Assassin's Honor (9781561648207) (3 page)

Some passenger died? This was why my men and I pushed ourselves and our ship to the point of total fatigue to get to Key West so quickly?

I swallowed my sarcasm and merely said, “Sir, I still don't understand why
Bennington
was needed here.”

The admiral shook his head slowly, looking down at his desk. Then he looked up at me. “It wasn't your ship I needed, Wake. It was
you
.”

Key West Naval

Station Saturday morning

10 December 1892

The intensity of the admiral's stare matched his tone.

This was getting a little overdramatic, I thought, but I humored him. “Yes, sir. So they found an
unnaturally
dead body . . . but why do you need me?”

Now that he was in the meat of the matter, the pace of Walker's narrative picked up speed. “I'll explain. The morning of
Philadelphia
's arrival, one of the first-class passengers, a Mr. Simon Drake, age fifty-three and traveling alone, was found dead in his cabin by a steward. There was no obvious sign of foul play on the body, according to a shore doctor functioning as the coroner, who ruled it an apparent heart attack. He allowed the body to be immediately embalmed and buried, this being the tropics.

“On the face of it, Drake's death was routine and didn't warrant official attention. Passengers die naturally every day on
ships. Nothing unusual about that, or so everyone thought at the time. Ever heard the name—Simon Drake?”

“No, sir.” But I had noted that Drake and I were the same age. Heart troubles. Hmm. Was the pounding in my chest something more than nerves?

Walker harrumphed and nodded. “Yes, well, I didn't know Drake's name either. But maybe we should have, from our time in intelligence work, as this is where things get interesting. The steamer's purser checked his records and informed Captain Chambers that Drake was an American who worked as a senior telegraphist in Caracas for the German railroad firm there. Now, not many clerical fellows can afford a first-class cabin, so the captain thought it a bit out of the ordinary.

“Then, when the purser was packaging up the personal belongings in Drake's cabin, he found a couple of intriguing items and notified his captain. One of them was hidden inside a pillow case—a four-inch-square section cut out of a German nautical chart. It contains a coastline the purser and captain didn't recognize, with a place name,
Xel-ha
, underlined. It also has the words
Dzul
and
Verabredung
handwritten next to it.”

“How do you know it's actually a German chart, sir?”

A flicker of annoyance darkened his face. Admirals aren't used to being interrupted. “It has German words printed on it—
Karibisches Meer
—which even I know means Caribbean Sea. It shows a north-south coast, so it could be in Venezuela near Puerto Cabello, where there has been some conflict between the government army and some of the left-over anti-Crespo rebels.”

“I see, sir,” I said, though I really didn't.

He resumed. “And now the second item. Inside the cabin's safe, which was found to be locked, there was a piece of common note paper containing several lines of numbers separated into groups. It appeared to the captain to be some sort of coded message.”

Coded message? Now I was beginning to understand the urgent summons.

“Captain Chambers and I are old acquaintances, and when we were having dinner the same evening, he mentioned the situation. Said it was a bit of a mystery to him. When I expressed an interest in seeing those items, he gave them to me. After perusing them closely, my interest was piqued even more, so I sent my squadron intelligence officer and the staff surgeon over to the steamer to have a look in Drake's cabin, to see if anything was amiss. That was something the shore doctor evidently didn't do before rendering his verdict on the cause of death. The intelligence officer contributed nothing; he's new at it and nearly useless. But the surgeon returned with a significant observation—the odor of garlic, a lot of it, on Simon Drake's bed pillow.”

“Garlic, sir? I don't understand the meaning.”

“And neither did I, Commander. The surgeon says it's a telltale sign of arsenic poisoning. It turns out arsenic mimics the general characteristics of a heart attack. A check with the purser revealed no actual garlic was found in the cabin. The surgeon spoke with the steamer's cooks and learned there was no meal with large amounts of garlic served on the ship during her most recent voyage from Venezuela. Therefore, the garlic on the pillow must have gotten there by Drake breathing on it as he died.”

“That
is
a curious development. A postmortem examination of Drake's body might shed light on it, sir.”

Walker's beard shook in the negative. “Surgeon says it's too late—the embalming ruined the body for that type of examination.”

“Bad luck.”

“Yes, bad luck, indeed, but I am still faced with an enigma. An American citizen who works for the Germans in Venezuela has in his possession a small part of a German chart depicting an unknown coast, as well as a coded message—and then he is murdered on an American ship, probably by a professional who knows the dark art of assassination by poisoning. So what does it all mean?”

“I have no idea, sir,” I admitted.

Walker's eyes narrowed. “Commander Wake, I have a feeling something nefarious is afoot, and the Germans are hip-deep in it. Our country, or at least this region, will surely end up being involved in whatever it is, to an uncertain end. And that means that
we
in this squadron will be involved. Furthermore, I think time is short before this thing, whatever it is, comes to fruition—otherwise, why murder the man? So I intend to discover exactly what is going on here and either stop it or spread the alarm, before it gets further out of hand.”

He exhaled loudly as his tone grew exasperated. “This, however, has not proven an easy task, for it turns out not a single soul on my staff can read the confounded German language with any proficiency, so I don't know the English translation of those mystery words on the chart. None of my staff recognizes that coast, either. And I have discovered none of them, not even the newly arrived signal and intelligence officer, have ever worked on foreign code deciphering, either out in the fleet or up at the naval intelligence office in Washington.”

I wasn't surprised. I'd heard the new intelligence man, a lieutenant commander with over twenty years in the navy, had only recently started in the field of naval intelligence. I didn't envy him his assignment, for the admiral never suffered ignorance among his subordinates gladly. Few in the navy were wary of the Germans yet, even after our confrontation with them at Samoa in '89. Most eyes were focused on Spain and Cuba.

“Any German passengers or crew on
Philadelphia
, sir?”

“Captain Chambers and I thought of that, too. No, none on the manifests. And no one disembarked at Key West either—it was just a temporary coaling stop. She's gone now. Left the next day.”

“And ONI's opinion of the coded message, sir?”

“On top of everything else, the telegraph station here is temporarily out of service due to a break in the line between here and Punta Rassa. I've sent the original coded message to ONI
by armed courier, via steamboat to Tampa's telegraph station. But it will take more than a week, probably ten days, to get the information up there and the translation of the message back to me. That's too long—I want this enigma solved now. I kept an exact copy of the numbered message on the notepaper, but unfortunately, I don't have the expertise around here to give me answers.”

He slapped his right hand down on the desk as a sly grin emerged.

“Ah . . . but all was not lost for me, for I did have
you
down there in Jamaica, didn't I? Actually, you're the perfect man for the case, especially if the code does turn out to be German. You're the only man in Uncle Sam's Navy who has seen them in combat close up, and you've got the wound to prove it. You're the one who stole the German navy's code from them at Samoa in eighty-nine, you're well versed in their activities in the Caribbean, and you know this region's coasts better than almost any officer in the squadron. So now, Commander Wake, you know why you were summoned posthaste. You're the man who's going to figure out this enigma and tell me what it means.”

The admiral stood and handed me a dark blue U.S. Navy Department dispatch envelope. “The items are inside. Take them back to your ship. Report back here in three hours and tell me what these people are up to in our area of operations.”

U.S.S. Bennington

Key West Naval

Station Saturday morning

10 December 1892

Ignoring the inquisitive looks from my officers and men, I descended to my cabin directly upon returning aboard
Bennington
. Once in my sanctum, the numbers would be tackled first, for they might explain the chart.

There were three lines of numbers, separated into groups. The first line had five groups, the second had four, and the third had five. It was obviously a coded telegraph message, but not in the standard European commercial, military, or diplomatic code. Most of those were in five-digit groupings of numbers. These groupings had only four numbers each. The admiral's premonition was right.

It was the secret code of the Imperial German Navy.

From my safe, I extracted my copy of the 1888 German naval code, painstakingly copied from the original lead-lined
code book. During one of my last clandestine missions at the Office of Naval Intelligence, in March of 1889, that code book had been surreptitiously removed from a reef near the wreck of the S.M.S.
Adler
, flagship of the German squadron in Samoa.

The Germans still didn't know we had it. From what we heard later, they assumed it was lost in the wreck. I had the only copy outside of the Special Assignments Section of ONI, of which I had once been the senior officer. ONI is located within a small office in the bowels of the State, War, and Navy Building, across the park from the president's mansion. ONI functions as his trusted resource for understanding—and influencing—events around the world.

The first number group was the mathematical formula to start deciphering the rest of the message. There were eight German formulas, some of which were quite complicated. But I was in luck; according to what I saw, this was one of the simpler ones. The formula would consist of only addition, subtraction, and division, in that order, utilizing each number in the initial group as the operating feature.

Following the formula, the number groups changed into a complete new set of integers. I had now completed the first phase of deciphering the message.

Comparing the new number groups with those on the secret code list before me, I found the letter of the German alphabet represented by each numeral or pair of numerals. There was an additional complication. Unlike English's twenty-six letters, the German alphabet has another four letter-diacritic combinations, for a total of thirty letters.