He needed this man to shut up, but the gentleman inside him refused to say so point-blank. Luckily, when he didn’t comment on the career observation, the man returned his attention to the road.
After Luke, Isabella, and Howell had left for the train station, he’d read more about the Beale cipher. The tale spoke of how a treasure was buried in 1820 by a man named Thomas Jefferson Beale. The secret location was somewhere in Bedford County, Virginia. Supposedly Beale entrusted a box containing three encrypted messages to a local innkeeper, then disappeared, never to be seen again. Before dying, the innkeeper gave the three encrypted ciphers to a friend. The friend spent the next twenty years trying to decode the messages, able only to solve one. That friend published all three ciphers and his solution to the one in an 1885 pamphlet. Interestingly, the original messages from the box were ultimately destroyed in a fire, so only the pamphlet remained.
He’d downloaded that pamphlet to his phone and read about the Declaration of Independence as the key for one of the ciphers. How that discovery had been made was never adequately explained. Which led him to believe that, at least with the Beale cipher, perhaps the solution may have come before the cipher. Which was not the case here.
As Isabella had noted, the first number of the Beale cipher, as shown in the pamphlet, was 115. The 115th word of the Declaration of Independence was instituted. So the first letter of that word, i, became the first letter of the decoding. The idea would be to repeat that process with each number, garnering a new letter each time. He agreed with Stephanie’s assessment that Mellon had wanted FDR to solve the code, so he would not have made it overly difficult. And from everything he’d read, the Beale cipher would have been a known commodity in Mellon’s time. Also, something else Stephanie had said made the connection more plausible. She’d learned that Mellon was buried in Upperville, Virginia, at the Trinity Episcopal Church. An interesting fact considering Mellon’s connections were all to Pennsylvania.
What had Mellon told FDR?
“I’ll be waiting for you.”
He’d brought a pen, along with the hard copies of Mellon’s cipher and the Virginia Declaration of Rights. It would take a few minutes, but he had to number every word.
So he started at the top.
It took another twenty minutes before he came to the final word and wrote the number 901 above other. His driver had stayed quiet, seemingly realizing he needed to concentrate.
He studied Mellon’s cipher again.
The first number was 869. He searched for the word that corresponded to that number and found it. Equally. He noticed that other words also began with e. A quick scan showed more than twenty.
He wrote an e on the page.
He was assuming that, like the Beale cipher, the numbers corresponded to the first letters on the key, but it could be the opposite and refer to the last. He knew that some substitution ciphers even utilized a certain position within a word—like the third letter of each—which could really complicate matters.
The next number was 495. Demand. There were multiple words that also began with d, the first appearing in the prologue with declaration.
He added a d beside the e.
The third number, 21, led to which from the prologue. He kept going until, at the sixth match he had a word.
Edward.
The odds of that being wholly coincidental were next to zero. He apparently was on to something.
“Mr. Malone,” the envoy said. “I dare not disturb you, but I must pass on a message that came before we left Zadar.”
They were still cruising on the highway, shrouded in darkness.
“You’re just now mentioning this?” he asked.
“I wanted to earlier, but I could see you were absorbed in your work so I left you alone. After all, we have another half hour before arriving and you weren’t going anywhere.”
This man was more of a diplomat than he’d given him credit for.
“Ms. Stephanie Nelle, your superior, I believe, passed a message through the embassy’s secured channel.”
He waited as the envoy reached inside his suit jacket and removed a folded sheet of paper, which he handed over.
He read the paragraph.
The last sentence caused him the greatest concern.
They took the bait and made a move on Kim in Zadar. It failed. Kim escaped, but killed a man in the process. The Chinese and/or the North Koreans are definitely there.
That gave him pause.
And he hoped Luke and Isabella could handle things.
FIFTY-TWO
Hana stared out into the night through the window. The cold darkness beyond seemed threatening. Night and day in the camp had always been the same, neither offering any respite from suffering. The train churned along on a bumpy ride through the Croatian countryside, nothing but black beyond the glass. She and her father were inside a first-class compartment that accommodated four seats, two on each side facing the other, the door shut but unlocked.
“Why kill the man at the hotel?” she asked him.
They hadn’t said a word since fleeing Zadar.
“It was necessary. We can’t have any interference. Not now.”
She’d been told all of her life that killing was necessary. Either to enforce camp rules, to prevent escapes, or to free a prisoner from generational bondage. Death is liberating. That’s what Teacher had told them every day. If that was true, she hoped Teacher was enjoying his freedom.
Her father seemed wholly comfortable with killing whomever he pleased. Three had died over the last twenty-four hours.
“I learned earlier,” he said, “that our Dear Leader killed my other half brother and all of his family. Your uncle and cousins. He did that to show me that he could.”
She wanted to say, Just like you, but knew better.
“We have to stay vigilant,” he said. “And never can we be weak.”
“What of your other children?”
She wanted to know what he thought.