The Langley Case: A Nathan Roeder Mystery

Back in a Mind that might not be as mad as I thought

I figured I had some time after coffee. Time to try to figure things out on my own, without worrying about Felicia or about Johnny Staples. His predictable but inevitable betrayal, if it came, would be dealt with in good time. Her wide eyed Sprawl hick thing would fade in time. The longer she was doing things alone, the less time I’d have to be bothered by it. Besides, I needed some time to figure out what was really going on. Was my idea right, or was Oliver really just a nutcase?

At the end of our conversation, Theresa was the one to leave. Since there was already a privacy field, and a good one, I figured it was just as smart to stay where I was as to go anywhere else. If I didn’t pay for anything, there was no way to track me anywhere. I kept the refills of her coffee coming; they’d be billed to her as expenses anyway.

I whipped out my PDA and pulled up the copy of Oliver Langley’s journal. I pulled up where I’d stopped reading, and the very thing I was looking for hit me like a ton of bricks.

I doubt anyone in my lifetime will ever put together that these murders are connected to one another. This is why I leave this testament. The people, the victims, have a right to know. They should know fear, and see that what I have done may have been done before. May be done on a regular basis.

There it was, a mission statement. The whole point and purpose of the diary. They should know that this sort of thing may have been done before. Even on a regular basis. The victims have a right to know. He’s talking, through the diary, about that other organization.

Had he named them already?

I read on, picking up at the next entry.

There will no doubt be those who believe this is a work of fiction. They may point to the dates where I claim to have committed a kill and cross check it with my appointments log, to discover that I could not have been two places at once. But I am far more clever than that. When I wish to make a kill, I will schedule meetings with people I know are chronically late, or have conference calls that can be made from a remote location. I may even have a meeting completely Net based, so that I can physically be one place while my Wire connects me wherever the meeting may be.

The secretaries need never know.

In the darkest corner of the rock that is my heart, I hold secrets that I will hold until I die. There is no cipher here, no way to decode what I am saying. There is nothing more than the words themselves.

I didn’t believe it, but I probably would have if I hadn’t already connected as many dots as I could. A cipher. It wouldn’t need to be that complicated. It might just be the first word of each sentence, or of each word. Could be an issue of paragraphs, or of pages.

Trying to move on to greater things, I began to vary my techniques. Hoping to achieve immortality through my work, I tried leaving a sign. Even a sigil. But doing so seemed pedantic. Also childish. Not one to give in to my baser desires, I abandoned the idea.

T-H-E-B-A-N. Theban? What the hell did that mean? Theban probably means nothing. Looking at the first letter after each comma, I end up with just I-I-I. III. Three, the third. Theban III. If we lived in some kind of sci-fi drama, I’d think that was the name of some planet somewhere.

There are signs and sigils in the world, dear reader. Important things you must pay attention to. Hints and clues. Scattered, spread throughout the universe. If you look the right way, if you are attentive, then you can make things out. Scrambled as they are, they still make sense; anyone can figure that out. No one needs their hands held; not even a dunce. Dunces are intelligent enough to figure out what they need. As there is no need to speak on this, I shall so no more again, dear reader.

There’s a serious clue there. I saw it because of the bracket phrases. It’s a method used when putting a code into text. You put some kind of key phrase at the start and end of your message. In this case, I think it was ‘dear reader’.

I-H-A-S-N-D. That doesn’t mean anything. But the words suggest that it’s scrambled. By unscrambling them, maybe they make sense. Danish. Is Theban a Danish phrase? Is there something to do with the Danish? It’s a clue, I’m sure of it.

Unless it’s not the first letter of the first word. What if it’s the first letter of the last word? T-C-U-T-T-E-D-R. No. Maybe the answer comes later.

I killed because I had the desire to kill. It is often thought that violence, at least in the extreme and homicidal sense, has been bred out of us. As we grow further and further from the lottery, we become better and better as people as a whole. It is believed that the people born and raised in the Sprawl are becoming a different species from those born and raised on the Tiers. It is quite possible that this is the case.

Meaning that those below are less than we are. Those below are insignificant. Those below are another species. One that can be killed at will, on a whim, without fear of reproach. It is no more wrong to kill them than to kill any other inferior species.

This was the line of thought that has been used throughout the ages to justify homicide on an enormous scale. So large that it can be called genocide. It is there, dear readers, that location and nationality mix in their most literate form. The members of one nationality in a location determine that theirs is the best, or the only, nationality that matters. And so they destroy all others.

It’s a numbers game.

Of course, like so many other games, there is significance beyond the initial thought. You must go round about, dear readers, from rules to regulations. Think of the rules as characters, the regulations as authors. Sometimes a character may appear once and again with different authors. So to do many games share rules, but regulations are specific to the sports in question. There is the rub, dear readers.

I couldn’t really follow anymore. I knew there was some significance to that whole passage, something in the code that I couldn’t figure out. But the key phrase didn’t suggest any other codes. Which either meant that I had the wrong key phrase or that Oliver, being a smart fucker, went on more than one level. In addition to having a cipher, there’s a message in the text itself. Something of significance that will tell me how to crack the cipher. Once I figure out what the hell he was talking about.

I didn’t have it then, but I could feel the pieces floating around in my head, trying to find ways to fit together. Sooner or later, it would come to me. But for now, I had to get back to the business of staying alive long enough to let these things come to me.

Which meant I had to get back to Felicia and to Johnny. I had to find out how things were progressing with them. Maybe they’d have something that would help. Maybe they’d have something that would save my ass.