Fringe - the Zodiac Paradox (13 page)

Allan spun to face a young Chinese man with long, shaggy hair and a concerned expression. He was wearing a grease-stained mechanic’s uniform.

Something let loose inside of Allan and he launched himself at the concerned stranger, tackling him and knocking him down. The young man was surprisingly strong, but his hard, angry punches and vigorous struggle inflamed and infuriated Allan more that they hurt him. The flare of sparks in his hands and forearms became hotter and brighter than ever, burning the flesh off the stranger’s skull like a blowtorch as Allan smashed his face against the curb again and again. The unfortunate stranger stopped screaming and went limp in Allan’s grasp, but he couldn’t stop battering the lifeless body for several endless minutes.

Cracked and blackened teeth scattered down the alley like loaded dice.

His hands felt as if they were being attacked by angry hornets, deadly sparks flying with every blow like a blacksmith hammering hot metal. When he finally forced himself to stop and back away from the charred corpse, he felt spent, but calm.

He couldn’t allow the idiot hippies to get the upper hand. He had to keep a clear head and think, to rely on the superior mental acumen that had gotten him this far.

He easily hefted the slender young man’s body and tossed it into an open dumpster, covering it with damp, moldy cardboard and newspaper. He closed the lid, and then gathered up the scattered teeth, slipping them into the left front pocket of his fatigue pants. There was a rather substantial amount of blood around the edge of the curb, but it had turned dark brown and lumpy, flash-cooked on the concrete by Allan’s furious heat. It looked more like the sludgy leakage from old rotten garbage than the evidence of a recent murder.

Allan had nothing to worry about.

He stuck the shopping bag under one arm and strolled casually back around to the door of the warehouse. No one was there. No authorities had been called. He slipped in unobserved.

* * *

He didn’t find his notebook.

He scoured the stairwell and the whole of the third floor. It was gone. Which could mean only one thing.

They had it. The hippies from Reiden Lake had his notebook.

Well then,
he thought.
Let the games begin.

Back at Nina’s thankfully empty house, the three of them sat on the soft, musty couches in the dim living room, trying to rethink their strategy, to brainstorm and see if they could make any headway with the coded notebook. But within minutes, the fear, anxiety, adrenaline, and stress—combined with the lack of sleep the night before—caught up to them with a vengeance.

Before long they were all out cold, as if they’d been sapped.

Walter woke to the soft, gentle clink of a teacup and saucer. When he peeled his sandpapery eyelids open, he saw that the fluffy Himalayan cat had curled up on his chest and Abby the pregnant blonde was sitting crosslegged on the floor, drinking a cup of tea and leafing through the pages of a large book featuring the art of Alphonse Mucha.

“Hi,” she said with a sunny, childish smile when she saw that he was awake. “Would you like some tea? I just made a fresh pot.”

“My dear,” Walter said, knuckling the sleep from his eyes and gently moving the placid cat from his chest to the couch so he could sit up. “In this moment, I believe my body needs caffeine more than it needs oxygen.”

“Did somebody say caffeine?” Bell asked from underneath a purple and red paisley throw pillow.

“Four hundred and fifty milligrams, administered intravenously, please,” Nina said, sitting up, rotating her neck, and twisting her tangled hair into a topknot. “With cream and sugar.”

Abby looked at Nina, then back at Walter with her big eyes even bigger than normal. Walter followed her gaze back to Nina and saw what Abby was seeing. The bruising, the spit lip, the signs of their ill-prepared hand-to-hand struggle with the killer. Walter’s hands flew involuntarily to his own face, running his fingers over the damage there. Even the slightest contact made him wince.

His body hurt, too. Everything hurt.

Nina, noting the shocked look on Abby’s sweet, simple face, shook her head, letting her red hair fall back down.

“You should see the other guy,” she said.

“Wow,” Abby said. It was all clearly more than she could wrap her pretty blond head around. “I mean... wow. I’d better... you know... go get that tea.” She got to her feet with minimal struggle, considering her enormous belly, and then drifted away into the kitchen.

Walter took the killer’s notebook from his pocket and was about to open it when Nina gave him a sternly arched eyebrow and a terse shake of her head.

So he slipped the notebook back into his pocket as Abby returned from the kitchen, balancing a tray of steaming mugs, a fancy silver Victorian creamer, a bouquet of mismatched spoons, and a whimsical ceramic sugar bowl shaped like an octopus. The minute she set the tray down, the three of them fell on the tea like animals. Walter drained more than half of the scalding hot liquid in one foolhardy gulp, utterly unmindful of his burnt tongue.

“Thank you, Abby,” Nina said, getting to her feet with her mug in one hand and gesturing toward the stairs. “Now, will you excuse us? We’re going to go on upstairs. We’ve got a few things to discuss.”

“Oh...” Abby said. “That’s cool.” She picked up the lazy cat. “I’ll just hang out down here with Cat-Mandu.” She turned the feline over and cradled him like an infant, any shock or questions about their bruises long gone from her mayfly mind. Even if she realized that they didn’t want her overhearing their conversation, she didn’t seem to care at all.

She set the cat down and went back to her book without another word.

Walter and Bell followed Nina up the stairs, mugs in hand.

Back in Nina’s large Spartan bedroom, the three of them plunked their sore, beat-up frames into the same seats they’d chosen before the madness. Nina and Bell together on her tightly made bed, and Walter at the desk by the windows.

“Okay,” Nina said. “We’re all thinking it, but I’m going to say it. That was really, really stupid. If I hadn’t brought my gun, we’d all be dead.”

“But we saved the passengers,” Walter argued. “You said so yourself—isn’t that what matters?”

“Nina’s right,” Bell said. “We didn’t think things through, but we got lucky. Next time, we might not be so lucky. We need a plan.”

Walter nodded, duly chastened.

“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “So from here on out, we need to find a way to fight the killer with brains, not brawn. Attack this problem like scientists, not... Dirty Harry.”

“Right,” Bell replied. “And what is the first thing a scientist does when confronted with surprising or atypical results?”

“Repeat the experiment.”

“Repeat the experiment?” Nina echoed. “We almost got ourselves killed today. If you want to repeat that, you can count me out.”

“I’m not talking about repeating the events of today,” Bell began.

“Repeat the original experiment,” Walter finished. He felt that old familiar flush of excitement—the one he got when he and Bell were perfectly synchronized in their thinking process, on the verge of a major scientific breakthrough. “Recreate the original
formula.
We need to see if we can reopen that gate.”

“Because if we can do that,” Bell said, pausing to let Walter finish.

“We can send him back.”

Nina looked from Bell to Walter, a slight frown creasing her brow.

“Are you sure that’s wise?” she asked. “I mean, the last time you opened this gate, you let a killer stroll right in to our world. What if it happens again?”

“She’s right,” Bell said. “What if we unleash a whole army of Zodiacs?”

“But I don’t see any other way to stop him,” Walter said. “We can’t just let him keep killing.”

“Okay,” Nina said. “What if you two drop the special acid and concentrate on opening the gate again, and I’ll stand by with Lulu.” She pulled the handgun from her purse and gave it an affectionate pat. “Anyone or anything comes through that gate, I’ll let ’em have it.”

“I don’t know if I can condone that plan of action,” Walter said. “I mean, yes, clearly the last person or being that traveled through the gate has an unquestionably violent and unstable disposition. But that doesn’t mean that every single individual from the other side of that psychic gateway can be condemned to death, based solely on the actions of one man.

“I wouldn’t want to be summarily exterminated by aliens who judged the whole human race on the behavior of Charles Manson, for example,” he continued. “The next being that passes through might be a scholar or a scientist or a grandmother not unlike the ones we saved today.”

“Fair enough,” Bell acknowledged. “But I still think having Nina standing by as ground control couldn’t possibly be a bad idea. Not as an executioner—just as armed back-up, in case things get ugly.”

“Also,” Walter said, taking out the killer’s notebook and laying it on the desk, “I think it would be wise to spend some time working on decoding this. It may contain information about the world on the other side of the gate. Information that might be useful—or at least good to know before we open the way again. Forewarned is forearmed.”

“You see if you can get anywhere with that notebook, Walter,” Bell said, pulling his own red notebook from an inner pocket. “And Nina and I will see about acquiring the chemicals and equipment required to recreate our original formula. Good thing I keep every single formula written down.”

But Walter was barely listening. He opened the notebook to the last written page and stared at the groupings of letters, searching out double pairings and running a series of simple substitutions in his head. He reached for a pencil and a blank sheet of paper from a stack beside Nina’s typewriter, and began to fill it with scribbled notes and test keys.

Some time later, although Walter couldn’t have guessed how long if he’d been paid to do so, he became aware of a warm, spicy, almost ambrosial smell.

Chinese food.

Up until that moment he’d only been vaguely aware of a distant discomfort somewhere in his midsection, but when the smell hit him, he was suddenly voraciously hungry. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything to eat.

He lifted his blurring, exhausted eyes from the scattered pages of his notes and saw Nina and Bell. He hadn’t noticed them leaving the room, but they clearly had gone somewhere and returned. Bell was carrying a large box of beakers and burners and heavy, brown glass bottles.

But Walter was only interested in what Nina was carrying. She was the one with the food. At that point, Walter was willing to trade his right arm for one of those wonderful little folded paper boxes.

“Nina,” Walter said as she handed him one of the warm boxes. “You are my angel.”

“And what am I?” Bell asked. “Chopped liver? Ergot seems to grow on trees in this town, but do you have any idea how hard it was to obtain monopropellant-grade anhydrous hydrazine?”

“Are there any forks?” Walter asked, peeling open his box of noodles and breathing in the fragrant steam.

“Just these,” Nina replied, holding up a fist full of balsa wood chopsticks.

“That’s okay,” Walter said, tipping the box to his lips like a cup and slurping up the noodles.

“Lovely,” Nina said, separating a pair of the chopsticks for herself and delicately dipping them into her own container. “Just try not to make a mess on my desk.”

“No, no—of course not.” Walter moved a page of his notes over to the right to cover a large splat of sauce. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“So Nina’s got a small lab we can use, set up in the basement,” Bell said. “Small, and nothing fancy, but it’ll do. There’s even a darkroom for Chick’s photography.” He peered over Walter’s shoulder. “How are you getting on with the notebook?”

Walter slurped another mouthful of noodles, talking around them.

“I tried all the basic approaches,” he said. “Including the one those teachers used to crack the cipher he sent to the papers. No dice. This is much more complicated, and far more secure. See, look here.”

He poked at the notebook with a saucy finger.

“I started off with frequency analysis. Searching for pairs, right?” He flipped the pages and pointed first to a double
Q
and then a double
F
. “Hoping to lock down my
L
. The most common double-letter pairing in the English language being the double
L
, of course, challenged only by the double
T.
But here’s the thing. It’s rarely the same.” Another massive mouthful of noodles. “There are only one or two repeats in the whole book. So that got me thinking polyalphabetic substitution.”

“Vigenère?” Bell asked, putting down his box of chemicals and grabbing some food of his own.

“Could be,” Walter said. “But that seems like such a pain. Plus we have a few symbols mixed in here and there, though not on the last ten pages.”

“What’s Vigenère?” Nina asked.

Walter sorted through his notes until he came up with the Vigenère’s square he’d laid out.

“It uses twenty-six substitution ciphers,” he told her. “One for each letter of the alphabet. But the problem is that it requires a keyword to solve.” He pulled out a list he’d made of logical guesses that he’d already tried. Words like
Zodiac
and the names of several known victims. But none had panned out. “We could spend the rest of our lives trying to randomly guess his keyword. And worse, I’m fairly certain he’s using multiple keywords, maybe even more than one on every page. I wouldn’t say it’s crack-proof, but I believe it may be beyond my own personal abilities.”

Bell had stopped eating with his chopsticks frozen halfway to his mouth. He put the box of noodles down and came over to the desk, eyes zooming in on the last written page of the notebook.

“Try
Reiden,”
he said.

“My God,” Walter said, putting his own food aside and grabbing the pencil.

* * *

Less than an hour later, Walter had most of the last page of the notebook deciphered. He held the handwritten translation up and read it out loud to Nina and Bell.