From the Ashes (39 page)

“Another code?”

“Yeah.” As Mara looked at the images, Jon pulled out Michael’s notebook from his backpack and turned to a blank page.

“Can you decode it?” Mara asked as Jon started transcribing the letters from the pictures.

“I think so... Here, look.”

Mara leaned over to see what he had written:

“O-key dokey, then,” Mara said, her eyes wide, her face moving away from the page. She massaged her hamstring so as to keep up appearances for anyone who might’ve been suspicious of her earlier “injury.” ��I’ve got nothing.”

“Well, we know from previous experience that Rockefeller was a fan of rhyming couplets. The last two lines don’t have any of the same characters, so it’s probably not a monographic substitution code.”

“Huh?”

“Monographic, meaning each letter in the code refers to one letter in the original message. Like the one we found in Riverside Church. This one is probably digraphic, meaning each
pair
of letters in the code refers to a specific pairing of letters in the original message.”

“And you can solve digraphic codes?”

“Well, there are different types. This one, though, I’d be willing to bet is a Playfair code.”

“Play
fair
?

“Not ‘play fair’ two words, but ‘Playfair’ the one-word name, like Lord Playfair, the guy who popularized them in the 1800s. You use a keyword to create a five-by-five table of the alphabet that serves as your key.”

“But five-by-five is twenty-five,” Mara reminded him. “There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet.”

“I know. Playfairs either put I and J together, or eliminate Q. Seeing as there’s no Q in the coded message, I’m gonna guess he went with the latter.”

“So what’s the keyword? ‘Phoenix’? ‘Division’?”

“I think he would’ve shied away from words that reminded him of what he had done. Wait...” Jon pulled the stone table from his pocket. “What about ‘the penitent pray’?”

“A
keyphrase”
?

“Yeah, it’d make decryption harder if someone were to find it and try to decipher it without the keyword. ‘The penitent pray’ isn’t in the dictionary.”

“True. Okay let’s try it. How do these work?”

“You start your five-by-five square off with the unique letters of your keyword, meaning that only the first ‘t,’ ‘e,’ ‘p,’ and ‘n’ get in.” He scribbled in the notebook. “Which gives us:”

“And then,” he continued, “we fill in the rest of the alphabet. Like so...”

“And voila, we have our key. Next, we have to break the code into the digraphs:”

“And then we use the key to translate each of those digraphs into the original. For example, H and E are in the same row on our key, so we take the letter immediately to the left of each letter, giving us T and H. A and E are in the same column, so we take the letter immediately above each, giving us E and W. And T and A are in neither the same row nor the same column, so we take the two other corners of the rectangle they would form, the corner that’s on the same row as the first letter being the first of the two letters from the message, and we get E and I.” Jon fell silent as he deciphered the rest of the message, Mara quietly watching on in admiration at the way his mind worked.

Jon finished writing and pointed to the page. “And the decoded digraphs look like:”

“The X’s are usually superfluous, simply added to give a relative position to double letters like ‘EE’ and ‘LL’ that can’t be charted in a Playfair code, so we nix them and are left with:”

“More following the eyes?” Mara said, but Jon didn’t respond. Turning her gaze from the page, she saw him staring slack-jawed and wide-eyed at Rockefeller’s last riddle. “What?” she asked.

“Oh my God.”

“What?” she repeated, more urgently. “You know where it is?”

“Yeah. Oh my God. Of course.”

“Jon, what? Where is it? Where are the Dossiers?”

Jon stood, shoved his cell phone and the notebook back into the backpack, and grabbed her hand, starting to pull her back toward the vestibule entrance. She stood and remembered to feign a slight limp to appease the sympathetic eyes that followed them to the doors.

“Jon, just tell me already. Whisper it if you have to, but I deserve to know. Where did he hide them?”

Jon pushed open the heavy bronze door and jabbed a finger into the night, pointing across Fifth Avenue to Rockefeller Center, to Lee Lawrie’s statue
of Atlas Supporting the World,
bowed on one knee by the weight of his burden. Kneeling in penitence toward the majestic beauty of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Jon’s outstretched finger quivered as he pointed toward Rockefeller Center’s famous statue. His voice shook as the single word nearly caught in his throat:

“There.”

Ramirez threw Wayne to the floor of the dark, cinder block room. About ten feet square, it was a disused storage room for some business that – judging by the silence that pervaded the room – was closed for the night. The door they had come through was made of heavy iron, veins of rust and the peeling remnants of an ancient paint job marring its face. The dirty concrete floor was strewn with old newspapers and broken beer bottles. A single light bulb, set high into one wall, cast a flickering yellow glow over the room.

Keeping his pistol trained on Wayne, Ramirez tossed a pair of handcuffs at the prone agent.

“Cuff yourself to the pipe,” Ramirez ordered, motioning to a heavy iron pipe protruding from the wall, its other end buried a foot below in the concrete floor.

Wayne pulled himself up into a crouch and complied, his own gun, phone, and GPS monitoring device having been confiscated by Ramirez en route to this tomblike chamber. Once the cuffs were in place, he turned back to face his captor. “Ramirez,” he said, forcing himself to keep his tone even and free from the nervousness he was beginning to feel, “what are you doing?”

“What am
I
doing? How about what are
you
doing? You who Greer trusted with this secret assignment. You who are trying to destroy everything we’ve worked for.”

“And what is that? Killing innocent civilians? Burying the truth?” Despite Wayne’s best efforts, he couldn’t help the traces of indignation that crept into his tone.

“That truth should never have happened.” Ramirez began pacing angrily, stalking up and down the room in front of Wayne. “If Rockefeller and Stimson had known what the Nazis would do, they never would have helped them take power in Germany.”

“I agree. But burying the truth doesn’t make its consequences any less real.”

“It
has
to be buried. Do you know what would happen if this got out?”

“I had the training, too, Ramirez. Yeah, I know the Division’s theory. But someday it
will
get out. And then what? You gonna kill everyone who watches that news special, who reads that article, who logs on to that blog? You can’t stop this, Ramirez. This skeleton has to be brought out into the open so it can finally be put to rest.”

“Into the open?
The world would be clamoring for our head!”

Wayne shrugged, maintaining his collected demeanor. “For a season, perhaps. Some saber rattling, some angry denunciations, a whole lot of apologies, but I think the most damning thing is that we continue to hide it. We continue to kill for it. And as long as we do that, we will continue to be haunted by this shadow from our past.”

Ramirez spat on the floor. “You’re insane. You want to tell
them
about the Operation? About the Division?”

“The truth will set you free,”
Wayne said in a hushed tone, as though speaking to himself.

“What?”

Wayne straightened his back against the wall. “Yes, Ramirez, that’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s our history. We have to deal with it – the good, the bad, and the ugly – together.”

Ramirez gestured toward the door with his gun.
“Those people
get their panties in a bunch over Brangelina and Justin freaking Bieber and you think they can be trusted with
this
?

Wayne kept his expression stoic. “I hope so. But it’s not for you, me, Greer, or the Division to make that decision for them.”

Ramirez shook his head in disgust, glaring with unbridled antagonism at his fellow agent. “That’s where you’re wrong.” A buzzing sounded from his pocket. The agent pulled out the phone, checked the caller ID, and flipped the phone to his ear. “Ramirez. Yes sir, I’ve got him contained. Are you ready to move on the targets?”

Wayne grimaced as the conversation continued. Both Greer and Ramirez had come to New York to finish what he would not. And they now had the true GPS positions of Jon and Mara, who by now had to be nearing the end of their quest. Another wrench in his plans. Then, with a final look of disgust, Ramirez took a step away and turned his gaze from Wayne, as though the very sight of the traitorous agent was an offense to the mission that he and Greer were discussing. And Wayne’s dark cloud grew a silver lining. In his arrogance, Ramirez had failed to remember that Wayne too was an adept agent. Just with different allegiances.

Wayne reached into his coat pocket with his free hand and procured a paperclip, which he proceeded to bend into a more useful form. Ramirez swiveled toward his captive, who palmed the makeshift lockpick, trying to continue looking hopelessly defiant. With another ashamed shake of the head, Ramirez turned away again to focus on the conversation. Wayne fitted the lockpick into the lock, waited for Ramirez’s own voice to mask the sounds of his escape, and removed one handcuff, and then the other.

Unfortunately, all Wayne could hear was Ramirez’s side of the conversation, but it was rich enough in information that he decided it would do. ‘Yes sir. St. Patrick’s. Rockefeller Center? Son of a bitch. Yes sir, I’ll be right over. One last thing to take care of.” He hung up and started to turn when Wayne slid away from the wall, kicking out and catching Ramirez in the shin.

Ramirez cursed and dropped the phone as he staggered back, still standing. His shin wasn’t broken, but Wayne figured it must’ve hurt like hell. Ramirez tried to level his gun at his opponent, but Wayne crashed into his side, slamming him into the far wall. Wayne pounded a fist into Ramirez’s gut, then flung the handcuffs at the single flickering light bulb. With an explosive shattering of glass and phosphorus, the room was cast into darkness.

“God damn you, Wilkins!” Ramirez’s winded and furious voice came from the dark. “Where the hell are you?” Ramirez still had his gun in hand, but Wayne knew that his opponent wouldn’t risk any stray shots in this ricochet-prone cinder-block chamber.

Wayne strafed noiselessly, trying to circle around where he assumed Ramirez was. The concrete room’s acoustics bounced sounds around like a pinball, making it all but impossible to accurately ascertain a sound’s source. Which was what Wayne was counting on.

He tossed a beer bottle from the floor in the direction of Enrique’s voice, leaping to the side as he threw it. An
oof
told him he’d hit his mark. He rushed, grabbing for the beltline. Where Ramirez had stuffed Wayne’s gun when he’d confiscated it earlier.

Ramirez was closer than Wayne had anticipated, apparently having run straight toward the threat once the thrown beer bottle gave away his position. Their bodies collided, Wayne grabbing his pistol as Ramirez brought his own gun’s handle down on Wayne’s forehead. A gash opened up, trickling blood down through his right eyebrow. He clenched his eyes shut, fought on. In the darkness, his sight was useless to him anyway.

Wayne heard the click of a round being chambered, Ramirez’s hand grasping at Wayne’s clothing, trying to keep track of his target in the lightless room. Wayne thrust his gun-holding arm upward, knocking Ramirez’s hand from his shirt collar. He grabbed Ramirez’s other wrist with his free hand. The gun in Ramirez’s hand erupted, a gunpowder flash temporarily illuminating the room. Wayne’s ears rang with the concussion reverberating through the tiny room. But the brief moment of light gave him a target, and he intended to use it.