Chapter Four
Four
I follow Dane up the escalators to a ticket counter where, in flawless Spanish, he purchases two tickets to Barcelona on the AVE, the high-speed train.
The ticket guy tells us to hurry; our train leaves in just ten minutes.
We wind our way across the large plaza, through the ticket check, and down a long ramp to the platforms, where a shiny, sleek train with a pointed nose awaits.
This is clearly a bad idea, and yet I still seem to be going.
We enter the quietly humming train, and I follow him down the carriage.
He opens the doors to another car, and I lose sight of him, but in a moment he comes back my way.
He plucks my backpack from me and keeps going, a wordless remark to hurry it up.
We go through three more carriages until he slides open the door to a private compartment.
He pulls the door closed after me as I bump and jostle my way into the seat across from him. There’s a small table between us.
The train begins to move. We’re really doing this.
Dane crosses a leg over one knee and brings his hands to his mouth like he’s praying, except he doesn’t strike me as the praying type. “Do I have it right that you were involved romantically with Howland?”
“Yes.” I can’t help but cringe.
“Why?” he asks.
I sit back, thumping against the seat. Because sometimes, despite our best efforts to make careful decisions in life, we falter?
Does he want me to say that? I would like to conceal my romantic ineptitude and my failure at not seeing Eric’s reptilian undercoat fast enough.
A possible answer is that Eric said he was good at puzzles, and that fascinated me.
And when I met him, he was being incredibly nice—I’d just seen him gently console a student of his who burst into tears over a paper.
Maybe there was a little hero worship on my part at first, despite the power imbalance and risky professional politics of dating your grant principal. It doesn’t matter.
“I was slow to see his faults,” I finally say.
I dated throughout my twenties, but Eric probably represented authority in a way that I subconsciously looked for after losing my parents.
When he wanted to be everything to me, I let him.
I understand now that he knew this and took advantage of it.
I classically, foolishly, thought I could change him.
It’s a tale as old as time, and it won’t be my story again.
“And you just broke up with him this morning,” Dane says.
“Yes. Although honestly I knew a while ago. Can we drop it now?”
Dane leans back and looks out the window as the train pulls up overground and into the daylight. “Are you okay?”
I stare at him a moment. “Am I okay about what?”
“The breakup.”
I can’t see why he cares. “If we weren’t on a train right now, I’d be dancing through Madrid, singing at the top of my lungs. Can we get back to the Enigma Challenge?”
There is a hint of a smirk on his lips. “What do you want to know?”
“What’s the prize for this game? A hoard of pirate treasure?”
Dane taps his finger on the table between us. “Twelve million dollars.”
I breathe in. Twelve million dollars. Holy shit.
“There can be a catch. Sometimes winning is also a nonnegotiable invitation to work for ProtoDark. Like I mentioned, they seem to use the game as a way to recruit people.”
I stare at him. “So not only do I have to keep playing this but I’ll be forced to work for them too?” A wash of panic sweeps through me, quiet and insidious in its magnitude, $12 million or not.
“Not everyone works for them,” Dane says.
“You can decline?”
For the first time, he looks uneasy. “I wouldn’t say you can decline…but they might not need you.”
We sit in silence for a long moment, and I look out the window at the blur of land. I appreciate that he’s giving me time to absorb this nasty little reality. But I’m already trying to work out what to do next.
Because I sure as hell cannot lose this thing.
“What are the five puzzles?” I ask.
“We don’t know yet,” he admits, even though it sounded like he knew what they were earlier.
Maybe he said that to move me along. I’m not sure how I feel about this.
“They can be anything. They’re different every time the game is played.
Originally, the challenge consisted of a mix of security-programming puzzles and acrostics, a few riddles.
This time it seems to involve ciphers.” He nods at the shrink-wrapped guidebook sitting between us on the table.
“For example, the clue Celia’s book to guide you is difficult.
If you didn’t get to the bookseller in time to buy a copy, you’d have no way forward.
That already cuts down the contestant pool by a lot. ”
I try to picture how many copies of the book there were at the stall. Five, maybe, at most.
“It’s a little like the Beale ciphers,” I say.
“That’s a ciphertext challenge that supposedly leads to $40 million in treasure buried somewhere in Virginia.
Only one of the three ciphertexts has been solved, but most people think it’s a hoax.
” I think about some of the world’s biggest unsolved crypto puzzles: the Voynich manuscript; the fourth Kryptos message at the CIA headquarters, which a whole group of codebreakers continually works on; and a carrier pigeon’s message from World War II.
My favorite ciphers, of course, focus on literature, like Edgar Allan Poe’s two famous cryptograms, both of which have been solved, and the anagrams found in Milton’s Paradise Lost, spelling FALL and SATAN.
Beatrix Potter too wrote journals for years in a fascinating cipher she made up.
“Except the Enigma Challenge isn’t a hoax,” Dane says. “And because the puzzles can be so difficult to solve, some players try to steal the answers. That’s why we were accosted outside the convention center.”
“How did they know to target us, though?”
“They watch who’s working the puzzles and come after them. There are teams of people working on this—and some of them are downright evil.”
“Great,” I mutter. “Deletion, forced work, and evil teams after you.” I shake my head.
“Can’t think why more people aren’t flocking to this.
” I feel stupid. In all the Reddit threads, someone should have mentioned the danger somewhere.
Or did I just not see it? Worse—was I so focused on intentionally disregarding Eric’s edict not to play and finding the puzzle that I willfully overlooked the cautions?
“It’s a lot to take in,” Dane says gently.
“Who else is playing?” I ask.
“We can’t be sure yet, but there’s one guy who calls himself the 1982, and he often enters the challenge. He has a particular reputation for violence.”
“What kind of name is the 1982?”
“It’s a team name, but it’s really just one guy, who I’m guessing was born in 1982.
He was Polish paramilitary, and he tries to approach the Enigma Challenge like a military operation.
He hires people to play for and with him, but if they lose—and they always do—he tends to kill them.
That’s the unfortunate thing about the challenge.
People like him are attracted to play. There are a few other players who are ex-intelligence people who’ve been trained to program or break codes. ”
I give an involuntary shiver. “Is that who was attacking you at the devil statue?”
His jaw tightens. “It wasn’t the 1982, but it was definitely someone who doesn’t want me playing the game.”
“Did you catch them?”
He purses his lips, and I can tell he doesn’t want to answer.
“How does anyone know to follow us?” I try.
“They’re not following us,” he says, looking irritated. “They’re following me.”
A realization hovers just outside my understanding. My brain is annoyingly slow at pulling it into focus. It’s the way he said if they lose—and they always do and someone who doesn’t want me playing the game.
“How do you know all this stuff about the Enigma Challenge?” I ask, suspicious now. It’s there. The answer is right there, waiting for me to reach out and grab it.
Dane just looks at me. He bites his bottom lip and says, “Because I’ve won it the last two times.”
My mouth drops open. “With all the cash?”
He nods.
“Twice?”
A second nod.
Another sliver of unease hits me for attaching myself to him.
I don’t know Dane Seaver at all. Does he work for ProtoDark if he won twice?
Did he somehow get out of working for them?
I would hate it if Eric was right about him.
“Why do you need me, then? Playing a third time should be easy for you.”
“Apart from the fact that you refused to sell me your guidebook, the challenge is different each time.” He bites his bottom lip. “The challenges I won had programming and hacking elements to them. I’ve never seen straight cryptograms before like the numbers at the statue.”
“You didn’t solve the puzzle at the statue?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “No.”
Satisfaction rears again, even though this game is far from being an easy set of puzzles now.
A childhood memory surfaces: my dad, shoving back his chair and doing a butt-shaking dance after solving a puzzle, howling with laughter.
Even though I wasn’t remotely solving his cryptograms, he always called me his assistant and used the opportunity of completing a puzzle to take us out for ice cream.
Ice cream celebrations feel so quaint now.
I look at Dane again. He didn’t know how to solve that introductory puzzle, yet he knows what the game entails.
I can see how we need each other. He’s pushed up his shirtsleeves and is resting his forearms on the table.
I notice a long, thin white scar on the top of one forearm, stretching up into his sleeve, and wonder how he got it.
I don’t know him. But I’m stuck playing this.
“If you’re helping me, then I guess you want a portion of the winnings?” I ask. “If we win.”
“We can work something out.”