by James Ponti
“Like with the ancient Greek and hieroglyphics,” Paris said. “That’s brilliant.”
“But there’s more,” said Kat. “Brooklyn, why don’t you show them?”
With a click of a mouse, Brooklyn opened a massive photo gallery on the monitor. The images were almost all of birds taken around the world at locations ranging from tranquil mountain lakes to busy urban landscapes.
“Remember that Parker wanted a camera that had Bluetooth built into it?” she asked.
“Right,” said Rio. “So he could upload his pictures to the cloud for the rest of the Dodos to see.”
“These are those pictures,” Brooklyn said. “I hacked into his cloud account. There are thousands of photos, and they date back at least ten years.”
“How hard was it to hack?” asked Monty.
“For me with a supercomputer at my disposal?” Brooklyn said with a smile. “Not hard at all. But to be fair, they were barely encrypted. He intended to share them with the other Dodos.”
“The good news is that they’re all dated,” said Kat. “So when you compare them against the bird books, it fills in even more information. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface, but we already know that he traveled a ton over the last few years.”
“Berlin, Beijing, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City,” said Brooklyn. “He was crisscrossing the world and there doesn’t seem to be any pattern to it.”
“And you know how I hate it when there’s not a pattern,” joked Kat.
“Well, I know one pattern,” said Mother. “I’m not sure about which birds are there, but I do know those cities would make for an all-time greats spy tour. They represent some of the most important espionage centers over the last fifty years.”
“And he went to all of them, multiple times, even though he retired from MI6,” said Brooklyn.
“Now here’s where it gets most curious,” said Kat. “During that time, the bird he’s most interested in is the magpie, which is odd, because magpies are common. You can find them across Europe, Asia, and western North America.”
“Right, magpie,” said Sydney. “That’s the name I read in the bird books and blurted out at the safe house when I shouldn’t have.” She turned to Mother and said, “You shushed me and told me we’re not to talk about it, but you never said why.”
“Magpie is the code name given to a double agent working inside MI6,” said Mother. “I only know about it because I helped out on a sting attempt once. For at least ten years there’s been someone inside MI6 passing secrets along to Umbra. Since I was trying to infiltrate Umbra, they asked me to help plant some bad information to see if it would help, but it didn’t.”
“So Rutledge was going all over the world trying to figure out who Magpie was?” Rio asked.
“That would make a lot of sense,” said Mother. “Especially because of his retirement.”
“What do you mean?” asked Brooklyn.
“Magpie’s literally inside MI6 and therefore could potentially interfere with any investigations MI6 is running,” he said. “But a retiree outside the Service can move around more easily without attracting attention.”
“Until he did,” said Kat. “You tell them, Brooklyn. You’re the one who figured it out.”
“Okay,” Brooklyn answered.
She flipped through the photo gallery until she reached the last page of images.
“We’re missing one bird book,” she said. “The one Rutledge was using when he died.”
“And he took them everywhere, so it would still be in San Francisco,” said Mother.
“But we do have the pictures he took right up until the end.” She clicked on the final image, and it expanded and filled the screen. It was a picture of three large birds with black feathers. “This is the last one.”
“Are those magpies?” asked Sydney.
“That’s what we thought at first,” said Kat. “But they’re actually ravens. They’re similar looking and belong to the same family, but they’re a different species.”
“And here’s the strange part,” said Brooklyn. “They were taken two days after Rutledge died. And we checked the metadata on the picture and know that it was taken with the same camera.”
Mother had a totally confused look on his face. “You mean the camera Clementine used to take the picture of the kids?”
“Yes,” said Brooklyn.
“So Clementine took this picture?”
Brooklyn nodded. “This is the fortune cookie,” she said. “This is the secret message she’s sending you.”
“I don’t understand,” said Mother. “Why would she send me a picture of three ravens?”
“Do you know what a group of ravens is called?” Brooklyn asked.
“No,” he said. “What?”
“There are two terms, actually. I came across them while we were trying to identify the pictures. A group of ravens is called a conspiracy or a murder.”
25. The Underground
THE CHIEF OF THE SECRET Intelligence Service arrived at work every day in an armored SUV driven by a specially trained agent and accompanied by a personal protection officer, known as a PPO. This was necessary for security reasons and appropriate for someone in charge of such an important and sensitive agency. As for the rest of the senior staff, most of them also arrived in impressive vehicles driven by imposing agents. The business of who had which make and model of car, and which specially trained driver, had become something of a status symbol among the group, which was made up primarily of men, all of whom were highly competitive.
Tru took the tube.
“If the London Underground was good enough for my father to take to work every day, then it’s certainly good enough for me,” she once said to one of her status-conscious colleagues who’d asked her about it. “Besides, I like to look at my people.”
“My people” was the term Tru used to describe regular British citizens. Not the ones who were on the telly or sitting around a conference table at MI6. But real people with briefcases and backpacks, runny noses and slobbering babies. These were the ones she’d sworn to protect, and seeing their faces to and from work was a twice daily reminder of how important her job was.
She was walking among them in the King’s Cross St. Pancras tube station on a Monday morning when a man began to carefully follow her. During his years with MI6 he’d had high-level surveillance training, but he hardly needed those skills for this. Because of her height and limp, Tru was easy to pick out, even among the crush of commuters.
He never had to get closer than fifteen meters to keep her in his sights. To make sure she didn’t see him, he wore a blue cap and sunglasses, and when they reached the platform for the Victoria line, he turned the other way and kept his eye on her by watching in the security mirror hanging from the ceiling. When the train heading toward Vauxhall Cross arrived, he waited until after she boarded before getting on one car behind her.
They’d only just pulled out of the station when his phone buzzed, signaling the arrival of a series of texts:
I saw you the moment I stepped foot in King’s Cross.
Meet me at the Wilton Road exit of Victoria station.
The hat and glasses are fooling no one.
Mother shook his head and laughed. He should’ve known better than to think he could outfox the fox. He’d come to London for just one reason: to talk to Tru. It had reached a point where he needed to tell her about Magpie, and he had to do that face-to-face and away from the prying eyes and ears of Vauxhall Cross.
Now that he suspected Rutledge may have been murdered, he wanted the team to go to San Francisco, and he couldn’t do that without looping in Tru. A day trip to Oxford was one thing. But the seven of them flying off to California would be impossible to hide. Besides, if they uncovered Magpie’s identity, he’d need to tell her.
His problem was that he didn’t want to mention anything about Clementine or the photograph of the kids. If his wife was, in fact, a double agent, then the odds were that T
ru already knew and was somehow involved. He wanted to get the green light to go to San Francisco without letting on that he was getting closer to finding Clemmie.
Mother got off the train at Victoria station and exited onto Wilton Road. There he saw Tru waiting impatiently, her collar flipped up to fight the morning chill, her face frozen in a disapproving scowl.
“What took you so bloody long?” she asked, irritated.
“I came straight up from the train,” he said. “You couldn’t have been waiting more than fifteen seconds.”
“Not what took you so long to meet me on the street,” she replied. “But what took you so long to come down to London to have this conversation. I’ve been waiting for days.”
He looked at her totally confused.
“I assume you’ve come to discuss Magpie.”
So much for his carefully made plans. Just as she’d been throughout his career, Tru was five steps ahead of him.
“You know?”
“I know you’ve been digging around.”
“I knew you bugged the safe house.”
“Of course I did,” she said. “I’m a very tall woman who stands out in a crowd, yet has still managed to have quite a successful career in espionage. I didn’t last for thirty-nine years at MI6 by trusting people and leaving them to their own devices. Now, let’s talk about Magpie and let’s do it quickly. I have an eight-fifteen with C, and I am never late.”
Mother explained that he felt certain Rutledge had been murdered and explained the photo gallery of bird pictures and the ominous meaning behind the image of the three ravens.
“The picture was taken with his camera two days after he died,” he said. “Someone is trying to send a message,” he added, making no guess as to who that someone might be.
He didn’t mention the bird books, because that would’ve required him to admit to the break-in at the Bodleian. But he did tell her about the pocket calendar, offering only “It came in the mail after his passing and was given to Monty by a porter she knew at Oxford.”
Tru had many questions, but she neither had the time nor the inclination to ask them. How this information came to light was not nearly as important as the fact that it had. Besides, despite what she said about not trusting people, she trusted Mother implicitly. If she sometimes snooped or eavesdropped, it was only out of her wish to protect him.
“What’s your plan?” she asked.
“All seven of us will go to San Francisco. We’ll come up with a cover story to explain why, but when we get there, we’ll use his calendar to retrace his final days and see if we can make headway into who may have killed him.”
“If you can answer that, you may well discover Magpie’s true identity.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“Okay, the mission is approved. But it will be a verbal approval only. Just this conversation. No record. No communication. No one in Vauxhall Cross will know. There’s no telling what Magpie hears in that building, so we’ll have to maintain radio silence.”
“Of course,” he said.
“If there comes a moment of dire need to communicate while you’re in the field, you are to contact me directly on my private mobile, not the work one I just texted you on.”
He gave her a look. “I don’t have the number for your private mobile.”
“Yes you do,” she assured. “I put it into the contacts on your phone while I was standing here waiting for you.”
“You can do that?” he asked, surprised.
“I’m Tru. I can do whatever I please. It’s under the name Harrison Marcus.”
He smiled. “You don’t much look like a ‘Harrison Marcus.’ ”
“Says the man named ‘Mother.’ ”
He smirked and asked, “Anything else?”
“Yes,” she said. “You desperately need to work on surveillance skills. Today’s demonstration was pathetic. You’ve really gotten rusty.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, duly chastened. “But to be fair, I was intending for you to see me. I just didn’t want to approach you close to home or close to work.”
“Tell yourself that if it makes you feel better,” she said with a wink. She started to walk away, but stopped and turned back to say, “And make sure to tell Sydney and Brooklyn that they were outstanding during their testimonies in Parliament. I was quite proud of them both.” There was a pause, and then she added, “You and Monty have done a right good job with them. All five of them.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
That evening, Mother returned to the FARM and informed everyone that they were heading to California for Operation Golden Gate. He was at the dining room table working out the cover story with Monty and Sydney when Brooklyn entered the room with a stunned look on her face.
“Are you okay, sweetie?” asked Monty.
“Yeah, Brook,” said Sydney. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I found them,” Brooklyn said slowly, almost as if she didn’t believe what she was saying.
“Who?” asked Sydney, confused.
Brooklyn looked directly at Mother and said, “I found Robert and Annie.”
26. Chloe and Griffin
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU found Robert and Annie?” a thunderstruck Mother asked, his voice loud enough to attract the others from the neighboring rooms.
“I mean I’ve identified the names they’re using and the school they attend,” Brooklyn said. “It’s possible that Clementine’s withdrawn them, but they were there as recently as a few months ago.”
Mother sat in a daze as he wrapped his head around this development.
“Did I hear that right?” Paris asked as he hurried into the room with Rio and Kat right behind him.
“You found them?” asked Rio. “How?”
“Ever since Kat figured out that the picture was taken in San Francisco, I’ve been running different search protocols through Beny,” Brooklyn said. “First, I checked hotel registers within fifty miles of the city on the dates around when the picture was taken. But that didn’t work because there were just too many rooms and no way to know if Clementine had put all of them on the register. Or even if she was using a hotel. Then I searched flight manifests for arrivals at nearby airports for the three weeks leading up to that date and departures for three weeks after,” said Brooklyn. “That’s six weeks of flights to and from three large international airports.”
“Wow,” said Sydney. “That had to be a bigger number than the hotel rooms.”
“Much bigger,” said Brooklyn. “But it was also a precise number. I knew that if they flew to San Francisco, each of them had to have a ticket. I also knew that Clementine is an expert at lying low so I thought about the way we fly: usually on separate reservations, but always on the same plane. So I had Beny search for every combination of three people who arrived and left on the same flights during those time frames. Then I narrowed that to only include groups in which at least one of those passengers was a child.”
“And what did that leave you?” asked Rio.
“A massive number,” she answered. “But we’ve got a supercomputer that can perform five hundred trillion floating-point operations per second.” She flashed a proud smile. “My boy Beny was engineered for massive numbers. So I had him start searching for each of those people on social media.”
“There’s no way that Clemmie would let the kids be on social media,” said Mother.
“Right,” said Brooklyn. “That’s when Tru came to the rescue.”
“You told Tru about this?” Mother asked, panicked.
“No,” she said. “Of course not. But I thought about what she said that night we ate feijoada. She said that she could tell the recipe was from Rio de Janeiro not because of the ingredients it had, but because it was missing the orange slices.”
“Sometimes the answer lies not in what you see, but in what is missing,” Sydney said, repeating what Tru had told them.
“Exactly,” said Brooklyn.
Kat smiled. “You had Beny identify which names didn’t have social media accounts.”
“Yes,” answered Brooklyn. “I told him to eliminate the names of anyone whose picture he found more than five times. I figured there might be a couple of slip-ups or photos that were tagged wrong.”
“So he’s looking for people who aren’t there?” said Sydney. “That’s…”
“Brilliant,” said Monty, finishing the sentiment.
“Thanks,” Brooklyn said. “That still left a lot of people, especially because we’re dealing with a bunch of kids who are too young to be on social. But now it was a much more manageable number. So I took things that we know about Robert and Annie and included them as search variables, like Robert’s glasses and asthma, and the fact that Annie is an excellent swimmer and wears braces. That led me to Chloe and Griffin Mass. His eye doctor is right across the street from her orthodontist. And even though her water polo team is championship caliber, she’s always missing from the photos celebrating their victories.”
“Chloe and Griffin?” Mother said, his voice full of emotion. “Chloe was the name of Clemmie’s best friend when she was growing up, and Griffin is her mother’s maiden name.” For him, this was confirmation. “You really have found them. That’s amazing. Where are they?”
This was the part that made Brooklyn hesitate. The one gray cloud in the happy news.
“Rose Hill,” she said. “It’s a boarding school in Australia. Just outside of Sydney.”
The news hung in the air for a moment before Paris turned to Mother. “I thought you checked out all the boarding schools in Sydney a few years ago.”
“Not all of them,” Sydney said softly, her voice cracking.
This was the reaction Brooklyn had worried about. Three and a half years earlier, Mother had rushed to Australia after Clementine was spotted at the Sydney airport. He had a list of all the boarding schools in the area and visited them one by one, posing as a police officer looking for a pair of missing children.
