Christa Faust - Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

“She’s right,” Bell said. “What if we unleash a whole army of Zodiacs?”

“But I don’t see any other way to stop him,” Walter said. “We can’t just let him keep killing.”

“Okay,” Nina said. “What if you two drop the special acid and concentrate on opening the gate again, and I’ll stand by with Lulu.” She pulled the handgun from her purse and gave it an affectionate pat. “Anyone or anything comes through that gate, I’ll let ’em have it.”

“I don’t know if I can condone that plan of action,” Walter said. “I mean, yes, clearly the last person or being that traveled through the gate has an unquestionably violent and unstable disposition. But that doesn’t mean that every single individual from the other side of that psychic gateway can be condemned to death, based solely on the actions of one man.

“I wouldn’t want to be summarily exterminated by aliens who judged the whole human race on the behavior of Charles Manson, for example,” he continued. “The next being that passes through might be a scholar or a scientist or a grandmother not unlike the ones we saved today.”

“Fair enough,” Bell acknowledged. “But I still think having Nina standing by as ground control couldn’t possibly be a bad idea. Not as an executioner—just as armed back-up, in case things get ugly.”

“Also,” Walter said, taking out the killer’s notebook and laying it on the desk, “I think it would be wise to spend some time working on decoding this. It may contain information about the world on the other side of the gate. Information that might be useful—or at least good to know before we open the way again. Forewarned is forearmed.”

“You see if you can get anywhere with that notebook, Walter,” Bell said, pulling his own red notebook from an inner pocket. “And Nina and I will see about acquiring the chemicals and equipment required to recreate our original formula. Good thing I keep every single formula written down.”

But Walter was barely listening. He opened the notebook to the last written page and stared at the groupings of letters, searching out double pairings and running a series of simple substitutions in his head. He reached for a pencil and a blank sheet of paper from a stack beside Nina’s typewriter, and began to fill it with scribbled notes and test keys.

12

Some time later, although Walter couldn’t have guessed how long if he’d been paid to do so, he became aware of a warm, spicy, almost ambrosial smell.

Chinese food.

Up until that moment he’d only been vaguely aware of a distant discomfort somewhere in his midsection, but when the smell hit him, he was suddenly voraciously hungry. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything to eat.

He lifted his blurring, exhausted eyes from the scattered pages of his notes and saw Nina and Bell. He hadn’t noticed them leaving the room, but they clearly had gone somewhere and returned. Bell was carrying a large box of beakers and burners and heavy, brown glass bottles.

But Walter was only interested in what Nina was carrying. She was the one with the food. At that point, Walter was willing to trade his right arm for one of those wonderful little folded paper boxes.

“Nina,” Walter said as she handed him one of the warm boxes. “You are my angel.”

“And what am I?” Bell asked. “Chopped liver? Ergot seems to grow on trees in this town, but do you have any idea how hard it was to obtain monopropellant-grade anhydrous hydrazine?”

“Are there any forks?” Walter asked, peeling open his box of noodles and breathing in the fragrant steam.

“Just these,” Nina replied, holding up a fist full of balsa wood chopsticks.

“That’s okay,” Walter said, tipping the box to his lips like a cup and slurping up the noodles.

“Lovely,” Nina said, separating a pair of the chopsticks for herself and delicately dipping them into her own container. “Just try not to make a mess on my desk.”

“No, no—of course not.” Walter moved a page of his notes over to the right to cover a large splat of sauce. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“So Nina’s got a small lab we can use, set up in the basement,” Bell said. “Small, and nothing fancy, but it’ll do. There’s even a darkroom for Chick’s photography.” He peered over Walter’s shoulder. “How are you getting on with the notebook?”

Walter slurped another mouthful of noodles, talking around them.

“I tried all the basic approaches,” he said. “Including the one those teachers used to crack the cipher he sent to the papers. No dice. This is much more complicated, and far more secure. See, look here.”

He poked at the notebook with a saucy finger.

“I started off with frequency analysis. Searching for pairs, right?” He flipped the pages and pointed first to a double Q and then a double F . “Hoping to lock down my L . The most common double-letter pairing in the English language being the double L , of course, challenged only by the double T. But here’s the thing. It’s rarely the same.” Another massive mouthful of noodles. “There are only one or two repeats in the whole book. So that got me thinking polyalphabetic substitution.”

“Vigenère?” Bell asked, putting down his box of chemicals and grabbing some food of his own.

“Could be,” Walter said. “But that seems like such a pain. Plus we have a few symbols mixed in here and there, though not on the last ten pages.”

“What’s Vigenère?” Nina asked.

Walter sorted through his notes until he came up with the Vigenère’s square he’d laid out.

“It uses twenty-six substitution ciphers,” he told her. “One for each letter of the alphabet. But the problem is that it requires a keyword to solve.” He pulled out a list he’d made of logical guesses that he’d already tried. Words like Zodiac and the names of several known victims. But none had panned out. “We could spend the rest of our lives trying to randomly guess his keyword. And worse, I’m fairly certain he’s using multiple keywords, maybe even more than one on every page. I wouldn’t say it’s crack-proof, but I believe it may be beyond my own personal abilities.”

Bell had stopped eating with his chopsticks frozen halfway to his mouth. He put the box of noodles down and came over to the desk, eyes zooming in on the last written page of the notebook.

“Try Reiden,” he said.

“My God,” Walter said, putting his own food aside and grabbing the pencil.

* * *

Less than an hour later, Walter had most of the last page of the notebook deciphered. He held the handwritten translation up and read it out loud to Nina and Bell.

* * *

After I take down the bus I shall kill another teenage whore. A pretty brunette, like the first one on this side. I’ve been watching one girl who I think will fit the bill perfectly. Her name is Miranda.

My last girlfriend was older, a sad drunken waste of a person, and I found myself abruptly distracted at what should have been my most beautiful moment by the loose skin on her neck and the baggy, worn-out shape of her breasts. Yet the sparks in my hands were brighter and burned longer than ever before.

Not that I regret my previous choice. It’s only that the anticipation of killing has me feeling particularly appreciative of youth. That young teenage whore will be the perfect reward for what is sure to be my most acclaimed performance to date.

I’d like to see that sad sack Iverson and his FBI cronies try to keep this one out of the press.

I think I shall make myself wait a few days to claim my reward. The sparks are getting hungrier every day, but controlling appetites is what separates man from beast. I shall wait until