Saturday, November 20
Drayco awoke with his heart racing, and it took him a few moments to realize he wasn’t in his own bed. Right. He’d been drugged, kidnapped, and dropped off in this smelly, clammy dump.
After working unsuccessfully on the puzzle for several hours, he’d tried to get a few hours of sleep, hoping it would help his thought processes. But the bed felt like it was stuffed with rocks—make that ice cubes—so he hadn’t slept much.
At least, he didn’t think he had. His internal chronometer was usually pretty good, and under ordinary circumstances he’d guess it was about five-thirty in the morning. But how could he be sure with no windows and no way to tell time?
He hoped the mattress didn’t have bedbugs, although he’d checked for signs before lying down, prepared to sleep on the cold tile floor if he had to. He could always use his coat as a blanket.
It was a dreamless sleep, a pity. If he were luckier, his subconscious would have worked overtime while he slept to solve the puzzle, and he’d be done with it. But instead, he had more of his paralyzing hypnopompic nightmares on waking—this time, being trapped in dark, brackish water and running out of oxygen. Wonder why you’d had that one? His recent near-drowning case loomed in his memory.
With a sigh, he swung his sock-clad feet onto the hard concrete floor, trying to ignore the pervasive bleach-mildew stench in the room. It was showtime again. That puzzle wouldn’t solve itself.
He rubbed a hand through his hair in lieu of a comb. Then he hopped up to splash some water from the toilet tank on his face, since the faucet in the sink didn’t work. He found he was wistfully hoping for more salted coffee when he noticed someone had placed a new tray just inside the door during his slumber.
Lukewarm coffee, cold bagel. Better than nothing.
He sat down on the bed to “enjoy” his breakfast, hoping it would be a welcome distraction from the tiny room. The dank space wasn’t helping the leftover claustrophobia from the car trunk.
One thing Drayco hadn’t heard again were the carillon bells. Either he was in an interior room, which made sense because of the lack of windows, or he’d imagined the bells during his half-drugged state while being dragged out of the car.
Coffee in hand, he picked up the notepad, where he’d sketched out different ways of solving the puzzle, and sat down again at the little desk. The puzzle had to be a substitution cipher, but what about the French characters mixed in with the English letters? Not very characteristic of a typical cipher.
Okay, that skewed the whole basic cipher idea, but surely it couldn’t be all that hard. He’d worked on far more complicated codes than this without any problem solving them. But he hadn’t been abducted, cold, hungry, thirsty, and sleep-deprived, had he?
After what felt like several hours of fruitless labor, he got up and paced in his little cell. The room was so tiny, he could barely get three strides in one direction. Even if he weren’t six-four, he doubted he could have paced more than four steps at a time. But the pacing did nothing for his problem-solving.
If only he had his Steinway, he could pound out some Bach fugues and have this thing solved in a half hour. Bach’s counterpoint never failed to spark his imagination. It had served him well during his ill-fated piano career, then his thorniest cases at the FBI, and later in his private practice. It was a miracle of the universe.
Frustrated and angry, he flopped onto the bed and looked up at the ceiling, playing through some Bach in his head, hoping it would suffice. Sure enough, after a few passages from the D major fugue, he had a brainstorm.
This time, he knew he was on the right track, and it was a “simple” cipher, except the extra French letters were crucial to fill in the key. He’d already tried several combinations and thought he was close. But with this new idea, he figured out what appeared to be a solution.
Or was it? With dismay, he looked at his handiwork. The results were a string of words for numbers, like “three,” “nine,” and “two,” followed by two Latin words, caelesti and amplexus, and then another group of numbers starting with “six,” “five,” and “nine.”
He leaned back in the chair, staring at those words and feeling irked at both the situation and himself. He was certain he’d solved the cipher, that it must be the only correct solution, yet he didn’t know what in the world the results could mean.
Was this the complete answer to the coded cipher? Or was there something more, some other critical aspect he was overlooking? More importantly, would it placate his captors enough for them to release him?
His stomach made rumbling noises. He was suddenly ravenous. His kidnappers had kept him juiced up on caffeine, but hadn’t left him much in the way of food other than the one bagel. So he decided to go ahead and ring the bell. What did he have to lose at this point?
Moments later, he heard steps outside the door, followed by the sound of the deadbolt being clicked open. A man walked in, wearing a hood and mask and not saying anything as he carried in a tray with an opened bottle of soda and a sandwich. Even though Drayco couldn’t see the man’s face like he had with the guy outside last night, he was pretty sure this was a different captor, because this fellow was taller and heavier.
Drayco said, “I think I solved it, at least part of it. But you’re going to have to help me interpret the results.” He walked over to the table and picked up the paper he’d been working on, which he waved in the air.
The man didn’t reply and put the tray on the floor before turning around to leave. Before he shut the door, Drayco heard music playing in the background. Not carillon bells this time, but a big band arrangement of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” a version he’d never encountered before. Were they holding a dance party out there?
The silent jailer closed the door. Once again, the lock clicked into place.
That went well. So much for the solve-the-puzzle-and-be-released promise. Or maybe the masked delivery boy was just a lower-level flunky who was reporting the news back to his master.
Drayco examined the newly arrived tray of food. It was one of his favorite types of sandwiches, pastrami on rye. Another coincidence, like the salted coffee? And what about the opened soda—poisoned? Drugged? He could go for days without eating. But he was so thirsty, he wasn’t sure he could avoid drinking the soda. He wasn’t quite ready to guzzle water from the toilet tank without being able to boil it first.
Well, the coffee wasn’t drugged, right? He took a chance and sipped some of the drink, which was thankfully not lukewarm. But after only a few minutes, he had second thoughts and said aloud to the empty room, “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” as he started to get drowsy again. His vision faded around the edges until everything winked out.