The Jefferson Key (13 page)

This was a trap.

Still, he’d been forced to take the chance.

She advanced farther into the room, keeping her gun trained on him. She reached into her back pocket and found a cellphone. One push of a button and she said, “Our pirate has arrived.”

This just kept getting better.

She stood too far away, maybe ten feet, for him to do anything that would not get him shot. He noticed that her weapon was sound-suppressed. Obviously, the
NIA
wanted minimum attention drawn to this effort, which might work to his advantage. He had to do something, and fast, since he did not know how far away that assistance was located.

She tossed the phone aside.

“The laptop,” she said. “Toss it on the bed.”

He nodded his assent and started to lob it onto the mattress. At the last second he propelled the device straight at her, spinning it across the room.

She dodged and he lunged, kicking the gun from her grasp. She spun, raised her arms, and attacked. He slammed his right fist into her face, driving her onto the bed. Dazed from the blow, she reached for her bloody nose.

He found the gun on the carpet.

Finger on the trigger, he grabbed a pillow from the bed, pressed the gun into one side, the other onto her head, and fired once.

She stopped moving.

The pillow had muffled the sound-suppressed report to almost nothing.

Dammit. Killing was not something he enjoyed doing. But he hadn’t set this foolish trap.

He tossed the pillow aside.

Think
.

He’d touched only the laptop, its power cord, and the door handle.

He retrieved the computer from the floor. It had landed on one of the upholstered chairs and seemed okay. He would keep the gun. He found a washcloth in the bathroom and opened the exit door with it, then wiped the knob on both sides. He stuffed the cloth in his pocket and headed for the elevators.

He turned the corner just as a sound announced the arrival of a car.

Two men stepped off, both young and clean-cut. Surely the radioed assistance. He casually brushed past, never giving them a second glance. It would take them less than a minute to discover the body and begin their pursuit. He wasn’t necessarily worried about these two, but the ones they could radio would be a problem.

He pressed the button with his sleeved elbow and waited.

“Hey,” a voice said.

He turned.

Both men were rushing back his way.

Crap.

His right hand rested in his pocket, fingers on the gun.

He withdrew the weapon.

NEW
YORK
CITY

WYATT
HOPPED
DOWN
FROM
THE
LAST
RUNG
OF
THE
FIRE
ESCAPE
to the pavement and grabbed his bearings, deciding to walk the few blocks east toward Central Park and find a cab. The quiet side street was tree-lined, light on traffic, but heavy with parked cars. Several displayed violation tickets on their windshields. Night had arrived with a chill that matched his mood. He did not like being used or manipulated.

But Andrea Carbonell had done both.

That woman was a problem.

She was a career intelligence operative who’d risen from low-level analyst to agency head, managing to keep
NIA
useful even in difficult times. His previous dealings with her had been varied—occasional jobs for which she paid well—and there’d never been any problems out of the ordinary.

So why was this time so different?

None of this really concerned him. Yet he was curious. More of that operative inside him seeping back to the surface.

He approached an intersection and was about to cross when he noticed a black sedan parked fifty feet away. The face that stared at him from an open rear window was familiar.

“Forty-two minutes,” Carbonell called out to him. “I gave you forty-five. You hurt them?”

“They’re going to need a doctor.”

She smiled. “Get in. I’ll give you a lift.”

“You fired me, then you allowed those idiots to take me. I’m going home.”

“I was hasty on both counts.”

That curiosity inside him swelled. He knew he shouldn’t but he decided to accept her offer. He stepped across the street, and the sedan left the curb as soon as he settled into the rear seat.

“We found Scott Parrott,” she said. “Dead in Central Park. The pirates are predictable, I’ll say that for them.”

He’d worked with Parrott for the past month. He was NIA’s conduit to the Commonwealth, the source of all of his intel. Of course, he hadn’t told
NSA
or
CIA
any of that. None of their damn business.

“I knew Clifford Knox would do something,” she said. “He’d have to.”

“Why?”

“It’s all part of the pirate thing. We insulted them by interfering so they have to retaliate. It’s their culture.”

“So you sacrificed Parrott?”

“That’s a harsh way of putting it. What did you say at your admin hearing? Part of the mission. People get killed sometimes.”

Yes, he had said that. But he didn’t catch the connection between his comment, referring to agents under fire who required help, and sending a man to meet with someone you knew was going to kill him.

“Parrott was careless,” she said. “Too trusting. He could have protected himself.”

“And you could have provided him a warning or backup.”

She handed him a file. “That’s not how it works. It’s time you learn more about the Commonwealth.”

He handed the packet back. “I’m done.”

“You realize there’ll be repercussions over what happened back there.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

“They won’t see it that way. What did they want? For you to turn on me? Give up the Commonwealth on the assassination attempt?”

“Something like that.”

“You’re a smart guy, Jonathan. The only one for this job.” She smiled. “I know they’re after me. I’ve known that for a while. They think I’m on the take to the Commonwealth.”

“Are you?”

“Not in the least. I have no use for their ill-gotten gains.”

“But apparently, you have use for them.”

“I’m a survivor, Jonathan. I’m sure you don’t have to worry about a paycheck. You have millions stashed away, no danger of anybody ever getting their hands on it. I’m not that fortunate. I have to work.”

No, that wasn’t right. She
loved
the work.

“Even in a changing job market,” she said, “courtesy of a presidential downsizing, opportunities still exist. I simply want one of those for myself. That’s all. No payoffs. No bribes. Just a job.”

Since clearly no one at
NSA
or
CIA
would touch her, and she wouldn’t settle for anything less than a deputy administrator or a director’s post, her choices were limited. She’d also want to go somewhere safe. Nothing on the chopping block. Why jump from one fire into another?

He caught her gaze.

She seemed to read his mind.

“That’s right. I want the Magellan Billet.”

KNOX
WHIRLED
,
THE
SIGHT
OF
THE
SOUND-SUPPRESSED
GUN
stopping the two men’s advance.

“Hands to the side,” he said. “Step back.”

They obliged and slowly retreated down the hall.

Another elevator arrived, and the doors opened.

Two more threats stood inside, similar to the first pair. The sight of his gun momentarily caught them off guard, as neither of them held a weapon. He fired twice into the elevator, angling the shots up, trying not to hit anybody, just rattle them into a frenzy.

The doors closed as the two men dove to the floor, arms shielding their heads, trying to avoid the rounds. But the few seconds used to discourage the new threat encouraged the old one, and a body slammed into him broadside.

He hit the carpet and lost his grip on the laptop.

Using his legs, he pivoted upward and flipped himself, propelling the man off him. He rolled right and fired at the second agent rushing down the hall, dropping the body to the carpet.

The other man recovered and swung a fist.

Which connected.

WYATT
CONSIDERED
WHAT
CARBONELL
HAD
TOLD
HIM
.

The Magellan Billet.

“Seems like a good place to be,” she said. “Daniels loves it. Odds are his party will retain the White House after next year. It’s the perfect spot for a career woman like me.”

“Except that Stephanie Nelle heads it now.”

He noticed their route, toward Times Square, in the direction of his hotel, the location of which he’d never mentioned to Andrea Carbonell.

“I’m afraid Stephanie has come on some hard times,” she said. “The Commonwealth took her prisoner a few days ago.”

Which explained how his email to Malone in Copenhagen had worked so easily. He’d opened a Gmail account in Stephanie Nelle’s name. Nothing unusual would have flagged on Malone’s end. Field agents regularly used common email providers since they drew no attention, revealed nothing about the sender, and blended perfectly with the billions of others. If Malone hadn’t taken the bait, or had communicated with Nelle outside the email, he would have waited for another time to repay his debt. Luckily, that had not occurred.

He was curious, though. “The Commonwealth is helping you acquire a new job?”

“They’re about to.”

“And what is it you have that
they
want?”

She laid the folder in his lap. “It’s all explained in here.”

He listened as she told him about privateers, letters of marque from George Washington, an attempt on Andrew Jackson’s life, and a cipher Thomas Jefferson considered unbreakable.

“A friend of Jefferson’s,” she said, “Robert Patterson, a professor of mathematics, conceived what he called the perfect cipher. Jefferson was fascinated with codes. He loved Patterson’s so much that, as president, he passed it to his ambassador in France for official use. Unfortunately, there is no record of its solution. Patterson’s son, also named Robert, was appointed by Andrew Jackson as director of the U. S. Mint. That’s probably how Jackson learned of the cipher and its solution. It’s logical to assume that the son knew. Old Hickory was a big fan of Thomas Jefferson.”

She showed him a copy of a handwritten page that contained nine rows of letters in seemingly random sequence.

“Most people don’t know,” she said, “that prior to 1834 there were few records of Congress. What existed was contained within the separate journals for the House and Senate. In 1836 Jackson commissioned the
Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States
, which took twenty years to finish. To create that official record, they used journals, newspaper accounts, eyewitnesses, whatever or whoever they could find. It was mainly secondhand information, but it became the
Annals of Congress
and is now the official congressional record.”

She explained that nowhere in the
Annals
was there any mention of four letters of marque granted to any Hale, Bolton, Cogburn, or Surcouf. In fact, two pages were missing from the official House and Senate journals for the congressional sessions of 1793.

“Jackson tore those pages out and hid them away,” she said, “concealed behind Jefferson’s cipher. It has done its job well, protecting that hiding place—” She paused. “Until a few hours ago.”

He spotted his hotel down Broadway.

“We hired an expert a few months ago,” she said. “A particularly smart individual who thought he could solve it. The Commonwealth has tried, but none of their hired guns were successful. Our man is in southern Maryland. He’s privy to some computer programs we use for Middle East decoding that apparently worked. I need you to go see him and retrieve the solution.”

“It can’t be emailed or couriered?”

She shook her head. “Too many security risks associated with that. Besides, there’s a complication.”

He caught the implications. “Others know about this?”

“Unfortunately. Two of whom you just sent to the hospital, but the White House knows as well.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I told them.”

AIR
FORCE
ONE

MALONE
WAITED
FOR
AN
ANSWER
TO
HIS
QUESTIONS—
WHO
contacted me two days ago and who left the note?
—but none came. Instead Edwin Davis handed him another sheet of paper, this one with nine lines of random letters, written in the same script featured on Andrew Jackson’s letter to Abner Hale.

“That’s the Jefferson cipher,” Davis said. “The Commonwealth has tried since 1835 to crack it. Experts tell me it’s not a simple substitution, where you replace one letter of the alphabet with another. It’s a transposition, where letters are placed in a defined order. To know the sequence, you have to know the key. There are something like 100,000 possibilities.”

He studied the letters and symbols.