Checkmate (14 page)

Ralph was driving and I was beside him, with Lien-hua and Brin in the backseat.

The women were talking quietly about the funeral. It sounded like Brin had moved past her issues with the sermon and she and Lien-hua were listing the people they'd seen there that they knew, discussing follow-up calls they might want to make to some of the family members who were grieving.

Ralph had just turned onto his road when my phone vibrated.

I tapped the screen and a text message came up from an unknown caller:

Cur homo mortalis caput extruis at morieris en vertex talis sit modo calvus eris.

“That's weird,” I muttered.

“Whatcha got?” he asked.

“Somebody sent me a message in Latin.”

“Who's it from?”

“I have no idea.”

The most obvious answer would have been Tessa, but this was from 426-2225, which wasn't her number.

No area code came up.

I tapped at my screen to put a call through to the number but no one answered. No voicemail. After letting it ring a dozen times I hung up and called Cyber to have them trace the number.

The conversation in the backseat faded as our wives' attention shifted toward what was going on in the front.

I copied the Latin text and pasted it into an online translator, but the translation it brought up didn't make any sense:
Why a mortal head up but such is only going to see the top, you will be bald.

Ralph's house was right up ahead and he began to slow down.

“What did you get?” Lien-hua asked me.

“It's nonsense.” I read it to them.

“You should have Tessa help you with it.”

That was not a bad idea.

We pulled into the driveway.

But first things first.

While the others filed into Ralph's house, I went over to touch base with the agent who'd been assigned to watch the house.

I thought it would be Agent Woods, but apparently Danner had relieved her, and as I approached the car he rolled down his window. An empty burrito wrapper lay on the floor next to him.

I asked him how things had been. “All good. Quiet,” he told me. “I knocked on the door once, checked on them. They were watching TV.”

“Thanks. Hopefully, we won't have to call you back again.”

There was a tiny pause. “Yes, sir.”

Inside the house, Tessa and Tony were in the living room. Tessa had the remote control on her lap and the wide-screen TV that stared out across the room had been paused in the middle of
Star Trek Into Darkness
, one of Tony's favorite movies. I imagined that they'd been watching it as a necessary distraction from having to think about where their parents were.

Better to go to a funeral than to a party.

Maybe it depends a little on how old you are.

“Hey,” Tessa said to me.

“Hey.”

“Did it . . . did it go okay?”

“Yes.”

Brin and Lien-hua disappeared into the kitchen to round up some lunch and I said to Tessa, “I wonder if you can help me with something.”

“What is it?”

“Come on. I'll show you.”

She handed off the remote to Tony, who went back to his movie. Then she followed Ralph and me to the room that had been set aside as the nursery.

“Yes?” Tessa asked inquisitively. “What do you need?”

“A translation. I tried plugging it into one of those online translators and what came up didn't make sense.”

“Yeah, well, those things are pretty much useless unless you're just trying to find out how to ask someone where the bathroom is or how much the sombrero costs.” She held out her hand. “Let me see what you have.”

“It's Latin.”

“Perf.”

I gave her the phone and she settled into the rocking chair beside the crib. Some baby clothes sat neatly inside it. The pink hat that Brineesha had knitted for the baby lay on top of them.

Tessa studied the phone's screen. “Well, it starts with
cur
, so it's a question—why?
Homo
is ‘man,'
mortalis
is an
obvious one—even if you don't know Latin you should be able to translate that.”

“Mortal, deadly?” I said.

“Yeah.
Caput
is ‘head . . .'” It sounded like she was thinking aloud. “‘Why, mortal man . . .'
Extruo
is ‘to build up, pile up, raise . . .' So: ‘Why, mortal man, do you raise up your head . . . ?'”

She paused and I wasn't sure if she was expecting us to reply, but I didn't interrupt, just waited for her to go on.

“Okay, so that's the first part, then
at morieris en vertex . . .
In Latin the word
at
means ‘but' or ‘while' or ‘on the other hand'—anything along those lines.
Morior
can mean ‘to expire' or ‘fail' but also ‘to die.' And
en
is a command—‘look!' ‘Behold!' . . . So I'm thinking it's, ‘When, behold, you will die.'”

She scrunched up her face and studied the phone. “And then there's
vertex
. It's usually the crown or the peak or top of something, but that just doesn't really make . . .” She mumbled a few comments about
talis
and
calvus
and
eris
and the random subjunctive construction of some sort. Then, finger-swiping to a Latin vocabulary website, she looked up a couple of definitions.

“Okay, here's what I'm thinking about the second half: ‘When, behold, you will die and the top, or crown of your head, will become as bald as this'—
calvus
, that's bald—‘as this' . . . what?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it's referring to something bald and dead, you know, like a skull, but it's just implied. It's not implicitly stated.”

“So,” Ralph put the whole thing together: “‘Why, mortal man, do you raise up your head when, behold, you will die and—'”

Tessa cut him off. “‘End up as bald as this skull.' I mean, you can condense it some; that's basically what it's saying, contextualizing it into English.”

Ralph pulled out the bulletin from the funeral, wrote her translation on it, and examined it.

I wondered what that text might mean to the investigation.

You will die? Is it referring to one of the people we buried today? Someone else entirely? Another victim?

The message could easily be taken as a threat against me.

We really needed to find out who sent that text.

“So what's it from?” Tessa asked. “This phrase, I mean?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“But it's a case, right? It has to do with this bombing?”

“Tessa, I don't know.”

“Oh, come on. A mystery note in Latin about death and an awareness of the finite nature of human existence arrives right after the funeral of those killed in the explosion? And it just so happens to be sent to one of the FBI agents who actually survived the bombing? The guy whose book was left at the scene of a homicide that's related to the case? Seriously? You don't have to be C. Auguste Dupin to figure that one out.”

Most people might have said you didn't need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure it out, but Tessa hated
Holmes, was convinced that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle plagiarized and based Holmes on Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin. But that was a rant for another day.

“Tessa.” I gestured toward the door. “Give us a minute, okay?”

“I already know what it says. Why can't I listen in?”

“This is official FBI business.”

“So it
is
a case.”

“Tessa, you have to . . .” I paused. She probably knew Latin as well as, if not better than, anyone in the Bureau. It made sense to use her expertise as long as she was here. Besides, she'd already worked through the translation. “So, you haven't heard it before? You don't recognize it from any readings you've done?”

“No.” She looked deep in thought. “It sounds like something a medieval philosopher might have written.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, the grammar is all weird and loose. It's not smooth like it would be if it were written by a Roman, by someone who really knew the language well. Besides, in all my reading I've never come across it. And there's no question mark, which is a little odd.”

“Lunch is served,” Brineesha called from the other room.

“Alright,” Ralph said. “We grab a bite to eat and then Pat and I look into this, see what we come up with.”

“Pat and you?” Tessa's tone made her disappointment clear.

“Yes. Pat and me.”

After Brineesha said grace and offered up a prayer for those who'd lost loved ones in the attack, we passed the food around. No one really seemed to have an appetite, not even Tony or Ralph.

The meal was uneventful and we decided to wait until later for dessert.

After we left the table, Ralph and I went to his basement for a little privacy.

He and Brineesha had a one-room apartment down here, where Brin's mom had stayed with them before she died late last summer.

Lien-hua spent some time here recovering after she was attacked by Richard Basque in April. Brin was a nurse, so rather than stay at my house, it had made sense to have Lien-hua stay where Brin could help her if necessary. Also, the basement had access from the driveway so she hadn't had to deal with the stairs.

Using my laptop, I looked for anything relating to the Latin phrase—even excerpts of it—but didn't come up with anything.

Ralph took the opposite approach and searched for Tessa's translation online to see if it was a quote from somewhere.

Nothing.

It might not appear anywhere. It could have just been written by someone to taunt you.

Yes, that was a possibility.

I heard footsteps on the stairs. Tessa's gait. “Can I come down?”

“What is it?” I said.

“Did you solve it yet?”

“Not yet, but—”

“I've been thinking about it. I might have something for you. Can I come down or do we have to do this whole talking-to-each-other-up-the-stairs thing?”

I looked at Ralph, who shrugged. “Come on down,” I told my daughter.

She joined us in the basement. Ralph had his weights set up in the corner of the room and she took a seat on the weight bench.

“The language of the Church is Latin,” she said. “Maybe it's something from one of their catechisms or the Vatican archives . . . or . . .” Her voice faded out as she got caught up in her thoughts. “With the whole skull deal maybe it's an inscription on a sculpture or something. You might want to have your team search medieval books or writings from the Church. . . .”

My cell rang.

Angela's ringtone.

“Hold that thought.” I answered the phone. “What do you have, Angela?”

“Nothing is coming up for the phone number that the text came from.”

Why didn't that surprise me. “So whoever's behind this has found a way to send texts from numbers that aren't his?”

“Unfortunately, that's not too difficult. For less than ten dollars you can download apps that'll do it. I'll search for mnemonics and look a little more closely to see if I can decipher the origin of the text.”

“Good. Thanks.”

When we hung up Ralph said, “Anything?”

“Not yet.” I turned to Tessa. “You were saying?”

“It might be lyrics from a song or a refrain from a poem. Could even be something contemporary.”

“Wouldn't they show up online?”

“Maybe,” she acknowledged. “But it could be that someone translated the phrase from English into Latin and that would mean they might have used a slightly different word order or syntax. So, the lyrics might not have come up if you searched for them with those specific words.”

“It would be some pretty dark lyrics, don't you think?” Ralph said.

She shrugged. “Not really.”

“Any idea on bands?” I asked her.

“I mean, House of Blood or maybe Death by Suzie might have some lyrics like that, but I know most all of their songs, so . . . probably not. Maybe Boomerang Puppy—they actually have a whole song in Latin. The phrase isn't in it, but who knows? It could be there's a song out there that I don't know about. I'll do some checking.”

She already had her phone out. “And we need to send out an inquiry into the Latin underground.”

She'd gone through this with me before. Over the last decade there'd been a resurgence of Latin on the Web: discussions, videos, podcasts, all in Latin. An essentially dead language was being revived and revitalized by Latin geeks online.

“Tessa, let's say someone didn't know Latin as well as you do and was translating from the English into Latin, or vice versa. Can you come up with some other phrases—”

“That could have been translated that way.”

“That's what I'm thinking, yes.”

“So, you're officially asking me to help you with a case?”

“It's not exactly a case, it's just—”

She patted her hand against the air to stop me. “Sure. Let's just pretend it's important.”

Some time ago I'd given her the nickname Raven, partly because of her interest in Poe and partly because, with her black hair and untamed imagination, she made me think of a free-spirited bird. And now the nickname slipped out. “That's not what I mean, Raven, I . . .”

“No, it's cool. I get it, Agent Powers.”

“Agent Powers, huh?”

She shared a look with Ralph.

I let them have their fun.

Tessa retreated upstairs to look into the Latin underground, and I called Angela back to have her team do image searches on skulls, album and CD covers, different translations of the Latin—and to contact the Vatican just in case my daughter was right about their catechisms or archives.

“Whoever sent that text to you knew how to cover his tracks,” Angela told me. “I wasn't able to find out exactly where it came from. It was routed through a carrier in North Carolina, but the GPS seems to have come from the DC area.”

“So North Carolina or DC?”

“There are digital signatures that point to both. That's what I'm saying. That's why it stuck out to me.”

“Interesting.”

“And that's not all. Lacey has been busy. Remember the list of words that the numbers in the column of the book might spell out mnemonically?”

“Yes.”

“And one of them was Meck Dec?” She sounded like I should know what that was referring to.

“Yes.”

“That's our link.”

“What's our link? Meck Dec? What does that mean?”

“The Mecklenburg Declaration.”

“I've never heard of it.”

“I hadn't either, but Lacey dug it up. Before the actual Declaration of Independence was written, a year earlier, back in 1775, the people in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina—where Charlotte is located—well, they wrote up their own declaration of independence and had a local tavern owner deliver it to DC. The stories are a little conflicted from there on out, but apparently he completed his trip but the declaration was rejected. He returned to Charlotte and became something of a folk hero. Captain Jack. You know, like in
Pirates of the Caribbean.
But he was a tavern owner, not a quirky, fey yet gorgeous pirate.”

“Gotcha.” I'd almost forgotten how much Angela, who is single, is in love with Johnny Depp. “So what happened to this declaration?”

“It was destroyed in a fire, although there was an alleged copy of it printed in 1819 in the
Raleigh Register
.”

“Alleged?”

“Some of the phrases are so close to what's found in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence that some people think he plagiarized it, others think the version printed was a fake. In any case, in Charlotte they take it all pretty seriously. They even celebrate May twentieth, the day it was signed, as Meck Dec Day.”

So.

That gave us three investigative threads that led to North Carolina: the stolen Colonial weaponry; the numbers scribbled in the book, if they really were referring to the Mecklenburg Declaration; and the origin of the text message.

She said, “I'm going to forward you the list of words that can be made from the phone number you sent me. I think one of them will catch your eye.”

“Which one is that?”

“Trust me. You'll know it when you see it.”

She ended the call and a few seconds later her list of words arrived.

Of the ones that actually contained some meaningful combination of letters, I found
gam-back, ham-cab-5, I-coca-a-5
, and more, but it only took a second or two for my eyes to land on the one that made the most sense.

4-26-2225

I-am-back

I showed it to Ralph.

“What are you thinking?

“I'm thinking it's time to call Margaret. We may need to take a road trip to North Carolina.”