18

Drive to Stonehenge

The English countryside sped past, blotches of greens and browns, hillocks and grazing cattle. The air smelled of freshly cut grass and diesel. It had taken them nearly half an hour to reach the western outskirts of London even using Salem’s map hack. Charlie said it’d be another hour or more until they reached Stonehenge.

Salem rode in the passenger’s seat, grief cloaking her. Charlie allowed her silent space.

The president’s directive had been clear: get Mercy back. Salem would have searched for the girl even if the president hadn’t ordered it, but she was grateful for the official assignment. It meant she had a partner and access to FBI resources.

Vida had provided precious little detail. She’d confirmed there was a Stonehenge train just as there had been a Beale train, and they were two of many. The Underground had been formed to create the trains, their goal to safeguard women’s intellectual and financial wealth from the Order, who would either claim or destroy it. Each train was a series of ever-deeper codes that eventually led to a single location that housed land deeds, scientific achievements, formulas, maps, jewels, and gold—the treasure of women throughout the ages.

But the keepers of the trains were hunted and killed, and what they knew died with them. Through the millenia, the Underground lost the solutions to many of their own trains, and in some cases, the awareness that there was a train at all. Between that and time destroying many of the hiding spots, no one knew for sure what was left. It had fallen into the mists of legend. But the Order searched and the Underground scoured, racing against each other, one to maintain the power, the other to restore the balance.

Salem hadn’t cared.

She did now.

Vida had revealed that Mercy Mayfair’s lineage was the key to cracking the code that would tumble the patriarchy once and for all. It had nothing to do with her blood, which had been drawn and studied by the Underground’s scientists. It was not anything Mercy could recall, no passcode murmured to her by her mother, who’d had it whispered to her by her own mother, and so on down the line through the tunnel of history. The truth was that the Underground had no idea how Mercy fit in, only that as the last living Mayfair, she was the key.

The Order knew the same.

They’d previously thought it more prudent to monitor the child than take her. Vida suspected that they wanted the Underground to do their heavy lifting, to show them how Mercy unlocked it all. But then there was Stonehenge, one of the first and biggest of all the code trains, uncrackable for thousands of years, and Salem sniffing around Stonehenge, connecting Mercy to it, must have tipped the scales. They’d clearly decided it was too much of a risk to leave the girl at large. They’d kidnapped her, gambling with four days—how long they’d given Salem to solve the train—to discover what was at the end of the fabled train.

Salem assumed they’d be watching her the whole time.

Charlie always carried an overnight bag in the boot of his car. Salem was given twenty minutes to pack. She brought Mercy’s doll as well as her Ativan, popping two along with three aspirin and a bucket of water before they left for Stonehenge. With presidential approval, Assistant Director Bench had allowed them four days to retrieve the child.

Salem got to work immediately, ignoring Charlie’s erratic driving. The B&C was tethered to her cellphone for WiFi access. She typed furiously on the laptop, uninterested for the moment in Stonehenge.

Her dad had always told her that to solve a puzzle, you had to locate the beginning.

Salem needed to find out who Mercy really was. If she could uncover what the Order wanted from Mercy, she might be able to bargain that information to save her. Screw the Stonehenge train, the Underground, the Order, and anything that didn’t involve her, Bel, and Mercy living a safe and boring life back in Minneapolis.

She began with a search on the Mayfair name. The first hit showed her that Mayfair was a district in London. The second pulled up information on a two-week fair held in London from 1686 to 1764.

She filed both facts away, digging deeper for the name’s genealogy. The lack of information frustrated her. Mayfairs had immigrated to the United States since the earliest of records, but only a handful, and all from Ireland. They settled in New York or San Francisco, mostly, some making it inland to Illinois in the late 1800s. When she tried to trace the root of the name back to Europe, though, she’d dead-end time and again. No coat of arms. No mottoes or family crests. No famous explorers or governors or even cobblers with the name.

She tried her own name, backward knocking at the problem.

Her screen flooded with information. Wiley, alternative spelling Wylie, a surname of Northern Ireland and Scottish origin. The name was first used by the Strathclyde-Britons in the late 1590s. An Irish woman, Ann Wiley, was the first Wiley to arrive in America, landing in Maryland in 1674. Salem could have read all day if she wanted to learn more about her own surname. When she returned to Mayfair, though, nada.

Maybe she could nail down more facts about the actual Mercy Mayfair.

Ernest, Mercy’s older brother, had told Salem and Bel that Mercy had been born in Georgia and that their mother had died in childbirth. Ernest, who couldn’t have been more than thirteen at the time, had stolen his sister rather than have them both turned over to the county. He may have lied about that, but Salem didn’t think so, and ultimately, it didn’t matter. She didn’t have anything else to go on.

Fourteen keystrokes were all it took to call up the Georgia state birth records. She’d need Gaea to break through their firewall. The program may be young, but this was codebreaking at its most basic.

That left Salem’s own ethics as the remaining boundary. She was rulebound—every mathematician was—and without a warrant, what she was about to do was illegal. Her SAC could get her one, but that could take days. She realized she was grinding her teeth, an old habit from after her dad’s death. She really had no choice but to slice through the firewall. Research, that’s what she’d call it. No way to perfect Gaea if she wasn’t tested.

Salem turned Gaea on. It took all of four minutes for her baby to punch gleefully through the firewall. She plugged the name Mayfair into the DOS screen that appeared, offering 2007 to 2012 as the parameter dates because she didn’t know exactly what year Mercy was born.

Zero results.

She groaned in frustration.

Charlie kept his eyes on the road. “Search not going well?”

Salem hadn’t told him she wasn’t researching the Stonehenge train, but she figured he’d catch on. He’d been moments behind her when she’d walked into the foyer, had been the one to help her off the floor, had heard everything. “Mercy’s last name is Mayfair, but I can’t find any history of her birth or even the origin of the name. It’s like someone went into the system and erased even basic Wikipedia data.”

Charlie tapped the steering wheel. “It’s possible.”

Salem’s head jerked back. “You think someone would go through the trouble of removing a last name from the internet?”

He shrugged. “I’ve seen weirder. I bet you have too.”

It was true. “What kind of work did you say were you doing at MI5 before you got yoked to me? Cryptographer or cryptanalyst?” The first was a codemaker, the second a codebreaker. While most computer analysts were good at both, they usually specialized in one area or the other.

“I worked where they put me. Are you familiar with the Coogan case?”

Salem shook her head.

“It was big in the UK three years ago. Serial killer was chopping up girls in South London. Fancied himself a bit of a coding genius. Like your Zodiac Killer. Left a clue at every scene. Got seven girls before we caught him.”

His words hollowed out a spot in Salem’s stomach. “How did you crack his code?”

“I was just part of the team. And the truth is that Coogan got lazy. He repeated an earlier cipher pattern in his last note. The repetition allowed us to crack it.”

“I’m glad you were able to stop him,” she murmured.

A comfortable silence settled between them, unspooling itself.

“Hey,” he finally said. His quiet tone drew her full attention. “We can talk about your mother.”

She stiffened.

“Or not. At your own pace. That was a bit of a bad job she laid on you back there, is all.”

Salem’s vision narrowed. “She had reason to be upset.”

Charlie looked like he wanted to say something, his brain warring with his mouth. He pinched his lips together and glanced out his window before looking back at the road. “Yeah. Maybe.”

Salem stared out her own window. She desperately wanted to call Bel, to tell her that the Hermitage had only been a tentacle of the octopus they’d fought, to ask for her help in fighting the larger monster. But she couldn’t think of a way to tell her that her indiscretion had gotten Mercy kidnapped. She couldn’t bear the reprobation in her best friend’s voice.

She shifted in her seat. “How far are we from Stonehenge?”

“Another half an hour, maybe. I can’t drive any faster,” Charlie said, not unkindly. When she didn’t respond, he fiddled with the radio buttons. He landed on a station playing jangly folk tunes. He sped up to the bumper of the car in front of him and then slowed down when the westbound M4 motorway passing lane filled up.

Charlie seemed to want to keep the conversation going. He nudged her. “Nina and Lucan slept together last night after we had drinks. Bet on it.”

Salem didn’t have the stomach for a response. In a normal time, that news would have twisted her rib cage, but it was only hours earlier that Stone had rejected her in no uncertain terms. Even if he had wanted her, she didn’t have the mental space for him now. It took all her concentration to keep her brain from eating itself, caught in a loop imagining poor Mercy, afraid, begging for Salem, not understanding why no one came.

“Sorry. Was there something between you and Stone?”

Salem snapped into the conversation. “No. I don’t care about him, only Mercy. You heard my mom. It’s my fault that she was taken. If anything happens to her, I’m done.”

Charlie drew a breath deep enough to lift his chest. “I know she’s your ma, but that doesn’t mean she’s right. In fact, on this front, she seems straight wrong.”

Salem didn’t want to think about it because then she’d cry.

Charlie must have sensed her distress on the subject. He pointed toward her computer screen, taking his eyes off the road for far too long. “Maybe it’s time to consider Stonehenge. Your mother seems to think there’s a mountain of a conspiracy there, and if your president is setting us on this merry chase, I’m inclined to agree. There’s got to be something to it that every archeologist has overlooked.”

Or misunderstood. Salem angled her rotating screen so the sun didn’t flash off it. Because now that you mention it, when I was in Ireland, I saw Stonehenge in a new light, and I wonder if … But she didn’t want to tell him about her graveside hypothesis. Or did she? She had to trust someone.

But maybe not just yet. She began a wide-net search on Stonehenge, skimming the information. “Nothing much here,” she said. “Stonehenge’s basic history that the stones we recognize now have been around for five thousand years, and that no one really knows what the structure was built for. Pretty much what you told me earlier.”

He tapped the side of his nose. “I’m a bit of a history buff. But what’s that I hear in your voice?”

His attentiveness warmed her and made up her mind. She would share her theory. “The day before we met, I went to Ireland.”

“Sure. With Agent Curson. Dead end, the report said.”

Salem realized she hadn’t seen Agent Curson since. “It was. At least as far as what we were called out for. There was no threat to the president that we could discern. The woman had uncovered a tiny replica of Stonehenge.”

“What, made of stone?”

“Yeah, but it had an extra stone in it.”

The radio crackled, and Charlie changed the station. “There used to be quite a few more stones, you know, more than what we see now. The original had seventy-five, and postholes indicate there was more to it, maybe even a timber structure built atop. Have you heard of the Aubrey Holes?”

Salem didn’t want to make him feel bad for pivoting the subject from her big reveal. He didn’t know she’d been about to share something with him that she hadn’t even told Bel. “No. What are those?”

She clicked the phrase into her search bar as he spoke. Aubrey Holes.

“Chalk pits surrounding Stonehenge. There’s fifty-six of them in all. John Aubrey discovered them in the 1600s, but they believe they predate the construction of Stonehenge as we know it, from around 3100 BC. Can’t tell if they contained wood posts or stone. Plus, there’s the Heel Stone, outside what we recognize as Stonehenge. It marks the midsummer sunrise. There’s the Slaughter Stone, the Altar Stone. Who can say if the stone you saw was even an extra? Maybe it was just an earlier construction.”

“Maybe.” Salem verified everything he had just said. She’d commented earlier that he seemed to know a lot about Stonehenge, and it had bothered him. She kept that observation to herself this time. She searched for a sketch of Stonehenge in its prime to run against what she’d seen at Mrs. Molony’s.

He indicated her screen again. “You know I love computers, but it’s not good to type while sitting in a moving vehicle. Unsettles the stomach. Besides, it’s lonely out here in the real world, and we need a plan going in. You’re the only one who’s solved one of these code trains. Tell me what we’re looking for at Stonehenge.”

Salem clicked her screen shut. “I don’t know.”

He waited.

She sighed. “I know I have to save Mercy. That’s it.” She couldn’t hold the tears back.

He made tsking noises. “Why, if you can crack the Beale train, then Stonehenge will be a piece of cake. Count on it!” He patted her shoulder awkwardly. “Hey, you’ll cheer right up when I tell you the best part.”

“What’s that?”

“I got us inside Stonehenge! They’ll clear it for our arrival. We have fifteen minutes to solve an apparent code that’s evaded centuries of attempts.” He chuckled. “Not a thing to worry about there.”

It wouldn’t be enough time. Panic stroked Salem’s throat. She grasped on to an earlier thought to distract herself. “Do you know what happened to Agent Curson?”

Charlie shrugged. “I assume he’s back at the Campus.” He gripped the steering wheel and pointed to the right. “Here we are. Look at those gorgeous rocks.”

Salem followed the path of his finger.

Her jaw dropped. She was looking at history’s most famous mystery.