FORTY-SEVEN MINUTES LATER, JON Mallory was downtown in Foggy Bottom, rapping on Roger Church’s door.
“Come in.” Church turned away from his computer table. “How are you holding up?”
“Feeling numb. What’s happening?”
“Don’t know. Not sure.” Church was still more a reporter than an editor, a man with lots of curiosity and more than a few connections. Jon was sure he knew more about Trent than was being reported on television. “What do you think?” Church asked, reaching for his coffee mug.
“It wasn’t self-inflicted,” Jon said.
“Okay.” Church sipped his coffee, watching him. Returned the mug to the coaster on his desk.
“What time did it happen?” Jon asked.
“Early morning, they’re saying. Maybe 3 or 4 A.M. A capital policeman found him at about 4:45.”
Not long after I found Honi.
“It wasn’t self-inflicted,” he said again.
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“Police I talked with said that nothing about it seems suspicious, though.”
“Meaning—?”
“Gunshot residue on the right hand. Indentation in the web of skin between the thumb and forefinger consistent with the gun’s kick-back. Muzzle and cylinder residue on his shirt and collar. Angle of the shot, location of the gun, all checked out. And, most significantly, no bruises or signs of a struggle anywhere on the body. It all seems pretty consistent with a suicide.”
“Or an expert at making it appear that way.”
He tilted his head to the side: maybe.
“How about the gun itself? Whose is it?”
“Not clear yet,” Church said. “But you can see how this is going to play out: Trent was severely distressed because of all these stories coming out on the Internet. Depressed, maybe. Worried that he was going to be the target of a lot more media scrutiny and attacks in the days and weeks to come. Tied to something that would make him seem like a pariah.”
“He was upset. But not suicidal. If anything, the opposite.”
Jon looked out the window toward the Mall, where he had found Trent sitting on a bench fifteen hours earlier. “What’s happening, Roger?” he finally said. “Is this all because of the story?”
“Don’t know.” Church reached for his coffee. Jon waited, knowing he was about to tell him something. Knowing he saw a larger picture than Jon did. “It’s the middle of the day in Saudi Arabia, Jon. I’ve done a little checking there.” He set the mug back on the desk, keeping his fingers on the handle. “Honi Gandera was reported as a missing person by his wife to Riyadh police six days ago.”
“Who brought him here? What happened?”
Church shook his head. “That’s all I know. The police aren’t releasing any of it to the media. Which is interesting.”
“Why?”
“Someone high up is blocking it. I don’t know.” He made a long exaggerated sighing sound. “Tell me what Tom Trent told you.”
“What he told me?”
“Last night.”
“He told me this story going around about him is a fabrication. An elaborate set-up.”
“Did he think anyone was going to try to kill him?”
“No.”
“If someone was trying to set him up, why would they then kill him?”
“Well, it makes it harder for him to refute anything.”
Church nodded. “That it does.” Jon imagined what was coming, how the stories would unfold. It was ingenious, just as Trent had said. The seeds of the next day’s headlines were already planted. And the day after that, on and on, for weeks. Episodic stories that would lead into one another. He knew how the media worked, how a good story could infect it like a virus. What had Trent said? How much would it cost to buy a news story?
Dominoes: Begin with a controversial, charismatic businessman. Founder of an African-based charity organization. The organization is accused of distributing an experimental, unapproved flu vaccine in Africa that may, in fact, have caused a deadly mutation. Next, it turns out the businessman may have once authored a paper urging the “makeover” of the Third World by means of “humane depopulation.”
Then, just as the revelations begin to surface, Trent commits suicide. Leaving the story to be molded any way people want to shape it.
Jon Mallory understood the caprices of journalism, and he knew how this story was probably going to supplant his. Knew that it was designed that way. It had to be. The story would steal headlines for days, probably weeks. Meaning it would be difficult for the real story to find an audience.
“Okay. Let’s assume it wasn’t self-inflicted,” Church said. “As far as we know, Trent hasn’t defended himself to anyone but you. I would imagine they had hoped to take him out before he talked with you. Which would make you a prime target now, too.”
“Yes.” Jon felt a pang of fear, then a rush of adrenaline. “Except they still expect me to lead them to my brother,” he said. “That’s what I think they want: my brother.” He looked at Church, took a deep breath. “He was married?”
“Pardon?”
“Honi.”
“Yes.”
“Children?”
“I think so. Two boys.”
Jon looked away, felt his eyes tear up. “Dammit!”
“Is this making any sense yet, Jon?”
“Not really. That kind of mutilation—I don’t know. The psychology behind it. It almost seems like something organized crime would do.”
“Yes. Exactly what I’ve been thinking, actually,” Church said, surprising him. “There’s a terrorism group, Jon, called Al Khamsa. ‘The Five.’ Also known as the Hassan Network. At its core is a single family business. Three cousins, two brothers, named Hassan. They’ve grown beyond that into an international network. Sort of a terrorism-for-hire outfit. I’ve talked to people in the intelligence community who have seen their work first-hand.”
The Hassan Network. Yes, Jon Mallory had heard the name, although he didn’t know much about them.
“They supposedly have two signature methods of killing,” Church went on. “One has been called ‘extreme psychological terrorism.’ They have one operative in particular who does this, one of the cousins. He kills in a way that is specifically tailored to leave permanent psychological scars on people close to the victims. He makes sure that they discover, or see, the crime scene.” Church rubbed two fingers on the handle of his coffee cup. “Or the body. It involves mutilation, usually, deliberately left for the victim’s loved ones to find. The idea is to leave behind something so horrific that they can never really get the image out of their heads and resume a normal life. I’ve talked with FBI investigators about it. It’s a powerful technique.”
Jon felt a quick wave of nausea. “That sounds like what happened with me.”
“Yes. It’s been done in some drug-related cases, too. And a few high-end murder-for-hires. Mehmet Hassan is the name of the assassin. He’s known by the nickname Il Macellaio.”
“The Butcher.”
“Yeah.”
“What about the other method?”
“The other signature method is to kill the victim in a way that resembles either suicide, an accident or natural causes. It can involve an auto accident, lying on train tracks, jumping from a building, self-inflicted gunshot.” Jon grimaced. “In some cases, they use poison properties that aren’t generally known, that aren’t easily detected in autopsies.”
“Who would have hired the Hassan Network, though?”
“That’s what we need to figure out.” Church opened his desk drawer, extracted a key, and pushed it toward Jon Mallory. “Listen. I don’t think you’ll want to stay at home for a while. Why don’t you go out to our condo on the Eastern Shore. Spend a night or two there and get your bearings. Clear your head. Then let’s put this story together and run with it.”
JON MALLORY WENT home and hastily packed a travel bag. It was eerie being in the house again, remembering the night before.
He drove out into Maryland farm country thinking about his brother’s puzzle. He came to a gas mart, pulled off, and parked. Listened to the stillness. He opened the first sheet of paper and spread it on the seat. It was well-worn now at the folds. He studied the numbers again, knowing it had to be something simple—something that sophisticated surveillance might miss. Something that he had shared, once, with his brother.
Focus. If the numbers were substitutions for letters, they came out as this: 14672224 = ADFGBBBD. Jon wrote them down, as he had earlier. It didn’t help, although something about the sequence looked familiar.
He started the car and drove again, past cornfields, barns, occasional houses.
Try again, he thought. Stick with those letters. Just consider them in a different way. Think smarter.
Several miles ahead, he pulled over. A small country grocery. “Homemade Preserves,” a sign said. There were two pick-ups and three cars in the lot. Jon Mallory wrote the sequence out one more time: 14672224. Underneath, the corresponding letters: ADFGBBBD. Where had he seen those letters before? Somewhere, long ago. During his childhood, maybe. Codes that only the two of them would know. Let the information come to you.
Then, as he was crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, something else occurred to him. In changing the numbers to letters, he had only considered single digits—one through nine. There was no reason to think that there wouldn’t be corresponding letters beyond the ninth letter in the alphabet. What if some of the numbers were paired? If 1 and 4 meant 14, say—the fourteenth letter of the alphabet: N—instead of A and D.
On the Eastern Shore, he pulled over at a Sunoco station and scribbled out all of the possible configurations involving paired numbers. Most meant nothing. But something about the letters clicked in his memory.
Then all at once he saw it. A combination that he recognized: if the final four numbers were two sets instead of four—22 and 24, instead of 2, 2, 2 and 4—then the sequence was one he knew: ADFGVX.
Yes. A combination that his brother would know that he’d recognize. ADFGVX was a famous war cipher—the code used by the German military during World War I. Jon couldn’t remember all of the specifics, but as a kid he and his brother had used it to exchange secret messages. Charlie telling him in code that he had to go away for a few hours. Never saying where.
Jon needed to find a wireless hot spot or an Internet café. He asked at the gas station. About five miles “that way,” the man said, was a public library. Jon pulled back into traffic and drove quickly down the two-lane roads to a small town called Stevensville. The library was on Main Street, as the man had said, across from the Stevensville Cemetery.
Four computer monitors were lined up against a wall in the back, three of them in use. He logged on the free computer and Googled “ADFGVX”: 34,200 returns. He skimmed through the details of the cipher: It was first used in the spring of 1918, as German troops advanced on Paris, to transmit attack plans to commanders on the front lines. The Allies routinely intercepted German cables but were unable to crack this cipher; for a time, military leaders, on both sides, considered it unbreakable. Then on June 2, a French cryptanalyst managed to decipher an ADFGVX-encoded cable detailing plans for a German offensive in France. The Allies sent troops to the front lines, and the German Army was turned back.
The ingenuity of the ADFGVX cipher, Jon read, was that it mixed substitution and transposition. It was made up of a simple six-by-six grid, randomly filled with 26 letters and 10 numbers, beginning with zero. It was only useful when the receiver knew the sequence of the numbers and letters.
Jon opened the sheet of paper with the letters and numbers and counted again. Yes: 36.
That was the easy part. Draw a grid, fill it with numbers and letters. He’d been given the correct number: 36. There were two possible ways of doing it: lay the numbers in vertically or lay them in horizontally.
Two grids. Then he understood: “V” circled. A directive. V for vertical. It had to be.
The rest of it, though, he wasn’t so sure about. Jon went back to the explanation on the Internet: “In its first, substitution, phase, the ADFGVX cipher could be broken by frequency analysis, so it was further scrambled by transposition, meaning the use of a seven-letter word.”
So he had the cipher, but nothing to use it with. Or was he missing something? Something obvious. The cipher required something else. A coded message to use on it—in a way that was simple but would be detected only by them. Invisible to others. This message was being conveyed in three parts, Jon realized, each useless without the other two.
He thought about Thomas Trent. The way his eyes had scanned the Mall. And the last thing he had said to him. Go back to where you’ve already been. You’ll know what that means. A method they had used before to transfer information.
Jon wondered if he should go back through the e-mails on his laptop, looking for familiar words, numbers, phrases. Or was it something else? It had to be simple, something he’d already figured out. His brother would have made it deliberately easy. Go back where he had already been.
His fingers rested on the keypad. Then it came to him. He tried a Web address he’d used before: Horticult.net.
It took him less than five minutes to find it, in a message board under an entry from D. Gude—their grade-school mathematics instructor. In a long message titled “Rampaging weeds”—what to do when wild violet or Bermuda grass takes root in your lawn, and how, through a “careful strategy of rooting, spacing, and mulching”—D. Gude was able to win “the war over rampaging weeds.” Two-thirds of the way through, he found the combination of numbers he was looking for. “My personal weeding cycles, by days of the month,” it said, then: 1,4,6,6,7,4,6,6,1,4,24,4,7,7,22,22,7,6,24,6,4,6,24,7,24,
1,7,7,1,22,6,6,7,4,22,22,24,4,7,6,24,1,24,1,7,7,
1,4,7,4,7,4,7,22,22,6,1,4, 7,6,22,24,7,7,6,22.
That had to be it.
The largest number was 24, so that would work as days of the month. The numbers all less than the number of days in a month.
But it would also work with letters in the alphabet.
If this was the coded message, it would have to be translated into letters, though. The commas made it easier, so that 22 would be V, not BB. Jon Mallory went through the numbers and jotted the corresponding letters underneath:ADFFGDFFADXDGGVVGFXFDFXGXAGGAVFFGD
VVXDGFXAXAGGADGDGDGVVFADGFVXGGFV
That was only half of the ADFGVX code, though. It also involved a transposition of letters. He called up the explanation of the cipher again on the computer. But it was a little like putting together a complicated toy or piece of furniture. Maybe he was making it too difficult for himself.
His brother would have made it easy.
If he had found the coded message, there was no point in coding it further through transposition. Charlie would have kept it simple, giving him a key and a code, from two different sources. Jon just had to put them together. Let the information come to you.
To decipher the code, then, he went back to the ADFGVX grid. At its simplest, the code used pairs of letters to form corresponding letters or numbers. There were 35 in all in this message.
So where A crossed with D on the grid was the letter R. FF became E. GD was S.
Eleven minutes later, he had it. The message in its entirety read as follows:
“Reservation. 6 Lake St, Villars, SW. Friday.”