The Chaos Code

by Justin Richards

  Matt had laughed, but Mum didn’t. ‘Your father was younger then,’ she said. ‘We both were.’ And that seemed to close the topic.

  Which didn’t really help, Matt thought frustrated. There were no cables to connect. Matt got down and looked under the desk. There was nothing hidden so far as he could see – no envelope with secret codes taped to the bottom of any of the drawers. But there was a metal plate with a manufacturer’s name stamped on it. ‘Timberly.’ He counted the letters, feeling more confident and excited – eight!

  He bumped his head in his haste to get out from under the desk, catching the bruise he’d got the previous night. He scarcely noticed as he typed in the name, sure it would work.

  But it still wasn’t right. He got the same error message and almost thumped the screen in frustration. Why wasn’t it ‘Timberly’? It made sense. It fitted the clue. If Dad was actually here, he’d shout at him. Matt took a deep breath. But was it the only answer that fitted the clue? That was the next question.

  And then he got it. Really got it, he was sure – even more sure this time. Mum’s name. Before she was married and became Sarah Stribling she’d been Sarah Milligan. He typed ‘milligan.’ It didn’t work. He stared at the red error message. The error had to be wrong, he thought, smiling despite his irritation at the notion of an error being itself a mistake.

  A mistake. That might just be it. He typed ‘Milligan’ again, but this time with a capital M. There was an agonisingly long moment when nothing happened. Progress blobs crawled along the bottom of the web browser as it contacted the server computer, wherever that was. Matt held his breath. Then the screen changed.

  It showed a plain window of text – black on white. A letter, addressed to Matt.

  ‘Yes!’ he said out loud, his hands bunched into triumphant fists.

  Dear Matt,

  Sorry about the cloak and dagger stuff, but you can’t be too careful these days! Actually I thought you’d enjoy the challenge and I’m glad, though not at all surprised, to see that you’re up to it. Well done.

  I’m sorry I’m not at home now. Your mother did warn me you were coming, but I’ve had to go away. It was sudden, though not unexpected. I really don’t know when I’ll be back, and so I thought I’d better give you some clue what to do and where to go while I’m away. Like learning Latin, it could be quite an ad-Venture. And you might need some help with it.

  Remember those games we used to play when you were younger? Notes and cryptic clues? Let’s Find Treasure, I used to say and you were always so good at it. But maybe you’re too old for that now. I’m sure you’ll think of something to do.

  Great, capital, so the real question is where you can go. Obviously you’re welcome to squat at The Old house for As long as you like. Unless maybe you think you should find a school friend like Ned or Tim or someone to Join for the Annual holidays. No more Encouragement needed.

  I’ll be in contact just as soon as I can, but don’t worry if you don’t hear from me. (Too many negatives in that last sentence, I fear!)

  Remember – LFT (doesn’t work on the computer, sorry!)

  Love,

  Dad

  Matt read it through several times. He couldn’t believe it was as innocuous and unassuming as it seemed. Why go to all the trouble – the ‘cloak and dagger stuff’ as Dad described it – just to say he was away for a few days and Matt would have to look after himself. No, Matt decided, there had to be more to it than that.

  He read the letter again, thinking carefully about every word and phrase. First of all, he was sure it was from Dad. The mention of ‘Let’s Find Treasure’ brought back more memories of the treasure hunts Dad had set up when Matt was about eight years old. Dad used to plant clues for him round the house and garden – simple coded messages, like lists of numbers where 1 represented A and 2 stood for B and so on through the alphabet. Then Dad would pretend it was a mystery to him as well and help Matt work them out … All the messages were marked with a symbol – like a capital letter E with an extra line across the top. It was, Dad helped Matt work out, an amalgam of the letters L F and T all drawn over the top of each other. They decided between them it must stand for ‘Let’s Find Treasure.’ And like Dad said at the end of the letter, the symbol wouldn’t work on the screen – you’d need to create a graphic for it, and Dad probably wasn’t up to that.

  All of which meant, surely, that the text on the screen was itself a clue. There was a message hidden in it. Maybe several messages. ‘You might need some help with it’ told Matt he needed help from someone else. He wasn’t sure about the mention of Latin. He learned Latin at school, though he wasn’t any good at it. Dad had insisted he do the option and of course Dad knew Latin as well as the ancient Romans did. But he wouldn’t expect Matt to decipher a clue in Latin, would he?

  So, what else? What else in the message on the screen was odd or strange, pointing to a hidden meaning? Matt’s attention focused on the mention of his friends Ned and Tim. He didn’t know anyone called Ned, and he didn’t know a Tim that he’d call a friend. Dad knew some of Matt’s friends – he’d met Nick Blows several times, and Alex Moon had been to stay … So why make up names? Ned was an anagram of ‘end’ – was that important? What about Tim though – short for ‘time’ perhaps?

  He started again from the beginning. And stopped when he got to: ‘Great, capital.’ That didn’t seem to fit. Neither was the sort of word Dad would use. ‘Great,’ well maybe. ‘Capital’ certainly not. And why was ‘go’ in italics?

  Actually, now he read it again, that whole paragraph was rather odd. Why was Dad calling it ‘The Old house’? Why not capitalise ‘house’ if he was using capitals on ‘The’ and ‘Old’? And then he got it.

  Of course, that was why Ned and Tim were there – Dad needed two names that Matt would realise were made up, were there for some specific reason. And they had to be names that started with N and T. Capital – Capital letters. And ‘go’ was italicised because the first two capitals in that paragraph were G and O from ‘Great’ and ‘Obviously.’ Spelling ‘GO.’

  He grabbed the Biro he’d found in the desk drawer and the nearest piece of paper to write down the capitals from the whole message. The Biro scratched D but no ink came out. So he stuck it back in the drawer and took out a pencil – broken.

  Third time lucky, and the gel pen he tried worked. It was green, but that didn’t matter. Matt traced his finger along the lines on the screen and copied down the capital letters:

  DMSAIIWIIYI

  He stopped – it was just gibberish. Matt stared at the message on the screen. Perhaps the italicised ‘go’ was where he should start. Perhaps he just needed the capital letters from that paragraph. He tried again – and almost at once could see that he was right.

  GO TO AUNT JANE

  Matt stared at what he’d written. Well, he thought, that’s clear enough. He read back through the last few lines on the screen in case there was more. I I T I. Didn’t look like it. More gibberish. But the comment about ‘Too many negatives’ made sense now. Take out a negative from the sentence and what Dad was telling him was: ‘do worry if you don’t hear from me.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Matt said out loud. ‘Like I couldn’t have guessed that by now.’ He was feeling queasy as he wondered what had happened to Dad. This was more than a game – what had happened that made Dad feel he had to send Matt a coded message?

  He printed out a copy of the web page, folded it up, and put it in his pocket. Then he shut down the computer and went up to his room. He hadn’t bothered to unpack yet, which was a good thing because it looked like he was off again.

  Taking the money from the broken teapot in the kitchen to pay for a taxi, Matt then went to phone. There was an address book beside it, and Matt found the number of a local taxi company and called for a lift to the station. Then he hunted through for Aunt Jane’s number. She was Dad’s older sister, so he looked under S – Jane Stribling wasn’t listed. Matt sighed. What if Dad knew the number off by
heart and hadn’t bothered to write it down? He tried in the J section – and the first entry was ‘Jane.’

  He lifted the handset again, and was about to dial. ‘You can’t be too careful,’ Dad’s letter had said. He tapped the handset against his chin as he thought about that, the dial tone buzzing. Was the house being watched? The phones tapped? He remembered the figure he thought he had seen across the fields the night before. And he put down the phone. He scribbled Aunt Jane’s number on the back of the printout of Dad’s letter, and let himself out of the house.

  • • •

  Mrs Dorridge was wary, but finally allowed Matt to borrow her phone for a quick call. He managed to catch Aunt Jane just as she was leaving for work. She still lived in the same village where she and Matt’s Dad had grown up.

  ‘Nothing about your father surprises me,’ she said in response to Matt’s hurried explanations. ‘Hasn’t done for years. It’s typical. So don’t worry – I’m sure he’s just run off on some archaeological beanfeast and forgotten all about you. Of course you must come to stay with me here. I’ve plenty of room and I’ll be glad of the company, though you’ll have to fend for yourself during the day, or you can help out on the estate. I’m sure Mr Venture won’t mind.’

  He’d not been to Aunt Jane’s for years. Usually she came to visit Dad. Matt could remember her little cottage, on the edge of a wooded area just off the main drive that led through the estate to the enormous manor house where Aunt Jane worked. Matt wasn’t really sure what she did – she was some sort of personal assistant to a reclusive multimillionaire. Or something.

  ‘I’ll call you when I get to Cheltenham station. I’ve got a taxi coming.’

  She laughed at that, sounding suddenly much younger. ‘If you’re getting a taxi as far as Branscombe station, you might as well come all the way here. It’ll take you forever otherwise because you need to change at Gloucester. Don’t worry, I’ll pay.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Matt said. He was aware of Mrs Dorridge watching him carefully from her living room door, and hurriedly said goodbye.

  ‘I hope you get your phone fixed soon,’ Mrs Dorridge said sternly as she saw him out.

  ‘I hope so too. Thanks ever so much.’

  ‘Works all right to call taxis then,’ she observed through narrowed eyes.

  ‘Er, yeah,’ Matt admitted. ‘It’s a bit weird. Intermittent fault they said.’

  The old lady nodded, evidently far from convinced.

  The trees in the fields were hardly moving, but the wind had whipped the leaves in the close into a whirlwind. Matt sat on his suitcase outside Dad’s house waiting for the taxi. He watched the shapes the leaves made as they whirled and spun around him. It was odd the way the wind seemed to be trapped within this area. He hadn’t noticed it before. It made him uneasy, and he had the strange feeling he was being watched. Had someone been watching the house – been in the house last night? Had they attacked him? Were they still watching? Would they come back? Matt’s stomach felt empty and he shivered despite the morning sunlight.

  He didn’t have to wait long for the taxi – and was both relieved and irritated to see that it was the same driver as the previous evening.

  This time the man did help Matt with his luggage. ‘You off again?’ he said. ‘Don’t blame you. Couldn’t stick it here myself. Back to the station then?’

  ‘No,’ Matt told him as he got in the back of the big car. ‘I decided there’s no point bothering with the train. You might as well take me the whole way, if that’s OK.’

  The taxi man reversed the car onto the driveway and turned round. ‘So, where to?’

  Matt told him, and the driver nodded. ‘Take about an hour. That OK?’

  He really meant, could Matt afford it? ‘That’s fine,’ Matt assured him. ‘My aunt’s expecting me. She’ll pay when we get there.’

  The driver glanced round, grinning. ‘No problem then. Quite an adventure, eh?’

  The man spoke most of the way, but Matt hardly listened. There was something niggling at the back of his mind. Something the taxi driver had said or done. It echoed something Aunt Jane had said on the phone that had made him think again of Dad’s message. Matt took the printed copy from his pocket and read it through once more. He couldn’t read much in cars or he felt sick, so he skimmed through quickly, then looked out of the window while he tried to work out what had bothered him.

  He replayed Aunt Jane’s words in his head, trying to remember what she’d said which had made an impact. A word or phrase, no more. He’d half made a connection, just for a second. Then it was gone. It was when she’d been saying he could help out on the estate … He glanced at the printed page again, and suddenly it seemed obvious.

  There at the end of a sentence – a word broken across two lines and hyphenated. On the screen, it had seemed quite normal, but on the printout, with a different typeface, it seemed as if the word had been deliberately split:

  I’m sorry I’m not at home now. Your mother did warn me you were coming, but I’ve had to go away. It was sudden, though not unexpected. I really don’t know when I’ll be back, and so I thought I’d better give you some clue what to do and where to go while I’m away. Like learning Latin, it could be quite an ad-Venture. And you might need some help with it.

  The bigger space before the next line and the capital letter at the start clinched it for Matt. Venture – that was the name of the man that Aunt Jane worked for. Julius Venture – he remembered Aunt Jane and Dad talking about him. And as for learning Latin, Matt knew enough to understand that ‘ad’ was Latin for ‘to.’ So, in Latin, ‘adventure’ – or rather, ‘ad Venture’ – meant to go to Venture.

  He watched the countryside speed past for the rest of the journey. Was Dad telling him again that he should go to Aunt Jane’s, he wondered? Or was there more to it than that? Was it really the reclusive Julius Venture that Dad was sending him to for help? And what sort of help did he need? Matt watched the world going past outside without really seeing it. He was pleased with himself for having worked out Dad’s clues. But at the same time, he was anxious and worried – wondering what had happened to Dad, and what he could do about it …

  The car sped along the narrow Cotswold lanes. A flurry of leaves and spattering of rain followed it on its way.

  Chapter 3

  The taxi driver was impressed by the wide gateway into the estate. Huge wrought iron gates swung silently open as the car approached, and closed just as silently behind it.

  ‘Quite a place,’ the driver said as they caught sight of the manor house through the trees. It was an imposing seventeenth-century mansion built of Cotswold stone.

  ‘Yes,’ Matt agreed. ‘But that’s not where we’re going.’

  The driver was less impressed with Aunt Jane’s cottage as they drew up outside. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘How quaint.’

  The cottage had been built at the same time as the main house, providing accommodation for the gardener or groundsman, Matt assumed. It was like the manor house in miniature – same grey stone, same style of windows and door, same slate tiles on the roof. It had its own little forecourt, paved with irregular slabs of stone, just off the driveway. Nestling as it did in the shadow of a small wooded area of the grounds, it looked like a setting for a fairy tale. A rather bleak fairy tale, though, Matt decided – dull and grey and square and shadowy.

  He stood with his luggage on the forecourt as Aunt Jane emerged and hurried to pay the taxi driver.

  ‘Oh, let me give you a hand with that,’ she said, taking his suitcase from him. But she didn’t take it inside, instead she set it down again, took a step back and inspected Matt.

  ‘You are so like your father,’ she said. ‘Goodness, how you’ve grown, it’s been too long since I last saw you. How old are you now?’ She shook her head. ‘No, don’t tell me. I don’t think I want to know.’

  She was much as Matt remembered her, thin and willowy and serious. Only she seemed smaller. Which made Matt realise how long it must h
ave been since he last saw her, and how much he must have grown. He’d changed far more than she had. She was noticeably older – older than Matt’s mum, he knew. Her shoulder-length hair was streaked with grey where it had been uniformly dark brown, and her face was beginning to gain a texture like the stone of her house.

  Matt smiled. ‘I’m fifteen. You sent me a card, remember?’

  ‘Oh, that just happens automatically. If your birthday is in my diary, you get a card. I don’t keep count. Come on inside. I won’t ask how your father is,’ she said as she led the way, carrying his case, ‘because I’m sure you won’t know. But how’s your mother?’

  Matt almost said she’d run off too – both his parents had upped and left. If that was really what Dad had done. He tried to tell Aunt Jane he was worried, but her expression told him she was not at all concerned about her brother. He wondered about mentioning the intruder, the missing letters, Dad’s weird website message. But now he was here and safe, Matt decided to wait until he had his own thoughts in order and Aunt Jane was more responsive.

  Still muttering about her brother’s selfish absent-mindedness, Aunt Jane showed Matt to the spare room. It was tiny and square with bare stone walls and a small window that faced the main house. He could just see it through the trees, the morning sunlight reflecting off the windows. The only furniture was the bed and a small chest of drawers beside it. There was a lamp on the top of the chest.

  ‘I hope it will do,’ Aunt Jane said. ‘Julius – Mr Venture – said that you can stay up at the manor house if you want, there’s plenty of room there, of course. But I thought this was more cosy and I’d rather you were with me. If that’s all right?’

  Matt nodded. ‘I’ll be fine. Thanks.’

  ‘Of course, you’re welcome to use Mr Venture’s library and do your homework or whatever you have to do up there. I’ll show you round this afternoon if I have time. I’m sorry I’m going to be rather busy, but of course I didn’t know you were coming until …’