Free That Nietzsche Thing by Christopher Blankley Page B

was the daughter of a
high-ranking NeoCon politician. There was no evidence of bad blood
in the family. But here she was, on the other side of the country,
on a quest. A quest her father, at least financially, approved
of...
    Q? Book or man? Did it matter? The
iconoclastic Rosicrucians weren’t interested in burning copies of
Dark’s novel but tearing them apart to attempt to decode them?
Pre-computers, how else would you have done it? That’d have been a
profanity to the orthodox wing. They’d have inevitability come to
blows. The book was sacred, after all. Soon, just attempting to
decode the novel would have become a blasphemy.
    And Vivian was certainly attempting to decode
Q. Had she succeeded? Was that why she was dead? Was she somehow
connected to the iconoclastic faction of the Rosicrucians? Was her
father, the senator, connected to those Rosicrucians?
    Was the whole NeoCon Party connected to these
Rosicrucians?
    Fuck me.
    Three C’s...not a direct translation from the
Latin, but certainly a repetition of theme. A respectful
reinterpretation of first principles?
    No, it was too crazy to even conceive.
    The whole United States of America in the
grasp of an apocalyptic cult? President Cassidy? The whole NeoCon
movement? The Hot Kids, the youth of America?
    Now my imagination was just running away from
me.
    It was bullshit. Nothing I could ever prove
in a million lifetimes. All I had was three letters scribbled on a
wall, and that, I very much suspected, would quickly vanish once
Constantine’s investigators arrived.
    But ideas like that had an uncomfortable
habit of sticking in the craw. It was the first, vaguely rational
explanation for the Fed’s Wardship of Seattle and their total
overreaction to the Montavez case. If the girl had found evidence
that Q, the man, was in Seattle...and the Geneing Rosicrucians had
gotten to her before she’d told anyone...
    I reached for my bomber and took the e-reader
from my pocket.
    She’d decoded it somehow. She must have. Dark’s Last Novel . Q. She’d bought the original copy...why?
To trade it with the Rosicrucians? For what?...for something that
had let her decode the novel. But they’d figured out what she was
attempting to do and stuffed her in that dumpster. But she’d
decoded the novel first, and the copy on the e-reader was the only
one she’d had.
    She’d decoded it on this. Somehow.
    I stared at the e-reader. If O’Day couldn’t
decode it, what did I think I could do? But, had O’Day even tried?
He’d just recognized the file and thought it was all a joke.
    Still, I knew nothing about cryptography, and
I had no access to computing resources. Even O’Day’s equipment was
probably still off-line. The Rosicrucians had done their job well.
I had nothing. Just the e-reader and some crazy idea that our
government was firmly in the hands of a satanic cult.
    But none of that would matter if I knew the
decrypt key. Everything O’Day had been talking about, all ninety
years of cryptanalysis, had been attempts to brute force the
encryption. They’d tried every known key hoping to stumble on the
right one. But Vivian Montavez had found the key itself. Or deduced
it from the evidence she’d collected. You didn’t need computers, or
a specialized understanding of cryptography if you had the key. You
just punched in it and bam! Like an ATM. Any douche, even
me, could do that.
    I had to get back into Vivian’s head, figure
out what she’d figured out about Dark. She’d done my trick, gotten
inside Dark’s head. Dark was just another dead body, after all,
dead for ninety years. Not murdered perhaps, but it didn’t matter.
For Vivian, Dark was also in the enviable position that he couldn’t
interfere with her investigation.
    I tapped at the e-reader until I got to the
decrypt menu. The ebook version of Dark’s Last Novel shipped
with a decode routine. The whole enticement to buy the book was
that, maybe, you’d be the one to figure out how to decrypt it.