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 tJiought 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 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 objects. Not that any of his neighbors suspected as much, for Lucien had the style, the accent, and the manners to fit in seamlessly.