Chapter Twenty-Five
Twenty-five
“Why do guys always have to mess with public monuments?” I ask.
“Why do you assume it was a guy?” Dane runs a hand over the metal inlaid on the top of the trig point, which is a circle with three spokes.
“You know it was drunk boys coming up here.”
“Getting drunk and defacing public property was never my idea of a good time. When I was a teenager, I liked hacking into things I shouldn’t.”
“And what’s a good time to you now? I’m not being suggestive. I want to know.”
Dane looks out toward Easter Road, where Hibernian FC plays.
It’s a big white-and-green rectangle of a stadium, easily visible from here, but when I trace a line from the top of the trig point, it doesn’t match the inlaid brass spokes.
None of the spokes seem to point to anything specific.
I don’t see how the puzzle works when there’s no line to the stadium, unless there’s some magical ley line or something.
But I don’t think that’s what the fourth puzzle meant.
He’s taking too long to answer, like he really has to think about it.
I start to suspect he’s simply not going to, but then he says, “I like good company. Being with people I trust and care for, which isn’t very many people.
I’ve had to build that as an adult since I don’t really talk to my family. ”
Probably most of us want that in life. I think about that picnic and the dinner with Xhan and Luca in Paris and how lovely they were. How comforting. If I could have more meals with friends like those, they would be my best good times too.
“What happened with your older brother?” The question is out before I can consider whether he might not want to answer, whether it’s too personal.
He circles around the trig point. “I told you Max was upset because the FBI zeroed in on me for hacking into our internet provider when I was seventeen. But I did more than that. I hacked into every business I could think of in our hometown. Then I hacked into bigger ones. Then I implemented a supply chain hack, which got me into the clients of companies. It wasn’t good; I’m not proud of the destruction.
Everyone wanted to know why I did it. The FBI and my parents both thought I was trying to steal money.
But I only did it to prove to myself that I could. ”
I circle opposite him.
“Max was in college, trying to maintain a squeaky-clean image so he could apply for government intelligence positions after graduation. FBI, CIA, NSA, who knows what he wanted to do. He took it as a personal insult that I had a criminal record as a juvenile. We got into a massive fight, and he gave me this scar.” He rubs his forearm.
I’m shocked. I thought he’d gotten that in the course of his ProtoDark work. “But your record was wiped the next year when you turned eighteen, right?”
“Right.” He gives a little shrug.
“Have you talked about it with him?”
He shakes his head. “It was easy not to back then because Max was away in college and I left the following year. We just…never spent time around each other after that. He’s a lawyer in DC now, and my younger brother, Jordan, restores museum pieces in New York.
I talk to Jordan, but I haven’t spoken to Max since. ”
“You haven’t spoken to your brother since you were seventeen?” They were in their thirties now. As much as I sometimes struggle to find things to say to Christine, I can’t imagine not talking to her. But our situation is different. We’re all we have.
“I know.” Dane looks out at the city, looking worn, like he feels the weight of the words. I ache to brighten him up.
“Hmm. Three Seaver boys,” I say with dramatic relish.
“Max looks like a ferret, and Jordan has giant toad lips. I’m the only good-looking one.”
I laugh. “Maybe they got all the charm.”
“We both know that’s not true.” He slides me a little look, and we laugh.
I lean on the trig-point marker. There’s nothing on the summit but rock and puddles from the rain. I’m worried that we’ve finally come up against a puzzle that has stumped us.
“Maybe it’s not supposed to match the spokes,” Dane says.
He turns his jacket collar up against the wind and still manages to look as breathtakingly handsome as he does when he’s relaxed at dinner in Paris.
I want to reach out and wrap my arms around him.
Lean against him for warmth. Comfort him for the yearning I can see he clearly has over his family, for the relationship he lost with his brother. But I don’t know if he would want that.
“I don’t know why they have to be so cryptic.” I step away, down off the base of the marker.
He gives a small laugh. “That’s the game.”
I look at the ground as though there were an invisible line stretching between the trig-point marker and Easter Road far off in the distance. My eye follows the line off the rock to where it meets the soft ground. There’s not much up here but windswept rock and patchy grass, but…
My pulse picks up.
I walk to where the rock meets the ground, still in that invisible line, and there—there, in an almost imperceptible little disturbance in the ground, is a bit of metal peeking out. “Dane. Here.”
I brush dirt away to reveal a small rectangular metal plate. I pick at it, but it’s embedded. A web address in IP numbers is engraved on it.
Dane comes to squat down near me. I run a finger over the numbers. He types them into his phone and frowns. “The address isn’t right.”
“Did you type it correctly?”
He slides me an incredulous look, but carefully pokes out each symbol of the address again. Still the page comes back as an error.
“I know what this is,” he says. “See?” He points to the first part of the address. “Those numbers are server numbers. If I know those, I can hack in and find whatever’s stored. And I bet only one thing is there: the fifth puzzle. I’ll do it as soon as we’re back at the hotel.”
“Good thing you can do that.” I take out the dummy puzzle we created last night and hand it to him.
It’s a small block of wood that was part of the back of the desk in our hotel room.
We discussed the medium for hours. Dane said it needed to be something that couldn’t be easily blown away or lost, like paper, because we didn’t know what the puzzle would be up here.
On the block, we’ve written an address to a website Dane set up that contains nothing but a simple cipher string.
We debated which one to use for a long time.
We know the 1982 can crack puzzles, but I didn’t want to make it too difficult or he might not solve it, or worse, guess that it’s a fake.
In the end, I settled on the dancing-men cipher used in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” one of the stories in the 1905 book The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.
It’s a series of stick man figures that resemble semaphores.
If the 1982 is at all familiar with substitution ciphers, he will figure it out.
Our message looks like a row of little stick figures holding various yoga poses.
The line decodes to
ELIMINATE ALLARD. TRACK HIM AND KILL.
Although the letter A has the highest frequency—and frequency analysis is how the cipher was solved in the story—I’m betting he’ll use L, with that last word KILL looking pretty obvious.
“Remember, he’s Polish,” Dane said early this morning. “He might not have read the Sherlock Holmes books.”
“If he can’t figure it out, then he doesn’t deserve to move forward,” I told him. “It’s like the fourth puzzle in Paris; you either know it or you don’t. What kind of puzzle solver doesn’t know about the dancing men?”
“This is you being a puzzle nerd,” he said, and my heart twinged at the affection in his tone.
“We can’t all be ruthless challenge winners,” I responded.
Anyway, there are plenty of dancing-men cipher tables out there on the internet—there’s even a font, which I downloaded and used to write the cipher this morning—so I maintain it’s not strenuous.
Now, Dane pries up the metal plate from the ground and replaces it with the wooden block. We artfully arrange dirt and grass on it without covering it entirely. A rain cloud moves in stealthily, and the sky darkens.
“Do you still have the urge to hack into companies?” I ask lightly as we make our way back toward the path to leave Arthur’s Seat.
“I’m much more interested in finding system vulnerabilities and getting paid by companies to patch them. White hat stuff as opposed to black hat.” He looks up at the sky. “My work for ProtoDark unfortunately veers into black hat.” He glances at me. “How do you feel about that?”
“Are you asking whether I’m put off by your tarnished soul?” I inject a note of teasing into my words, perhaps to cover for the fact that he’s just basically asked me if I like him.
He stands still, looking out over Edinburgh. The wind ruffles his hair. “Are you?”
I move past him on the path. “No, Dane.”
But I’ve misjudged my footing in the effort to seem nonchalant, and I slip on a slimy patch of mud.
His hand shoots out to steady my arm, and then he slides his hand down to my palm.
He doesn’t let go when the path evens out.
There is no reason to keep holding my hand, except under the pretense of speed, but equally, I don’t shrug it off.
“Paris and Edinburgh had geographic clues,” he says. “This is following the same pattern. This last one will be difficult.”
“All of it has been difficult,” I mutter as we descend the path. Fat plops of rain hit my face. “Maybe parts have been okay.”
But he slows down so that I have to slow too, or run into him. He stops and gives me a serious look. “The company has certainly been enjoyable.”
My cheeks heat. I want to kiss him, but fat raindrops pelt our faces and the chill makes standing here unpleasant. We have to get back to the hotel, especially if Allard has people out here looking for us. I turn and pull him down the path.
Our walk back to the hotel is uneventful, but my body aches with the tension of not knowing whether we’ll be jumped at every turn. Once we’re safely ensconced in our room, Dane gets to work on whatever it is he has to do to the server of the fifth puzzle’s web address. My phone rings; it’s Luca.
“Hey,” I say.
“Dane isn’t answering his phone,” Luca says.
“He’s hacking into a server right now.”
Dane doesn’t bother looking up from what he’s doing on his phone, and I can’t help the little surge of affection at his focus.
“I have news,” Luca says. “The 1982 has departed Paris. He took a Ryanair flight that left this morning for Edinburgh at 8:05.”
I check my watch. That was over an hour ago. The urge to hurry surges in my chest. “He’s figured out the fourth puzzle, then.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Any sign of Allard?”
“I’ve got a guy watching Sophie’s, and he’s been at her apartment since yesterday. Did you find the fifth puzzle?”
“We just found it, and we’re working on it now.
” I tell him about last night, about the body in the roundabout and the message from Allard.
I leave out the part where we’ve decided to get Allard and the 1982 to take each other out.
Something tells me Luca wouldn’t approve, so I’ll let Dane have that conversation later.
“It makes sense now how Allard’s been tracking you,” Luca says when I’m done. “You got rid of the app, of course.”
“Dane’s handling that,” I say, which is not untrue.
There is a silence and then a quiet laugh. “Tell him to call me when he can and he can tell me whatever little move you two are planning.”
I don’t bother scoffing that we’re not planning anything; Luca is too good at what he does, and he clearly knows Dane. We end the call, and I relay the news to Dane. He doesn’t react for a long moment as he finishes what he’s doing.
Finally, he inhales sharply and leans back.
“Got it.” He looks at me as though coming back to himself, like he’s been in a hacking dimension.
“The 1982 is on his way, then. Good. We’ll find out when he accesses our version of the fifth puzzle.
” He crosses the room and hands me his phone.
“Here. Let’s get the real puzzle going. Enter the PIN you signed up for the game with. ”
The website on his phone is blank, except for a small box for a PIN. I enter mine. It’s eerily like what we set up for the 1982. Dane leans over my shoulder to watch. On the screen, much like the rabbit image in France, four black-and-white pages of photos appear.
They’re photographs of us.