Spy and the Thief (13 page)

Rand roused himself with a sigh and felt his way across the darkened office to the telephone, then waited while the call was switched to his line. Outside, fog was rising from the Thames.

“Hello?”

“Rand?”

“Yes.” He recognized the familiar harshness of the Inspector’s voice. “What is it, Stephens?”

“I tried to reach you at your flat.”

“I’ve been sleeping in the office this week. Busy time. What’s so urgent?”

“A mess, Rand. You’d better come down.”

“Down where? What is it?”

“We have a dead man here. He may be Jimmy King from your department.”

“My God!” Rand steadied himself against the desk, wide-awake now. “How did it happen?”

“It would be better if you saw for yourself. I can have a car pick you up in five minutes.”

“Very well.” He hung up and dressed quickly. Then he hurried down to the central decoding room where Malley and the others were working through the night. “How’s it going?” he asked.

Malley shrugged. He was a big Irishman who liked his work. “Nothing yet. We’re trying some transpositions now.”

Rand glanced up at the blackboards with their solid rows of meaningless letters. “What time did King go off duty?”

“A little before midnight, I think. What’s wrong?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Rand said. He went downstairs to wait for the police car.

The ride through the dim, nearly deserted city was something of a nightmare. They followed the river east toward Greenwich, and here the fog was thickest, obscuring even the outline of the road ahead.

“What’s the trouble?” Rand asked the uniformed driver. “What happened?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

“Was it an automobile accident?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

Finally they stopped behind two other police cars at a dark blur of a house, almost hidden from the road by a small forest of brambles and bushes. Rand knew they were somewhere in Greenwich, and the sound of groaning foghorns told him the river was not far away.

He followed a constable up the steps and into a dimly lit hallway. They walked down it to the very last door, where a group of silent men stood waiting in front of it. Rand recognized Stephens at once and shook his hand. “Sorry to get you here like this, Rand.”

“That’s all right, Inspector.”

Stephens reached out a gloved hand and pushed open the door. Jimmy King’s body was crumpled near the center of the room, his dead eyes staring at the ceiling. There was a bloody wound in his left side, near the heart. But as Rand’s eyes left the body they took in the room itself, and he felt his breathing quicken. The room was lined with bookcases that held a large assortment of encyclopaedias and atlases and leather-bound textbooks. And on top of the bookcases, spaced evenly around the room some six feet above the floor, were 24 clocks.

“Clocks?” Rand asked.

The Scotland Yard man nodded glumly. “It looks as if his time ran out.”

Hastings was at his desk in Security by nine o’clock, eyeing Rand distastefully across a desk already littered with the raw materials of a day’s work. “What is this business with King?” he asked. “He was one of your people, wasn’t he?”

Rand nodded. King had joined the Department of Concealed Communications two years earlier, when he was fresh out of college. He was bright and quick to learn, and had proved especially good with transposition ciphers.

“What was he working on?” Hastings wanted to know.

“The same thing as everyone else in Double-C, the Bermuda Cipher.”

“You haven’t cracked that one yet?”

Rand shook his head. “Day and night for a week. I’ve even been sleeping in the office.” The Bermuda Cipher had been picked up ten days earlier by a joint U.S. British listening post near the Russian border. It was a long message, apparently destined for certain Russian agents operating in the London area. The first word of the message, in Russian plaintext, had been
Bermuda.
It was followed by 346 letter-groups of five characters each. They had been sent over standard teletype lines from Moscow to Paris, then hand-delivered to someone in London. It was not the first such message. A previous one, from London to Moscow, had been headed with the Russian word for
Hong Kong.
They’d had no luck, deciphering that one, either.

“All right,” Hastings said, “he was working on the Bermuda Cipher. Anything else? Anything that might have taken him to that house in Greenwich?

“Nothing,” Rand told him. “What have you learned about the owner?”

“The property is owned by the estate of a deceased manufacturer. It was rented eighteen months ago by a man named John April. The neighbors describe him as something of an eccentric. He’s tall and middle-aged, with bushy hair and a little beard.”

“He’s an eccentric, all right,” Rand agreed. “He had twenty-four clocks in the room where Jimmy’s body was found.”

“Clocks?”

Rand nodded. “One for each of the twenty-four time zones of the world. They were set an hour apart, to show the time anywhere on the planet. I suppose the location of the house in Greenwich must have given him the idea. Greenwich Mean Time is the standard for the world, of course.”

Hastings pursed his lips distastefully. “Did Stephens tell you how they happened to find the body?”

“They had a phone call from a girl at three o’clock this morning. She said only that there’d been a killing at the Greenwich address and then hung up.”

“The neighbors saw nothing?”

“In the middle of the night, with that fog? Not a thing.”

“Find anything interesting in the house?”

“I’m going back for another look this afternoon,” Rand said. “What I saw wasn’t much. Cheap furnishings, probably left by the owner. The murder room was the only one of interest. Apparently it was used as a study of some sort. Stephens’ people are searching it, of course.”

“What about the twenty-four clocks? Did they all have the correct time?”

Rand allowed himself a slight smile. “Right to the minute. The clocks are numbered from One to Twenty-four. Clock Number One has the correct time for London, Paris and Berlin, which is the same since we adopted British Standard Time in 68. Clock Number Two is an hour later and shows the time in Athens, Jerusalem, and Cairo.”

Hastings leaned back in his chair, looking unhappy. “Why should your man King be murdered in a room with twenty-four clocks?”

“I don’t even know what he was doing in the house. When we discover that, we’ll be a long way toward an answer.”

“I want you to get to the bottom of this thing, Rand. If King was involved in anything subversive, it might endanger your whole department.”

Rand rose to leave. He’d had enough of Hastings for one morning. “What’s subversive about getting killed?”

“You at least must admit that the manner of his death was in extremely bad taste.”

Rand turned and left the office without further comment.

He went down to the decoding room where Prank Malley was working at the blackboards. “Time to go home, Frank. The day crew can take over.”

The Irishman sighed. “Not a thing yet. And I feel I’m so near!”

“What have you done so far?”

“I keep thinking it should be a modified Vigenere. That’s always been a favorite with the Russians. The message uses letters instead of numbers, but I think I’ve figured that part of it. Only the first ten letters of the Russian alphabet are used. They easily transpose into the numbers one through zero. The trouble with a Vigenere, though, is that a key word or key number is needed for the solution.”

Rand scanned the blackboard quickly. “What about Bermuda as the key word?”

“Tried it first thing. Nothing.”

Rand had been doing Vigeneres and Nihilist ciphers while Malley was still in grade school. Somehow the look of this was different. “I think you’re on the wrong track,” he said. “But keep at it if you want to. I’ll be back to help out the day men as soon as I can.”

He went up to his office and glanced quickly through the morning’s mail. But he was unable to concentrate on it, unable to think of anything but Jimmy King’s outstretched body. He stood for a time at the window, watching the almost imperceptible movement of Big Ben’s minute hand across the river. The fog had lifted, and was now replaced by bright May sunshine.

He phoned Inspector Stephens and learned they had just completed the autopsy on King. “As we thought, a knife wound in the side. A long slender blade that went through the heart. Perhaps something like a sword cane.”

“Time of death?”

“Between two and three, as near as we can figure.”

Rand hung up and pondered some more. King had left Double-C just before midnight, and two or three hours later he’d been killed in a house in Greenwich. Why had he gone there? To meet the girl who had phoned Scotland Yard?

He went out to the dead man’s desk in the main office, ignoring the stares of the secretaries, and began to go through King’s drawers. There were few personal items—a packet of matches from a gambling club, a few small coins, a notebook of telephone numbers. Rand paused at this last and leafed through the pages. Several girls’ names were listed, with phone numbers. He was sorry he hadn’t known King better outside of office hours. As it was, the names meant nothing to him.

He dropped the address book into his pocket and went back to the decoding room. “Frank, did Jimmy King ever mention any girls to you?”

“Not to me. He was all business.”

Rand grunted and went over to the blackboard. “A number cipher of some sort,” he decided, studying the number-groups which had now replaced the previous letter-groups. “But not necessarily a Vigenere.”

“Any ideas?”

Rand smiled. “Lots of them.” He reached for the chalk.

But two hours later he gave up in disgust and left the building.

Inspector Stephens led Rand down the Greenwich hallway to the room at the end. “And this is where we found the body.”

“I remember,” Rand said. He gazed again over the faces of the 24 clocks, each with its own number and identifying card. “What do you think this room was used for?”

The Scotland Yard man shrugged. “A study, I suppose.”

Rand glanced over the shelves of books. There was a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a number of atlases, some textbooks in forensic medicine, and even a leather-bound edition of Dickens. “What do you make of the books?” he asked Stephens.

“We’ve been through them. Everything but the Britannica apparently came from the sale of an estate. There’s a bookplate in each one—the same bookplate. We checked it out—the name’s meaningless.”

Rand opened a couple of books at random, studying the faded bookplate of some long-dead collector. “Odd. They don’t even seem read.”

“Just for show.”

“Are the clocks for show too?” He replaced the books and turned back to Stephens. “Any lead on the girl who phoned?”

“None,” Stephens replied.

“Or the missing Mr. April?”

“Not really. The neighbors confirm that he carried a cane. Could have been the murder weapon.”

Rand nodded. “Jimmy confronted April in this room and April killed him. The girl with Jimmy called Scotland Yard. Simple. If only we had April.”

“He left some clothing in an upstairs closet, but nothing that can be traced. We know he was about the same size and weight as the dead man, and the neighbors put April’s age at around fifty. But that’s all we’ve got. The beard could be a fake.”

Rand looked again at the 24 clocks surrounding them. “I wonder why anyone would want to know the time in every major city of the world?”

“The man was an eccentric. He lived in Greenwich, so he had twenty-four clocks.”

“Perhaps,” Rand said. Once more he studied the numbered cards below each clock. Some cards listed only one city, while others carried the names of several. Clock Number 5 was tagged
Karachi,
while Clock Number 8 had
Canton, Hong Kong, Manila.
On Clock Number 20 he found the names of
Bermuda, Caracas, Halifax.
The final clock, Number 24, said
Dakar, Dublin.

He looked again at the card for Clock Number 20, remembering the Bermuda Cipher. But after a time he could only sigh and walk away.

At eight o’clock that evening the girl phoned his apartment. Her voice was low and husky, and he knew at once that this was the one. “Mr. Rand?”

“Speaking.”

“I was a friend of Jimmy’s.”

“Oh?”

“I must talk to you. I have some information about his death.”

“All right.”

“Where can we meet?”

“You’re welcome to come up here.”

“No. Your place might be watched.”

“My phone might be tapped too. Did you think of that?”

“I had to take the chance. Can you meet me at Battersea Park? At the entrance to the amusement area?”

“When?”

“Is nine too soon?”

“I’ll be there. How will I know you?”

She hesitated. “You’ll know me.”

The pleasant May weather had brought out the children and the lovers, and somehow Rand felt a bit out of place lounging against the wall of a candy-striped pavilion waiting for a girl he had never seen. Then, quite suddenly, she was there before him—and he did know her. The mouth, nose, eyes—they all belonged to Jimmy King.

“You’re his sister,” he said, giving words to the obvious.

She nodded. “I’m Rita. He never mentioned me?”

“Not that I remember. I’m afraid I wasn’t as close to Jimmy as I might have been.”

“I don’t think he would have permitted it.” She glanced around at the crowd of evening funseekers. “Is there some place we could go?”

Rand steered her up the walk to a little tea-and-sandwich shop beneath the trees. They took a table in the rear and waited until the elderly woman proprietor had served them.

“Now then, Miss King, what do you know about your brother’s death?”

“Everything, I’m afraid. In a way I was the cause of it.”

“You’d better tell me about it,” Rand said grimly.

“Well, in the first place I’m twenty-seven—two years older than Jimmy was. Ever since college I’ve been pretty much on my own. Our parents died a few years back, leaving me enough money to get by on.” She tossed her blonde hair as she spoke, in a gesture Rand found a bit too youthful for a woman of 27.