The Jefferson Allegiance (12 page)

“So these murders—“ Kincannon left it hanging.

“Cut to the core of the country,” Evie said. “Someone was sending a message.”

“Where do you suggest we go to find the killer?” Ducharme asked, tired of circling, the beast wanting to strike.

Evie shook her head. “Unfortunately, the killer isn’t the priority.”

“The rest of the disks,” Ducharme said, not asking.

She reached into the leather bag and pulled out her wooden disk. “I have number one.”

Ducharme took his out. “Number twenty-six. I assume there are twenty-four more?”

“Correct. And we need to find them.”

“Why?”

“They lead to something.”

“What?”

“We’ll know when we find them and read the message.”

Lying again
, Ducharme thought, glancing in the rearview mirror for a tail. Nothing. Which was wrong. He pulled into a parking lot and put the Blazer in idle. He pulled out his MK-23 and slid out the magazine, checking it and the weapon. Something wasn’t right; years of living with weapons told him that. He stared at it for a moment, and then began thumbing the stubby .45 caliber rounds out of the magazine while Evie and Kincannon watched.

Ducharme got to the bottom of the magazine and noted that the last one was lighter than the others. He re-loaded the gun, keeping the round out. He slid the light bullet into his pocket. “Interesting. Our friend Agent Burns put a tracking device in my gun.”

“Why?” Evie asked.

“To follow us,” Ducharme said.

“We have to figure out why LaGrange and McBride were meeting,” Evie said.

“OK," Ducharme conceded. "Besides the Poe thing—West Point and the University of Virginia—what do you think the thread is between McBride and LaGrange?”

“The Poe thing is in the past,” Evie said. “In the present, yesterday, they obviously had a common enemy.”

Ducharme nodded. “I think they were worried about their meeting being compromised.”

“What makes you say that?”

“McBride's roses and the bottle were a meeting safe signal,” Ducharme said. “He was probably going to place them on the Milestone. LaGrange would see them and know it was safe to approach. And if McBride had been doing the same thing at Poe’s grave every year, then it was also an annual situational safe signal.”

“Safe from who?” Evie asked.

Kincannon answered. “From whoever killed them.”

“Why cognac and three roses?” Ducharme asked.

“Poe was a heavy drinker,” Evie said. “Alcohol killed him at a relatively young age, although amontillado would seem more appropriate. The roses are thought to represent the three people supposedly buried under his monument: Poe, his wife Virginia, and his mother-in-law, Mary Clemm. You said ‘annual situational safe signal,’” Evie noted. “It makes sense.”

“You know what a safe signal is?” Ducharme was surprised.

“Yes. The Poe Toaster is reported in the news. If he didn’t show up on Poe’s birthday it would be reported in the news. And if the Toaster showed up on a day other than Poe’s birthday and left the roses and cognac, it would also make the news. An indirect means of signaling when either side doesn’t want to directly contact each other.”

“I don’t think they teach safe signals in civilian colleges,” Ducharme noted.

Evie sighed. “They do at the Farm. So following the logic, the killer knew they would be meeting at the Zero Milestone ahead of time.”

“Hold on,” Ducharme said. “The Farm? You were CIA?”

“Once upon a time,” Evie admitted.

“What the fuck?” Ducharme said. “Researcher?”

She gave him a look of disdain. “Field operative. I speak Farsi, Russian and German. Spent six years overseas, two in the Middle East, two in Turkey and a year and a half in Russia. They
appreciated
my memory in the Agency, by the way.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Kincannon said. “How do you go from that to Monticello?”

“Long story for another time,” Evie said. “Not important right now.”

Ducharme ran a hand across the stubble on his chin. “Why do you say the killer knew about the meeting?”

“General LaGrange was killed
before
he made it to the Zero Milestone," Evie said. "Which means there’s a very good chance they were going there to meet the killer or someone the killer knew. But they were betrayed.”

Ducharme mulled over other aspects of the murders. “What about the head-heart letter by Jefferson? Why would the killer want to infer that letter?”

“I’m not sure the killer wanted to infer the letter,” Evie said. “I think it was a lure.”

Ducharme was confused. “What?”

“The killer couldn’t be sure LaGrange got a message to you or that McBride got one to me. But arranging the head and heart like that, would definitely be sending a message to us. To me at least.”

“I don’t follow,” Ducharme said.

“Perhaps I’m wrong,” Evie said.

“And if you’re right?” Ducharme asked. “What’s the purpose?”

Evie shrugged. “To draw us out into the open.”

“Why?”

“No idea.

Lying once more
, Ducharme thought.

She spoke. “Let’s consider the letter itself. It’s a love letter. Sort of. Let me think.” She pulled out her iPhone and played with the screen.

Ducharme looked over at her. She stared unfocused at her iPhone, lost somewhere in her own mind. He glanced in the back seat. Kincannon had his eyes closed. Rest when you can—a mantra of Special Forces.

When Evie spoke, her voice was low as she read.
“If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its head, instead of its hearts, where should we be now? Hanging on a gallows.”
She looked up. “The thrust of the letter was that one should trust one’s heart over one’s head. Jefferson was in love with Mrs. Cosway. He’d broken his wrist trying to jump over a fountain in Paris in an attempt to impress her just a month before he wrote the letter.”

Ducharme was surprised. Thomas Jefferson, the one carved into Mount Rushmore, the one whose Memorial looked solemnly over the Tidal Basin, jumping a fountain to impress a woman?

Evie went on. "Jefferson was trying to use his head to discipline what he believed was his misbehaving heart. If you read it closely, there’s also a great deal of Jefferson’s political philosophy in it and his thoughts on how things should be conducted in the United States. A political letter inside a love letter, so to speak.”

Ducharme rubbed the scar under his right eye, trying to alleviate the constant irritation. “If the letter was politics inside love, perhaps what the killer did was politics inside hate.”

Evie looked at him in surprise. “Interesting.”

“Maybe it’s even simpler than that.” Ducharme pulled his hand away from his face. “You really think McBride was this Poe Toaster?”

“McBride was fascinated with Edgar Allan Poe. He had those specific items for a reason.”

“So the killer probably also knows that the flowers and bottle was a signal. What was your relationship with McBride?”

Ducharme watched Evie, expecting anything from a snort to a slap, but there was nothing. Kincannon’s eyes opened to slit.

“He was my mentor when I did an internship at the
Post
, while I was in grad school,” Evie said. “He was my student at UVA after he retired. When he graduated, he taught part-time in the history department. I teach a class there as part of my curator duties. He was my friend.”

She reached in the briefcase and pulled out a metal rod. “The disks go on this.” She unscrewed one end of the rod and slid on the disk. Then she took Ducharme’s and slid it on. “We have disks one and twenty-six. We need twenty-four more disks.” She frowned. “But—“

“What?” Ducharme asked.

“There should be two ciphers. Identical. If we only have one—“ her eyes got the faraway look for almost a minute before she spoke again. “OK. If there’s only one Cipher, then there are two messages on it. One is an initiating Key phrase once we have all the wheels. The wheels are turned to that twenty-six-letter Key. Then we look at the other rows to find the true message.”

“Ingenious and simple.” Ducharme was used to dealing with encrypted messages. Jefferson had invented a simple but effective means long before the era of electronic ciphers. It had limitations--you had to have the actual cipher, not something you could carry around in your pocket. And the Key. But still—a metal rod and wood disks cipher that were pretty much unbreakable.

“What kind of message will it yield?” Kincannon asked. “Obviously it’s important, but what twenty-six letter message could be that important?”

“No idea,” Evie said, her eyes sliding away.

Ducharme glanced in the rearview mirror and met Kincannon’s eyes. The Sergeant Major nodded ever so slightly.

“What’s strange,” Evie said, oblivious to everything around her, “is that there are only two original Jefferson Cipher Wheels known to be in existence. One at Monticello, and one in the Smithsonian. I checked and the one at Monticello is still there. And if someone had stolen the one at the Smithsonian, I’d have heard about it.”

“These are from a third.”

“Yes. And it’s definitely an original made by Jefferson himself. I can tell from these markings on the rod.”

“That you, the Curator at Monticello, didn’t know about.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, and then spoke. “LaGrange and McBride were meeting this evening at the Zero Milestone, but given they were using a safe signal, they were worried they might be attacked. They wouldn’t have brought their disks, and they sent one to each of us. The question is why were they meeting now? And here in Washington? Why not in Baltimore at Poe’s grave?”

Logical. Analytical. Always thinking. There was definitely something different from the norm with Evie, Ducharme thought, beyond the fact that she had CIA in her past. It was as if the murders earlier in the evening had not occurred. “LaGrange was assigned to the National Security Council. He lived here. Maybe they were meeting someone else in the area.”

“Why now?” she repeated her first question.

Ducharme shrugged. “I don’t know. Either the meeting was planned a while ago, or they just decided to do it.”

“McBride gave me his briefcase and told me to meet him at the restaurant yesterday afternoon. So it was a short notice thing.”

Kincannon summed that up. “Something happened yesterday that made them decide to meet. So the killer also knew they were going to meet. So—“

Evie completed the thought for him. “—the killer did something yesterday to make them contact each other. Such as set up a meeting.”

“And they were very worried about the meeting,” Ducharme said.

“Why do you say that?”

“They sent us the two disks and sent both of us to that restaurant.”

Evie nodded. “They did. You know, Poe wrote the
Purloined Letter
and—“ she fell silent and went into one of her states again. “The real question is what is the connection forged by Jefferson, the person from the past who reached out from the grave to bring McBride and LaGrange together?”

“And put them in their own graves.” The beast reared up in Ducharme’s chest. He took a deep breath. Let it out. Forced himself to relax. His head was pounding, a steady drumbeat of pain and anger. “I know the Poe connection, but what is Jefferson’s tie to the two of them?”

“Thomas Jefferson not only founded the University of Virginia,” she said, “but also the Military Academy.”

“You told Burns that, but Sylvanus Thayer was the father of the Military Academy,” Ducharme responded.

“Thayer wasn’t even the first Superintendent,” Evie shot back. “He was the third.”

Kincannon spoke from the back seat. “Don’t fight the lady, Duke. She’s ahead of you in points already.”

Ducharme ignored him. “Washington. He founded West Point. There’s that big-ass statue of him on the Plain in front of the Mess Hall. There is
no
statue of Jefferson at the Academy. We had to memorize every damn statue at the place as Plebes.”

“Jefferson founded the Military Academy in eighteen-oh-two when he was President,” Evie said in a calm voice.

The date was right. Ducharme realized he’d never connected the date with the President at the time.

“Few people would think Jefferson founded the Military Academy,” Evie added. “He was opposed to a standing army.”

“So why’d he do it?” Ducharme asked.

“Publicly, because a standing army was a reality of having a country,” Evie said. “Jefferson didn’t want the officer corps to be full of favored sons and sycophants. He felt if they had to have an army, they needed a professional officer corps that swore allegiance to the country, not to a particular party or a particular President.” She took out her cigarette case, and in the reflected glow from the streetlight he noticed something was inscribed on the cover.