Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

Her reply was slow and sad. “No, I guess not. But you’re already different — I can feel it. I can sense it. I don’t need telepathy to see that — well, it’s as if all those years in Boston have just been wiped away. And you’re back in the thick of things. And I don’t like it. It scares me.”

“It scares me, too.”

“You were talking in the middle of the night.”

“In my sleep?”

“No, on the phone. Who were you talking to?”

“A reporter I know, Miles Preston. Met him in Germany in my early CIA days.”

“You asked him something about the German stock market crash.”

“And I thought you were fast asleep.”

“You think that has something to do with Dad’s murder?”

“I don’t know. It might.”

“I found something.”

“Yes,” I said. “I remember your saying something when I was drifting off in Greve.”

“I think I now understand why Dad left me that letter of authorization.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Remember the document left to me in his will? There was the title to his house, and the stocks and bonds, and that bizarre financial ‘instrument,’ as the lawyers kept calling it authorizing me to have all the rights of beneficiary, foreign and domestic?”

“Right. And?”

“Well, that would have been pointless for any domestic accounts, which automatically go to me anyway. As for foreign accounts, where banking laws vary so widely, a letter like that would come in handy.”

“Especially with a Swiss account.”

“Exactly.” She got up from the bed and walked over to the closet, opened a suitcase, and soon retrieved an envelope. “The financial instrument,” she announced. She foraged a bit longer and then produced the book her father had for some reason bequeathed me, the first edition of Allen Dulles’s memoirs, The Craft of Intelligence.

“What the hell did you bring this for?” I asked.

She didn’t reply. Instead, she returned to the bed and set both items down carefully on the rumpled sheets.

Next, she opened the book. The predominantly gray jacket was immaculate, and the spine of the book cracked as she opened it to the middle. It had probably been opened a few times before. Maybe just once, when the legendary Mr. Dulles had taken out his Waterman fountain pen and written on the title page in blue-black ink in his neat script: “For Hal, With deepest admiration, Allen.”

“This was the only thing Dad left to you,” she said. “And for a long time I wondered why.”

“As did I.”

“He loved you. And although he was always sort of frugal, he was never cheap. And I wondered why he’d leave you just this book. I knew his mind pretty well — he was a game player. So when they let me pack up my things, I collected all the documents Dad left me, and I decided to take this along and look through it carefully for any kind of markings — that’s the sort of thing he’d do for me when I was young, mark books up for me so I’d make sure not to miss the important passage. And I found it.”

“Hmm?”

I looked at the page she was indicating. On page 73, which dealt with codes and ciphers and cryptanalysis, the phrase “Pink Code” was underlined in the text. Next to it, scrawled lightly in pencil, was “L2576HJ.”

“That’s his seven,” she explained. “And definitely his two. And his J.”

I understood immediately. “Pink Code” really meant the Onyx Code; Dulles had clearly wanted not to give away the actual name. The Onyx Code was a legendary World War I codebook that the Agency had inherited from the U.S. Diplomatic Service. It was still kicking around, though rarely used, since it had long ago been cracked. L2576HJ was a coded phrase.

Hal Sinclair had left Molly the legal means to access the account.

He had left me the account number. If only I could decrypt it.

“One more,” she said. “The page before.”

She pointed. At the top of Page 72 was a series of numbers, 79648, which Dulles had cited as an example for the general reader of how codes work. It was underlined lightly in pencil, and next to it Sinclair had penciled “R2.”

R2 referred to a codebook of much more recent vintage, which I’d never used. I assumed that 79648 was another code that would translate into a different series of numbers (or perhaps letters) when the R2 code was applied.

I needed code information from within the CIA, yet I couldn’t risk disclosing my whereabouts. So I placed a call to an Agency friend from Paris days who had retired some years ago and was teaching political science in Erie, Pennsylvania. I had saved his ass twice — once on an all-night stakeout that had gone bad, and once bureaucratically, by clearing his name in the subsequent investigation.

He owed me big, and he agreed without hesitation to place a call to a trusted friend of his, still in the Agency, and ask him, as a favor to an old friend, to take a quick stroll over to the cryptography archives one floor below. Since any codebook three quarters of a century old was hardly a matter of national security, my friend’s source read to him a series of codes. He then placed a call to the pay phone outside the hotel and read them to me.

And finally I had the account number in hand.

The second code, however, was a tougher nut to crack. The book wouldn’t be stored in the crypto archives (the Crypt, as it was called), since it was still active.

“I’ll do my best,” my friend in Erie said.

“I’ll call back,” I replied.

We sat in silence. I glanced through Dulles’s memoir. He had begun the section “Codes and Ciphers” with that famous stern dictum from Henry Stimson, the secretary of state in 1929: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

He was wrong, of course, and Dulles took pains to point that out. Everyone in the spy biz reads everyone else’s mail, and anything else they can. Maybe, though, spies aren’t gentlemen.

And I wondered what the hell Henry Stimson would have declared about whether gentlemen read each other’s minds.

I called Erie back an hour later. He answered the phone on the first ring. His voice was different, strained.

“I couldn’t get it,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Had someone gotten to him?

“It’s deactivated.”

“Huh?”

“Deactivated. All copies withdrawn from circulation.”

“As of when?”

“Yesterday. Ben, what’s this all about?”

“Sorry,” I said, my chest tightening. The Wise Men. “I’ve got to run. Thanks.” And I hung up.

The next morning we walked along Bahnhofstrasse, a few blocks from the Paradeplatz, until we found the correct street number. Most of the banks were headquartered in the upper levels of the buildings, above the fashionable shops.

Despite its grandiloquent name, the Bank of Zurich was small, family-owned, and very discreet. Its entrance was concealed on a small side street off Bahnhofstrasse, next to a Konditorei. A small brass plaque said simply B. Z. et Cie. If you had to ask, you had no business knowing.

We entered the lobby, and as we did, I sensed a movement behind us. I turned quickly, tensing, and saw that it was only someone, probably a Zuricher, passing by. Tall, quite thin, in a dove-gray suit, he was no doubt a banker or shopkeeper going to work; I relaxed and, my arm around Molly, entered the lobby.

But something stuck in my mind, and I glanced back again, and the shopkeeper was gone.

It was the face. Pale, extremely pale, with large, elongated yellowish circles under the eyes, pale, thin lips, and thin blond hair combed straight back.

He looked strikingly familiar, there was no doubt about it.