The Jefferson Key (Cotton Malone 7)

“Jackson tore those pages out and hid them away,” she said, “concealed behind Jefferson’s cipher. It has done its job well, protecting that hiding place-” She paused. “Until a few hours ago.”

He spotted his hotel down Broadway.

“We hired an expert a few months ago,” she said. “A particularly smart individual who thought he could solve it. The Commonwealth has tried, but none of their hired guns were successful. Our man is in southern Maryland. He’s privy to some computer programs we use for Middle East decoding that apparently worked. I need you to go see him and retrieve the solution.”

“It can’t be emailed or couriered?”

She shook her head. “Too many security risks associated with that. Besides, there’s a complication.”

He caught the implications. “Others know about this?”

“Unfortunately. Two of whom you just sent to the hospital, but the White House knows as well.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I told them.”

TWENTY-THREE

AIR FORCE ONE

MALONE WAITED FOR AN ANSWER TO HIS QUESTIONS-WHO contacted me two days ago and who left the note?-but none came. Instead Edwin Davis handed him another sheet of paper, this one with nine lines of random letters, written in the same script featured on Andrew Jackson’s letter to Abner Hale.

“That’s the Jefferson cipher,” Davis said. “The Commonwealth has tried since 1835 to crack it. Experts tell me it’s not a simple substitution, where you replace one letter of the alphabet with another. It’s a transposition, where letters are placed in a defined order. To know the sequence, you have to know the key. There are something like 100,000 possibilities.”

He studied the letters and symbols.

“Someone obviously deciphered it,” Malone said. “How else did Jackson compose the message?”

“He had the good fortune,” Daniels said, “to appoint the son of the cipher’s creator as head of the U.S. Mint. We’re assuming Daddy told his boy, who told Jackson. But Jackson died in 1845 and the son in 1854. Both took the solution to their graves.”

“Do you think the Commonwealth tried to kill you?” Cassiopeia asked Daniels.

“I don’t know.”

But Malone was more concerned about Stephanie. “We can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

“I don’t plan to,” Daniels said.

“You have thousands of agents at your disposal. Use them.”

“As the president told you,” Davis said, “it’s not that simple. CIA and several other intelligence agencies want the Commonwealth prosecuted. NIA wants to save them. We’re also about to eliminate NIA and about fifty more redundant intelligence agencies in the next fiscal year.”

“Does Carbonell know that?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Daniels said.

“And drawing attention to the Commonwealth would only escalate the problem,” Davis made clear. “They’d love a public spectacle. In fact, they may be baiting us into one.”

Daniels shook his head. “This has to be handled quietly, Cotton. Trust me on this. Our intelligence people are like a bunch of roosters I once saw on a farm. All they do is fight one another to see who’s going to be the cock of the walk. In the end, it takes the life out of ’em all, and none amounts to much of anything.”

Malone had personal experience with those turf wars, which was another reason he’d opted to retire out early.

“The big boys have decided to take the Commonwealth down,” Daniels said. “Which is fine with me. I don’t care. But if we start publicly interfering with that effort, then it becomes our fight. We’re then going to have more problems, which will include my least favorite kind. Legal problems.” The president shook his head. “We have to handle this quietly.”

He didn’t agree with that at all. “To hell with the CIA and NIA. Let me go after the Commonwealth.”

“To do what?” Cassiopeia asked.

“You have a better idea? Stephanie needs our help. We can’t do nothing.”

“We don’t even know the Commonwealth has her,” Cassiopeia said. “Seems this Carbonell is the better lead.”

His friend was in trouble. He was frustrated and angry, as in Paris, last Christmas, when another friend had been in peril. He’d been two minutes too late that time, which he still regretted.

Not this time. No way.

Daniels pointed to the sheet. “We have a trump card. That cipher was solved a few hours ago.”

The revelation grabbed both his and Cassiopeia’s attention.

“An expert the NIA hired deciphered it, using some secret computers and a few lucky guesses.”

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“Carbonell told me.”

More dots connected. “She’s feeding you info. Playing both sides. Trying to make herself useful.”

“What irks me,” Daniels said, “is she thinks I’m too stupid to see through her.”

“Does she know Stephanie was looking into her?” Cassiopeia asked.

“I don’t know,” Daniels said, his voice trailing off. “I hope not. That could mean big trouble.”

As in death, Malone thought. The intelligence business was hard-pitch fastball. The stakes were high and death common.

So finding Stephanie was the priority.

“Those presidential papers I told you about in the National Archives?” Daniels said. “Like I said, only a few people can get into them. An intelligence agency head is one of those.”

“Carbonell was on the log sheet?” he asked.

Davis nodded. “And she’s the one who contracted for the cipher to be solved.”

“She reminds me,” Daniels said, “of one of those roosters. A little scrawny thing who watches all the fights from the side, hoping to become the top bird simply by being the last one standing.” The president hesitated. “I’m the one who sent Stephanie out there. It’s my fault she’s missing. I can’t use anyone else on this one, Cotton. I need you.”

Malone noticed that Cassiopeia was watching the muted TV screens, the three stations replaying the video of the assassination attempt over and over.

“If we have the cipher solution,” Davis said, “then we have something both the Commonwealth and Carbonell want. It gives us a bargaining position.”

Then he realized. “Carbonell provided you the information so you’d obtain the solution. She wants you to have it.”

Daniels nodded. “Absolutely. I assume it’s to keep it away from her colleagues, who would like nothing better than to destroy it. Fortifying those letters of marque could become problematic to their prosecutions. If I hold the key, then it’s safe. Our problem, Cotton, is that right now we don’t even have a pair of twos to bluff with, so I’m willing to take anything.”

“And don’t forget,” Cassiopeia said to him, “you were invited. With a special engraved invitation. Your presence has been requested.”

He stared at her.

“Somebody specifically wants you here.”

“And they wanted you to leave the Grand Hyatt,” Daniels said, lifting the typewritten note from the table. “Stephani

e didn’t write this. It was designed to flush you out. Ever thought that whoever sent it might have wanted some cop or a Secret Service agent to shoot you dead?”

The thought had occurred to him.

“Go to the Garver Institute in Maryland and get that cipher solution,” Daniels said. “Carbonell tells me the people there are expecting you. She’s provided us a password that will gain you access.”

He wasn’t stupid. “Sounds like a trap.”

Daniels nodded. “Probably is. The people who want to prosecute the Commonwealth do not want that cipher solved.”

“Aren’t you the president? Don’t they all work for you?”

“I’m a president with not much more than a year left in office. They don’t really care what I think or do anymore. They’re more interested in the next person who’ll be sitting in this chair.”

“We could be wasting time,” he said. “Whoever has Stephanie could just kill her and be done with it. We’d never know.”

“Killing her would be counterproductive,” Davis pointed out.

“And killing the president was productive?” Cassiopeia asked.

“Good point,” Daniels said. “But we play the odds. We have to. And the odds, at least to me, say she’s alive.”

He did not like the passive approach, but recognized that what Daniels said made sense. Besides, it was getting late and the Garver Institute seemed the best use of his time until morning. Owning that cipher solution would indeed provide bargaining power.

“Why am I here?” Cassiopeia asked the president.

“I assume to grace us with your beauty wouldn’t work?”

“Any other time, maybe.”

Daniels sat back in his chair, which groaned under his tall frame. “Those contraptions that fired on me took time to make. The whole thing required a crap load of planning.”

That was obvious.

“There were half a dozen people in the White House,” Davis said, “who were aware of the New York trip for the full two months after we decided to go. All high-level aides or Secret Service. They’ll be interviewed and investigated, but I’d stake my life on each one of them. A few more were told two days ago, but Secret Service tells us that those rooms were reserved at the Hyatt five days ago, using phony credit cards.”