Riptide (26 page)

T
he following afternoon, as Hatch came up the path from the dock after treating a diver’s sprained wrist, he heard a crash
resound from the direction of Wopner’s hut. Hatch sprinted into Base Camp, fearing the worst. But instead of finding the programmer
pinned beneath a large rack of equipment, he found him sitting back in his chair, a shattered CPU at his feet, eating an ice-cream
sandwich, an irritated expression on his face.

“Is everything all right?”

Wopner chewed noisily. “No,” he said.

“What happened?”

The programmer turned a pair of large, mournful eyes toward Hatch. “That computer impacted with my foot, is what happened.”

Hatch looked around for a place to sit, remembered there was none, and leaned against the doorway. “Tell me about it.”

Wopner shoved the last piece in his mouth and dropped the wrapper on the floor. “It’s all messed up.”

“What is?”

“Charybdis. The Ragged Island network.” Wopner jerked a thumb in the direction of Island One.

“How so?”

“I’ve been running my brute-force program against that goddamn second code. Even with increased priority, the routines were
sluggish. And I was getting error messages, strange data. So I tried running the same routines remotely over on Scylla, the
Cerberus
computer. It ran lickety-split, no errors.” He gave a disgusted scoff.

“Any idea what the problem is?”

“Yeah. I got a good idea. I ran some low-level diagnostics. Some of the ROM microcode was rewritten. Just like when the pumps
went haywire. Rewritten randomly, in bursts of a regular Fourier pattern.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Basically, it’s
not possible.
Follow that? There’s no known process that can rewrite ROM that way. And on top of that, in a regular, mathematical pattern?”
Wopner stood up, opened the door to what looked like a refrigerated corpse locker, and slipped out another ice-cream sandwich.
“And the same thing’s happening to my hard disks and magneto-opticals. It only happens
here.
Not on the boat, not in Brooklyn. Just here.”

“You can’t tell me it’s not possible. I mean, you saw it happen. You just don’t know why yet.”

“Oh, I know why. The frigging Ragged Island curse.”

Hatch laughed, then saw Wopner was not smiling.

The programmer unwrapped the ice cream and took a massive bite. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Show me another reason, and I’ll buy
into it. But everyone who’s come to this goddamn place has had things go wrong. Unexplainable things. When you get right down
to it, we’re no different from the rest. We just have newer toys.”

Hatch had never heard Wopner talk like this. “What’s gotten into you?” he asked.

“Nothing’s gotten into me. That priest explained the whole thing. I ran into him at the post office yesterday.”

So Clay’s been talking to Thalassa employees, now, spreading his poison,
Hatch thought, surprised at the strength of his anger.
The man’s an irritant. Someone ought to squeeze him like a sebaceous cyst.

His thoughts were interrupted when St. John appeared in the doorway. “There you are,” he said to Hatch.

Hatch stared back. The historian was dressed in a bizarre combination of muddy Wellingtons, old tweed, and Maine oilcloth.
His chest was heaving from exertion.

“What is it?” Hatch asked, rising instinctively, expecting to hear that there had been another accident.

“Why, nothing serious,” said St. John, self-consciously smoothing down the front of his sou’wester. “Isobel sent me to bring
you to our dig.”

“Our dig?”

“Yes. You probably know I’ve been helping Isobel with the excavation of the pirate encampment.”
Isobel this, Isobel that.
Hatch found himself mildly annoyed by the historian’s familiar attitude toward Bonterre.

St. John turned to Wopner. “Did the program finish executing on the
Cerberus
computer?”

Wopner nodded. “No errors. No luck, either.”

“Then, Kerry, there’s no choice but to try—”

“I’m not going to rewrite the program for polyalphabetics!” Wopner said, giving the ruined CPU a childish kick. “It’s too
much work for nothing. We’re running out of time as it is.”

“Just a minute,” Hatch said, trying to defuse the argument before it started. “St. John was telling me about polyalphabetic
codes.”

“Then he was wasting his breath,” Wopner replied. “They didn’t become popular until the end of the nineteenth century. People
thought they were too error-prone, too slow. Besides, where would Macallan have hidden all his code tables? He couldn’t have
memorized the hundreds of letter sequences himself.”

Hatch sighed. “I don’t know much about codes, but I know a little about human nature. From what Captain Neidelman’s been saying,
this Macallan was a real visionary. We know he changed codes halfway through in order to protect his secret—”

“So it stands to reason he would have changed to a more difficult code,” St. John interrupted.

“We know that, dummy,” Wopner snapped. “What do you think we’ve been trying to crack for the last two weeks?”

“Hush up a minute,” Hatch went on. “We also know that Macallan switched to a code containing all numbers.”

“So?”

“So Macallan wasn’t only a visionary, he was also a pragmatist. You’ve been approaching this second code as just a technical
problem. But what if there’s more to it than that? Could there be some pressing reason why Macallan used
only numbers
in the new code?”

There was a sudden silence in the hut as the cryptologist and the historian fell into thought.

“No,” Wopner said after a moment.

“Yes!” St. John cried, snapping his fingers. “He used numbers
to conceal his code tables!
”

“What are you talking about?” Wopner grumbled.

“Look, Macallan was ahead of his time. He knew that polyalphabetics were the strongest codes around. But to use them, he needed
several cipher alphabets, not just one. But he couldn’t leave a lot of alphabet tables lying around where they might be discovered.
So he used numbers! He was an architect and an engineer. He was
supposed
to have lots of numbers around. Mathematical tables, blueprints, hydraulic equations—any one of those could have done double
duty, concealing a code table, and nobody would have been the wiser!”

St. John’s voice had a clear, excited ring to it, and there was an eager flush on his face Hatch hadn’t seen before. Wopner
noticed it, too. He sat forward, the forgotten ice-cream sandwich melting into a brown-and-white pool on his desk.

“You might have something there, Chris old boy,” he muttered. “I’m not saying you do, but you might.” He pulled the keyboard
toward him. “Tell you what. I’ll reprogram the
Cerberus
computer to try a chosen-plaintext attack on the code. Now you boys let me be, okay? I’m busy.”

Hatch accompanied St. John out of the hut and into the drizzle that cloaked Base Camp. It was one of those New England days
when the moisture seemed to congeal out of the air itself.

“I should thank you,” the historian said, pulling the sou’wester tighter around his plump face. “That was a good idea you
had, you know. Besides, he’d never have listened to me. I was thinking about bringing the Captain into it.”

“I don’t know if I did anything, but you’re welcome.” Hatch paused. “Didn’t you say that Isobel was looking for me?”

St. John nodded. “She said to say we’ve got a patient for you at the far end of the island.”

Hatch started. “Patient? Why didn’t you tell me first thing?”

“It’s not urgent,” said St. John with a knowing smile. “No, I wouldn’t call it urgent, at all.”

A
s they mounted the rise of land, Hatch glanced southward. The cofferdam had been completed, and Streeter’s crew was now working
on the massive pumps arrayed along the western shore, tuning them up after their recent ordeal and preparing them for use
again the next day. Orthanc stood gray and indistinct, the illumination from the observation tower casting a greenish neon
glow into the surrounding mists. Hatch could see the faint shadow of someone moving about inside.

They topped the crown of the island and descended toward the east, following a muddy path that wound its way through an especially
dense area of old shafts. The excavation site itself was spread across a flat meadow lying behind a sharp bluff on the eastern
shore. A portable storage shed was standing on a platform of concrete blocks at the far end of the meadow. In front of it,
the heavy grass had been trampled flat, and a great checkerboard grid had been marked out in white string across an acre of
ground. Several large tarps lay in a disorganized heap. Here and there, Hatch could see that some of the meter-square grids
had already been opened, exposing rich, iron-stained earth that contrasted sharply with the wet grass. Bonterre and several
diggers were crowded together on an earthen balk beside one of the squares, their slicker-clad backs glistening, while another
excavator was cutting out the sod in an adjacent square. A few large orange markers had been posted beyond the gridsite.
It’s a perfect spot for a pirate encampment,
Hatch thought.
Hidden from both the sea and the mainland.

A hundred yards from the site, the ATV had been parked at a crazy angle on the rough ground, a large gray box trailer in tow.
Several large pieces of equipment on three-wheeled carts were lined up behind. Rankin was kneeling beside one, preparing to
winch it back into the trailer.

“Where’d these toys come from?” Hatch asked, nodding at the equipment.

Rankin grinned. “The
Cerberus,
man, where else? Tomo-graphic detectors.”

“Come again?”

The grin widened. “You know. Ground-penetrating sensors.” He began pointing to the various carts. “You got your ground-penetrating
radar. Good resolution of bodies and, say, mines up to a dozen feet or so, depending on the wavelength. Next to it is an infrared
reflector, good in sand but with relatively low saturation. And there at the end is—”

“Okay, okay, I get the idea,” Hatch laughed. “All for nonmetallic stuff, right?”

“You got it. Never thought I’d get a chance to use any of it on this gig. As it was, Isobel nearly had all the fun to herself.”
Rankin pointed at the orange markers. “You can see, I found a few scraps here and there, but she’d already struck the mother
lode.”

Hatch waved good-bye and trotted ahead to catch St. John. As they walked down to the site, Bonterre detached herself from
the group and came over, slipping a hand pick into her belt and wiping her muddy hands on her rear. Her hair was tied back
and her face and tawny arms were again smeared with dirt.

“I found Dr. Hatch,” said St. John unnecessarily, a sheepish grin on his face.

“Thank you,
Christophe.
”

Hatch wondered at the sheepish grin. Surely St. John hadn’t become the latest victim of Bonterre’s charms? But nothing else,
he realized, could possibly have pried the man away from his books to grub about in the mud and rain.

“Come,” she said, grabbing Hatch’s hand and pulling him toward the edge of the pit. “Move aside,” she barked amiably at the
workers, “the doctor is here. Clear up your loose.”

“What’s this?” Hatch asked in amazement, gazing down at a dirty brown skull rearing out of the dirt, along with what looked
like two feet and a jumble of other ancient bones.

“Pirate grave,” she said, triumphantly. “Jump in. But do not step on anything.”

“So this is the patient.” Hatch climbed down into the excavated square. He examined the skull for a moment with interest,
then turned his attention to the other bones. “Or should I say, patients.”

“Pardon?”

Hatch looked up. “Unless this pirate had two right feet, you’ve got two skeletons here.”

“Two? That is
vachement bien!
” cried Bonterre, clapping her hands.

“Were they murdered?” Hatch asked.

“
Monsieur le docteur,
that is your department.”

Hatch knelt and examined the bones more closely. A brass buckle lay on a nearby pelvis, and several brass buttons were scattered
across what remained of a rib cage, along with an unraveling string of gold piping. He tapped the skull slightly, careful
not to prize it from the surrounding matrix. It was turned to one side, mouth gaping open. There were no obvious pathologies:
no musket ball holes, broken bones, cutlass marks, or other signs of violence. He couldn’t really be sure what killed the
pirate until the excavation was complete and the bones had been removed. On the other hand, it was clear that the original
body had been buried in haste, even thrown into the grave: the arms lay askew, the head was turned and the legs bent. He wondered
for a moment if the rest of the second skeleton lay beneath. Then his eyes were suddenly arrested by a golden gleam near one
of the feet.

“What’s this?” he asked. A compact mass of gold coins and a large, carved gemstone lay embedded in the earth near the lower
tibia. Only a little of the soil had been brushed away, keeping the coins
in situ.