Mercy's Chase

by Jess Lourey

  The craggy sunlight scraped across London’s rooftops. The rain had stopped an hour earlier, morphing into a hoary frost. Salem was sure she’d never be warm again. She’d been raised in Minnesota, the land of four seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter, and road construction, but that had been an honest cold. Snow. Ice. A serious cold that scrubbed the air, razing it of germs and pests, wiping the earth clean, rebooting it for spring.

  London cold was sneaky. Damp-that-crept-into-your-bones sneaky. It weakened Salem where Minnesota cold fortified her. She shivered as she walked toward the Campus, but her mind ran hot. It had shifted into whiteboard mode, scribbling hypotheses, running algorithms, noting random facts that arose. Rosalind Franklin. Stem cell research. Freelance Romani computer nerds on the hunt for a paralysis cure.

  A snippet of 702’s “Where My Girls At” popped from Salem’s pocket.

  “Shit!”

  A man in a rain parka glanced her way, scowling. The streets were starting to wake up, people hustling to work, businesses opening.

  “Sorry,” she said, scrambling for her cell. The song was Bel’s text tone, a joke from their favorite song of 1999. She’d emailed her friend a dire warning two hours earlier and never followed up on it.

  She thumbed the button on her cell and the screen lit up, revealing Bel’s text.

  You switching teams?

  Relief washed over Salem. Bel had taken the email as a joke, thank god, focusing on the photo of Alafair, the suggestion that Salem was spending the night with a woman. Salem’s fingers flew over the keyboard. Naw, still benched by the home team. What are you doing up so late?

  Research. Didn’t even check email until just now. Who was the hottie?

  Her name is Alafair. Met her last night.

  Is she single?

  Salem couldn’t fight the smile. I’ll ask.

  And she would, if she ever saw Alafair again. Salem had agreed to help her; of course she had. If there was a way to give Bel her legs back, Salem would move heaven and earth to find it. Alafair would send her all the Rosalind Franklin research over a secure channel. As soon as Salem finished out this week in the FBI, she would devote every waking minute to poring over it, sending updates over the same channel.

  Before letting her go, Alafair had filled Salem in on the minimal data they’d so far uncovered. It amounted to only three suggestions that Rosalind Franklin had discovered a way to regenerate spinal tissue and nerves: a newspaper clipping dated 24 February 1958, referring to “an exciting development from Birkbeck College, something our paraplegic soldiers and polio victims will be interested in”; a note from a friend warning Franklin that she was becoming too famous; and a page purported to be from Franklin’s diary where she wrote, I must hide the cure seven levels deep or the men will take this, too, from me.

  Salem had checked on her phone to confirm that Franklin had been working at Birkbeck College in 1958, but that was a thin connection, especially since cursory research suggested Franklin’s DNA and RNA work was isolated to the tobacco mosaic virus while at Birkbeck. Alafair had seen the doubt in Salem’s eyes, had convinced her there was more, that Franklin’s lab assistant confirmed that she’d perfected human cell regeneration and had made a medical discovery that would alter the world: she could make the paralyzed walk.

  That lab assistant was Alafair’s grandfather. He’d passed down the story.

  He swore that Franklin had been murdered for the discovery, her death by ovarian cancer a public ruse. The grandfather, upon learning of her passing, had returned to the lab for Franklin’s notes. They had vanished. He believed Franklin had hidden them.

  The story was ludicrous built on top of ridiculous, but the sad thing was Salem had heard even weirder. This, at least, was a cause she could fight for: Bel.

  She started to type I’m coming home Sunday, but stopped herself.

  Miss you, she typed instead. She would tell Bel in person, all of it.

  Miss you too, Bits. Olive juice.

  Salem smiled. The last part was code for “I love you.” Turns out your mouth made the same movement for either phrase.

  The Campus was just ahead. Salem could not wait to get to her room and strip off her damp clothes. She might even pop an Ativan and return to the steam room to leach the cold out of her bones. The door felt lighter than usual as Salem opened it, the warmth of the foyer welcoming. She avoided eye contact with the security guard, emptying her pockets into a tub before stepping through the metal detector, waiting on the other side as he recorded her entrance into the computer docket.

  After this week was over and she left the FBI, she definitely would not miss the institutional feel of this building, more nursing home than office suites, no images on the walls, not even the pale globbiness of dentist office art.

  Her tub came through on the conveyer belt.

  She reached for it.

  Vida Wiley flew into the lobby just as Salem was fishing her phone out of the tub. Assistant Director Robert Bench followed Vida. His face was grim, gray hair askew as if he’d been woken.

  Vida’s expression was violent, twisted with pain and accusation. It was the same face Salem had woken up to on the beach the day her father had died. They had not yet discovered his body, but the police had arrived. Water search and rescue was out on the lake. Salem was being treated by EMTs. She was coming to, still mercifully unaware that her father had drowned.

  Gracie’s car had pulled up. Salem didn’t know then that the authorities had called Vida, and that Gracie had driven her to the lake. She only knew that she was sitting on the bumper of an ambulance, and that everyone surrounding her was a stranger, and no one was telling her anything.

  Salem had looked over at Gracie’s car, overwhelmed with relief when her mother fell out. Vida lurched toward Salem, her face the gruesome color and shape of a broken heart. She held her hands toward Salem not in comfort but in accusation.

  “What have you done?”

  The same words then as now.

  Vida lunged at Salem, stopping only when Assistant Director Bench restrained her. Her hair was loose, her pajamas out of place in the harsh light of the Campus. She held Mercy’s rag doll in her hand. It would have been a relief to see her crying. Her face was dry, though, her eyes hollowed pits in her face, her mouth condemning.

  “What have you done?” she repeated.

  Salem backed up, stumbling against the hard plastic of the metal detector. She knew she wasn’t twelve anymore. She realized her brain was her strongest weapon, that it could compute at incredible speeds. She understood there were resources available to her now that she hadn’t possessed fifteen years earlier.

  But for the life of her, she couldn’t recall what they were.

  She wanted to look at Bench for a clue as to what the situation was, how she should react, but she couldn’t pull her gaze away from her mother. Vida was Salem’s only parent, and she hated Salem. That truth was tattooed across Vida’s face, the brittle veneer of courtesy fallen away. All the raw emotion her mother really felt for her—the betrayal, the fear, oh god, the envy—was laid bare.

  Salem couldn’t track the situation. What had she done? Alafair had assaulted two men, but that felt more like a cartoon attack than a reality. Alafair had assured her they were not the type who would go to the police. Salem planned to quit the FBI, but no one knew that, not even Bel.

  What had the power to so upset Vida?

  Her eyes were drawn to the rag doll, a blank smile stitched on its face, its yellow-yarn braids askew. The sharp-clawed awareness of what was missing from this picture hit her so fast and hard that she could not duck. She stood her ground even though the realization felt like a body blow. “Mercy?”

  She swayed. Hands reached out to her, but they weren’t her mother’s. She would have recognized Vida’s touch, had been craving it for the past fifteen years. No, her mother w
as not embracing her, but her words were burying her.

  “They kidnapped her. Do you understand? They have her now. That innocent child is with the men who did this to me.” Vida pushed her hair back, showing the ear with the missing lobe, one of many scars she carried.

  Salem shook her head, pushed away against the hands trying to pull her toward a chair. It wasn’t the security guard, or Bench. Charlie? “I don’t understand.”

  Vida drew close to Salem, so close their noses nearly touched. Her voice hissed, her morning breath sour. “We’ve all been so careful. Every one of us. You’re the only one who refused to listen. The only one who isn’t taking this seriously, who refuses to learn about the Underground. Because of you, they took the girl.” Vida pulled on her hair. “What did you say? What were you stupid enough to utter on an unsecured line?”

  Vida threw down a ball of paper she’d been squeezing in her fist. She stood, stepping back from Salem, hate illuminating her eyes.

  Salem reached for the paper with shaking hands. Smoothed it out.

  Solve the Stonehenge Train for the girl. You have until midnight 24 September.

  Salem moaned because she knew, in that moment, she saw it all. There was only one person she spoke with socially, one woman in the whole world who she didn’t use an unsecured line with because they only talked about middle school and dating and if it started to get real, Salem would change the subject.

  Bel.

  “You wouldn’t believe it, Bel. She’d 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.”

  “Was it a code?”

  “It was—”

  “You solved the mystery of Stonehenge, didn’t you?”

  “For sure. And for my next trick …”

  It had been innocent. A joke. But somehow those words had caused Mercy’s kidnapping. There had been power in them. Conspiracy.

  Those words were pulling Salem back into the witch hunt web.

  The child. The stone. The Underground.

  “What is Mercy?”

  “She’s the last.” Vida sounded hollow, hoarse. “She’s the code that sets us free.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me they wanted her?” Salem didn’t recognize her own voice.

  Vida squeezed her stomach as if she was trying to hold herself in. “Because you wouldn’t listen.”

  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.

&
nbsp; 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.