MONDAY WAS GUN DAY. OR GUN DELIVERY DAY RATHER. LIKE A man worrying at a sore tooth, Xervish seemed to be unable to stop himself from returning to them much more often than was safe for him. Today was to fulfill a longstanding request from Kinza. Guns and ammunition and the last of their cash, extracted from a safehouse stash they had previously maintained.
It was a sign of the times that nothing retained stability, not even a hitherto thriving black market business. Without Hoffman’s access and Kinza’s ferocity to back it up, there remained virtually nothing of their criminal enterprise. Contacts switched off, customers moved on, suppliers dried up, safehouses were overrun: In effect, it was as if someone had taken a gigantic brush of whitewash to their past.
Guns and cash, however, were enough for Dagr, who had not been overly fond of their previous line of work to begin with. In the city, guns and cash opened up vistas of possibility. Yet when he saw Kinza stripping down the Makarov pistols, hands moving in a blur like some kind of violent pianist, he felt a moment of disquiet. There was in his stance a subconscious intent. Dagr wondered if, in the end, he would leave this city so quietly.
Xervish for once was in high spirits, regaling them with wild adventures from his childhood, in which Kinza figured as a chief tormentor and instigator. The haggard lines from his face faded and he appeared youthful again when he described how, at age five, they had attempted to rob the neighboring carpet store of its chief window display, had staggered down a side street with a twenty foot long roll at a snail’s pace, been caught and soundly thrashed.
They heard about the girls Kinza had stolen from him, the broken Chevrolet they had inherited from an uncle, which Kinza had gradually fixed, the nights they had cruised happily in this vehicle, the bathtub brewery Kinza had persuaded him to make, with a view to augmenting their beer supply, and the acute poisoning Xervish had suffered as a result.
In all of these, Xervish cut a comical or desperate figure and Kinza as some kind of devil. Later, too, there were oblique references to the sister Xervish had lost, and Dagr guessed that she must have been one more thread tying them together, a big one, for Kinza’s fingers tightened, and the rage flared in his eyes at any mention of her. Dagr could see the furnace at his core bellowing, could guess that the violence Kinza offered the world was in part still recompense for that previous episode of his life.
Guns. Kinza’s choice was the Soviet made Makarov, a snub-nosed semiautomatic, reassuringly heavy. It had been the official Red Army sidearm for forty years, from 1951 to 1991. True to Soviet scorched earth logic, the gun used a 9×18 mm cartridge, where the bullets were 0.2 mm larger in diameter than the standard NATO-issue cartridges used by all other “western” handguns. In case of a full blown NATO attack, the pesky capitalist invaders would not be able to use any Russian ammunition in their fancy designer weapons, and the soldiers of the motherland would be spared the indignity of getting shot with their own bullets.
The Iraqi army had used the Makarov for a long time because it had relatively few moveable parts, rarely malfunctioned, and could be repaired in the field by a one-armed halfwit; also, the Spetsnaz used these guns, and those nightmarish Russian commandoes were held in awe by all the Arab militaries.
For the same reasons, it was a weapon in high demand among the insurgency. It was easily concealable and could be pulled up in a flash to assassinate an unsuspecting collaborator.
Kinza had two of them, but his were actually the much rarer East German model, manufactured in Suhl. The grip bore a stamp of the name Ernst Thaelmann that, for all anyone knew, was either a very popular East German or, bizarrely, the name of the factory. The East German pistol had always been considered the finest of all the Makarovs, as any fool knew that German engineering, even the lunatic East German sort, was a thousand times better than Russian or Chinese or Bulgarian or any other communist-inspired state. Then too, the aficionados were well aware that the original designer of the Makarov, one Nikolai Federovich Makarov, had basically copied his design from the inestimable Walther PP sidearm, used by the Luftwaffe in WWII, so it was only fitting really that the best Makarov be manufactured in German soil. And if anyone thought they knew better than the Luftwaffe, well…
With the nonexistence of that country and the discontinuation of the original line, this gun had earned a cult following. Kinza, who had a healthy interest in concealable semiautomatic handguns, had acquired these from some retired (dead) Republican Guard army buddy, and now had a gaggle of gun enthusiasts following his every move. Many times, on the way to some rendezvous, they had been stopped in dark corners by furtive, bearded men wanting to get a look at the Makarovs. Kinza had turned down offers of hard cash, bricks of opium, titles to bombed out houses, and even gratuitous bearded male sex.
Dagr, who could not be trusted with such serious weapons, was given an old .45 caliber US army issue gun, a sort of hand cannon for amateurs of the point and pray mentality. It had originally been won in a game of cards from Hoffman, himself a terrible shot, who normally called in air cover for anything more serious than a bazaar pickpocket.
Today they were in a celebratory mood, were in fact passing around a bottle of single malt, and using Mother Davala’s best crystal glasses. Xervish had fixed up back-to-back trips, an entire convoy heading to Mosul on staggered days with empty trucks, following their own arcane schedule of profit and loss. Xervish, plugged into this system somehow, had put an end to their concerns. Kinza and Hamid would go next Friday, a week from now, and Xervish and Dagr would follow the very next day. They would rendezvous in a safehouse in Mosul, also arranged.
That left a week of upcoming idleness, a period in which Kinza planned to find the Lion of Akkad and wrest from him, if possible, the secret of the watch. Their curiosity had grown; Dagr had kept his finger on the watch doggedly for the past three days and marked down the intervals of the errant fluctuations. Held against a time chart of minutes and seconds, this faint mechanical thrumming took on a different look, a numeric pattern of some sort.
At first, it had been random but finally, on the third day, Dagr had discerned a repetitive sequence. In effect, he had reached the end of a cycle, which indicated to him that either the machine was malfunctioning repetitively, or there was a code of vibrations embedded in it, which was more or less three days long.
This discovery had fired them all up, but after hours of conjecture and feverish speculation, they had been forced to come back to reality. Very possibly, Dagr had glumly concluded, just a mechanical aberration. In fact, given the difficulty of making a watch behave deliberately in this way, it very likely was a natural aberration. Still, the alternative was so exciting that it was impossible to dismiss.
Dagr had transposed a 72-hour clock against the vibrations and assigned a numerical value against each one. His grid was essentially a breakdown of 72 hours into seconds: 72(hours) × 60(mins) × 60(secs) = 259,200 seconds. Against each of these points, there was either a 0 (for no vibration) or a 1 (for a vibration). Thus,
S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6, S7…
1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, …
The first and obvious assumption, of course, was that this was a binary code, and Dagr had spent some moments of joy at having solved the puzzle so easily. The binary code, used in machine language, was essentially one of the oldest forms of transcribing letters to numbers by simply using a sequence of 0s and 1s. The permutation of a string of 0s and 1s could be used to represent each letter of the alphabet in question, and the string could be as short as or as long as necessary, depending on the size of the alphabet. In computer language, for example, the binary code for each letter was a sequence of seven 0s and 1s, i.e., the letter A might equal 01000001.
The first few binary code analyses, however, had not been fruitful, possible messages being gibberish. Dagr also had to consider that binary code in itself was not so much useful for hiding information, as it was for transcribing letters into numbers so machines could deal with them.
A second kind of relationship had occurred to him, namely, the correspondence of seconds (S) against vibrations (V) on a numeric scale, where say, S(1) = V(1), S(6) = V(2), S(136) = V(3), S(144) = V(4)…S(259,198) = V(XXX). From S(259,200), the entire thing started repeating. Dagr, following this path, was left with a bunch of numbers or fractions or number associations, which he had to sift through. He had put these results through various mathematical algorithms, trying, without much success to come to a scheme where the numbers coalesced into letters. It was difficult enough, but without knowing even which language the code might be in or a hint of what kind of math had been used or some inkling of what kind of words were in the message, it was almost impossible.
Or, as Dagr concluded to Xervish, if he had the use of a US supercomputer, perhaps the one that played chess against Kasparov, he might run through all possible permutations and get some idea of what they had. This was the “brute force” approach to breaking systems, and it was accepted that any code could be broken given enough time and computational power, but where both of these were lacking, it was necessary to obtain extraneous information. For example, if Dagr could guess a set of words that was likely to appear in the message, he could devise tests for the frequency of those vowel combinations; he would have, in essence, moved from random to somewhat informed.
Kinza, loath to give up, sent Xervish forth with this new mission. It was apparent to him that the Lion, injured, disoriented perhaps, must be in the city somewhere. Baghdad was now dissected by bunkers and checkpoints into zones with flows of traffic, and it was possible, given a starting area, to narrow down where exactly someone might flee to. Poring over Google earth maps, Dagr had drawn up a grid. The idea was for Xervish to make discreet enquiries to initiate contact, if possible. After all, they had something that belonged to the Lion, some kind of negotiation should be welcome to both sides. Since they couldn’t leave the house, it was necessary to bring the Lion to them, voluntarily. In the few days they had left, Kinza hoped to learn something.
The very next day Xervish returned again, like a homing pigeon drawn to his keeper. His first report was not good. No one in the criminal fraternity had heard of the Lion. Hassan Salemi had upped the price on their heads. Hoffman was missing, probably court-martialled. Kinza grimaced but kept his cool.
They had taken to spending the afternoon tea hour at the library, discussing the code with Mikhail. It was not an unpleasant way to kill time. Even the librarian, somewhat convinced by Kinza’s teatime manners, could face these sessions with a semblance of equanimity. Dagr could almost believe he was in his old room, surrounded by his texts, working on some obscure equation. Much of the time was spent with Kinza and Mikhail offering outlandish suggestions, which Dagr had to shoot down with tedious explanations in mathematics.
In this time, surrounded by books, he even captured some of his previous donnish nature, the forgotten art of steepling his fingers just so, the constant struggle to enunciate, using mathematical notation on small scraps of looted paper to demonstrate quite obvious points that his audience nonetheless failed to appreciate. He had asked for a blackboard and chalk since he did his best thinking that way, but this turned out to be against the Code of Behavior compiled by Mikhail for proper library etiquette. Ever since Dagr had broken the spine of a 1917 atlas, tearing Greenland asunder forever, the librarian had put him down as one of those individuals who was Inadvertently Dangerous to Books and now kept him under close observation.
It had taken considerable persuasion to allow freehand ink-work in the library, Dagr having had to vociferously express his resolve not to write his name in any books or draw in the margins or tear out pages or any of the other infractions that Mikhail imagined Dagr to be on the constant verge of committing.
Mikhail, who had read up on the Druze, had a number of ideas. His powers of expression, however, were so underdeveloped that he could barely get two words out without stammering and becoming rapidly incoherent. His favored mode of communication was to blurt out a single word and then shy away in a fit of mumbling, the deciphering of which required a form of cryptanalysis in itself.
“We’re in a tough spot,” Dagr was saying, “The Druze used an alphanumeric code.”
“Which means?”
“Numbers equal letters,” Dagr said. “For example, the simplest alphanumeric is A=1, B=2, C=3, etc… Computers, for example, commonly use ASCII alphanumerics, which is a seven-number sequence of 0s and 1s, essentially binary code. Another simple code, also used in programming, is Hex, which converts all the characters on a keyboard to a double digit number.”
“And the Druze code isn’t one of these simple ones?” Kinza asked.
“No, I tried all the obvious stuff already,” Dagr said. “In most cases, an alphanumeric code is not really a method of hiding information so much as converting letters into numbers so computers and their programmers can deal with them.”
“This Druze thing is a computer code?”
“Probably not,” Dagr hesitated. “I mean, why put it into a watch? If it was recent, you could use a disk or pen drive or any other kind of electronic media. This code is put into a mechanical object. And it’s actually set against time. I think it must be to hide something, something quite long perhaps.”
“So how would you break this, professor?”
“Well, this is really more of a job for a cryptanalyst.”
“You’re just being modest.”
“Computers. We need really big computers!” Mikhail blurted out. He spoke low and fast. Oftentimes, only Dagr understood him.
“Right, or computers. Lots of them. Or one really big one.”
“Yes, yes, like the one that played chess with Kasparov,” Kinza gave a shout of laughter that startled everyone. “You’ve got some kind of fetish for that thing.”
“Well, it’s a lot of computing power to waste on something useless like chess,” Dagr said, exasperated. “I mean here we’ve got hundreds of itinerant mathematicians begging for processing space, and the imperialistic white devils are just mocking us by using mainframes to beat third-rate chess players.”
“Third rate?”
“Well, he didn’t beat the computer, did he?”
“He’s the best player who ever lived,” Kinza said. “According to FIDE.”
“Incorrect. He’s the best professional player who ever lived,” Dagr said. “Chess is just a bunch of permutations of a single scenario. It only looks like a game. In reality, it’s just a math puzzle. It’s even easier than a completely random puzzle because the same few situations keep repeating themselves. Logically, any first-rate mathematician would be unbeatable in chess. Of course, they’d never play it in the first place because they’d have better things to do.”
“So Kasparov would be no good at deciphering the Druze code.”
“Precisely.”
“Whereas you would be excellent at chess.”
“Precisely,” Dagr said. “If I bothered playing of course, which I wouldn’t because I have better uses of my time.”
Except of course, Dagr had played chess once, and these days, he dreamed of it often. Sitting in the balcony with his grandfather an hour before kindergarten, the sun just beginning to warm things up, the old man back from his morning walk, natty in his ivory cane and hat. He smelled of soap and tobacco and faint aftershave. They had a ritual, both of them early risers while the rest of the family slept. First, they would open a little packet of pastry, freshly bought, smacking of honey and butter, and then the wooden chess board, with the beautiful grainy pieces, felt lined in the bottom, solid and heavy with its little knights and bishops. The morning game, a secret for no discernible reason; Dagr couldn’t imagine anyone objecting to it, but no one else played, and somehow the conspiracy was cherished.
The grandson would always set the board, laboriously putting each piece dead center, and then the old man would take a pawn in each closed fist and offer the choice, and no matter which he picked, some legerdemain always gave him the black. The white pieces started and therefore had the advantage, and his grandfather took a fiendish delight in trouncing him. The black had to defend, and Dagr always lost until he learned to play to a standstill, and then finally to counterattack and win.
Beautiful mornings for two years, until his grandfather had a stroke, and the board was lost, and…
“Alkindus…etaionshrdlu.” Mikhail interjected, brandishing a tattered hardcover edition.
It took Dagr a moment to focus; it was difficult to wrench his mind back, the world in the past was too strong, too richly colored compared to what was now left over. “Hmm, Al Kindi?” he finally said. “You’re on the right track, but I’ve tried that already.”
“Polyalphabetic—like ENIGMA.”
“Rotor like the World War Two stuff, you think? Could be. I’ve done the obvious frequency analyses for Arabic. Hmm, might be a different language altogether, you think? Sneaky Druze.”
“Excuse me, what the hell are you guys talking about?” Kinza asked.
“You know, cryptanalysis,” Dagr said.
“Two…two or more languages,” Mikhail said.
“Words from two languages? Hmm, that might throw off the frequency counts of course.”
“No vowels…” he whispered.
“No vowels? To throw us off? Sneaky Druze.”
The unmistakable snicker of an East German Makarov cocking cut him off. “Really, I’m serious. What the hell are you guys talking about?”