The Camelot Code (19 page)

A soft summer shower falls as the handsome delivery driver juggles the cardboard box in his arms and struggles to lock the back doors of his van. The neighbourhood he’s in looks decent, but you can never be sure. Leave the vehicle unlocked and you’re as good as asking for some scumbag to climb in and steal stuff. Maybe even the van itself.

As far as he’s concerned, they’re welcome to it. It’s a piece of shit. The engine’s slower than a constipated snail and it stinks of sweat and cigarettes. Still, he’ll be shot of it soon.

He checks the name and address on the package, then climbs the short stack of steps to the apartment block. Dark marks appear on top of the box where raindrops hit and get blotted by the cardboard.

He knocks on a tatty door and waits.

There’s a noise on the other side. The sound of someone pressing against the door. He sees a little fisheye lens in the middle of the wood and guesses the occupant is on the other side peering through at him.

‘Who is it?’ The voice is female and hesitant.

‘Amazon. I’ve got a package to be signed for.’

The door opens a chink and a chain pulls tight. He pushes the box forward so she can see the smiley river logo.

It closes again and opens fully.

He extends the parcel in his hands. ‘Careful with this; it’s a little heavy.’

The woman takes it from him.

He lunges forward and pushes her so she staggers back and falls. The heavy parcel bangs painfully against her chest as she hits the floor and cracks her head.

The delivery man kicks the door shut and stands over her. He leans down and pushes the end of a silenced handgun into her mouth. ‘You really should have asked for some ID, cupcakes.’

Less than two miles from the Cabinet briefing in Whitehall, Mitzi Fallon and Jon Bronty set up base in an FBI office inside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

Intelligence officers have been working from here since the days when the country’s second president, John Adams, had a home in the picturesque square.

Two doors away, field officers are getting up to speed on the Eurostar bomb blast and working out how it fits with the attack on Grand Central in New York.

Mitzi watches bigwigs come and go as she passes over the water bottle she took from Gwyn’s office. She completes all the necessary chain-of-evidence paperwork and asks how long she’ll have to wait to get the DNA profile.

The answer comes from a young clerk being run ragged by all the sudden activity. She’s mid-twenties, with frizzy brown hair and hard black spectacles that sit on an aquiline nose amid a pale, freckled face. ‘Within the week. Maybe sooner if the labs are at full strength.’

‘How about tomorrow?’ There’s a hint of annoyance in her tone. ‘I’m only here for a couple of days and this is linked to a homicide back in the US.’

‘Homicides aren’t priority.’ She pushes the bagged evidence into her tray and starts fresh work on her computer.

Mitzi takes it back out and drops it in front of her. ‘Then what is?’

The young Chicagoan gives her a scornful upward glance. ‘If you don’t know don’t ask, ma’am.’

Mitzi bends low over the computer and lifts the nametag on the lapel of the clerk’s black jacket. ‘Please don’t screw with me, Annie Linklatter. As you see from my currently less than pretty face I’m in a bad place at the moment and people in bad places do bad things. So how about you cut me a break and save us both a lot of pain?’

The girl’s face reddens. ‘I’ll try for tomorrow – or the day after.’

‘Tomorrow would be real good.’ She wanders away. ‘I’ll be by first thing.’

Bronty is on the phone when she gets back to their temporary office. ‘I’ve got Vicks on the line,’ he says.

‘Put her on speakerphone.’

Bronty obliges. ‘Vicks, Mitzi has just walked in – you’re on speaker.’

‘Hi, Lieutenant! I’ve got some good and bad news for you. Which would you like first?’

‘I only do good news, Vicks. Keep the bad to yourself and go fix it. What you got?’

‘Okay. I’ve done the extra digging you asked for on Owain Gwyn. I’m just mailing it to you.’

‘Great. I’ll log on while we’re speaking.’ She flips open her computer and powers up.

‘And the cryptologists have made progress on the data you sent over. It’s really weird. Seems to be a story about King Arthur and his knights.’

‘Codex,’ whispers Bronty to Mitzi in a triumphant told-you-so tone.

Vicky continues her update, ‘The file directory they decrypted is entitled “The Camelot Code” and it contains four parts –
The Fallen
,
Avalon
,
Modern Prophecies
and
The Arthurian Cycle
.’

Mitzi writes the names down on a pad next to the computer, which is still running start-up security programs. ‘So, what is this, a kind of Arthurian
Twilight Saga
?’

‘They’ve only transcribed the first page – apparently the code is problematic.’

‘They say what kinda code it is?’ asked Bronty.

‘Yeah, they call it Random Revolver. Every letter of the alphabet is represented by a number – that’s the simple part, like a kid’s cypher – but then the numbers and the letters related to them don’t stay the same, they keep changing. So for example, say the letter A is represented by 1, N by 2 and D by 3. The word
AND
would be coded 123. You get that?’

‘Yeah, that’s easy to follow.’

‘Right, but in the next sentence, the letter A is represented by 2, N by 3 and D by 4, so
AND
now becomes 234.’

Mitzi gets it, ‘So everything just moves down a number.’

‘No, sometimes letters and numbers are randomly matched. Hence the name. The cryptologist I spoke to said the only way they cracked it was to create two virtual circles – the outer one had twenty-six letters on it, the inner one had twenty-six corresponding numbers. The letters got a new number every sentence. But this didn’t make sense when they hit the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first and twenty-eighth lines. At those points, the whole sequence reset and sometimes would go backwards or start skipping odd or even numbers.’

‘Days of the week,’ observes Bronty. ‘It reset because there are seven days in a week. Monks used to write what were called Calendar Codes, where every week or every month they changed the key to the code they wrote secret messages in.’

‘Enough,’ says Mitzi. ‘You two are making my head pound. Vicks, just tell me what this damned Camelot Code said.’

The young researcher gets excited. ‘It’s wonderful, weird gothic stuff. You have to read it to make sense of it. I’m sending a transcript of what they’ve cracked so far. It’s from a section called
The Fallen
.’

‘Can’t wait to read it,’ says Mitzi sarcastically. ‘Anything else to brighten my day?’

‘That’s it.’

‘You said there was bad news.’

‘I did, and you told me to keep it to myself.’

‘I know, but as well as being a lying bitch, I’m nosy as hell. So tell me.’

Vicky braces herself for a verbal backlash. ‘The data you sent to me – it started to self-corrupt as soon as I opened it. I lost a lot of the files and —’

‘What?’

‘
Please
– before you holler – the cryptologists say it wasn’t my fault. They say it was primed with a suicide bug.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It means that when copies are made on software or hardware that doesn’t belong to the originator the code corrupts. You must have the original authorized copy.’

‘So how come it didn’t corrupt instantly when I sent it to you?’

‘It would have done on any other system but ours. The FBI computers locked the first digits, that’s all. Everything else died within that split-second. The techies say the coding and technology behind all this is super smart – as in intelligence agency smart.’

Mitzi glances at the small memory stick lying free in her purse. ‘Good job I took high security measures to protect the original, then.’

‘Absolutely,’ says Vicky, unaware of the irony.

There’s a ping on Mitzi’s computer. She glances at the screen. ‘Just got your stuff. I’ll go check it with Bronty and one of us will get back to you. Thanks, Vicks.’

She kills the call and Bronty comes round behind her to look over her shoulder.

Mitzi opens her mailbox and clicks on a document marked
The Fallen
.

The two investigators exchange glances of bewilderment.

Mitzi shrinks the mail and looks for the other document that Vicky promised. ‘Let’s read what she found out about Owain Gwyn before we start trying to work out what all this means.’

The next attachment is a series of factual points. It lacks the lyrical narrative of the decoded transcript but the contents are every bit as dramatic.

Mitzi finishes Gwyn’s biog and types a note to Vicky asking her to dig deeper into the history of the ambassador, his family and his business. She hits
SEND
, pushes her chair back on its wheels and turns to Bronty. ‘Why, oh why, did I never find a guy like Owain Gwyn? On paper, he’s everything a girl could ask for. A man with almost as many medals as millions.’

Bronty is unimpressed. ‘He’s not all he seems, Mitzi, trust me on that. He has amazing charisma, I’ll grant you, but there’s a dark side to him as well.’ He leans across the laptop and taps the screen with his finger. ‘Look at this: the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross for bravery in battle and the Victoria Cross for inspirational leadership on the battlefield. What do those medals mean to you?’

She answers with one word, ‘Hero.’

‘It means he’s a killer. A trained and ruthless life-taker. One so good at it, his government and Queen have awarded him their top prizes for doing so. People like Owain Gwyn redefine the word dangerous. We have to be careful – very careful – in how we deal with this man.’