IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE. HOW’S THAT POSSIBLE? THEY USED THE EARTH’S MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGROUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS? THEY SHOULD IT’S BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY-EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY-SEVEN MINUTES SIX-POINT-FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY-SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY-FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO
“It mentions something buried,” Louise said. “But that latitude and longitude isn’t in Iraq; it’s right here.”
“Actually, about one hundred fifty feet southeast of the sculpture,” Otto said. “So far as I know, nothing’s been found there. But that could have been a ruse to throw everyone off. Maybe the key was ‘it’s buried out there somewhere.’”
“WW, William Webster?”
“That’s the current thinking, but he’s never been willing to answer any questions about it. Like I said, I always thought the thing was nothing more than a toy.”
He brought up the decryption for the third panel. “This one is a transposition cipher. A regular mathematical system that shifts the letters on the sculpture to the plaintext ones.”
SLOWLY DESPERATELY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT-HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q
“It’s Howard Carter talking when he opened King Tut’s tomb in 1922. And the question at the end was asked by Lord Carnarvon, who was standing right there. To which Carter supposedly said something like: ‘Yes, wonderful things.’”
“The big problem is the dates,” Pete said. “The sculpture was dedicated in ninety, which means Sanborn must have been working on the thing in the late eighties. But Alpha Seven didn’t get to Iraq until the spring of oh three. So unless the guy could see into the future, the coded message has nothing to do with what’s hidden outside of Kirkuk.”
“Coffin didn’t mention anything about them burying whatever was out there — just that they saw it,” McGarvey said. “Could have been buried before Kryptos was devised. Webster was the DCI from eighty-seven to ninety-one. Maybe it was buried then.”
“Maybe he knew about it,” Pete said.
“Or maybe it was buried five thousand years ago,” Otto said. “But I’m betting in the last five or ten years.”
“Why?” McGarvey asked.
Otto brought up the fourth panel. “This one hasn’t been solved yet, even though a lot of seriously bright cryptographers have been working on it since ninety. A few years ago Sanborn published a clue. He said letters sixty-four through sixty-nine—NYPVTT—en clair read BERLIN.”
He turned the iPad so everyone could see the screen. It was split in two columns of fourteen lines each.
NGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOS TMQSRSYUZMRYDKRYPTOS
ABCDEFGHIJOHIJMNQUVWX ABCDEFGHIJDPYSHJQMLKUC
“They’re different,” Pete said.
“Yes,” Otto said dreamily. “The column on the left is the one that’s been published since 1990. The one that’s in all the books and on every Internet site. The one the code breakers have been working on since then.”
“The one on the right?” Pete asked.
Otto looked up at her and then Louise and finally McGarvey. “I took that picture this morning.”
“Jesus,” McGarvey said. “Someone changed the panel.”
“Probably not long ago. Otherwise, someone might have noticed it,” Otto said. He brought up a photograph of a husky-looking man with a broad Teutonic face and square jaw. “Until last year this guy worked for us as a maintenance man. Name was Ludwig Mann. Part of his job was cleaning the outsides of all the buildings on campus, including the New Headquarters Building.”
“In the courtyard of which is Kryptos.”
Otto brought up another photograph, this one of a man who could have been a very close relative of Mann. Hair a little thicker, a face bit thinner, but with the same jaw and eyes. “Roy Schermerhorn,” Otto said. “Alpha Seven.”
“Let’s put something up on an encrypted site the CIA normally uses to contact its officers, that Carnes and Coffin were murdered in Athens,” McGarvey said. “We want the rest of Alpha Seven to contact us immediately because their lives are in danger.”
“The killer will see it too,” Pete said.
“Right. In the meantime, Otto can work on cracking the new code on four.”
“My darlings are working on it right now.”
“What about us?”
“We’re going to see if we can find Mr. Schermerhorn. He somehow changed the message on four, which means he knows something and maybe has posted a warning.”
“Where do we start?”
“His social security number when he worked here. It’ll be a fake, of course, but it’ll list an address.”
“And?” Pete said.
“I’m betting that once the message goes up on the bulletin board, someone will be calling in,” McGarvey said.
“Or one of the other team members will get themselves killed,” Louise said.
“If they’re as good as they’re supposed to be, they’ll know that the killer has also seen the message and they’ll be on their guard. But for now Roy Schermerhorn is our best bet.”
TWENTY-ONE
On the way home from the Milwaukee Public Library, Roy Schermerhorn took a great deal of care with his tradecraft, switching buses twice, backtracking his way for several blocks downtown. Stopping to light a cigarette while he watched the reflections in a store window of people and cars. Watching the roof lines for snipers. Even a passing police cruiser gave him pause.
He turned suddenly and walked into a tavern already busy mostly with people in suits and ties stopping in for a drink or two before going home. This was beer town USA; stopping in for a beer and a shot after work was the norm.
Sitting at the end of the bar from where he could watch the front door and the short hall back to the restrooms, he ordered a Mich Ultra draught.
Ever since he’d moved here, his normal weekday routine was to stop at the library after work to use one of its computers to cruise the Internet, especially the CIA bulletin boards, and the numerous Kryptos sites. Until this afternoon nothing concrete had been happening, though the campus apparently was conducting some sort of a lockdown drill. One day of which would have been understandable, but it had been going on for three days now.
Then this afternoon he’d used an old password to get into one of the encrypted sites the Company used as a bulletin board, and the Alpha Seven message popped up.
His beer came, and he forced himself to raise the glass with a steady hand, though he was truly more frightened than he’d ever been since ’03, after they’d gotten out and George had disappeared.
Carnes had left first, and a couple of months later Coffin had come over to where Schermerhorn had been living at the time, in Chevy Chase, and said he was going to disappear for a while.
“Just to be on the safe side,” he said. “You know how it’s probably going to work out.”