Polar Shift (NUMA Files 6)

"I'm buying you a ticket to Bletchley Park," Barrett said, referring to the British code-breaking headquarters during World War II.

"Using the alphabets to write the word message, you'd still get gibberish." Karla stared at the word with disappointment in her eyes.

"Your grandfather didn't want to make it too easy. I came up with the same result. Then I went back to the key word. D and R are four spaces apart in the word door. I wrote down every fourth word in the main verse, but my gut feeling told me that it was too much. So I tried every fourth letter. Still nothing I could sink my teeth in. Then I thought, D and R are fifteen letters apart in the alphabet. I used that formula in the poem and picked out every fifteenth word. Then I used the plain and cipher alphabets to attempt the cryptanalysis. Are you still with me?"

"No," Austin said.

"Yeah, that's what happened to me too," Barrett said with a grin. "So I cheated. I ran the whole bloody mess through a computer." He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a computer printout. "This is what I got."

"A mishmash of vowels and consonants, but no words," Karla said.

"I tried everything. I called up an MIT professor who spoke Hungarian and ran it by him. No go. Then I remembered Kovacs spoke Romanian, and called up a guy who runs the Transylvania Restaurant back in Seattle. He couldn't make heads nor tails of it. I would have torn my hair out, if I had any. I went back to the words that I had discarded, particularly turvy-topsy. I thought maybe it applied to what I was doing."

"How could you turn the message upside down?" Karla said with skepticism.

"I couldn't. But I could interpret the words loosely, and run it backward, like the second line of the poem. Which is what I did.

Still didn't make sense. Then I had an epiphany. As I rode around on my bike, I realized that it wasn't supposed to be words. It was exactly what it was, a string of letters, more or less. Once I jumped that hurdle, I figured that there were numbers in the message as well. Back to the computer. Certain letters were indicators that meant the next letter was actually a number. A preceded by another letter equals 1, B equals 2 and so on."

"You've lost me again," Austin said. From the puzzled look on Karla's face, she was wandering around in cipher land as well.

Barrett set the computer page aside and picked up the napkin in both hands. "This is an equation."

"An equation for what?" Austin said.

"By itself, the message doesn't make sense, but we've got to look at it in context. Kovacs intended that the message would be seen by only one person: Karla. He said she would always have the poem when you needed it."

"Are you saying what I think you're saying?" Austin said.

"I just figured this out a few minutes ago, so I can't be sure until I put it to the test," Barrett said. "But Kovacs could have given us a set of electromagnetic frequencies."

"The antidote," Karla whispered.

Austin gingerly picked up the napkin as if it would fall apart. "This is the frequency that can neutralize a polar shift?"

Barrett's Adam's apple bobbed a couple of times "Hell, I hope so," he said.

Karla leaned over and kissed Barrett on the top of his bald head. "You've done it."

Barrett looked downhearted for someone who had saved the world. "Maybe. I'm afraid we don't have much time."

"What do you mean?" Austin said.

"After our meeting, I listened to the phone conversations transmitted by the electronic bug you planted on Gant's estate. He and Margrave talked. They've left the country by now."

"Damn," Austin said. "Where did they go?"

"I don't know. Margrave never got around to telling me the plans for the final phase. But it's not where I'm worried about, but what. I think they're about to put their plans for a polar reversal into effect."

"Any estimate on how long we have?"

"Hard to tell," Barrett said. "The target location is in the South Atlantic. I wasn't in on the final discussions, so I don't know the exact spot. Once they're on-site, it's only a matter of hours before they pull the switch."

Austin handed the napkin back to Barrett. "Can this equation be translated into something we can use to actually neutralize the reversal?"

"Sure. The same way E = mc2 was translated into the Bomb and nuclear power. All you need are the resources and the time."

"You'll get all the resources you need. How long will you need to build something that will do the job?"