He let the sentence fade, blew air out of his mouth.
Ricci looked at him.
“Okay, I read you,” he said. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Keep the distractions away. This came at us damn fast. I know everybody’s stressed, but you’ve got to give us a chance. Let us do our work.” He paused, settled. “I’ve got a few hunches to check out. If they amount to anything, you’ll be the first to know about it.”
Ricci nodded. He stood quietly looking into the room
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^a moment. Carmichael had connected Palardy’s CPU to a large, wide, flat panel display mounted on the wall above his desk, and clocks were winging across it. With the screen saver’s teal blue background, the effect was more than a little surreal, as if they were flocking in the air outside a window.
“There they go again,” he said. “Up and away.”
Carmichael at first looked as if he hadn’t understood , Ricci’s meaning, then he realized where his eyes had gone and swiveled halfway around in his chair.
“I have to get rid of that,” he said, glancing at the panel. “Pops into my face every five minutes.
Ricci remembered the antique dugout clock in Palardy’s bedroom, then the eerily musical call of the cuckoo in the death-house silence of his living room.
“A thing for clocks,” he snorted.
Carmichael turned to him.
“What did you say?”
Ricci noted the cryptographer’s sudden look of interest.
“Clocks,” he said. He heard himself take a breath. “Palardy had some kind of goddamned thing for clocks.”
At her desk, Megan Breen had been thinking constantly about the boss, and she told everyone that her eyes were red because of allergies. Some visitors to her office even fell for it.
She heard her private line buzz now and picked up, tossing a crumpled Kleenex into the trash.
The caller was Ashley Gordian.
“Ashley, hello. How is-?”
She stopped. Waited for Ashley to say something at the other end of the line. How to balance the need to
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Tom Clancy’s Power Plays
tackle reality against her fear of what it might be?
“Cord’s condition hasn’t changed in the past couple of hours,” Ashley said. Megan almost sighed with relief; at least he wasn’t worse. It was strange how the definition of good news became relative once the ground started to slide. “He did open his eyes for a little while around lunchtime. The nurse couldn’t be sure how alert he was, and I wasn’t in the room. I can’t… they won’t let me stay with him. But I’ve already told you that, haven’t I?”
“I think so, yes,” Megan said. In fact, Ashley had told her, and more than once. She sounded lost. “Are you at the hospital right now? There’s nothing pressing at the office, and it would do me some good to get away. We could have coffee-”
“That’s why I was calling,” Ashley said. “I think you should come down here. And that you’d better bring along Pete or one of the others. I’ve heard from Eric Oh, the epidemiologist. There’s been some word about Cord’s illness, and I don’t know exactly what to make of it. Except that it’s important.” She paused. “I’m sorry I’m being disjointed …”
“Don’t worry about that, Ashley. My guidebook’s open in front of me, and it says it’s allowed under the circumstances.”
Megan heard Ashley move the receiver from her mouth and clear her throat.
“Thank you,” she said after a moment.
“Thank the writer.”
Another brief silence. When Ashley spoke again, her voice was a bit steadier. “Eric’s heading over to meet me,” she said. “And Elliot Lieberman, Cord’s regular doctor. Eli has an office at the hospital…”
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i “Yes.”
“Someone from Richard Sobel’s genetics lab is also coming. The tests are still inconclusive, and I’m sure they wouldn’t be willing to disclose anything if they didn’t trust us to be discreet. Not yet. Not until they had more proof. People would jump all over them. Attack their reputations, lump them with flying saucer theorists -”
“Ashley … what is it they’ve found?”
Ashley took an audible breath. The words weren’t coming to her lips easily. “They think that the virus was manufactured,” she said at last. “That someone may have specifically designed it to kill… to murder… Roger.”
Megan held the phone a moment, stunned. “I’ll be right over,” she said.
Ten minutes after ousting Ricci from his office, Carmichael sat at his desk with the door locked behind him, his telephone unplugged, and his intercom and corporate cellular turned off. Before severing these contacts with the outside world, he had instructed the group of analysts working on Palardy’s secret communication to call him on his personal cell phone if they shook anything loose.
He needed to be alone. To think. And puzzle out what appeared to be a simple-even primitive-cryptogram that he was sure Palardy must have known would be decipherable to UpLink’s specialists, experienced pros who were used to making and breaking messages generated with the most sophisticated methods of algorithmic encryption.
There was something about the bigrams and polygrams … something that kept tickling Carmichael’s
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Tom Clancy’s Power Plays
mind right below the uppermost level of consciousness, trying to burrow up to the surface like an insect through a thin layer of soil. It had been about to emerge before the flurry of interruptions from Ricci and company startled it away. Now, absent distractions, he hoped to coax it back out of its hidey-hole.
To help him focus, Carmichael had added a clipart icon from his word processor to the string of ciphertext transmitted by Palardy, and the image on his wall panel looked like this:
RHJAJAOOBHJMOOWHRH’JMOOWHBHJAOO
TJAJOO?!CAJBJTRH GWRHMVGCRHUGBHAJOORHJBAJOO.RHBH
CAJBJTRHGCBHGWJAOOTJrCARHJAOO
CATJJAOOUG?!BHJBJAMVGCRHJAOORHJB
JAOORHGW!!RHJA””ALRHMFTJJAUGRHBH
:MVGCRHJAOOTJJGWH!AJOOJPGCTJTJJA
OOUGRH!?JAOORHUGBHMVBHJARHJTRH
JAOOGWRHJBJAMVJGTJJAOO””MVGC
BHAJMV,TJGCJBJMJMRHJAJGTJJAOO!
CAIBHJTRHGWRH.
He sat at his computer console and stared at the cryptogram. It reminded him a lot of the type that might have been incorporated in an old-fashioned potboiler, circa the 1890s, meant to amuse and challenge the astute reader with a basic knowledge of encipherment techniques. And he had a feeling Palardy had wanted it that way. Wanted it to be just difficult enough to buy him time to retract it
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‘W
ml
p-unbroken, should that become advantageous, and simul- fctaneously rattle whoever might steal his laptop in the pi event he was harmed beyond retracting it.
Carmichael stared at his monitor. It almost was as if he’d stepped into a Holmes novel. Or one of Poe’s prototypical mystery stories. And the damnedest thing, the thing he would never have admitted to anyone outside 1 his crypto section, was that getting to the clear might H have actually entertained him were the stakes not so ter- i ribly high.
“Give it to me, Palardy,” he muttered into the silent ‘room. “Give me something.”
A thoughtful expression on his face, hands poised ||over his keyboard, Carmichael decided to remove the [punctuation marks from the character string. They had al| most jumped out at him as nulls on first impression, and that feeling had only grown stronger as he studied it.
He typed, repeatedly tapping the delete key. The im- H age in front of him was now:
RHJAJAOOBHJMOOWHRHJMOOWHBHJAOO
TJAJOOCAJBJTRH GWRHMVGCRHUGBHAJOORHJBAJOORHBH
CAJBJTRHGCBHGWJAOOTJCARHJAOO CATJJAOOUGBHJBJAMVGCRHJAOORHJBJA
OORHGWRHJAALRHMFTJJAUGRHBH
MVGCRHJAOOTJJGWHAJOOJPGCTJTJJAOO
UGRHJAOORHUGBHMVBHJARHJTRH
JAOOGWRHJBJAMVJGTJJAOOMVGCBH
AJMVTJGCJBJMJMRHJAJGTJJAOO
CABHJTRHGWRH
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Tom Clancy’s Power Plays
Carmichael stared at the monitor. Trying to stay mentally loose and limber, slip into what athletes liked to call “the zone,” a space where you didn’t second-guess yourself, where you let yourself be guided by the automatic cognitive and sensory processes that equaled instinct.
“Come on. Give it up.”
He typed again. Letting his thumb give the space bar some action. Splitting up the obvious letter groups to leave him with:
RH JA JAOO BH JMOO WH RH JMOO WH BH
JAOOTJ
AJOO CA JB JT RH
GW RH MY GC RH UG BH AJOO RH JB AJOO RH BH CA JB JT RH GC BH GW JAOO TJ CA
RH JAOO
CA TJ JAOO UG BH JB JA MY GC RH JAOO RH JB JAOO RH GW RH JA AL RH MF TJ JA UG
RHBH
MY GC RH JAOO TJ JG WH AJOO JP GC TJ TJ JAOO UG RH JAOO RH UG BH MY BH JA RH JT
RH
JAOO GW RH JB JA MY JG TJ JAOO MY GC BH AJ MY TJ GC JB JM JM RH JA JG TJ JAOO CA
BH JT RH GW RH
Carmichael stared at the monitor. All right, he thought. Getting somewhere. And here it came again,
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that tickle of a thought in his brain soil. Some of those Indiscrete letter pairs … What was it about them that seemed to bait it out?
Carmichael did a quick cut and paste to put the combinations that kept drawing his eye onto a separate screen:
GW JA TJ JM AJ
He stared at them.
“Come on, come on, let’s see you. Come on ou-“