Three days earlier…
The man looked like a clash of styles, something that should have been rubbed out on an artist’s easel for being too confusing. Short, jet-black hair, bits at odd angles like he had just been roused from sleep, and a clean-shaven chin clashed with the old-style half-moon eyeglasses resting lightly on his thin nose. His smartly-tailored black suit, crisp white shirt, and thin black tie clash with the beaten brass tie tack holding the accessory to his chest, fashioned in the shape of the Scales of Justice. In one hand, his PDA smartphone, and in the other a sheet of crisp, white computer paper. Around him, plain-clothes FBI agents move to get into positions, one in particular glancing in his direction and subtly motioning for him to stay back. He knew the dance by now; he had come to half a dozen of these, and he always insisted on showing up. It was part of the deal, the price for his service.
The mind wraps its secrets in symbols. Words, letters, and numbers are simply symbolic representations of concepts, so it is a simple matter to exchange one set of symbols for another, or to change the rules that govern how the symbols collide to form meaning. The man’s mind had always had a penchant for disassembling and reassembling symbols to dig for their meaning. When he had discovered the ciphers in the back of Scientific American as a pre-teen, he had devoured them, dismantling them and putting them back together faster and faster. Ciphers were easy; codes were significantly more difficult, and he had cut his teeth on simple codes when he branched out into computer science on the way to his degree in Mathematics. Codes, unlike ciphers, are their own languages, and are much harder to break, but he had displayed an aptitude for it that led him to here and now.
His aptitudes had caught the eye of the NSA’s feeder programs, but he had bucked, resisted at the thought of working for No Such Agency. It was not that he had any dislike for the law; he felt that the law was the best tool for ensuring Justice, which was the best way to ensure civility. He had simply felt that it was not his direction. Shortly after his graduation, he received a package, lacking a return address and containing the tack he wore, along with a hand-written note, the text ciphered and signed with a strange symbol. A few years later, after his first consultation with the FBI, he had received a similar package and letter, containing the eyeglasses on his nose. The cipher had been more difficult, but he still shattered it with ease.
After a few minutes, the plainclothes agents emerged from the short, squat warehouse that they had entered, along with a dozen men in clothes ranging from T-shirts and shorts to dress shirts, ties, suspenders, and fine slacks, all of them short, dark-haired, some hiding their slanted eyes behind dark sunglasses. Yakuza. The agent that had waved him off before now motioned him closer, and the man walked, his strides light and easy. He strode down the line, looking from one criminal to the next, weighing them with his eyes behind the thick lenses, the light of the sun hanging low in the sky glinting from the tie tack. Intuition bore down on him, confirming what he had already suspected. He glanced to the agent, and nodded. The other FBI agents escorted the criminals to waiting SUVs, the vehicles wheeling away slowly toward the nearest police station to begin processing. “Nice work, Tom. That was a nasty code they were using.”
“It wasn’t a code, it was a cipher. Just garbled through three different languages.” It had stumped him temporarily until he had identified the base language, which led to a different revelation entirely. These criminals were slick, and had used Egyptian hieroglyphs to start their cipher. A quick trip through a few books and the whole thing had fallen wide open. Once he had cracked the cipher, a third package had arrived at his door, addressed to Mr. Thomas Oliver, just as the others had been, and containing a heavy compass, the body cast from solid copper, aged with a dark green patina. The cipher in the letter would have been wickedly difficult even three months before, but he destroyed it with alarming speed. He also recognized the mark signing the letter, the head of an ibis. The letter’s text was different, however; the previous two simply commended the reader for breaking the code, but this one requested his presence at a hotel in Las Vegas. Destiny seemed to tug at him, and he knew that he could not fight its flow.
“Yeah, well, it was damn fine work all the same. Do you want to come with me to processing?” The agent walked to an unmarked Ford, opening the passenger door for Thomas, but he shook his head. “I’m sorry, Agent Fields, but I can’t. I’m heading out of town and I have to leave right away. I trust that you’ll take care of all of the arrangements.” The FBI man just nodded, climbing into the car before it pulled away from the curb. Oliver had brought his own car, and he moved to it, glancing at his duffel bag and carry-on in the back. He could afford fresh clothes if he needed them, but he had packed anyway. He was heading for a meeting, or perhaps a confrontation, with his mysterious patron, and he could only wonder at the implications. The head of an ibis bird was the trademark of an Egyptian god, Thoth, and his research made Thoth look like the patron of puzzles. What kind of a person would use Thoth as his trademark?
All The Worlds, A Stage 