Page 128 of The Last Kingdom

He signaled to Knight.

Bait taken.

They readied themselves.

Chapter 73

COTTON RECALLED EVERYTHING HIS GRANDFATHER TAUGHT HIMabout the cipher wheel. The alphabet on the inner wheel was always for the actual message to be sent. The outer wheel’s letters created the cipher text. The randomness of the key word made breaking the cipher next to impossible, as there were literally millions of words to choose from. Fenn and the curator watched him closely, which was becoming annoying. Koger had wandered off to check things out.

He stared at the cipher.

KRTY OGNM ISQL NBCD ZIOH LWDP DSGR ALOC

“I need something to write on,” he said to the curator.

The man hurried off, then returned with a pen and pad.

“Give me a few minutes.”

And he sat at the desk.

Fenn and the curator drifted back out to the corridor, beyond the archway, near the window. They conversed like two aspiring ventriloquists, lips barely moving, their voices pitched just enough for the other to hear.

He realized he was working backward. Not encrypting a message, but rather decrypting one that already existed. The first letter in the cipher wask, so he twisted the outer wheel until itskaligned with theeon the outer wheel. He could hear his grandfather’s lesson.That’s your pointer. Don’t forget.Then he altered the wheels’ alignment so the outerknow faced the innerhfromehre. He repeated that process each time with the cipher letters, twisting the wheels, finding a letter that corresponded with the matching letter from the key.Ehrewas a short key. Which meant it would repeat itself eight times to match the thirty-two letters in the cipher text.

He kept working the wheels back and forth, occasionally allowing his gaze to drift to the two men standing twenty feet away. Amazing. Who knew that conversations between a boy and his grandfather would one day become vital? He’d loved that man. His father died when he was ten, lost in a top secret US Navy submarine accident. His grandfather became everything. They spent a lot of time together. He missed him. He’d been dead a long time.

It took a few minutes, but he ended up with a fully deciphered text. Which he locked into his eidetic brain. Then, while keeping his eyes on the two men who were still quietly conversing out in the corridor, he used the point of the pen to carve out the cipher and numbers from the brittle paper Dianne McCarter had provided. He then rolled that fragment into a tiny ball and swallowed it. Koger wanted the message secure.

Now it was.

He alone knew.

“Did Ludwig III speak English?” he asked the curator, grabbing the man’s attention.

“Ja,” the curator said. “He was quite fluent in several languages.”

He wrote on the pad, tore off the top sheet, and held up the piece of paper. “Which explains why this was coded to English.”

“Perhaps it was an added measure of security,” the curator said. “Using an American cipher wheel, so why not create the message in English. In the early part of the twentieth century that language wasn’t spoken nearly as universally as it is today.”

“Do you have the full message?” Fenn asked.

He nodded and stood.

Fenn motioned.

Three men appeared in the corridor. Two were from the castle last night. They’d been part of the contingent of brothers who’d confronted Rife. Both held pistols. The third man was an older, sharp-faced, gnomish little man with patches of wiry hair fringing a balding top. He wore a charcoal herringbone wool coat and a homburg hat.

Fenn stepped into the study. “I will have that message.”

He stayed still.

“Be sensible, Herr Malone,” the other man said. “We do not want bloodshed. The message,bitte.”

“And you are?”

“Albert. Duke of Bavaria. I am the one who involved America in this quest.”

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