Triggers

“Well,” said Muilenburg, “let’s hope whoever it is doesn’t read a newspaper or watch the news between now and the zero hour, because I can’t see that stuff without thinking it’s high time someone did something—and if they think that, they’ll know what that something is, right?”

“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” said the aide. “I imagine they will.”

Kadeem Adams knew that President Jerrison was confined to his room in the ICU. But the man was gregarious by nature; Kadeem had seen that often enough on TV. And he was doubtless lonely. It was no fun being hospitalized, as Kadeem himself well knew. But, more than that, Jerrison was a politician; he wouldn’t be able to resist the photo op. Even bedridden by an assassin’s bullet, the president would make time to see an Iraq War vet, to have his picture taken shaking the young man’s hand, and—yes, Kadeem knew the stats—given how poorly Jerrison was doing with African-Americans in the polls, to be seen congratulating a black soldier would be the best of all.

And so he went to Professor Singh’s office and waited patiently outside the closed door until the man Susan Dawson had been questioning came out. Before she could bring someone else in, he entered himself.

Susan looked slightly flustered. “Hello, Kadeem.”

He smiled his warmest smile. “Hey, Sue.”

She didn’t return the smile. “It’s awkward, you knowing my memories.”

“Sorry ’bout showing off earlier. I don’t mean to pry.”

She nodded. “No worse than what I’ve been doing with Professor Singh’s mind, I guess. I just hope these linkages aren’t going to last forever.”

“I dunno,” said Kadeem. “It be cool, in a way. I never got to go to college. But now I got a college-level education, kinda: whatever you remember of your classes, I can remember. Don’t think geography would have been my choice of major, but I know things now I’d never have known.”

“I guess,” said Susan. “Anyway, what can I do for you, Kadeem?”

“Ma’am,” he said, “I got a favor to ask.”

She tilted her head slightly, apparently noting that he’d dropped the overly familiar “Sue.”

“Yes?”

“The president, he’s just downstairs, right?”

She looked for a moment like she was going to deny it—a reflex security concern—but there was no point; it had been mentioned on newscasts that he was on the second floor. She nodded.

“I’d like to see him. Meet him. Y’know? Something to tell my grandkids about someday.”

Kadeem had no doubt that Susan, or one of her associates, had already been through his service record in minute detail. They’d know it was exemplary, and that he even had a degree of security clearance because of the weapon systems he’d worked with. There was no reason at all to think he presented a risk.

“He’s still quite weak. He’s in intensive care.”

“I know, ma’am. And I know you’ve gotten to see him every day for years. But for a guy like me, I’ll never get another…” He stopped himself; saying “shot at this” would hardly be the right phrasing just now. “…chance. Would mean the world to me.”

Agent Dawson didn’t reply at once, and so, Kadeem added, smiling as nicely as he could, “Please, ma’am.”

He suspected she was weighing the new reality: that he’d know whether or not she actually tried to get him an audience; that she couldn’t get away with just saying she’d asked, but someone higher up had denied his request. Finally, she nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Seth Jerrison had been fascinated by codes ever since he’d stumbled across Herbert S. Zim’s classic Codes and Secret Writing in his school library when he was ten. Zim had outlined all sorts of ways to conceal written communication: everything from language tricks such as Pig Latin and Oppish to making invisible ink with lemon juice. He’d also demonstrated lots of substitution-cipher systems; the tic-tac-toe code had long been one of Seth’s favorites.

Shortly after reading the book, Seth had invented his own encryption system that he called the “13 Code.” He used it to share secret messages with his fourth-grade friend Duncan Ellerslie about Brenda Jackson, who they both agreed was the cutest girl in their class. One message he remembered sending looked like this:

3-6-4

ELBHA DROQB WGBEB XXBLX NDHUI Y!

Zim had recommended clustering letters into groups of five, lest word lengths provide clues to their meaning; he also suggested using all capitals, so that proper nouns or the pronoun I couldn’t be easily detected.

The key to the 13 Code was to pick any three numbers that added up to 13, and put them at the beginning of the message. The recipient would then write down the letters of the alphabet in three paired columns, the lengths of which corresponded to the three numbers given. For the key of 3-6-4, the recipient would produce a decryption table that looked like this:

And then he’d use that table to substitute the appropriate letters to yield the plain text of the message. Thus:

ELBHA DROQB WGBEB XXBLX NDHUI Y!

would become: