THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller Read Free Page B

van, listening to the conversation between McNally and Jordan Fletcher.
    He fell into the cipher. It was always the same process, like one of those 3-D puzzles that looked like some kind of Impressionistic painting until you relaxed your eyes, stared beyond the image, and it suddenly shifted into place. His old sensei, Master Yamaguchi, had called it “Reclining in Chaos.” There was no other way to describe it. Decker had possessed this skill for as long as he could remember. It was like a good ear for music, or the ability to run fast. He simply had a way with numbers and symbols, a gift for finding patterns in seemingly random data.
    He took a deep breath and began, as always, with a substitution cipher, replacing true letters or numbers – plain text – with alternate characters – cipher text. He looked for patterns, series and common combinations. Nothing. Since the cipher McNally used was numeric, Decker dismissed traditional Caesar and keyword number ciphers off the bat. On the other hand, he thought, it might have been a telephone keypad cipher. But since McNally was using two-digit numbers – some of which were greater than twenty-six – he set aside this protocol as well.
    It took him only a few seconds to flick through each of these contenders. After his training, and based on his innate skills, he was able to dismiss unlikely ciphers and codes virtually immediately. Also, having been brought up by his Aunt Betsy, a devout Catholic, and her husband Tom, an equally devout Episcopalian, and after his briefing on the White Apocalypse earlier, Decker believed “the book” which Fletcher had referred to in his phone call was the Bible.
    In the end, Decker broke McNally’s cipher in less than sixty seconds. It turned out to be a simple book code: chapter and verse, followed by a third number specifying the word in the verse McNally wanted to use in the construction of his sentences. And he discovered it just in time; the suspects were planning to make a break for it from the farmhouse through some kind of tunnel.
    Decker jumped out of the van and started to make his way back toward the farmhouse, completely surrounded now by local and state police, plus the FBI SWAT team that had taken up positions with snipers around the property. As he approached, he noticed Troopers Dick and Harry Sloane – the identical twins – standing outside the main fence of the property, drinking coffee, breath steaming from their mouths. It had grown even colder in the last few minutes. The setting sun lingered in the trees across the vacant snow-flecked corn fields. A raised eyebrow of geese sliced the sky. That’s when he saw the head of Peter Sampson poke out from the drainage ditch that ran along the fence line of the property, behind that clump of holly bushes, their berries livid crimson, buckshot of blood, frozen in time. He could barely make Sampson out in the blaze of spotlights the police had set up facing the house. He was only a dozen yards away from the two state troopers.
    Decker ran forward. He was about to call out to the Sloane brothers when he noticed Sampson was carrying a hunting rifle. Mary McNally was right behind him, followed by the three children. He watched as Sampson crawled up out of the ditch and aimed his gun at Harry Sloane.
    Without even thinking, Decker leapt into the ditch. He wrestled the rifle from Sampson’s hands. Sampson was a large man, well over six feet tall, and built like a defensive guard. He swung at Decker, who danced out of the way at the last moment. Then Sampson reached for another weapon, a .357 magnum stuffed behind his belt. He drew the gun but Decker was much too fast. He jabbed his left palm up under the large man’s nose, sending his head back, and shot a spear thrust deep into the jugular notch beneath his exposed chin. Sampson went down. His windpipe had collapsed, sending shards of cartilage into his throat. Within seconds he had choked to death and lay still. Mary