Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-six
“Well, this isn’t creepy at all,” I say.
The photos must have been taken with one of those long-range paparazzi lenses; we’re blurry, and the angle is wide.
They’ve zoomed in on us. The first photo is of us eating tapas in Barcelona, me taking a piece of cheese off Dane’s plate.
The second is of me grabbing the egg from the fountain in the cathedral.
The third page is of us kissing in front of the Winged Victory in the Louvre.
I feel the heat gather in my cheeks—the kiss is fucking gorgeous, as good in black and white as it is in my memory.
In the photo, my eyes are closed, and Dane’s mouth is caught open, in motion as he’s taking my mouth in his. I feel a little weak looking at it.
The fourth page is a photo of us outside on the street after dinner later that night, captured from the side.
It’s obvious that our hands are on each other.
We thought we were alone on that street, apart from that guy who walked by.
We thought we’d been discreet. It’s disturbing that we were being watched everywhere.
I don’t know what to say. I don’t dare look at him to see what his reaction is.
Someone has applied gold lines over parts of the photos. It’s detailed work. In some, my hand is outlined. In others, our legs.
“It might be a steganographic puzzle,” I say. “Something in the pixels of the photos, maybe?”
He zooms in and points to hand-painted borders around the photos.
They’re elaborate, reminding me of illuminated manuscripts.
On the Barcelona photo page, it’s dragons and swords and little knights on horses.
One of the pages of us in Paris has vines and roses.
Toward the bottom it changes to a motif of what looks like thistles before fading into stars.
It reminds me of the famous Voynich manuscript, a hand-painted and hand-written manuscript that’s on the list of the world’s uncracked cryptograms.
“Who knew hackers were such artists?” I muse.
“They’ve never done anything like this before,” he says. “I need to get these printed so we don’t have to zoom in on them.”
I look at him. “You said they were much heavier on programming in the previous challenges, right?”
“Much.” He strides to the window.
“But this would have taken so much time.” I look at the photo of us in front of the Winged Victory. “And yet this photo is of us from…two days ago.” Was it only two days ago?
Dane runs a hand over the back of his head, his T-shirt rising slightly with the movement and showing off a bit of skin.
I look at the border around the photos of us at the Louvre. It has a bunch of blocky symbols in the roses.
“It’s a pigpen cipher,” I say, pointing to the blocky symbols.
I get up and root through the room’s desk drawer for hotel stationery and a pen.
I draw out the grid of the pigpen cipher.
“Letters are represented by fragments of a grid they sit in. See—letters A through I are in a standard three by three grid, so each letter is represented by the border of the grid it sits in. The rest of the alphabet adds in dots.” I draw out four grids for him.
Two are three-by-three grids that separate letters A through R, with the remaining letters in X-shaped grids.
One of the cross grids and one of the X grids have dots around the letters, so the code can be shaped by the angle of the grid and a dot, if necessary.
“Kind of weird that our fake fifth puzzle is so similar,” he says.
The symbols are spread across the photos.
I follow one from the gold line in my hand in the Louvre kissing photo.
“Oh…ah.” I see it now. I have to zoom in to get it, but there is a slight arrow in gold on the tip of my index finger in the photo.
Following the arrow in a line to the border goes directly to a symbol.
I look at my fingers in gold in the other photos—sometimes it’s Dane’s mouth—to find other tiny arrows pointing to symbols.
I collect the symbols, using the pigpen key to convert the shapes to letters.
But the string is scrambled. Another code. I consider whether this is yet another cipher type, but it’s too simple—that HTFIF EUJN is obviously JUNE FIFTH, which is two days from now, so it’s an anagram. I move letters around until, unscrambled, they decode to
LOCH NA SEALGA FISHERFIELD FOREST JUNE FIFTH
Dane leans over my shoulder as I write out the message. I’m momentarily distracted by his nearness, his heat. “I’m not sure about the Loch na Sealga part. I might have the letters wrong.”
He pulls out his phone. “You have it right. Loch na Sealga is in Achnasheen, in the Scottish Highlands. It’s in an area called Fisherfield Forest. It’s…
a giant area of uninhabited land. A big hiking area.
” He looks up, our eyes meeting. “We have two days to make our way out there. We’ll need the time if it’s as remote as it looks.
There may not be roads. We probably have to hike in. ”
“But what are we looking for in this Fisherfield Forest place?”
“I don’t know. Something near this loch.”
I look back at the photos. “There’s more to this puzzle. But this is definitely the first part.”
“I’m going to go find a printer.”
But he doesn’t move. He lets me study the photos on his phone.
The more I look, the more I see. There are tiny letters drawn in at seemingly random spots around the photos, but I am certain nothing about this is random.
It’s disconcerting that someone has been watching what we’ve done, catching the kiss and the hot street moment.
I jot down the letters that I see. Nothing makes much sense; it’s not so much a cipher as a hidden message I’m not yet seeing. I look up, frustrated, and Dane gently takes his phone.
“I’ll be back,” he says. “With printouts.”
I work on the code and notes I have while he’s gone. The next time I look up, Dane’s back with four sheets of A5-size paper, the photos and their borders printed to the edges.
“Lady at the copy shop thought I was trying to print out porn,” he says, his tone light. It’s the only acknowledgment he’s given to the photos of us.
“Obviously it’s not porn,” I mutter. I spread the pages out on the bed. The prints are undeniably helpful. I don’t have to constantly zoom in on them. I lose myself noting down what I see.
Bottles of water appear in front of me; at some point Dane leaves and comes back with food. I’m lost to the work the way I get when I fall into research.
By the time I look up, it is midday.
“I don’t have anything new,” I tell him, looking around at the detritus on the bed. Empty water bottles and snack wrappers and paper. “I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry about it? You’re doing the best you can.”
“Because. The 1982 will have landed by now, and Allard is probably on his—”
Dane’s phone rings. His eyes stay on mine as he answers, and there’s a hint of a knowing smile as he says, “Ah, okay. As expected. Yeah, she’s still working on it. I know. I know. Thank you, Luca.” He ends the call. “Allard has departed Paris. Paris to Edinburgh on another Ryanair flight.”
I look back at the puzzle. I’m not panicked, for once, even knowing two monsters are after us.
I get back to work. At one point, Dane leans me back to massage the tension out of my shoulders.
I briefly let myself picture what it would be like to have this kind of support all the time. To have Dane with me after all this.
“What?” he asks, reaching out and brushing a piece of unruly hair out of my eyes. I realize I was staring at him.
“Nothing.” I shake my head. Mentioning the future feels too big, too unanswerable, especially right now. I need to focus on the puzzle.
He watches me a moment longer. “I’ve been reading up on Fisherfield Forest. It’s repeatedly referred to as one of the wildest and most remote areas of the country. There are no roads and no vehicle access. Riddled with lochs and mountains, which they call Munros.”
“How do we get there?”
“We’ll drive to the west coast. It’ll be close to five hours.
Then we’ll hike in, probably camp overnight.
I just booked us a car, and in a bit I’ll go out and get us camping equipment.
I’ll see what kinds of hotels or Airbnbs they have out that way.
We need to leave this afternoon if we want to stay ahead of our two good friends. ”
I nod and turn back to the chaotic spread of my notes. There’s something else here I’m not seeing, and it bugs me. Dane leaves to go procure supplies and the rental car, and I dive into the photos again.
■ ■ ■
I’m pulled out of my studying by my phone ringing. I glance at the screen and see that it’s Eric. I ignore it and set the phone to silent and go back to the papers.
A text follows.
Eric: Call me. It’s about Christine.
I’m calling him before I can think it through.
It’s a potent sense of guilt for not calling Christine sooner on this trip.
On weekends she refinishes old pieces of furniture, trying to make a little extra cash for the house by selling them after.
She does a gorgeous job of the work, but an armoire could have fallen on her and seriously injured her.
She always wants to do things on her own and won’t accept help even when it seems obvious that she should.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, and my mind is going off on irrational panic tangents.
“That was fast,” Eric answers in the smug tone that I hate.
“What’s going on with Christine?” My initial reaction dies down, and logic steps in. There is no furniture injury. Eric wants something.
“She got your stuff from my condo,” he says in an infuriatingly calm voice. This is like when we talked in Barcelona. He refused to answer questions then too. “And she made some rude remarks.”
I exhale a breath in irritation. “What do you want, Eric?”
“I hear you left Paris.”
My pulse skitters that he knows. “That’s none of your business.”