Corvus shifted his legs. He could feel the muscles around his mouth straining from the effort to smile. The humiliation was almost unbearable. "As it happens I am working on an important project."
"May I ask what?" Right now it's at a somewhat delicate juncture, but within a week or two I'll
be able to bring it to you and the tenure committee-in confidence, of course. It should answer most satisfactorily."
Peale gazed at him a moment, then smiled. "That's splendid, Iain. The point is, I think you're a fine addition to the museum, and of course your distinguished name, associated as it is with your illustrious father, is also important to us. I'm asking these questions only in the spirit of giving counsel. We take it to heart when a curator fails to make tenure; we look on it more as a failure on our part." Peale rose with a broad smile, extended his hand. "Good luck."
Corvus left the office and walked back down the long, fifth-floor corridor. He was so full of silent rage he could hardly breathe. But he kept his smile, nodding left and right, murmuring greetings to colleagues who were on their way out of the museum at the close of day, the herd heading back to their split-level ranches in faceless American suburbs in Connecticut and New Jersey and Long Island.
17
THE WHITEWASHED ROOM behind the sacristy of Christ in the Desert Monastery contained only four things: a hard wooden stool, a rough table, a crucifix, and an Apple PowerBook G4 laptop computer with a printer, running on DC solar power. Wyman Ford sat before the computer, tingling with anticipation. He had just finished downloading two cryptanalysis programs and was about to unleash them on the code he had laboriously typed in from the dead man's notebook. Already he knew that this was no simple code; it had not yielded to any of his usual tricks.
It was something truly special.
He lifted his finger and brought it down smartly: the first program was off and running.
It wasn't exactly a decryption program, but rather pattern analysis software that looked at the code and made a determination, based on number patterns, as to what class of code it belonged to-substitution or transposition, placode or encicode, nomenclator or polyalphabetic. He had determined it wasn't a public-key code based on factoring large primes. But beyond that, he'd struck out.
It was only a matter of five minutes for the program to return a beep, indicating the first analysis was complete. Ford was startled when the conclusion popped up: UNABLE TO DETERMINE CODE TYPE
He scrolled down through the pattern results, numerical frequency tables, probability assignments. This was no random grouping of numbers-the program had picked out all kinds of patterns and departures from randomness. It
proved the numbers contained information. But what information, and how encoded?
Far from being discouraged, Ford felt a shivery thrill. The more sophisticated the code, the more interesting the message. He ran the next program in the module, a frequency analysis on single digits, number pairs, and triplets, matching it against frequency tables of common languages. But that too was a failure: it showed no correlation between the numbers and the English language or with any other common language.
Ford glanced at his watch. He'd missed Terce. He'd been at it now for five hours straight.
Damn.
He went back to the computer screen. The fact that each number had eight jjgits- byte-a
implied a computer-based code. Yet it was written with pencil in a grubby notebook, apparently in the middle of nowhere, with no computer access nearby. On top of that he had already tried translating the eight-digit numbers to binary, hexadecimal, and ASCII, and ran those through the decryption programs, still with no success.
This was getting fun.
Ford paused, picked up the notebook, flipped it open, ruffled through the pages. It was old, the leather cover abraded and worn, and there was sand between the well-thumbed pages. It smelled faintly of woodsmoke. The numbers were written with a sharpened pencil, clean and crisp, in neat rows and columns, forming a kind of grid. The evenness of the writing led him to believe that the journal had been written all at the same time.
And in the entire sixty pages of numbers there wasn't a single erasure or mistake.
Without a doubt the numbers had been copied.
He shut it and turned it over. There was a stain on the back cover, a smear that was still slightly tacky, and he realized with a start that it was blood. He shivered and quickly put the book down. The blood suddenly reminded him that this was not a game, that a man had been murdered, and that the journal very likely contained directions to a fortune.
Wyman Ford wondered just what he was getting himself into.
He suddenly felt a presence behind him and turned. It was the abbot, hands clasped behind his back, a faint smile on his face, his lively black eyes fixed on him. "We missed you, Brother Wyman."
Wyman rose. "I'm sorry, Father."
The abbot's gaze shifted to the numbers on the screen. "What you're doing must be important."
Wyman said nothing. He wasn't sure it was important in the way the abbot meant. He felt ashamed. This was just the kind of obsessive work habit that had gotten him into trouble in real life, this compulsive focusing on a problem to the exclusion of all else.
After Julie's death, he had never been able to forgive himself for all those times he worked late instead of talking to her, eating dinner with her, making love to her.
He could feel the kindly pressure of the abbot's eyes on him, but he couldn't raise his own to meet them.
"Ora et Labora, Prayer and Work," said the abbot, his gentle voice with an edge to it.
"The two are opposites. Prayer is a way of listening to God, and work is a way of speaking to God. The monastic life seeks a strict balance between the two."
"I understand, Father." Wyman felt himself coloring. The abbot always surprised him with his simple wisdom.
The abbot laid a hand on his shoulder. "I'm glad you do," then turned and left.
Wyman saved his work, backed it up on a CD, and shut down the system. Putting the notebook and CD in his pocket, he returned to his cell and placed them in the drawer of his bedside table. He wondered: had he really gotten the spook trade out of his system?
Is that what this was about?
He bowed his head and prayed.
18
TOM BROADBENT WATCHED Detective Lieutenant Wilier pacing back and forth in his living room, the policeman's slow, heavy steps somehow conveying insolence.
The detective wore a plaid sports jacket, gray slacks, and blue shirt with no tie, and his arms were short with bony, veined hands swinging at the end. He was about forty-five and no more than five-eight, with a narrow face, blade-like nose, and sagging black eyes rimmed in red. It was the face of a true insomniac.
Standing behind him, notebook flopped open in his hand, was his sidekick, Hernandez, soft, plump, and agreeable. They had arrived in the company of a no-nonsense woman with iron-gray hair who introduced herself as Dr. Feininger, the Medical Examiner.
Sally sat on the sofa next to him.
"A human hair was recovered at the crime scene," Wilier was saying as he slowly turned on his heel. "Dr. Feininger wants to find out if it came from the killer, but to do that we need to eliminate all others who were at the site."
"I understand."
Tom found the black eyes looking at him rather intently. "If you don't have any objection then, sign here."
Tom signed the permission form.
Feininger came around with a little black bag. "May I ask you to take a seat?"
"I didn't know it was going to be dangerous," said Tom, with an attempt at a smile.
"I'll be pulling them out by the roots," came the crisp answer.
Tom sat down, exchanged a glance with Sally. He felt pretty sure there was more to this visit than getting a few hairs. He watched as the M.E. removed a couple of small test tubes from her black bag and some sticky labels.