“Hana Sung. His daughter. She was on the cruise, trailing Larks while you did.”
He heard the unspoken insult of his failure to notice her. “Only on TV does the good guy always know that someone else is watching. There were three thousand people on that boat. That’s a lot of faces to keep track of. And let’s not forget, you’re the one who gave Larks way too much rope.”
“Don’t you think I know that? I get it. You guys are the pros. I’m the rank amateur, who messed it all up.”
He actually needed this woman’s assistance, so he decided to cut her some slack. “That’s one way to look at it. Another is you made a call at the line of scrimmage, as the play was happening. We all do that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. So let’s not sweat it and finish this thing.”
“I got it,” Howell called out.
They stepped to the computer and he gazed at the screen, which displayed an image of a crumpled page with four lines of numbers.
As Malone suspected, the sheet was a cipher. Stephanie had told him every detail she’d learned, and now it was up to him to solve it. He searched his eidetic memory. Tyrannical aristocrat. George Mason. History and Mason begins the quest. A quote from Lord Byron. A strange coincidence, to use a phrase, by which such things are settled nowadays. And Mellon said he would be waiting for Roosevelt. That’s what Stephanie had told him. Random elements, all somehow connected.
“I know what this is,” Isabella said.
He was curious to hear what she had to say.
“It reminds me of the Beale cipher? Ever heard of it?”
He shook his head.
“There’s a story that around 1820, a man named Thomas Beale and twenty-nine other men found a treasure in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. For whatever reason, they reburied it and hid its location behind three pages of numbers, just like this. One of the ciphers has been solved. The other two remain a mystery.”
“And you know this, how?” Luke asked.
“I do have interests outside of work. Codes fascinate me.” She motioned to one of the other computers. “May I?”
Malone nodded. “By all means.”
She sat and typed, working the keyboard and finding an online image of the Beale cipher sheets. And she was right. The pages were similar. Random numbers, one line after the other.
“The second of the three ciphers was solved using the Declaration of Independence,” she said. “It explains all that here. You assign a number to every word in the Declaration, then match that to the code. The first number in the Beale cipher is 115. The 115th word in the Declaration of Independence is instituted. That starts with i. So the first letter of the code is i.”
A classic substitution cipher. Simple and easy, provided you knew which document had been used as the key. Without that knowledge the cipher became next to impossible to solve.
“Looks like you just earned your keep,” Luke said to her. “Pappy, I think she might be on to somethin’.”
He agreed. It seemed possible.
“All we have to do is find out what document Mellon used,” Howell said.
Malone’s mind was already working on that, but first, “You told me that Kim contacted you using an alias. Peter From Europe. Do you still have that email?”
Howell nodded. “I keep everything.”
Kim had to be pleased with himself, managing to obtain the stolen documents then escaping the ferry. Malone had made a mistake allowing that opportunity, but he now saw a way to regain the upper hand.
“Kim still has the original cipher,” Isabella pointed out.
“Which I’m assuming Treasury has no copy of,” he said.
She shook her head.
“Which explains,” Luke said, “why they’re all fired-up anxious to get it back.”
“We can’t allow Kim to keep it,” she said.
“Believe me, it’ll do him no good,” he said. “There’s too much he doesn’t know.”
Luke smiled. “And that will usually hurt you.”
Exactly.
FORTY-FOUR
Hana stood under the shower, her skin alive from the steamy flow. Bathing still remained, for her, a luxury. Every time she turned on a faucet and allowed clean, fresh water to engulf her she thought of the camp. No one bathed there, unless allowed, and only then when it rained or in the cold river. She never knew just how awful her life had been until she was free. Insiders simply knew no better. The camp was their world. There she’d been a short thin child, her hair just a brush of fuzz, her scalp always covered with a filthy white cloth tied at the neck. By the age of six beatings from her mother became a regular occurrence. And always over food. Until the age of seven, each day her mother had gone to work in the fields, leaving her alone. The morsels left for her to eat never made it to midday. As soon as her mother was gone she’d devour not only her portion but her mother’s, too, never considering the fact that her mother may starve. Why would she care? Your own belly was all that mattered. The guards encouraged such conflicts and never objected if prisoners hurt one another. That violence simply saved them the trouble, as they’d all die soon enough anyway.
She wondered if there would come a time when she did not think of the camp. Probably not. Fourteen years had passed, yet the memories had not faded. She thought back to the day after Sun Hi was murdered, when she approached her mother for the last time. By then they barely spoke, her world evolved to nearly total silence.
“Why am I here?” she asked again.