The Carolina Coup: Another Rwandan Genocide? (The Jeannine Ryan Series Book 4) (16 page)

In Dillon, South Carolina, Jeannine Ryan awoke to the smell of coffee rising up the stairs from the floor below.  She slipped on her jeans and shirt and went down to the kitchen.

Alone at the table, Wayne Johnson arose and poured her a cup.  She took a swallow and looked about the room.

“Where’s Bill?  He’s not on the sofa.”

Before Wayne could answer, Bill Hamm, a perspiring mixture of wrinkled running-pants, sweaty top, and bare arms, burst through the kitchen door.  He slumped into the chair next to Jeannine and took several long breaths.

“That was great.  I made two miles with no problem.  And I could have run another two.”

Jeannine tossed her head and shook the hair off her forehead.

“Very macho.  But what about your antibiotics?”

Bill grinned and pointed to the empty container on the table. 

“I took them before the run.  That was the last of them and I’m done.  I feel fine.”

He jumped up, seized Jeannine by the waist, spun her out of the chair, and kissed her.

“See, I really am fine.”

“OK, OK, you win, but put me down.  The fun and games can wait.  We have work to do.”

She gave Bill a squeeze and turned to wink at Wayne.  The latter laughed for the first time since his arrival in Dillon.

FBI agents Stew Marks and Jack Marino had just ordered their Egg McMuffins at the drive-in window when the blip on their laptop started to move.

“Hugh Byrd is on the road again.  There he goes.”

“Where?”

“Not Florence.  He’s on Route 301, near Dillon, South Carolina.  Maybe he’ll take I-95 to North Carolina.”

Stew reached out the window to grab the bag of McMuffins.  Then he handed the carton with two hot coffees to Jack.

The latter balanced the laptop on one knee, with the container on the other.  He freed the cups from the cardboard, and fixed them firmly in the receptacles by the ashtray.

Stew spoke.

“I don’t think Ryan is in North Carolina.  My bet is she’s hiding in South Carolina.  If Byrd is in Dillon, that must be where she is.”

“Byrd may not know any more than we do.  If he knew where to find Hamm and Ryan, he would have been there yesterday.  I think he has given up and is going back north.”

Jack paused.  The blip on the laptop had changed direction.

“Stew, wait, he’s turning.  Maybe he
is
stopping in Dillon.”

The blip stood motionless.

“Stew, he’s stopped.”

Stew took the last bite of his McMuffin.  Ahead were the city limits of Dillon.  He turned to Jack.

“This is Dillon.  Now we’ll see if Byrd knows something we don’t.”

He turned in the direction of the blip.

Hugh Byrd stopped his car in the parking lot of the Walmart Supercenter in Dillon, South Carolina.  He sat and watched as a steady flow of customers hustled into the entrance.

Hugh was optimistic.  At his direction, the NSA was monitoring calls to Wayne Johnson’s former secretary, Mona Larson, in Maryland.  Yesterday, they had a hit.  Wayne had called her. Triangulation from several towers indicated that the call had come from this Walmart.

So Johnson came here for groceries.  Hamm and Ryan must be nearby. Wayne Johnson would not drive far from their hiding place.

He withdrew a map of Dillon from the glove compartment and spread it on the seat.  He put his thumb on a nearby half-rural area. He would start there.

He reached for the ignition, but paused.
Be careful Hugh, watch yourself.  Hamm is dangerous
. Only last Thursday, seven days ago, Smets had dumped the drugged Hamm into the Intracoastal Waterway, and Ryan had snatched him from the hospital the Saturday after.  After a week Hamm might have recovered.

To hell with it!  Weak or not I can handle him!
  Confident once more, he turned the key.

Hugh drove out of the lot.

Parked down the street from the Walmart in Dillon, Jack Marino studied the blip on his laptop.  He turned to his partner, Stew Marks.

“Byrd’s on the move again.”

Stew looked at the screen.

“I see him.  I’ll hang back.  We don’t want him to spot us.”

In their “safe” house in Dillon, Jeannine Ryan, Bill Hamm and Wayne Johnson sat around the kitchen table.  The briefcase, the cause of many recent troubles, lay open.  Jeannine handed Bill a brown folder.

“What is this folder about?  It’s all encrypted.”

“Those documents I’m not sure about.  They’re from GES, Guerry Electronic Systems.”

He pulled a sheet from the folder.  It had a coded message.

slsyemul,95,g78fsty7y|

mu9s|o16yeg4jh|yjjyet

5kr4tlunjy9tektjho8'

isel'rtgg32fdlumriuyi

o|uynj|zylunktygytywz|

m,xs|ny8fdl4j5|u17f

tv4nxai4nfmc9ef

Jeannine pointed.

“A name is written on the back, ‘
Gahuj.
’  Who is that?”

“That’s
Maximilien Gahuj,
the brother of Charles Hakizimana, a leader of the Rwandan genocide.  Hakizimana is dead.  After the genocide, his son, Maximilien Gutera, lived with his uncle, Maximilien Gahuj, in Paris.  Gahuj trained the boy as a soldier, and now Gutera is the leader of a consortium of Hutu groups who seek to restore Hutu rule in Rwanda.  Gutera is arrogant and violent, any competitors are gone, eliminated.  Apparently Gutera is planning atrocities that will be blamed on the current Rwandan government so that he can seize control.”

“What kind of atrocities?  What do you mean?”

“That’s what I hope these documents will tell us.”

“But they’re encrypted.”

“Jeannine, you have to decrypt them.”

She grimaced.  At least the encryption was not RSA.  She picked up the paper to count letters and symbols.  Frequencies might help, but should she use English or French?

She started counting.

In Dillon, Hugh Byrd had already checked at two service stations.  This was number three.  Hugh handed the man behind the counter a photograph of Bill Hamm.

“Have you seen this man?”

The man laid a torque wrench on the counter and looked at the photo.

“Who are you and why do you want to know?”

“He’s my buddy.  We were in Iraq together.”

“OK, I seen him.  Big guy, a jogger, he ran by here this morning.”

“You know where he’s staying?”

“Nope, never saw him before today.”

“That fits. He was supposed to get here yesterday.  Did you see where he came from?  Or which way he went?”

“Look, I work.  I don’t watch every rich boy who runs by to see where he goes.”

Hugh handed him twenty dollars.  The man called through the door behind him.

“Joe, that big jogger this morning, did you see which way he ran.”

“Yeh Goose, I saw him.  He turned down Azalea Road.”

The man whose nick-name was “Goose,” turned back to an excited Hugh.

“You’re in luck, Mister.  Azalea Road is a dead end.”

Bingo!

Hugh tossed another twenty to “Goose” and smiled.

It was only when he was in his car that a warning flashed like neon through his brain.

Crap!  If Hamm is jogging, he must be recovered!

At their “safe” house in Dillon, Jeannine sat alone at the kitchen table, Wayne had gone for a walk in the pine woods that bordered the rear lot.

Bill came in and fondled the hair on the back of her neck.  He leaned over and kissed her.

“Bill, I know you think you’re all better, but I’m trying to concentrate on this message.  I don’t have a clue what to do next.  The letter frequencies are not helping.”

He reached across the table and put another paper in front of her.

“Try this one.  It’s all numbers.”

Jeannine grabbed the paper and sat down.  Bill went out the door to find Wayne Johnson in the back yard.

She looked at the block of numbers.  There were nine rows, each with 32 digits (or 16 pairs,) making 144 pairs the block.  Counting the pairs starting from the left for each row, none was greater than 39.  All could be remainders that occur after division by 41.

And the Vigenère encryption method was easy to program using remainders!  She stood up and paced.

To represent the alphabet, I’d need at least 26 numbers for the letters and another 10 for the decimal digits.  That would make 36.  Plus I might want a few punctuation marks, so 40 numbers total would be enough.  And a mathematical type might work modulo a prime, like 41 for the sake of elegance.  So the encrypted numbers could range from 0 to 40?

She retrieved the first encrypted sheet and studied the letters.

slsyemul,95,g78fsty7y|

mu9s|o16yeg4jh|yjjyet

5kr4tlunjy9tektjho8'

isel'rtgg32fdlumriuyi

o|uynj|zylunktygytywz|

m,xs|ny8fdl4j5|u17f

tv4nxai4nfmc9ef

She sat and counted the assorted characters.  There were 141 characters, not 144 pairs as in the numerical code, but close
.
The three extra number-pairs could be random, appended to the last line of digits to make a block with all lines the same length.

Maybe these two sheets are code for the same message?

She aligned the initial sixteen characters in the first message with the initial sixteen number-pairs in the second.

They do code the same message!  The numbers 18, 11, and 37 have repeats matched by repeats in “s,” “l,” and “comma.”  And 05 and 06 code to “f” an “g,” respectively, so the letters “a to z” code to the numbers “0 to 25.”  And it looks like the digits “9 to 0” code to “26 to 35.”

She
jumped up. 
Maybe it’s a “Vigenère” encryption scheme that uses a key word.  That method is easy to program on a computer.  But how?

The trick is to count letters in the message from zero instead of one.  Suppose a message comprises 100 letters occupying 100 “positions.”  Number the positions 0 to 99 so that the first letter occupies “position 0” and the tenth occupies “position 9.”

Suppose the key word is “watch” which has 5 letters in positions 0 to 4.  Next suppose that the message’s tenth letter (in position 9) is “s.”  To encode that “s” divide 9 by 5 (the number of letters in the key word.)

That division yields a remainder of “4” (pointing to position “4” in the keyword.)  The key word letter in position “4” is “h” whose code is 07.  Adding 7 to 18 (the code for “s”) gives 25 and division by 41 leaves a remainder of 25, the final encrypted number for the tenth letter, “s.”

(I’ve guessed the number of characters is 41 which includes digits and punctuation as well as letters.  Whatever it is, it’s greater than 25, so the remainder won’t change.)