Tess came into the hallway to see them off. “Just make sure you save me a couple.”
Just then, the phone rang. Tess didn’t look like she was in any rush to answer it. Eileen looked at her. “You gonna get that?”
“I’ll let the answering machine pick it up.” Tess shrugged.
“You’re gonna have to talk to him, sooner or later.”
Tess made a face. “Yeah, well, later’s always better where Doug’s concerned.”
She could guess the reason for the calls her ex-husband had left on her voice mail. Doug Merritt was a news anchor at a network affiliate in Los Angeles, and he was totally absorbed in his job. His one-track mind (keeping to only one subject, thinking of only one thing) would have linked the raid on the Met with the fact that Tess spent a lot of time there and would definitely have contacts. Contacts that he might use to get an inside track on what had become the biggest news story of the year.
The last thing she needed right now was for him to know that not only was she there, but that Kim was there with her. Ammo he wouldn’t hesitate to use against her at the first opportunity.
Kim.
Tess thought again about what her daughter had experienced last night, even from the relative shelter of the museum’s restrooms, and how it would need to be addressed. The delay in the reaction, and the odds were there would be one, would give her time to better prepare how to deal with it. It wasn’t something she was looking forward to. She hated herself for having dragged her there, even though blaming herself was far from reasonable.
She looked at Kim, grateful again for the fact that she was standing there before her in one piece. Kim grimaced at the attention.
“Mom. Would you quit it already.”
“What?”
“That pathetic look,” Kim protested. “I’m okay, all right? It’s no
biggie. I mean, you’re the one who watches movies through your fingers.”
Tess nodded. “Okay. I’ll see you later.”
She watched them drive off and walked in to the kitchen counter where the answering machine was blinking, showing four messages. Tess scowled at the device. The nerve of that creep. Six months ago, Doug had remarried. His new wife was a twenty-something, surgically enhanced junior executive at the network. This change in his status would lead, Tess knew, to his angling for a review of his visitation rights. Not that he missed, loved, or even particularly cared for Kim; it was simply a matter of ego and of malice. The man was a spiteful prick, and Tess knew she’d have to keep fighting the occasional bursts of fatherly concern until his nubile young plaything got herself pregnant. Then, with a bit of luck, he’d lose the pettiness and leave them alone.
Tess poured herself a cup of coffee, black, and headed for her study.
Switching on her laptop, she grabbed her phone and managed to track down Clive Edmondson to the New York-Presbyterian Hospital on East Sixty-eighth Street. She rang the hospital and was told he was not in a critical condition but would be there for a few more days.
Poor Clive. She made a note of visiting hours.
Opening the catalog of the ill-fated exhibition, she leafed through it until she found a description of the device taken by the fourth horseman.
It was called a multigeared rotor encoder.
The description told her that it was a cryptographic device and was dated as sixteenth century. Old and interesting, perhaps, but not something that qualified as what one would normally term a “treasure” of the Vatican.
By now, the computer had run through its usual booting up routine and she opened up a research database and keyed in “cryptography” and “cryptology.” The links were to Web sites that were mostly technical and dealt with modern cryptography as related to computer codes and encrypted electronic transmissions. Trawling through the hits, she eventually came across a site that covered the history of cryptography.
Surfing through the site, she found a page that displayed some early encoding tools. The first one featured was the Wheatstone cipher device from the nineteenth century. It consisted of two concentric rings, an outer one with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet plus a blank, and an inner one having just the alphabet itself. Two hands, like those of a clock, were used to substitute letters from the outer ring for coded letters from the inner one. The person receiving the coded message needed to have an identical device and had to know the setting of the two hands. A few years after the Wheatstone was in general use, the French came up with a cylindrical cryptograph, which had twenty discs with letters on their outer rims, all arranged on a central shaft, further complicating any attempts at deciphering a coded message.
Scrolling down, her eyes fell on a picture of a device that looked vaguely similar to the one she had seen at the museum.
She read the caption underneath it and froze.
It was described as “the Converter,” an early rotor encoder, and had been used by the U.S. Army in the 1940s.
For a second, it felt as if her heart had stopped. She just stared at the words.
1940s was “early?”
Intrigued, she read through the article. Rotor encoders were strictly a twentieth-century invention. Leaning back in her chair, Tess rubbed her forehead, scrolled back up to the first illustration on the screen, and then reread its description. Not the same by any means, but pretty damn close. And way more advanced than the single-wheel ciphers.
If the U.S. government thought that its device was early, then there was little wonder the Vatican was eager to show off one of its own devices; one which appeared to predate the army’s by some six hundred years.
Still, this bothered Tess.
Of all the glittering prizes he could have taken, the fourth horseman had zeroed in on this arcane device. Why? Sure, people collected the weirdest things, but this was pretty extreme. She wondered whether or not he might have made a mistake. No, she dismissed that thought-he had seemed very deliberate in his choice.
Not only that, but he took nothing else. It was all he wanted.
She thought about Amelia Gaines, the woman who looked more like someone out of a shampoo commercial than an agent of the FBI. Tess was pretty certain that the investigators wanted facts, not speculation, but even so, after a quick moment’s thought, she went into her bedroom, found the evening bag she’d carried last night, and pulled out the card given to her by Gaines.
She placed the card on her desk and flashed back to the moment the fourth horseman had picked up the encoder. The way that he had picked it up, held it, and whispered something to it.
He had seemed almost… reverent.
What was it he had said? Tess had been too distraught at the Met
to make a big deal out of it, but all of a sudden it was all she could think of. She focused on that moment, pushing everything else out of her consciousness, reliving the scene with the horseman lifting the encoder. And saying… what? Think, damn it.
Like she had told Amelia Gaines, she was pretty sure the first word was Veritas… but then what? Veritas? Veritas something…
Veritas vos? Somehow, that seemed vaguely familiar. She trawled her memory for the words, but it was no use. The horseman’s words had been cut off by the gunfire that erupted behind him.
Tess decided she would have to go with what she had. She turned to her computer and selected the most powerful metasearch engine from her links toolbar. She entered “Veritas vos” and got over twenty-two thousand hits. Not that it really mattered. The very first one was enough.
There it was. Calling out to her.
“Veritas vos liberabit The truth will set you free.
She stared at it. The truth will set you free.
Great.
Her masterful detective work had uncovered one of the most trite and overused sound bites (brief speech, short statement (especially one that is broadcast on television) of our time.
Chapter 9
Gus Waldron emerged from the West Twenty-third Street station and headed south.
He hated this part of town. He wasn’t a big fan of gentrification. Far from it. On his own turf, the fact that he was the size of a small building kept him safe. Here, his size only made him stand out among the fancy piss-ants scurrying along the sidewalks in their designer outfits and two-hundred-dollar haircuts.
Hunching his shoulders, he knocked a few inches off his height. Even then, big as he was, it didn’t help much and neither did the long, black, shapeless coat he wore. But he could do nothing about that; he needed the coat to conceal what he was carrying.
He turned up Twenty-second Street, heading west. His destination was a block away from the Empire Diner, located in the center of a small row of art galleries.
As he walked past, he noted that most of the galleries had just one or maybe two pictures in their windows. Some of the pictures didn’t even have frames for chrissakes, and none that he could see had a price tag.
How were you supposed to know if it was any fucking good if you didn’t know what it fucking cost?
His destination was now two doors away. To outward appearances, Lucien Boussard’s place looked like a slick upmarket antiques gallery. In fact, it was that and a whole lot more. Fakes and pieces of dubious origin infected the few genuine, unsullied (not stained, pure) objects. Not that any of his neighbors suspected as much, for Lucien had the style, the accent, and the manners to fit in seamlessly.
Very cautious now, eyes alert for anything or anyone that didn’t look right, Gus walked past the gallery, counted off twenty-five paces, then stopped and turned around. He made as if to cross the street, still couldn’t see anything that seemed out of place, and went back and was inside the gallery, his movements quick and light for a man his size. And why shouldn’t they be? In thirty fights, he had never once been hit hard enough to go down. Except when he was supposed to.
Inside the gallery, he kept one hand in his pocket, wrapped around the butt of a Beretta 92FS. It wasn’t his handgun of choice, but he’d had a couple of misfires with the .45 ACP, and, after the big night, it wasn’t smart to carry the Cobray. He took a quick look around. No tourists, or any other customers for that matter. Just the gallery’s owner.
Gus didn’t like many people, but, even if he had, he would not have liked Lucien Boussard. He was a smarmy (excessively ingratiating) little shit. Narrow face and shoulders to match, he wore his long hair pulled back into a ponytail.
Fucking French fag.
As Gus came in, Lucien looked up from behind a small spindly legged table where he sat working and faked an elated smile, a feeble attempt to hide the fact that he had instantly started sweating and twitching. That was possibly the one thing that Gus did like about Lucien. He was always on edge (pressured, tense), as if he thought Gus might at any moment decide to harm him. The greasy little fuck was right about that.
“Gus!” It came out like “Gueusse,” which only made him hate Lucien even more, every damn time he heard it.
Turning his back to him, Gus set the lock on the door, then walked over to the table. “Anyone out back?” he grunted.
Lucien shook his head rapidly from side to side. “Mais non, mais non, voyons, there is no one here but me.” He also had an annoying habit of repeating his faggoty French expressions several times. Maybe they all did that.
“I wasn’t expecting you, you didn’t say-”
“Shut the fuck up,” Gus spat back. “I’ve got something for you.” He grinned. “Something special.”
From beneath his coat, Gus pulled out a paper bag and laid it on the table. He glanced back at the door to make sure they were out of any passerby’s sight line and took something out of the bag. It was wrapped in newspaper. He started to unwrap it, looking up at Lucien as he did.
Lucien’s mouth opened and his eyes suddenly flared wider as Gus finally brought out the object. It was an elaborate, jewel encrusted gold cross, around a foot and a half long, breathtaking in its detail.
Gus set it down onto the open newspaper. He heard the hiss as Lucien sucked in his breath.
“aMon dieu, mon dieu.“ The Frenchman dragged his eyes up to Gus’s and all at once the sweat was popping across his narrow forehead. ”Jesus, Gus.“
Well, he had that right.
He looked down again and, following his example, Gus looked and saw that the newspaper was open at a photo spread of the museum.
“This is from the…”
“Yeah,” Gus smirked. “It’s something, isn’t it? One of a kind.”
Lucien’s mouth was twitching. “Non mats, il est completement tare, ce mec. Come on, Gus, I can’t touch thus.”
It wasn’t as if Gus wanted Lucien to touch it, he just needed him to sell it. And he couldn’t exactly wait for a bidding war either. For the past six months, Gus had had a seriously bad run at the track. He had been in the hole before, but never like this, and he had never before been in the hole to the people who were now holding his markers. Throughout pretty much all of his life, since the day he grew taller and heavier than his old man and had beaten the crap out of the drunken bully, people had been afraid of Gus. But right now, for the first time since he was fourteen years old, he knew what it meant to be afraid. The men who held the markers for his gambling debts were in a different league from anyone else he had ever known. They would kill him as readily and as easily as he would step on a roach.
Ironically, the track had also provided him with a way out. It was how he’d met the guy who got him in on the museum job. And now here he was, even though he’d been given clear instructions not to attempt to sell any of his hoard for at least six months.
The hell with that. He needed money and he needed it now.
“Look, don’t worry about where it’s from, all right,” Gus ordered Lucien. “You just work out where it’s going and for how much.”
Lucien looked like he was about to have a seizure. “uNon mats… listen to me, Gueusse, this is not possible. It’s not possible at all. It’s too hot to touch right now, it would be crazy to-“
Gus seized Lucien around the throat and dragged him halfway across the table, which rocked precariously. He thrust his face within an inch of Lucien’s. “I don’t care if it’s thermo-fucking-nuclear,” he hissed. “People collect this shit and you know where to find them.”
“It’s too soon,” Lucien’s voice squeaked from the pressure around his throat.
Gus let go and the Frenchman dropped back into his seat. “Don’t talk to me like I’m some kind of retard,” he barked. “It’s always gonna be too soon for this shit, there’s never gonna be a right time. So it might as well be now. Besides, you know there’s people who’ll buy this because of what it is and where it came from. Sick fucks who’ll pay a small fortune to be able to jerk off at the idea of having it locked up in their safe. All you have to do is find me one of them and find him fast. And don’t even think of trying to dick me on the price. You get ten percent, and ten percent of priceless is nothing to piss on, is it?”
