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Simon stared at the note. It meant nothing to him. A load of mixed up letters with a few numbers thrown in. A sip of his pint, he sat back and said, “Well, looks like a load of bollocks to me.”
Nicks shook his head. “I know what it is, just how I’m going to decode it, I’m not sure. I can’t just walk into an Army place and ask them if I can borrow their BATCO sheets, that’s if they still use it these days. Anyway, even if they did, this is a one-time use code. How do I know which sheet it was encrypted from?”
Si looked baffled. “What’s BATCO?’
Nicks gave him an absent-minded glance. “It’s short for Battle Code.”
He took a swig of his Guinness, stood up and stuffed the message in his pocket. “I’m going outside for a smoke,” he said, dragging his jacket off the chair.
Ten minutes later, he sat down again and took a small notebook from his leg pocket. Pulling the cut-down pencil from the spines, he said, “I think I’ve figured it out.” Simon looked at him, enquiringly.
“It has to be something I can access. So, I googled it and there it was on Wikipedia. A BATCO sheet.” He began checking the encryption against the picture on his phone then wrote some numbers down. Si wandered over to the bar and came back with another two pints.
He looked at what Nicks had written. “How did you get that?”
“Simple,” Nicks replied. “The first number and letter tell you the setting. Then you use the letters, on the same line, which correspond with the numbers running along the top. AHG YM XZ UP SC MR XD NZ becomes ‘53.6061073.006570’.”
“Where d’you get the dots from?”
Nicks smiled, condescendingly. “Here, the G is found at the end of the line then look to the top and there’s a dot. Same with the C.”
“Still means fuck all to me,” Si replied and took a mouthful of beer.
“It’s easy. The dots indicate some form of ‘batch’ of numbers. Separate it in the right place and you get a longitude and latitude reference, like this.” He scribbled the numbers again for Simon’s benefit. “It’s got to be. Get Google maps on your phone.”
Si fiddled with his mobile then handed it to Nicks who entered the numbers into the search field.
“There you go!” He showed the result. It was a small cottage on the outskirts of Southport, flat fields, irrigation ditches and small hamlets, in an area known as ‘the moss’.
Simon was impressed, but not much. “Ok, Einstein, what about the rest.”
Nicks deciphered the second line of code. Thirteen numbers. He typed them into Google. It was an ISBN for a book of selected poems by Robert Browning. Then he decoded the last part. Seven numbers. Staring at it, he laughed.
Simon looked at him as if he’d finally lost it. “What’s so funny?”
Nicks beamed at him. “It’s because I don’t need to look that up. I know what it is.”
Si glared at him. “And are you going to share it?”
“Sorry. It has to be right. Put this onto Google. 6073332 What’d you get?”
“Nothing that means anything to me.”
“Well it should do. It’s the catalogue number for a song called Gaye by Clifford T Ward.”
“What label? You need the label.”
“Charisma.”
Simon chuckled. “That’s ironic, coming from you.” A pause. “There you go. Correct, but somehow I don’t see where it’s getting us.” He tapped the screen. “Ah, I get it. The ‘B’ side was ‘Home Thoughts From Abroad’ which is also a Browning poem. I learnt that at school. ‘Oh to be in England now that April’s there’ ...”
“Not now, Si.”
He looked disappointed. “How d’yer know the catalogue number anyway?”
“Old Clifford was a favourite of mine when I was a teenager. I knew everything written on that single. Still play him, now and then.”
“Ok, so, this message is telling us to go to the cottage, get that book, wherever it is, and then I assume what he wants us to have is tucked in the pages of the poem.”
“Or, maybe, it’s been rendered into a microdot.”
Simon smiled. “Great! But what if there’s someone in when we go?”
Nicks was gulping his Guinness and flapped his hand at Simon as he swallowed. Finally, he replied, “It’s not a problem because it’s empty.”
“Because this is where they found him and the girl?”
“Exactly! Did I not mention that before?”
Simon ignored him. “Ok. I’ve just thought. If it is a microdot, what do we do with it?”
Nicks took a last mouthful from his glass then waved it at Simon. “Get another in, will you? We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. It’s too late to be messing around up there now.”
“I just got the last round in.”
Nicks flashed him a scathing look. “C’mon, I’ve just worked my arse off there, it’s the least you could do.”
Simon stood up, grabbed the glasses and began to walk away. “I want a divorce.”
Nicks called after him, “I heard that!”
He set the beer down and dropped a packet on the table. “Have some scratchings.”
They sat, quietly, savouring their brews and crunching their way through the crispy pork fat.
“How did Don know you’d get it? The message, I mean.”
Nicks threw him a sideways glance. “We talked about stuff.”
“When? When did you ever do that?”
Nicks frowned. “What do you think we did when you were late for a briefing, Si? Sit and stare at each other?”
“No, course not. What sort of stuff?”
“Just stuff. History, likes, dislikes, nothing complicated.”
“Why did he never speak to me about that sort of thing?”
“I don’t know. Maybe if you’d bought a new watch he would have.”
Simon took a mouthful of lager and put the glass down. “Fuck off, Nicks.”