7th son, p.14
7th Son, page 14
“Nucleotides may not be the answer,” Jack said. “If this is only part of a genetic sequence, we’ll never know what Alpha’s trying to tell us.”
“We didn’t play the entire message,” Thomas said. “Maybe if we transcribed the whole thing . . .”
John continued to stare. AGAACA. AGAACAA.
A-G-A-A-C-A.
Of course, you bastard. Of course.
“Yeah,” John said. His voice was calm, transfixed. “Play back the whole thing. Write it down. And, ah . . .”
He glanced up at the others, embarrassed.
“Somebody get me a guitar.”
John realized his request was ridiculous: Get me a guitar. Here. In a “Code Phantom”–protected cloning facility, whatever the hell that meant.
But Kleinman had nodded and hustled out of the room. In Kleinman’s absence, Kilroy2.0 replayed the entire message while Michael and Jay collaborated on the decoding. They were wrapping up when Kleinman burst back into the Common Room with General Hill not far behind. Hill’s eyes were chilly.
But the soldier was also carrying an acoustic-guitar case. John stifled a laugh. This, this . . . force of nature . . . is an axeman? What’s he play? “The Army Goes Rolling Along”?
Hill’s eyes narrowed; he was looking at John as if he were reading the young man’s mind.
“I’m sorry,” John said, suppressing a giggle. “It’s just . . .”
Hill brushed past Kleinman, strode over, and placed the guitar case on the round table. He fired a smirk in John’s direction and opened the case.
The clone’s eyes widened. The wood was spruce—Sitka spruce, the best around. It was deep brown on the edges, slipping into a warm gold in the center. The headstock read C. F. MARTIN & CO., and just below that was a pearlized logo of a rat and the letters G.O.W.R. The gold tuning pegs glimmered in the skylight sunlight.
“It’s a Martin,” John whispered. His eyes flitted from the six-string to the general, then back again. Glittering letters were inlaid on the fingerboard. When read vertically, they spelled skiffle.
John closed his mouth, then said, “You own a Martin?”
“Limited edition,” Hill said.
“Yeah, I know,” John marveled. “A Lonnie Donegan Brazilian. They only made seventy-five of these.” He couldn’t pull his eyes away from it. A Martin. He’d only strummed them in guitar shops, and then only for a minute; he’d always been too broke to afford to break one. John whistled a note of amazement. “Motherfucker. This put you back, what? Seven gees?”
“Almost nine.”
Jack gasped. “Nine thousand dollars? For a guitar?”
“A limited-edition Lonnie Donegan,” John marveled. “It’s beautiful. Beautiful.” He reached for the guitar. Before he lifted it out of the case, he looked at General Hill. “I’ll be careful.”
“I know you will.”
John sat down on the couch and propped the Martin on his knee. It felt nice in his hands; it felt right, if that made sense. John strummed a first-position E chord and grinned. The guitar was perfectly tuned, and the sound was warm, rich, aural butterscotch. He looked down at the piece of paper on the table, read the first three lines, and began plucking the strings with his fingertips.
A-G-A-A-C-A. A-G-A-A-C-A. A-G-A-A-C-A-A.
“Huh,” John said. “Does that sound familiar to any of you?”
“Negatory,” Dr. Mike said.
John played it again, looked at the others for any recognition. “I don’t have the foggiest, either.”
He played the notes again. And again.
Nothing.
“What if you were to play them differently?” Jack offered, leaning back against the couch cushions. “I don’t mean in a different order. I mean to a different beat. You just played them straight through. Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam. Play it differently: Bam-bam-bam . . . bam-bam . . . bam-bam, or something like that. Catch my drift?”
“I do.” Stupid. What John had just done was not really different from replaying the monotone Morse code. “Stagger the beats so they might actually sound like music.”
“Like emphasizing the correct syllable in a word,” Michael said.
John tried again, playing the first line as Jack had suggested: A-G, A-A, C-A.
Now that sounded familiar. John looked at his brothers and saw hints of recognition on a few of their faces—Michael and Father Thomas, most notably.
Something was there. “Do you feel it?” John asked them. “It’s there. Tickling my brain.”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “Sounds sinister. Play it again.”
John’s fingers moved up and down the neck of the Martin as he played the notes again with the same rhythm. It did sound sinister; the tune was almost like a dirge—repetitive, starting in a neutral A, then dipping into a dark G, then back to A . . . up to a bittersweet C, and back to A again.
As John finished, Jack closed his eyes and softly hummed the tune over and over. Father Thomas was staring at the ceiling, nodding his head slightly to the humming—then he was nodding at something else. Nodding and grinning.
John played the six notes and listened.
“ ‘Mr. Mo-jo ri-sin’,’ ” the priest sang along. “ ‘Mr. Mo-jo ri-sin’.’ ”
“That’s the Doors,” Michael said.
“Yes,” John said. “That’s ‘L.A. Woman.’ ”
FOURTEEN
John looked at the rest of the letters written on the piece of paper and began to play them. They came easily, now that he had a pattern to work from. The first wave of notes were indeed the droning bridge from “L.A. Woman”: “Mr. Mojo risin’ . . .” The next transcribed lines (A-A-A-A-G-A-G-C-G-A-A) were the chorus of the song: “L.A. woman, Sunday afternoon.” As John plucked the strings, Father Thomas sang that, too. Funny. The priest hadn’t struck John as a Lizard King fan.
John was getting into the rhythm of the song when the last line threw him. Only three letters in the last line of the transcript—C, C, and E—were notes. The rest of them . . . who knew?
“This last bit isn’t music,” John said. “Take a look.”
The clones gathered round the table and gazed at raw Morse code Jay had scribbled onto the paper, then to Michael’s translation below it:
CCXCVIIEIII
“Those are Roman numerals,” Father Thomas said quickly. “At least almost all of them are.”
Jay picked up the slip of paper. “He’s right.” The UN specialist frowned, then tapped at the last letter of the writing. “But E isn’t a Roman numeral; at least, I don’t think so.”
“It’s not,” Father Thomas said. “Does that mean that none of these letters are supposed to be Roman numerals?”
“One step at a time, hoss,” Michael said. “Let’s test the theory before we throw it out. Aside from the E, what’s this thing say? Kilroy, can you deliver?”
“Yes,” Kilroy2.0 said, and typed on his keyboards. A new window popped onto the computer screen; just one of at least a dozen. “With the exception of the E—which doesn’t translate into a Roman numeral—the number reads 297 and then 3.”
Sighing, Jack plopped down on the couch beside John, who had to quickly move the Martin so it wouldn’t be bumped. “Christ. This guy doesn’t give us a break, does he?”
“You gotta sing for your supper around here,” Michael said. “No pun intended, John.”
John smiled slightly, placing the guitar back in the case.
“Okay. Let’s think about this,” Dr. Mike said. The profiler began to pace. “The song is ‘L.A. Woman.’ It’s written by the Doors. Mr. Mojo’s risin’ and all that. And now, 297, the letter E and 3. So. What do they all have in common? What’s the link?”
“The words L.A. Woman have seven letters,” Father Thomas said. “Seven letters, seven clones, 7th Son.” Then, as if he needed to explain: “Just a thought. I’m a crossword junkie.”
“Not bad,” Jay said. “Sevens. We should write that down.”
He then looked over at Kleinman, who, along with General Hill, was standing away from the group, silently watching them work. Kleinman winked and tossed Jay his pocket notebook. Jay caught it with one hand, then knelt by the table and began writing.
John spoke up. “Well, we could take the anagram approach. I mention it because there’s some lore out there about the lyric ‘Mr. Mojo risin’.’ They say it’s an anagram for ‘Jim Morrison.’ It’s true, by the way.”
“No shit,” Michael said.
“Not a pebble.”
“ ‘L.A. Woman’ anagrams into ‘AWOL Man,’ ” Kilroy2.0 said.
“That’s sounds appropriate,” Michael said. “Alpha ran like hell from this place.”
The hacker raised a finger. “It also anagrams into ‘anal mow.’ ”
John laughed.
“Okay. So maybe it anagrams into a clue,” Dr. Mike said, waving his hand distractedly, “and maybe it doesn’t. Big picture first. The title. ‘L.A. Woman’ is significant. My gut’s telling me whatever Alpha is saying has something to do with Los Angeles. Here’s a happy coincidence: L.A. is my stomping ground. It’s where I live.”
They considered this for a moment, as Jay scribbled his notes onto the notepad.
“You know, that might be important in itself,” Father Thomas said. “I mean, Alpha deliberately left the Morse-code file for us, even labeled it for us. He knew it’d take someone who understood Morse code to spell out the letters—and a musician to play those letters, right? And the Roman numerals. It’s like he’s baiting us. It’s as if he knows—”
“—that what we know will unlock the clue,” Michael said. “Sonuvabitch. No wonder Durbin’s boys couldn’t get this far. It’s written solely for us. The general said we’ve been tailed our whole lives, and that intel came back to 7th Son. Alpha saw that data while he was still here. He knows us. Knows where we live. Knows our strengths.”
“But we don’t know what any of this means,” Jay said, putting down his pen. “These last numbers: 297, E, 3. Are we supposed to multiply them? Divide them? Are they map coordinates, like Michael said? Pages in a book? A zip code? We’ll be here for days trying to figure out what they’re supposed to mean.”
“You’re missing the point,” Dr. Mike said, shaking his head. “The priest is right.”
“The priest has a name.”
“Sorry, Thomas. But you’re right: the knowledge we’ve all used to get to this point has come pretty naturally to us. And Michael’s right, too: he’s playing on our talents. We couldn’t decipher the message separately, sure, but together, we’ve been able to piece it together with minimal brainpower.”
“You call this minimal?” Jack said.
Dr. Mike chuckled. “You should see me on a tough profiling case. I get the worst fucking migraines; shit keeps me up at night. The point is, these clues—all of them, including the Roman numerals—have certainly not been Advil-worthy. The answers have come naturally. This bit with the numbers is the same way. Don’t misunderstand. Alpha’s smart, probably smarter than us. That’s bad for the long run. But right now, it’s good. He’s guiding us; baiting us, just like Thomas said. I’m sure of it. We just have to make the connections.”
John looked back down at the sheet of paper. It’s just like the music notes. It’s all right there, if you look for it:
CCXCVIIEIII
297, then E, then 3. What does the E mean? Where in the hell is the E in this thing, anyway?
“Hey, Michael,” John said. “Which one of these doohickeys in the Morse code is the E?”
“Our myster-E,” Kilroy2.0 said.
The marine plucked the pen from the table and circled a single character, near the end of the code. “There it is, hoss.”
John looked at the paper. “It looks like a period. You’re telling me that a single dot is an E in Morse code?”
“Yeah,” Jay and Michael said simultaneously. They looked at each other and smiled slightly; their mouths crooked up at the right, their dimples appearing in their cheeks at the same time. John shook his head. “Uncanny” doesn’t even begin to describe it, he thought.
He was about to say as much when Dr. Mike scooped up the paper and looked at it. His eyes were wide, wild. “What if it were a period?”
“What do you mean?” Father Thomas said.
“The E, damn it. What if the E were just a dot, like John said? A period? What if it weren’t supposed to be translated into Morse code?” Dr. Mike crunched the paper in his fist as he paced. He dropped the wad onto the table. “What if it were a decimal point?”
“Then it’d read 297.3,” Jack said. “Does that mean anything to you?”
Dr. Mike nodded. “Yeah. I think it does. Kilroy, find me an online copy of the DSM. You know what that is?”
The hacker flinched. A look of horror slipped over his face for an instant. Then he blinked and nodded.
“I bet you do,” Dr. Mike said. “I don’t care if you have to hack, slash, or burn your way through the whole Net to find it. Just find it, Kilroy.”
The lunatic began typing.
John leaned forward. “What’s this all about, Doc?”
Mike looked up at John. “We were right. About Alpha. About the clues playing to our strengths. This one’s right up my alley.”
It didn’t take long for Kilroy2.0 to access an online version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, probably because he did indeed hack, slash, and burn his way through the Internet. He hijacked the identity of at least one psychiatrist (using the doctor’s so-called secure information including Social Security number, address, and credit-card numbers) to get the information. For shits and giggles, Kilroy2.0 also ordered a two-year subscription of Penthouse Letters for their unwitting benefactor, one Dr. Robert Riehl of Toledo, Ohio. It was apparently the least Kilroy2.0 could do to thank Dr. Riehl for the kind and selfless loan of his identity.
General Hill and Dr. Kleinman had discovered an uncontrollable urge to discuss something at the far end of the room during these transactions. Their backs were turned through the whole thing. John grinned at that. There it was again. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Out of sight, out of mind.
Kilroy2.0 loaded and launched something called a trackscrambler before he logged on to the American Psychiatric Association’s secure DSM subsite with the stolen ID and password. Kilroy2.0 typed “297.3” in the search field and retrieved one hit.
Dr. Mike was right. It was a psychiatric diagnosis.
“Shared psychotic disorder,” Michael read aloud, from over Kilroy2.0’s shoulder. The marine didn’t seem to register the lunatic’s ripe aroma or was charitably ignoring it. “It’s a delusion shared between two or more people, usually created by an ‘inducer’ who’s already suffering from a psychotic disorder.” He turned to Dr. Mike. “I need a little dose of English over here. The shrinkspeak ain’t cutting it.”
Dr. Mike stood up from his seat on the couch. “I know this disorder. I studied it in grad school.”
“I wonder if Alpha knew that,” Jack said.
Jay and Thomas looked at each other, their faces grim.
“I think we know the answer to that,” Dr. Mike said. “Shared psychotic disorder is a kind of small-scale ‘cult of personality.’ ”
“Living Colour,” John murmured. “Killer song.”
“Yeah,” Father Thomas said, from beside him. “Whatever happened to them?”
John nearly laughed out loud. “You’re full of surprises, Father.”
“We’re basically talking about a close relationship between two people,” Dr. Mike continued, “in which one of them is full shit-bird crazy and the other is highly suggestible but relatively healthy, from a mental perspective. The suggestible person begins believing whatever delusions the psychotic is spouting and also becomes shit-bird crazy in the process. I read about one case in which these two lovers believed, with every shred of their psyches, that the FBI was watching them through their home computer screen.
“Often the delusions are filled with persecution,” Dr. Mike continued. “But there are cases in which the couple—or groups of people, this is how cults get started, you know—embrace a more, ah, liberated lifestyle due to the delusions.”
“Kinky sex? That what we’re talking ’bout here, Doc?” Michael asked.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Thomas said.
“Sometimes,” Dr. Mike said. “Think of it more in terms of people doing things they normally wouldn’t do, society be damned. Bonnie and Clyde are classic examples. Back in the day, people in my field used to call this condition all kinds of different things: psychic infection, double insanity, contagious insanity. The French had a term for it.”
“Yeah, it’s here,” Michael said, staring at the screen. “Folie à deux.”
“ ‘Madness between two,’ ” Jay whispered.
“That’s right,” Dr. Mike said. “Folie à d—”
He stopped in midsentence . . . then literally slapped his hand against his forehead. Kilroy2.0 shrieked a laugh.
“Motherfucker!” Dr. Mike cried. “You wily motherfucker!”
“What is it, Doc?” Michael said.
“It’s a place.” Dr. Mike waved his arms like a tent revival preacher. “A nightclub in Los Angeles. That’s what it was called. Folie à Deux.”
Michael clapped Kilroy2.0 on the shoulder. “Kilroy, pull up the L.A.-area business listings, yellow pages, newspapers, maps, whatever you can.”
Kilroy2.0 nodded, grinning like the mad genius he undoubtedly was, and began typing furiously on the keyboards.
The marine turned to Dr. Mike and smiled. “We’re going club-hopping.”
FIFTEEN
It was a good thing Douglas Devlin could read Cyrillic. Da. A very good thing indeed . . . if only to appreciate the irony stenciled on the tin sign before him.
He stood outside in the Russian darkness, watching his breath condense in the air, his exhale made visible by the few outdoor lights here at the Tatishchevo garrison. The Volga River was about sixty miles away, but the frigid wind hailing from the water made the snowy air brittle even here. And for those who hadn’t grown up in such an environment as Devlin had, almost unbearable.
