birds…” He cleared his throat. “I couldn’t cut him down; he was too high. The other guys didn’t even want to. It was like nothin’ had happened. They walked by him laughing and joking and Pierre even threw some rocks up to see if he could hit his nose. Those kids in the gangs… They’re not Firsts, but they might as well be.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

A
bacus continued to stare at
Rod, trying to root out any deception. Hannah sat quietly with her hands folded in her lap; her knuckles were white from tension.

“That was a long time ago,” Abacus said into the silence.

Rod agreed. “Yeah. After that, things were quiet for awhile. In the gangs, it’s every man for himself unless we’re fighting another gang. But with the food from the hijacked truck, everyone was pretty chill for a while. I mostly stopped drinking and I never did drugs. With Alec dead, there was a lot of talk about who was gonna lead us. There was a girl, Olivie. She’d kinda been Alec’s girlfriend. She was okay, older than most of them, and her parents were rebels. Seemed like she had a little more common sense, maybe a little more feeling, than the rest. I thought she’d end up running the gang and that was okay with me. She was tough but fair and she was good at holding people together. Then a younger punk, Yves—we had to call him
Boucher
, for butcher, because he said he’d cut up a bunch of Firsts one time, although nobody saw it—he decided he was going to be the leader. Most of us, we rallied around Olivie, and for a few months after Alec died it was quiet. Nice. Like a family.” He stopped talking and stared out the small window at the rain coming down outside.

After a full minute, Hannah said, “What happened?”

“We ran out of food. Then Boucher told us he had a line on another truck to hijack. He said he had it all figured out, that he’d gotten the info from a young slave he saw sometimes in a back yard who worked for the driver. He had a lot of intel: schedules, times, a description of the driver, where the truck was kept when it wasn’t running. He said it was going to have fresh food on it, like beef and vegetables and fruit, even a few cases of wine. He talked it up for weeks. Finally Olivie agreed to set it up. We were going to ambush the truck when it was coming into the city from the east, on some two-lane country road. Took us forever to get out there.

The night of the op, Boucher says that he and Olivie are taking point. The rest of us had jobs—tearing up part of the road, piling up debris, making a blind next to the road where we were going to pull it over.” He paused again, then rubbed his eyes. “I was helping with the blind, and the two of them, they were pretty far down the road. It was pitch dark out there and we were working hard to be quiet, and then all the sudden there’s a scream. It went on for a couple seconds and then just stopped all the sudden. Everyone knew it was Olivie, but nobody knew where she was. Boucher had run the whole thing and kept us in the dark.

We waited an hour and no truck came. I guess there was never any truck. Finally, Boucher comes up to the blind and says we’re going, the op is blown. I asked him where Olivie was and he said she’d had an accident, she was in the woods, dead. He had a big knife strapped to his belt… I couldn’t see very well in the dark, but I could see there was blood on it and on his jeans. We never saw Olivie again; we just left and went home like nothing happened. Except now Boucher was the leader.”

He stared at Hannah for a long time, then shifted his gaze to Abacus. “After that, I just wanted out. But Boucher, he knew I suspected he’d killed Olivie, and he made sure I was never by myself. I didn’t want to lead him to Hannah or the tunnels so I didn’t run. I kept my nose clean, didn’t cross him, and tried to do him favors to earn his trust. A few weeks ago, he asked me to go scavenge for something by myself. We’ve been short on supplies since he took over and we have to go farther away to find things. He doesn’t have the manpower for us to be doubled up all the time. After he’d sent me a few times and I came back with what he wanted, he seemed to relax a little. So a few days ago, I decided to risk talking to Hannah at the Depot. I know he didn’t follow me; he’s got a girl now, and she keeps him busy.”

“Would he send someone else to follow you?” Abacus asked.

Rod shook his head. “We don’t have enough people. The other gangs don’t like him so they’re not sharing supplies anymore, and definitely wouldn’t help him. We had a couple that we shared stuff with before, when Alec and Olivie were the leaders. Now they’d be more likely to try and recruit us away. Anyway, there are only nine of us now. The rest are either dead or went out scavenging and never came back. Boucher stays at the house with Natalie, so that leaves seven of us to get enough food and supplies. Nobody would care if I left. They
all
want to leave.”