AHP Newsgroup: Novel’s Injured-On-The-Track Thoroughbred Helps His Rescuer
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Feb. 26, 2009
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Sally Wright
Horses have always played an important role in Sally Wright’s Ben Reese mysteries. Now, in the new Code Of Silence, Ben Reese (college archivist/ex-WWII reconnaissance scout who’s based on a real person) rescues an injured-on-the-track thoroughbred who’s on his way to the killers. Wright accurately presents the plight of discarded racehorses, while also showing the healing effects a horse can have on a human being who’s living through loss and trauma.
Journey, the horse Ben saves in Code of Silence, is Sally Wright’s own first horse. Like Ben Reese, she had twelve hours to decide whether to buy a half-starved, semi-sound, chestnut thoroughbred to keep him from going to the killers. Readers of Wright’s first five novels know how Journey fared, but in Code, the new prequel, readers can see how damaged Journey was, and the risk Ben was taking.
Still, the major story line in Code Of Silence revolves around the Venona Code, the real-life espionage encryptions used by the Soviets during the 30s and 40s to control some 300 agents in the United States. Venona wasn’t a single code, but a series of random-number one-time-pad codes that were changed everyday. The encryptions would’ve remained unbreakable if the Soviets hadn’t reused the same pad (for reasons no one understands) for a nine month period in 1943 and ‘44. It therefore became possible to decrypt many of the messages sent during that time, and we broke the first in 1946. Even so, Venona, and our decrypts, were kept absolutely secret. Only American presidents, their British counterparts, and those directly involved in the decrypting knew of their existence.
It wasn’t until the Soviet Union collapsed, and the KGB archives were opened (briefly), that two well respected U.S. historians visited those archives and stumbled upon the Soviet side of 3000 encrypted Venona telegrams that had been sent to Soviet agents in the U.S., before, during, and shortly after, the Second World War.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s enquiry into what the U.S. knew of those telegrams (initiated by his reading of the historians’ articles) eventually led the N.S.A. to release three batches of U.S. decryptions in the mid-1990s.
In Wright’s Code Of Silence, Reese gets caught up in the conflicts among Venona’s code breakers in 1957 when he’s forced to become involved in a murder case that revolves around a character based on the real Soviet spy who told the Soviets in ‘47 that we’d started reading their messages from ‘43-‘44.
Yet, Code of Silence isn’t an explosion-on-every-page thriller. It’s the everyday life in small-college-town-America that Ben Reese constructed for himself after he was wounded in the war that’s the baseline for the books. When that life’s ripped apart by deliberate acts of violence - acts that drive Ben to rely again on the predatory skills that kept him alive behind the German lines - it’s how that destruction effects human behavior and notions of good and evil, which become the ultimate concerns of Code and the rest of the Ben Reese books.
It’s the horses who help Ben pick up the pieces, though, after the death of his wife (Journey in Code of Silence; Max in last summer’s Watches Of The Night) much the way the real horses they’re modeled on have kept Sally Wright working around them and wanting to ride till she can’t.
People see the cast on her hand now, and say, “Don’t you think it’s time to quit, or at least get an older horse? You don’t heal like you used to. And you’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”
She can’t argue with the last two statements. And she probably will try to find an older horse. But she’s not ready to quit riding yet - now that the ribs are healing, and the hip doesn’t cramp as much, and the cast’s about to come off.