Floating City (19 page)

He sat behind the desk. On it was a recent issue of
Strip!
He thumbed quickly through it. Every industry had a trade magazine these days, he thought. Beneath was a contract with one of the dancers, several bills from vendors and the utility company, and a bound business checkbook. He began taking notes. The club’s corporate name was Morgana, Inc. It had a Washington address.

He began methodically to go through the desk. The top drawer yielded the usual office supplies: pens, pencils, erasers, paper clips, rubber bands, blank lined notepads, and the like. He felt all the way to the back to make sure there wasn’t a false wall. He repeated this procedure in each of the other three drawers.

In one, he found some personal effects: the blonde’s extra lipsticks and other makeup items, but apart from substantiating her expensive taste, it revealed nothing of value.

In another, he pulled out an accounting ledger. He scanned it, but there seemed nothing out of the ordinary in it. The club’s books were kept in meticulous order. He doubted whether even the most zealous tax auditor could find as much as $10 out of place. A lot of money was going through the club, but it was being generated by a franchised network of Moniker’s strip clubs nationwide.

Returning the ledger to its drawer, he glanced at his watch, called the same number he had dialed from the club’s coatroom. Going through the laborious security procedures, he got the female voice. When he identified himself via his card number, she said, “That license is registered to Richard Dedalus.”

“Senator
Richard Dedalus?”

“Let me check the address…. Yes, it’s one of the senator’s cars.”

Croaker, taking down Dedalus’s home address, was silent for a moment. At seventy-six, Richard Dedalus was the elder statesman on Capitol Hill. He had not only seen history happen over the decades but, unlike most others his age, had had a decisive hand in it. It was said that John Kennedy would never have been elected without Dedalus’s support, that LBJ’s tough time in office was for the most part engineered by Dedalus. It was even rumored that Dedalus had been Deep Throat. Certainly, it had been Dedalus who had kept secret JFK’s serious illness—the lack of adrenals; and it had been he who had helped shape the committee investigating the assassination of John Kennedy. Could this dean of Washington power brokers have been in Dominic Goldoni’s hip pocket? On the face of it, it seemed incredible, but if the streets of New York had taught Croaker anything, it was never to discount the incredible—or even the impossible.

“Anything else?”

The female voice snapped his train of thought.

“As a matter of fact, there is. I need the long-distance telephone records for the last three months for Moniker’s.” He gave her the address. “Also, I have a partial D.C. license number on a black 1995 Nissan 300ZX ragtop. See what you can do.”

“It’s a help that it’s a ragtop; not too many of those around. Still, it’ll take a while.’’

“Tomorrow morning do you?”

“Not before six. All the info will be at the concierge desk at the Holiday Inn Central on Rhode Island Avenue and Fifteenth Street under the name Samuel Johnson.”

“You got it. Thanks.”

He sat for a moment, feeling momentarily defeated. He stared at the Sargent, letting the exotic aura of the painting flow over him, even though this was just a poster. It made him think of the blonde. In his imagination he conjured her up, watching her from the hallway as she came out of the office. He examined the clever glint in the cornflower blue eyes and wondered again what she was doing here. Could she really be managing this strip joint? Not likely. What was far more plausible was that she was here because no one would expect her to be in a sleazy place like this. It was his experience that people left their secrets in places where they felt them most unlikely to be discovered.

He continued to stare at the woman in her billowing white robes. What were the secrets with which Sargent had infused her? What was she doing and why was she doing it?

Abruptly, he got up, went over to the poster. He took it off the wall. The blank wall leered at him mockingly. Then he put the poster down, looked more closely. The wall was cracked, so it was difficult to pick up, but there was no doubt he was looking at cracks that formed a right angle. He followed them down, found two more right angles. He traced the lines all around with his forefinger until he had formed a rectangle.

Bingo!

Using the blade of a penknife, he dug into one crack, pulled up a corner. It peeled back, revealing a safe. Croaker produced a small key ring on which hung perhaps a dozen hooked implements. Eyeing the brand of safe, he selected one, inserted it in the lock. He put his ear to the metal housing, listened to the tumblers falling as he manipulated the probe.

The door popped open and he took a look inside. At that moment, he heard a sharp noise as someone in the corridor tried the doorknob. There was the muffled sound of a questioning voice and the door rattled.

Croaker went through the contents of the safe as quickly as he could. There was over $100,000 in neatly stacked and wrapped bills, the lease for the building, which was owned by Morgana, Inc., the usual insurance documents, a second accounting ledger, and a small calfskin notebook.

The noise at the door had ceased, but he was not fooled. Whoever had wanted to get in would be back, and he knew he needed to be out of there before then.

He opened the ledger first, went through it. This one told the true story of the Moniker operation. Morgana, Inc. was funneling tens of thousands of dollars per month through the club. The monies that were supposedly coming from the nationwide franchise organization were actually originating overseas, specifically France and England. And unlike the false ledger that showed the monies to be in the tens of thousands per month, this one put the amount far higher. Moniker’s laundered almost a million dollars a month for Morgana, Inc. No wonder there was no typical sleazebucket manager running this place.

Croaker slid the ledger back into the safe, opened the calfskin notebook. It was filled with neatly printed letters interspersed with Arabic numerals. He recognized this as some kind of code.

He pocketed the notebook, closed and locked the safe, pressed the plasterlike rectangle back in place, then replaced the poster. He crossed to the door, put his ear to it. Then, carefully, he unlocked the door and, opening it slowly, peered out through the sliver between the door and the frame. He saw no one.

He slipped quickly out of the office, exiting the club as Margarite and the blonde had done. He walked through the refuse-strewn alley and around the corner toward the front of the club. The rain beat harder, soaking him. He climbed into the cab and told the driver to take him to the Hay-Adams, Margarite’s hotel.

He dismissed the cabby outside the Hay-Adams, then took a room on the floor below Margarite’s. The night manager, responding to his badge, was only too happy to give him the location of her room. He also agreed to phone Croaker’s room when Margarite returned.

Up in the room, Croaker ordered food, took off his jacket, and rubbed his wet head with a towel. Then he sat down at the desk in the room and opened the notebook. He took out a pad and pencil and went to work.

He had spent six months in the army in codes and ciphers and knew more than the rudiments of cryptography. He felt certain this was no spy network he was dealing with, so the chances were good that this code would not be an arcane one. Something easy to remember, such as a substitution code where one letter filled in for another, would be a logical place to start, he determined.

The first thing he noticed was that the number 9 kept repeating on several pages. In each instance, the 9 was preceded by five letters. He began the series substitutions, using the three most common ones, as he had been taught.

He had gone through them all without success when the food arrived. He stretched, stood looking out the window at the rain-swept Washington night while he munched his chicken sandwich and swigged on a bottle of beer. It was almost midnight. Somewhere out there Margarite was in conference with the woman with the pale blond hair. For all he knew, they were both with Senator Dedalus, discussing the fate of the world, but he doubted it. Margarite had arrived at Moniker’s in Dedalus’s limo—in fact, she had had use of it from the moment she stepped off the plane at National. If the two women were going to Dedalus’s, why not use his limo? Instead, they had lit out from a dark alley in the blonde’s Nissan.

It was really pissing down out there, and the only good thing about the evening, as far as Croaker could see, was that he wasn’t out in it. He finished off the sandwich, took the remaining beer back to the desk, sipping it while he stood staring from the open notebook to his attempts at crypto-busting. He had thought he’d cracked it with the third substitution system. What was he missing? He looked at the code again, not trying to read each group of characters, but looking at the whole to see if a pattern would emerge. Switch the
a
and
e?
Substitute the five middle letters of the alphabet for vowels? Work backward from the end of the alphabet? Substitute a letter for another?

Wait a minute! He sat down in the chair, took up his pen. The numbers! Each grouping had either one or two numbers as part of it. His heart was thumping. After several tries, he thought he had it. The number was the key. You subtracted the number in the groups that began with even-numbered letters, added the number in groups that began with odd-numbered letters. For instance, the group DK3A decoded became AND—
A
was an odd letter, the first in the alphabet, and 3 was the key to go forward three letters, assuming the alphabet was a circle, so that
A
came after Z. In the instances where the groups contained two numbers, it was now simply a matter of either adding those numbers together or subtracting one from the other in order to obtain the key for that cipher.

Having cracked the code, Croaker now began the laborious work of translating the groups into English. It took him the better part of three hours. What he found himself looking at were a series of entries for delivery dates and contract prices for a mind-bending array of topflight international weaponry. All the latest ordnance was here, including American F-15 fighters, Lockheed SR-71 supersonic jets, Badger computerized flamethrowers, Sioux infrared gunships complete with Wolverine A-322 air-to-ground heat-seeking missiles, Russian Tupolev-22 M bombers, T-72 tanks, SAM-13 antiaircraft missiles, Python-600 mortars, Deyrael hand-held antitank bazookas.

His exhaustion evaporated as he drank in the implications of this comprehensive range of high-tech weaponry from the U.S. armed services. It was illegal to export this ordnance outside the United States, and yet here was proof of a steady source of supply. So Morgana, Inc. was in the same business as Avalon Ltd. Both were merchants of death operating beyond the law.

He rubbed his tired eyes. Everything was decoded except for the few groups that had the number 9 embedded within them. No matter what he did, he could not make them intelligible. Obviously, here the 9 was not the key; it must be part of the cipher itself. Then what
was
the key? Each group contained five letters plus the numeral.

Then he got the idea of breaking the number down into its additive parts. He started with three threes. That would make the first letter a
T.
But the second letter became Z, so that was out. He kept the
T,
the first three, decided to add one. That made TO—so far so good. He tried two, thinking that because there were five letters, he needed five numbers to equal nine, but that didn’t work. Adding three gave him TOT, but with only two ones left to make nine, he was back to gibberish. He tried five, got TOR. Three, one, and five equaled nine... maybe—

315.

It hit him all at once, the partially unencrypted letters and numerals coalescing in his mind. His head throbbed and he heard a rushing in his ears. In a fever of apprehension, he finished decoding the groups, certain now of what he would find.

“Jesus.”

Here within this calfskin notebook of a vastly prosperous arms merchant was confirmation of the enigmatic weapon that Nicholas had come across in the computer files of Avalon Ltd.

TORCH 315.

Quickly, he decoded the following groups. He sat back, staring at what had appeared out of the ciphers. He could hardly think, his heart was hammering so hard in his chest. So he and Nicholas had guessed right. He read the terse notation again and again as if it were a mantra, and as he did so, his blood ran cold:

“Torch scheduled March 15 at agreed site. Area chosen for proximity of target and density of population. Maximum impact assured.”

The moon-faced boy was eating a
banh chung,
a traditional Vietnamese sweet cake made from sticky rice. A smear of beans, onion, and pork, the cake’s filling, made his smile appear wider than it was.

Nicholas smiled back at the boy as he and Seiko approached the Giac Lam Pagoda. Sunlight glinted off the blue and white porcelain tiles along the roof of what was the oldest Buddhist temple in Saigon. Originally built in 1744, Giac Lam had last undergone renovations in 1900, sparing it the kind of modernist reconstruction that had ruined so many other temples in Vietnam.

The boy, his mouth filled with
banh chung,
ran behind the old
bo de
tree that dominated the garden in front of the pagoda. He was obscured by a pair of saffron-robed monks, a number of whom lived year-round at Giac Lam. In a moment, the monks disappeared inside the pagoda.

Nicholas and Seiko were in the Tan Binh district of Saigon, about ten miles from Cholon, the Chinese market district where Nicholas had first met Bay two nights and seemingly another lifetime ago. To the right of the pagoda were the heavily embellished tombs of the most venerated monks who had lived here.

This was the place that the arms merchant Timothy Delacroix had designated they meet him. It was now six minutes past six in the morning.