Tales From the Black Chamber (8 page)

“Ah.” Hunter still looked a little askance at John.

“Right,” said John with an ‘I told you so, idiot' glare at Agent Hunter. “What I was going to say is that the people we're dealing with are a little too trigger-happy for my liking. I mean, they killed Mildred out of the blue, then tried to shoot Anne and me into Swiss cheese. No threats, no warnings, straight to murder. That's fanaticism, I think.”

“It's scary,” said Anne.

“Yep,” said Hunter, crossing to the counter. “Coffee?”

“Thank you,” said Anne.

Hunter poured her a cup, then returned to the living room, where he leaned the M16 in a corner. Anne took her mug and followed him into the room.

“Thank you very much for this wonderful display, Agent Hunter. This should make our job a lot easier. I noticed you put key numbers on the sides of the boards to make it easier to find what we're looking for.”

“What
are
you looking for?” the FBI man asked.

“Well, first, some oddity in the text. It's conceivable that a page here or there could have been replaced with something else—a message, a map, a code, something. Secondly, maybe something extraneous like a note in the margins or the like.”

“It is fairly marked up, I noticed last night. Do you know all those languages? I recognized German, Greek, Latin, and some others.”

“I do, actually. I was a little bit of a nerd.”

“You hide it well.”

“Thanks, Agent Hunter. What about you?” Anne hoped a little chatting might make him a little friendlier, but her question seemed to turn his face to stone again.

“Me? I'm going to go clean the shotgun. I have no idea when it was last fired.”

Skimming the papers, Anne ate a bowl of cereal; then she and John got settled in the living room with the chart. They decided on a methodology of scanning all the sheets on one side of a board to see if anything struck them, then taking all ten sheets down, dividing them in half, going over them closely page by page, and finally replacing them.

After a couple hours, John rubbed his eyes and said, “You know, it'd be nice to have something to compare this to, to kind of be able to say, “None of this is relevant.”

“You mean another copy of the
Brevarium dæmonologicum?
” Anne replied. “I'm sure there's probably a rare-book dealer here in town that has one. They're not
that
rare. I know Georgetown's library has one.”

John stood up. “Problem solved. The Foundation has excellent relations with Georgetown. I'll be right back.”

“They'll just give it to you?”

“Sure. We loan them stuff, they loan us stuff all the time. It's a little bit odd for me to call them up and say I'm on my way over to get something, but …” He waved and walked out to the garage. Anne listened to the door go up and down and then turned back to the photos.

The control copy did help, though John made himself more work by deciding to go back to the beginning and write down all the underlined phrases in case they somehow formed a code. Sometime shortly after midnight, Anne rubbed her eyes for the umpteenth time and yawned. She took a sip of the café mocha for which she'd sent Agent Hunter out to the Chevy Chase Lake Starbucks.

Anne's cell phone rang, showing a 212 number, but not one she recognized.

A man's deep voice said, “Is this Anne Wilkinson?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Ms. Wilkinson, I'm Detective Marvin Lincoln of the NYPD arson squad, and I'm calling to find out if you are all right.”

Her heart began to race. “Yes, yes, I'm fine. I'm on business in Washington, D.C. Why are you calling me?”

“Well, we're not one hundred percent sure, but it looks like someone blew up your office.”

“
What?!
”

“According to passers-by, there was a loud boom about a half hour ago, and your office window blew out in a fireball, showering glass all over the street. FDNY responded almost immediately, and the fire was out within a relatively short period. There was some blast, fire, and water damage to the offices adjacent to yours, but the place was empty and no one seems to have been hurt. There was no evidence of anyone being injured on the scene, and we're calling all your coworkers at home to ensure they're all right.”

“Oh, thank God.”

“So I'm glad to be talking to you, Ms. Wilkinson.”

“And I to you, Detective.”

“So, can you help me out? Why would someone blow up your office?”

“I don't know, Detective. To scare me? In which case, they've succeeded. Otherwise, perhaps to destroy something? My computer? My files? The rare books in my wall safe?”

“The wall safe was intact, though damaged, and your partner Mr. Hathaway's coming down to check out any water damage to the contents. It didn't look like anyone tried to open it, though.”

“That's very strange, Detective. I'd be happy to give you the contents of my computer. H&E has an off-site backup system, so I imagine you'll have all the information as of a couple days ago at the earliest.”

“Thank you, Ms. Wilkinson. Did you have any personal objects or other valuables there that might have been stolen and the bomb placed to cover up the theft?”

“No, I'm afraid not. My office isn't very personal.”

“Can you think of anyone who might have done this?”

“The only one who occurs to me is a very strange man who was in my office last week.” She described the man to the detective and referred him to the D.C. detectives investigating Mrs. Garrett's murder. Detective Lincoln asked her a variety of other questions, to which she had very basic answers.

“Okay. Thank you for your time, Ms. Wilkinson. I'm glad you're all right, and I'll be in touch with more questions soon, I'm sure.”

“Thank you, Detective.”

On the couch, John looked stricken. “What happened?”

“They blew up my office.”

“Oh, dear God, are your friends ok?”

“Yes, everyone's fine, it sounds like. I've got to call them though.”

“If it was a time bomb,” John speculated, “that was a lousy time to try and kill you.”

“I doubt they were trying to kill me. Scare me, maybe. But they must have found one of our missing pages in the conference room and realized that there was a copy on my computer, and they were trying to destroy that. Of course, now I'm scared out of my mind. Who
are
these people? What's next? My apartment?!”

“Not to unnerve you further,” John said, “but chances are they've already searched it.”

“Okay,” Anne said, her voice tight. “I'm going to do my very best not to freak out and start screaming rhetorical questions about what the hell is going on and what the deal with this goddamn book is.” She took a gulp of her mocha. “And I'm going to go call my partners, coworkers, friends, and ex-boyfriend and tell them that I'm alive and then apologize for, I don't know, attracting the attention of a mad bomber. Also that I'm on indefinite leave, as of right now.”

John began, “An—”

Anne held up her hand. “No, John. I can't talk about this anymore. I'm going to go make my calls and then go to bed.”

As she walked up the stairs she heard Agent Hunter come in the front door.

“They blew up her office,” John told him.

“Who
are
these guys?” Hunter asked with audible exasperation.

“I wish I knew,” sighed John.

A day later, they declared the text of the book to be identical to the control breviary. The type was consistent and within the natural variations of a print run as well. John had brought a laptop from the Coolidge Foundation with which Anne was able to download the three pages left behind in the conference room. So it came down to the underlining or the marginalia, they figured. They spent another day carefully writing down all the marginalia longhand, then entering it into the computer. John already had most of the underlined words and their position on the page written out:
salvat
, p. 132 ¶3 ln. 4 wd. 8. He explained to Anne that it was conceivable that the position on the page could be a numerical code that could then be transposed back into letters. Anne agreed that that was certainly possible given sixteenth-century cryptography and steganography. But despair crept in when she started talking about the variety of codes that could have been used: the line within the paragraph could indicate the letter in the word—here, line four would indicate the fourth letter,
v
; the initial letters might be arranged in a transposition cipher; rotating letters in the word might also be used; there might be a key word or number used to encode it that they wouldn't have at all; or a variety of other methods.

“If only we knew a cryptographer,” said John.

“This is Washington. Aren't there a lot of retired NSA and military types we could consult with?” Anne asked.

“I'll ask Agent Hunter. He might be able to pull some strings. But even if he can, I'm worried about disseminating the text.”

“Because we know these mystery people will try and kill anyone with a copy,” Anne said.

“Exactly.”

“Damn it, if we could just figure out who they
are
,” Anne said, smacking the page in front of her.

“Well, I know Agent Hunter has people trying to run them down.”

“Of course, if this were some crappy novel, it'd be a bunch of albino Vatican hit men trying to cover up the fact that Jesus's descendants are a family of Lithuanian shoe salesmen in Perth Amboy and the papacy is run by aliens.”

John cracked up. “If only it were that simple!” He laughed. “What the heck did Mildred see in here?”

“You know what?” said Anne. “Let's put codes on the back burner. She didn't have enough time to do any elaborate code breaking. Even if this was the first and only book she looked at—which I doubt—she just wasn't in the conference room long enough. So either there's a code she recognized right off—in which case, maybe we should be looking in her library, not this book—or there's no code at all, and we're just missing something.”

John looked thoughtful and didn't speak for a while. “You know what, I think you're right. What say we break for the night and go down to Mildred's house tomorrow and see what we can find?”

“Sounds good to me,” Anne yawned. “I'm exhausted and just about cross-eyed from looking at all this stuff.” She rubbed her eyelids.

They said their good nights and went up to their bedrooms. Anne immediately went into the bathroom and began brushing her teeth. She was looking at the Van Gogh reproduction on the wall next to the sink absently when she thought she saw something move out of the corner of her eye. She turned to look in the mirror, for that's where she'd seen it, then looked behind her. Nothing.
My eyes are tired; my brain is frazzled
, she told herself.
Maybe I should take a Unisom
.

She spat into the sink and looked at herself in the mirror as she drank a cup of water.
You're not looking so hot, honey
, she told herself.
I look like I've been pulling all-nighters at college for a week, but I don't have a nineteen-year-old's constitution (or skin) anymore.

Suddenly, her reflection rippled in the mirror. Or she thought it did. It looked like someone had dropped a pebble onto a pond surface right at the tip of her nose and a little wave radiated outward.

Oh my God, I'm tired
, she thought.
I'm hallucinating
. It had happened to her once before in college. She remembered sitting in an exam room seeing little movements out of the corner of her eye that weren't really there. Nothing as dramatic or weird as the ripple, though. She rubbed at her eyes for a while.

When she looked in the mirror again, Anne was comforted to see her face undisturbed by any sort of special effect. For a moment. Then it happened again. She started and stepped back. She stared at the toilet. No distortions. The shower, nothing. The Van Gogh print, fine. The mirror again. Ripple. Ripple. Then a slowly eddying darkness at the central point—where her nose should have been. Anne shrank back, taking a step to the left. The blackness followed her to the left, as if attached to her face. She reflexively batted at her face, but only succeeded in giving herself a sore nose.