Chapter Two A Matter of Life and Death #2
"I'll confess I had an ulterior motive in asking you here tonight, Mr. Burnham. I hope that doesn't sound too dreadfully rude — I like to think we're all grateful to the motive that brought us together."
Graham inclined his head, smiling, and felt the whole table's attention gather like a held breath.
"I understand from a mutual friend that you're something of an expert in — code work. Cryptography. Did his message this morning give you any hint of the favor I meant to ask?"
"It did," Graham said, and drew the letter of introduction from his breast pocket, sliding it across the white cloth. "I understand you have something you'd like deciphered."
Halifax scarcely glanced at the letter before setting it aside — as though the reading of it were only a formality among men who already understood one another perfectly — and reached instead into his own coat for a long leather wallet.
"We've an important message here we simply can't make sense of," he said, drawing out a folded square of paper. "Our usual man's out of the country and can't be reached for weeks, and it's rather urgent we know what it says."
Graham's whole body went cold as he recognized, even folded, the twin of the paper resting against his own chest. He reached for it with a hand he willed, by sheer force, to stay steady.
"I'll do what I can," he said.
Every eye at the table fixed on him as he unfolded the paper, and in that instant Graham understood, with a clarity that struck him almost like physical pain, exactly what he was looking at.
The message was written in the Bureau's own cipher — a cipher he had studied for two years — and its plain meaning, once decoded, would expose one of the most sensitive questions his department had wrestled with for months.
If it fell into the wrong hands tonight, men like these — men whose fortunes, he now understood, were built on preying upon the innocent, some of them, God help them, no older than the boy he had left behind in the hospital ward — would use it to do incalculable harm.
For one terrible instant the room swam before his eyes.
Then, as clearly as if a hand had steadied him, he thought of the Director's warm, weathered grip, and beneath it, older and steadier still, a thought that was not quite his own: Isaiah 41:10 — "Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee.
" He did not know, afterward, whether he had prayed those words or simply remembered them, but they steadied his hand all the same.
He summoned his easiest smile. "Happy to have a look, if I can be of use. Every code has a key somewhere, if a man's patient enough to find it. This looks fairly straightforward, actually."
The held breath around the table let go, and dinner resumed its ordinary murmur.
Graham kept up a pretense of eating while he studied the paper, and it was in turning it over that he first saw the small red cross inked across the back.
"My own mark," Halifax said pleasantly, catching his glance.
"So I'd know it from any other paper that happened to cross my desk.
" He said it lightly, but every man at the table understood him well enough — it was there so that no one could slip a counterfeit past him unnoticed.
Graham felt the weight of the duplicate paper in his own vest pocket like a stone.
This, he thought, is going to be considerably harder than I hoped.
Among the things the Director had pressed on him before he left Washington — half in jest, or so Graham had thought at the time — was a small velvet case holding a pair of shell-rimmed spectacles, a false mustache, and a set of heavier eyebrows, for use, the old man had said dryly, "should the evening call for a different face than the one you were born with.
" Graham had laughed then. He did not feel much like laughing now, but he did reach, with what he hoped looked like idle habit, for his vest pocket and the spectacles tucked there beside the duplicate message.
Could he manage the exchange under cover of putting them on? And if he did — would anyone think to look for the absent red mark before he could get well away?
He worked it slowly, patiently, while the table's talk rippled on around him — the duplicate eased from his vest pocket into his lap beneath the heavy damask napkin, the real message held conspicuously in his other hand, red cross outward, while his lifted coat lapel gave him cover to search, quite naturally, for his glasses.
"Ah — here we are," he murmured, settling the spectacles on his nose and smoothing the paper flat upon the tablecloth before him, all the while turning over, with cold and careful calculation, exactly how he might complete the exchange without a single watching eye catching the movement.
His chance came with the butler, who paused at his elbow with a silver tray to clear the crumbs.
Graham drew politely aside, lifting the paper from the cloth into his lap for the brief instant the butler required — and in that instant the true message, red cross and all, vanished beneath his napkin, while the duplicate took its place upon the table, face down, its plain back giving nothing away.
It was done. It could not be undone. Graham sat with his heart hammering so loudly he half believed the whole table must hear it, the real cipher hidden against his knee, the false one lying in plain sight beneath his own idle hand, and six pairs of watching eyes upon him with nothing better to occupy them until the next course arrived.
He was still holding that fragile, terrible balance — smiling at his hostess, admiring the salted almonds she offered him, his hand resting with studied carelessness over the substitute paper — when, from somewhere down the hall, a telephone began to ring.
Graham went very still. He knew, without needing to check the tall clock ticking in the front hall, precisely what hour it must be. The Director had promised him a call at just this time — a lifeline, if he needed one, or a signal, if he did not.
The butler appeared a moment later to murmur that a call had come for Mr. Burnham, and Graham rose with careful, unhurried apology, gathering napkin and paper together against his coat as though he had simply forgotten he still held them.
He swept up his coat and hat from the hall rack as he passed, praying — genuinely praying now, with no more pretense of merely thinking about it — that no one in the dining room had marked his leaving.
In the little telephone alcove he freed the real cipher and slid it deep into an inner pocket, dropped the napkin onto the table there, and lifted the receiver.
"Hello — yes. Oh, good evening." He pitched his voice clear and easy, meant to carry, should anyone be listening, straight back into the dining room.
"You don't say so. How did that happen?"
And then, glancing toward the lit doorway behind him, his blood went to ice. He saw Halifax himself lean across the table, lift the paper that lay there, and pass it, with a genial word, to the guest at his right.
The voice on the line delivered the agreed-upon phrase, and Graham answered as he had been instructed, his own voice remaining, by some grace he did not stop to question, perfectly cool and clear even as his pulse roared in his ears.
"All right. Certainly — let me get a pencil. Go ahead, I'm ready."
He watched, unable to look away, as Halifax's guest turned the paper over in his hands — turned it, and turned it again, and Graham saw the exact moment understanding broke across the man's face.
There was no more time for pretense. Graham set down the receiver mid-sentence, turned, and in three swift strides had the front door open behind him, even as he heard, from the dining room, Halifax's chair scrape back and his voice rise in sudden fury.
The whole table was on its feet as Graham slipped through the door and pulled it shut behind him — no longer any use in silence now, no longer any pretense left to keep.
He had been discovered, and whatever came next would have to be outrun.
He went down the front steps two at a time and out into the roar and glitter of the New York evening, with nothing between himself and the men now surely pouring out behind him but the small, hard-won lead of a single closed door.