“No need. He came without luggage. We even gave him fresh clothing at this end.”
“And yet,” Rand remembered, “he said he came bearing the name of the double agent. Did he mean that literally, that he carried the name on his person?”
“Only one way to find out,” Toby Fly said. “Let’s strip him and examine the body.”
Sir Roscoe Hammond cleared his throat. “I think the young lady might be excused before we get on with this.”
Polly Carver bristled. “He’s a dead man, for God’s sake! I have as much right to stay as any of you.”
“Let’s get to it,” Rand said.
They found what they sought taped to the inside of his thigh with a wide plastic strip that almost exactly matched the color of his skin. Rand pulled it off with needless gentleness and held it up. “A tiny photograph,” he decided. “Someone bring me a magnifying glass.”
He peered at the photo print through the glass and saw three lines of typed letters, twenty letters to the line. “What do you make of it?” he asked Sir Roscoe, passing him the photograph and the glass.
“It’s a cipher!”
“Seems to be,” Rand agreed. The message read:
WALRUSORKWAITOFEEHMF YEAAOTPYEDNTSYTGVERN DRESTRELENOANLNAAWIO
“The first word seems to be walrus,” Polly pointed out.
“Walrus?”
“Walrus,” Rand confirmed. “Walrus ork wait o fee hmf, if you want to separate it that way.”
“Walrus or Kwait,” Toby suggested. “Short for Kuwait, on the Persian Gulf?”
Rand took back the message. It had been years since he’d tackled an enemy cipher, but he’d spent most of his life cracking them. “I’ll need a blackboard,” he decided, “pads, pencils, chalk. And lots of black coffee.”
“You’re really going to try breaking it?” Hammond asked.
“Someone has to.”
Rand worked far into the evening while the others made arrangements for the disposition of the corpse. By midnight he’d tried the most likely substitutions without success. Toby Fly came up to watch him work. “Any luck, old man?”
“Not yet.” Rand tapped a list of letter frequencies he’d made. “There are twenty letters of the alphabet represented. E is the most frequent, occurring eight times, as you might expect in ordinary English. A is next, showing up seven times. Then N, O, R, and T with five each.”
“What does it mean?” Toby asked.
“Damned if I know.”
“I think I’ll go to bed.”
An hour later Temple and Polly came by. “Any luck?” Polly asked.
“All of it bad.”
Temple frowned at the blackboard where Rand had printed the message in large chalk letters. “Think it could be in Russian?”
“You know better than to ask that question. As a Russian expert you can see there are no characters from the Russian alphabet here.”
“True enough. But they could be English equivalents.”
“I doubt it. Before he died Lifnov told me they used English in the Moscow office as much as possible, trying to duplicate London conditions. From the sharpness of the letters in the photo I’d guess it was typed on a standard IBM typewriter, with an English language keyboard.”
“What about the walrus at the start?” Polly asked.
“It could be a key word signaling the exact cipher being used, in which case the actual message would start with the letters following.”
“Maybe it’s not a cipher at all,” she suggested. “Maybe it’s a book code.”
“What book?”
“Through the Looking-Glass. You remember ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter,’ don’t you?”
Rand took a deep breath and put down his chalk. Almost in unison the three of them attacked the shelves of books at the end of the room. After a few minutes’ search Temple shouted, “Here it is!”
“No good English library would be complete without Lewis Carroll,” Rand agreed, flipping the pages until the familiar Tenniel illustration of the two creatures caught his eye. “Here it is.”
It was a long poem, and they spent the next hour trying to make some connection between the letters on the blackboard and the words on the page.
Finally, admitting defeat, Temple and Polly left him alone.
He turned out the lights and started toward the room Hammond had assigned him. Then, to help him sleep better, he went downstairs and asked Sir Roscoe if he might have a weapon to keep in his room. The slender white-haired man eyed him distastefully. “Do you really think that’s necessary, Rand?”
“There’s a killer in this house.”
Hammond gave him a loaded Beretta automatic from his desk drawer.
In the morning the cryptic message was still on the blackboard. Sixty letters, arranged in three lines of twenty each. He broke them down into five-letter groups, the way coded messages were usually transmitted:
WALRU SORKW AITOF EEHMF YEAAO TPYED NTSYT GVERN DREST RELEN OANLN AAWIO
The second group in the middle line almost spelled typed, and this got him searching for possible anagrams.
“Still working at it?” Polly asked when she brought him breakfast at nine o’clock.
“I’m an early riser.” He stared at the orange juice and toast, wondering what good a Beretta under his pillow was when he ate the food they brought him without question.
“Olimski says he’s leaving today,” she told him.
“Can’t Hammond stop him?”
“He’s too concerned about London. They’ve heard what happened and they want to send a team up here.”
“They sent a team already,” Rand pointed out. “That’s what caused the trouble.”
“Perhaps Olimski is right about the possibility of suicide. Perhaps the whole thing is a Russian plot to have us suspecting one another.”
“That’s a bit bizarre even for them.”
“What about my book-code idea?”
“We tried that last night and got nowhere. Book codes use numbers, not letters.”
“Couldn’t these letters stand for their numerical place in the alphabet? WALRUS would be 23-1-12-18-21-19.”
Rand tried it, returning again to the Carroll poem. “The twenty-third word in the poem is and, hardly a good beginning for a message. The twenty-third letter is e.” He counted out the rest of them. “E-T-I-N-E-T. Nothing likely there.”
“You said WALRUS could be just a preliminary word. Start the message with the next part.”
“ORK gives us 15-18-11. The corresponding words in the poem are his, to, and his again. The letters are N-N-H.”
“Well, it was a good idea.”
“Let’s go down and see Olimski,” he suggested.
He locked the door of the suite behind them and followed Polly to the Russian’s room. But Olimski had already departed. The closet was empty and his bag was gone. They met Toby Fly on the stairs. “If you’re looking for that crazy Russian he’s in with Hammond, typing a letter to the Prime Minister!”
“What?”
“Says this whole matter was handled all wrong, that Lifnov was driven into a state of depression and killed himself.”
Toby was right. They found Olimski seated behind the big electric typewriter in Hammond’s office, carefully pecking out a message while Sir Roscoe stood by helplessly. “I am sorry,” Olimski told Rand and Polly, “but the truth must be told.”
Rand walked behind him and watched the words he was typing. “It wasn’t suicide, Olimski. It was murder. One of you is a double agent.”
Mark Temple appeared in the doorway, apparently summoned by Toby who brought up the rear. “What is this, Olimski? We’ve got enough trouble here without your going off and writing crazy letters!”