Chapter 6
I awoke to two phones ringing at once.
One was my cell, chirping like a disposable little bird in my bomber. A sat up and dug around desperately for it, my half-awake brain somehow sure the call was critically important.
The source of the other ringing phone I couldn’t quiet place. There was a moment of dislocation as I tried to remember where I’d fallen asleep.
I looked around, pausing in the search for my cell phone, to examine my surrounding: four walls and a heavy door, the skirting of the walls curved to allow easy sluicing. That’s right, I’d found an empty drunk tank and bedded down for the night. The second ringing was from beyond the crack in the open door.
“Hello,” I said wearily into my phone. The other phone continued to ring outside the jail cell.
“Funny, Sasha. Really funny,” the phone said. Was it? I didn’t remember playing any jokes. Someone, somewhere answered the other phone. I was eternally grateful.
“What? O’Day?” I asked my handset.
“Yeah, really funny Sasha. I always appreciate the Seattle Police wasting time and computational resources like that.”
Johnny O’Day. The Mick bastard. He was my guy at the university. The guy with the computers and the time to decode the e-reader I’d found in Montavez’s apartment.
Yesterday, while waiting on the Fed’s Forensic team, I’d done the regular footwork and interviewed the girl’s neighbors. Nothing out of line there. She was quiet, well-behaved, no boyfriend, no loud parties. When the CSI guys showed up, I’d hopped a bus and paid a visit to O’Day. Uncharacteristically, I was in rush to return downtown to occupied Seattle and submit my report to the Special Agent. Maybe I figured a little brown-nosing couldn’t hurt.
But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember playing any joke.
“Did you decode that e-reader?” I asked. “Was it something stupid?”
“What?” O’Day replied. He faltered, now as confused as I was. “No, of course not. I didn’t decrypt your e-book, ass-hat.”
“Then, why are you calling me?”
“Because—” O’Day exhaled. “Are you kidding me? Are you trying to tell me you have no idea?”
“No. What?”
“Wow, great work, Sherlock,” he said sarcastically.
“Look, Day, you woke me up and now you’re starting to piss me off. Do you want me to come over there and start checking your pill bottles against prescriptions? ‘Cause I’m betting your Oxy count doesn’t exactly add up.”
“Relax, relax,” O’Day said, defensively. “Jesus, Sasha, calm down. I thought this was some stupid joke, that’s all. If you’re saying it isn’t, it isn’t. Okay?”
“Okay,” I took a breath. “Now, Day, slowly and in words of two syllables or less: Why haven’t you decoded that e-reader?”
“‘Cause it can’t be decoded, Sasha. Everyone knows that. It’s Dark’s Novel.”
“What’s that?” I asked. “A dark novel?”
“No—”
A head popped around the open cell door. It was the Duty Officer. “Hey Fonseca, phone for you.”
I put my hand over the mic of the cell. “What? Oh, thanks. Just a sec.”
“It’s one of those FBI douches.”
“What? Constantine?”
“Yeah, that was it.”
“Thanks, tell him I’ll be right there.”
“He didn’t sound like the kind of guy you put on hold.”
“Just...” I looked at my cell phone then at the Duty Officer. “Just tell him to cool the fuck off, okay?”
“Okay.” The Duty Officer shrugged and disappeared from the doorway.
“O’Day? Are you still there?” I asked my phone.
“Yeah. Are you listening, Sasha?”
“No, what was that about a dark novel?”
“Not a dark novel,” the irritation in Day’s voice could have climbed out of the phone and slapped me. “Dark’s Novel. As in A.E. Dark. The novelist. Haven’t you ever heard of him?”
Something in the back of my memory said War of the Planets, but I wasn’t about to swear to it.
“Didn’t he start some weird cult? Like L. Ron Hubbard?” That I was more sure of.
“Rosicrucianism, right. But he didn’t start it, he resurrected it. The Order of the Rose Cross dates back to Dark Ages—”
“Okay,” I interrupted. I knew O’Day. If I let him fly off on a tangent, it’d take half an hour. “So, Dark wrote a novel, and it’s encrypted on the girl’s e-reader? Why is that funny?”
“It wasn’t…” O’Day growled in frustration. “It wasn’t encrypted on the e-reader. Well it was, but wasn’t. The novel is encrypted, but not just on that e-reader. Do you get what I’m saying?”
“No,” I said in all honesty, “what are you talking about, Day?”
“The novel was encrypted by Dark, himself. In 1964. Pre-microchip, do you understand? He did it all by hand. No one has ever been able to decrypt it. Nobody knows how he was able to do it. It’d have taken forever, even with all the super computing power we have today. It’s the biggest fucking mystery in mathematics since Fermat’s Last Theorem. Are you seriously telling me you’ve never heard of it?”
“What? No,” I said. What the fuck was he talking about?
“And you, smart-ass, send it to me to decode for you,” Day said, his voice dripping with irony.
“Okay, now I’m starting to get the joke,” I said. But I wasn’t. “So, nobody has ever read the thing?”
“Nope.”
“How do you know it’s even a book? Maybe Dark liked practical jokes. Maybe he thought it was all just some big wheeze.”
“There’s a whole school of thought that agrees with you, Sasha. But that hasn’t dampened people’s curiosity. Dark released the encrypted text in published form. He paid for a run of ten thousand copies himself. Do you know what that cost in 1964? If it was an elaborate hoax, he fronted a mighty lot of money for a joke only he could laugh at.”
“Let me get this straight: Dark published a whole book no one could read?”
“Not at the time of publication, no. But Dark stated in interviews that when the technology existed to decode the book, humanity would be ready to read its contents.”
“How humble.” I laughed. “But we still can’t decode it? Even ninety years later?”
“Nope. And it’s not through a lack of trying. There are whole on-line communities dedicated to the novel. Websites, chat-rooms. Shit, you’re telling me you’ve never heard about any of this?” I shrugged at my phone. Day went on. “The prevailing wisdom is that he made some mistake in his mathematics. He did the whole thing by hand, remember. All the multiplication of primes, then typed out the encrypted text on an Underwood. If he made one tiny error in the whole process, one misplaced decimal point, hit one wrong key, then the whole thing would be...”
“Gibberish,” I finished his sentence.
“Right, gibberish. That’s the conclusion our best computer scientists have come to, that Dark’s last novel has been lost. That all we have is a locked copy with no key.”
“But I’m guessing Dark’s Rosicrucian cult hasn’t accepted that.”
“Possibly. But they’re all dead now. Defunct. The whole order, en masse, took the Geneing dope at the beginning of the epidemic. Before people really understood what the shit did. The Rosicrucians no long exist as an organization. Cult or otherwise.”
“But the girl had the novel on an e-reader...” I said to the empty jail cell.
“What’s that, Sasha?” O’Day asked over the phone.
“Nothing. Thanks for your help. I owe you a beer.”
“No problem,” O’Day said casually. “What about the e-reader?”
“Keep it,” I said.
“Thanks. Well, then, talk to you later,” O’Day said, finishing the call.
“Wait!” I called out. “What was the title of this guy’s encrypted novel?”
“Well, that wa
s encrypted, too,” O’Day replied, “so no one knows...”
“So people just call it Dark’s Last Novel?”
“Pretty much. But, in the encryption community, it’s casually known as Quelle. You know, after the theoretical gospel of the Bible, the one Mathew and Luke both draw from. The one no one will actually ever get to read, because it’s long since been lost to history. Get it?”
“Yeah, yeah. Quelle, huh?”
“Yeah. Though, like whoever owned this e-reader of yours, that’s usually shortened to just Q.”