Mercy's Chase

by Jess Lourey

  “That means less money for it, which means less security and easier for us to search. I’m confused. If these Standing Stones are what Stonehenge was meant to send us toward, why hide it? Why not just directly send the seeker to Stenness?”

  “For the same reason you hide anything,” Salem said, thinking again of Daniel Wiley, and the day he’d driven that lesson home.

  Her father was hand-sanding a walnut monk’s bench. She remembered the sun poking through the shop window’s dusty glass, and sawdust the color of heartsblood dancing in its beam. Salem had trailed her finger through the specks, upsetting their fairy dance. She was on summer break, between second and third grade.

  “You know why people hide things, don’t you, Salem?”

  She’d helped her dad pick out the wood for this bench, held and handed him tools while he measured, cut, drilled, and dremeled, watched in awe as he carved the lion’s heads that would decorate each end of the two armrests.

  “So other people don’t find them?” she’d guessed.

  He’d reached for the varnish. She remembered wanting him to open it more than anything in the whole sweet world. He’d always made her leave at this point in a project, said little girls with developing brains mustn’t be in close quarters with varnish. She imagined it smelled like butterscotch.

  “That’s right.” He smiled, encouraging. He wore the cut-off jean shorts and the faded, paper-thin Led Zeppelin Icarus t-shirt he always wore at that stage in the project, that time of year. “And why don’t they want other people to find them?”

  Salem pushed a sticky curl from her face. “Because they don’t have enough to share?”

  He studied her and set down the can. “You know what, I think you’re old enough to watch the final step.”

  She couldn’t believe it. “You’re going to let me watch the varnish?”

  He chuckled. “If you like, but I have something that comes right before the varnish that I think you’ll enjoy even more. It’s the final test of the furniture.”

  He reached into the mouth of the carved lion’s head and tugged its wooden tongue. Next, he turned the head 45 degrees and slid the top of the armrest toward the center. Underneath lay a long, narrow hidden drawer. He repeated the action with the other lion’s head.

  Salem was speechless.

  “I add the compartments into every piece of furniture I make, but these are my favorite design.”

  He flipped the varnish lid and stirred the viscous liquid underneath. She wrinkled her nose against the acrid odor. It didn’t smell like butterscotch at all. He painted quietly, carefully, until he was done and the monk’s bench gleamed as if it had been carved of liquid gold.

  “Back to the question I asked you earlier.” He scraped the excess varnish off the stir stick using the lip of the can. “There’s only one reason a person ever hides something.”

  She blinked, waiting.

  He clicked the lid back into place. It made a hollow snap, like a metal bone breaking.

  “Fear. That’s the only reason.”

  Salem wondered if her dad and Charlie’s dad would have gotten along, if maybe they’d even been in the Underground together. She studied his silhouette as he drove, found herself feeling reassured by his jawline and the way he tugged at his ear when he was feeling frustrated.

  “This is the same way it was with the Beale train,” Salem said. “The treasure was buried several codes deep, each serving as a gatekeeper for the next.”

  Charlie nodded. “I know. I read the report. I memorized the report. Some of the most famous women in American history hid that treasure so well that only a master codebreaker could find it. Can I poke the elephant in the room?”

  Salem felt a furrow plowed between her eyebrows. “What?”

  “You’re certain that’s what we’re dealing with now? A situation like the Beale train?”

  Salem shrugged. Charlie’s words made clear that he wasn’t having it.

  “We know that Mercy Mayfair was kidnapped by people who believe there is a series of codes connected to Stonehenge that lead to some unknown treasure. They want us to find it, and they’ll return her. I need you to be clear that we’re up against the Order, an organization with limitless resources, not some random kook. I need you to say it.”

  Salem breathed shallowly. They were on dangerous ground. Salem had so far managed to focus on cracking a code to save Mercy without devoting too much thought to which organization she was serving and which she was fighting. If Charlie was playing devil’s advocate, that would require her to face the truth of the men who had kidnapped Mercy. The Order had killed Grace Odegaard without a second thought, carved slabs of flesh out of Vida Wiley. What would they be doing to tiny, frightened Mercy Mayfair? An icy splash of fear ran down Salem’s spine. She couldn’t let it bury her if she wanted to save the child.

  “You told Mrs. Molony you were familiar with the Underground.”

  “Aye.”

  “Then you must believe that the Order exists, that there’s a shadowy cabal of men who run the world’s economies, decide wars, create laws, and devote their lives to keeping women from personal or political power.”

  He didn’t answer her right away. The corrosive poison of hysteria began to bubble at Salem’s sanity. “Say it,” she said. “Say you believe in this crazy conspiracy bullshit.”

  Charlie sighed. “Here’s what I believe. There are no conspiracies, only people born with more money and power than the rest of us, facing the same choice the rest of us are up against every day: do I do the right thing, or do I do the easy thing? And when you are a man, and the whole world is set up to make you believe that your comfort is the right thing, always, that choice becomes muddier. You don’t even have to be that smart to be on top. You start out with money, with the chutes already greased for you. You’re shown the rulebook that the rest of us can only guess at. Best yet? You own the media so you get to tell the story. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s how society has been run since time immemorial. Hell, it’s how elementary school playgrounds are run. So yeah. I believe that the Order exists.”

  “And the Underground?”

  He shot her a quick, troubled glance. He was less forthcoming on this point. “It’s real. I’ve met members.”

  Salem had too. It had cost her dearly. “You think the Order has Mercy.”

  “I know it.” His voice was husky. “I need you to be certain too. Else we might miss what matters.”

  Salem dug in her purse for an Ativan pill and swallowed it dry. “I just want to solve the train and get Mercy back. That’s all.”

  I’m coming for you, baby girl. Don’t give up. Please don’t give up.

  A rose bloomed across Salem’s screen, Gaea using a version of the computer program that had won Salem the eighth-grade science fair to break in and tell Salem she’d found something. “Hold up.”

  “What is it?”

  “Gaea uncovered a Stonehenge outlier. Or at least she thinks she did.” Salem’s pulse picked up. Gaea didn’t have a bug; she’d kept working because she knew there was something more out there. Salem clicked on the rose. A document appeared. Salem whistled low. “She gathered another page of outlier information.”

  “Impressive. Anything we can use?”

  Salem scanned the data, disappointment forming a heavy ball in her gut. “Not at first glance. It looks like wacky theories about Stonehenge. Aliens building the site, Stonehenge having great acoustics because it was really an ancient concert hall, Stonehenge being the gateway to the lost city of Atlantis, another postulating that Nephilim built Stonehenge.”

  He chuckled. “I’ve heard that one. The Nephilim were supposedly a race of giants, now extinct. An image from the 1100s depicts them constructing Stonehenge with Merlin’s help.” He pointed his thumb at himself. “A bit too far-fetched for this one. Anything else?”

 
; “Here’s one that says Hypatia designed Stonehenge.”

  “Hypatia? The mathematician?”

  “I imagine so, but the dates don’t line up. She was born between 360 and 350 BC, thousands of years after Stonehenge was built.” Like any self-respecting math geek, Salem had fan-girled Hypatia during high school. At a time where few women had been taught math, let alone allowed to teach it, Hypatia had risen to the head of Alexandria’s Neoplatonic School, where she taught astronomy and philosophy and was admired for her intellect and dignity. A pagan, Hypatia was stripped and murdered by a mob of Christians worried that her correct calculation of the vernal equinox would undermine the Church’s authority, which had scheduled Easter based on Ptolemy’s incorrect computations of the date.

  “Whoever forwarded this theory must have conflated her astronomical research with Stonehenge’s alignment to the winter solstice’s sunrise and sunset.” Salem kept scanning the page. “There’s also a theory here suggesting that Stonehenge was a place of healing, like an ancient Lourdes. Apparently, a lot of the bones discovered in the area show evidence of injury and illness. That’s about all that’s here. Gaea provided links to the sources of these outliers. We can follow up on them later, but I don’t see anything urgent.”

  “Agreed.” He slowed down so a sheep could finish crossing the road. “Tell me again how it is you don’t go green reading on a computer as we careen and carom on these narrow Irish roads?”

  “Never get carsick,” Salem said, already tweaking the original Stonehenge search so that it was now looking for mention of mercy-stone replicas like Mrs. Molony’s. She checked the Stenness net and the bomb net and found them both still empty. She shifted in her seat, scaring up the smell of sage from the protection sachet tied at her waist. The smell made her think of Alafair. They had another half hour until they reached the Dublin airport. With Gaea running all her research for her, she decided to do some digging on Alafair and Rosalind Franklin’s DNA research.

  Salem had little to go on with Alafair’s group except that they were freelance hackers. She entered as many identifiers as she could think of, without much hope. If they were any good, they’d use concrete firewalls. After several frustrating minutes, all she’d uncovered was an organization called the Indigo, a group of freelancers and codebreakers that would work for anyone if the price was right. They’d been tied to some high-profile, high-skill hacks, including crashing all the Google servers for a day. The little information she found on them indicated that they were a well-resourced but clandestine group that demanded—and received—a very high price for their work. If Alafair was a member of the Indigo, she would be fabulously wealthy. The tent she and her brother traveled in made that unlikely.

  Oh well, good practice for Gaea. Salem programmed her progeny to follow Alafair’s trail and moved on to Rosalind Franklin. This research was much more discoverable, but Salem couldn’t locate anything specific to DNA research and paralysis recovery. She set up Gaea to devote space to collating and removing redundancies. That meant Salem’s baby was running five research and codebreaking algorithms simultaneously, and so far, all was well. A good sign.

  “Look at this.” Charlie was signaling and slowing down. “A hitchhiker.”

  Salem squinted into the darkness, startled. “I don’t see anyone.”

  “Passed him a few meters ago.”

  Salem’s heart thudded unpleasantly at her throat as Charlie pulled onto the shoulder. “We shouldn’t pick up a hitchhiker.”

  Charlie shrugged. “That’s what we do in the UK.”

  Salem snapped her computer screen shut. The thought of a stranger sitting behind her, out of her line of sight, crawled like bugs across her flesh. “I’m moving to the backseat.”

  Charlie’s head hinged back on his neck. “That’d be rude.”

  “That’s what we do in the US.” She felt bad, but staying in front would be worse. She unhooked her seatbelt, gripped the B&C and her phone close to her chest, and slipped out the front door and into the back without glancing around. She locked both rear doors, snapped her buckle, and waited.

  Charlie’s expression in the rearview mirror appeared amused. “You could have left the door ajar for him.”

  The hitchhiker managed just fine. The front passenger door swung open. “On your way to Dublin?”

  “Yes sir,” Charlie replied. “The airport. We can drop you off anywhere between here and there but don’t have time for anything more specific.”

  “That’ll do.” The man stuck his head in and swiveled to stare at Salem. His hair was long, gray and stringy, hanging forward. The lack of wrinkles around his mouth was at odds with his hair color. The shadows might have erased the lines. It’d be easier to place his age if his eyes weren’t covered by large sunglasses, the comprehensive kind that followed eye surgery. “Kind of you to make room for me.”

  Salem wished she could melt into the seat. As a child, she’d had elaborate fantasies of being able to surround herself with a panic room at will. Whether provoked by social anxiety or straight-up fear, her power would allow her to drop down into the floor through a secret chute that led directly to a padded room with a computer, books, and enough food and water to last until the threat passed, whether a minute or ten years. The chute’s entrance would close behind her and become part of the impenetrable walls of the panic room.

  “You’re welcome.” Salem silently applauded herself for not remaining in the front seat just so she didn’t appear rude. Bel would be proud of her for looking out for her own comfort.

  The man slid in and snapped his own seatbelt into place. “Not a bad evening for a walk, though I always prefer a ride.”

  “That’s right,” Charlie said. The two of them settled into small talk, volleying it back and forth as if they’d known each other their whole lives. Salem had witnessed that instant comradery among UK natives. She didn’t know if it was because they were politer, more gregarious, or shared a longer history as a country.

  The B&C was warm on her lap. She flipped it open. Gaea already had a hit. The frisson of discovery sparked along Salem’s veins. If this was what it felt like to go fishing, she could understand the thrill. She’d assumed Gaea was delivering the initial report on Franklin. When the report turned out to be an email sent from the office of the United States Speaker of the House, it took Salem a moment to reorient.

  Of course. Gaea wasn’t running five search and collate programs—Stonehenge, Stenness, the bombing, Alafair’s group, and Rosalind Franklin. She was running six. Salem had forgotten her priority, the reason she was working in London: detect viable assassination threats against the president.

  Salem read the email, her shoulders tight with shame. She was relieved to discover that this wasn’t a legitimate threat, just an official email containing hot words:

  We understand that you advise against Representative Vit Linder attending the International Climate Change Summit as your department will already be taxed providing security for the president and vice president. Representative Linder had been excited to attend and is disappointed in your recommendation, to say the least, but understands that protecting President Hayes and Vice President Cambridge must always be given precedence. As Representative Linder’s country is his priority, he will remain in the United States and not attend the summit.

  Salem understood why Gaea had plucked the email out of the massive sea of words flowing across cyberspace. Besides containing nearly every hot word, it had been sent from the office of a government official to the Secret Service. While it featured all the key ingredients, they weren’t in the right order. The Speaker of the House’s email was obviously not a threat.

  Salem could use this misstep to tighten Gaea’s net.

  She’d already peeled back a layer of code to pinpoint the source of the misread when a tingle at the base of her neck told her that she was missing something important. She reread the ema
il. Nothing to see here, folks. She wished Charlie and the hitchhiker would quit talking so loudly. It made it difficult to concentrate.

  She read the email one more time.

  Still nothing.

  She’d already sent the Stonehenge data to Agent Stone via the thumb drive she’d handed the female guard at the visitor’s center. He may or may not receive it, but there was no reason to keep pretending she didn’t trust him. He’d kept his word during she and Bel’s cross-country race a year ago. More than that, Lucan Stone had saved her and Bel’s lives and then risked his career for them, all in a short five minutes. At the time, they were wanted fugitives, set up for the planned assassination of Gina Hayes. Stone tracked them to the front of Dolores Mission in San Francisco, but so had the Hermitage, the American branch of the Order. Stone had inconvenienced the contract killers who had Bel and Salem in their grip, causing them to leave their prey for a more expedient time, but not before the more terrifying of the two men had dislocated Bel’s shoulder.

  Stone didn’t call in backup, men who would have arrived to arrest Bel and Salem. Instead, he’d taken action, stepping between Salem and Bel, both of them falling toward shock as the contract killers slipped into their car and drove away.

  “Hold her,” Stone had ordered Salem.

  She’d grabbed Bel around the waist.

  Stone had held up both hands, palms out. “I’m going to touch you. This will hurt.”

  Bel had nodded.

  He’d placed his right hand on her good shoulder. With his left, he’d jerked and pushed her loose arm in one swift movement. Bel’s knees had buckled, but Salem held her upright.

  “She’ll be all right,” Stone had said, “but she needs to sit down. And we need to talk.”

  They’d gone into a nearby coffee shop. Salem ordered tea, Bel coffee, and they waited for him to arrest them, for his reinforcements to come and take them away, thereby driving the final nail in their mothers’ coffins.