The Dead of Night

by Peter Lerangis

  He contemplated texting Attleboro with an update. But he changed his mind.

  You’ll always be an outsider. . . .

  Some things just had to be done solo.

  Flipping open his phone, he navigated to his browser window, which showed a confirmation of his flight to Boston.

  In the upper right corner, he clicked on a link: CHANGE FLIGHT DESTINATION.

  “Maybe stale orb means something in Persian,” Dan said as he brushed his teeth. “Some special saying from Ulugh Beg’s time. Like that Greek dude shouting ‘Eureka’ when he invented souvlaki or whatever. You know, like . . . ‘Look, Abdul. Star number one thousand! Woo-hoo! Stale orb!’”

  “It was Archimedes,” Amy replied, looking up from her pile of papers. “And he discovered the principle of buoyancy. Oh, and, Dan? Ulugh Beg influenced generations, right up to Tycho Brahe. He estimated the length of a year and the angle of the earth’s tilt to unbelievable accuracy. But he didn’t say ‘Woo-hoo! Stale orb!’”

  “Okay, okay, just trying to think outside the planetarium,” Dan said, spitting in the sink. “You know, chop open the mystery with my mental parall . . . ax? Get it?”

  “If I read one more word about parallaxes, celestial declinations, astrolabes, sextants, quadrants, and gnomons,” Amy said, rubbing her eyes, “I’ll scream.” It was nearly two-thirty A.M. and she had pored over every word of Umarov’s material at least twice. There was no doubt about Ulugh Beg’s awesomeness. But awesomeness had its limits. For one thing, it wasn’t going to save Uncle Alistair.

  “Wait,” Dan said. “Did you say parallaxes? Is that the plural? I thought it was, you know, one parallack, two parallacks.”

  “There’s no such thing as a parallack, Dan!” Amy replied. “Now either come out and help or go to sleep.”

  “Hey, sorry.” Suddenly, Amy heard Dan’s toothbrush clatter into the sink. “Hold on. You nailed it, big sister!”

  “Nailed what?” Amy said.

  “The word a,” Dan said. “Vespy is not asking us to find stale orb — he’s asking us to find a stale orb. What if the a is supposed to be in there? A, S, T, A, L, E, O, R, B.”

  “So?” Amy asked.

  “Remember when I said this thing was an anagram?” Dan asked. “Maybe I wasn’t wrong after all! Let’s try it with the a added in.”

  Amy looked over Dan’s shoulder as he began writing:

  Dan nearly leaped out of his chair. “That’s it! Arab stole! It was something stolen by a famous Arab. You know the history. Was anyone jealous of Ulugh Beg? Would some other astronomer want to take something of his?”

  “People were mad at him,” Amy said. “His own son beheaded him. But that’s because Ulugh Beg became cruel as he got older. He sometimes murdered his own subjects.”

  “Why?” Dan said. “Did any of them steal something important? Something that might still be hidden?”

  But Dan’s words were fading as she rearranged the letters of ARAB STOLE in her mind. “Hold it, Sherlock,” she said, grabbing her pen back.

  Carefully she wrote out one word:

  ** ALERT **

  Kabra, I. Canceled flight.

  Sinead stared slack-jawed at the text message on her screen. So he’d gone to New York. And now he wasn’t coming back.

  This was the wrong time for a crisis.

  She sent a quick message to Ian —

  Where r u?

  A moment later she received her answer, the same as last time:

  Out of Network

  With a deep sigh, she lowered her head into her hands.

  I should have expected this.

  She’d worked with Ian. Tolerated him. Given him the benefit of the doubt. She always knew he had a lot of hidden qualities. The problem was, they were all bad ones.

  “Mrrp?” said Saladin, who was sitting on the desk with an I-told-you-so look.

  “There must be an explanation,” Sinead said.

  “Braachh!” Saladin coughed up a hair ball and slunk away, nose in the air.

  It was twenty minutes to seven. Evan would be arriving any minute. Sinead couldn’t afford to be sidetracked. By now she’d hoped to nail the problem at hand.

  The identification of Nellie’s lizard.

  The photo had been blurry and pixelated. But Attleboro’s state-of-the-art image-enhancing software could sharpen the blurriest blob into an accurate high-res depiction. Sinead had worked hard on the parameters so it would predict the type of lizard by comparing length, coloration, proportion, anatomy.

  First, she needed to prep the image. On a magnification of eight hundred, she shifted a pixel here, a pixel there. To help things along. Then she pressed ENTER.

  RENDERING . . .

  Within a microsecond, the software produced three possibilities: lizards from New Zealand, North Africa, and Argentina.

  She stared at them all carefully. Which one?

  But before she could get to work, another message popped up. It was from an Ekaterina operative in the Cambridge University zoology department.

  Thanks for the jpg . . . Working on it now — Agent BullCommando2

  Sinead’s fingers paused in midair. I never sent any inquiries. . . .

  No one was supposed to know about this. Nellie’s lizard was classified.

  Instantly another message appeared. An Ekat in Kentucky.

  Reached out to SwampHamster1 at the Cincinnati zoo for reptile verification. — SneakyRed1.

  And another:

  Was there a sound file with that, ClueCommander1?

  The door flew open and Evan rushed in. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “My mom grilled me because the faculty adviser for speech club told her I wasn’t —”

  “ClueCommander1 — that’s your code name, isn’t it?” Sinead asked, pointing to the message on the screen. “You sent out the lizard image to the Cahill Command Message Board!”

  “Yup, from my cell phone,” Evan explained. “Don’t worry. It’s encrypted to two thousand forty-eight bits. Even the CIA doesn’t use that level.”

  Sinead couldn’t believe her ears. This was what you got when you trusted an outsider. “Evan, you never got clearance to do that!”

  “But it’s just you and me here,” Evan said. “I thought —”

  “And Dan and Amy don’t count — or Jonah, Erasmus, and Hamilton?” With a sigh, Sinead flopped back in her chair. “The Cahill Command Message Board has thousands of people, Evan. We can encrypt all we want, but we don’t know some of them very well. What if some renegade Tomas goes after the hostages alone, trying to be a hero? What if a dozen different Cahills come up with a dozen different lizard identifications? What if there’s a mole — a Vesper who reports this whole search back to the top? You’re supposed to clear message board use!”

  “Ouch.” Evan sank into a chair. “Okay, so, um, wait . . . I’ll send another message, taking it all back?”

  Sinead shook her head wearily. “Too late, Evan.”

  Time for some serious changes.

  Attleboro security was supposed to be state of the art, but in minutes, it had become a joke. This was not acceptable. She opened a file cabinet drawer and took out a small ankle bracelet. “Look, just for a week or so, I would like you to wear this under your socks.”

  “A GPS tracker?” Evan looked at her in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right? You’re treating me like a spy?”

  “I plan to give one of these to Erasmus and Jonah and Hamilton when they get back,” Sinead said.

  “But not Ian?” Evan asked.

  “Ian is gone,” Sinead shot back. “He went to New York on a moment’s notice, then canceled his flight back.”

  “But his mom is there!” Evan said. “Maybe it’s her birthday and he wants to surprise her.”

  “And ma
ybe it’s snowing purple gumdrops,” Sinead said. “His mom is Isabel Kabra, Evan! The woman who killed Amy and Dan’s parents, who shot her own daughter! From now on, I need records of all of our movements. Not only for security, but for your own protection.”

  Evan stood abruptly, his face growing red. “I designed that bracelet, for use with enemies. I set up over two hundred safeguards for us. For weeks, I have been lying to my friends and family in order to come here. I spend every minute of every day thinking of ways to rescue the hostages and get Amy and Dan back home safe. I may not be a Cahill, but I’m the only one who knows how to do anything here.”

  “Evan, please,” Sinead said.

  “And I am not wearing a tracker bracelet,” Evan said as he stormed out the door.

  Vesper Four loathed privacy. It was for weak-minded saps. People with shaky self-esteem.

  But when you were a Vesper, you did what you had to do.

  The room was dark and quiet. Soon it would be necessary to return to the hubbub and excitement. To the world that suspected nothing.

  What a dark week. The Turkish stronghold had blown up, Vesper Six had failed, phone security had been breached, Interpol was still on the case, the hostages tried to escape, and the boy got his photograph.

  Vesper One would be angry. Heads would roll.

  But what a stroke of luck today had brought! The big man was going to love the news.

  Vesper Four smiled. The sounds were growing louder outside the door. In a moment, people would be knocking. This wouldn’t take long.

  V-1: Lucky break. Contact established with the Cahills. Exactly where you’d expect. Will track. Can kill. Awaiting instructions.

  — V4

  Evan Tolliver hunched over his phone. The duck pond in back of the school was deserted but the air was freezing. He had only a moment between the end of school and the beginning of Robotics Club.

  “Evan?” came Amy’s voice.

  She sounded so close. He could barely speak for the grin on his face. And the cold. “Hey, Ames! Just checking in. How’s it going?”

  “It’s late here,” Amy said.

  “I know. Sorry,” Evan replied. “I just — wanted to hear your voice. You sound great.”

  “Yeah,” Amy said. “Same here.”

  Evan frowned. He thought he could hear someone else in the room. “Is someone there?”

  “Dan,” Amy quickly replied. “It’s our hotel room. And . . . the Rosenblooms.”

  “Oh,” Evan said. “Um, well . . . Sinead and me . . . I mean, Sinead and I . . . we had kind of a fight. She wants me to wear a tracking device.”

  He could hear Amy sigh. “Oh, Evan. Look, just do what she says, okay? Ian’s not around, and she needs you there more than ever. We need you.”

  We need you. Evan loved the sound of that. “Okay, I’ll do it,” he said softly. “I promise. Good luck with tomorrow, Ames. I know you’ll find what you need. But stay safe. Because I need you.”

  “I will,” Amy said. “Bye, Evan.”

  “Bye.”

  He hung up and sat still for a long while, trying to feel positive. Trying not to obsess over the fact that he hadn’t heard what he’d been hoping to hear:

  I need you, too.

  Jake tapped Amy’s wrist gently. “Hey, your eyes are closing.”

  “No, they’re not,” Amy replied, shaking the sleepiness out of her brain. In the wee hours of the morning, only she and Jake were still up. Atticus had fallen asleep on the sofa. Dan had disappeared into the bathroom a half hour ago and most likely dozed off in there.

  “They were,” Jake said. “I was watching them.”

  Amy cocked her head. “You were watching my eyes?”

  “Well, not watching,” Jake said. “Checking. Just to make sure we were staying on track. That’s all.”

  She wasn’t totally sure, but she thought she could see his face turning red.

  It made her feel a slight tickle inside, like the flutter of moth wings. Stop that! Why was she even wasting a nanosecond teasing this guy? He was exactly the kind of guy she didn’t like, a hottie who knew he was a hottie. Thereby canceling the hotness completely.

  Well, not completely.

  She took a deep breath. She needed to stay on track.

  Astrolabe. They had the word. But they didn’t know what to do with it. She tried to focus on Umarov’s poem.

  “Bet you can say it by heart,” Jake asked. “Any progress on what it means?”

  Amy turned the paper so he could see. “Well, we know ‘Gurkhani Zij’ is the observatory. And ‘Taragai’ is Ulugh Beg’s real name.”

  Jake looked carefully. “So deep within the observatory lies his ‘unfinished prize, / The unperfected instrument . . . vast in power . . . small in size.’ I’m guessing that’s the astrolabe?”

  “Most likely,” Amy replied. “It’s a small instrument. But it’s not very powerful.”

  “What if Ulugh Beg was trying to perfect some kind of supercharged astrolabe?” Jake said. “A portable, totally accurate instrument, six hundred years earlier than the ones we have today?”

  Amy nodded. It made sense. “So, by studying the Fakhri sextant in its full size, he could learn how to miniaturize it. Right, Jake. A discovery like that would have been huge in the fourteen hundreds.”

  “The question is, why would Vesper One want it?” Jake asked. “It’s just an astronomical thingie.”

  “Let’s find the thingie first. After ten-fifty P.M. tomorrow, when Uncle Alistair is safe, we can ask why.” Amy rubbed her eyes and pored over the poem again. “Okay, the ‘Fakhri apex’ is the top of the Fakhri sextant. Looks like we start there.”

  Jake leaned in to look. “‘His catalog, though vast in scope’ . . . What’s his catalog?”

  “The count he made of all the stars,” Amy said. “One thousand eighteen of them.”

  “‘Of divisions had but three’ — so let’s divide the number of stars into three parts,” Jake suggested.

  Amy turned a sheet of mathematical scribbles she’d made. “I tried that. But the number doesn’t have three factors. Only two.”

  “Yo, Att, wake up, we need all hands on deck,” Jake called out to his brother.

  Atticus sprang up from the couch and stumbled over. He glanced at the notes and recoiled. “Math. Very dangerous. Let Dan go first.”

  “Dan?” Amy called out to the bathroom door.

  A barely audible grunt responded.

  “Should I break in and get him?” Atticus asked.

  “No,” Amy said. “He’s been working hard today. Let him rest. And if he falls asleep and has a sore butt in the morning, at least he won’t be trying to slide down the Fakhri sextant.”

  Inside the bathroom, Dan was wide awake. The butt in question was cushioned by a fluffy hotel towel, folded and placed on the closed toilet lid.

  His eyes were glued to a message that had appeared on his phone screen ten minutes earlier:

  Okay, I know I need to be patient. But it’s been a while, Dan. I’m thinking maybe you’re angry? Or confused? Oh, well. I’ve been patient and hopeful for a long time. I can hold out a few more hours or days.

  Please understand that the endgame is coming closer. What you see isn’t what it seems. What appears to be cruelty is kindness. What seems needless pain is mercy. Maybe none of this makes sense now, but it will very soon.

  One last thing. You have to trust me if you value the future of the world. And the love between father and son.

  AJT

  A droplet of sweat fell from Dan’s brow. It splatted on the screen, mottling the words.

  My father’s words.

  Dan wiped off the moisture and looked at the message again. No mystery, no vague hints. AJT had said the things he’d only hinted at
before.

  Father and son. There it was, in black and white.

  Since the fire, Dan had lived with a disease. It wasn’t anything visible, but he felt something had burrowed into his soul. He had learned to live with loss. He had protected himself. All his life, he’d turned away from the sight of boys playing catch with their dads, holding hands to cross the street. He fought against the envy, told himself that some things were simply impossible.

  Now, with three words, the impossible was a click away. An opportunity to climb a bridge into the past. Or into utter darkness.

  Or more likely, both.

  What’s happening to me?

  He had vowed to turn his back on the darkness. To set the bridge aflame. But now he sat there, thumbs frozen over the keypad. Again.

  He had composed a response but deleted it, three times. It felt like writing to a ghost. What happened when the dead became alive again? What happened to feelings that had been beaten down over nine years?

  How wide did a river have to be until it was too wide to cross?

  Who was Arthur J. Trent, anyhow?

  Cruelty is kindness . . . pain is mercy. . . .

  A Vesper, no doubt. That question had been settled in Dan’s mind now. Answering the message meant betraying the Cahills. Throwing aside the gauntlet and everything he believed in. Making a pact with the murderer of William McIntyre.

  A sudden pounding on the bathroom door made him jump to his feet.

  “Yo, what happened? Did you fall in?” came Jake’s voice.

  The door flew open, and Dan snapped the phone shut.

  Ian Kabra could not understand why people liked driving for themselves. It was needlessly complicated. It involved skill and attention. It made you sweat and caused your leg to cramp. It was an action best left to hired professionals. He was simply not cut out for maneuvering a rented Jeep in a godforsaken South American jungle that made upstate New York look like the Riviera.