The Jefferson Allegiance (35 page)

“But you really don’t know what it is.”

“Not yet.”

“How can I help?” Burns finally said.

“We need a plan,” Ducharme said.

“That’s a good idea,” Burns said dryly.

“This Surgeon—“ Ducharme began, but Burns cut in.

“Who?”

“The killer. That’s what she calls herself. I think she works for your Mister Turnbull.”

“No shit. And then there’s General Parker,” Burns said.

“What about him?”

“I’m not stupid,” Burns said. “The pieces are all there. McBride-Tolliver-Poe’s grave. LaGrange-You-Custer’s grave. Groves-Simone-and most likely John Adams’s grave. So we have Parker-Peters and what grave?”

“No idea,” Ducharme said.

“’No one’s and everyone’s’,” Burns said.

“What’s it mean?”

“No idea. I figured Tolliver might do something with it.”

“Who does Turnbull really work for?” Ducharme asked.

“I don’t know,” Burns said.

“But you can try to find out.”

“I’ve tried and he doesn’t exist.”

“What?” Ducharme said.

“He didn’t go to college. He didn’t go to high school. He wasn’t born. As I said, I think he’s at another level.”

“What level?” Ducharme said.

There was silence. “I’ve been in Washington a long time,” Burns finally responded. “There’s another level. I can’t define it specifically, but the real power lies somewhere in the shadows, and that’s where Turnbull comes from. Where did he get those choppers from? An Apache? Gunmen?”

“Then we’re going to have to go into the shadows,” Ducharme said.

“How?” Burns asked.

The image of the words popped into his head and he said them without thought: “
’Let the enemy come ‘til he’s almost close enough to touch, then let him have it and jump out and finish him with your hatchet
’.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Rogers’s Rules of Rangering. I was in the Infantry for a while,” Ducharme explained. “It always comes down to boots on the ground, face to face, and blade to blade. You understand the latter, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“See you on the ground.”

The phone went dead.

“What was that about?” Evie asked. “’No one’s and everyone’s’?”

“The clue to General Parker’s disks,” Ducharme said.

Evie sat back in her seat. “Interesting.”

“You know,” Ducharme said, “it would have been a whole lot easier if they’d just FedExed us the disks.”

“This was the only way they could keep the Cipher—and the Allegiance—safe,” Evie said.

“Great,” Ducharme muttered.

************

Burns wearily walked to the bank of elevators. They opened before he reached them. He knew that he would never again reach this top floor unless Turnbull authorized it. The thought didn’t disturb him because he had no desire to be at this level if it meant being the greedy, self-centered power seeker that ‘succeeding’ in Washington required.

He got in the elevator and punched in the number for the much lower floor for his office. The elevator descended and then halted. The doors swished open. Burns walked down the corridor. About a quarter of the desks in the large, open DC Section pool were occupied. He strode through, nodding at familiar faces, grabbed a cup of day-old coffee, and went into his small office. Barely big enough for a desk and chair. The reward for over two decades of selfless service.

There were no windows in the office.

Burns kicked back from the desk, the back of the chair immediately slamming into a filing cabinet. The walls felt like they were closing in on him. His eyes darted about. A wall full of plaques, photographs, and certificates. The equivalent of the tiny ribbons military people wore on their dress uniforms above their left pockets. Even adding in the plaques and their engraving, all told it was worth less than a couple of hundred bucks in cold cash when they were made, and so much less now.

Worth only what one felt about them. Burns had always been proud of his awards, his medals, his certificates. Had been.

“Fuck you, Agent Turnbull.”

Burns bellied up to the desk. He pulled out his notepad. He thumbed through, reading his notes since this clusterfuck had begun. He paused at what had appeared to be a minor observation at the time: the mouse pad from General Parker’s office. Burns turned on his computer and Googled “USAF Honor Guard.” He wasn’t surprised to see the result: the Air Force’s ceremonial unit in the DC Area. Handled events at the White House and burials at Arlington. Looking down the unit’s web page he saw that Parker had commanded the unit from 1997 through 1999, before retiring.

Odd that of all the units Parker had been in and all the combat missions he’d flown, the only unit crest he had in his office was that one.

Anomalies deserved further investigation.

The pieces were here, and he knew he had to put them together. Burns looked up at the ceiling and extended the middle finger of his right hand.

*************

“Welcome back,” Ducharme said to Kincannon. “What’s the word on New York?”

Evie was still driving. They’d picked up Kincannon from an open field next to the service road off the Interstate. Pollack had immediately taken off in search of fuel, telling them to call her when they needed her.

“The killing in New York was covered up, just like all the other ones,” Kincannon said. “Our friend the Surgeon has very powerful friends.”

“What did you find at Monticello?” Evie asked.

Kincannon reached into his pocket and pulled out a small plastic case, which he opened. He retrieved a thumb drive. “Bingo.”

“Hurt anyone?” Ducharme asked.

“Don’t ask a question you don’t want to know the answer to,” Kincannon said.

Ducharme grimaced, but nodded.

Evie held out her hand. “May I have it please?”

Kincannon put it in her palm. “Can I see this cipher thing?” he asked.

Evie pulled out the rod with the fourteen disks they’d recovered so far on it, passing it to him. Kincannon took it and spun the disks, nodding. “Pretty sharp.”

“Jefferson was a genius,” Evie said as she pulled out McBride’s computer and pushed the on button. “He invented the Wheel Cipher while serving as Secretary of State to ensure that his correspondence would be secure from prying eyes. To encode a message, a cryptographer dials up a twenty-six-letter message in a row. Then go to any other row and write those letters down and send them. To decipher the message, the receiver would set his own identical Wheel Cipher to the text and look for a message on the other lines that made sense.”

“So shouldn’t there be another one?” Kincannon asked.

Evie explained the concept of a Key line to set the machine and reveal the message.

“Ok, another stupid question,” Kincannon said. “Even if we get all the disks—we still don’t know what the twenty-six letter Key is.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Evie said. “Jefferson encoded the location of the Allegiance on this cipher—“ she pointed at the partially complete machine. “He wasn’t sending a message to another cipher, he was sending the cipher to someone in the future. If I might have the momentary conceit to think like him, then the Key line is central to finding the message.”

“That’s what Kincannon just said.” Ducharme was irritated. “We don’t have—“

Evie cut him off. “But we must have it. The code line for this cipher isn’t a random list of letters.”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Like everything else we’ve been tracking down in this puzzle, there must be a logic to it. I believe the code line is something coherent, a phrase most likely, that we dial up. And somewhere else on the cipher is the location of the Allegiance.”

“So what’s the Key?” Kincannon asked.

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” Evie said. Her attention was on the flickering computer screen. She pushed the thumb drive into the USB port.

Chapter Nineteen

In the rear of the Blackhawk, Lily glanced at the GPS display. A small, red blinking dot had just appeared at the forward edge of the screen. The chopper was gaining on it rapidly. Looking out the window, the twin black ribbons of the Massachusetts Turnpike slashed across the snow-covered countryside.

“Gain some altitude,” she ordered the pilot over the intercom. “I don’t want us to be heard by someone on the ground. And slow down.”

“Roger that, ma’am.”

She alternated her gaze between the GPS and the highway below, waiting until the red dot was dead center. “Go steady with the eastbound flow of traffic and offset to the south.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Lily glanced out the left window. There was a line of cars on the turnpike, but she easily spotted the big black Blazer with tinted windows. “Arm your Hellfire missiles,” she ordered.

The pilot and co-pilot both twisted their heads and stared at her for a moment in shock, before looking forward. “Ma’am,” the pilot said tentatively. “We’re in the States. What—“

“There’s a vehicle with terrorists on the road,” Lily snapped. “I have the authority to use deadly force to stop them.”

There was a pause, and then the pilot’s voice came over the intercom. “Hellfires armed.”

Lily pulled out her satphone and texted.

>>>EVIE AND DUCHARME IN SIGHT. HELLFIRES ARMED. REQUEST PERMISSION TO TERMINATE.<<<

The reply was immediate.

***NEGATIVE. THEY HAVE HALF THE DISKS. FOCUS ON PRIMARY MISSION. RECOVERING DISKS IS PRIORITY***

Lily grimaced.

>>>DESTROYING DISKS AS GOOD AS DESTROYING ALLEGIANCE<<<

***NEGATIVE NEGATIVE NEGATIVE. THE ALLEGIANCE WILL ALWAYS BE A THREAT. IT MUST BE FOUND AND DESTROYED***

>>>YES SIR<<<

***THREE OPERATIVES KILLED AT MONTICELLO. TIME IS OF ESSENCE***

Lily stared at the words trying to make sense. Had there been disks there? Who’d killed the operatives?

The phone went dead. She turned the intercom on. “Put the safeties back on your Hellfires. Get me to Quincy, ASAP.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The relief was audible in the pilot’s voice.

Lily ran her nails over the poorly healed cuts. Blood welled up.

*************

“What’s wrong?” Kincannon asked in a low voice, ignoring Evie who was enraptured with the computer in the back seat.

“I don’t know,” Ducharme said. He realized he was hunched forward, shoulders tight, hands gripping the steering wheel with just a little too much force. “Bad vibes.” It felt like he was back in Afghanistan, driving the Up-Armor Humvee, waiting for an IED to go off.

Kincannon straightened in the passenger seat, looking at the mirror on his side. “I don’t see anything.”

Ducharme forced himself to relax. “Nothing. It’s all right.” He glanced back at Evie, catching her attention. “What’s the relationship between Jefferson and Adams besides the fact they died on the same day?”

“Adams was a Federalist,” she began, but Kincannon cut in.

“Hold on,” he said. “I thought you said the Federalists hated Jefferson.”

“They did,” Evie said, lowering the screen. “Let me explain—and you need to understand before I tell you what McBride wrote on this—by telling you about the low point between the two of them, and how Hamilton was involved. Because I think the Allegiance is some sort of compromise. And you need to understand the way these people operated.”

“All right,” Ducharme said. “Go ahead.”

“The election of eighteen hundred was Thomas Jefferson versus the incumbent John Adams. That election exposed one of the flaws of the Constitution. The Electoral College could only vote for President. The way the Constitution was written, the Vice President was the person who got the second largest number of votes in the election. When the vote was tallied, they ended up with anti-Federalist Jefferson versus his own Vice Presidential candidate, Aaron Burr, in a deadlock and Adams was out of it. To further complicate things, because of the tie, the vote was then given to the outgoing Federalist House of Representatives.”

“Clusterfuck,” Kincannon succinctly summed it up.

Evie nodded. “At first, most Federalists voted for Burr simply to keep Jefferson out of the White House in a show of support to Adams. But Alexander Hamilton hated Burr more than Jefferson. So he got a congressman named Bayard to swing a group of Federalists to vote for Jefferson and give him the election. This sowed the seeds of the most famous duel in American history four years later between Hamilton and Burr. It also led to the Twelfth Amendment in the same year, requiring Electors to make a choice between their selections for President and Vice President.”