Chapter Twelve
Twelve
Dane catches my elbow as I struggle to steady myself in the small space between seats. We probably have seconds before whoever it is figures out that there’s a second entrance. Behind us, the door handle rattles under the folding chair. It won’t hold forever.
We move to the opposite door and Dane pushes it open cautiously, but no one is waiting for us. We run up the steps to the top level. He turns toward the exit, but I pull him toward the exhibition hall.
“If it is someone after us, they might expect us to go outside. Let’s wander in here like we’re looking at the art.”
He nods, and we hurry through galleries of Miró’s brightly colored abstracts.
It feels disrespectful not to pause and take it all in, to rush past these priceless works as though they’re doing nothing more than decorating our escape.
At the end of a series of rooms, I look back and see a man who doesn’t seem like he’s here for the art.
He isn’t bothering to look at any of the work.
We move through to another gallery, and I think we’ve lost him.
I hate that we have to do this, that we have to stay constantly vigilant.
We round a corner and hurry down a long ramp to find two gallery options; one has a security guard stationed in what looks like an empty hall, so we go that way.
The guard walks past a large window looking into a courtyard enclosed on all sides, with a mobile suspended over a small circular pool of strange-looking liquid.
No one follows us. It gives us a moment to slow. I feel my shoulders relax.
“What drew you to study ciphers in literature?” Dane asks.
I glance at him. He’s looking as casual as could be, hands in his pockets as we study the courtyard and the pool. “My father. He was a hobby cryptologist. I was a big reader, and we loved hearing about ciphers used in stories.”
“But you had an aptitude for codes early on?”
I nod. “The photographic memory feels like a cheat, sometimes.”
He shrugs. “Doesn’t make you any less brilliant.”
The compliment—I’m sure it is one—floats around me like a cloud. “What about you? What drew you to hacking?”
“I liked knowing that I could.”
I understand that. We are alike in the curiosity to solve, to understand.
“Why do you think they used Morse code in this puzzle?” he asks. “Out of all possible codes.”
“I don’t know. It feels random, like they’re just using different systems.” I consider the ciphers used so far: Caesar, Morse. Before that, to kick off the game, a substitution cipher. “What kinds of puzzles did you solve when you played?”
“Both challenges required me to program different things. The first had me in Lisbon, where I had to program code in an SQL injection to break into a police database and erase a specific piece of evidence.”
“How did you feel having to do that?”
“I think I justified it at the time by telling myself that removing the evidence didn’t seem to affect the related case.
I was only deleting a name of a witness so ProtoDark couldn’t be connected to the case.
But they wouldn’t have asked me to do it if it wasn’t important.
” Dane looks at the small pool behind the window. “I don’t feel great about it.”
“Were all the puzzles in that challenge like that—doing their dirty work for them?”
“Not all. All of my puzzles took the form of practical attacks against common computing and firewall vulnerabilities, and I got the sense they were testing whether I could do it. How far I would go.” Dane shakes his head.
“To get the next puzzle in the series, I had to write string-manipulation tasks, then write stream and block ciphers, and then start in on RSA keys. Encryption. Hacking. Vulnerabilities. Both challenges were like that.”
I’ve been grimacing through all his words. “I’d be deleted instantly. How did you win?”
He shrugs like it’s nothing. “There was some light geocaching involved at the end, where a satellite-communicator box was buried. I had to press it and enter my PIN. I guess it pings out a message that you’ve won.”
I look behind us again. No one is there, and I feel much better.
“Weird that the puzzles in your challenges were suited to you, and these are suited to me.” I stare at the silvery liquid running down the mobile pieces into the pool.
At first look, I thought the silver sheen was a trick of the light on the water.
But it’s not water. I move over to a small sign that says it’s the Calder Mercury Fountain, a monument to the mining operation in Almadén, Spain, where beautiful things, like mercury, weren’t toxic at first glance.
It’s only in retrospect that you see how badly you’ve been exposed to the poison.
“We should get going,” Dane says. “We have a slight time advantage, but if they replace the egg, then others will be solving this.”
I nod, and we make our way back through the galleries.
I don’t see the man from earlier. The only other people in here are other patrons and the odd security guard.
I think we might be okay as we exit the building and Dane waves down one of the many taxis circling outside the museum and we get in.
He directs the driver to the cemetery. I breathe out, resting against the seat.
Dane is looking at his phone. “Araceli sent some intel. She has eyes on the conference, and apparently there’s a group in one of the conference rooms today still trying to crack the first puzzle.”
He turns his phone toward me so I can see his screen. There’s a grainy photo of four people sitting around a table with the day one agenda in front of them.
“I wonder how many people already figured it out,” I say. “Professor Marini, I guess, since he left the conference on the same train we did. And he was being chased by that 1982 guy. So who’s chasing us?”
Dane looks solemn. “I don’t know.”
I sigh. “Let’s go see Death, then.”