Protocol 7 Read online

  “Absolutely,” Hayden said. He was leaning against the bookcase, arms folded, a look of outrage and deep concern on his lined face.

  Simon felt the tension flow from his body. “Then it’s not just me,” he said.

  “Not at all,” Sammy said, utterly in shock from what she had witnessed.

  Ryan turned and faced his old friend with an unaccustomed intensity. “Simon, listen to me. We have to get to the bottom of this. Whatever you need—connections, media, bribes, I don’t care—it’s yours. All of it. We have to locate Oliver and bring him home.”

  Simon looked at the others. “The rest of you?”

  “I’m there,” Andrew said, his voice uncharacteristically rough. “Whatever you need.”

  Hayden snorted. “What do you think?” he said.

  Sam gave him the ghost of a smile. “You already know my answer, Simon.”

  Simon took a breath. The relief that flowed through him was a palpable, physical sensation. He smiled completely, sincerely, for the first time in days. “That is exactly what I wanted to hear,” he said.

  Ryan frowned, thinking furiously. “Have you contacted the authorities?”

  “No. What would I tell them? ‘Good lord, Inspector, I received a message from my father and he’s alive and well and seems quite happy! Help me!’”

  Andrew snorted. “Besides, the ‘authorities’ have been lying to you all along, haven’t they? They’re the ones who told you he was dead. ‘Oh, ever so sorry, do forgive us, b’bye now.’”

  Simon nodded. “Exactly.” He reached into the other pocket of his jacket. “And there’s more.”

  “More?” Andrew crowed.

  “Good,” Ryan said.

  Simon pulled out the hand-bound book and put it on the end table where his father’s head had appeared moments before. “I was given this at the same time I was given the message from my father. It’s a diary of chess games.”

  “Oh, come now,” Ryan scoffed. “The man never kept notes of any kind; the last thing in the world he’d do is keep a chess diary.”

  “Exactly what I said,” Hayden told them. He crossed the room and held out his hand. “Let me take a look at that again.”

  Simon gave it to him. “I’ve already played through all these games; I think there are some general…ideas? He was trying to convey to me with them, but I think there’s more. I think there is specific, important information hidden in here somehow, and I want your help to find it.”

  Ryan also started leafing through the journal, concentrating hard. “Who gave this to you?” he said.

  “I did,” said a new voice from across the room.

  All of them in a single movement whirled around to look at the double doors that Sabrina had closed almost an hour earlier.

  Jonathan Weiss, still in his tailored raincoat, was standing just in front of the closed doors, his hands in front of him, gently holding his sopping hat. “If you’re trying to be secretive, the first thing you need to do is to lock the doors.”

  Simon was the first to move. He rose and walked over to Jonathan, overwhelmingly glad to see him. Samantha, who had never much cared for Jonathan, held back, her arms crossed, her expression skeptical.

  Ryan had met Jonathan only a few times in the past, at holiday parties and large gatherings, and even those had been many months ago—now he sat quietly, wondering how he had managed to get in without a peep. Andrew, meanwhile, had no idea who he was at all. Once introductions had been exchanged, and assurances that Jonathan knew everything about Oliver’s disappearance—and probably more—had been made, he was welcomed as part of the group and given a place to sit.

  “So what do we do next?” Andrew asked.

  Hayden had lost interest in the social niceties almost immediately. He was concentrating on the diary instead. Now he looked up at Simon, his eyes glittering sharply. “You say you’ve played through these games?” he said.

  Simon nodded, as he and Jonathan walked closer to the others. “First night I got it, yes.” He briefly described what he’d learned from playing through his father’s chess journal. He’d found that each of the matches had a message—a “moral,” so to speak—but he had to admit that none of it amounted to much. He showed the scientist a hand-written list where he’d recorded what he learned.

  Hayden scowled at it. “Juvenile,” he said.

  Simon frowned back. “What?”

  Hayden stared briefly, intensely at each page of the diary, then flipped it over almost impatiently and moved to the next. As the others chatted about Jonathan’s arrival and Oliver’s disappearance, Simon realized that Hayden was playing each of the games in his head, one after another, at astonishing speed.

  “A good chess game is like a Chinese puzzle box or a set of Russian dolls,” Hayden said as he read. “Layer on layer, a puzzle in a puzzle.” He gestured in frustration at the diary. “But these games are absurd, Simon. Oliver was a much better player than this. A brilliant player, actually, much as I hate to admit it. So why did he record this odd set of matches? And why, in every single one, did he lose on purpose?”

  Simon glared at him, baffled as well. “What?”

  “Look. In every single one, he moved the king into a specific, compromised position. He moved the king into an intricate but contrived checkmate.” He shook his head emphatically; the silver wings of hair swayed back and forth. “No, he was far too sophisticated a player to do that. Something else is going on.”

  He looked around the room as if searching for something. “Ryan,” he said. “Do you have paper and a pen somewhere?”

  Ryan turned to him, mildly surprised. No one actually used paper anymore. “Ah…I can call the notepad up on the console, if you like.”

  Hayden shook his head, less emphatically this time. “No. Nothing electronic. Oliver only trusted ink on paper; I’m going to follow his lead.”

  It was a more difficult task than anyone expected. Ryan searched the desk drawers and even asked the AI. They finally located an antique fountain pen—quite a lovely bit of craftsmanship—but sheets of blank paper were nowhere to be found.

  Finally Hayden lost patience. He stood up, stalked to the nearest floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and pulled a book off the shelf almost at random. Simon noticed it was the largest book—in size, if not thickness—within easy reach.

  “The Peregrinations of Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Facsimile Edition,” he read. He cocked an eye at Ryan. “You mind if I use this?”

  Ryan blinked in surprise, then shrugged. “I suppose not,” he said. “I doubt anyone’s opened it since the turn of the century.”

  Hayden opened it, flipped quickly to the back, and located three pages with printing on only one side. Without another word, he curled his hands around the edge and jerked. The pages separated from the binding with a loud rip.

  Hayden replaced the book on the shelf and plopped down exactly where he had been sitting before. Quickly, almost carelessly, he drew a chessboard on one of the sheets—an eight-by-eight grid. Then, half from memory, half from referring to the diary—he drew an “X” and a number in the square where the king had been left at the end of the game: X1 for the first game, X2 for the second, until he ran out of matches to record.

  As he worked he said, “Andrew? Draw another grid. You too, Sam. Rip that page in half. Simon, Jonathan: grids.”

  They all followed directions; in a matter of minutes, just as Hayden was finishing his list, they were all staring at individual sixty-four-square diagrams.

  He looked up at them, concentrating intensely. “All right then. Sammy? Put the letters A to Z in your boxes, one letter per box, beginning in the upper left. Left to right, top to bottom. It’ll repeat about two and a half times.”

  “Got it,” she said and started writing.

  “Andrew? Same thing, but start in the lower left. Bottom to top, left to right. Simon? Start in the upper right. Right to left, top to bottom. And Jon—”

  “Bottom to top, right to left.”
r />   “Right. Tell me when you’re done.”

  It only took a moment. When the last of them had finished, Hayden said, “All of you know algebraic chess notation, I assume?”

  All heads nodded. Most of them had learned it when they were children. Hayden smiled. “All right then. I’m going to start calling out squares. Write the corresponding letter at the bottom of the page, in the order I give it. My guess is that one of you is going to start seeing actual words, and the others will see gibberish. Ready?”

  They all said they were.

  “Good. Here we go. H8…G5…F4…B3—”

  “Got it,” Samantha said. “Oh my god…”

  Hayden looked away from his paper, and found all four of them were holding up their sheets. Three of them were showing him an indecipherable jumble of letters under their grids…but Samantha’s read:

  HELP

  “I’ll be damned,” he said in a hushed voice. “It worked.”

  He carefully read the rest of his list. Sam completed the message. No one else spoke until he was done. She wordlessly handed over the sheet, her eyes huge and filled with tears.

  Hayden read the message, then sighed deeply. He gave it to Simon, then stood up and turned away, so he wouldn’t have to watch the younger man read it.

  HELP ME

  HELD CAPTIVE IN ANTARCTICA

  TALK TO LEON. HE WILL KNOW

  Simon put his hand to his forehead, as if his mind was moving in too many directions at once.

  “This is crazy,” Hayden said into the silence. “He must have played each of these games in reverse, starting with where he had to have the king end up.” Simon ran both hands through his hair and pressed his skull between them. Why Dad? he asked himself. Why did he have to go to such incredible lengths to send me a message? And even now: no one but me would know what he meant by “Talk to Leon.” He’s still being careful, even in his code-within-a-code message. He looked at Andrew and Ryan; they were both speechless as he handed the message to them, so they could read it for themselves.

  “Ryan?” He said as they finished. “I need a glass of scotch.”

  Samantha’s eyes were filled with tears. “Simon,” she said, almost whispering. “I am so sorry.” She closed her eyes.

  Simon stood up and gave her a warm embrace. “It’s okay. I’m going to find him.” He looked up at all the friends and allies around the room. “We are going to find him.” He squeezed her between his arms and closed his own eyes.

  Ryan handed him a glass with three fingers of decent scotch in it. As he raised it to his lips, the sliding doors rolled open and Sabrina revealed herself.

  “Ryan?” she said. “Is everything all right?”

  The group exchanged guilty looks. “Fine, darling,” Ryan said, trying to keep it light. “In fact…I think we’re about to break it up for tonight.”

  The others looked at each other and nodded, stunned and mute. Sabrina smiled at all of them. “Is there anything I can get for you before you go?” she said.

  Samantha cleared her throat. “Yes, please,” she said politely. “I could do with a glass of water, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  Sabrina offered her a very thin smile. “Not at all,” she said, and retreated to the kitchen.

  Andrew took advantage of the moment. He opened his briefcase and passed out the secure phones he had created, one to each of them. “Talk only to each other with these,” he said. “And don’t even mention the plan in any other way—not now. Clear?”

  They all agreed.

  “Things are happening very fast,” Simon said. “I’ll talk to you all tomorrow, but please, if I call and say, ‘it’s time,’ be ready!”

  There was a strange, sweet electricity in the air between them: anticipation, dread, boldness, fear. Sabrina returned with a glass filled with water. Samantha took it with murmured thanks and drank a fraction.

  “Ah,” she said. “Much better.”

  “We’re off then,” Simon announced, slightly uncomfortable under the withering gaze of Ryan’s fiancée.

  Samantha offered her hand to Sabrina. “You’ve been a gracious host, thank you.”

  The grip was very polite and very brief. “Of course,” Sabrina said.

  Those women just don’t like each other, Simon observed as he gathered everything and put on his coat.

  Simon watched them file down the hall and make brief goodbyes to their hosts. As they left, he thought briefly of the list he had made. It was complete now, one way or another. He had talked with everyone he wanted to. Though how he would proceed without Max on board, he still wasn’t sure.

  I’ll work it out somehow, he told himself. I’ll have no choice.

  OXFORD, ENGLAND

  Ryan's Estate

  Simon and the others stood in the oval driveway for a while. He was unsurprised to see a shiny, sleek black hybrid roadster—a car worth more than his annual salary at Oxford—parked behind Andrew’s boxy Range Rover. “Yours?” he asked Jonathan.

  Jonathan shrugged and gave him a smile that was almost embarrassed. “Rented. To a guy you’ve never heard of, far as I know.”

  Simon let it pass; he shook Ryan’s hand and bid him good night as he packed Andrew, Samantha, and Hayden into the Range Rover. “Just drop everyone off, please,” he told Andrew. “I’m going to stay and talk with Jonathan a bit; I’m sure he’ll get me home.”

  The others had little to say; it had been far too eventful an evening.

  “Tomorrow,” Simon told them. “We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

  After the Range Rover’s taillights flared one last time and disappeared beyond the gate, Simon and Jonathan sat side-by-side in his car and talked. Every twenty minutes or so for the first hour, Ryan or Sabrina would peek through the front window, checking to see if they were still there. After about ninety minutes, they stopped checking and simply went to bed.

  “Have you contacted Max?” Jonathan asked.

  Simon shrugged. It was an obvious question. He told Jonathan about the conversation he’d had with his old friend, and how disappointing it had been.

  “You might want to try again,” Jonathan suggested. “Who knows, he might have changed his mind.”

  Simon thought about it for a moment and then agreed. “No harm in trying,” he said. He picked up the secure phone that Andrew had given him and dialed Max’s number from memory.

  Much to his surprise, he heard a pre-recorded voicemail message meant especially for him, rather than Max himself, live and in person. It was his friend’s voice—that much was clear—but the words made no sense at all.

  “Hey buddy,” Max’s voice told him. “I know that you’re thinking about that vacation you were talking about, but I talked to the other guys and none of them can make it. I’ll catch up with you later. Give Jake my love.” The disconnection was a loud pop in his ear.

  Simon stared at Jonathan with frank and obvious confusion. “What the hell is wrong with that guy?” he said. “What vacation? Besides, Max never mentions Jake in his phone calls. And he would never say ‘give my love to Jake,’ even if that’s what he wanted to say.” Something was very wrong here. He just had no idea what it was.

  “Never mind,” Jonathan said. “We’ll just have to do this without him.”

  They sat in the car for almost three hours, talking through the plan. The eastern sky was turning chalky with dawn when Jonathan finally started the nearly silent engine and drove Simon back to his flat.

  Neither of them knew that the clock was already ticking, and that everything was about to change.

  THE REPUBLIC OF MALTA

  Before Dawn

  The air traffic controller assigned to the night shift at one of Malta’s more modest airfields didn’t really know what to make of it. He rarely had more than a flight or two a day; sometimes days would go by when no planes of any size arrived at all. But today—in the last nine hours—he had barely had time to sit down.

  The last arrival had been a small private jet
. It had given him call signs, but he knew they were counterfeit; they were unlike any he’d ever encountered before. He watched with his binoculars as a single, stunningly beautiful passenger with jet black hair and striking blue eyes exited the aircraft and left the tarmac in a black limousine that had already been waiting. The one lone crewmember that had stayed behind didn’t even bother to visit the tower or file a flight plan for departure.

  The controller didn’t like it—not one bit. But nobody asked him to. One thing he knew for sure: no one wanted to answer any questions, so he wasn’t about to ask any.

  * * *

  The woman who had arrived on that private jet knew exactly where she was going. She had instructions, and she would follow them exactly, as always.

  She was driven to a small village not far from the airstrip, but 1,800 miles from London, where her flight had begun. The limo dropped her in a deserted square near the center of town shortly before dawn, next to an ancient sewer cap that, she knew, plunged hundreds of feet to an underground passage—one that had been created literally thousands of years ago.

  A stranger was waiting for her. He gestured to her. She nodded to her silent driver as the stranger took her bag and escorted her to the side of the square, to a narrow, dusty alley choked with deep blue shadows. The wind tugged at the woman’s long, dark hair. It was warm enough, even as the sun was rising, but she felt a chill pass through her nonetheless.

  There was a set of steps halfway down the alley that led to a narrow doorway. The stranger dropped her bag in front of the door and hesitated, reluctant to move any closer to the entrance. Never mind, she thought. She didn’t need the help. She picked up the bag and opened the door herself. It was unlocked.

  There was a winding set of stairs that took her deep underground—three flights below street level. At the bottom she was greeted by a young girl, no more than ten years old, who led her wordlessly to a small room even deeper underground.

  The little girl helped her undress and handed her a satin robe, unadorned but smooth and warm to the touch. Then she led her to the baths for her ceremonial cleansing.