Текст книги "The Navigator"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Chapter 15

VIKTOR BALTAZAR HAD LISTENED in silence as Adriano told him about the foiled hijacking plot. The bile had risen higher in his throat with each detail of the failed attempt to steal the Phoenician statue. Although he displayed no outward manifestation of his anger except for a vein pulsating in his forehead, Baltazar’s fury was like the molten innards of a nascent volcano. When Adriano described how the mineral ship had been shadowed in a helicopter by the same pale-haired man who had prevented the theft of the statue, Baltazar could stand it no more.

“Enough,”he growled.

Baltazar squeezed the cell phone in his mailed fist, tightening his thick fingers like a vise, until he felt the satisfying crunch of plastic and metal. He tossed the ruined instrument to the groom holding the reins of a giant gray sorrel. He took a steel helmet from the hands of his waiting squire and lowered it onto the padded cap on his head.

With his sturdy frame encased in gleaming armor from head to toe, Baltazar resembled a hulking robot from a science-fiction film epic. He was far more agile than any metallic monster, however. Even wearing armor that weighed seventy pounds, he easily pulled himself into the stallion’s high-backed saddle.

The squire handed Baltazar a fifteen-foot wooden lance. Called a courtesy lance because of the blunt steel tip that distinguished it from a sharp-pointed war lance, the weapon was still potentially lethal when propelled forward by the power and strength of the huge Belgium horse. Baltazar had bred the animal from a long line of great warhorses that were known as destriersin medieval times. The animal was twice the size of an ordinary riding horse. Even without its protective armor, his mount weighed more than a ton.

Baltazar rested the lance across the thick, arching neck. The squire handed him a shield that came to a tapering point at the bottom. The head of a bull was emblazoned in black on the white shield. The same bull’s-head motif decorated Baltazar’s tunic and a flowing cloth that was draped over the horse’s body.

With the lance at rest, Baltazar bent forward until he could see through the occularium,a narrow horizontal slit set high in the face of the helmet. On his left was a low, solid fence known as the tilt. On the other side of the tilt, at its far end, was a rider, also dressed in full armor, who was mounted on an equally large horse.

Baltazar had singled the man out of his mercenary corps. His practice opponent had a sturdy physique and was an accomplished rider. Like a sparring partner for a professional boxer, he usually came out on the losing end in his jousts with Baltazar. He was paid extra to compensate for his bumps and bruises. Baltazar tended to treat his opponent lightly, not because of any sympathy. He simply didn’t want the bother of training a new practice knight. But after learning about the failure of the hijacking, Baltazar was in a murderous mood.

He glared at his unsuspecting opponent with blood in his eyes. He had refrained from unleashing his vicious temper on Adriano. The young Spaniard he had rescued from a murder charge was intensely loyal. Despite Adriano’s size and strength, Balthazar’s personal assassin was in some ways as delicate as a fine watch. Threatening or scolding Adriano would have sent him into a spell of despondency, and he might have dealt with it by going on a self-destructive and awkward killing spree.

Baltazar clenched his teeth and tightened the grip on his lance. A herald dressed in a gaudy medieval costume raised a trumpet to his lips and blew a single note. The signal to charge. Baltazar raised his lance and put his long gold spurs to the horse’s flanks.

The massive animal dug its hooves into the sod and moved out in a deceptively slow amble known as pacing. The smooth ride kept the rider in his saddle where he was better able to aim the lance. Both riders kept their lances pointed toward their left at a thirty-degree angle. Each man kept his head two feet from the tilt and his right hand three feet. The left hand was protected by the raised shield.

The horses accelerated with a thunder of hooves. At the midpoint of the tilt the riders clashed. Baltazar’s opponent was the first to score. His lance hit Baltazar’s shield dead-on. The fluted breastplate was designed to shunt off a lance head, diluting the force of the impact, but the shaft shattered even before it was deflected to the side. Baltazar’s lance found its mark a second later. The blunt tip slammed into his opponent’s left shoulder.

Unlike his opponent’s weapon, Baltazar’s lance stayed intact. Even the blunted lance had a battering ram impact. The force of the moving horse and rider, concentrated on one small spot, knocked his opponent out of his stirrups. He crashed to the ground with a noise like a junkyard avalanche.

Baltazar wheeled his horse around and tossed the lance aside. He slid out of the saddle and drew his sword. His opponent’s body was on its back, twisted at an unnatural angle. Ignoring the groans of pain, he stood over the man with straddled legs and held his sword high in both hands. The point was aimed down. He savored the moment, and then he drove the sword into the ground a few inches from the man’s neck.

With a snarl of disgust, he left the sword in the ground and strode off toward a tent covered in fabric that repeated the bull’s-head design. A medical crew that had been standing nearby hurried out to tend to the injured jouster.

Baltazar’s squire helped him remove his armor. Underneath his chain mail suit he wore a protective layer made of Kevlar. His opponent would have worn the more traditional suit of padded cotton, which offered little protection. Baltazar always liked to give himself an edge. His lance contained an alloy core that prevented it from shattering like that of his opponent’s wooden weapon.

Still wearing his chain mail, Baltazar got behind the wheel of an Umbrian red Bentley GTC convertible and drove away from the jousting field. He accelerated the twelve-cylinder, twin-turbocharged car to sixty miles per hour in less than five seconds. Although the car could go nearly two hundred miles per hour, he held it at half that speed. He raced along a road for a couple of miles before turning onto a driveway that led past manicured lawns to a vast pile of stone built in the style of a Spanish villa.

He parked the Bentley in front of the mansion and strode to the door. A house the size of Baltazar’s would have begged for a large staff, but he employed only one servant, a trusted valet who doubled as a chef of considerable accomplishment. Baltazar lived in a few rooms of the mansion. If he needed chores done, he summoned members of his private army, who lived in a nearby barracks when they weren’t patrolling the grounds of the vast estate.

The valet met him at the door. Despite his servant’s quiet household manner and skills, he was a master of martial arts and highly trained as an armed bodyguard. Balthazar made his way to his pool house and stripped to the skin. He swam half a mile in the Olympicsized pool and then soaked in the hot tub, letting the anger ooze out of him. After his bath, he slipped into a white hooded robe similar to those worn by monks.

Even dressed in the loose robe, Baltazar cut an imposing figure. The garment could hide the thick arms and legs, but there was no way to contain the wide shoulders. Baltazar’s imposing head looked as if it had been sculpted out of granite that by some miracle of alchemy had been transformed, almost, into flesh and blood.

He left orders with his valet that he not be disturbed and locked himself in his portrait gallery. The walls of the huge room were covered with pictures of Baltazar’s forebears going back hundreds of years. Baltazar poured cognac into a snifter, swished the liquor around, and took a sip. He set the glass aside and went over to an eighteenth-century oil painting of a young matron that hung on the wall near the huge flagstone fireplace. He put his face inches from the portrait so that their eyes met. He placed his hands on the carved panels to either side of the painting.

Tiny sensors located behind the subject’s eyes probed his retinas and matched the findings with data in a computer database. Hidden scanners in the panels compared his hand-and fingerprints to those in a database. There was a soft click and a section of the wall opened to reveal a stairway.

He descended the stairs to a steel door that opened with a pushbutton combination. Behind the door was a room lined with glass-enclosed cabinets. The airtight cabinets were controlled for temperature and humidity to protect hundreds of thick volumes arranged by date.

The books contained the history of the Baltazar family going back more than two thousand years. The chronicles told of the family’s origin in Palestine, its move to the island of Cyprus, where they flourished as shipbuilders. The family provided ships for the Fourth Crusade. They were involved in the bloody looting of Constantinople, where they stole as much gold as they could carry in their vessels.

After the Crusade, the family threw its lot in with the Crusaders. They moved to western Europe and joined a cartel that used the stolen gold as the basis for a mineral empire. Since then, every birth, death, and marriage, going back to Cyprus, had been recorded. Business dealings. Feuds. Diaries. Each detail, no matter how sordid, embarrassing, or criminally liable, was enclosed between the covers of the gold-embossed volumes.

Baltazar had read every word in every volume, and it was his Crusader past that had stoked his interest in jousting and other trappings of chivalry. A touch screen computer built into the wall was used to make entries and serve as a reference guide.

A stone idol sat on a platform in the center of the room. It was the figure of a man, with his palms up, arms angled slightly downward, as if he were waiting to be handed something. He had a round, bearded face, and his lips were spread wide in a smile that was just short of a leer. Twin horns protruded from the sides of his head. The god Ba’al was given a special place because he was the namesake of the Baltazar family, which had courted his favor and asked it to guard its fortunes since its very beginning.

The idol had been used in unspeakable rites of human sacrifice. It had originally been set up on the edge of a fiery pit. The stone feet were still blackened by smoke and heat. In hard times, priests of Ba’al would sacrifice infants, placing them on the sloping arms, where they rolled into the flames. Instead of a blazing fire, the space in front of the idol was occupied by an altar. Sitting on the altar was a chest made of dark wood and decorated with dozens of precious stones.

Baltazar pushed back the lid and lifted out a smaller, undecorated wooden box. Inside the box were several sheets of parchment, which Baltazar spread out on the altar. His father had introduced him to the contents of the box when the family’s main base was still in Europe. The script told of his family’s history before it fled to Cyprus. But it was not until he was older and had studied Aramaic that he was able to understand the dark secrets that had resulted in their exile.

As he read the instructions set forth by his ancient ancestor, he could feel the weight of centuries pressing down on his shoulders. After a moment, he carefully replaced the parchment in its twin receptacles and closed the lid.

He lifted eyes that were nearly colorless and saw Ba’al’s stony gaze. It was as if the ancient god were looking directly into his soul. Power seemed to flow from the statue into Baltazar’s body. He drank in the invisible emanations like a thirsty pilgrim until it seemed as if he would burst.

He backed up to the door, then turned and climbed the stairs to his study. Still shaken by the experience, he finished his brandy to calm his nerves. Then he picked up the telephone. He punched the keys, and his call was relayed to Adriano through a series of connections, each designed to disguise its origin.

Baltazar thirsted for details on the failed hijacking and theft. He wanted to know the identity of the man who had spoiled his plans. Whoever he was would receive the same fate as hundreds of others who had run afoul of the Baltazars: the promise of a long and painful death.

Chapter 16

FOR A SUPERSECRET GOVERNMENT ENTITY, the National Security Agency is remarkably visible to the world at large. The NSA’s headquarters are at Fort Meade, Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington, in two high-rise office buildings, faced in blue-black glass, that look as if they had been created by a cubist in a dark frame of mind.

The office buildings are an illusion. The structures represent only part of an extensive complex said to include ten acres of underground operations. The NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the U.S., possibly the world, and the agency’s twenty thousand or so employees include the best cryptologists in the country.

Angela Worth, the assistant librarian at the American Philosophical Society, drove past the NSA complex and turned into the parking lot for the NationalCryptographicMuseum. She had arisen early in the day, called in sick, and driven south from Philadelphia. She found a parking space, grabbed an old briefcase from the passenger seat, and headed for the museum’s front door.

She asked the receptionist in the museum’s lobby if she could see D. Grover Harris. A few minutes later, she was approached by a skinny, mop-headed young man dressed in jeans. He shook Angela’s hand.

“Hi, Angela,” he said with a bashful grin. “Nice of you to come all this way.”

“No problem, Deeg. Thanks for seeing me.”

Angela had met Deeg at a convention of puzzle fans. They had hit it off immediately. They were both geeks. Deeg was pleasant and good-looking, and impossibly bright. And like Angela, he was low on the institutional ladder. He ushered her into his cluttered office and offered her a seat. The space was hardly bigger than a closet, confirming Harris’s bottom status on the agency’s food chain.

Harris settled behind a paper-covered desk that would have been considered a firetrap by any competent inspector. “You sounded pretty excited on the phone. What’s going on?”

Angela unlocked the briefcase. She extracted the Jefferson file copies and handed them over to Harris without comment. He scanned the pages and found the perforated cardboard on the bottom of the stack. He held it to the light and then placed the cardboard over a page.

“This wouldn’t be a cipher grille, would it?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Angela said. “You’re the expert on codes and ciphers.”

“I’m just an aspiringexpert who’s been taking courses at the NationalCryptologicSchool.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Angela said. The NSA school trained people from all government departments in the fine points of cryptographic analysis.

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’rethe one that picked up on this,” he said. “What can you tell me about it?”

“I think it was misfiled by subject. It should have gone into a Thomas Jefferson file.”

He sat bolt upright in his chair. “Jefferson?”

“Uh-huh. I’m pretty sure the handwriting is his. I’ve compared it to the Declaration, and there’s a small TJ in the lower right hand corner of the cover page.”

He held the page up to his face and let out a soundless whistle. “Jefferson. That would make sense.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Angela said with a sigh of relief. “I was worried that I’d be wasting your time.”

“Hell, no!” Harris shook his head. “Most people don’t know that Jefferson was an accomplished cryptologist. He used ciphers to communicate with James Madison and other government figures. He became proficient at codes and ciphers when he was minister to France.” He rose from his chair. “C’mon. I’ve got something to show you.”

He led the way to the exhibition area and stopped in front of a display case that held a brown wooden cylinder mounted on a spindle. The cylinder was about two inches in diameter and eight inches long and was constructed of a series of disks. The rims of the disks were inscribed with letters.

“This was found in a house near Monticello,” Harris said. “We believe it’s a ‘wheel cipher’ Jefferson invented when he was serving as Washington’s secretary of state. You write your message and rotate the disks to scramble the letters. The person getting the message un-scrambles them with a similar device.”

“Looks like something out of The Da Vinci Code.”

Harris chuckled. “Ol’ Leonardo would have been fascinated by the next evolution of the wheel cipher.”

He dragged her over to another display case containing several machines that looked like big typewriters.

She read the placard. “Enigma cipher machines,” she said with excitement in her eyes. “I’ve heard of them.”

“They were one of the best-kept secrets of World War Two. People would have killed for one of these contraptions. They were basically glorified versions of Jefferson’s wheel cipher. He was far ahead of his day.”

“Too bad we can’t use one of these things to decipher his writing,” Angela said.

“We may not have to,” Harris said.

They returned to Harris’s office, where he plopped behind the desk again. He leaned back in his chair and tented his fingers.

“How did you get into codes and ciphers?” he said.

“I’m good at math. I do the crosswords, and I’ve liked acrostics since I was a kid. My interest in puzzles got me into reading books on the subject. That’s where I read about cipher grilles and Jefferson’s interest in cryptology.”

“Half the cryptologists in the world would have given me the same answer,” Harris said. “It was exactly those interests that allowed you to sense the possibility of a hidden message in this stuff.”

She shrugged. “Something about it struck me as being funny.”

“‘Funny stuff’ is what the NSA deals with on a regular basis. Jefferson would have felt right at home in the agency.”

“Where does his wheel cipher fit it?”

“It doesn’t. Jefferson got away from cipher devices later in his career. My guess is that he only used the grille to create a steganograph to conceal the fact that the artichoke info contains a secret message. He would have jotted down the message in the apertures and built sentences around them.”

“I noticed that the syntax in the text seemed stilted or just plain weird in some of the lines.”

“Good catch. Let’s assume Jefferson used this as an extra layer of concealment. First, we’ll have to copy the letters exposed by the holes in the grille.”

Angela pulled a notebook out of her briefcase and handed it over. “I’ve already done that.”

Harris inspected the lines of seemingly unrelated letters. “Fantastic! That will save a lot of time.”

“Where do we start?”

“About two thousand years ago.”

“Pardon?”

“Julius Caesar used a substitution cipher to get a message to Cicero doing the Gallic Wars. He simply substituted Greek letters for Roman. He improved on the system later on. He’d take the plain text alphabet and create a cipher alphabet by shifting letters three places down. Put one alphabet over the other and you can substitute those letters on one row for the other.”

“Is that what we have here?”

“Not exactly. The Arabs discovered that if you figured out the frequency of a letter’s appearance in written language, you could decipher a substitution cipher. Mary, Queen of Scots, lost her head after Queen Elizabeth’s code-breakers intercepted the messages used in the Babington Plot. Jefferson developed a variation of a system known as the Vigenere method.”

“Which is an expansion of the Caesar substitution.”

“Correct. You create a batch of cipher alphabets by shifting so many letters over for each one. You stack them in rows to form a Vigenere box. Then you write a key word repetitively across the top of the box. The letters in the key word help you locate your encoded letters, something like plotting points on a graph.”

“That would mean that the letters in your clear text would be represented by different letters.”

“That’s the beauty of the system. It prevents the use of letter frequency tables.”

Harris turned to a computer and, after typing furiously for several minutes, created columns of letters arranged in a rectangular shape. “This is the standard Vigenere box. There’s only one problem. We don’t know the key word.”

“How about using artichoke?”

Harris laughed. “Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter,’ out in plain sight? Artichoke was the key word Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis used to unlock the code they agreed on for the LouisianaTerritory expedition.”

He wrote the word artichoke several times across the top of the square and tried to decipher the encrypted message revealed through the grille. He tried the plural form and shook his head.

“Maybe that was tooobvious,” Angela said. They tried Adams, Washington, Franklin,and Independence,all with the same disappointing results.

“We could spend all day doing this,” Angela said.

“Actually, we could spend decades. The key word doesn’t even have to make sense.”

“So there is no way a Vigenere cipher can be broken?”

“ Anycipher can be broken. This one was busted in the 1800s by a guy named Babbage, a genius who’s been called the father of the computer. His system looked for sequences of letters. Once he had those, he could figure out the key word. Something like that exceeds my skills. Fortunately, we’re within spitting distance of the greatest code breakers in the world.”

“You know someone at the NSA?”

“I’ll give my professor a jingle.”

The professor was in class, so Harris left a message. With Angela’s permission, he copied the material. He’d been so intent on the written text that he had paid little attention to the drawing.

Angela saw him studying the lines and Xs. “That’s the other part of the mystery. I thought it was a garden layout at first.” She told him what she had found on the ancient-languages website.

“Fascinating, but let’s concentrate on the main text message for now.”

Harris made copies of the papers. Angela tucked the original documents back into her briefcase. Harris walked her to the door and said he would let her know what he learned. Two hours later, he got a call from his professor. Harris started to tell him about the cipher problem. He only got as far as the name Jefferson when the professor told him to come over immediately.

Professor Pieter DeVries was waiting for Harris at the other side of the security check-in. The professor practically dragged Harris to his office in his haste to look at the file.

The professor epitomized the brilliant but absentminded mathematician that he was. He tended toward tweed suits, even in the warmer months, and had the habit of tugging at his snowy Vandyke beard when he was engaged in thought, which was most of the time.

He studied the artichoke file. “You say a young lady from the Philosophical Society brought this to you?”

“That’s right. She works in their research library.”

“I probably wouldn’t have given it a second look if not for the grille,” which Angela had let Harris hold on to. He picked up the perforated cardboard, stared at it with disdain, and then set it aside. “I’m surprised Jefferson would have used something as crude as this.”

“I’m still not convinced this stuff conceals a message,” Harris said.

“There’s one way to find out,” the professor replied.

He scanned the columns of letters into a computer and tapped the keyboard for a few minutes. Letters arranged and rearranged themselves on the screen until a word popped up.

EAGLE

Harris squinted at the screen and laughed. “We should have known. Eagle was Jefferson’s favorite horse.”

The professor smiled. “Babbage would have sold his soul for a computer with tenth the capacity of this machine.” He typed the key word onto the screen and then instructed the computer to use it to decipher the message he had scanned earlier.

The letter Jefferson had written to Lewis in 1809 came up in plain text.

Harris leaned over the professor’s shoulder.

“I can’t believe what I’m reading,” he said. “This is crazy.” Harris dug out the paper with the odd drawings on it. “Angela thinks these words are Phoenician.”

“That concurs with what Jefferson’s source at Oxford says in his letter.”

Harris felt a great weariness. “I’ve got the feeling that we may have stumbled onto something big.”

“On the other hand, this fairy tale may be a hoax, the product of a clever imagination.”

“Do you really believe that, sir?”

“No. I think the document is for real. The story it tells is another matter.”

“How do we handle this thing?”

The professor tugged at his beard so hard it was a wonder that the Vandyke didn’t come off.

“Ve-ry carefully,” he said.