Chapter Twenty-Six #2
“I hope you’re watching out for yourself. Lots of unsavory people play the Enigma Challenge.”
“I know.”
“Zoe,” he sighs. “You’ve got serious danger coming your way. Listen to me. If you just—”
But I can’t take his evasive answers and riddles.
“No, Eric,” I say. “Enough. Don’t call me again.
We’re done.” There is no point in continuing this conversation so he can tell me what I already know or try to wheedle information out of me.
I end the call and block his number. Many problems could be solved by blocking people’s numbers outright, but we think people will change.
And they don’t. They show you who they are from the outset.
It’s a hard lesson to learn, and I hope I’m done learning it.
Then it occurs to me: How did Eric know we’d gone to Paris, much less left it? I never told Christine I’d left Madrid. I never told her about Barcelona or Paris. It’s unsettling, but I don’t have time to dwell on it now. I force myself to focus on the puzzle.
Dane comes back an hour later, looking the most delighted I’ve ever seen him.
He dumps a number of bags on the floor and Italian takeaway on the desk. I get up and stretch, rolling out the kinks in limbs that were sitting too long, and watch as he holds up his purchases.
“Got an Airbnb,” he says. “It’s not bad. It has two bedrooms, for starters.”
I snort. Like that matters now.
“It’s in an area called Laide on the coast. From there we have to hike about ten miles to Loch na Sealga, and we’ll camp overnight.
Ideally you’ll have found what else we’re supposed to do out there before then.
” He waves the most compactly folded tent I’ve ever seen, followed by two sleeping bags.
They’re so impossibly thin that I can’t imagine they offer much shelter.
“They’re made for high-wind, extreme camping. ”
I fold my arms across my chest. “Are we climbing Mount Everest?”
“From what I learned from the guys at the store, camping in the Scottish wilds is almost the same, but without the corpsicles.” He splays out packets of dehydrated food and nuts on the bed.
“I wouldn’t discount corpsicles with us,” I say.
He smiles and continues to show off his purchases: a toilet trowel, a single-burner camp stove, a pot with fancy collapsing handles, and an assortment of little lanterns and lights.
There’s also a water-filter squeeze pouch and bottle, a compass, two fancy slim hiking backpacks, two hats with midge netting, a roll of duct tape and a box cutter, and copious amounts of midge spray.
He looks so pleased with it all that I find myself grinning.
“You had the time of your life buying all this, didn’t you,” I say.
He grins. “I did a lot of camping when I was a kid. My brothers and I would go. Look at this whistle.”
“Do we need a whistle?”
He tucks it into his backpack. “When I camped as a kid, my brothers and I would fight over who got to manage the whistle. Whoever held it had all the power.”
I laugh, picturing this.
He turns away to clip off the tags from the backpack. “Let’s leave soon. We’ll get to the cottage tonight and hike out tomorrow. That gives us an overnight out there and the next day we’ll find the solution. How’s the puzzle going?”
I open my mouth to say I haven’t made much progress, but instead, I find myself unable to hold it in and blurt, “Eric called me.”
Dane stops what he’s doing with the camping gear. “And?”
“He said he heard I left Paris.”
“How does he know that?”
“Maybe he’s playing the game.” I consider whether Eric could have solved the puzzles. He researches ciphers but only the history of them. He leaves the actual solving to others. “But I doubt he’s managed to crack these. He gets easily frustrated by ciphers.”
We stare at each other, and I see the realization in his face at the same time it hits me.
“He’s working with Allard,” I say. “He put that tracker on my phone in Madrid, that first day.” I cannot believe I didn’t connect the dots before.
That note he left me at the hotel that morning was weird, and I should have given it more thought then.
I’m only surprised that he’s technically proficient enough to have done this.
It makes sense that Eric attached himself like a barnacle to the heft of Allard’s hull. But I’m dismayed all the same.
“Howland is a shady bastard,” Dane says darkly.
“Who isn’t, in this game?” I meet his eyes. “Excepting present company, of course.”
But instead of flashing me that alluring half smile he has, something else crosses his face. All trace of humor is gone. “I’m a lot less clean than you think I am, Zoe.”
“I know. You’ve told me.” I shrug.
He looks like he might have more to say, but then he pushes aside the camping gear to look at the papers. “Let’s see what you’ve got here.”
I didn’t find much while he was out. There’s definitely something to the tiny letters I see wound into the symbols in gold, but they don’t make any sense when I put them together and try to decipher them.
I suspect that some of them are red herrings.
There’s a messy tangle of anxiety in this puzzle for me, because solving it is imperative to not being deleted, and yet if we win then this whole adventure with Dane is over and I’m not ready to part from him.
“We’ll figure this out,” he says. “We should get going. Can you work on it in the car?”
I nod. At least we know the place, Loch na Sealga in the Scottish Highlands, and the day, June 5, two days from now.
Allard is on his way, and he’ll track us from Edinburgh.
Once the 1982 gets the puzzle from Arthur’s Seat, he’ll know to track Allard.
The only thing I can do is cross my fingers and hope it goes to plan.