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 the 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.”