Jeffery Deaver - Watchlist

“And you don’t have the encryption key.” Wheels within wheels, Carson thought. How many layers would they have to penetrate?

“Not yet,” Chang said. “This is an old-style pencil-and-paper cipher-you can tell because it’s just letters-but, wait a minute, look at the letter frequencies! I haven’t seen one of these in years, but I think this might be a Playfair cipher.”

“Playfair?” Carson said. “Spies used it, a long time ago-in World War II, right? How do you find the encryption key?”

“If it’s Playfair, it’ll be a group of 10 to 15 unique letters. It could be a single word, but sometimes it’s, say, a long phrase in a book, a song lyric-”

“A phrase all the members of the group would have to know.”

Chang nodded. “Anyone who needs to decode messages.”

“Wiki, you called the technology, for the heavy-water reactor, the ‘copper bracelet.’ Right?”

“Yeah.”

“When we were in France, the ‘copper bracelet’ was an actual physical copper bracelet. Jewelry.” As she spoke, Carson tried to circle her left wrist with her right hand. The effort made her gasp. “There were words engraved on it, in Hindi, or-”

“Sanskrit. Do you want your pain meds now? It’s a little early, but… ”

“I’ll wait. You’ve seen it? The bracelet?”

“With the elephant and the moon? Sure. Middleton sent it to me at the lab. I’ve got it with me.”

“You know what it says?”

“Yeah, sure. It’s a quotation, from the Buddha. “Irrigators direct the waters; Fletchers fashion the shaft, Carpenters bend the wood. The wise control themselves.”

“Where’s it from, the quote?”

“A text called the Dhammapada . It’s a compilation of the Buddha’s words.”

“Could that be the key word? Dhamma-whatever?”

Chang shook his head. “Too many repeating letters.”

“Well, could the quote itself be the encryption key?”

“It’s a long enough phrase,” Wiki said. “Let’s give it a whirl.”

“I think I remember how to do this,” Carson said. “You make a five-by-five grid, right?”

“Yeah. The most common way to do it is to take the first letter of each word in the phrase. So we’d start out ‘I’, ‘D’, ‘W’, ‘F’, then ‘A’, from the second letter of ‘fashion’, since we’ve already used the ‘F’, then ‘H’, ‘S’, and so on. You arrange the letters at the beginning of your grid, one to a square, followed by the rest of the letters in the alphabet, in order, with the Q, or sometimes the J, omitted. And if the first letter in each word doesn’t work, you try the last letter, or-”

“So there are a lot of possibilities. This could take a while.”

“Take me a few minutes to write a tiny Perl program. Really, it’s way quicker than filling in the grid hit or miss.”

“Perl?”

“Sorry. It’s this really easy computer language-I’m boring the hell out of you, aren’t I?”

“No, Wiki, I love puzzles.” She stopped. The pain was waking in earnest now; fire blazed down the length of her arm. “Maybe you better give me a pill or two?”

“Hey, I’m sorry. I forgot.”

Chang disappeared from Carson’s view with a clatter, using the wheeled desk chair to scoot around the van’s interior. He retrieved a vial of pills from a satchel, a paper cup and a bottle of water from the monitor shelf, before returning to the side of the cot. “You lie back and relax, okay? You’re turning paler every second.”

“But I-”

“Hey. Doctor’s orders.”

Obediently, Carson swallowed the pills. Chang scooted his chair back to the shelf, turned a gooseneck lamp to focus on his laptop keyboard, flexed his fingers and went to work.

“Not the first letter of every word,” he said. “Not the last. Dammit.”

Carson closed her eyes. It had felt right, basing the encryption key on the quote from the bracelet. “So much for hunches. Now what do we do?”

“Hey, come on. If they can code it I can crack it. Hey, wait a sec. I’ve got it! Just the thing, it’s perfect, a little gem of a program I once wrote for a puzzle contest.”

“A puzzle contest?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of embarrassing, right? For the American Cryptogram Association. Bunch of retired crossword addicts and a few computer geeks too. I never thought this thing would come in handy but lemme see now… Yeah, this won’t take longer than a minute or two. It’ll run way faster on this baby than on the computer I used when I wrote it.”

Chang’s fingers flew across the laptop’s keys.

“How’re you doing, Connie? Pills working?”

“Yeah. I think so.” The fire was subsiding; Carson welcomed the throbbing in its stead.

“Hey, hey, we nailed it. Whoa, look at this sucker, fourth letter in every word.”

“What’s it say?”

“Oh shit,” Chang murmured under his breath. “Dammit to hell.”

“It didn’t work… ” Carson felt utterly deflated by the letdown. She heard the chair wheels cross the floor.

Chang’s dark eyes peered down at her from behind his spectacles. “No. It worked, all right,” he said, “but here’s the thing: they’re not planning to go online with the heavy-water plant. There is no heavy-water reactor, never was a heavy-water reactor. Sindhu didn’t send any ‘copper bracelet’. The ‘copper bracelet’ is the organization, not some shortcut to a nuclear reactor.”

“But what about those shipping manifests? Sindhu sent something.”

“You know where the plant is, right?”

“On the Chenab River.”

“It’s an Indian-funded project, but the location is in disputed territory, between Pakistan and India.”

“I know,” Connie said impatiently. “Traditional enemies.”

“With nukes,” Chang added.

“Yeah. So?”

“So they didn’t send copper piping and coils. They sent thermobaric explosives. They’re going to blow the Baglihar dam sky high.”

Just as the BlackBerry had been pre-planted in the drawer, the Browning Buck Mark.22 was taped inside the toilet tank. Jana appreciated the compliment. The.22 was a marksman’s gun. A larger weapon would have been overkill.

The bathroom was easily as large as the room she had shared with her brothers growing up. White veined marble surrounded the tub and steam shower, aqua tile gleamed on the walls and floor.

She used the facilities quickly, flushed the toilet and turned on the hot water in the Jacuzzi, using the noise to cover the sound as she screwed the Gemtech Suppressor to the threaded end of the Trail-Lite barrel.

She jutted her head into the bedroom. Crane was naked on the bed, scanning the room service menu.

“Pierre,” she said. “Come here.”

Crane looked over the menu. “I was going to order us-”

“This is better,” she said over the rushing water.

“In a moment,” he replied as he reached for the telephone.

He ordered something.

She set the pistol down temporarily on the edge of the Jacuzzi, opened a jar of bath salts, the source of the jasmine aroma, and inhaled deeply. On the edge of the tub, white towels were folded into a thick stack.

She checked her appearance in the mirror over the twin sinks, rearranged her hair. “Please, Pierre.”

Crane rolled from the bed and opened the door. He stood naked in the frame. “I’ve ordered us a bit of caviar-”

Jana stopped him just inside the doorway by aiming the silenced pistol at his knee. Not so close that he could move in and grab it away in one of his karate moves.

Shock registered in Crane’s eyes.

“You’re surprised, Pierre? This is what it’s come down to. If you want to live, answer me. First, what do you know about Harold Middleton?”