The Black Sun
Satisfied, he walked on, his rubber soles squeaking rhythmically on the floor like a metronome marking time, the polished toecaps of his boots glowing with a white sheen from the dimmed overhead lights.
Al Travis had been a guard at the National Cryptologic Museum since it had first opened. He liked it there. He’d finally found a place where he felt he was part of something special, something important. After all, technically he worked for the NSA, the agency responsible for protecting Uncle Sam’s information systems and breaking the bad guys’ codes. Hell, the NSA was right in the thick of things with this whole War on Terror.
He came upon the next exhibit – the Cipher Wheel. A series of rotating wooden discs, the wheel had been used by European governments for hundreds of years to encrypt sensitive communications. According to the card, it was designed to be used with French, the international language of diplomacy until the end of the First World War.
The Cipher Wheel’s cylindrical shape nestled snugly in its display case, the wood polished by generations of anxious fingers. He paused, looked at it, and checked with the information card that he was right in believing this to be the oldest such device in the world.
And then of course there was his favourite exhibit – the big one, as he liked to say – the Enigma machine. The museum had several versions on display in two large glass-fronted cases and Travis never failed to pause when he walked past, running his eyes appreciatively over them. He found it incredible that, in ‘breaking’ the code generated by this oversized typewriter, Polish and then British mathematicians had helped win the war for the Allies in Europe. But that’s what the card said, and who was he to argue?
A sudden noise made Travis stop. He checked over his shoulder and then peered into the semi-darkness ahead of him.
‘Anyone there?’ he called out, wondering if someone had come to relieve him early. As he paused, waiting for an answer, a steel wire shaped into a noose was lowered from above him until it was hovering just over his head, glinting in the lights like a silver halo. Then, just as Travis was about to move on again, it snapped past his face, the wire tightening around his neck and pulling him three feet off the ground.
Travis’s hands leapt to his throat as he scrabbled at the wire, his legs thrashing beneath him, his throat making an inhuman gurgling noise. Two dark shapes materialised out of the shadows as he struggled and a third man dropped down noiselessly from where he had hidden himself in the roof space above the ceiling tiles.
One of the men pulled a chair over from the wall and positioned it under Travis’s flailing legs. Travis located the top of the chair with his feet and, wavering unsteadily, found that he was just about able to perch on tiptoe and relieve the choking pressure on his throat, his lungs gasping for air, blood on his collar where the noose had bitten into the soft folds of his neck.
Teetering, his mouth dry with fear, he watched as the three figures, each masked and dressed in black, approached the left-hand display cabinet. Working with well-drilled efficiency, they unscrewed the frame, levered the glass out and leant it against the wall. Then the man in the middle reached in, took out one of the Enigma machines, and placed it in his accomplice’s backpack.
Travis tried to speak, tried to ask them what the hell they thought they were doing, to point out that there was no way they were ever going to make it off the base, but all that came was a series of choked grunts and whispered moans.
The noise, though, made the men turn. One broke away from the others and approached Travis.
‘Did you say something, nigger?’
The voice was thin and mocking, the last word said slowly and deliberately. Travis shook his head, knowing that these were not people to be reasoned with, although his eyes burned with anger at the insult.
The man didn’t seem to be expecting an answer. Instead he kicked out and knocked the chair from under Travis, who plunged towards the floor, the steel wire twanging under tension and snapping his neck.
For a few seconds Travis’s feet drummed furiously, then twitched a few times, then were still.
THREE
Clerkenwell, London
3rd January – 5.02 p.m.
Tom was sitting at his desk with a copy of The Times in front of him, folded into four so that only the cryptic crossword was visible. He had a ballpoint pen in his mouth, the end chipped and split where he had chewed it, his forehead creased in concentration. Much to his frustration, he hadn’t filled in a single word yet.
The desk itself was French, circa 1890, solid mahogany carved with fruit, foliage and various mythological creatures. It had four drawers on the left and a cabinet on the right, each opened by a lion-mask handle. Caryatids and atlantes flanked the corners, supporting the overhang of the polished top.
Tom and Archie had bought the desk not for its rather obvious beauty, but because it was identical on both sides, a subtly symbolic statement of equality that had resonated with the two of them. And despite occasionally feeling like one half of some odd Dickensian legal couple, for Tom, at least, the desk had come to encapsulate his new life – a solid partnership on the right side of the law.
There was a knock at the door.
‘Yeah?’ Tom called, grateful for the interruption. He had been staring at the paper so long that the clues had started to swim across the page.
The door opened and a woman wearing jeans, a pale pink camisole and a tight black jacket walked in, her right arm looped through the open visor of a black motorcycle helmet.
‘Catch,’ she called.
Tom looked up just in time to see a tennis ball flashing towards his head. Without thinking, he shot a hand out and snatched it from the air, his fingers stinging as they closed around it.
‘How was your game?’ Tom asked with a smile as Dominique de Lecourt stripped off her jacket, hitched herself up on to the side of his desk and placed her helmet down next to her. She had a pale, oval face that had something of the cold, sculpted and remote beauty of a silent-movie star, although her blue eyes, in contrast, shone with an immediately inviting blend of impulsive energy and infectious confidence. Her right shoulder was covered with an elaborate tattoo of a rearing horse that was only partially masked by her curling mass of blonde hair. Her left arm, meanwhile, was sheathed in a glittering armour of silver bangles that clinked like a hundred tiny bells every time she moved. Just about visible, under her top, was the bump of her stomach piercing.
‘Didn’t play. Decided to go to that auction instead.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist,’ Tom laughed. ‘See anything good?’
‘A pair of Louis XV porphyry and gilt-bronze two-handled vases.’ Her English was excellent, with just a hint of a Swiss-French accent.
‘Made by Ennemond-Alexandre Petitot in 1760.’ Tom nodded. ‘Yeah, I saw those in the catalogue. What did you think?’
‘I think two million is a lot to pay for a couple of nineteenth-century reproductions made for the Paris tourist market of the day. They’re worth twenty thousand at most. It’s a law suit waiting to happen.’
Tom smiled. Sometimes he found it hard to believe that Dominique was still only twenty-three. She had an instinct for a deal, coupled with a sponge-like ability to retain even the most incidental detail, that rivalled all but the most seasoned pros. Then again, Tom reminded himself, she’d had a good teacher. Until he died last year, she’d spent four years working for Tom’s father in Geneva. When Tom had relocated the antiques dealership to London, she’d readily accepted his offer to move with it and help run the business.
The antiques shop itself was a wide double-fronted space with large arched windows, vital for attracting passing trade, although most visitors to Kirk Duval Fine Art & Antiques called ahead for an appointment. At the rear were two doors and a staircase. The staircase led to the upstairs floors, the first floor currently empty, the second floor Dominique’s apartment, the top floor Tom’s. It was supposed to have been a short-term arrangement, but the weeks had turned into months. Tom hadn’t pressed the point, sensing that she would move out when the time was right for her. Besides, he valued her company and, given his pathological inability to form new friendships, that gave him his own selfish reasons for keeping her around.
The left-hand door opened on to a warehouse accessed via an old spiral staircase while the right-hand door gave on to the office. The office was not a big room, perhaps fifteen feet square, the space dominated by the partners’ desk. There was a single, large window which looked out over the warehouse below, a low bookcase running underneath it. Two comfortable armchairs were positioned on the left-hand side of the room as you went in, the brown leather faded and soft with age. Most striking, though, was the wall space behind the desk, which was taken up with Tom’s glittering collection of safe plates – an assortment of brass and iron plaques in various shapes and sizes, some dating back to the late eighteenth century, each ornately engraved with the safe manufacturer’s name and crest.
‘How are you getting on with the crossword?’ she asked with a smile, peering down at the unfilled grid in front of him. ‘Any easier?’
‘Not really,’ he admitted. ‘I mean, take this: “Soldier got into cover for a spell.” Five letters.’ He shook his head. ‘I just don’t see it.’
‘Magic,’ she answered after a few seconds thought.
‘Magic,’ Tom repeated slowly. ‘Why magic?’
‘A soldier is a GI,’ she explained. ‘A cover is a Mac. Put GI into Mac to get a spell. Magic.’
She tapped her long, graceful finger playfully on the tip of Tom’s nose as if it was a wand.
‘I give up.’ Tom, defeated, threw his pen down on to the desk.
‘You just need to keep at it,’ she laughed. ‘One day it’ll all just click into place.’
‘So you keep saying.’ Frustrated, Tom changed the subject: ‘When’s Archie back?’
‘Tomorrow, I think.’ She picked at a frayed piece of cotton where her jeans were ripped across her left thigh.
‘That’s twice he’s been to the States in the last few weeks.’ Tom frowned. ‘For someone who claims to hate going abroad, he’s certainly putting himself about a bit.’
‘What’s he doing there?’
‘God knows. Sometimes he just seems to get an idea into his head and then he’s off.’
‘That reminds me – where did you put those newspapers that were on his desk?’
‘Where do you think? I threw them away along with all his other rubbish.’
‘You did what?’ she exclaimed. ‘They were mine. I’d been keeping them for a reason.’
‘Well, try the bottom left-hand drawer then,’ Tom suggested sheepishly. ‘I put a bunch of old papers in there.’
She slipped off the desk and opened the drawer.
‘Luckily for you, they’re here,’ she said with relief, pulling out a large pile of newspapers and placing them down in from of him.
‘What do you want with them anyway?’ Tom asked. ‘Are you collecting tokens or something?’
‘Do I look like I collect tokens?’ She grinned. ‘No, I wanted to show you something. Only you might not like it…’
‘What are you talking about?’ Tom frowned. ‘You can tell me anything, you know that.’
‘Even if it’s about Harry?’ she asked.
‘Harry?’ Tom sprang up.
Harry Renwick. The mere mention of his name was enough to make Tom’s heart rise into his throat. Harry Renwick had been his father’s best friend; a man Tom had known and loved since…well, since almost as long as he could remember.
That was until it transpired that dear old Uncle Harry had been living a double life. Operating under the name of Cassius, he had masterminded a ruthless art-crime syndicate that had robbed and murdered and extorted its way around the globe for decades. The betrayal still stung.
‘You told me he’d disappeared after what happened in Paris. After the –’
‘Yeah,’ Tom cut her off, not wanting to relive the details. ‘He just vanished.’
‘Well, wherever he’s gone, someone’s looking for him.’ Dominique unfolded the top newspaper, the previous day’s Herald Tribune. She turned to the Personals section and pointed at an ad she’d circled. Tom began to read the first paragraph.
‘Lions may awake any second. If this takes place alert me via existing number.’ He flashed her an amused glance. She indicated that he should read on. ‘If chimps stop their spelling test within one or so hours, reward through gift of eighty bananas.’ He laughed. ‘It’s nonsense.’
‘That’s what I thought when I first saw it, but you know how I like a challenge.’
‘Sure.’ Tom smiled. Amongst her many attributes, Dominique had an amazing aptitude for word games and other types of puzzles. Never one to be outdone, it was partly this which had driven Tom to attempt the crossword. Not that he was making much progress.
‘It only took me a few minutes. It’s a jump code.’
‘A what?’
‘A jump code. Jewish scholars have been finding them for years in the Torah. Did you know that if you take the first T in the Book of Genesis, then jump forty-nine places to the fiftieth letter, then another forty-nine places to the fiftieth letter after that, and so on, it spells a word?’
‘What?’
‘Torah. The book’s name is embedded in the text. The next three books do the same. Some say that the whole of the Old Testament is an encoded message that predicts the future.’
‘And this works in the same way?’
‘It’s a question of identifying the jump interval. In this case, it’s every eighth letter.’
‘Starting with the first letter?’
She nodded.
‘So that makes this L…’ Tom counted seven spaces, ‘then A…’ He grabbed a pen and began to write down each eighth letter: ‘Then S…then T. Last!’ he exclaimed triumphantly.
‘Last seen Copenhagen. Await next contact. I decoded it earlier.’
‘And there are others like this?’
‘After I found this, I looked back through earlier editions. There have been coded messages using the same methodology every few weeks for the last six months or so. I’ve written them out here –’
She handed Tom a piece of paper.
‘HK cold, try Tokyo,’ he read. ‘Focus search in Europe…DNA sample en route…Reported sighting in Vienna…’ He looked up at Dominique. ‘Okay, I agree that someone seems to be looking for someone or something. But there’s nothing to say it’s Harry.’
Dominique handed him a newspaper from the bottom of the pile and opened it at the Personals page.
‘This was the first and longest message.’ She pointed at a lengthy ad she’d circled in red.
‘What does it say?’
‘Ten million dollar reward. Henry Julius Renwick, aka Cassius, dead or alive. Publish interest next Tuesday.’
Tom was silent as he tried to digest this news.
‘Did anyone reply?’ he asked eventually.
‘I counted twenty-five replies in all.’
‘Twenty-five!’
‘Whoever’s behind this has got a small private army out there trying to track Harry down. The question is why.’
‘No,’ Tom reflected, ‘the question is who.’
FOUR
FBI Headquarters, Salt Lake City Division, Utah
4th January – 4.16 p.m.
Where had it all gone wrong?
When had he passed from being a high achiever to an average Joe, a stand-up guy, but one who, according to his superiors, didn’t quite have what it took to go all the way? How was it that people almost half his age were accelerating past him so fast that he barely had time to spit their dust from his mouth before they were a speck on the horizon? When had hanging on long enough to max out his pension become his only reason for getting up in the morning?
Special Agent Paul Viggiano, forty-one, slipped a bullet into each of the five empty chambers of his shiny silver AirLite Ti Model 342 .38 Smith & Wesson as each question registered in his mind.
The gun loaded, he snapped it shut and stood contemplating it for a few seconds before raising it to eye-level. Again he paused and took a deep breath.
Then, breathing out slowly, he emptied the gun into the target at the far end of the indoor shooting range as fast and as loudly as he could, each successive bang magnifying the noise of the one before it, until it seemed that the whole room was echoing in sympathy with his plight.
‘Sounds like you really needed that,’ the woman in the booth next to him said with a smile. He managed a tight grimace in response as she turned to take aim. And how was it, her intervention reminded him, that in some misplaced drive for gender equality, the Bureau was falling over itself to promote women? Women like that bitch Jennifer Browne, who’d got moved upstairs while he’d been posted here. Wherever here was.
One small oversight, that’s all it had been. One little slip in an otherwise spotless career. And here he was, drowning in mediocrity.
He shook his head and hit the button to retrieve the target from the other end of the gallery. It whirred towards him, the black silhouette ghosting through the air like a vengeful spirit, before jerking to a halt just in front of him. He examined it for holes.
To his disbelief there were none. Not a single one.
‘Nice shootin’, Tex,’ smirked the FBI armourer, sneaking a look over his shoulder. ‘Hell, you’re as liable to blow your own balls off as hit the bad guy.’
‘Screw you, McCoy.’
Viggiano’s distinctive New Jersey drawl somehow suited the Italian ancestry suggested by his thick black eyebrows and hair and permanent five o’clock shadow. His dark looks were complemented by a firm, unyielding jaw that jutted out like a car bumper, giving the impression that, if you threw something at him, it would bounce off like a rock hitting a trampoline.
The woman next to him squeezed off her shots one by one with a plodding, rhythmic monotony confirming Viggiano’s impression that she probably ironed her husband’s socks. She then carefully placed her gun down in front of her and retrieved her target. Viggiano couldn’t help but peer over.
Eleven holes. She had eleven holes in her target. How was that possible unless…unless it was her six and his five? He’d been so worked up he’d fired at the wrong target.
The woman had obviously come to the same conclusion. She looked up at him, her eyes dancing, her laughter only seconds behind. He threw his ear protectors down on the bench and stalked out of the room before she could show anyone else.
‘Oh, sir, I was kinda hopin’ I’d find you down here.’ Byron Bailey was an African American from South Central LA, a bright kid who’d made it the hard way, winning a scholarship to Caltech on the back of good grades and an evening job packing shelves in his local 7-Eleven. He had bad acne, which had left his ebony skin pitted like coral, while his nose was broad and flat and his eyes wide and eager. What struck Viggiano most, though, was his tail-wagging enthusiasm, a sickening trait that he shared with most rookies and one which only served to make Viggiano feel even older than he already did.
‘So, you found me.’ Viggiano marked his disinterest by fastidiously picking invisible pieces of lint off the lapels of his immaculately pressed suit.
‘Er, yessir.’ Bailey seemed momentarily unsettled by Viggiano’s irritable tone. ‘We got a tip-off about that heist from the NSA complex in Fort Meade. You know, the one the boys back in DC are all choked up about. It sounds like it might be for real.’
‘What are you babbling about?’ Viggiano caught his reflection in a glass door as he spoke and adjusted his tie so it was centred precisely under his chin.
‘You ever heard of the Sons of American Liberty?’
‘Who?’
‘The Sons of American Liberty.’
‘Nope.’
‘They’re a fringe group of white supremacists. Our mystery caller fingered them as the people behind the theft.’
‘Did you get a trace?’
‘No. The call was made right here in Salt Lake, but that’s all we know. Whoever he was, he had the sense to ring off before we could get a fix on his location.’
‘Any intel on the caller’s ID from the tape?’
‘Forensics are still working on it. They don’t think they’ll get much. Only thing they’re saying at the moment is that he doesn’t sound like he’s from these parts.’
‘That’s it?’ Viggiano sighed heavily. ‘Jesus, it hardly narrows it down.’
‘No, sir.’ Bailey agreed.
‘Where are these jokers based?’
‘Malta, Idaho.’
‘Malta, Idaho!’ Viggiano exclaimed in mock celebration. ‘Just when I think I’ve run out of two-bit shithole towns to visit, another one shoves its head right up my ass.’
‘If it’s any consolation, sir, Carter said that he wanted you to head up the investigation at our end.’
‘Regional Director Carter?’ A flicker of interest in Viggiano’s voice now.
‘That’s right. Apparently you dealt with a similar situation a couple of years back. He said that you were the only one available with the right level of experience for this. He suggested I help you out too, if that’s okay, sir.’
Viggiano clipped his gun back into its holster. ‘Well, for once Carter’s right,’ he said, running a hand through his hair to check that the parting was still right. ‘Saddle up, Bailey. You’re coming along for the ride. Paul Viggiano’s gonna show you a shortcut to the big time.’
FIVE
Borough Market, Southwark, London
5th January – 12.34 p.m.
The market stalls were tightly packed under the rusting cast-iron railway arches, their shelves groaning with freshly imported produce: Camemberts from Normandy as big as cartwheels, pink Guijelo hams, and bottles of olive oil from Apulia that glowed like small suns.
Shoals of eager shoppers, wrapped up against the cold, battled their way along the aisles, their movements seemingly governed by whatever enticing smell, be it fried ostrich burger or warm bread, the wind happened to bring their way. Overhead, trains screeched and scraped their way along the elevated track, an intermittent rolling thunder that grew and faded as quickly as a summer storm.
‘What are we doing here?’ Archie snapped irritably as he dodged between two pushchairs and then squeezed past a long queue in front of one of the many flower stalls.
In his mid-forties and only of average height, Archie had the stocky no-nonsense build of a bare-knuckle boxing champion, his cauliflower ears and slightly crumpled unshaven face reinforcing the image. So there was a certain incongruity about his choice of a tailored beige overcoat over an elegant dark blue pinstripe suit, and his neatly clipped hair.
It was a contradiction reinforced by an accent that Tom had never quite been able to place, although he was the first to admit that his own – a transatlantic hotchpotch of American and British pronunciation and idioms – was hardly easy to nail down. In Archie’s case, the street-speak of the market stall where he had first learnt his trade mingled with the rounded vowels and clipped Ts of a more middle-class background.
Tom suspected that Archie, ever the opportunist, had developed his own unique patois to enable him to move unchallenged between two worlds. It was a neat trick, but one that left him, like Tom, fully accepted by neither.
‘You’re meant to be coming to dinner tonight, remember? I thought I’d splash out.’
‘Oh shit.’ Archie slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘I’m sorry, mate, but I’d completely forgotten.’
‘Archie!’ Tom remonstrated. What made Archie’s unreliability especially annoying was its very predictability. ‘We spoke about it last week. You promised.’