Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [54]
Drummond reddened. “Who did that to you?”
“They said they was Interpol.”
“That means we can rule out Interpol.”
Struggling to keep pace, Charlie surmised that whoever Bream was working for had interrogated Hector. They would have exhausted every means of locating the bomb before mounting their Gstaad operation.
Continuing down the stairs, Hector said, “I told those fuckers what Señor Fielding told me, which was pretty much nada.”
“Tell me anyway,” Drummond said.
“When we loaded the Pristina onto his boat, he said he was gonna run it over to some new hiding place he got on Bernadette Islet or Antoinina Islet—you know, there’s tons of them little isles around here, no people on ’em, no nothing. The boss, he liked to cruise around, find new ones and draw ’em onto his map. He’d name ’em after the ladies he took there …” Embarrassment tinted the guard’s beefy face. “On dates.”
“I imagine your ‘Interpol officers’ searched all these islands?”
“Bernadette’s just a giant-ass sandbar, maybe three kilometers north of here. High tide, thing’s underwater. So you couldn’t really hide nothing there. So of course they didn’t find nothing.”
“What about Antoinina?”
“That’s the thing. There’s no Antoinina on any of Señor Fielding’s maps. Or on any map. Closest thing’s Arianne Islet, which is far, forty clicks easy. They tore that rock apart too. Found shit.”
“Could there be some meaning to ‘Antoinina’ that they missed?” Charlie asked Drummond.
“Damned if I know,” he said.
Which was reason to hope otherwise. Drummond opposed even mild profanity.
Charlie had difficulty keeping up with Drummond on the slender beach, which was piled with round, sea-smoothed stones that could broadcast their whereabouts.
“While it’s on my mind, I should say that I might know what Fielding meant by those islets,” Drummond said.
“That could come in handy,” Charlie said. He’d presumed Drummond had chosen to keep mum in the presence of Hector. Nice guy and all, but probably a hardcore criminal who would have been less concerned for their well-being once he knew the whereabouts of a weapons system that could net him enough of a fortune to buy this island several times over.
“Do you remember the false subtraction cipher?” Drummond asked. “Yeah. You’re thinking alphanumeric values of ‘Bernadette’ and ‘Antoinina’?”
“Ought to yield the latitude and longitude of Fielding’s hiding spot. I’d need to do the math on paper. But perhaps you can do it in your head.”
With each letter assigned a number based on its alphabetical order, BERNADETTE minus ANTOININA translated to:
As the cipher’s name implies, false subtraction isn’t true subtraction. Charlie worked left to right, subtracting numbers on the bottom line from those directly above. 2 – 1 = 1, 5 – 1 = 4—if this were true subtraction, 5 – 1 would yield 3 because the 1 that comes next borrows from the 5 in order to subtract 4. As for the rest …
“One-four-seven-six-one-three-six-five-four-eight-one-one-six-four,” said Charlie.
“Good.” Drummond nodded. “That gives us latitude and longitude, using decimal values. Latitude of 14.7, longitude 61.3. Or about fifteen nautical miles off the coast of Martinique.”
Bream’s people surely used potent decryption software to parse every permutation of Bernadette and Antoinina, but without the simple cipher Drummond had taught Fielding years ago, they might as well have searched for the mythical treasure of San Isidro. The single-degree latitudinal difference between the 14 and the 13 yielded by actual subtraction equaled 69 miles, a margin of error of some 15,000 square miles.
Charlie was suddenly distracted by the sound of an approaching police boat’s siren—what had been a distant drone became a shriek.
Drummond broke into a jog, continuing to stay close to the seawall, depriving DeSoto or anyone else atop the cliff a glimpse of him. Over the resulting ruckus of stones and clamshells, he shouted, “Now all we have to do is get there.”
Charlie joined Drummond in peering around the edge of the rock wall to see DeSoto on the pier, pacing alongside the bobbing