Salem's Cipher Read online

  Bel tried to shrug and paled with the effort. “The Underground told us. They’ve been right about everything else.”

  “Dammit.” Stone sat back and rubbed the top of his thighs, clearly weighing something.

  Salem found herself able to study him dispassionately. He was handsome, his features strong, his skin smooth and dark. Normally, she’d be terrified to sit this close to him, to talk to him.

  She’d been through too much to care anymore.

  “Help us,” she demanded. “Or let us go.”

  He stared at her, eyes lingering on her face. “Your cat is fine.”

  She laughed. She didn’t know where the sound came from. “What?”

  “I asked the Minneapolis field office to check on him when they searched your apartment. Your neighbor across the hall has him, and he’s fine. Your catsitter might want to be more subtle, however. He offered to sell a bag to my agent.”

  Salem nodded. Skanky Dave and Beans seemed like characters from a dream.

  Bel came to a decision. “Salem’s right. We need you to help us or to at least let us go. You know we haven’t done anything wrong or you would have already arrested us. Let us finish what we’re doing. Give us until Monday.”

  Stone shook his head. Salem thought he was coughing but realized it was soft laughter.

  “You two are going to rescue whichever of your mothers is alive and dismantle the Hermitage, one of the best-funded and most well-connected organizations in the world?”

  “In that order,” Bel said fiercely, leaning forward.

  Stone’s expression grew serious. “You know what? I believe you can. Because you two are some combination of lucky, strong, and smart that I’ve never seen before. But I can’t just let you go. It’s a million to one that you’ve even survived this long. Plus, Senator Gina Hayes is going to be speaking on Alcatraz in less than two days. No way can you roam San Francisco. Your faces are too hot, even with those disguises.”

  Salem’s brain raced, the metal cylinder burning a hole in her back pocket. If she held Beale’s keytext, they could travel to Virginia, retrieve the lightning bolt—whatever it is—and hand it over within a day. She didn’t tell him about the potential assassination. Salem figured there was no point. If they took down the Hermitage before Alcatraz, Hayes would be okay. If they didn’t, there was no protecting her. “Thirty-six hours.”

  “What?”

  “Give our luck thirty-six hours. And then we’ll bring you what you need to solve the murders of those five women, plus Mrs. Gladia, and take down the Hermitage.”

  “Will you tell me what it is that you’re after?”

  “We can’t,” Salem said, “because we don’t know. Thirty-six hours.”

  Still, he hesitated.

  “If you want to get to the roots of why those women were killed, you can’t do it without us.” Bel pointed to Salem. “You can’t do it without her. In five days she’s blown through codes that have been hidden for over a century.”

  Stone stared at Salem. The fear of being seen and coming up short raged inside of her, burning muscle off bone, but for the first time in her life, she didn’t stare at her feet, didn’t hide from the attention.

  She held his gaze.

  It was Stone who finally looked away after something passed between them. She didn’t know what, but it felt good.

  He rubbed his chin and laughed again, this time more of a growl of amazement. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you’ve got it. Thirty-six hours.”

  82

  San Francisco

  “Lightning never strikes the same place twice.” Ernest was attempting to reassure Salem and Bel that the SFPD was gone as he followed them into the rear of the Golden Lucky Fortune Cookie Company.

  “That’s not true,” Salem said quietly. “Lightning can strike any location twice.”

  “Did the ninjas get anything?” Bel asked, referring to the SWAT team’s uniforms.

  “Nope.” Ernest raced ahead so he could hold the door to the second-­floor apartment open for them. “Lu hid it all before they broke through. She’s gonna need a new door for the lab, though. They shredded the wood one and then the metal one.”

  “Anyone arrested?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” Stone had assured them that he’d do his best to keep the local police and FBI off their backs for the next day, and Salem needed computer power. Returning to Lu’s made the most sense, as long as the police were gone and the computers were intact.

  They met Lu in the kitchen. Her arms were crossed but her eyes were dancing. “Dragon riders come home!” She slapped Bel on the bottom as she walked past. “You get clue at Mission too. I see it in your eyes.”

  Salem held up the cylinder, opening and closing drawers with her free hand until she located dish towels. She made a sling for Bel and let Lu remove the splinter from her finger and bind it before marching to the computer lab.

  The shards of the wooden door had been swept up and removed, and the iron prison gate was leaning against the wall, off its hinges. All ten techs had returned to their computers as if no interruption had occurred, a symphony behind the scenes, trying to stay one step ahead of the Hermitage. The window Bel and Salem had slipped out of was closed and locked.

  Mercy ran across the lab and hugged Salem around the waist. “I knew you’d come back! You always do.”

  Salem smiled, surprised at the wave of emotion the hug elicited. She kissed the top of Mercy’s head. “I missed you. What’ve you been up to?”

  Mercy smiled at Lu. Salem realized for the first time that the girl had dimples, sweet valleys on each side of her pink rosebud mouth. “Lu taught me how to make fortune cookies!”

  “She shit at it,” Lu said, winking at Mercy. “She eat them all up before they cool. Now, enough chatter. Time to get to work.”

  Salem gave Mercy a squeeze before breaking free and walking to a table covered in computer parts. She stacked them to the side to clear a spot. Bel and Ernest stood at her elbow. Lu commanded someone to prepare a computer for Salem. Two techs hurried to comply.

  Salem felt oddly embarrassed by all the attention.

  “Can I get a lamp?” While Ernest went to grab one, Salem screwed off the cylinder’s metal cap and tipped the case upside down.

  Nothing fell out.

  For a heart-stopping second, she wondered if someone had already retrieved the clue, but when she peeked inside, she spotted a yellowed curl of paper. Using a pen, she teased out the scroll.

  Ernest plugged in and flicked on the lamp, illuminating a looping scrawl of black ink on ancient paper.

  The Declaration of Independence.

  Second first alone.

  Last first third, first and third make one.

  Miss Gram guards the truth.

  Salem’s stomach thudded into her spine. Hell on wheels, it’s another code.

  Bel’s brow furrowed. “Didn’t you say the Declaration of Independence had already been used to crack the second cipher? Wouldn’t someone have already figured out if it was the keytext for all three?”

  Exactly. And how many decades dead was this Miss Gram?

  Salem pushed aside the worry that was beginning to fog the edges of her vision and stumbled to the computer that had been opened for her. A flurry of keystrokes, and she pulled up a copy of the three Beale ciphers. She pointed at them. “See how they’re constructed? Each of Beale’s three ciphertexts is a string of numbers separated by commas. In the second one, the one that’s already been decoded, each number represents a word in the Declaration of Independence, and the first letter of that word is what Beale used to write his message.”

  She enlarged the image of the second cipher. “Check it out. The first number Beale used in the second cipher was 115. Instituted is the 115th word in the Declaration of Independence, so we know that th
e first word of the second Beale cipher is I.”

  “What the second cipher say?” Lu asked.

  Salem cleared her throat. “It gives an accounting of all the treasure in Beale’s vault—gold, jewels, and silver, worth over $60 million in today’s money.”

  Lu whistled.

  “The treasure is supposedly stored in a stone-lined vault, in massive pots, six feet underground somewhere near Montvale, Virginia, but no one has ever located it because they haven’t cracked the first cipher, which is supposed to contain the exact coordinates.”

  “But when you had that first cipher up, it looked long,” Ernest said. “Nearly as long as the second. How can it just be coordinates?”

  “A lot of people have wondered the same thing.” Salem sighed. “And the third cipher doesn’t seem long enough to be a list of all the heirs, like the Underground legend says.”

  “How does the story change if you know about the Underground and Lucretia Mott and their hiding the contents of Beale’s vault until someone friendlier to their cause was running the country?” Bel interjected.

  Salem spread out her hands. “I don’t know. No one does, not without the keytext.”

  Lu pointed at the scroll. “It the Declaration of Independence for all three! Dummy.”

  “The man who solved the second cipher tried that. So did a lot of people.” Salem returned to her computer screen. “The Declaration of Independence, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, the Bible, the Articles of Confederation, the Louisiana Purchase. Every single major document from that era, and a lot of minor ones, was tested. None of them worked. The first and third cipher remain encrypted. The innkeeper Beale entrusted with the box eventually handed all three codes over to James B. Ward in 1885. Ward published a pamphlet asking for help in solving them, and that’s how everyone came to hear of the Beale Ciphers.”

  Lu jabbed her finger at the scroll Salem had retrieved from Mission Dolores. “Now you have key. You figure it out.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Bel said defensively, moving closer to Salem. “This has been unbroken for a hundred and fifty years! She’s not a wizard.”

  Lu directed a dismissive sound in Salem’s direction, something like a raspberry. “I know her type. She look fragile, but when wave hits, she go deep. Women have been doing it forever, the strong ones. She can sit at computer and figure this out. Not so hard.”

  Lu patted Salem’s head before shuffling toward the door. “Go deep. I make more food. You solve this.” She held out her hand to Mercy. The girl ran up to her and they disappeared out the door.

  That left ten strangers staring at Salem, plus Ernest and Bel.

  Salem drew in the deepest breath of her life. “Okay. Who has programming experience?”

  Four hands shot up.

  She let out the breath, slow and sweet. “Wonderful. I want you guys over here helping me modify an online decrypter I created in grad school. Maybe we can program in what the scroll says and pick up a pattern I’m just not seeing. The rest of you, start Googling solutions to the Beale cipher.”

  A woman in a striped shirt laughed.

  “I’m serious,” Salem said. “Sometimes the truth hides in plain sight.”

  83

  3 E 70th St, New York

  Carl Barnaby loosened the bow tie of his tuxedo as he rode the elevator to the second basement level of the Hermitage headquarters. His computer forensics department had hauled him out of the Audubon Society dinner with a single-word text: pink. The code word indicated they had found information on the Underground and that it was urgent. Barnaby hoped it was the positive kind of urgent. Gina Hayes’s condescending “audience” of him, where he had to plead his case like a supplicant, had left a bad taste in this mouth.

  He was of a generation that didn’t call women names, but he believed his son would refer to Gina Hayes as a class-A bitch. Barnaby wouldn’t miss her when she was gone.

  The elevator stopped at -2. The door slid open, revealing a billiards room. Barnaby inserted a plastic card into a slot, and the elevator’s back panel slid open directly onto the forensics lab. Abhay, head of computer forensics, rushed toward the elevator. Barnaby couldn’t tell if the sheen on Abhay’s face was triumph or worry.

  “Sir!”

  Barnaby’s mind was still rolling over the Audubon event. Hayes hadn’t seemed intimidated. In fact, she’d acted confident. “What did you find?”

  “Over here.”

  Abhay led him to the north side of the lab, where a white LCD screen was set up. “Blake, pull it up.”

  Barnaby didn’t recognize Blake. He must be a new hire. Whatever he had on his screen was coming into focus. “What am I looking at?”

  Abhay cleared his throat. “We believe you are looking at the same computer screen Salem Wiley is currently looking at.”

  Barnaby stood straighter.

  “We’ve been monitoring all of her online activity. She logged into her University of Minnesota Dropbox account approximately twenty-four minutes ago.”

  “She’s back in Minnesota?”

  “No. San Francisco.” Abhay paused for Barnaby to get his bearings.

  “Chinatown?”

  Abhay smiled. The Hermitage’s computer forensics staff had been lurking on the Golden Lucky Fortune Cookie Company server since one of their best men had discovered it at the beginning of the year. They assumed the server belonged to the Underground, maybe was their technological hub, but it had so far served them better to monitor it than shut it down. “Yes sir.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “We believe she’s modifying a decryption software that she developed while a grad student. It’s quite good, actually. NSA is using a version of it on most of their computers. It works by—sir, are you all right?”

  Barnaby had gone the color of tapioca pudding. “The Beale Cipher.”

  Abhay glanced at the screen. “Yes sir. She appears to be trying to crack it. We don’t know why, maybe to access the rumored treasure to fund the Underground? But there’s no way … ”

  Barnaby was no longer listening.

  His body was ice-bath cold.

  It wasn’t the docket these women were after.

  It was the destruction of the Hermitage.

  His voice sounded froggy. “We need it all.”

  “Sir?”

  “Every word she types.” He gained volume. “Save it, store it. I want the directions to Beale’s vault the very minute that Salem Wiley discovers them. Understand?”

  “Sir, there’s no way she can, that anyone can, solve—” Abhay saw Barnaby’s expression and gulped. “Yes sir.”

  Barnaby turned toward the elevator. His legs carried a slight tremor. Jabbing the elevator button, he pulled out his cell phone and was unsettled to see an incoming call from his counterpart in Europe. The man would not be pleased with how the US branch of the organization was faring. He ignored the call and punched in the number to the guard station one level below him. “I want the woman from Minneapolis taken out of her cell, bathed, fed, and sent to Jason. The two of them are going to Virginia.”

  So much was at stake.

  He needed all boots on the ground, every chip on the table.

  84

  Chinatown, San Francisco

  There comes a time in a person’s life when they are shoved into the quick, that moment of truth when they find out if they were made to fly or are merely a two-legged creature putting on airs.

  For Salem, that moment was now.

  Hollering suggestions to the other programmers, manufacturing lines of code, her fingers flying like Mozart’s over piano keys, she conducted the most important symphony of her life. Binary digits floated past her eyes. She grabbed them from the air, stuffed them in their place, stacked them like the sticks and stones they were to design the Trojan horse that would sneak through Be
ale’s Cipher, crack it open, and deliver the glory inside.

  In Salem’s experience, computer life had been solitary. She’d spent thousands of hours hunched over a board marked with letters, celebrating private victories, discovering thrilling knowledge and having no one to share it with. Working in a room of people all bent toward the same cause was exhilarating. Running ahead of them and yelling back instructions, and then having someone do the same for her, energized her like never before, leapfrogged her past any level that she could have obtained on her own.

  That’s why Salem wasn’t jealous when the woman in the striped shirt, Margaret, jumped out of her chair and yelled, “I got it!” In fact, Salem shot out of her own chair and hooted. She was happier than she’d been in days. They all rushed over to Margaret’s computer, staring over her shoulder to see what she’d discovered.

  “So, I started with Beale’s clue that you found in the bell.” Margaret pointed at her screen. “The Declaration of Independence. Second first alone. Last first third, first and third make one. Miss Gram guards the truth.” She smiled shyly. “I’ve been focusing on one part: Second first alone. I think second refers to the second cipher, first refers to the fact that the numbers of that cipher correspond to the first letter of their assigned word in the Declaration, and alone means that the second cipher is a standalone.”

  “That makes sense.” Salem tried not to sound disappointed. The second cipher had already been decoded over a century ago.

  Margaret continued. “With that in mind, I moved to the next line of Beale’s clue: last first third, first and third make one. So, based on what I just told you, I posited that maybe the two unsolved ciphers, the first and the third, are actually one cipher spread across two separated codes.”

  Salem’s pulse picked up. That had never occurred to her. Everyone was staring at her, but she was studying the white board inside her head. Numbers were landing, words were moving, ideas were lining up.

  That’s where she saw it, finally, with Margaret’s help:

  The solution to the Beale Cipher laid out as clearly as the future of quantum computing had been when the clear blue line had shone across Babbage’s Vigenère cipher solution to his Differential Engine research.