Brigands Key Page 25

  “What business partner? You’re the sole proprietor of Brigands Key Land Holdings.”

  “I had a partner. I bought him out.”

  “Who?”

  “Artie Blount.”

  “Blount was involved with Roscoe?”

  “You bet. Me and Blount, we used to quietly buy rundown places and flip ’em. We bought the old Remarque place and slapped a little paint on it and put it back on the market. Artie had his real estate license by then and did the brokering for us. He showed it to Roscoe. I guess you could say they hit it off real well. Blount divorced Maureen over it. She never told nobody, and moved away. Blount spent many a night at Roscoe’s. Would walk there after dark and leave before daybreak. But I knew.

  “Roscoe started renovating the old pile of sticks not long after moving in. He worked on it real slow. Artie let on how Roscoe started renovating one of the upstairs bedrooms, knocking out a wall or two. That’s when their little romance cooled. Roscoe never allowed Artie around his house again.”

  “Blount,” Sanborn said. “So Roscoe found some tantalizing clues hidden by Crazy Fred. He knew he’d found something big. My guess, Blount got real nosy and found out the same stuff. Roscoe figured Blount was trying to horn in on his big find and threw him out.”

  Charley had been listening quietly. He stepped forward. “Roscoe lived there for years. Then all of a sudden, he got on this kick about treasure hunting. And codes, and code-breaking. Got the bug real bad, right after he started remodeling the place. He was after a big treasure but he never knew what he was looking for.”

  Sanborn motioned to Greenwood and started for the gym. “Okay, Tommy. Let’s go collect Artie Blount.”

  “He ain’t here, Boss. There’s a handful of folks missing and we’re going to their houses to check on them. It’s easier to spot who ain’t here than who is. Artie ain’t here.”

  Sanborn turned to Governor Crawford. “I need a favor.”

  “Name it.”

  “Place three of your troops under Officer Greenwood’s command for the next ten minutes.”

  “Can’t do that. I just stuck my neck on a Constitutional chopping block to claim they’re under my command.”

  “Under Greenwood’s direction, then.”

  “Done. Lieutenant Fisk! Get over here.”

  “Tommy, take these Guardsmen to Blount’s house. Arrest him and cuff him and meet us at the bridge. Use extreme caution and extreme prejudice.” Sanborn faced Grant. “You satisfied that the mayor’s clear?”

  “Not really. Keep him under guard.”

  “Damn you,” Johnson snapped.

  Hammond said, “Does ‘Remark 43’ mean anything to you?”

  Johnson looked puzzled. His eyes widened. “Hell yeah. Crazy Fred’s safe deposit box, number 43. The longest-held safe deposit box on the island. It’s a legend down at the First Bank. Fred left an open account that has kept the box active since his death, paid for years in advance. The bank’s honored it, figuring a relative would claim it some day.”

  “What’s it take to open a safe deposit box?” Grant asked.

  “Probable cause and a court order,” Sanborn said.

  “We’ve got probable cause and I’m not waiting for a circuit court to hold session. Johnson, issue the order.”

  Johnson hesitated.

  “Got something to hide, Mayor?”

  “I’ll get you keys to the bank and assume responsibility for the order to open the box.”

  * * *

  A gust of wind hammered them, spraying them with rain as they huddled at the door of the bank. Sanborn handed Charley a flashlight and carefully followed bank president Sally Jansen’s reluctant instructions for robbing her bank.

  He keyed open the multiple locks on the main entrance and they entered the dim, quiet bank. Half the security systems, including the front door alarm and motion sensors, had failed when the power on the island had blinked out. Sanborn made a mental note to get after Jansen about such an unreliable system if… when they got out of this.

  A set of LED lights, powered by battery, ghosted the interior in pale green light.

  “This way,” Sanborn said, sweeping the lobby with his flashlight. He moved across the room, unlocked a door to the tellers’ stations, and another behind that into the rear of the building. Beyond that lay the vault and a barred room. Sanborn examined the combination lock and withdrew the slip of paper Jansen had scribbled on. He read the paper, shielding it from his companions. He glanced at them. “You mind?”

  They turned away. Sanborn dialed the combination and was rewarded with a loud click. He turned another key and pushed the barred door open. “Here you go. The safe deposit boxes.”

  The room was little more than a wide hallway, lined with rows of safe deposit boxes. A marble-topped table was centered in the room.

  They scanned the numbers and found Box 43. Its door was a large one, two feet to a side. “Crazy Fred had one of the bigger boxes,” Sanborn said.

  “I’ve got the key,” Grant said. He raised a crowbar and wedged its point into the hairline crack of the drawer slot. He raised a sledgehammer and struck the end of the crowbar. The steel clanged sharply, throwing off sparks. He struck five more times and the frame around the drawer bent inward. He struck twice more and leaned into the crowbar. There was a snap and the door bulged forward an inch and sprang open.

  Inside were two items; an envelope and a wooden box.

  Grant handed the envelope to Sanborn, pulled the box out, and set it on the central table. It had a hinged lid. Grant slipped the hasp and raised the lid, revealing a black machine.

  “Some kind of typewriter,” Hammond said.

  The machine had a set of mechanical typewriter keys, arranged in standard QWERTY layout. Above the keys were three rows of small round windows, each window the size of a dime, each containing a single letter, also arranged in QWERTY layout.

  Above the windows were three vertical slots. Each slot had a metal wheel set down inside the machine, the rim of each wheel projecting just above the slot. A wood panel opened on the front of the box, revealing rows of small, cabled plugs fitted into sockets. A small metal plaque was attached to the front of the machine, inscribed with a single word.

  Enigma.

  “Hey, wow,” Charley said. “It’s an encryption machine. A German Enigma, from World War II.” He pulled out his code book and the stack of laminated sheets from Roscoe’s boat. “Enigmatic Lady Port! Roscoe was telling me to find and use the Enigma. That’s why this was unsolvable.”

  Sanborn tore open the envelope, withdrew a slip of paper. “Just three digits here,” he said. “Seven-four-nine.”

  “It’s code stuff, man,” Charley said. “I read about the Enigma machine. It was freakin’ ingenious. A message is encrypted by an Enigma technician, typed in. The machine’s wiring scrambles the message and each transposed letter is lit in sequence on the machine, copied down, and sent in Morse code to the receiving Enigma technician, who types the encrypted message into his machine and writes down the corresponding light. The encryption contains some fifty-billion-billion possible combinations. That’s impossible enough to crack, but the real beauty of it was that the code changed every day. It was thought for years by both sides to be absolutely unbreakable. Capturing and possessing a machine wouldn’t solve the code. Only knowing the daily settings would solve it, and the Allies eventually figured out how to anticipate the daily sets. U-boats carried Enigma machines to receive their orders. Chief, let me see that paper.”

  Sanborn handed Charley the sheet.

  “We’ve got it! These numbers are the day-setting, telling us what presets to program the machine to.” Charley read aloud the numbers and turned the three wheels to match them.

  Grant pressed one of the keys. Nothing happened.

  “It’s battery operated,” Charley said. “The battery’s dead after this many years.”

  Grant and Sanborn hurried out into the outer office, rummaged through a supply c
abinet, and returned with a 9-volt battery. Charley had already opened the cabinet of the Enigma and removed the wires from the ancient German battery. He placed the fresh battery beside the machine and twisted the wires onto its terminals. He pressed a key and the light above it blinked on. “We’re up and running!”

  “Who’s a good typist?” Grant asked.

  “Sixty words a minute,” Hammond said. He pulled up a chair in front of the machine.

  “Type like there’s no tomorrow.” Grant sat next to him and opened a notebook and readied a pencil. “Read us the code sheets, Charley Eff.”

  Charley began calling out the scrambled letters, Hammond typing each as he went, Grant scribbling down the reordered letters.

  In seconds, they knew they had cracked the code.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Captain Remarque’s Journal

  October 1962

  Committing this to paper is not necessarily smart but after much deliberation it is my decision. Recent events (and a too-close familiarity with the baser instincts of our species) have prompted this history. It is all I have left to offer. I pray that the chance of good outweighs that of evil this story might bring.

  I am old and cannot live forever, but these events will not die with me. Furthermore, I set these thoughts in code for English decipherment. I have acquired a working Enigma from a collector in Belgium, and with it I secure this story from the casual thief.

  I am known on this strange, friendly island as Fred Remarque. Crazy Fred. The odd old bird with the funny accent.

  My name is (or was) Captain Friedrich Remarque. I am German. I grew up in Pirmasens, near the French border. My childhood ended abruptly when the guns of August 1914 came to bear. At seventeen, I entered the German Navy.

  The Great War ended badly for Deutschland.

  I returned to Pirmasens and became a shopkeeper, a seller of linens. I failed at it. And my country failed and rage and misery led us into nightmare once again. In 1936, I was again conscripted into the Navy, now called Kriegsmarine. I became commander of Unterseeboot-498.

  Our boat was a Type IX-C, sturdy, built for long-range missions. A top speed of over eighteen knots. Seventy-six meters long, with a draft of under five meters. She packed twenty-two torpedoes, a 105-millimeter deck cannon, and two anti-aircraft guns. My crew of forty-eight was the best in the fleet.

  We prowled the Eastern Seaboard of America, killing ships and Americans. Upon occasion, we let ships slip away, to avoid detection. Intelligence was often more valuable to the Reich than the tonnage of sunken ships. We deposited spies on American soil and we collected spies from American soil. Never did we ask what they knew. They were an elite class of warriors. Untouchables, Americans might say.

  In 1942, U-498 steamed into the Gulf of Mexico. In a week, we had sunk three freighters. Airplanes swarmed, searching for us. We slipped quietly back into the Atlantic and crossed the ocean to celebrate our success, and returned and did it again.

  So it went. The wolfpacks ruled the Gulf for a year, sending fifty-six ships to the bottom. But the Americans grew stronger and committed men, planes, and ships to the Gulf. In summer of 1942, the U-166 was attacked and went down. It was, history tells us, the only German submarine lost in the Gulf of Mexico.

  That is a lie.

  By 1943, the wolfpacks were in retreat across the Atlantic. The enemy had decrypted the Enigma code, and he designed ships and planes to kill us. Three out of every four German submariners lost their lives.

  By spring of 1945, the war lapsed into nightmare for the Fatherland. The Soviets were destroying Berlin, the Americans and British had retaken Italy and France and were crossing the Rhine. The war was all but lost. The Kriegsmarine was a shell of its former self. In 1940, we lost twenty-four U-boats. In 1944, two hundred and fifty. Yet we fought on.

  The U-498 cruised the Mid-Atlantic, still on the hunt. Forty kilometers northeast of Savannah, we targeted a rusting cargo ship making a dash for the city. Three kilometers separated us. Another seven northwest prowled a destroyer, keeping a protective eye on the merchant ship and another vessel, ten kilometers farther. If we could slip in quietly and claim our prize, the destroyer would be tasked with collecting survivors, unable to give chase. Good. The Führer had ordered all U-boats to kill any survivors, to take no prisoners. The captains universally hated the barbaric order. The threat and presence of the destroyer would excuse me from carrying it out.

  We shadowed the freighter, watching, alert for trouble. When the destroyer drifted farther out of range, we closed swiftly. The torpedoes were armed, slicked with Vaseline, ready for firing. I took the periscope and drew upon my target. It would be an easy kill.

  I hesitated. To this day, I’m not sure why.

  I could feel the eyes of my crew upon me. They were waiting, wondering.

  First Watch Officer Becker burst into the room, frantically waving a piece of paper. “Captain, do not fire! We have received a radiogram.”

  I took the paper and read it. “You are certain of the decryption?”

  “As certain as ever, Captain.”

  I turned to the crew. “There will be no attack. We have been redirected. Mueller, take us to ten fathoms, course southeast.”

  “Where are we headed, Captain?”

  “Into the Gulf of Mexico.”

  The crew exchanged glances. The Gulf had been abandoned by the U-boats for two years. A sudden, hurried course change to the Gulf meant only one thing. A spy mission.

  The men hated spies. There were only two tasks a sub could perform on spy missions. Insertion and removal. Both were dangerous. Both required shallow water maneuvers, creeping close to shore, damn near beaching oneself.

  A sub was as good as dead if a patrol plane spotted it in such a place.

  Farther abroad, safely removed from Savannah, we surfaced under cover of darkness and switched from batteries to diesel engines. Conditions were favorable and we moved swiftly. We passed Jacksonville far out at sea and turned due south. In fifty-four hours, we rounded the Florida Straits and entered the bathtub that is the Gulf of Mexico. In another twenty-four, we passed Tampa.

  Since ’42, patrols by plane and destroyer had made the Gulf untenable to submarines. Now we had returned to challenge them on a dubious mission in the waning weeks of a war we had no chance of winning.

  Our mission had already extended far beyond our planned stay at sea. Morale was low and water and food supplies even lower. I cut rations of both, further eroding morale.

  On the night of April twelfth, our drinking water ran out, but we had reached our destination. We crept to within three kilometers of shore and eased into position in gentle seas. I stood atop the conning tower, scanning the darkness ahead. A low ceiling of clouds blotted out a quarter moon. Rendezvous with spies are always performed under new moon, the darkest of nights, yet we were under less than darkest conditions. The men swore about poor planning, but they knew better. For us to be sent here, now, optimum conditions had been willfully ignored.

  Someone had deemed the mission vital.

  I had memorized my charts of the area. The water was a mere seven fathoms at high tide. We hoped. The charts were not the best, as this was an area of little shipping. I had crewmen fore and aft taking soundings, and found that the depth was less than six fathoms. We were close to running aground. There was no need to be here. This coast was rural, sparsely peopled. Tallahassee lay one hundred and twenty kilometers northeast, Panama City seventy kilometers northwest. Strung along the coast like a necklace were tiny fishing hamlets.

  Ahead, small barrier islands girdled the bay of the Apalachicola River. We dared not enter the shallow bay, but I could smell the land and forest and the fresh, muddy water. I breathed deeply. Though we could see nothing of the land ahead and dared not lay a foot upon it, the nearness of solid earth, however foreign and hostile, never failed to stir the imagination and yearning of submariners too long at sea.

  “It is time, Captain,” said Becker, at my
right.

  “The signal, then.”

  The signalman flashed his light twice rapidly, paused, and flashed once more.

  We waited.

  There was no signal in reply.

  “The pick-up has not made rendezvous, Captain. We have performed our task. Perhaps we should leave.”

  “Patience, Becker.” I was as anxious as he to be out of that dangerous place. We waited in silence, watching, listening for two hours. I glanced at my watch. “Signal once more.”

  He did so and we waited.

  “Mein Kapitan, the tide is ebbing. We were already shallow when we came in at high tide. In another ten minutes, we will be aground.”

  The sky was already graying in the east. In an hour, the sun would be up. I felt relieved, absolved. “We have fulfilled our mission to the best of our ability. We shall be on our way.”

  “Captain!” Mueller cried, pointing.

  A hundred meters ahead, a dark shape, barely visible, crept over the gentle waves. A small boat approached, its small engine rattling.

  “Arms at the ready, men.”

  Mueller and Becker unshouldered their carbines and aimed at the small craft. I unholstered my Luger and clicked the safety off and raised it to eye level.

  The black figure throttled the boat’s engine to an idle and the dinghy coasted. The figure raised its arms toward us. Becker sucked in his breath and leaned into his carbine.

  “Steady, Becker,” I said.

  A light flashed on the boat, five short times, followed by a single long one. The correct response signal.

  “Proceed, sir,” I called softly.

  The figure maneuvered his tiny craft and pulled alongside the sub. Crewmen scrambled to haul the man aboard. He was dressed head to toe in black, his face painted black. A canvas bag was slung over his shoulder, clearly containing something of considerable bulk. He struggled under the weight of it. I offered to help him with it. He waved me back, with a piercing angry light in his eyes.

  “Captain Friedrich Remarque,” I said, saluting. “At your service, sir.”

  “I am Shreck,” he replied in a raspy, tired voice. “Max Shreck.” A good name for a spy who wishes to remain anonymous. Max Fear, after the gaunt actor that played F.W. Mirnau’s ghastly vampire, Nosferatu.