The Pandora Directive

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Here’s the print-out.” Pernell opened a medium-sized valise and pulled out about ten pounds of computer paper. He dropped it in front of me with a resounding thud.

I handed him a smoke. “Is this it? I was expecting something substantial.”

Pernell smiled and turned his head slightly as he exhaled. “Hey, you wanted all the possible anagrams. There are Messages from Outer Space has 30 characters. The guy who does the anagrams down at the Mirror told me that there would be 10 million trillion possible combinations.”

He waved his hand toward the computer print-out. “Those are the only combinations that contain at least four English words with four or more letters.”

I glanced over the first page, then flicked through the rest. The sheer quantity was mind-boggling. Pernell smiling at me. “Shouldn’t take you more than a couple of weeks to get through that stuff.”

“Maybe I’ll get lucky.”

“I’d start of the back and work forward. I always find what I’m looking for at the very end.” Pernell snuffed his smoke and closed up the valise. “By the way, I followed upon the information you gave me. Everything checks out. It’s gonna be one hell of a story.”

“I’m sure the NSA’s gonna love it.”

Pernell grinned viciously. “Yeah. I know.”

He was playing the journalistic kamikaze, pointing his nose straight toward the NSA and damning the torpedoes. I wondered if he knew what he was getting into. To the agency, we were two little bugs. At any time, a huge NSA shoe could descend from the sky and crush us. The difference between me and Pernell was that he wasn’t scared. Apparently he’d never had the pleasure of Jackson Cross’s company.

“You’re in the middle of something big, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

He narrowed his gaze and leaned forward. “How ‘bout letting me in on it?”

“Can’t do it.”

Pernell looked at me thoughtfully. “What’s your price?”

“Don’t have one. Sorry.”

Pernell grimaced. “In my line of work, I have to coerce information out of people all the time. A lot of times, I get it for free. My first offer is cash. If that doesn’t work… sex, drugs, whatever. I’ve gotten pretty good at it, but I can’t get an angle on you. It bugs me. What’s your weak spot?”

“Uh… math.”

“C’mon, you know what I’m talking about. Most weak spots are above the neck and below the waist. But the biggest weak spot is thinking that you don’t have one.”

“We hardly know each other, Pernell. I usually make people buy me dinner and take me out dancing before I confess my fatal flaw.”

Pernell raised his hands in a gesture of resignation. “Fine. Just remember, whether you know it or not, there’s a weak spot in there somewhere. Maybe I can’t see it… maybe you can’t either, but it’s there. And someone will find it eventually.”

“Someone already has. It’s just above my knee. Drives me crazy.”

He stood up and cradled the valise under his arm. “I like you, Murphy. It’s been good knowing you.”

I watched Pernell walk to the door and exit the lounge. The pile of computer paper sat in front of me like the last pie in a pie-eating contest. It looked too big to tackle, but I needed to find that one magical anagram hiding like a needle in the proverbial haystack. This was going to require a distilled beverage. Bourbon, please. No, make that a double. I reached into the inner pocket of my overcoat and pulled out a pen. A drag on a Lucky Strike and a deep gulp of bourbon, and I turned my attention to the anagrams.

I’d always hated English classes. After two hours of poring over the computer print-out, I finally figured out why: I hated the actual letters. My fourth bourbon was a distant memory, and I was out of smokes. I walked across the bar to the cigarette machine with a handful of quarters. Psychedelic patterns consisting of unnatural combinations of vowels and consonants blurred my vision. A harshly attractive woman cast a dog eared smile in my direction. Sorry, honey. No time for romance. I’ve got anagrams on my mind.

I dropped quarters into the machine slot for several minutes, then collected my cigarette pack and returned to my table. Squinting through the smoke, I started round two. The process was like playing a slot machine. Each new combination was a potential winner, but they kept coming up lemon/orange/bell. Occasionally, I’d run across a near-miss, such as FEAR SCHEMERS REMOTE OUTER PASSAGE. I once dated a New Age po-etess who would undoubtedly have found deep significance in this type of random combination, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t what I was looking for.

Hours passed. Except for the occasional trip to the porcelain bank, I was glued to the print-out. Eventually, even the barflies had to admit defeat and head for home. I was about to order from waitress number three when I saw the line I’d been searching for: MERGE THE FOUR RARE CASES TO SEE MAPS.

It had to be the right one. It seemed as likely as anything that the puzzle boxes contained a map of some kind. To what, I couldn’t know for sure. Maybe the Pandora Device.

Suddenly, I thought of the disk I’d found in Malloy’s room. Would this anagram help me break the encryption on the disk I’d found in Malloy’s room? There was only one way to find out.

Back at my office, I slipped Malloy’s disk into the drive of my computer. Once again, I got the message CONTENTS ENCRYPTED. PLEASE ENTER AUTHORISATION CODE. This time, I typed in MERGE THE FOUR RARE CASES TO SEE MAPS. INVALID PASSWORD — TOO MANY PARAMETERS. Damn. I typed it in again, changing the “FOUR” to a “4”. No luck. I tried it again, changing the “TO” to a “2”. Still no good. I sat back and thought it over. Maybe I was being a chump. Maybe the password had nothing to do with the anagrams. Worse, maybe the anagram I need wasn’t the one I’d found. The thought of going through the rest of the anagrams made me want to vomit.

I leaned back over the keyboard. For the hell of it, I typed FOUR RARE CASES. The screen blinked. I was in.

I paged down to a schematic drawing of an odd-looking contraption. It vaguely resembled a camera with all the attachments hooked on. Under the drawing was the caption The Pandora Device. Paging down again, I saw that the contraption was comprised of three interlocking pieces. It appeared to have a small control panel.

So this was the Pandora Device. It seemed utterly innocuous. I looked at the diagrams closely, trying to fathom what message, what power, could be contained inside. Malloy had given no further clues.

I read the message to Witt several times, then leaned back away from the computer. Unless Malloy was a terrible exaggerator, the implications were even more serious than Fitzpatrick had led me to believe. For the first time, I wondered whether it was my place to be in the middle of this. Regardless, I was in the middle, and with no way out. And Fitzpatrick was counting on me. I needed to find the other boxes.

Fitzpatrick already had two of the boxes: Regan’s and Emily’s. Archie Ellis had received one, but it had been stolen. I didn’t have high hopes of finding that one, but I had to try. Another box, obviously, was in Witt’s possession. That left one box unaccounted for. Maybe it had been sent to OE. Unfortunately, I have no clue who that was, though his or her identity would probably turn up if I kept looking.

For the time being, I decided that the trail of my investigation led to the Cosmic Connection. Ellis was my only link to locating Elijah Witt. I wasn’t optimistic that Ellis could help with finding out who’d stolen his box, but maybe Regan had gotten some information regarding Witt. I picked up the phone and called her hotel. She wasn’t in. Feeling impatient, I decided to pay Ellis a visit and beat Witt’s address out of him if I had to.

The door to the Cosmic Connection was locked, and the Closed sign was out. I peered into the darkness, trying to see if Ellis’s was around. The place appeared to be deserted. I knocked on the door several times, but there was no answer. I checked the lock, but it was a dead bolt, shut tighter than Rook’s wallet.

A narrow alley ran down the right side of the shop. I followed it to the end. There was no back door on this side of the building. I started back toward the front when I noticed a small piece of rain-stained plywood crate on the ground, set against the side of the building. Just on the off chance, I knelt down and pushed it aside. A small, cracked window looked big enough for me to squeeze through, though I’d have to take off my fedora. It was a big price to pay, but this was a big job.

After a few minutes of trying to pry the window open, I resorted to brute force and kicked it in unceremoniously. Managing to climb through without tearing my overcoat, I found myself in the bowels of the Cosmic Connection. With nothing more than five-second intervals of match light and my innate sense of direction, I stumbled around the dark basement until I found a light switch. Shadows sprang up around me, and I found myself amid a jungle of cardboard boxes, piles of books, and a plethora of indescribably odd objects. To my right was a rickety set of stairs leading up to the main floor. I reached the top and, throwing open the basement door, stepped in to Ellis’s shop.

The smell of incense was much less noxious than it had been before. Ellis wasn’t here, and my guess was that he hadn’t been for awhile. But I was wrong.

As I looked around, I caught sight of something behind the counter. As I approached, I saw the bottoms of a pair of old sneakers. Leaning over the counter, I looked straight into the glazed, unseeing eyes of Archie Ellis. The hole in his head was new. A pool of congealed blood had gelled around him. He looked like an overgrown kindergartener taking a nap on a giant raspberry fruit roll-up.

Life was getting cheaper by the minute, and I felt like the Grim Reaper’s calling card. I lit a smoke. Poor bastard. I checked around. Whoever had killed him, it hadn’t been a burglar. Who was I kidding? He’d gotten waxed on my account. He wasn’t worth killing for any other reason. Malloy, I could understand, but not Ellis. Things were coming to a head. Someone was going around, tying up loose ends, maybe trying to find the box Ellis no longer had. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen soon. I needed to find Witt.

I made a systematic search of the Cosmic Connection. I don’t know how long Ellis had run his shop, but he’d collected a few lifetime’s worth of paraphernalia. One entire section of the store was piled high with newspaper articles, Magazine clippings, and news-wire photographs. Several file cabinets were stuffed full of correspondence. There were racks of home videos, undoubtedly of UFO sightings, and an impressive library of laser disks, dealing with all forms of paranormal subject matter. Ellis had apparently stashed things in one spot until there was no room left, then moved to another section of the building.

After some time, I found the most recent dumping ground. Rooting through the stacks of paper, I found what I was looking for: a scrap of paper with the name J.I. Thelwait, Witt’s alias, written on it. There was also an incomplete mailing address: PO Box 24, Richfield. The state and zip code had fought a battle with a coffee stain and lost. They were smeared to the point of illegibility. But at least I had an address. Now I just needed to find out where it was.

I seemed to remember Ellis saying something about Witt retiring to a place in the Northwest. He could have been trying to throw me off, but it was a good place to start. There was a vid-phone on the counter, sitting on top of a vid-phone directory. I opened the directory and found the page with the area-code listings. Starting with one of Washington state’s four codes, I dialled 1-509-555-1212. The operator’s voice came on and asked for a city. I said Richfield and asked for the number of J.I. Thelwait. The operator told me that Richfield was in area code 206. The 206 operator informed me that there was no one by that name listed. I asked him to check Elijah Witt. No luck.

In Oregon, there was no city named Richfield. California had a Richfield, but no Elijah Witt or J.I. Thelwait. I resorted to checking the other Western states. The Richfields in Nevada, Utah, and Idaho didn’t pan out. Montana, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona had no Richfields. I wasn’t too keen on trying every state in the country. Could Ellis have meant western Canada? Maybe Witt was across the border. I dialled the number for Canadian information. There was, indeed, an Elijah Witt in Richfield, British Columbia, but his number and address were unlisted. I didn’t care. Just like the Mounties, I had enough to get my man.