Page 115 of The Fourth Option
“Okay, no music.”
She crossed her arms. “You know, you look like a shorter, skinnier Thor with your new haircut, like after he gets cleaned up to be a gladiator in that one movie.”
Walker ran his fingers through his freshly cut hair. “Thanks?” he ventured.
Below them, the washing machine in the garage hummed and churned.
“Looks like we missed that one,” she said, pointing at a piece of flannel shirt in a Ziploc bag.
“That’s something else.”
“As in?”
“I’ll explain later.”
“We need another seat,” Belle said, already halfway out the door. “Be right back.”
Walker moved a wooden spindle chair to the desk, its legs uneven on the warped floorboards. The lamp cast a warm cone of light over the workspace, illuminating Connor Staub’s battered Moleskine journal and Walker’s typewritten pages, smudged Courier font on crisp paper, punched out by his Royal De Luxe on the van’s swivel table.
Belle returned with a folding chair, set it up, and sat forward, inspecting the pages Walker had laid on the desk.
“So,” she said, “you’ve cracked Connor’s cipher?”
“That would be overstating it,” Walker replied. “But I’ve definitely made progress.”
He tapped the edge of the journal, then gestured to his typewritten notes. “Connor used a Vigenère cipher. It’s an old-school polyalphabetic substitution with extra letters thrown in. Looks random unless you know the key word.”
Belle leaned in. “And you figured out the key word?”
“I figured out part of it. He embedded clues in the margins with little marks, almost like typos. Turns out they weren’t. They correspond to phrases his father and I used back in the SEAL Teams. Figured that out thanks to you.”
“What phrases?”
“Old mottos likethe only easy day was yesterday. I tried that as a key, and a few of the entries started to make sense. He’s got others, but I’m still working out the phraseology.”
She raised an eyebrow. “So what did you get from the bit you’ve decrypted?”
“Fragments. Enough to confirm that he thought the cops were dealing Snowball and that a cop named ‘Slate’ and another named ‘Chestnut’ were involved. Slate has the same number of letters as Rayne, and Chestnut has the same number of letters as Hendrick. Rayne and Hendrick are the two dirty cops from the trap house. There are three other code names here. At least two appear to be higher up the chain than Rayne and Hendrick. Five letters, seven letters, and six letters.”
“What’s your IQ? You some Mensa genius or something?”
“I just connect dots.”
Belle’s eyes narrowed. “All these guys cops?”
“Unclear. The cipher’s still holding back the rest. I think Connor layered it by using multiple keys. Maybe even used a book cipher on top of the Vigenère. He was smart.”
“You mean paranoid.”
“Not paranoid enough.”
Belle dropped her head.
“I’m sorry, Belle. That didn’t come out the way I intended.”
“Forget it. So, we have the names of two dead cops who we confirmed were the two Connor had identified as being tied to the drug trade.”
“For now,” Walker said. “But there’s more, and in this case, I think we need an internet connection to figure it out.”
