The Black Sun (40 page)

“You think he was working for Renwick?”

“Well, it would certainly explain how Renwick was able to stick so close to us. How he knew exactly where we’d be last night,” said Tom.

“And presumably why he topped Turnbull once he’d served his purpose,” Archie added.

“So what now?” Bailey interrupted them.

“We’re stuck in here, that’s what now,” Archie snapped. “How can we do anything, unless we get out.”

“I can’t let you go,” said Bailey. “It’s a good story, but I need hard evidence to make something like this stick. Besides, I have no jurisdiction here. I’m sorry.”

He walked slowly out of the room, nodding at Agent Cunningham on his way out.

“This is crazy,” said Tom. “I can’t believe you’re keeping us in here. We’ve done nothing wrong.”

Cunningham approached them slowly. “Bailey’s right. He doesn’t have any jurisdiction here,”

he

said.

“But

I

do.”

His

the black sun 349

eyes snapped up to meet theirs. “He told me what you guys discussed. He thinks you’re telling the truth, that you’re not the people we’re looking for. Hell, who knows, he may even be right. But that doesn’t mean I can just let you go.”

“So what are you saying?” Tom asked uncertainly.

“I’m saying that I came in here with Bailey.” Cunningham spoke deliberately, his expression leaving them in no doubt that he was serious. “That after he left the room you overpowered me and handcuffed me to the bed.” He produced a pair of steel handcuffs from his pocket and dangled them in front of Archie. “That you took my keys . . .” He dangled his key ring with his other hand, the metal chinking noisily. “And found your way up the back stairs to the fire exit on the south side of the building.”

“And then what?” Archie asked, cautiously accepting the handcuffs and key ring off Cunningham.

“Then you guys have got about twelve minutes before Bailey comes back and finds me. In fact, make that ten,” he said, consulting his watch. “After that, we’ll be looking for you. The Russkies too. I’d advise you to get out of town.”

“What do you want in return?” Tom asked, snapping the cuffs open and fixing them around the painted metal bed frame.

“A phone call when you catch up with these guys.” Cunningham pulled a business card from his top pocket, the corners worn and dog-eared. “We’ll take it from there.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

REKI FONTANKI EMBANKMENT, ST. PETERSBURG

January 11—11:43 a.m.

It had taken fifteen minutes of fielding questions before Tom was finally able to hold up the memory card retrieved from Kristenko’s camera and turn to Viktor. “You got something that can read this?”

“Sure.”

She led them down a long dark corridor to her office, an understated room lined with books and framed movie posters. Tom sensed that this was probably the only room she had had a hand in decorating herself, although he noticed that here, as everywhere, there were no photos, as if the past was a place she preferred not to be reminded of. The computer screen flashed into life as the system began to load, an egg timer rolling over onto its back every few seconds. In a few minutes it was done, and the screen filled with Cyrillic characters.

“You’d better let me drive,” Viktor said with a smile, slipping into the chair behind the desk. She slipped the card into a slot on the side of the machine and called up the pictures of the painting.

There were six in all. One of the front and rear of the canvas, and one of each of the edges,

normally

hidden

by

the black sun 351

the frame, but typically included in the photographic record of any major work of art, owing to the difficulty for the would-be forger of replicating something that could not be seen.

Tom soon found himself thanking Kristenko for his thoroughness, for it was on these edges that a series of meticulously inked black capital letters could be seen. A code.

“This must have been what Renwick was after.” Tom pointed at the screen. Dominique grabbed a pen and began to scribble the letters down on a pad.

“A bunch of letters is no use without the decoding machine,” Archie pointed out.

“A decoding machine?” Viktor frowned.

“The Enigma,” Tom explained. “Renwick had one stolen, remember? It’s a German wartime encoding machine, about the size—”

“Of a small briefcase,” Viktor finished his sentence for him. “I know. I told you, Viktor had one restored so he could use it.”

“Is it still here?” Tom asked hopefully.

“As far as I know, it’s in the library with everything else. I’ll go and get it.”

She left the room and returned a few moments later with two wooden boxes, one much smaller than the other. She placed them both on the desk. “Viktor bought it from some dealer in Switzerland about five years ago for his collection.”

“Lasche,” said Archie. “It had to be Lasche—he’s the only one who would deal with something like this.”

“Do you know how it works?” asked Tom.

“Of course. Viktor showed me,” she said.

She unclipped the battered and stained case, the wood thick with cracked varnish, and folded it back, revealing a machine that on first inspection looked like an old-fash-ioned metal typewriter. It sat snugly in its box, the raised black keys large and round, with the letters of the alphabet clearly marked in white.

But

a

closer

look

revealed

differences.

There

were

no

352 james twining

rollers between which to feed a sheet of paper. Instead, the flat case above the keys was punctured by twenty-six round glass windows with the faint shadow of a letter in each one. And above these were three narrow slots. The front of the box folded down to reveal twenty-six holes, each labeled with the letters of the alphabet, different pairs of which were joined by black cables.

“Viktor, it took a truckload of boffins almost half the war to crack that thing,” Archie pointed out. “How the hell are you going to manage on your own?”

“Because she’s not trying to crack it, is she?” Dom pointed out. “The hard work’s been done. All she’s trying to do is operate it.”

“Have you ever used one of these?” Tom asked.

“No,” said Dominique. “But I know the theory of how they work. Well, some of it at least.”

“How . . . ?” asked Archie.

“Codes and puzzles are my thing, remember?” Dominique explained. “I’ve read some books on it. All she needs to operate it are the settings. After that it’s easy.”

“What settings?” Tom looked at her blankly.

“The settings for the machine,” Viktor confirmed. “What are they?”

“Don’t we just plug in the numbers?” Archie frowned in confusion.

“This machine uses substitution encryption,” said Viktor.

“When one letter is substituted for another?” Archie guessed. “So
A
becomes
F
,
B

becomes
G
, and so on.”

“Exactly. Enigma is just a very complex substitution system.”

“Complex in what way?” asked Tom.

“The key to breaking any code is spotting a pattern,” Dominique replied, taking over from Viktor. “The beauty of the Enigma was that it changed the pattern after each individual letter.”

“Through these?” Tom asked, taking a metal disc with teeth and electrical circuits from the small wooden box that had been brought in with the machine.

“The

rotors,”

Dominique

confirmed.

“Every

time

a

letter

the black sun 353

was encoded, the rotors would change position and so would the pattern. And as a further safeguard each original letter was mapped to a totally different starting letter through the wires on the plug board before it even went through the rotors, and then the entire process was repeated in reverse before the encoded letter would light up.” Her fingernail tapped against one of the glass windows. “They say there are one hundred and fifty-nine million million million possible combinations in all.”

“So, to decode a message, you would need to know exactly how the original machine had been set up,” Tom surmised.

“Exactly.” Viktor stepped forward. “They used to issue codebooks so that, on any particular day, everyone would know what setting to use. If we don’t have the settings, we’re going to have to involve some expert help.”

“Which will take time. Something we don’t have,” Tom said.

“Well, Renwick must know, or he wouldn’t have gone to all this bother, would he?”

Archie observed. “There must be some way to work it out.”

“You’re right,” said Tom. “Maybe we missed something. Let’s have another look at those photos.” They turned to the screen once again and examined the painting’s edges.

“How many of these wires did you say there were?” Archie asked eventually.

“It varied,” Viktor replied. “Between ten and thirteen, depending on the setting. Any unwired letters were passed through the rotors without having been substituted first. It was another way of confusing eavesdroppers. Why?”

“It’s just that there are twenty-six letters along the top edge of the painting,” said Archie. “And they look like they’ve been written in pairs.”

Viktor nodded. “Thirteen pairs of letters. That could easily be the setting for the plug board—
U
to
A
.
P
to
F
. . .” She quickly reconfigured the wires to match the pairs of letters along the top of the frame. “There.”

“Which leaves us with what?” Tom inquired, his voice animated by their apparent progress.

354 james twining

“The choice of rotors and their settings,” Viktor replied. “We need to know which three to select and what ring settings to give them.” She took the remaining four rotors out of their greaseproof paper and pointed at a small ring that seemed to have been stuck to the side of each rotor. “These rotate and are then locked into a starting position. Without these,

we’ve

got

nothing.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

6:21 p.m.

They had taken turns in front of the computer, each trying to make sense of the jumbled mass of letters that decorated the painting’s edges like elaborate black lace. But no matter how hard they looked at the photos, whatever clever tricks they came up with to count the letters or divide them by the number on the other side, or subtract one from the other, they were no closer to discovering the rotor settings or which rotors they should use. They had even, in desperation, brought in the items they had recovered—the photos of the Bellak paintings, the Bellak painting of the synagogue itself, the walnut box that had contained Lammers’s medal, the medals, the safety-deposit box key, and the leather pouch and map hidden within the box—to see if they could provide some inspiration or reveal some hidden clue or message. But after six hours of fruitless inquiry, the letters had begun to cobweb across their vision.

Archie had long since left the room, complaining of a headache, while Viktor had gone to arrange some food for them. For Dominique, however, solving this puzzle had developed into a personal battle. She knew that Tom and Archie made fun of her for getting like this, often over quite trivial things, but she couldn’t help herself, especially when, 356 james twining

as in this case, it was almost as if they had been set a formal challenge. It aroused her deepest competitive instincts, which were further fueled by her desire not to let the others down.

She had therefore stayed at the desk, her eyes glued to the screen, pausing every so often only to flex her fingers where they had been gripping the mouse. Tom was sitting behind her, eyes closed, and she couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or thinking until he broke the silence with a question.

“Do you think we should call it a day? Maybe we need to take a fresh look in the morning?”

“The morning will be too late,” she replied matter-of-factly, without even looking around. She was getting frustrated at herself and was having difficulty masking it. She sensed Tom was about to say something, but he must have thought better of it because no words came. An awkward silence settled until Dominique looked around with a frown.

“You know, the camera wasn’t empty.”

“Hmm?” Tom’s eyes were shut again in thought.

“Your camera—it had other photos on it when you gave it to Kristenko.”

“Oh yeah,” said Tom. “I guess I forgot to wipe it. Nothing there that shouldn’t have been, was there?”

“Don’t think so, no,” she said, scrolling through the images on the disk. First the shots of the synagogue in Prague, the walls scrawled with hate-filled graffiti, the floor carpeted with children’s drawings, the painting’s empty frame. Then shots of the stained-glass window from the church in Kitzbühel that Lammers had had installed. A castle. A circle of trees. Some birds taking wing through an azure sky. Finally the shots of the Bellak portrait.

Dominique paused, frowning. She scrolled back through to the pictures of the stainedglass window, then picked up the faded black-and-white photo of the same scene that Archie had found in Weissman’s secret room. She looked up at the window, then down at the photo.

“Tom?”

she

called

in

an

uncertain

voice.

the black sun 357

“Mmmm?” he answered, keeping his eyes shut.

“I think I’ve found something.”

“Really?”

“They’re not the same.”

“What’s not the same?” His eyes snapped open.

“The painting and the window. The photos of each one. They’re not the same. Look.”