Cloister of Secrets

Chapter 1: Behind the Veil

White Collar Conference Room. Thursday, November 10, 2005.

"How about Dagfinn?" Neal rolled the name on his tongue as he tossed his rubber band ball even higher in the air. "It has a note of sophisticated gravitas."

He and the other members of the team were cooling their heels in White Collar's conference room while waiting for their boss to appear. Peter's tardiness gave them ample time to arrive at a consensus.

"Only to your ears," Diana objected. "Gunnar, now that's a name which commands respect."

"Not as much as Kjartan," countered Travis, White Collar's tech and sci-fi expert.

Jones looked up from his laptop. "You just like that name because it reminds you of Klingons. He'll never go for it. Bjorn, on the other hand—"

"—sounds like a poet." Diana shook her head firmly. "The boss would never approve."

"What won't I approve?" Peter said, striding into the room. "The fact that you're all wasting time"—he glanced at the plate of cinnamon rolls on the table—"and eating pastries while I was spending a brutal morning being cross-examined at court?"

"You're just grumpy because you haven't had one yet," Neal said, passed him a plate. "You should have called to let us know you were on your way back. Then I would have bought you decent coffee."

"We're all enjoying macadamia nut blend," Travis said, rubbing extra salt into the wound.

Neal stood up. "But I'll get your mug and supply you with the Bureau's carefully crafted house blend of swill."

"Sit back down," Peter ordered. "I'm wise to your tricks. As if you weren't the ringleader in this."

"Not this time," Jones said. "Astonishing as it sounds, it's all Travis's fault."

Peter's brow furrowed as he studied their resident geek. "Do those bloodshot eyes indicate what I think they do?"

Travis grinned sheepishly. "Aidan and I pulled an all-nighter, but it was worth it. We cracked the code."

Peter's worry lines disappeared. "That's why you were late! I was going to ask you for an update, but you hadn't arrived by the time I needed to leave. Neal, bring me that coffee. News like this is worth two cinnamon rolls."

It was too bad Aidan couldn't join in the celebration, but he was at work. Like Neal, he was juggling multiple jobs. By day he was a cybersecurity programmer. Evenings he was a grad student in visual arts at Columbia. In addition, for the past month, Aidan had been working with Travis to decrypt Rolf Mansfeld's files.

When Rolf's office was raided in Hungary, the hard drive from his computer was one of the prize trophies. Ever since then, Travis and Aidan had made unraveling the arcane programming language Rolf used to encrypt the files their top priority.

"Rolf created a new esoteric language," Travis said. "The breakthrough came when we realized it was based on number sequences derived from 'The Haunter of the Dark.' "

"Isn't that the Lovecraft short story Rolf mentioned at the sci-fi convention last year?" Peter asked, looking stunned.

"That's the one. Aidan and I weren't having any luck finding the key. Out of sheer frustration more than anything else, we listed all the references we'd known him to use. Rolf was sending Diana coded comments to her stories at about the same time he was masquerading as Alistair Chapman at the convention. We reasoned he might have had that story on his brain."

"Write up the details on the language," Peter ordered, "and I'll review them later. For now, let's cut to the chase. What does the file contain?"

"It's a list of buyers of stolen art, including details about where their tastes lie." Travis winced. "We're not home free yet. The names are written in a different code. But since we figured out the first one, we hope decrypting them won't be as much of a challenge. Most important of all, we obtained Rolf's handle for the dark web—his user name, password, even his IP address."