Chapter 13
The key was still in the rubber plant. The cold coffee was still on the stove. Everything was as I’d left it. Except for the flashing of emergency lights from the center of the city, the evening beyond the windows of Vivian’s apartment looked peaceful. I struggled out of my bomber and dropped my body heavily onto the futon. I turned on the TV only to be bombarded by news of the continuing riot. I turned off the TV and wondered if there was any food in Vivian’s fridge.
There was. Bread and hummus and cold cuts. I made a sandwich and dug an errant beer out of the crisper. Returning to the living room, I sat back down on the couch and listened to the silence. It would be chaos, down in the streets of Seattle, but up here on the hill, all was quiet. I took my Rhino off my belt, and with a shaking hand put it on the coffee table before me. I dug into my sandwich.
Three C’s...It was so insane that there couldn’t be any truth to it. But such a crazy, paranoid, conspiracy theory brought so many elements of the Montavez case into focus. And it was the only half-sensible explanation for everything that was going on downtown.
The old woman in the bookstore had mention there’d been a schism in the Rosicrucian’s ranks, into an iconoclastic faction and an orthodox wing who’d stayed loyal to the teachings of A.E. Dark. Then they’d all vanished, according to O’Day, consumed by the Geneing epidemic.
An epidemic somehow connected to Dark, though as of yet, I had no idea exactly how.
Q, Q...it all came down to Q. Constantine had said the Vivian was in Seattle looking for Q. Both the book and the man. But finding the book, or rather decrypting the book that was hiding in plain sight, was finding the man. The text of Q must contain some clue to the identity of the man, Q. But what could a book, written ninety years ago, tell about a man living today? Unless he was very, very old. Ancient in fact.
No, that was dead end.
But the three C’s...that was no coincidence. I didn’t believe in coincidences. Not anymore. A catchy turn of phrase. Competence, Community, Comparison. Corpus...what was the rest of it? I’d already forgotten. I should have written it down.
Corpus means body, I knew enough Latin to know that. So, it wasn’t a direct translation. But the repetition of three C’s and Constantine’s reaction to the basement of the flop. And him insisting on keeping the book.
It all fed into my crazy theory.
Okay, the Genies in that house, the one’s who’d left the e-reader in Montavez’s apartment then torched O’Day’s lab to get it back, were certainly the Rosicrucian’s O’Day spoke of. The ones who’d take the Geneing very early in the epidemic. They must be the orthodox wing. They’d taken Vivian’s original copy of Q and literally worshiped it. On the off-chance that O’Day was attempting to decode the novel, they’d burned his computers. Any attempt to actually read Dark’s Last Novel was sacrilege to them.
But what if they were only half the story? Only one faction had become Genie’s en-masse. What if the iconoclastic wing had remained sane? What if the iconoclastic wing had gone legit...
Vivian Montavez was the daughter of a high-ranking NeoCon politician. There was no evidence of bad blood in the family. But here she was, on the other side of the country, on a quest. A quest her father, at least financially, approved of...
Q? Book or man? Did it matter? The iconoclastic Rosicrucians weren’t interested in burning copies of Dark’s novel but tearing them apart to attempt to decode them? Pre-computers, how else would you have done it? That’d have been a profanity to the orthodox wing. They’d have inevitability come to blows. The book was sacred, after all. Soon, just attempting to decode the novel would have become a blasphemy.
And Vivian was certainly attempting to decode Q. Had she succeeded? Was that why she was dead? Was she somehow connected to the iconoclastic faction of the Rosicrucians? Was her father, the senator, connected to those Rosicrucians?
Was the whole NeoCon Party connected to these Rosicrucians?
Fuck me.
Three C’s...not a direct translation from the Latin, but certainly a repetition of theme. A respectful reinterpretation of first principles?
No, it was too crazy to even conceive.
The whole United States of America in the grasp of an apocalyptic cult? President Cassidy? The whole NeoCon movement? The Hot Kids, the youth of America?
Now my imagination was just running away from me.
It was bullshit. Nothing I could ever prove in a million lifetimes. All I had was three letters scribbled on a wall, and that, I very much suspected, would quickly vanish once Constantine’s investigators arrived.
But ideas like that had an uncomfortable habit of sticking in the craw. It was the first, vaguely rational explanation for the Fed’s Wardship of Seattle and their total overreaction to the Montavez case. If the girl had found evidence that Q, the man, was in Seattle...and the Geneing Rosicrucians had gotten to her before she’d told anyone...
I reached for my bomber and took the e-reader from my pocket.
She’d decoded it somehow. She must have. Dark’s Last Novel. Q. She’d bought the original copy...why? To trade it with the Rosicrucians? For what?...for something that had let her decode the novel. But they’d figured out what she was attempting to do and stuffed her in that dumpster. But she’d decoded the novel first, and the copy on the e-reader was the only one she’d had.
She’d decoded it on this. Somehow.
I stared at the e-reader. If O’Day couldn’t decode it, what did I think I could do? But, had O’Day even tried? He’d just recognized the file and thought it was all a joke.
Still, I knew nothing about cryptography, and I had no access to computing resources. Even O’Day’s equipment was probably still off-line. The Rosicrucians had done their job well. I had nothing. Just the e-reader and some crazy idea that our government was firmly in the hands of a satanic cult.
But none of that would matter if I knew the decrypt key. Everything O’Day had been talking about, all ninety years of cryptanalysis, had been attempts to brute force the encryption. They’d tried every known key hoping to stumble on the right one. But Vivian Montavez had found the key itself. Or deduced it from the evidence she’d collected. You didn’t need computers, or a specialized understanding of cryptography if you had the key. You just punched in it and bam! Like an ATM. Any douche, even me, could do that.
I had to get back into Vivian’s head, figure out what she’d figured out about Dark. She’d done my trick, gotten inside Dark’s head. Dark was just another dead body, after all, dead for ninety years. Not murdered perhaps, but it didn’t matter. For Vivian, Dark was also in the enviable position that he couldn’t interfere with her investigation.
I tapped at the e-reader until I got to the decrypt menu. The ebook version of Dark’s Last Novel shipped with a decode routine. The whole enticement to buy the book was that, maybe, you’d be the one to figure out how to decrypt it. If the eggheads had done their work right and correctly identified the custom cipher Dark had used, then all a reader needed to do was type in the correct code.
It was easy as that.
Vivian had done it. She’d found Q. But what did the daughter of a powerful, NeoCon/Rosicrucian senator know that the entirety of the Internet had missed?
What had she traded that blessed copy of Dark’s Q to the Genie Rosicrucian’s for? If I knew that, I’d already have the book decrypted. I looked around the room; it couldn’t be something physical. Nothing in the apartment looked out-of-place. Except...
I held up the e-reader and looked it over. This? I’d instantly pegged this as the only odd item in the room the first moment I’d stepped into Montavez’s apartment. It had never jived with the rest of the décor.
This? I turned the e-reader over in my hands. She’d traded the Genies a twelve-hundred buck copy of Dark’s Last Novel for a five buck e-reader? It made no sense. Unless it had data on it that she’d erased...no, she hadn’t expected to get killed. She’d no time to erase anything.
She hadn’t been trying to hide her tracks.
No, she hadn’t traded the book for the e-reader.
She’d traded for something else. Something ephemeral. The key to decode Q? But that was a blasphemy to the Rosicrucians – at least the Genie kind. They’d never give up that information, even if they’d had it. Which they didn’t, because if they did, the iconoclastic Rosicrucians would have stolen the knowledge long ago and decoded the book and none of this was have ever happened...
Ack! I was thinking in circles. I was screwing myself into the ground. I took a wild stab at the decrypt key: Corpus, I typed. The e-reader’s little speaker beeped a long, sad whammy. I tried Dark then Galronts. Two more whammies.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a dictionary work, or anything connected to Galronts. Otherwise the brute force attacks, or the million Internet geeks guessing at a million consoles would have hit on it. I tapped the paperweight e-reader on my knuckles and tried to think. What did Vivian know that a hundred thousand cryptographers didn’t?
Geneing. The answer ambushed me out of nowhere. Vivian Montavez had made some unique discovery linking Geneing and A.E. Dark. Following her trail, I’d done the same. Q, used to denote the progenitor of the Geneing epidemic, the most hated man in America, was somehow linked to Q, Dark’s Last Novel.
I’d initially thought that Vivian was attempting to decode Q in order to find Q the man, but there was a serious possibility that the opposite was true. What if she’d been seeking out Q, the man, to decode Q, the novel? What if there was something about Q’s genetic drug/virus that served as a key to Dark’s unbreakable encryption?
I leapt to my feet and reached for my bomber. The autopsy report for Vivian was folded up in my inside pocket. She’d died a Genie, the testing indicated, but she’d obviously not lived like one. The apartment I was sitting in was solid evidence. So, she must have taken the Geneing dope just before her death? Why? Why throw her life away like that? If she hadn’t been murdered, the Geneing would have quickly killed her. Unless...
I flipped through the pages, to the genetic report on Montavez’s DNA. Normally, I only ever glanced at the last line, the one that said, positive or negative. But now I looked over the scientific gobbledygook before it. The talk of genetic markers and redundant strands.
What if there was not just a simple correlation between Geneing and Dark’s Last Novel, what if Geneing was the key to Dark’s Last Novel?
Literally.
Hidden somewhere in the genetic code that the virus modified...the stream of G’s, A’s, C’s and T’s that designated Geneings marker...it certainly looked like a block in encrypted text...
But it was impossible! Did they even know about DNA in 1964? They certainly didn’t have gene therapy. And the first known case of Geneing would have been sixty years in the future. But nevertheless. What had Dark said? When the technology existed to decode the book, humanity would be ready to read what was in it? Maybe he hadn’t meant computing power to brute forcing the encryption, but the decoding of the human genome to the point where we could decode a redundant genetic strand.
It was impossible! Insane. As insane as the idea that our government was controlled by a cabal of Rosicrucian cultists. But like that idea, once this one got into my head, I couldn’t get it out. I began to key in the genetic marker into the e-reader, but it was far too long.
I needed a computer.
I stormed out of the apartment and down to where I’d parked the Accord, on a side street, before the riots had begun. It was safer up there on Queen Anne, away from the rampant property destruction. And my whole life was in the trunk. I dug around, found my old iBook and sprinted back up the stairs, back into Vivian’s apartment.
Fumbling with the power cord, I booted the laptop and reached for my phone in my bomber. As the desktop loaded on the computer, I dialed O’Day’s number.
“What?” he answered the phone. Sometimes I think my life would be a lot smoother without caller ID.
“Hey Day, how’s the lab?” I asked. I logged onto the SPD VPN and brought up the digital copy of Vivian’s autopsy report. That I could cut and paste.
“How do you fucking think? They poured gasoline on my servers and set them alight! Fuck you, Sasha, for getting me involved in whatever you’re investigating...”
I highlighted the string of characters that was the genetic marker for Geneing and pasted it into an email.
“I’m calling to get you even deeper involved, O’Day.” I hit send on the email. “I’m sending you a text string I want decoded.
“Oh no!” O’Day protested. “Not a fucking chance!”
“Even if it decrypts Dark’s Last Novel?” I teased.
O’Day was silent.
He was silent so long I figured he’d hung up. “Hello?” I asked the line.
“I’m still here,” O’Day’s voice came back. Flat and unemotional.
“Just look at the email and tell me if it’s something that can be decoded.”
More silence. I let O’Day work.
“That looks like a DNA string,” O’Day came back. “That’s not a code.”
“No, but—”
“There just isn’t enough variation in the text for a strong cipher. G, A, T, C. You can’t hide a message in that string.”
“How can that be?” I asked. “Don’t computers only use two characters? Zero and one? Isn’t the whole of human knowledge encoded into two characters? Here you have four.”
“Hmm, well...” O’Day replied.
I’d done it, I’d stumped O’Day. He hated that. He was the kind of guy who had to have an answer for everything. There’d be no stopping him now until he could tell me exactly why I was full of shit. “I once attended a symposium, and one of the speakers postulated that since the nucleotides of DNA only form two unique bonds – Guanine with Cytosine and Adenine with Thymine, never Guanine with Adenine or Thymine, and never Adenine or Thymine with Cytosine – then DNA was, for all purposes binary.”
“Come again?” I said. He’d lost me at Guanine.
“That it’s not G-A-T-C but G and A, and T and C. If we designate the G-A pair as one and the T-C as zero then we get...” O’Day went silent.
“What do we get?” I finally asked. Was he working on something? Had a Rosicrucian come along and cracked him across the back of the head? “O’Day? Are you still there?”
“I’m still here,” he muttered. “Let me pass the result through a Feistel key schedule...fuck!” O’Day was so surprised that he dropped his phone. I could hear it clatter to the floor.
“O’Day? O’Day?” I screamed into my phone. I climbed to my feet and ran a frustrated hand through my hair. Come on O’Day, pick the fucking phone back up... “Day? What did it decode to? Day? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah,” O’Day voice came back, distant and echoing. His voice returned to full-throated normalcy as he returned his phone to his ear. “It just took me by surprise, that’s all.”
“What did?” Tell me you idiot! “What did the code decode to say?”
“I...I don’t really know,” O’Day said solemnly.
“What is it?”
“Cain-300”
“Cain-300” I asked, confused. “Cain? As in the bible, Cain? As in Cain and Abel? As in Mark of Cain?” Then a cold shiver hit me, right down the middle of my spine.
“C-A-I-N, as in son of Adam and Eve,” O’Day confirmed. “Dash, three-hundred.”
“That’s crazy, but...” I reached for the e-reader.
“Where’d you get that DNA string from, anyway?” O’Day asked.
“You’d call me crazy if I told you,” I answered. I typed out C-A-I-N-3-0-0 into the e-reader’s decode window and received an audible whammy in return.
“What was that noise?”
“That e-reader you had. I was trying the text on Dark’s novel.”
“No,” O’Day said with irritation. “You’re not thinking like A.E. Dark. This is a guy who encrypted the title of h
is book – the title. Think about that? The decrypt key to the book isn’t going to be plain text. It, itself, will invariably be encoded...”
“What? Are you speaking English?”
“If we take the un-decoded text from the DNA string, it fits perfectly as a fifty-six bit key for a DES cipher...”
“Yes?” I prodded, impatiently. “Yes?”
“...pad it out to sixty-four bits and invert it. Then when we XOR the result...”
“What?” I screamed at my phone.
“Oh fuck,” O’Day exclaimed. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!”
“What?!”
“I’m getting text!” O’Day laughed. “I’m fucking getting English text!”
“Don’t fuck with me, O’Day. Because I couldn’t take it.”
“No, no!” O’Day screamed. “Here, I’ll send the key to your e-reader. It should start to see what I’m seeing.”
I looked at the e-reader in my hand. The decode dialog filled with string of text, then closed itself. There was an interminable pause as an hourglass appeared on the screen. Please God, I said to myself, no whammies, no whammies, no whammies.
Then it started to decode.
Right there before my eyes, Dark’s Last Novel started to spit out page after page of clear text. I’d done it! O’Day had done it! The novel was decoding! I couldn’t believe my eyes.
“Motherfucker,” I said. There was little else to say.
“Yeah, totally,” O’Day agreed, then repeated solemnly. “Motherfucker.”
I read the title page of the book, perhaps the first eyes to do so in over ninety years. The real title of Dark’s Last Novel came as no surprise. Perhaps I’d already guessed it in the back of my mind. But there it was in black and white before me: The Source. Of course. What other title could the book have ever had?
“Well, thanks for your help O’Day,” I said. But thanks didn’t really didn’t cover it.
“Are you going to tell me where you got that DNA string?” O’Day asked, still chuckling to himself.
“Maybe someday,” I answered. “Over a beer. But for right now...”
“I know, I know. Police business.”
“Right. Well...talk to you later, alright?” I said, eager to dive into Dark’s book. “I’ve got some reading to do.”
“Yeah, me too,” O’Day agreed. Then, almost as an after through, asked, “You want any credit in this? I mean, decoding Dark’s Last Novel...”
“Hell no!” I answered quickly. “I don’t know anything about jack shit, okay?”
“Right. Right.”
“You enjoy yourself,” I said. “But watch out for crazed Rosicrucians. They’re going to be pissed.”
O’Day laughed. “I will.”