Even though Heat had accepted intellectually that it was time to get some
expert help with the code, Rook still had to overcome her emotional reticence.
“Look, you said yourself that Wynn may be trying to cover up something imminent.”
He tapped the copies of the marked-up music they had scanned. “We might be sitting
on the answer to that right here. And the longer you delay, the greater the chance
you’re blowing your shot at stopping whatever conspiracy you believe is heating up.
Now, if you want to be all proud and stubborn and bang your head against the wall
while time slips away, go ahead. But if you seriously want to crack this, I trust my
expert completely.”
Rook’s expert tore open six packets of sugar, dumped them all at once into his
coffee, paddled-stirred the paper cup waving his pipe cleaner arms, and then sipped
with a stage wink across the café table at Nikki. “Mr. Tahoma, I hear your
grandfather was one of the Navajo code breakers back in World War Two,” she said.
“You’re a friend of Rook’s, you call me Puzzle Man, OK? And yeah, my shi’nali
was a Windtalker, damn straight.” He blew across his coffee and set it down. “He
and his unit created codes for the Marines rooted in our Navajo language. Totally
skunked the Japanese. Is it in my blood? Duh. I spent the Cold War in the army
eating schnitzel and cracking signal traffic out of East Berlin, basically getting
medals I can never wear for turning the Soviets into jackasses. The NSA snatched me
up, and next thing, I’m breaking down secret cables about who shot down an airliner
over Korea, which tent Gadhafi sleeps in, and who’s buying ammo for the Chechen
rebels.”
“Is that where you and Rook met, Chechnya?”
“Fuck no,” he said. “Star Trek convention.”
Rook gave her a rueful shrug. She asked Tahoma, “I assume you’re no longer
involved in government work?”
“What gave me away, the shorts and flip-flops?” His high-pitched laugh turned a
few heads, then he leaned in to her speaking in a low voice. “I was invited to
pursue independent interests when a psychological review suggested I might be
borderline.” He cocked an eye and grinned, “Like that’s a drawback in the spook
trade.”
In a weird way, his nuttiness made it easier for Nikki to make the leap. An on-the-
spot, unscientific gut profile told her that Puzzle Man possessed a genius-level
knack that also made him such a social misfit that he survived by operating under
strict personal rules. He was a head case who not only broke codes, he lived by one,
too.
Plus, Rook had nailed it. The longer she sat on this, the more likely she was to
squander the opportunity, either to find Wynn or to head off whatever he was
involved with—or both. Time to give Puzzle Man his shot.
Ten minutes later, at the kitchen table of his cluttered shoe-box apartment above
the Strand Book Store, where he worked part-time, Keith Tahoma swept aside the draft
of the 3-D anacrostic-Sudoku puzzle book he was designing and studied the copies of
Heat’s coded sheet music. She tried to give him the provenance; that the pencil
marks between some of the notes appeared in the songs of Nikki’s old piano exercise
book, and how her mother, whose handwriting this was, had been killed hiding some
unknown secret information from spies. But when she began to speak, Puzzle Man just
snapped a finger at her to stop, keeping his eyes riveted to the pages. After a few
minutes, he looked up at the two of them and said, “Man, I am impressed. And I’ve
seen them all, Vigenère ciphers, Polybius squares, Trimethius tableaux, Alberti
discs, the Cardano grille, Enigma machines, Kryptos… I’ve trained in acrophony,
redundancy, word breaks, Edda symbols. But this. Wow.”
“What does it say?” asked Rook.
“Beats the fuck outta me.” Heat’s chin dropped to her chest. “But dispirit not.
Give me some more time to rassle this gator.”
At the door on the way out, Rook said good-bye, but Puzzle Man didn’t hear. He was
already lost in the code.
Nikki’s first order of business when she arrived at the Two-Oh was to pull in
Malcolm and Reynolds to help Rook and Rhymer set up their RFID track on Tyler Wynn.
She knew Captain Irons would pitch a fit when he got a whiff of the redeployment of
assets from the serial killer investigation, but the electronic consumer tracking
presented the hottest lead in either case, and Detective Heat’s training and
experience dictated the hot lead was the lead you followed until a hotter one came
along.
That happened mid-morning.