75
Less than two miles from the Cabinet briefing in Whitehall, Mitzi Fallon and Jon Bronty set up base in an FBI office inside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
Intelligence officers have been working from here since the days when the country’s second president, John Adams, had a home in the picturesque square.
Two doors away, field officers are getting up to speed on the Eurostar bomb blast and working out how it fits with the attack on Grand Central in New York.
Mitzi watches bigwigs come and go as she passes over the water bottle she took from Gwyn’s office. She completes all the necessary chain-of-evidence paperwork and asks how long she’ll have to wait to get the DNA profile.
The answer comes from a young clerk being run ragged by all the sudden activity. She’s mid-twenties, with frizzy brown hair and hard black spectacles that sit on an aquiline nose amid a pale, freckled face. ‘Within the week. Maybe sooner if the labs are at full strength.’
‘How about tomorrow?’ There’s a hint of annoyance in her tone. ‘I’m only here for a couple of days and this is linked to a homicide back in the US.’
‘Homicides aren’t priority.’ She pushes the bagged evidence into her tray and starts fresh work on her computer.
Mitzi takes it back out and drops it in front of her. ‘Then what is?’
The young Chicagoan gives her a scornful upward glance. ‘If you don’t know don’t ask, ma’am.’
Mitzi bends low over the computer and lifts the nametag on the lapel of the clerk’s black jacket. ‘Please don’t screw with me, Annie Linklatter. As you see from my currently less than pretty face I’m in a bad place at the moment and people in bad places do bad things. So how about you cut me a break and save us both a lot of pain?’
The girl’s face reddens. ‘I’ll try for tomorrow — or the day after.’
‘Tomorrow would be real good.’ She wanders away. ‘I’ll be by first thing.’
Bronty is on the phone when she gets back to their temporary office. ‘I’ve got Vicks on the line,’ he says.
‘Put her on speakerphone.’
Bronty obliges. ‘Vicks, Mitzi has just walked in — you’re on speaker.’
‘Hi, Lieutenant! I’ve got some good and bad news for you. Which would you like first?’
‘I only do good news, Vicks. Keep the bad to yourself and go fix it. What you got?’
‘Okay. I’ve done the extra digging you asked for on Owain Gwyn. I’m just mailing it to you.’
‘Great. I’ll log on while we’re speaking.’ She flips open her computer and powers up.
‘And the cryptologists have made progress on the data you sent over. It’s really weird. Seems to be a story about King Arthur and his knights.’
‘Codex,’ whispers Bronty to Mitzi in a triumphant told-you-so tone.
Vicky continues her update, ‘The file directory they decrypted is entitled “The Camelot Code” and it contains four parts — The Fallen, Avalon, Modern Prophecies and The Arthurian Cycle.’
Mitzi writes the names down on a pad next to the computer, which is still running start-up security programs. ‘So, what is this, a kind of Arthurian Twilight Saga?’
‘They’ve only transcribed the first page — apparently the code is problematic.’
‘They say what kinda code it is?’ asked Bronty.
‘Yeah, they call it Random Revolver. Every letter of the alphabet is represented by a number — that’s the simple part, like a kid’s cypher — but then the numbers and the letters related to them don’t stay the same, they keep changing. So for example, say the letter A is represented by 1, N by 2 and D by 3. The word AND would be coded 123. You get that?’
‘Yeah, that’s easy to follow.’
‘Right, but in the next sentence, the letter A is represented by 2, N by 3 and D by 4, so AND now becomes 234.’
Mitzi gets it, ‘So everything just moves down a number.’
‘No, sometimes letters and numbers are randomly matched. Hence the name. The cryptologist I spoke to said the only way they cracked it was to create two virtual circles — the outer one had twenty-six letters on it, the inner one had twenty-six corresponding numbers. The letters got a new number every sentence. But this didn’t make sense when they hit the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first and twenty-eighth lines. At those points, the whole sequence reset and sometimes would go backwards or start skipping odd or even numbers.’
‘Days of the week,’ observes Bronty. ‘It reset because there are seven days in a week. Monks used to write what were called Calendar Codes, where every week or every month they changed the key to the code they wrote secret messages in.’
‘Enough,’ says Mitzi. ‘You two are making my head pound. Vicks, just tell me what this damned Camelot Code said.’
The young researcher gets excited. ‘It’s wonderful, weird gothic stuff. You have to read it to make sense of it. I’m sending a transcript of what they’ve cracked so far. It’s from a section called The Fallen.’
‘Can’t wait to read it,’ says Mitzi sarcastically. ‘Anything else to brighten my day?’
‘That’s it.’
‘You said there was bad news.’
‘I did, and you told me to keep it to myself.’
‘I know, but as well as being a lying bitch, I’m nosy as hell. So tell me.’
Vicky braces herself for a verbal backlash. ‘The data you sent to me — it started to self-corrupt as soon as I opened it. I lost a lot of the files and—’
‘What?’
‘Please — before you holler — the cryptologists say it wasn’t my fault. They say it was primed with a suicide bug.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It means that when copies are made on software or hardware that doesn’t belong to the originator the code corrupts. You must have the original authorized copy.’
‘So how come it didn’t corrupt instantly when I sent it to you?’
‘It would have done on any other system but ours. The FBI computers locked the first digits, that’s all. Everything else died within that split-second. The techies say the coding and technology behind all this is super smart — as in intelligence agency smart.’
Mitzi glances at the small memory stick lying free in her purse. ‘Good job I took high security measures to protect the original, then.’
‘Absolutely,’ says Vicky, unaware of the irony.
There’s a ping on Mitzi’s computer. She glances at the screen. ‘Just got your stuff. I’ll go check it with Bronty and one of us will get back to you. Thanks, Vicks.’
She kills the call and Bronty comes round behind her to look over her shoulder.
Mitzi opens her mailbox and clicks on a document marked The Fallen.
It has been decreed that in each kingdom the knight’s place of rest must be sited no more than a day’s strides on a beast from water and no deeper than the height of the tallest man.
The ground that holds the sacred bones of the fallen must forever be in the protection of his brothers and the soil that covers his blessed skin must be touched in equal measure by the sun and the moon.
Once every turn of harvest, those who live and serve will visit and tend the land of those who fell. They will light great fires and speak richly of the deeds of those who have passed. In the Ritual of the Eternal Flame, they will reignite the Spirit of Goodness that forged the great sword and served the only king.
And it is hereby decreed that in the homeland the place of rest will forever be where the great Celts cross and where the bards stand alone to deliver their eulogies.