Daniel Ganninger - Icarus Investigations 03 - Snow Cone (27 page)

The Swiss teams cordoned off the area around the square and had a special team on hand to examine the black case.  Muller wasn’t happy when
Galveston explained that the uranium was just pewter.  I’m sure Mayfield wasn’t happy about it either. 

A Swiss medical team bandaged up my leg and gave me an IV.  I needed stitches, but was yearning to see Jane.  I knew she would be distressed when she heard our story.

They had placed Mayfield in the back of a Swiss patrol car.  He held his head low, but I could see him in the car from the back of the ambulance.  I wondered what his motivation was to join the Red Hand.  Browning had been inserted by the syndicate; Mayfield was a different matter.  Maybe it was for the money, maybe he wasn’t happy with his job, or maybe he had a quest for power that only the Red Hand could fulfill.  He was a traitor to the United States government, and a black eye for the CIA.  We would never know what his true motivation was.

As I rested at the back the ambulance, I noticed Mayfield slump over in the back seat of the patrol car.  I assumed he was exhausted from the ordeal.  A Swiss officer peered in the window and immediately began to yell.  He was joined by other officers, and they opened the door to the car.  Mayfield slid out and onto the ground.  He was convulsing violently and the men attending to me raced over to the car and began to work on him, but they were too late.  Mayfield was dead.  He had killed himself. 

It had gone unnoticed by the authorities when they frisked him.  It was a small cyanide pill, one of the oldest spy tools in the books.  Mayfield had probably taken it anticipating an ominous fate back in the U.S., or more importantly, with the Red Hand.  As Veronica had said, “no one leaves the Red Hand.”

-Chapter 43-

I didn’t know how to feel about the deaths of Browning and Mayfield.  These were two men that had entered the Red Hand through different means.  Browning had been inserted by the organization, just as Nikos had indicated in his letter.  Mayfield’s history indicated that he hadn’t become involved that way.  He was either bought off, or did it to meet some other need.  We would never know.  These two men were puppets of the Red Hand, and they were expendable in their eyes.

I was escorted by the Swiss authorities to a local medical clinic where a doctor stitched up my leg.  He told me to stay off it for a while, and I told him that wouldn’t be a problem.  He gave me a pair of crutches and sent me on my way.

Galveston
delivered all the information we had about the Red Hand to Muller.  He wasn’t pleased that we had lied to him about having the enriched uranium, but once he saw Nikos’s documents, his anger faded away.  For Muller it was confirmation that the Red Hand did, in fact, exist. 

Muller let us return to our hotel after a barrage of questions about our involvement in the affair, or what we called
Operation Snow Cone
.  He was amazed two men and a woman were crazy enough to pull off such a stunt.  We didn’t argue with him.  We were crazy to have even thought of it, but it had been a success.

I greeted Jane back in our hotel room.  She gave me a lecture after she had made sure I was alright.  I hugged her for a long time.  She fought back tears thinking what could have happened.

Galveston gave Sally a hug and a kiss and saw the exchange between me and Jane.  He was someone that didn’t dwell on the past.  “Your guy here did one hell of a job,” he said to Jane while slapping me on the back.  “It was just another day on the job as a private eye in Icarus Investigation, right?”

“Yeah, I suppose,” I answered meekly.

“It’s time to pack up, everybody.  We need to get home,” he announced to the room.

I slowly hobbled to my backpack and began to place my clothes inside. 

Galveston came up behind me.  “You okay?” he asked.

“I, I could have died out there today,” I stammered.

“You didn’t, did you?”

“A little piece of me did.  I don’t think I can do this anymore.  It’s not fair to Jane.  I can’t keep going on these dangerous operations and expect to be okay.”

“It’s what you signed up for,” Galveston said bluntly.

“I think I want to take my name off,” I said without a smile.

“That’s it?  You’re going to take one little situation and pack it in?” he asked.

“I think so,” I replied slowly.

“Go ahead, you big baby,” Galveston fired back.  “Do you want me to get you a bottle?”

I was growing angry at his constant insensitivity.  “Look, if I don’t want to do it anymore, then I don’t want to do it,” I shot back.  “I saw what the Red Hand can do.  We saw their faces.  They weren’t common street thugs like we expected.  They’re going to come after us, and they have the means to do it.”

“Man oh man.  I never thought you would be the first one to run after things cut too close to home.  I at least thought it would be Alex,” he said, pointing at Alex as he stuffed half a sandwich in his mouth.

“What?  What did I do?” Alex responded with a mouthful of food.

“Roger, you just saved thousands of people.  You put the screws to a secret society that no one knew about.  Hell, even the CIA got duped.  What do you think we do this for—fun?” he inquired.

Galveston
caught himself after the statement.  He actually did do some of it for fun, but I understood his point.

“You’re making a difference, man.  Don’t throw that away.  We’re not amateurs anymore—stupid.”  He added the last word just as I had days before.

I couldn’t deny it.  As much as I would have liked to walk away, I just couldn’t.  I couldn’t let events in the past dictate my future, and I was with someone that felt that same way—Jane.  She knew the risks I took, and she never had tried to talk me out of them.  She was who I lived for, and if she didn’t care about me continuing in this dangerous business, then I was going to stay in.

“Thanks—dummy,” I responded.

Galveston gave me another slap on the back.  “Let’s get moving everybody.  The plane leaves in an hour.”

Everyone rushed to get their things together.  Jane came up to me again and gave me another hug.  “I love you,” she said and touched my cheek.

“I know.  I love you too,” I replied and gave her a kiss.

“Enough, love birds.  C’mon,”
Galveston implored while he stood at the hotel room door.

We drove to the
Geneva International Airport and sat down as a group to wait for our flight.  Muller had done us one additional favor and found out the status of Joe at the hospital in London.  He was doing well and out of bed.  He had already started some physical therapy and was walking on his own.  Sally was going to stay with him when we got to London, and he was set to be released in only a few days.

Jane sat down beside me after getting an overly priced cup of coffee.  “Roger, there was something I wanted to discuss with you.”

My heart began to race.  Was this about moving our relationship ahead one notch?  Between the cross-country cases, the move to Nashville, and this case, we hadn’t had time to discuss our future.  I was surprised she had picked such an inopportune time to discuss it.

“Sally and I were looking through Nikos’s documents.”

I realized she didn’t want to talk about our relationship, and I felt a bit embarrassed.  But I also didn’t want to talk about this insane case either.

“I found this strangely worded letter.”  She pulled out a copy of the letter and placed it on my lap.  “It’s to Veronica, but it jumps around so much.  It doesn’t make any sense.  And there is a block of letters and numbers at the bottom, right before this line here.”  She pointed to a line at the bottom of the page that read:

Unitas per sanguinous
is no more. 
Unitas per amare
is us.  Please use it to decipher my heart above.

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.  I had seen the page but just thought it was gibberish.

“Isn’t that the latin phrase from the disk?” Jane asked.

“Yeah.  It’s the identification of the Red Hand,” I replied.  I looked up the latin word,
amare
, and discovered it meant love.  “Unity through blood is no more.  Unity through love is us.  That’s rather cryptic,” I said. 

“That’s what I thought.  You don’t think it’s some type of code, do you?” Jane asked.

“Decipher my heart?”  I wondered aloud.  “It may be.” 

I pulled the gray disk from my pocket.  I hadn’t given it to Muller and instead kept it for myself.  We had been nice enough to give him a rough sketch of the object.  I placed the disk on the block of letters and numbers.  The holes on the disk aligned nicely with the letters, but I couldn’t tell what the reference point was.  I thought the disk was just an identification tag.  I never imagined that it could be used to decipher code.

I began to search the columns, trying to figure out a pattern.  An announcement came over the public address system announcing our flight to London.  The search would have to wait.

I boarded the plane and informed
Galveston about our possible lead.  We discussed it with Alex since he had experience in deciphering codes back when he was with the NSA.  He explained that there had to be a reference point to use the disk as a decoder.

We were perplexed, but I felt in my gut that we were on the right track.  Nikos had set up a code for Veronica to find.  But what did the code say?

Jane and I wrote down the jumble of letters and numbers on separate pieces of paper and handed them to Alex, Galveston, and Sally.  I then traced the outline of the holes of the gray disk until I had a rough template for them to follow.  We spent the entire flight trying to decipher the message line by line. 

The letters could mean anything, making it impossible to decipher without some sort of key.  We had to assume the code was simple. 

We spent the entire flight going over the letters and numbers with the disk.  We were just about to land in London when Jane discovered something interesting.  She had gone back to the body of the confusing letter.  She saw that the letter “x” had been placed a few times in it without it being correct in the word.  The block of letters and numbers also had a few “x’s” scattered in it.  When she tried each hole on the “x”, she continued to see nothing that made sense.  It wasn’t until she got to the bottom hole, the one with the cord going through it, when she began to see a pattern.  She showed me her results proudly.

“Could it be that easy?” I remarked. 

“I think so,” she replied.  “The ‘x’ marks the spot.”

I started from the first “x” in the body of the letter and read left to right along the top holes.  I wrote them down and moved to the next “x”.  When I got to the block of letters and numbers I had the following written down:

u 9 2 b a n q c e n t d e g v a

Everyone on the flight had left the plane, and we sat huddled together attempting to decipher the code
while a cleaning crew started their work.  The flight attendant instructed us we had to leave the plane.

We grabbed up our things, and I rushed out of the plane on my crutches and up the jetway while the rest of the Icarus crew followed.  We huddled together again, next to a row of airport terminal chairs.  You could feel the nervous anticipation in the air.

I began to write the last of the characters down until I finished with a jumble of letters and numbers.  It read:

u 9 2 b a n q c e n t d e g v a s a f d e p b o x 4 5 1

We all stared at the code and began to try to decipher its meaning.  I made lines with my pen to break up the characters into possible words.

“Box,”
Galveston said first, “and the number 451.”  He thought hard for a second.  “Safe deposit box, number 451,” he said confidently.

I quickly wrote down what he had said.

“It has to be a bank name,” Jane added. 

“The word ‘bank’ in
Switzerland ends in a ‘q’” Alex interjected.

I crossed through the letters and wrote down the word “bank”. 

“I think ‘gva’ must mean Geneva.  That’s the airport code,” Galveston said.

We were understanding the meaning.  Nikos had something in a safe deposit box.  We then struggled over the letters, c e n t d e. 

We determined it was a bank in Geneva.  But which bank?  Geneva had many banks. 

Jane began to search on her phone and finally came up with our answer.  “Banque Central de Geneve; Central Bank of
Geneva,” she said excitedly.

We smacked each others’ hands in congratulations.  We stared at what I had written down.  The only characters left were, u 9 2.  We all grew quiet because we knew what the “u” meant.  It was the thing we had been chasing the entire time—the uranium.  The 9 2 was still a mystery.  Was it the code to the safe deposit box?  Not likely, no code would be that short.  We just couldn’t figure it out.

Sally had watched us keenly and finally enlightened us.  “You guys know that ninety-two is the atomic number of uranium on the periodic table, right?”

We all turned and stared at her.  We then broke out in smiles. 

Galveston reached out and hugged her and gave her a kiss on her cheek.  “We would have been here all day if it wasn’t for you,” he said proudly.

Sally smiled back at him.  She had been the only one of us to pay attention in chemistry class.

Nikos had pulled a fast one on the Red Hand and switched the uranium.  It was his last promise to Veronica to set things right.  The highly enriched uranium was sitting in a safe deposit box at the Banque Central de Geneve in number 451.

“
Galveston, you know what to do,” I said to him.

“Got it, Roger.  I’m on it,” he replied quickly. 

Galveston left to call Muller and give him the information he badly wanted to hear.

I stretched out my legs in front of me.  We had done what we set out to do.  It was time to go home, but first, we would stop at the hospital to see Joe. 

We left the airport and went directly to the hospital.  Joe looked weary, but otherwise in excellent shape.  We told him all the stories from the last few days, and he sponged all the information he could from us.  Joe was set to leave in two days, and we planned to stay and accompany him home. 

We left Joe and told him we would see him the next day.  It was time for a celebratory dinner.

We found a quaint and quiet cafe near the hospital and enjoyed our first stress free time in weeks.

The beverages flowed freely, and we discussed everything but the case we had just finished.  We would have enough time to relive it later, right now we just wanted to enjoy a nice dinner with each other. 

Galveston grabbed Sally’s hand and held it tightly under the table.  I was impressed and amazed he hadn’t screwed up his relationship yet.