Mercy's Chase

by Jess Lourey

  “How long will it take us to get to Ireland?”

  “Two hours.”

  “And then to Kildare?”

  “Another hour.” Alafair pursed her lips. “I don’t know if the devil’s on your side, but today is Kildare’s fall festival, celebrating the equinox. It will be easy to blend in, for you as well as those hunting you.”

  Charlie snuffled. He had drifted into a troubled sleep.

  “Best thing for him,” she said, her tone gone acid. “That’s the Grimalkin’s work, amputating a finger after he has knocked you out. You spend the rest of your life wondering what else he took from you.”

  “Are you going to protect us?”

  Alafair raised an eyebrow. “The Roma as well as the Indigo are neutral in all matters historical and political. Our interests have crossed over in this, yours and mine. I will help you if it will help my brother, but I speak only for myself.” She lifted her nose in Charlie’s direction. “How well do you know him?”

  “He saved my life. If he hadn’t gotten the rope down to me, I never would have made it out of the Gloup.”

  Alafair nodded thoughtfully. “He is familiar to me, but I don’t know how. And I don’t trust him.”

  Salem didn’t tell her that Charlie worked for MI5. She knew him better than she knew Alafair and intended to protect him as he had protected her. “If we crack the Stonehenge code, and Rosalind Franklin’s research is found, how long until her cure would be a reality?”

  “We have scientists who have the equipment. We just need the data. Depending on how advanced it is, months. Maybe even weeks if she’d tested it herself.”

  That made up Salem’s mind. She reached for her overnight bag, into which she’d transferred the jeweled box. “I have something to show you.”

  44

  St. Brigid’s Cathedral

  Kildare, Ireland

  A car was waiting for them at the Dublin Airport, as promised. Charlie rested in the backseat, some of his color returning. Alafair drove. Salem took the passenger seat, firing up Gaea so she could add an additional command to the algorithms she was currently running, this one with a code-breaking bend.

  Gaea must break 8CH3COOH before they reached Kildare.

  Salem fed Gaea the string of code and then checked her nets.

  She hadn’t caught anything immediately noteworthy, only unrelated and isolated information about Franklin possibly dating Jacques Mering, the married director of a Paris lab she began her career at, some late-chiming groups taking credit for the bombing, but having their facts wrong, thousands of social media posts threatening to kill Hayes, but all of them so redundant in wording that, after collating all background information on each poster to verify they were impotent, Gaea presented it as a one-sentence report: “Dismissed 74,036 online threats against Hayes.”

  Salem lifted her head. Alafair was taking back roads as a precaution. It was a long shot that the Kirkwall police had discovered Bode’s corpse at the Gloup and connected it to the private airplane that took off, but they could not risk being detained. The country roads would add only minutes to the travel time, Alafair had promised.

  Salem didn’t mind. The close sky of Ireland healed something inside of her each time she returned here. She wondered if her dad’s people still lived here. She could ask around, once they solved this. Yes, she liked imagining a future, one with Mercy in it.

  Whitewashed cottages protected by waist-high rock walls sped past her window, broken by great swaths of verdant green interspersed with raspberry brambles as large as a house and bursts of dusty purple and orange flowers. “What are those?”

  Alafair flicked her eyes. “The flowers? The tall fire bursts are montbretia. The violet ones are heather. My mother used to feed us heather tea when we were ill. It cleaned you out, that’s for sure. I think it would have tasted even more bitter, but she went heavy on the honey.”

  “Hmmm.” Salem rubbed her face. Electric poles were the only modern touch on this stretch of road. Treetops met one another above the road, their hanging branches trimmed by tall trucks into a perfect truck-shaped hole. She pulled her attention back to the laptop. Gaea’s Moscow/London server collator had flagged another business email sent between the two. Like the previous email she’d caught, this one didn’t make clear what the businesses were.

  Our one-time offer is only on the table briefly—23 September, 12:00-12:30.

  Whereas the first email had originated in Moscow and gone to London, this one had traveled in reverse. As with the previous email, this one had been snagged because of the date. Salem didn’t hesitate in sending it on to Stone. She wouldn’t fill him in on the Stonehenge train any longer, but it would be irresponsible to withhold information related to the bombing or, potentially, to the president’s visit.

  That’s all there was in Gaea’s nets. Salem paused to think about Rosalind Franklin. Alafair had been excited—no, more like vindicated—to see Franklin’s Photo 51 inside the jeweled box. It was incontrovertible evidence that Franklin had been the one who’d picked up the Stonehenge train at the Gloup and moved it out.

  Alafair had also infected Salem with her confidence that Franklin had discovered a way to reverse paralysis. Salem had seen enough proof in Franklin’s genius and her work with DNA to believe there was hope for Bel to walk again at the end of the Stonehenge train. The pressure to protect the president, save Mercy, and find a treatment for Bel was immense. Salem had to shove all of that to the corner of her mind and focus on the next step, which was to find out everything she could about St. Brigid. She programmed Gaea to scour the internet for anomalies in the background while Salem completed a surface search.

  She discovered that the Catholic Church had claimed Saint Brigid of Kildare for one of Ireland’s patron saints, but they’d almost certainly co-opted her from the stories of a fourth-century priestess to Brigid, the Celtic mother goddess. The Christian festival in celebration of St. Brigid was scheduled to replace Imbolc, the pagan celebration of spring. On that day, the first of February, celebrants wove St. Brigid’s unique rush crosses and hung them over their doors to protect their homes.

  According to sixth-century texts, the pagan priestess first plaited the cross at her dying father’s bedside. She was a healer, skilled with metalwork, and exceedingly generous. When she converted to Christianity, she built an abbess on what was then a Celtic shrine in honor of the goddess Brigid. The woman, who was now also calling herself Brigid, created a school devoted to piousness and the arts. Her nuns attended the eternal flame in the Fire Temple. Brigid died in 525, and a shrine was built soon after near the Temple. This was destroyed and rebuilt many times during subsequent centuries, most notably in 1223 and 1686. An almost entirely new building was erected on the same location in the late nineteenth century.

  Also within a stone’s throw of the Fire Temple’s foundation, a tower—its design unique to Ireland—was erected in the twelfth century. It was still standing, one of only two such towers in Ireland that allowed access. Salem, Charlie, and Alafair were on their way to the nineteenth-century cathedral and twelfth-century tower right now, but none of Salem’s research revealed a connection to 8CH3COOH, which itself might be a keytext rather than a clue.

  Gaea pinged with preliminary research on what the numbers could potentially represent if they were isolated from the letters, and then combined or taken alone. Numerology suggested that 38 represented creative relationships; 83, business collaborations. The number 38 referred to a revolver, was the atomic number of strontium, a factorial prime, how many Bach flower tinctures were created in the 1930s, and the number of slots there are on a roulette wheel. The number 83 was used by white supremacist groups as a greeting, it appeared once in the Bible, was Bismuth’s atomic number, the age at which a practicing Jew can celebrate their second bar mitzvah, and a Sophie Germain prime—a computationally secure prime named after the famous eighteenth-centu
ry mathematician. The third letter of the alphabet was C, and the eighth H, two of the three letters used in the code carved into the back of the St. Brigid’s cross.

  The number 3 was the second Sophie Germain prime, a rough approximation of pi, representative of the holy trinity, a Fibonacci number, meant “end of text” in binary code, represented St. Peter in Christianity (who three times denied and three times accepted Jesus), and was the accepted number of times bad luck appeared.

  The number 8 was the infinity symbol, could represent the equinox, was also a Fibonacci number, and was the second magic number according to nuclear physics. In Greek numerals, where Greek letters were still used to symbolize numbers, 8 was written as the letter eta with an acute accent, roughly translating to H.

  “Here we go.”

  The slowing of the car dragged Salem out of her number research and into the present. That, and the smell of burgers grilling and the sight of packed crowds making the road ahead nearly impassable. “Wow.”

  “Yeah,” Alafair said. “The festival will make it hard to park. I think we should leave your guy in the car.”

  “That sounds about as fun as a pet fish,” Charlie said from the backseat.

  Salem turned. His eyes were closed and he was laying down. “You should rest.”

  He dragged himself to a sitting position. His color dropped and then returned. “I’m going with.”

  Alafair sniffed but didn’t argue. “I’ll drop you both off at the cathedral and then meet up with you after I park.”

  “Thanks.” Salem didn’t want to lug the B&C through the crowds, but she couldn’t leave it behind. She set Gaea to chime if she found anything remarkable, put the computer in its case, zipped it, and slid the strap over her shoulder in anticipation of exiting the car. People were ten deep on each side, smiling, talking, wearing bright scarves and caps. They moved to let the car past and then closed the space behind it. “This festival is a pretty big deal?”

  “To the Irish, every festival is a big deal. This is one of the originals, though. It’s a harvest festival, a time to celebrate the fruits of the year and connect with your neighbors before battening down the hatches for winter. While its roots come from an agricultural community, most of the celebration happens in town. As you can see, the cathedral gets its share of spillover.”

  Alafair pointed forward where a grand church on a hill was emerging into view. The majestic gray stones made Salem gasp. The building was compact yet grand, Celtic stone high crosses peppering the ground between the entrance and the cathedral in the typical Irish graveyard.

  Alafair put the vehicle into park. “Can’t take you any farther.”

  Salem opened her door as far as she could in the crowd and slid out, closing it before going back to help Charlie. Her leg protested with a sharp ache, but it wasn’t bleeding. Charlie was not emanating as much heat, either. The aspirin must have cut his fever. “Meet you inside the grounds,” Salem said to Alafair.

  “I got this,” Charlie said, smiling his lopsided smile as Salem tried to support him on her shoulder.

  Salem was going to argue but decided against it. “I don’t yet know what we’re looking for,” she said, pitching her voice so it traveled below the hum of the crowd.

  “Hasn’t stopped us yet,” Charlie said.

  A grateful warmth suffused Salem. “It makes the most sense to start in the main cathedral. It was built hundreds of years after Brigid died, but this part of the train was put in place recently, before Rosalind Franklin died.”

  “When was that?”

  “1958. All the structures here were well in place by then. We’re looking for a spot that would make sense to a scientist, or a Brit.”

  “Or a woman.”

  Salem’s mouth twitched. “Yeah, or a woman. Plus, a connection to the numbers eight or three, any combination thereof, and the letters C, O, or H.”

  They breached the open gate. The crowds were lighter inside, soberer.

  “I’ll walk the grounds,” Charlie offered. “Count headstones, look for other structures there might be three, eight, or eleven of. You go inside, and we text each other if we find something, deal?”

  “Works for me.” Salem felt bad leaving Charlie. His fever was down, but he’d lost something since the attack, something less obvious than a finger. She clapped her hands together once, sharply, to startle herself out of her thoughts. There wasn’t time for pity. She had a code to crack. Maybe they’d even locate the end of the Stonehenge train today. If the Underground was in charge, it’d make sense they’d move it to a church founded by a woman.

  The cathedral’s main entrance was propped open, a disconcertingly small door opening into the short end of the building that was shaped like a Christian cross from above. There was a line to enter, but it was fast-moving.

  “Buy a cross?”

  Salem smiled at the middle-aged man holding a St. Brigid’s cross toward her. His Irish brogue was thick. His belly stretched the fabric of the Def Leppard concert t-shirt he wore. The cross was made of straw. It was simple but lovely. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  He winked. “Long winters here. We either become artists or alcoholics.” He pointed upward. “He prefers the former. Can I interest you in one?”

  “Sure.” Salem unzipped her parka to reach for money.

  “Thank you. All the money raised goes to support the cathedral.”

  She became flustered when she realized she carried no cash. All the clothes she wore were from the Apothecary. Charlie had handled the money. “I’m so sorry. I don’t have my wallet.”

  He cocked his head. “It’s all right, love. We share the harvest.” He handed her a cross.

  “I can’t take this.”

  “You can and you will.” He pressed it in her hand, tipping his head toward her waist. “And tell the mothers that we were good to you here in Kildare, will you?”

  Her eyes darted downward. Mrs. Molony’s red-flowered sachet was still looped through the drawstring of her sweatpants. Her pulsed ratcheted. She wanted to ask the man what he meant, but he was already chatting with the family behind her. Mrs. Molony had told her the sachet would protect her. She’d assumed it was an old wives’ tale tied to the herbs inside, but it had meant more to Alafair, and to this man. She touched it, rubbed the cloth between her fingers, following the crowd as they entered the cathedral and then began walking its perimeter, oohing and aahing at the treasures it contained.

  She understood their awe. Stained glass windows let in colored light, which washed over stones and structures hundreds of years old. The foyer held glass dioramas depicting twelfth-century society in Kildare. Salem glanced at them only briefly, walking ahead toward rows of pews beneath lancet windows. The gray and white stone walls on each side of the pews held a cacophony of relics, including the sixteenth-century tomb of Walter Wellesley, a stone baptismal fount so eroded by age that it appeared to be built of foam, carved bits of rock, fifteen mismatched tiles framed like a larger-than-life sliding block puzzle, microwave-sized stone casts of nautilus shells, religious seals, and St. Brigid’s woven crosses tucked into alcoves built into the walls. Nothing was behind a rope or under glass, all of it accessible to the masses, all of it embalmed in the acrid odor of age.

  Taken together, the cathedral’s interior was grand and overwhelming.

  Salem did not know where to begin.

  She chose as a random starting point a straw St. Brigid’s cross nailed below the window nearest her. She would examine every nook and cranny before moving on. A pop of color behind a stone caught her attention. She leaned forward, peeking behind the shield-shaped rock propped against the wall.

  It hid a red ball of yarn.

  Her flesh crawled. It was a cat’s toy. She spun, looking for the Grimalkin, though she had no clues about the assassin’s appearance. No one was paying any attention to her. That didn’
t help. She was so wound up that she jumped when her phone buzzed. It was a text from Charlie.

  Meet me in St. Brigid’s kitchen. Burial vault to the right of path we came in on.

  Salem’s skin tingled. She wove her way through the crowd, leaving via the door she’d entered through. She was in such a hurry to reach Charlie that she bumped into a man. “Sorry!”

  “No worries,” the gentleman said, tipping his tweed cap and smiling as he disappeared into the crowd.

  “Over here!”

  Salem spotted Charlie’s waving hand and walked toward it as fast as her leg would allow. “What’d you uncover?”

  “Maybe nothing.” He glanced at her leg. “Can you manage the stairs?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then follow me.” He pushed gently through the crowd waiting to descend the narrow steps into the earth, pointing at the stone plaque mounted over the stairs. “It was built in the fourteenth century. While almost certainly used as a burial vault, it may have also been the entrance to an underground escape tunnel.”

  They reached the base of the stairs. Both Salem and Charlie had to crouch to enter the crowded room. Its ceilings were coved. What Salem could see of the space reminded her of the inside of a brick oven. It gave her the shivers. She scanned the walls to pinpoint what Charlie had seen.

  “Look up,” he said.

  She did. Channels like desperate scrapings ran across the ceiling. She lifted her hand and traced her fingers through it, shuddering. It looked like the handiwork of someone buried alive, trying to claw his way out.

  “There’s thirty-eight of them in this section.” A crack separated one chunk from the rest of the ceiling. “Does it mean something?”

  Salem pulled out her phone and clicked on its flashlight. The artificial illumination curried some annoyed stares from those presumably trying for an authentic experience, but she didn’t care. She retrieved her pen knife, too, and dug around the crack and further explored the scrapings. Charlie kept most of the crowd away from her.