Page 25 of Tightrope

Bewildered, he rose from the bed, the whiskey bottle clutched in one fist. Forty bucks. It was a small fortune for a guy like him.

He reached down and grabbed the bills.

“Leave me alone,” he shouted.

Another twenty appeared.

Eugene snatched up the bill. He shoved all three into the pocket of his trousers. Gripping the whiskey bottle in one fist, preparing to use it as a weapon, he unlocked the door and opened it.

There was no one on the front step.

“What the hell?” Eugene started to close the door.

A figure moved in the shadows on the right-hand side of the door. The light spilling through the doorway gleamed on a pistol.

Dumbstruck, Eugene edged back into the cabin. The stranger followed, moving into the light. He was dressed in a classy-looking jacket and trousers and a crisp white shirt. There was something terribly wrong with his face. From the neck up he was swathed in bandages. There were holes in the wrappings where the eyes and nose and mouth should be.

The man with the gun was wearing a mask that made him look like Boris Karloff in the movieThe Mummy.

Eugene told himself it should be funny, but he had never been so scared in his life. He retreated into the cabin.

Mummy Mask followed and closed the door.

“You can call me Smith,” he said in his muffled Cary Grant voice.

Chapter 14

Amalie had coffee ready when Matthias walked into the big kitchen. His grim expression told her that he had not found whatever it was that he was hoping to discover in Pickwell’s room.

“Have a seat,” she said. She waved a hand to indicate one of the wooden chairs at the big table in the center of the kitchen. “I take it you didn’t have any luck in Pickwell’s room.”

“No. It was a long shot because I had already searched the place, but I figured maybe I had missed something. I went through everything again. Nothing had been disturbed. I’m sure the intruder never got that far, assuming that was his objective.”

She realized that she almost felt sorry for Matthias Jones. Almost.

She put the cup and saucer down in front of him and added a small bowl of sugar and a little pitcher of cream. Then she took a seat on the other side of the table.

“The first time you asked to search his room I got the impressionthat you were looking for a very specific item,” she said. “Care to explain?”

“I was hoping to find a device that probably resembles a large, heavy typewriter.”

“Probablyresembles a typewriter?”

“I’ve never seen the Ares machine.” Matthias drank some coffee and lowered the cup. “No one I know has seen it. I found some drawings, just early design sketches, but I am fairly certain that the final version of the machine looks a lot like a standard typewriter.”

“What makes this particular typewriter so important?”

Matthias drank some more coffee and then, slowly, he started to talk.

“The Ares machine is a prototype of a new cipher machine, a device that can send and receive encrypted messages,” he said.

She raised her brows. “I’m not an engineer or a cryptographer but I do know what the wordciphermeans.”

“Sorry. Cipher machines that look a lot like typewriters have been around for a long time, ever since the end of the Great War, in fact. They are constantly being improved and redesigned to make the encryption more secure. As far as we know, the most advanced devices on the market today are those based on a design that was patented by Arthur Scherbius in Germany. They’re called Enigma machines.”

“Machines, plural? You mean there are a lot of them out there?”

“Sure. For years Enigmas were routinely marketed internationally to large businesses, as well as to various military organizations and governments. They were very expensive, however, so they didn’t show up in your local lawyer’s office or accounting firm.”