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 Beale’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.

She rushed back to her computer to input one more level of code to her program.

First and third make one.

The first and third cipher were actually a single document spread across multiple pages. That explained their length relative to their rumored content. She was so glad Margaret had thought of it.

Salem tweaked her program’s algorithm. Her fingers were a white blur of typing.

“Salem?” Bel asked. She sounded anxious. “Do you have it?”

“I … think … so.” She didn’t slow her typing. “I’m inputting last, first, and third, running all those possible combinations against the Declaration of Independence to see if the computer can find anything that looks like a—wait!”

Her exclamation brought the other programmers over.

“It’s the median letter!” she yelled. “The first and third cipher are clues to alternating letters of one complete document, like Margaret said, but rather than using the first letter of a word in the Declaration like the second cipher, they use the median letter!”

“What if there’s an even number of letters in the word?” Ernest sounded doubtful.

“Then it uses the letter gotten by adding the alphabetic positions of the two middle letters and dividing by two, rounding up if it’s a half number, just like in math,” Margaret said triumphantly, reading over Salem’s shoulder. “Your program is genius, Salem!”

Except that her computer was spitting out jumbled letters that looked almost but not quite like words. Salem’s balloon began to deflate. It didn’t make sense. She returned to her mental white board.

Miss Gram guards the truth.

She mentally studied the sentence. All the letters fell away except for four: gram.

She inhaled. Everyone in the lab did the same.

Just as Salem’s father had taught her, the best place to hide something is always in plain sight.

Miss Gram is Ana Gram.

The code is an anagram.

Salem made a final tweak to the program, adding an automatic unscrambler that would input every possible combination of a letter string to provide the most likely and recognizable English equivalent.

After completing the tweak, she only had to wait three seconds.

Latitude and longitude coordinates began unspooling on her screen.

She yelled with joy.

Everyone who wasn’t already crowded around her rushed over. Bel used her good hand to copy down the information.

Suddenly, Salem’s computer froze.

She tried to unlock it, pushing several keys.

It was still frozen.

A tiny cowboy appeared on her screen. “You’re being rode, missy,” he hollered, before yelling “Yee-haw!” and pixelating as he galloped off her screen.

“What happened?” Bel asked, her voice frantic.

“We were piggybacked.” It felt like someone was grinding sausage out of her guts. “If it was the Hermitage, they saw the same stuff we just saw. Coordinates and everything.”

“Maybe not,” Margaret said, racing back to her computer. “We have a thirty-second lag programmed in. Get your computer off-line!”

Salem followed her instructions without question. Killing the WiFi unfroze her screen, revealing that her program had decoded the entire cipher while the cowboy rode across off into the horizon:

Latitude three seven point three eight four six zero four
Longitude negative seven nine point seven three zero nine
four five, in Bedford County, Virginia.

Here you will find the Treasure, and the Lightning Bolt,
courtesy of intelligence obtained in the southern territories,
notes which will take everything from Jackson and his
descendants and return it to its rightful owners.

A list of names immediately followed. The Underground leadership docket.

Salem felt her world shrinking to a pinhole as she recognized many of them: Sanger, Nightingale, Ross, Curie, Hayes.

Bel pointed at the screen. “Look.”

Wiley was on the list. So was Mayfair, Ernest and Mercy’s last name. Odegaard was not present, but neither was Vida’s maiden name. The list was over a hundred names long.

Ernest left and returned with Lu. She read Salem’s screen. The lab was as quiet as a church.

Lu spoke into the momentous, charged air. “That settles it. Look like you two go to Virginia. I keep Mercy safe here. You take Ernest. We get you IDs. You don’t have much time. Only thirty-six hours until Hayes comes to Alcatraz.”