The Patriot Threat (35 page)

“It must be exciting to travel about and deal with all this intrigue and danger,” the envoy said.

They were headed out of Zadar on what appeared to be a freshly paved two-laned highway, its smooth surface unblemished, the thick road lines visible in the headlights freshly painted. The time was approaching 8:00
P.M.
, the sun gone to the west.

“It’s not what you think,” he said.

And it wasn’t.

Having your life in jeopardy every second may be a rush for some, but not for him. He liked the task, the mission, the results. Years ago, when he shifted from the navy to the Justice Department he’d wondered if that move was the right one. He quickly discovered that it was. He had a talent for thinking on his feet and getting things done. Not always according to plan or without some collateral damage, but he could deliver results. Now he was back in the saddle. An agent, in charge of an operation, one that could have dire consequences if he screwed up.

“I’ve been stationed all over,” the envoy said. “Germany, Bulgaria, Spain. Now here in Croatia. I love the challenges.”

He needed this man to shut up, but the gentleman inside him refused to say so point-blank. Luckily, when he didn’t comment on the career observation, the man returned his attention to the road.

After Luke, Isabella, and Howell had left for the train station, he’d read more about the Beale cipher. The tale spoke of how a treasure was buried in 1820 by a man named Thomas Jefferson Beale. The secret location was somewhere in Bedford County, Virginia. Supposedly Beale entrusted a box containing three encrypted messages to a local innkeeper, then disappeared, never to be seen again. Before dying, the innkeeper gave the three encrypted ciphers to a friend. The friend spent the next twenty years trying to decode the messages, able only to solve one. That friend published all three ciphers and his solution to the one in an 1885 pamphlet. Interestingly, the original messages from the box were ultimately destroyed in a fire, so only the pamphlet remained.

He’d downloaded that pamphlet to his phone and read about the Declaration of Independence as the key for one of the ciphers. How that discovery had been made was never adequately explained. Which led him to believe that, at least with the Beale cipher, perhaps the solution may have come before the cipher. Which was not the case here.

As Isabella had noted, the first number of the Beale cipher, as shown in the pamphlet, was 115. The 115th word of the Declaration of Independence was
instituted.
So the first letter of that word,
i,
became the first letter of the decoding. The idea would be to repeat that process with each number, garnering a new letter each time. He agreed with Stephanie’s assessment that Mellon had wanted FDR to solve the code, so he would not have made it overly difficult. And from everything he’d read, the Beale cipher would have been a known commodity in Mellon’s time. Also, something else Stephanie had said made the connection more plausible. She’d learned that Mellon was buried in Upperville, Virginia, at the Trinity Episcopal Church. An interesting fact considering Mellon’s connections were all to Pennsylvania.

What had Mellon told FDR?

“I’ll be waiting for you.”

He’d brought a pen, along with the hard copies of Mellon’s cipher and the Virginia Declaration of Rights. It would take a few minutes, but he had to number every word.

So he started at the top.

It took another twenty minutes before he came to the final word and wrote the number 901 above
other
. His driver had stayed quiet, seemingly realizing he needed to concentrate.

He studied Mellon’s cipher again.

The first number was 869. He searched for the word that corresponded to that number and found it.
Equally.
He noticed that other words also began with
e.
A quick scan showed more than twenty.

He wrote an
e
on the page.

He was assuming that, like the Beale cipher, the numbers corresponded to the first letters on the key, but it could be the opposite and refer to the last. He knew that some substitution ciphers even utilized a certain position within a word—like the third letter of each—which could really complicate matters.

The next number was 495.
Demand.
There were multiple words that also began with
d,
the first appearing in the prologue with
declaration.

He added a
d
beside the
e.

The third number, 21, led to
which
from the prologue. He kept going until, at the sixth match he had a word.

Edward.

The odds of that being wholly coincidental were next to zero. He apparently was on to something.

“Mr. Malone,” the envoy said. “I dare not disturb you, but I must pass on a message that came before we left Zadar.”

They were still cruising on the highway, shrouded in darkness.

“You’re just now mentioning this?” he asked.

“I wanted to earlier, but I could see you were absorbed in your work so I left you alone. After all, we have another half hour before arriving and you weren’t going anywhere.”

This man was more of a diplomat than he’d given him credit for.

“Ms. Stephanie Nelle, your superior, I believe, passed a message through the embassy’s secured channel.”

He waited as the envoy reached inside his suit jacket and removed a folded sheet of paper, which he handed over.

He read the paragraph.

The last sentence caused him the greatest concern.

They took the bait and made a move on Kim in Zadar. It failed. Kim escaped, but killed a man in the process. The Chinese and/or the North Koreans are definitely there.

That gave him pause.

And he hoped Luke and Isabella could handle things.

FIFTY-TWO

Hana stared out into the night through the window. The cold darkness beyond seemed threatening. Night and day in the camp had always been the same, neither offering any respite from suffering. The train churned along on a bumpy ride through the Croatian countryside, nothing but black beyond the glass. She and her father were inside a first-class compartment that accommodated four seats, two on each side facing the other, the door shut but unlocked.

“Why kill the man at the hotel?” she asked him.

They hadn’t said a word since fleeing Zadar.

“It was necessary. We can’t have any interference. Not now.”

She’d been told all of her life that killing was
necessary.
Either to enforce camp rules, to prevent escapes, or to free a prisoner from generational bondage.
Death is liberating.
That’s what Teacher had told them every day. If that was true, she hoped Teacher was enjoying his freedom.

Her father seemed wholly comfortable with killing whomever he pleased. Three had died over the last twenty-four hours.

“I learned earlier,” he said, “that our Dear Leader killed my other half brother and all of his family. Your uncle and cousins. He did that to show me that he could.”

She wanted to say,
Just like you,
but knew better.

“We have to stay vigilant,” he said. “And never can we be weak.”

“What of your other children?”

She wanted to know what he thought.

He shrugged. “There is nothing I can do for them, and I doubt they would want me to. None of them stayed loyal, except you.”

Because she’d had no choice. She was barely ten when her father was disgraced, still unaccustomed to the world beyond the fences. So when he chose to leave the country, she’d had no choice but to follow. True, as she grew older she could have left, but she had no desire to return to North Korea. She hated anything and everything associated with that place. Only once had she gone back, on a personal errand her father arranged, there for only a day. It happened ten years after she’d fled the camp. She was nineteen, fully recovered from years of malnutrition, and had wanted to see her mother. Her father secured permission and she’d reentered the camp that day inside a limousine, the superintendent there to personally greet her. Neither of them spoke of the past. She was taken directly to her mother, who was now working in the pottery factory, her days in the fields obviously over.

Her mother appeared weaker than she recalled, still wearing the same filthy sack-like clothes that stank of sweat, slime, and blood. And while her own hair had grown long and thick and her body had blossomed—the gaunt hollowness and pale skin no longer there—her mother had shrunk further. Most of the teeth were gone, the eyes sunk deep from lack of food, a prelude she knew to more serious problems.

“I thought you were dead,” her mother said. “I was told nothing. So I assumed you were gone.” The words were delivered with the flat lack of emotion she so vividly recalled.

“My father came for me.”

A look of surprise appeared on the tired face, which was exactly what she’d come to see.

“And he did not save me?”

“Why would he?”

And she meant it.

She still wanted an answer to the question she’d asked so many times.
Why was I a prisoner?
Her father had told her about the love affair and how his father had disapproved, her mother sent to the camp, no one at the time knowing she was pregnant.

“Because he loved me,” her mother said with a sadness in her voice. “I was a great beauty, full of life and excitement.” Then a coldness returned to her eyes. “I never told you why we were here, because I never wanted you to know of him.”

A curious answer, which compelled her to ask, “Why would you do that?”

“He sent me here.”

“That’s a lie.” The swiftness of her rebuttal surprised her.

“What did he tell you? That
his
father sent me here?” Her mother laughed. “You’re so foolish. You were always foolish.
He
sent me here.
He
wanted me gone. He enjoyed what he wanted from me then, when he tired of me, I was sent here to disappear.”

She’d never believed much of what this woman said. The camp forced prisoners to remain enemies, constantly distrusting one another. But the angry look in the sad eyes that stared back—which for the first time she could recall seemed to convey true pain—said her mother was telling the truth.

“He is a ruthless man. Never forget that. Don’t be fooled. He is as what came before him. You stand here in your fine clothes, your belly full, smug in your freedom. But you are not free. He is Kim. They have no loyalty beyond themselves.”

Her mother spit in her face.

“And you are Kim.”

Those were the last words they ever spoke. Since no semblance of anything resembling love had ever passed between them, she hadn’t given the woman another thought. She learned a year later that her mother was dead, caught trying to escape. How many times had she witnessed such
teachable moments,
as the guards described executions.

She could easily imagine her mother’s fate.

A wooden pole would be pounded into the hard earth. Prisoners would assemble, the only time more than two were allowed to gather. One of the guards would shout at how the ungrateful bitch had been offered redemption through hard work, yet rejected the generosity shown. To prevent any rebuttal, her mother’s mouth would have been stuffed full of pebbles, her head sheathed with a hood. Then she would be tied to the pole, shot, her body heaved into a cart for disposal in one of the mass graves, the occupants’ identities as meaningless in death as in life.

But she’d never forgotten what her mother told her that final day.

He sent me here.

She watched her father as he read more of the documents from the black satchel. Who were those men at the hotel? Why had they come? They had to be from Pyongyang. Who else would care? The Americans? Possibly. She was sure no one had followed them from the hotel and they’d made it onto the train with no incidents. But something told her they were not alone. There was danger here.