Salem's Cipher Read online

  “Bel.” Vida’s voice was a breath more than a sound.

  Bel and Salem exchanged a look laden with surprise and joy. Bel leaned in. “I’m here. So is Salem. You’re in the Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia. You’re safe. You don’t have to say anything. You need to rest.”

  Vida’s eyes twitched under her lids. Salem was wondering if she’d imagined the sound when Vida’s eyes shot open. She jerked, then groaned. Her eyes fell shut. “You’re both here. Both the girls.”

  “We are, Mom. And Bel’s right. You need to rest. We’ll stay by your side.”

  A tear leaked past Vida’s eyelashes, rolled over her cheek, and was absorbed by a white bandage. “You can’t.” She cleared her throat, but her voice didn’t grow any stronger. “Gracie is dead.”

  Bel made a sound, a cross between a whimper and a cough. “We know.”

  Vida blinked her eyes open again. It seemed to take a great effort to keep them that way. “Isabel, it was quick. She was scared, but she wasn’t in pain.”

  Salem reached across her mom and clasped one of Bel’s hands. She could read the agony in her friend’s face, could see her trying to file it away but having no place to put it.

  “Where’s her body?”

  A sigh rattled through Vida. “Minneapolis, I think. I don’t know.” Vida gazed at Salem. “You cut your hair, baby.”

  Salem touched her short curls. She’d forgotten. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Her hand flew to her mouth. That’s not what she had intended to say.

  Vida grimaced. “About the Underground? We hoped you’d never have to know. We trained you in case we were wrong.”

  Salem’s emotions were oil and water, betrayal and love. “We had a right to know.”

  She caught the rest of the words before they left her lips—Gracie didn’t have to die. If Salem and Bel had been told about this world, about their training, they could have used it earlier to obtain the codes. It hadn’t had to happen like this.

  Vida was painfully silent for a long moment, her eyes glistening. “Now you do.”

  Salem realized in that moment that she was wiser than her mother. The enormous sadness of that gagged her. She swallowed past it as best she could and held her mom’s hand, mourning who they used to be.

  “Did you get inside Beale’s vault?”

  Salem held up the scrolls. They hadn’t left her person since Bel’d slammed the rock into the killer’s brainstem.

  Vida chuckled. It turned into a cough. “That’s my girl. You need to fly to San Francisco and take them to Lu. She’ll know what to do.”

  “We’re not leaving you,” Bel said.

  “You are, and you’re leaving now. Look at me. Both of you. Look at what’s been cut off of me, pounded into me, sliced open on me. This is what they want to do to Gina Hayes.”

  The women locked eyes over Vida.

  “I don’t know how the Hermitage intends to do it, just when and where: Alcatraz, tomorrow.”

  Salem felt the words like a slap. “But how can we stop it?”

  Vida’s eyes fell closed. Her skin had grown shiny and wet-looking. “Get those papers to Lu. You can’t trust anyone but her. She has a plan. Go to her.”

  “Vida? Who gave you this information? Vida?”

  Vida didn’t answer Bel. Salem glanced at her monitors but couldn’t read them. She ran into the hall calling urgently for a nurse. “My mom just passed out.”

  The nurse jogged into the room and checked the equipment. “She’s stable.” Her glance was admonishing. “You wore her out.”

  Bel glared at the nurse until she dropped her gaze. When she did, Bel said, “We won’t bother her anymore. Give us a moment in here, please.”

  The nurse reluctantly stepped out of the room. Salem suspected she was looking for someone with the authority to kick them out.

  Bel walked around the bed and looked Salem in the eye. “What do you want to do?”

  Salem knew what the old version of her would have said: stay by her mom’s side until she was well enough to fly back to Minneapolis, and then never leave the house again. “Exactly what my mom said. Take these papers to Lu and save Hayes.”

  Bel’s lip twitched. “I can do it. You stay with Vida.”

  Salem turned back to her mom, leaning in close to her ear. “Hey, Mom. I know you can hear me. And I know you’re in good hands here. If you could talk to me, you’d tell me to stay with Bel, right? Heck, you did with your text. Follow the trail to the end, no matter what. Stick close to Bel.”

  “Salem.” Bel sounded exasperated.

  “We’re not arguing,” Salem said. “You call Lu. Tell her to get us plane tickets out. Have her send someone here to keep an eye on Mom. And then we go. We finish this together.” Salem held up the scrolls.

  Bel snorted in disbelief, then laughed, her face puffy from crying. “Why not? My schedule is clear. Why don’t we topple a corrupt organization and save a United States Senator?”

  “Exactly,” Salem said, kissing her mom’s cheek again, lingering for a moment. “Time’s wasting.”

  Monday

  November 7

  93

  San Francisco

  The private jet touched down on the San Francisco International Airport’s tarmac on schedule.

  A car was waiting. The driver stepped out and leaned against the vehicle, arms crossed in front of him, fingers unbelievably muscular.

  The plane taxied to a stop, the wind generated by it ruffling the waiting driver’s dark hair.

  Within minutes, the clamshell door of the jet opened with a pneumatic wheezing and the airstairs were lowered to the ground.

  One of the Hermitage’s air staff, a pretty flight attendant in a crisp uniform, stepped out and moved to the side of the stairs. Her smile was strained, her neck visibly bruised. She looked like she’d been crying.

  Jason appeared at the top of the stairs. He stabbed her as he walked past, a quick throat puncture with a replacement blade. She topped over backward, hitting the tarmac at an awkward angle.

  Geppetto laughed.

  Jason walked down the steps and slid into the front passenger seat without a word.

  Geppetto got behind the wheel and drove the car to Pier 33. Gina Hayes was scheduled to speak in five hours. A specially scheduled ferry was waiting to take them to Alcatraz Island.

  Jason’s face was set as tight as sinew, reflecting his mood. The nature of his unique craniofacial structure had saved his life, the malleability of his bones absorbing rather than shattering beneath the rock’s blow, though he had the mother of all headaches. When he didn’t call ten minutes after arriving on the scene of the Beale vault, the backup crew had descended. He was revived. The vault was emptied of its treasure. The corpses of the two men Jason had killed were dumped into it. Same with the bodies of the two backwater cops who arrived, presumably sent by Wiley and Odegaard.

  He didn’t call her Isabel anymore.

  The vault, now a tomb, had been resealed, reburied, and their tracks covered as much as possible. The blood remained, but a heavy rain would erase that. One member of the cleanup crew drove the police car several miles away and abandoned it before being driven back to headquarters by his partner. The subterfuge wouldn’t last for long, or it would last forever if the police didn’t get lucky. Jason didn’t care either way. The Hermitage possessed the treasure.

  They also had the Underground leadership docket, according to Barnaby. It had been downloaded into the Hermitage’s computer banks. A new underground harvest—the final one—would begin soon.

  All that remained was to secure and destroy the documents the women had stolen from the vault and then to kill Hayes.

  Jason had been disappointed to discover that much of Barnaby’s fuss had been about a two-hundred-year-old land treaty. From what Jason knew of American history, he didn’t see
how Jackson’s past indiscretions coming to light would be more than a quick-burning scandal, harmless to the Hermitage without Beale’s treasure to finance a lengthy legal battle or Gina Hayes alive to underwrite an investigation.

  Nevertheless, like a birthday piñata, all the remaining treats were wrapped in one tight package: Alcatraz. Wiley and Odegaard’s plane from Richmond would be landing at SFO in seventeen minutes. They carried the authentic treaty. They would take it to the Golden Lucky, where they would be told to bring it directly to Gina Hayes in person.

  Who else could they bring it to? FBI? NSA? Local police?

  No. There’d be no way to know they weren’t simply handing the document over to the Hermitage. The Underground possessed only one path out. It led them to Hayes, now outed as an ancestral Underground member thanks to Wiley’s cracking of Beale’s cipher, and the one person with enough power and incentive to use the documents to redistribute much of the Hermitage’s wealth back into its rightful hands.

  The women would clean up at Golden Lucky and fret over how to sneak onto Alcatraz. The security would be ironclad. They’d find a way in; not too easily as to cause them suspicion but not so hard as to be impossible.

  The Hermitage had made sure of it.

  And then Jason would tie up every single loose end.

  Alcatraz was going to be one bloody party.

  94

  Alcatraz

  “You ready?”

  San Francisco’s famous fog had unfurled itself like a blanket over the sky. Sleet fell, and the air smelled like tidewater. Salem couldn’t spot the water from where they stood, but she could feel it, just on the other side of Pier 33, a big wet maw waiting to pull her down, and she could hear its crashing waves.

  They stood a block away from the dungeonlike stone archway marking the pier. Salem knew the building had been a bomb factory in WWII, and that’s exactly what it looked like. She did her best to ignore the smell of the sea, and the scent of boiling Dungeness crab just up the pier, and the angry honk of sea lions, all of it warning her of the ocean. The three of them did their best to blend in with the masses jostling for a photograph of Senator Hayes.

  “No cold feet now!” Lu said, cackling. “You won’t believe who I had to blow to get those press passes.”

  She pointed at the IDs that hung around Salem and Bel’s necks, the photos expertly glued on to match the modified appearance of both women. In fact, Bel was no longer even female. Her laminated press pass read John Shaw, and she wore a dark brown mustache to match her hair along with round, wire-rimmed glasses. With colored contacts and expertly applied eye makeup, Salem passed for Asian, her head covered with a sleek black pageboy wig. Her press pass read Elizabeth Cho.

  The documents they’d obtained in Beale’s vault were tucked in a leather messenger bag that Salem carried crossways across her chest. The knives they’d taken off the killer in Virginia had been mailed along with an anonymous note to Agent Lucan Stone. Lu, who’d been almost as excited to see the locket as she’d been to see the treaty and code, had packed the necklace carefully away. She’d immediately sent a security detail to guard Vida in the hospital.

  “For real,” Lu said, her laughter melting. “You no look so good.”

  “She’s afraid of water.” Bel was using the gravelly voice she’d practiced. “At least old Salem was. New Salem isn’t afraid of anything.” She smiled reassuringly.

  “I might have nightmares about that mustache.” Salem raised an eyebrow, trying for humor. Her stomach felt sour, though, the earth shifty slidy under feet. After not leaving Minnesota for twenty-six years, she’d now traveled cross-country three times in a single week. Despite that, she couldn’t think of the ocean on the other side of the archway without going jelly from the neck down.

  Bel squeezed her shoulder. “You’re going to be okay. Look at how much we’ve survived. Hell, look at how we’ve thrived. My mom and yours did a good job training us.”

  Bel’s proud smile unnerved Salem. “How can you look so happy? Mom and Grace threw us to the wolves.”

  They’d already had a version of this talk in the airplane ride. Bel’s perspective was completely opposite of Salem’s. Bel had found her calling and was grateful to their moms for that. “We’re part of something important now, Salem. And we’re good at it. I get that you’re mad at Vida, but you have to get over it. What’s done is done.”

  Salem dropped her eyes. Strong, street-smart Bel felt like she’d been handed a gift. She couldn’t understand Salem’s feeling of betrayal. Salem stared in the direction of the water. Hundreds of people stood between it and her, but she could feel its pulse.

  “No time for fear,” Lu said, studying her, her voice grim. “Your dad never let fear get him.”

  A laugh shocked Salem. She pulled her attention back to Lu. “He killed himself. I’d say that’s something like fear.”

  Lu’s eyes grew comically round. “Daniel Wiley didn’t kill himself. He murdered!”

  Every lick of moisture in Salem dried up. “I was there. He killed himself.”

  Lu turned her around, toward the pier, and patted her on the back. “Your mom let you believe that to protect you.”

  95

  Twelve Years Old

  Daniel’s Last Hour

  It’s a perfect summer day. The sun beats its cat-stretch heat on Salem’s shoulders, cascading golden down her lean twelve-year-old body, weaving around her thighs, warming the sand between her toes. Her ringlets are tied up, but the fiercest ones break free. They frame her face, each curl dizzy with twists from the aggressive humidity.

  Vida is filling in for a colleague, and it is fair and even that Daniel has brought Salem to the beach this day because when she was five years old, Vida brought her to the lake without Daniel.

  Salem is wearing her rainbow bikini for the first time, and she gets to wear it without her mother’s judging eye. Its colors are electric. She doesn’t have much to fill out the top, but running her hands over her sun-warmed tummy, she knows it’s flat like it’s supposed to be. The stomach flu three days ago helped. The strings of the bikini bottom play along her curved thighs. When her top half catches up with her bottom, she’ll really be something in this swimsuit.

  She realizes she’s been alone on the beach for a while. This lake cabin 30 miles north of Minneapolis belongs to the Galvins, friends of her parents. They let the Wileys use it when they aren’t. Today is one of those days. Maybe Daniel is inside making lunch?

  Salem returns to her book, a thin volume her mother has checked out for her from the library, Helen Fouche Gaines’s Cryptanalysis. The book is sixty years old, the text cramped, but it captivates Salem’s hummingbird mind. When she next looks up, the sun has moved enough for her to adjust her towel so she doesn’t tan unevenly.

  But there’s her dad! He must have been in the cabin.

  His back is to her.

  He’s wading into the lake. She calls for him, but he doesn’t turn. It’s hot, he must be cooling off. She returns to the words, but something on the edge of her gaze catches her attention. It’s a person.

  Isn’t it?

  She slides her apple-shaped bookmark between the pages and sets down her paperback, craning her neck. She is sure she’d heard somebody, or had she seen them? She should ask her dad about it, but he’s out too far. In fact, she can’t even see his head.

  Standing, she begins to walk toward the cabin. Maybe Vida got done early and decided to join them. Salem is at the edge of the cabin. She can almost see who is around the corner.

  She takes the final steps toward the person, the air molecules straining to hold her back.

  She feels their snap like spiderwebs against her skin.

  Still, she keeps walking.

  96

  Alcatraz

  Salem scowled. Lu didn’t know what she was talking about. Daniel Wiley had definitel
y killed himself. Lu hadn’t been there, and Salem didn’t want to go back to the memory, not now, not ever.

  “Salem?” Bel was smiling but worry lined her eyes. “Time to go.”

  Salem breathed deeply and nodded. She’d give her left leg for an Ativan right now. “I’m ready.”

  They threaded the crowd, separating to pass through security. Salem walked through a metal detector, was patted down, emptied her pockets and her purse, and handed over her messenger bag. A female SFPD police officer held up the scroll of papers.

  “What are these?”

  Salem felt the cold squeeze of fear. This was the first of many junctures at which their plan could go off the rails. “Historical land deeds.” Lu had scanned them back at Golden Lucky, but Salem had been sent with the originals. Without them, and the scientific examination needed to verify their accuracy, the Underground had nothing. “They were written by the same stenographer as wrote some of the documents stored on Alcatraz. I’m hoping to match them up. You know, the signatures.”

  “This isn’t a field trip.” The officer called over one of her colleagues.

  Sweat dripped down Salem’s spine. “I’m an amateur historian.”

  Both officers stared at her before spreading out the papers. They examined them front and back and uncovered nothing. Still, they didn’t like it. The female officer was about to call a third officer over when Salem interrupted her.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t need to bring them. I can leave them with you and pick them up after the speech. My boss would fire me if I didn’t make it to the island on time.” Could they hear her words over the thundercrack of her own heartbeat?

  The line behind Salem shifted, the herd antsy.

  The female officer glanced from Salem back to the papers and then to the crowd. She made up her mind, rerolling the documents and handing them to Salem before sliding her messenger bag to her. “Don’t give anyone paper cuts.” She turned away, not waiting for a response, and began searching through the bag of the man behind Salem.