Chapter Five
Five
For a moment I’m frozen, waiting to see the carnage.
Professor Marini threw himself to the floor, but there’s no blood.
The shot went high, into the roof of the car.
Marini scrambles to his feet. Operators are shouting over the intercom, and now the train is slowing.
I look down the car to see Professor Marini’s pursuer, who is tall and thin and looks determined in a hardened, murderous way.
He stares at Professor Marini, and I can almost see him think it over: Shoot him again?
But people are standing from their seats, getting into the aisle and shouting, creating an unintentional barrier of witnesses between Marini and the guy.
It must be enough of a deterrent, because the gunman runs back the way he came, apparently spooked by the cacophony of shrieking passengers who are pouring out of the sleeper compartments.
The passengers also create a natural barrier between Professor Marini and us, and I desperately hope that the man was too focused on Marini to see us.
Dane doesn’t waste the cover the chaos affords.
He opens a compartment, pulls me in, and shuts and locks the door.
This car has sleepers, and we sink onto the lower bunks of two facing bunk beds.
Distantly, an alarm clangs through the train.
I can hear general mayhem and upset outside our compartment; people are in the aisles talking in that questioning, upset way they do when something big has happened.
Dane takes my hands in his. “You’re shaking.”
“Can’t imagine why.”
“Hey.” His voice is soft. “We’re okay. No one’s hurt.”
“Only because that guy missed! Professor Marini could have been killed.”
Dane nods. “But he wasn’t.”
“Who was he? The guy chasing Marini?”
Dane bites his lip, and I sense that he’s unnerved. “I think it was the 1982, who I mentioned earlier.”
The murderous ex-intelligence guy. I suppress a shiver at the memory of his face in our carriage window. “What happens now?”
“We stay in this compartment and hope the rest of this train journey is uneventful.”
It doesn’t sound fantastic. An announcement over the speakers informs us that the train will be stopping in Zaragoza for an investigation.
“Why don’t you take out the guidebook and see what you can find,” Dane says.
I’m not sure I can, knowing the 1982 is running around trying to murder people on the train, but I understand that he’s suggesting the guidebook as a distraction.
I could definitely use it. Suddenly, I feel an urgency to take a look and see what that possible first puzzle might be.
I pull out the little book and flip through.
There’s a section on sightseeing in Barcelona, covering museums, Park Güell, the Gaudí houses, and Sagrada Família, but the rest of the pages are blank, which is weird.
The Barcelona Cathedral pages are in color, and I stop there.
I spread the book open on the small table so Dane can see. He leans over, and I get a whiff of him again. It’s calming in the wake of what just went down.
“You’re sure the door’s locked?” I ask, thinking of the 1982’s thin, ghoulish face and his gun.
“Yes.” He reaches over and touches the lock to show me.
I spread the spine so the book is nearly flat.
In the Cathedral of Barcelona section, I notice some odd text: The g cloister u off r the right transept q is a walkway n around a lush a courtyard, inside p which v are a always t thirteen geese r in memory t of Saint Eulàlia t and her thirteen torments.
The extra letters look like a printing error, but I know that’s not it. I grab a pen from my backpack and start making a list of the extra letters. There are thirteen of them.
I read the lines again. I feel calmer now, less shaky. The answer is staring me in the face. Thirteen geese for thirteen torments.
When the extra letters are combined, they create a short cipher string of three garbled words.
GUR QNAPVAT RTT
A moment later, I write the plaintext.
THE DANCING EGG
“That’s it?” I can’t keep the disappointment from my tone. “ ‘The dancing egg’?”
“That was extremely fast,” Dane says, an eyebrow up.
“It’s a simple ROT13 Caesar cipher, where you shift letters by thirteen spaces.
” I point to the first letter in each word.
“It’s common.” I tap the pen on my lip and wish it had been a more challenging puzzle.
“See how the letters were randomly inserted into the line about the cloister? They’re like the thirteen geese.
Thirteen letters inserted into the text. But what does ‘the dancing egg’ mean?”
Dane’s fingers fly over his phone. “I think it’s this.” He angles his phone so I can see. In his search results for the dancing egg I read:
The dancing egg tradition takes place in Catalonia, Spain, on the feast of Corpus Christi, where an egg is suspended on the vertical jet of fountain water.
See l’ou com balla, or the dancing egg, in action at the Fountain of St. Jordi in the cathedral’s cloister on the day.
A tradition since the seventeenth century.
“When is the feast of Corpus Christi?” I ask. I’m still alert for any sounds of scuffling outside the door, but there’s only the hum of the train.
His fingers move on his screen. “Says here that it takes place on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, which means this year it’s Thursday, May thirtieth—which is tomorrow.” His eyes meet mine. “I’m guessing the Sant Jordi fountain holds the second puzzle.”
The familiar current of excitement from solving puzzles—even ones as simple as a ROT13, which is child’s play—is buzzing through me. “I guess that’s the first puzzle solved.”
He grins fully. Despite having just been chased down the length of a train by a thug, I can’t help but note the fact that while he’s handsome when he’s scowling, the grin transforms his face into something devastating.
“What happens after that?” The kickoff puzzle was a breeze, and so was this first one. If all five puzzles are similarly easy, then winning might actually be a cinch.
“I don’t know. Maybe all the puzzles will be in Barcelona. Maybe we’ll be sent all over Europe.”
I stare at him in surprise. “But—surely people have jobs to get to.”
He shrugs. “When the prize is this big, jobs are put aside.”
We are quiet. I stare at the blurred landscape outside the window as we slow on our approach into Zaragoza.
It’s a patchwork of green fields contrasted with the brown of dirt roads and, in the distance, the hazy outline of what might be the foothills of the Pyrenees.
My stomach gives a slight growl, and I remember that I haven’t eaten yet today—I only had that one cup of coffee and before that, the meal on the plane yesterday.
Everything about this trip has me out of my element, but that’s kind of what I wanted in coming to the conference.
This is the first time I’ve ever been out of the United States, and Spain has always been on my bucket list.
I look down at the guidebook in front of me. “Did you really need me to solve this?”
He looks at me, but I can’t decipher his expression.
It almost seems like he’s trying to decide how to word his answer.
Finally, he says, “Yes. I couldn’t figure out the kickoff puzzle on my own.
My expertise is in programming solutions to cryptograms. I ran those numbers through a program, but I had no idea about the guidebook until it fell out of your bag.
And this puzzle in the guidebook—I might have been able to get it, with enough time.
But you solved it with no assistance within minutes.
It would have taken me a lot longer to realize it was a ROT13 cipher. ”
I shake my head. Earlier he said he plays the game because it’s addictive, but that’s too easy. “Why are you playing the game, Dane? You’ve already won twice. You’re a millionaire. Why risk being deleted now?”
There’s a hint of a smile. “Would you buy it if I said I like playing the game?”
“No. Not when people chase you and wave guns around.”
“Then I guess the answer is that I want more. When you’ve won twice, it’s easy to think you’ll win again.”
I’m not sure I believe him. There’s something just this side of glib about his answer, like he’s trying to say what I want to hear but the truth is more complicated.
I don’t know him well enough to guess at his motives.
“When you’re not participating in Enigma Challenges and being chased by people, what do you do?
Besides roll around in your prize money. ”
Another half smile. “I run my own security company, focused on cybersecurity and vulnerabilities. I consult with corporations and governments, usually after they’ve been hacked, and I spend time reverse engineering threats and researching modern attack methods.”
I picture him spending sixteen hours a day hunched over a laptop looking for anomalies and running tests. I can’t square it: He looks like he leaps over fences and runs after bad guys. The man is in impeccable shape.
“I guess that’s better than being a weird guy drawn to the statue of the devil,” I say.
He gives a short laugh. “You were there too, Dr. Wilder. Using that logic, you’re also a weird guy.”
I like this. I’ve been called weird plenty of times for my devotion to cracking ciphers, and it’s never delivered playfully.
I watch as Dane picks up his phone, then stabs at it.
I try to peer at the screen, and the glimpse I get suggests this isn’t a regular smartphone.
It’s just lines of code. “What is that phone you have? A super-hacker phone or something?”
He looks at his phone as though just noticing it. “Yes.”
“Really?”
“It’s a PinePhone. It runs Linux.”
I snort a little laugh because all this is so new to me, and look out the window even though the view is the cement station walls as the train begins moving again.
“Is Dane Seaver really your name?” I ask.
He looks at me like I’ve lost it. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because,” I explain patiently, “Dane is a romance-hero name. Like, it’s a born-in-a-drainpipe-and-named-yourself kind of name.”
He scowls. “What?”
“I’m not saying it’s bad,” I say. “It’s a great name.”
“It’s not a romance-hero name,” he says after a while, but I see a little turn at the corner of his mouth. He’s not nearly as annoyed as he’d like me to think he is.
“Any family?” I ask. “A wife that’s going to resent me working with you and come after me?” It sounds like I’m fishing to see if he’s single, and I inwardly cringe. Hopefully the fact that I’m so recently out of a relationship covers me.
He shakes his head and idly studies the long stretch of scar on his forearm—perhaps to avoid meeting my gaze. “No wife. I have two brothers and our parents.”
“Are you close with them?”
“No.” His voice is quiet, almost introspective. “My older brother and I don’t speak at all.” A wince softens his features for the barest flash, and then it’s gone, almost like he’s schooled himself into not thinking about it.
To ease that wince and match his vulnerability, I say, “My sister and I aren’t close either, but when I was sixteen and she was nineteen, our parents died in a car accident. The other car hit them front on.”
“That’s awful. I’m so sorry. Was it a drunk driver?”
I shake my head. “They never caught the person. They walked away from their vehicle, and it wasn’t registered.
” It was infuriating, and at the time, we were too young to really question what the police were telling us.
Christine and I thought it was weird that we never saw the police report and that no one seemed to know anything about the car that hit our parents.
We were told the investigation was closed.
Being teenagers, we had no power or funds to push.
It was only later, as adults, after we had put some of the trauma behind us, that we realized the details seemed off.
“Christine and I had to stick together as a result, whether we wanted to or not.”
“Did you have family to help you and your sister?”
“It was just us.” I study my fingers, thinking about Christine.
I’ve long made peace with the fact that we’re not friends.
If I needed something, she’d be there, and knowing that matters.
But we don’t hang out, and we only check in with each other every few months.
“We’re different people. If we weren’t related by blood, we wouldn’t talk at all.
I think the loss of our parents is the only thing that ties us together. ”
“I get that. That’s how it is for me and my brother now.” Again, that pinch of pain makes a brief appearance in his face, and I suspect Dane wishes it was different.
The train jolts lightly, and there’s a sound from outside the compartment. Dane tenses and we wait, but nothing happens, and no further sounds come.
“Should we check?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “If we do, we might end up having to run through the whole train again. We have a little over an hour to Barcelona. Let’s sit tight, because, Zoe?”
“Yeah?” I have a feeling I won’t like what he’s about to say.
“The second puzzle is probably going to be much more intense.”