4

The Campus, London

“Everything is okay, don’t worry.”

Isabel Odegaard’s smiling face filled Salem’s screen before the room behind Bel shifted. She was in the kitchen of Salem’s childhood home, filling a glass with water from the refrigerator dispenser. She’d pimped out her wheelchair so it held a phone, a laptop, and a table for taking notes, all hands-free. Until last year, her life had been built around her physical prowess. Bel had been a Chicago police officer, best shot in her class, a self-defense instructor.

The assassination attempt had changed that.

The first bullet had passed overhead, missing its target.

The second bullet had paralyzed Bel from the waist down.

Both shots had been meant for Gina Hayes. Bel had used her body as a shield. Publicly, she was hailed as a hero. Privately, she struggled with excruciating physical therapy and even more painful depression as she traded power and policework for something different. Throughout, she’d made it clear that Salem should not feel sorry for her, and better not stay in Minneapolis to care for her. To this day, Salem wasn’t sure if she’d ultimately joined the Black Chamber to keep Bel from worrying she’d not joined because of her.

“Yes,” Bel said, answering Salem’s question before she had a chance to ask it, “it is midnight here. But that means it’s six AM there. I wanted to catch you before you went to work. It seems like all we do anymore is text. I wanted a real conversation.”

“Mercy is okay? Mom?”

Bel swiveled the phone so it faced the refrigerator and a crayon drawing of two broccoli-shaped trees with a rainbow joining them. Two people held hands underneath, one tall, one short, both with dramatically five-toed feet and five-fingered hands.

“They’re great. Mercy said this is a picture of you and her under a lucky rainbow.”

Salem’s heart melted. She and Mercy Mayfair had developed an unbreakable bond. When they’d first met, the child had been as skittish as a wildcat, fierce-eyed and bony, trusting only her brother, Ernest. During the cross-country journey to save Bel and Salem’s mothers, Salem tutored Mercy, bought her coloring books, and made sure she ate her vegetables. Gradually, the alley-cat girl had warmed to Salem. It had been nearly as hard to leave the child behind as it had been to abandon Bel.

Salem retrieved a mental image of the mini-Stonehenge with mercy written on the extra stone, and her chest tightened. Coincidence, surely. One is a name, the other a plea.

“Mercy seems happy?” Salem snapped open her laptop as she spoke and attached her phone to it via a simple USB connection. She propped up the phone so she could type while she talked. Bel had given her permission to test Gaea as needed during their conversations. One of its planned features captured background images in video calls, triggering an alert if they were of note: stolen items with visible serial codes, drug paraphernalia, illegal weaponry. She wanted to test how Gaea would translate the drawings taped to the refrigerator.

Bel reholstered her own phone, a grin lighting up her beautiful face. She’d decided not to regrow her strawberry blond hair after Salem had chopped it on the run. The pixie cut suited her delicate features, eyes the sweet blue of a cloud-free sky, creamy skin, elegant nose, full lips. “Mercy is better than happy. That kid is a goddamned genius. You know how she picked up the math you taught her when we were on the run? She’s the same with physical training.”

Salem’s face pinched before she could smooth it.

Bel chuckled. “Good thing you’re not a poker player. You’d be flat broke inside of an hour. Yeah, in answer to the question your face asked, I train her. Wheelchair-bound me. Krav Maga, plus evasive moves. The top of my body works just fine.”

Salem leaned toward her phone, eyes wide. “I didn’t doubt you, Bellie. I worry about her. She’s only seven. Do you really need to teach her to be afraid of the world?”

“Not afraid of it. Able to survive it. And I want her to know she’s getting trained.”

They sat in the silence, together. Bel spoke truth.

It wasn’t only Salem who’d been tricked into working for the Underground. She and Bel had both been secretly groomed by their parents, Salem for codebreaking and computers and Bel for strength and spycraft. They had excelled in their fields. When their parents’ worst nightmare materialized and the Hermitage hunted Bel and Salem in the hopes of destroying the Underground, they’d had to call on all their training to survive, to save Gina Hayes, and to crush the Hermitage.

The training had stuck. The betrayal as well.

The sticky pain of being lied to by their parents, of being groomed for a life they had no say in, reared its ugly head. Salem needed to silence it. Two possible topics of conversation came to mind, neither of which she particularly wanted to bring up: Stonehenge and Lucan Stone.

“I saw something in Ireland yesterday,” she blurted. “I went out there with another agent, Len Curson? I thought we were called out on a fool’s errand. There’s all sorts of them with the summit coming. The caller was a sweet old woman. Said she had something to show us.”

Bel’s face lit up with interest.

“You wouldn’t believe it, Bel.” Salem’s voice went high, fake-sounding even to her own ears. Her rational side was warring with her intuition, trying to muzzle it from voicing its ridiculous theory. “The woman had uncovered a little replica of Stonehenge in her backyard, right next to her grandmother’s grave. The word mercy was carved on one of the stones.”

Bel saw Salem’s distress. She didn’t waste time on tangential questions. “Was it a code?”

Salem squished her lips together. “It was—” But the words didn’t come. Hey, I don’t know what mercy has to do with anything, but if you see the placement of the stone it was written on, guess what? Things fall into place, and you see that Stonehenge is a profoundly stationary version of something you and I carry in our purses every day. It sounded stupid in her head and would certainly crush her under in its silly weight if she uttered it aloud.

Bel inhaled loudly. “You solved the mystery of Stonehenge, didn’t you?”

If they were together, in person, Salem could maybe confess what she thought Stonehenge really was, and they’d laugh about it. She couldn’t bring herself to do it over the phone, though. She shoved an easy smile on her face and waggled her eyebrows. “For sure. And for my next trick, I plan to crack the Zodiac Killer’s code.”

Bel studied her, squinting. Salem held her breath. This could go either way.

After a long three seconds, Bel went with the laugh. “That’s my girl.” She drank the water she’d drawn from the refrigerator. When she set down the empty glass, she wiped her mouth with her arm. “In honor of our unbreakable friendship bond, I should tell you that your mom has a surprise for you.”

Salem tensed. “What?”

“If I tell you, it’s not a surprise.” Bel winked and pivoted. “Hey, don’t suppose you’ve found any sexy British women for me to date? I need someone who takes no shit.”

The conversation continued for another ten minutes. Bel updated Salem on the freelance work she’d been doing. Salem shared as much as she could about her work at the Campus, which wasn’t much at all. After a promise to talk again soon, they hung up.

It was 6:30 AM.

That left enough time to work out.

Salem finished lacing her shoes and snapped the elastic band that held her room key around her wrist. She bound her wild morning hair in a topknot and stepped into the hallway. The dormitories were housed on the west end of the building, the conference rooms and offices of the brass in the middle, and the codebreakers’ computer lab was tucked at the east end. The workout area was below it all, in the basement. She could reach the gym from either end or the center of the Campus, but the middle stairs were better lit. She trotted toward those.

She was playing with the blue plastic band at her wrist when she heard a murmuring from one of the conference rooms. Cleaning staff? No one else would be in this early. She didn’t have a chance to reverse her course before the conference room doorway opened.

Assistant Director Robert Bench stepped into the hallway. Other than a brief orientation when she was first assigned to the Campus, she had encountered her supervisor only when she’d tried to convince him to assign her more Gaea time. In those brief run-ins, he’d come across as a gruff man with a twitchy muscle in his cheek that made her think he was always chewing on a bit of leftover meat. His face was jowled, his hair more gray than black.

He appeared neither pleased nor surprised to run into her at this hour.

“Agent Wiley. Just the girl I wanted to see.”

Salem stopped, flustered. “Yes sir?”

He got right to it. “President Hayes is arriving tomorrow to attend the summit. She has specifically requested you on her cyber security detail. She wants you to deploy Gaea.”

Salem flinched. That made no sense. The FBI hadn’t given her the time to develop the program, yet she was being asked to use it? For a moment, she wondered if this was a continuation of her earlier dream. With the president coming to London, Lucan Stone might also be near. “It’s not ready.”

“That’s what I told Hayes. She said you’ll employ other means, as well. But she was very specific that it is you she wants running code interference for her while she’s here, and that she wants you to test the new program in her presence.”

Salem nodded.

“One more thing.” He tipped his head toward the open door of the conference room he’d exited. “You have a new partner.”