Mercy's Chase

by Jess Lourey

  Charlie laughed. It was the first time she’d heard it. The sound was sweet, a little high and breathy like a mouse caught off guard. “She jokes! I wasn’t sure if you had a sense of humor.” He collected himself. “In all seriousness, your point is excellent. We can’t get too married to the first clue we’ve found.”

  “Exactly.” Salem pushed her hair behind her ears. “We need to find out if Stonehenge served dual purposes and, if so, what they were. Regardless of that, we need to dig until we know exactly who created the binary-based message, and who its intended audience was.”

  “Spend your time researching the people who built it and who came to it, because I’ve got all the stonework information you’ll need on Stonehenge up here.” Charlie tapped his skull, and then pointed to the dash-mounted GPS. “Satnav says we have forty-five minutes to your Mrs. Molony’s house. Do your worst.”

  He didn’t need to tell her twice. Like Mozart at a piano, she dove in, tapping out search terms, backing off when they offered the gentle pushback of a bottomless dead end, following up ruthlessly when the points of information began to connect, to hum with the unique frequency of pattern, a Fibonacci-esque orchestra of meaning and purpose that appeared as coincidence to the untrained eye.

  A twinge of doubt stained the thrill of pursuit: had her mother not necessarily molded her to be the Underground’s code breaker, but rather observed and nurtured a natural talent? That thought triggered a memory. In it, Salem was twelve.

  A self-defense instructor had been invited to their home. It was the second time such a thing had happened. The first time, it had been a judo instructor brought into the Wiley household to train both Bel and Salem. It was strange how normal such a thing had felt, but then, Grace and Vida were always doing stuff like that for their girls: dance classes, first-aid training, dragging Bel and Salem to community ed knot tying or immersion Spanish workshops at the local high school after hours.

  Salem wouldn’t even have questioned the close quarters self-defense instructor coming into their home for a private lesson except for Bel’s absence.

  “Bel would love this,” Salem had said. “She’d think it was super cool.”

  Vida and Daniel had exchanged a look. They could pass so much to each other without using words. Salem understood that’s how it worked when you married someone. You learned to read their mind. Salem could do that with Bel. She knew how good it felt.

  Vida must have won the eye-wrestle because she spoke. “Bel doesn’t need this class. She’s too advanced.”

  Salem felt her face crumble into her turtleneck sweater. Of course Bel didn’t need another self-defense class. She was beautiful and strong and smart and perfect, and Salem was holding her back. Their parents had had the girls take fewer and fewer classes together. Even with the judo instructor, Bel had ended up teaching him something by the end of the session. She was a physical genius. Salem was a computer nerd, not good for much if the electricity went out.

  Daniel must have seen her expression. “Honey, we all have our strengths. Bel is good at sports, strength, and speed. Your gift is in your noggin.” He’d tapped his head.

  “Then why do I need this class?” The instructor was supposed to arrive any moment. How gross would it be to wrestle with a stranger in your living room with your parents watching? Grody gross.

  Vida had scowled. “Because you’re a girl.” She said girl like it was a dirty word. That was confusing. Vida was famous for her support of women’s rights, and didn’t all women start as girls? Daniel reached for Vida, but she pulled away. A gray shadow had fallen over her face. Salem had seen it there before, mostly when her mom had that third glass of wine, or on the rare times when Daniel had to travel without her and she had to sleep alone.

  “You know what, Salem?” Vida continued, that gray shadow pinching her mouth. “Even if you get all the training in the world, you still might not be able to stop them. They might steal your most precious center, take it without a second thought, as if it wasn’t even yours to begin with.”

  “Vida!”

  Salem had never heard her father use that tone. It was clear they were talking about something else, and it was terrifying. Salem began to cry.

  “That’ll get you nowhere,” Vida had said, even as Daniel led her away. “It’s better you learn that in this world, girls don’t get to play.”

  The instructor had shown up, and Salem had worked so hard to do everything right. Her mom didn’t come out for supper that night. Daniel said he was tired and had gone to bed early. When Salem leaned her ear against the painted wood of their bedroom door, she heard her mother crying softly, and Daniel whispering soothing words.

  Salem wiped away the memory and the blotch of uncertainty it brought with it—what had happened to make her mom like she was? —as best she could. It didn’t matter if she’d always had an inclination toward mathematics and logic; it gave her mother no right to conceal her connection to the Underground. She should have told Salem about it.

  Gaea offered a rosebud, her signal that she’d collected data that could be something or nothing. When Salem clicked on it, she was surprised to see it was an earlier line that she’d cast, the one looking into the bombing outside Parliament. Across the world wide web, Gaea had found only two servers sourcing any reliable data connected to the bomb, and maybe not even that. One server was housed in Moscow, the other in London, and they’d shared a message that contained the exact day and time of the bombing embedded in what appeared to be an innocuous business email. It was likely only coincidence, but Salem sicced Gaea on both servers just the same, creating an algorithm that would scour those two servers for anything else that might shed a light on who was behind the bombing.

  Then she refocused on her Stonehenge search. As a computer scientist, she had automatically laid her hunches to the side. Fears and feelings could not be allowed to steer her work. If there was no evidence to indicate Stonehenge was grounded in the feminine, it would be a waste of time to research based on the subjective sense that women and Stonehenge were inextricably linked, even if she’d been unable to shake that feeling since being introduced to Mrs. Molony’s unearthed replica.

  Did the fact that Vida saw everything bad that happened—political, local, global, environmental, getting cut off in traffic—as a conspiracy against women affect Salem’s decision to put aside her hunch? Didn’t matter. Science was science.

  After cross-referencing multiple sites, Salem established that the English Heritage site contained the most comprehensive Stonehenge research. The data they presented posited that the Heel Stone may have been the earliest component of Stonehenge, followed by a circular ditch. Inside the ditch were the Aubrey Holes. As Charlie had said, the Aubrey Holes had held timber and possibly stone, an earlier but similar version of Stonehenge that was lost to the ages. Cremated remains were deposited in the Aubrey Holes, one per hole, enough remains to qualify Stonehenge as the largest known Neolithic cemetery in the British Isles.

  Five hundred years after the digging of the ditch and the creation of the timber-based monument and graveyard, the enormous sarsens and smaller bluestones that still stood today were brought in. They were erected in a vaguely similar pattern, the sarsen stones following the circle pattern of the Aubrey Holes but also erected in a horseshoe shape in the center. The bluestones were placed between the sarsens.

  As she read this research, Salem fought the urge to glance at Charlie, who was vibrating in his seat. It felt like a small betrayal to look up this information rather than simply ask him. After all, he’d been the one who first told her about the holes.

  Still, science. She had to be sure for herself.

  Three hundred years after the sarsens and bluestones were brought in, the bluestones were rearranged to form an oval and a road was built between the structure and the river Avon. That formation had produced the code they’d cracked today. Around the same time, barrows—b
urial mounds for the respected and wealthy—began appearing immediately next to Stonehenge or on hills within view of Stonehenge, indicating that either Stonehenge had been considered a holy place or an homage to the powerful. Also, celebrations drawing as many four thousand people began, the festivals occurring at midsummer and midwinter every year.

  Salem felt the warm and familiar tingle that sparked when she located the beginning of a thread she was trying to unravel. Stonehenge had been a gathering place for the Neolithic leaders. They had ordered its creation through whatever means available, and they gathered twice annually on constellation-based dates.

  Who were these exalted leaders? Knowing that would help Salem to understand who had orchestrated the code and, potentially, their reasons for using it. The loudest hits on Stonehenge and Stonehenge-adjacent burials came back from a hundred years or so after the construction period of Stonehenge as they now knew it. These discoveries included the burial mound of the “Amesbury Archer” along with other males interred with pottery, amber, gold, and flint, which would have represented great wealth at the time. More interesting was the oxygen isotope analyses proving that the powerful people buried at Stonehenge had traveled from all over what was today known as Europe as well as western Asia and northern Africa, again, as Charlie had said.

  Salem programmed Gaea to gather all research related to Stonehenge, stack it all on top of each other, collate and dismiss any repetitive information, and create a separate document of the outliers. A minute after she ran it, Salem found herself looking at something unusual, something unsettling.

  “Oh my god.”

  “What?”

  Salem jumped in her seat. She’d forgotten Charlie, and the rest of the world, were here. She was looking at whispers—a bone fragment discovered here or there, articles peppered around the internet rather than one cohesive document—but they all said the same thing: the bodies cremated or buried at Stonehenge immediately before, during, and after the construction of the monument that had produced “second” were women.

  “Stonehenge research from 2300 BC, which is when the version of the monument that we saw in the visitor center was created.” Salem instinctually turned the laptop screen toward him, even though he couldn’t study it while he drove. “Did you know that mostly women were buried there at that time?”

  He smiled, a quiet, soft gesture. “What do you think it means?”

  “Something inconceivable,” she said.

  “Yet your hypothesis is …?” he gently prodded.

  There was only one explanation. “That four thousand years ago, women held the power.”

  27

  Blessington, Ireland

  Salem tugged a hair tie from her wrist and wrapped it around her tumultuous curls, an unconscious habit that appeared whenever she was wrestling with two puzzle pieces that needed to fit together but were resisting. “But that makes no sense. Archeologists would be all over this if it were true.”

  Charlie’s lack of response caused her to pause her research. He was clenching his jaw so tight that his skin had gone white around his ears.

  “What is it?” Salem asked.

  “Are you familiar with the Birka, Sweden, Viking grave? Bj 581?”

  Salem shook her head. “No.”

  “Find it.” His voice was low, intense.

  She obliged. The article she found had been published two short weeks earlier.

  “I’ll save you the trouble,” he said. “History tells us that warriors and leaders were always men. Stories of powerful women have been whispered or sung, tales of Valkyrie and Amazons, but they were always dismissed as mythology. This bias has shaped everything we know about the past, has influenced what archeologists choose to see or not even look for.”

  Salem couldn’t help but think of her Stonehenge hunch.

  Charlie continued. “So, when a grave is discovered and searched, and it’s found to house the tools of war, or even more telling, evidence of leadership, the unquestioned assumption is that the skeleton is male. Bj 581 was no exception. Inside the grave, archeologists found the remains of one human, two horses, swords, armor-piercing arrows, an axe, a battle knife, two shields, and strategy pieces used to plan combat. Obviously, they’d stumbled upon the chamber-grave of a powerful and, so, male tenth-century Viking general.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Except they were wrong. A few years ago, a female osteologist was studying the bones for unrelated reasons when she noticed their feminine characteristics. An osteological test proved they were female.”

  He signaled an upcoming turn, his words heavy in the car. “Think about that. How many other beliefs about the roles of men and women do we have completely wrong?”

  Salem was researching as he spoke, corroborating his words within seconds of them leaving his mouth. “How do you know so much about this?”

  Charlie’s expression hooded. “I have a fascination with women’s history.” He glanced at her as if he wanted to say more, but then stared back at the road. Night was falling. The traffic had been thick leaving Dublin, but as they neared Blessington, they saw more horses than cars on the road. The world was slowing down the deeper into Ireland’s hidden places they drove.

  Salem let it go. He’d tell her more when and if he was ready, as he’d done when he revealed that his father had been a stonemason. “Will we get into trouble for flying to Ireland without permission?”

  “I have some clout,” Charlie said, his mouth set in a grim line. “I am cashing it all in to buy us two days to follow a lead. Told your man Bench that it was related to the president’s safety on top of the girl’s, in case he was up for arguing.”

  Salem had filled him in on Muirinn Molony and her belief that the Stonehenge replica was tied to an assassination plan. “Do you think it is?”

  “Who knows what to think anymore?”

  Just then their attention was drawn to the console between them, where Salem’s phone had been resting, the B&C sucking WiFi off it like a tick. It was suddenly lit up.

  “You’re getting a call,” Charlie said unnecessarily.

  Bel’s face lit up the screen, her photo smiling, untroubled, worlds away from the emotions she was certainly feeling as she called Salem from across the ocean. Salem’s stomach lurched. Bel was certainly calling about Mercy.

  “Is that Isabel Odegaard?”

  Salem’s pulse flared, suspicions about Charlie surfacing before she remembered the reluctant fame that she and Bel had acquired. Their faces had been plastered all over the news after Bel had thwarted the assassination attempt on Gina Hayes.

  “Yeah,” Salem said, hitting the button to send the call to voicemail. “I’ll get back to her later.”

  But she wouldn’t.

  She couldn’t bear speaking to Bel until Mercy was safe, even though this wasn’t the first time Bel had called or texted. In fact, she’d been reaching out so frequently that Salem had created a folder to route Bel’s incoming texts to so she didn’t have to read them, to risk seeing Bel’s anger and disappointment and pain.

  Salem stared out her window at the farms zipping past. Evening had laid its blanket on the ground. The air washing in through the vents smelled different, crisper, the wet of the woodsmoke grown musky, spiked with the cold promise of rain.

  “Her house is right up here.”

  Charlie pulled onto the small patch of gravel in front of Mrs. Molony’s cottage, parallel to the stone fence separating her house from the road. Déjà vu tugged at Salem. She’d been here only two days earlier, but it felt like another lifetime.

  The house appeared exactly as it had before, cozy in a hobbity way. Salem climbed out of the car and stretched and then hopped out of the way. The dirt parking strip was so narrow that Charlie had to crawl out her door.

  “Cute place.”

  “Yep.” Salem studied the house. Something cold twisted in her
gut. She sniffed the air. Manure and night. Traffic coasted far off, and nearer, a chicken bawked, probably in search of a safe spot to roost.

  “What is it?” Charlie asked.

  Salem pointed at the chimney. “No smoke coming out. And no lights inside.”

  “Maybe she’s run to town,” Charlie said, but he removed his gun from its holster.

  “Maybe.” A frown line formed between Salem’s eyebrows. Mrs. Molony hadn’t struck her as the type who left her house after dark. She took the lead, walking through the fence’s gate and up to the house. She knocked on the heavy wooden door. The noise was sharp.

  Rap rap rap. No answer.

  Charlie raised his eyebrows.

  Salem shrugged, stepping off the front stoop to peek inside a window.

  What she saw inside turned her blood to chalk. Mrs. Molony’s orderly home was in complete disarray. The two dining room chairs were toppled. Clothes were strewn everywhere. A cast iron pot was bubbling at the stove, gas flames flickering below it as if Mrs. Molony had been attacked while cooking dinner.

  Charlie glanced over her shoulder and saw the same scene. He pounded on the door. “Mrs. Molony, this is Charlie Thackeray. I’m here with Agent Salem Wiley, who you met two days ago. We are going to come in.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. Gun in his right hand, he reached for the doorknob with his left. It was unlocked. He pushed the door open. “Mrs. Molony, I’m stepping inside now.”

  Salem followed him inside, her chest heavy with dread. The small, well-insulated house was claustrophobically hot inside, the air redolent with bubbling stew and fresh-baked soda bread. Charlie flicked on the light and cleared the combination kitchen, dining, and living room while Salem walked over to the stove, scouring the shadowy corners for evidence of blood or body.