This is a work of fiction.

All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed

in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE CRYPTOS CONUNDRUM

Copyright © 2012 by Chase Brandon

All rights reserved.

A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

®
Forge is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brandon, Chase.
The cryptos conundrum / Chase Brandon. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7653-1877-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4299-4464-9 (e-book)
1. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Fiction. 2. Intelligence officers—
Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.R3597C79 2012
813'.6—dc23
2012009271

First Edition: June 2012

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 L1L

VERDUN, FRANCE. FEBRUARY 26, 1916

The cordite-clouded sky flashed sparks of primordial fire. And Earth’s
anvil shook with concussions that pounded his body and soul as though
smithed by Thor’s angry-red hammer. In terrified awe, Dr. Jonathan S.
Chalmers Jr. watched as blinding artillery bursts and dismembering det-
onations reinforced the enemy’s specter of Death that he felt already over-
shadowed him.
Cold, wet, wounded, and a lifetime’s distance from his family in New
York, Chalmers gripped the steel barrel and bloodstained stock of his
8mm French Lebel, but he would gladly have swapped the rifle for a crys-
tal brandy snifter.
A brilliant mathematician, Chalmers was a scholar and gentleman com-
pletely out of his affluent Long Island element. Against reasonable odds
or definable logic, he was also a private in the U.S. Army and at present
trapped in a gash of dangerous dirt between France and Germany known
as the Western Front. Here, a form of human slaughter called trench war-
fare raged unabated with the rising sun of each new day in a world at war
with itself.
Chalmers knew that the gruesome horror of this historic killing zone
was already immortalized in the battlefield term no-man’s-land—a realm
that his knotted guts and analytical mind told Chalmers was nightmarish
beyond even his own vivid imagination.

THE TRENCHES. 0215 HOURS

Chalmers clutched his circular ID tags, their cool metal a talisman for him.
He surveyed the trench to his left and right. Flanked by shattered bodies,
he saw his dead friends as harbingers of his own anticipated fate.
Chalmers had been sent up to reinforce the 407th French Rifle Regi-
ment two weeks ago with a platoon of American volunteers, including
longtime friend and fellow New Yorker Paul Baker, as well as some British
 CHASE BRANDON

regulars. He’d been under siege and without sleep for so long that he’d
lost all track of time.
“So tell me again, John,” Baker said. “What the hell are we doing here?”
“Saving the French by holding this line. Didn’t you listen to that lieu-
tenant’s briefing, le bâtard who sent us into this rats’ nest?”
“Yeah, right. Guess I overlooked the part about the Krauts trying to
wipe us out.”
Both men were scared, though they tried not to show it.
They winced, recoiling again from the thundering bombardment now
under way to destroy fortifications and trench systems along a twenty-mile
front from Bois d’Avocourt to Étain.
German Krupp howitzers, called Big Berthas, should have finished
the demolition in a matter of days. But both of them were still here, still
alive and holding this line—even though the French fortification at
Douaumont had been captured by German infantrymen.
Chalmers knew it was only a matter of time until the Krauts pushed
them back or overran the allied stronghold here in Alpha Sector. If they
survived the night, their orders were to go over the top at first light and claw
across a five-hundred-yard-wide strip of barbed-wire hell. And if they made
it to the other side, fight the Fritzies man to man with bayonets, and then
bare hands.
The killing zone, Chalmers thought. A suicide charge into no-man’s-land.
Chalmers touched his heart, then pulled a photo of Margaret from his
tunic’s breast pocket. He could make out her features in the sudden glare
of a bomb’s blast. He loved her deeply and felt this was probably his last
chance to look upon her face.
Chalmers felt his friend nudge him. He quickly replaced the photo.
“Seems like an eternity since we enlisted, huh?”
Chalmers nodded. “Maybe longer.” He scoured mud from his rifle
breech with his sleeve. “Sorry I snookered you into this latrine. Rotten
thing to do, Paul.”
“Aw, it’s all right. I’ve always been your shadow. You couldn’t have come
without me . . . just don’t leave without me, okay?” he said with a weak grin.
v
Chalmers and Baker had been neighbors and inseparable pals since they
were still in short pants. Two years older, Chalmers had always been like
a big brother to Baker.
Tall, lanky, and with angular good looks, Chalmers had excelled in
lacrosse in his early years but quit the sport in favor of academics.
 THE CRYPTOS CONUNDRUM 

Baker was short and stocky, and though quite smart, he tended to
muscle his way through life’s challenges, having eventually earned his law
degree and joined his father’s practice more through sheer grit than a
scholar’s grasp of jurisprudence.
A year ago, they’d been safe on Oyster Bay, Long Island, secure in the
warmth of their parents’ love and their families’ wealth, power, and influ-
ence. Although he’d recently married, Chalmers still lived in the stone
mansion that had housed generations of Chalmers families. Baker still
lived just down the road with his parents as well.
It was a near perfect world they’d willingly left in favor of this deadly
trench.
Even more than Baker, Chalmers had been born and raised in privilege,
with every advantage of wealth and sophistication his parents could give
him. Chalmers’s father, the man he’d been named after, was a successful
ship line attorney and investment banker. Chalmers’s French mother had
always been a tender caregiver to her son. She was a consummate home-
maker and devoted wife.
She’d told her son, when he was just a young boy, that she’d met his
father on one of his business trips to the Continent. They’d fallen in love
at first sight. He was their only child, and he’d always tried his best to live
up to their love and expectations. He had set a high achievement bar for
himself as well, especially in the field of education.
Most who knew Chalmers described him as being blessed with ex-
traordinary, if not incomparable, intelligence. When Chalmers was only a
few months old, he’d already begun to demonstrate awareness, physical
prowess, and nascent communication skills that astounded his parents
and the family physician.
v
Now twenty-six years old, Chalmers held doctoral degrees in mathemat-
ics and engineering physics from Columbia University. Before enlisting,
he’d been a professor, head of his department, and the youngest man to
hold that job. His students and university colleagues believed Chalmers
was a true savant, the most brilliant individual they had ever known.
He’d never set a foot off the path his parents had planned for him, nor
his own pursuit of knowledge, until the day he’d seen the recruiting poster.
Its patriotic message spoke to his idealism and sense of adventure, and
constituted what Chalmers called the convergence of coincidence—a force
majeure of unrelated events that shaped one’s life, that perhaps defined
the concept of life itself. He believed in the power of that force.
 CHASE BRANDON

Chalmers Senior believed that his son’s abrupt decision to enlist would,
“in hateful fashion,” as he’d put it, change the young man’s life, and he had
argued vehemently against it. Jonathan Chalmers had stood his ground—
and now occupied it in the soggy bottom of this trench.
Baker was here too, having followed Chalmers’s lead by signing up the
next day. Both of them now faced another moment of convergence, waiting
for the only thing they knew could ever end their friendship . . . Death.
 L2L

THE TRENCHES. L ATER

“I thought we’d be a part of a gallant army that would save France from the
heel of the Huns,” Chalmers said, his voice flattened by disillusionment.
“If this is gallant,” Baker replied, after spitting out the mud from the
trench wall that oozed into every orifice, “I’ll eat this stinking, ass-dirty
uniform.”
“Paul, truth is I wish I’d never gone to town, never seen that goddamned
poster.”
“We probably would’ve volunteered anyway, just to prove that we were
men.”
“Maybe it was just rebelling against following in our fathers’ footsteps.
Me probably more so than you.” Chalmers shrugged. “Doesn’t make much
difference now.”
“We should’ve swiped your dad’s boat again . . . sailed around the world
instead.”
“Yeah . . . Father told me I’d rue the day I volunteered.”
“And . . . ?”
Chalmers surveyed the corpse-strewn trench. “He was right . . . about
everything.”
v
Chalmers had made impetuous decisions that had landed him in hot water
before. Like the time he’d decided it would be exciting to cross Long Island
Sound in his father’s sloop-rigged daysailer during a fierce summer squall.
Baker had been along for the ride then, too. The boat had capsized and sunk
half a mile from the pier.
Chalmers rescued Baker from certain death in the whitecaps that day.
However, he wasn’t nearly so sure he’d be able to save them both from
his disastrous impulse to join the army.
They’d been assigned to the 101st Infantry, slated for an elite “explor-
atory” assignment in France. He’d promised Baker it’d be a memory maker
 CHASE BRANDON

to last a lifetime. He promised his parents and his young wife that he’d
come home in one piece as soon as they whipped those Germans into
shape.

FIRE BAY. 0330 HOURS

Concussive artillery shells and ratcheting machine gun fire shattered the
night. Chalmers was positioned with others in his unit, including Baker,
on the Alpha Sector fire bay, which was a cutout in the trench with an ele-
vated platform where Allied riflemen stood to fire on enemy positions.
“You have to admit, John, there’s a certain orchestral quality to it.”
Chalmers, who’d been trying to distance himself, at least mentally,
from this nightmare, cast a sideways glance at his trench mate.
“Sure. Like a concerto of death.”
Chalmers knew he was smart. He had the degrees and titles to prove
it. Right now, though, he felt like the dumbest jackass alive—the alive part
being a condition he feared would end soon enough.
“Yeah, I want you, too,” he muttered, remembering the poster with Uncle
Sam’s finger pointing at him. All Chalmers wanted now was to go home.
v
President Woodrow Wilson wouldn’t have his congressional declaration
of war against Germany and its Central Power allies until a year from now,
although Chalmers’ political sense told him that bill would have to be
passed. In the interim, a few small units of American volunteers had been
shipped overseas as a show of good faith to America’s future Allied Power
partnership with Britain, France, and Russia. Chalmers and Baker were
here in this trench as part of that “show.”
Chalmers believed the adage that those who failed to learn from his-
tory were doomed to repeat it.
He realized he’d enrolled himself in the front line of a brutal class.
Fear told him that something far worse than the school of hard knocks
was about to start.
THE  CRISIS  OF  ZIONISM

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