Cynthia Manson (ed) (59 page)

Rand turned and saw Daphne Sollis
standing not five feet behind him, unwrapping a scarf to reveal a tousled head
of red hair. “Daphne!” She looked puzzled for a moment and he identified
himself. “Ivan St. Ives introduced us a year or so back. He did some work for
me.”

She nodded slowly as it came back to
her. “Oh, yes—Mr. Rand. I remember you now. Is this some sort of setup? The
other one, Hastings, was here just last night.”

“No setup, but I
would
like
to talk with you, away from this noise. How about the lobby of the hotel next
door?”

“Well—all right.”

The hotel lobby was much quieter.
They sat beneath a large potted palm and no one disturbed them. “What do you
want?” she asked. “What did your friend Hastings want last night?”

“It was only happenstance that he
met you. though I’ll admit I came to the Crown and Piper looking for you. I
need to locate Ivan St. Ives.”

“I told Hastings we’re on the outs.”

“I saw him at Perkins and Simplex
earlier today.”

“Then you’ve already located him.”

“No.” Rand explained. “His Christmas
job would have ended today. I need to know where he’s living.”

“I said we’re on the outs.”

“You were drinking with him at the
Crown and Piper just a week or two

ago.”

She bit her lip and stared off into
space. “I don’t know where he’s living. He rang me up and we had a drink for
old times’ sake. That’s when he told me about the Christmas job. He talked
about getting back together again, but I don’t know. He works for a lot of
shady people.”

“Who’s he working for now?”

“Just the store, so far as I know.
He said he’d fallen on hard times.”

Rand leaned forward. “It could be
worth some money if you located him for us, told us who he’s palling around
with.”

She seemed to consider the idea. “I
could tell you plenty about who he’s palled around with in the past. It wasn’t
just our side, you know.”

“I know.”

But it would have to be after New
Year’s. I’m going to visit a girlfriend in Hastings, on the coast. Is your
friend Hastings from there?”

“From Leeds, actually.” Rand was
frowning. “I need St. Ives now.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help you.
Perhaps the store has his address.”

“I’ll have to ask them.” Rand stood
up. “Can I buy you a pint back at the

pub?”

“I’d better skip it now,” she said,
glancing at her watch. “I want to get home and change. I’m going to Midnight
Mass with some friends.”

“If you’ll jot down your phone
number I’d like to ring you up after New Year’s.”

“Fine,” she agreed.

He’d intended to phone Leila after
he left Daphne, but back at the Double-C office, Parkinson was in a state of
dejection. “We’ve run every possible substitution of the letter E and there’s
still nothing. We’re going down the letter-frequency list now, working on T, A,
O, and N.”

“Forty characters without a single
E. Unusual, certainly.”

“Any luck locating St. Ives?”

“Not yet.”

Rand worked with them for a time and
then dozed on his office couch. It was long after midnight when Parkinson shook
him awake. “I think we’ve got part of it.”

“Let me see.”

The younger man produced long folds
of computer printout. “On this one we concentrated on the first six
characters—the repetitive MPPMPM. We got nowhere substituting E, T, or A, but
when we tried the next letters on the frequency list, O and N, look what came
up.”

Rand focused his sleepy eyes and
read NOONON. “Noon on?”

“Exactly. And there’s another ON
combination later in the message.”

“Just a simple substitution cipher
after all,” Rand marveled. “School children make them up all the time.”

“And it took us all these hours to
get this far.”

“St. Ives didn’t worry about making
the cipher too complex because he was writing it in invisible ink. It was our
good luck that the box warmed enough so that some of the message began to
appear.”

“A terrorist network armed with
plastic explosives, and St. Ives is telling them when and where to set off the
bomb. Do you think we should phone Hastings?”

Rand glanced at the clock. It was
almost dawn on Christmas morning. “Let’s wait till we get the rest of it.

He followed Parkinson down the hall
to the computer room where the others were at work. Not bothering with the
machines, he went straight to the old blackboard at the far end of the room.
“Look here, all of you. The group of letters following
noon on
is probably
a day of the week, or a date if it’s spelled out. If it’s a day of the week,
three of these letters have to stand for
day
.”

As he worked, he became aware that
someone had chalked the most common letter-frequency list down the left side of
the board, starting with E, T, A, O, N, and continuing down to Q, X, Z. It was
the list from David Kahn’s massive 1967 book,
The Codebreakers
, which
everyone in the department had on their shelves. He stared at it and noticed
that M and P came together about halfway down the list. Together, just like N
and O in the regular alphabet. Quickly he chalked the letters A to Z next to
the frequency list. “Look here! The key is the standard letter-frequency list.
ABCDE is enciphered as ETAON. There are no Ns in the message we found, so there
are no Es in the plaintext.”

The message became clear at once:
NOONO NTHIS DAYCH ARING CROSS STATI ONTRA CKSIX. “Noon on this day, Charing
Cross Station, Track six,” Rand read.

“Noon on which day?” Parkinson
questioned. “It was after noon yesterday before he distributed most of the
boxes.”

“He must mean today. Christmas Day.
A Christmas Day explosion at Charing Cross Station.”

I’ll phone Hastings,” Parkinson
decided. “We can catch them in the act.”

Police and Scotland Yard detectives
converged on the station shortly after dawn. Staying as unobtrusive as
possible, they searched the entire area around track six. No bomb was found.

Noon came and went, and no bomb
exploded.

Rand turned up at Leila’s flat late
that afternoon. “Only twenty-four hours late,” she commented drily, holding the
door open for him.

“And not in a good mood.”

“You mean you didn’t crack it after
all this time?”

“We cracked it, but that didn’t do
us much good. We don’t have the man who sent it, and we may be unable to prevent
a terrorist bombing.”

“Here in London?”

“Yes. right here in London.” He knew
a few police were still at Charing Cross Station, but he also knew it was quite
easy to smuggle plastic explosives past the tightest security. They could be
molded into any shape, and metal detectors were of no use against them.

He tried to put his mind at ease
during dinner with Leila, and later when she asked if he’d be spending the
night he readily agreed. But he awakened before dawn and walked restlessly to
the window, looking out at the glistening streets where rain had started to
fall. It would be colder today, more like winter.

The bomb hadn’t gone off at Charing
Cross Station yesterday. Either the time or the place was wrong.

But it hadn’t gone off anywhere else
in London, so he could assume the place was correct. It was the time that was
off.

The time, or the day.

This day.

Noon on this day.

He went to Leila’s telephone and
called Parkinson at home. When he heard his sleepy voice answer, he said, “This
is Rand. Meet me at the office in an hour.”

“It’s only six o’clock,” Parkinson
muttered. “And a holiday.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But I’m calling
Hastings, too. It’s important.”

He leaned over the bed to kiss Leila
but left without awakening her.

An hour later, with Hastings and Parkinson
seated before him in the office, Rand picked up a piece of chalk. “You see, we
assumed the wrong meaning for the word ‘this.‘ If someone wants to indicate
‘today,‘ they say it— they don’t say ‘this day.‘ On the other hand, if I write
the word ‘this’ on the desk in front of me—” he did so with the piece of chalk
“—what am I referring to?”

“The desk,” Parkinson replied.

“Right. If I wrote the word on a
box, what would I be referring to?”

“The box.”

“When St. Ives’s message said, ‘this
day,‘ he wasn’t referring to Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. He was telling
them Boxing Day. Even if they were foreign, they’d know it was the day after
Christmas here and a national holiday.”

“That’s today,” Hastings said.

“Exactly. We need to get the men
back to Charing Cross Station.”

The station was almost deserted. The
holiday travelers were at their destinations, and it was too soon for anyone to
have started home yet. Rand stood near one of the newsstands looking through a
paper while the detectives again searched unobtrusively around track six. It
was nearly noon and time was running out.

“No luck,” Hastings told him. “They
can’t find a thing.”

“Plastique.” Rand shook his head.
“It could be molded around a girder and painted most any color. We’d better
keep everyone clear from now until after noon.” It was six minutes to twelve.

“Are you sure about this, Rand? St.
Ives is using a dozen or more people. Perhaps they all didn’t understand his
message.”

“They had to come together to
assemble the small portions of explosive into a deadly whole. Most of them
would understand the message even if a few didn’t. I’m sure St. Ives trained
them well.”

“It’s not a busy day. He’s not
trying to kill a great many people or he’d have waited until a daily rush
hour.”

“No,” Rand agreed. “I think he’s
content to—” He froze, staring toward the street entrance to the station. A man
and a woman had entered and were walking toward track six. The man was Ivan St.
Ives and the woman was Daphne Sollis.

Rand had forgotten that the train to
Hastings left from Charing Cross Station.

He ran across the station floor,
through the beams of sunlight that had suddenly brightened it from the
glass-enclosed roof. “St. Ives!” he shouted.

Ivan St. Ives had just bent to give
Daphne a good-bye kiss. He turned suddenly at the sound of his name and saw
Rand approaching. “What is this?” he asked.

“Get away from him. Daphne!” Rand
warned.

“He just came to see me off. I told
you I was visiting—”

“Get away from him!” Rand repeated
more urgently.

St. Ives met his eyes, and glanced
quickly away, as if seeking a safe exit. But already the others were moving in.
His eyes came back to Rand, recognizing him. “You were at the store, in line
for Father Christmas! I knew I’d seen you before!”

“We broke the cipher, St. Ives. We
know everything.”

St. Ives turned and ran, not toward
the street from where the men were coming but through the gate to track six. A
police constable blew his whistle, and the sound merged with the chiming of the
station clock. St. Ives had gone about fifty feet when the railway car to his
left seemed to come apart with a blinding flash and roar of sound that sent
waves of dust and debris billowing back toward Rand and the others. Daphne
screamed and covered her face.

When the smoke cleared. Ivan St.
Ives was gone. It was some time later before they found his remains among the
wreckage that had been blown onto the adjoining track. By then. Rand had
explained it to Hastings and Parkinson. “Ivan St. Ives was a truly evil man.
When he was hired to plan and carry out a terrorist bombing in London over the
Christmas holidays, he decided quite literally to kill two birds with one
stone. He planned the bombing for the exact time and place where his old
girlfriend Daphne Sollis would be. To make certain she didn’t arrive too early
or too late, he even escorted her to the station himself. She knew too much
about his past associations, and he wanted her out of his life for good. I
imagine one of his men must have ridden the train into Charing Cross Station
and hidden the bomb on board before he left.”

But he didn’t tell any of this to
Daphne. She only knew that they’d come to arrest St. Ives and he’d been killed
by a bomb while trying to flee. A tragic coincidence, nothing more. She never
knew St. Ives had tried to kill her.

In a way Rand felt it was a
Christmas gift to her.

THE CAROL SINGERS – Josephine Bell

Old Mrs. Fairlands stepped carefully
off the low chair she had pulled close to the fireplace. She was very conscious
of her eighty-one years every time she performed these mild acrobatics.
Conscious of it and determined to have no humiliating, potentially dangerous
mishap. But obstinate, in her persistent routine of dusting her own
mantelpiece, where a great many too many photographs and small ornaments daily gathered
a film of greasy London dust.