Dark Zone db-3 Read online

  “We know that room was opened,” blurted the younger policeman.

  Dean started to shake his head. Karr touched his arm. “We’d better come clean if we’re coming clean,” he said. “We were there. For about two seconds. We heard the message and then we went.”

  Lang nodded.

  “Now it’s our turn,” said Dean. “Who’s the dead man?”

  “Gordon Kensworth.”

  “Is that his real name?”

  “Wouldn’t it be?” asked Lang.

  “Were you watching the room?” asked Dean.

  “We had only enough men to watch one place,” said Lang. “The station seemed more important.”

  “The MI5 agent is Chris Wolten,” said Rockman. “You’ve met him before. He’s on his way upstairs.”

  “Is this an MI5 case or your case?” asked Dean.

  “The murder is our case,” said Lang.

  “When did Kensworth rent the room?”

  Dean had a solid technique, Karr decided — he asked questions he knew the answers to, both so he could validate what Lang said and so he would appear to know a little less than he actually did.

  “He checked in yesterday.”

  “When did he get to London?” Dean asked. “Do you know?”

  The inspector hesitated but then said the day before yesterday. In the morning he’d taken the Eurostar — the high-speed train that crossed beneath the English Channel via the Chunnel.

  “Where was he before that?” asked Dean.

  “We don’t know. We don’t know what his real name is yet. From what the hotel people tell us, he was English.”

  “Ask if he’s in their identity database,” said Rubens over the communications set.

  “Is he in your identity database?” said Dean.

  “No. He’s not a criminal. And we haven’t been told that he’s a terrorist or a spy.”

  “Are you sure he’s not one of yours?” said Dean. “Not an agent for MI5 or whatever?”

  “I don’t believe he’s in Her Majesty’s Service,” said Lang drily.

  “Whose service is he in?” asked Karr.

  “You are the ones who were dealing with him,” replied the detective inspector. “Don’t you know?”

  There was a sharp rap on the door. Chris Wolten entered.

  “My God, it’s not Kjartan Magnor-Karr, is it? The smartest man in the CIA?” said Wolten.

  “I’m not that smart,” said Karr cheerfully. “It’s just my IQ.”

  He appreciated the fact that Wolten assumed he was with the CIA rather than the NSA, and didn’t correct him.

  “He beat a civil servant to a pulp,” said one of the junior policemen.

  “Really, Tommy?”

  “I have a pretty bad temper. Especially when my buddy’s been jumped on by four guys.”

  Wolten turned to Dean. “And you are whom?”

  Dean hesitated — a play for the chief inspector, Karr thought, sharing his disdain for the intelligence dandies. Nice touch.

  “Charlie Dean,” said Karr. “My good buddy. Chris Wolten here is a liaison between, uh, different government interests.”

  “Yes, I am a liaison,” said Wolten. “Chief Inspector?”

  “I suppose you can have them,” said Lang.

  “Have they told you anything?” Wolten asked Lang.

  “Nothing of interest.”

  “Oh, anything they say is of interest, Inspector. Come along, gentlemen.”

  “Chief Inspector,” said Lang.

  * * *

  Rubens realized that the tiny bits of new information Dean had extracted — Gordon Knowlton had come to Britain from France via the Chunnel; someone else had snuck into his room not long before or after Dean and Karr — were like seeds. Some might sprout; some might not. As Karr bantered with the man from MI5 on the way out of the building, Rubens punched his communications line to connect with Johnny Bibleria’s phone and get his team of analysts and researchers to work on the new information.

  Johnny Bib replied in his usually bizarre way, commenting on the number of tubes and length of the Chunnel train tunnel beneath the Channel—3 and 31, respectively. These were prime numbers and to Johnny, who was by training a mathematician, they had significance bordering on the mystic. Calling Johnny Bib an eccentric was like saying that Einstein had written something about the speed of light, but Rubens was willing to put up with Johnny Bib’s nonsense because he was a true genius when it came to providing the obscure insight necessary for truly important intelligence work. The NSA had amassed history’s greatest collection of genius cryptographers and code breakers. It had mustered experts who could look at a pattern of telemetry and know what sort of system they were looking at without actually bothering to “read” the details of the transmission. The agency even had savants who could tease significance from seemingly random changes of electrical current. And then there was Johnny Bib, who could not only do all of that but also suggest where the key that tied it all together would be found.

  Why?

  It would be easier to figure out what Mona Lisa was smiling about. Rubens knew only that the cryptographers and others who worked with Bib worshiped him as a god — a rare honor for a mathematician.

  But dealing with Johnny Bib was never easy.

  “I don’t like it,” Johnny told him.

  “Like what?” asked Rubens.

  “The tunnel is one hundred fifty feet below the seabed,” said Johnny Bib. “Not a friendly number.”

  “Please pass the information along to your team and see if it helps,” Rubens told him.

  “Yes. Have you given any thought to that other matter we were discussing?”

  “Which matter?”

  “Complex Fibonacci function,” said Johnny Bib.

  It was a classic math problem involving a progression of numbers — and a problem that, as far as Rubens knew, could not be solved. Johnny Bib had brought up a conjecture about a possible solution some months ago. To get him out of his office, Rubens had agreed to think about it.

  “I haven’t had time to consider it, unfortunately,” he said.

  “I really think that we’re on the right trail.”

  “Perhaps. Concentrate for now on Eurostar. See if you can work backward from that somehow with this Kensworth. Passenger lists, maybe some connection or something. You know the routine.”

  “All right,” said Johnny Bib, clearly dejected.

  Rubens started to click off, then had an inspiration. “The train schedules probably work like a Fibonacci series.”

  “How so?” asked Johnny Bib, his voice perking up.

  “You don’t see it?”

  Johnny Bib thought for a moment. “Connections in the series?”

  “Precisely,” Rubens told him. “But that’s just the start.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course it is.” Johnny’s mind was already racing; he sounded short of breath.

  Fibonacci had begun his inquiry into number series by wondering how many rabbits could breed in a year; the answer was found in an interesting series where each new number was the sum of the previous two: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. What that had to do with the fact that the dead man had come to England from France Rubens couldn’t imagine, but if that was what Johnny Bib needed to start his inquiry, he was more than willing to go along.

  “Let me know what develops,” said Rubens.

  “Ambassador Clancy is holding for you,” Telach told him.

  “Clancy?”

  “I think he wants to apologize.”

  “Too late,” said Rubens. But he made the connection anyway.

  “I can do that favor for you,” said Clancy. “I have a condition, though. I want to arrange an escort for my daughter. She has to travel to Paris tomorrow. There’s been a fresh alert put out and I’m concerned. As her father. I realize it’s a lot to ask.”

  How convenient, thought Rubens, especially since he was probably going to have to send one of his team to France anyway; now t
hey had the prefect cover.

  Well, not perfect but certainly usable. And perhaps Clancy would be more cooperative in the future if the need arose.

  “Mr. Dean should be available,” said Rubens.

  “Not Dean. The young man. Tommy something or other. He looked like a football player.”

  “Tommy Karr?”

  “Yes. I think that was his name.”

  “It’s too late to help with the police,” Rubens told the ambassador. “But we may be able to arrange for Mr. Karr to escort your daughter. It may take a little time for me to set up, however.”

  “How much time?”

  “It should be in place by morning.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Yes,” said Rubens, killing the connection.

  17

  Denis LaFoote watched from the rented car as the Americans came out of the station, following the government man to a Ford parked up the street. LaFoote did not know for certain that the man belonged to the British intelligence service, but the tags on the car showed it was an official vehicle and that was a very logical guess. LaFoote started his own car and pulled into traffic behind them, following until they got onto M4, a major highway leading out of the city. At that point, LaFoote decided that he could no longer keep up without making it obvious that he was trailing them. He’d taken far too many chances already; his best bet now was to go back home and start from scratch.

  His stand-in’s death had been a terrible shock. He’d feared he was being followed or watched, but he thought he had managed to throw them off. Hiring the man had been prudent, but LaFoote hadn’t thought it would be a matter of life and death.

  How had they found him? What mistake had he made?

  He’d used his friend Vefoures’ credit card to buy the tickets back and forth between Paris and London. That must have led them to him.

  Or perhaps the phone? He had checked the line for a bugging device with his old methods — had they been superseded?

  Of course. In twenty years — of course.

  Still, it was the logical risk, the least amount of exposure. And now it seemed clear to him that it must be Ponclare.

  He tried not to jump to conclusions. Ponclare was, clearly, in the best position to order the murder, but it might not be the intelligence chief.

  It had been several years since LaFoote had been in England, and the seventy-two-year-old belatedly realized that he had gotten lost-he wanted to be on M25, the highway that formed a circle around the city; instead he’d somehow managed to get back onto M4 and misinterpreted a sign for Heathrow Airport as being for Gatwick Airport, which was near his hotel. He pulled off the road to consult a map; as he unfolded the paper a police car pulled off behind him.

  LaFoote tried to see the man in his mirror as he approached. It might be a routine traffic stop, he thought — or perhaps it was another assassin. He had a small pistol in his belt beneath his coat, his old Mab PA-8. There was only a second to decide what to do.

  Instinct told him to leave the gun hidden and roll down the window. He did so.

  “Hello,” said the policeman.

  “Bonjour,” said LaFoote. “How can I help you, sir?”

  The policeman leaned down against the car. He smiled indulgently, then told LaFoote that he couldn’t park at the side of the road, especially in the direction he was facing — LaFoote had gone off on the right side of the road, which was in the opposite direction of the traffic. Or would have been, had there been any traffic.

  “Oh, oui, oui,” said LaFoote. He explained that he was lost.

  The policeman took the map from him and, after turning it around a few times, found where he was and showed him how to get back to the highway. “It’ll be easy from there. Don’t worry, old fella; my granddad gets lost all the time.”

  LaFoote forced a smile to his face as he took the map back. Somehow he managed not to strike the officer as he pulled out, though the seventy-two-year-old Frenchman was sorely tempted.

  18

  A Navy aircraft was waiting for Lia after she finished with the doctor. It was a P-3 Orion, a large four-engined aircraft generally used for long-range spying missions. Thoroughly impressed, Fashona told her it meant Rubens was pulling out all the stops for her.

  Lia shrugged. Beyond tired, she followed Fashona across the apron where he had parked his aircraft and nodded when a Navy chief petty officer came out from the plane and asked if she was Ms. DeFrancesca.

  “We know you’ve been through a helluva time, ma’am,” said the chief. “You’re in Navy hands now. We’ll take care of ya. Flying you direct back to the States. Not a care in the world. Leave the worrying to us.”

  Lia forced herself to smile for him. Though in his thirties, he came off considerably older, ancient even — the wise old man of the sea, she thought. She climbed up the stairway to the aircraft’s rear compartment. The Orion — it was due back in the States for an equipment overhaul — boasted a large array of electronic sensors operated from consoles in the fuselage; the interior looked more like a high-tech computer lab than something that flew around the borders of hazardous airspace. The chief led her to a small lounge, insisted on giving her a blanket, and then went to “grab some grub.” She found his doting father routine a bit much to take — another sign, she realized, that she was coming out of the fog that had descended on her in Korea.

  It was like a fog, wasn’t it? She saw it through a haze. There were bits missing — the end. How had she escaped?

  She couldn’t remember all of the assault. Just being punched.

  Maybe she hadn’t been assaulted.

  I was assaulted.

  Raped.

  That was the word. Better to use it. Better to face it.

  The doctor and nurses hadn’t, actually. They had a kit and they had pills, but they hadn’t actually said “rape,” had they? They hadn’t even said “assaulted,” or “attacked.” As if you could avoid the reality by not naming it precisely.

  “Here now, ma’am,” said the chief, appearing with a tray. A covered bamboo basket sat in the center; it was the sort used as a steamer and held two trays. At the top was a fish dish; below were some small dumplings and fussily cut vegetables. The chief had also found chopsticks — and a bottle of Sapporo beer.

  “Nice airline,” said Lia, trying to joke though her heart wasn’t in it.

  “Like I said, ma’am. Navy’ll take care of you. Not a care in the world for you.”

  “Thank you,” she said. And then she started to cry.

  19

  The British intelligence officer was polite — more than polite, under the circumstances — but Dean sensed the resentment beneath the surface. They were mucking around in his backyard and hadn’t had the decency to tip him off about it. That was the way he saw it.

  Wolten drove them to a large house about twenty miles outside of London that MI5 used as a kind of guest cottage. He used the word cottage, but the building looked about the size of the White House. There was a fire going in the study off the entrance but no sign of whoever had started it.

  “So, chaps. Who was Gordon Kensworth?” asked Wolten, going to a sideboard and pouring himself a drink.

  “Don’t know,” said Karr. “How long have you guys been following him?”

  “We haven’t. Drink, Charles?”

  Dean passed. He leaned back in the leather club chair and felt his eyelids droop.

  “Tommy?”

  “Just a beer,” said Karr.

  “Bitters OK?”

  “If that’s what you’re calling beer these days.”

  “We used to call it beer,” said Wolten. He reached down into the cupboard. “But all the nasty business with the Germans caused a change in vocabulary. Now, how long have you been after this Kensworth chap? He’s not a Russian, is he? Bosnian?”

  Dean drifted off while Karr and Wolten danced. He started dreaming about Lia, wondered where she was, how she was. Then he looked up and saw Karr standing over him.

>   “What?” he said, struggling to open his eyes.

  “Time for bed, dude.” Tommy Karr’s laugh made the old floorboards shake. “Come on. We need to get some sleep. They’ll be hooking us up to the electrodes in the morning.”

  “I heard that,” said the British agent from the other room.

  Two rooms had been prepared for them upstairs. Karr put his finger to his lips as they walked up the steps — then announced very loudly that the whole place was bugged and Dean shouldn’t think of saying anything. Dean wouldn’t have had the energy even if he’d had the inclination. He collapsed face-first on the bed, still fully dressed. Somehow he managed to kick his shoes off before falling into a deep slumber.

  20

  Johnny Bib got up from his desk, took three steps to the side — precisely three — and placed his pencil into the sharpener. Working on a problem without a sharp pencil was a waste of time. He had seen this proven over and over. He had a theory that the type of pencil was also critical — but working out the various permutations would require considerable research, and he didn’t care to spend the energy. It seemed better to just muddle through with a variety of pencils, such as those he had collected in the cup at the front of his desk, marching on through time like the point on a Euclidian line.

  The metaphor wasn’t exactly right, was it? Points did not march. Someone — a mathematician — might imaginatively trod over the points, but they wouldn’t get up and walk by themselves. Not in Euclidean space, at least.

  Johnny considered this as he went back to his desk. The metaphor wasn’t right; the numbers weren’t right; the conclusions were nonexistent. Kensworth did not exist in the time and place called London, and this person named Vefoures was a French pensioner who also didn’t seem to exist, at least not lately.

  Which told him something. But what?

  Johnny Bib had been working on this question since nine or ten in the morning, and it was now past five in the evening. If there was an answer — and surely there must be an answer — he couldn’t see it.

  Perhaps some music would help. Johnny Bib sprang from his chair as the thought occurred to him and went back over to the credenza — three steps — and turned on the stereo. He selected the Thelonious Monk disk and went back to his seat, hoping to be inspired.