The Forbidden Fortress

by Diana Peterfreund

“Nope.”

  Eric was translating lines from “There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe” and doing dramatic readings of the nonsense that resulted. We were getting nowhere.

  Howard consulted the code book. “What we’re doing now is called brute force decryption,” he explained. “Trying every possible combination in a methodical way. It’s the slowest possible form of decoding there is.”

  “Oh, goody,” said Eric, and started in on a grid that used the keyword children.

  “So maybe it’s something else,” I said. “Like . . . ‘white’ was the ninth word in the poem.”

  “The ninth word in my poem is ‘a,’” said Eric. “Not much of a keyword. Plus nothing happened when I tried it.”

  “This could be anything,” Savannah said. “Maybe the key isn’t even in the poem. Maybe the fact that ‘white,’ the keyword, was in ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ is just a coincidence.”

  “Or maybe it’s another clue,” I said. “Have we tried to use the keyword ‘white’ on any of the other recordings?”

  Half an hour later, we all frowned down at the nonsense on our papers.

  “Okay,” I said. “So it’s not ‘white.’”

  Eric yawned. “Can we start this up again tomorrow, Gills? I’m starting to forget the alphabet.” He showed me his latest page, in which he’d repeated the letter L twice in the grid.

  I sighed. There had to be something. Howard couldn’t have translated that message by accident. And it had to be important, too, otherwise why would Dr. Underberg have sent Howard the book?

  I felt like such an idiot. I’d wasted this whole summer worrying about my mother’s plans, when there were much bigger problems to solve.

  Shepherds ready to move on target at Eureka Cove. The words swirled endlessly around in my head as I tried on different meanings. What if the target was Dad? He was the one they’d targeted the last time he’d started to expose them.

  Except Mom had pointed out the Shepherds didn’t seem to care at all about his book on Omega City. Maybe they didn’t care about Dad anymore.

  So then, what were they after?

  “What’s so important?” I blurted out.

  “About white?” Savannah asked, although that wasn’t what I’d meant.

  “It’s a color,” Eric volunteered.

  True. “Are there any other colors?”

  “In life?” asked Howard.

  “In the nursery rhymes,” Savannah said. She pointed at her sheet. “Silver bells. In Mary’s garden.”

  “Yes!” We crowded around Savannah as she quickly mapped out a grid for “silver.”

  But the result was a whole lot more of nothing.

  “Whatever the answer is,” Savannah said, “we don’t have it. Eric’s right. We should go to bed.”

  “I’m right?” Eric repeated incredulously. “Wait. Can I get that on record?”

  I stared at the mess of papers. Like I’d be able to sleep with a mystery like this hanging over my head. “It’s okay. You guys go to bed. I’m going to keep trying.”

  “Come on, Gills.” Eric put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t be like Dad.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what it means. Up all night working. We only have one more day here. You don’t want to be a zombie tomorrow. There’s nothing here that can’t wait until morning.”

  “And in the morning, we can ask Dr. Seagret,” Howard added. “Maybe he has a better idea how to test the codes, other than brute force.”

  I frowned. Don’t be like Dad? I wished I were more like him. Then maybe I’d be able to figure this out.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up the second I smelled coffee burning. It was so good to be back with Dad. Savannah was still sleeping, her head wrapped up in a towel. Before bed last night, she’d done some kind of deep-conditioning treatment to try to salvage what she could. Quietly, I threw on some clothes and headed downstairs.

  Dad was in the kitchen, wrestling with a hissing chrome machine. As I got closer, I could see half a dozen multicolored lights blinking at him in protest.

  “I don’t understand,” he said sadly. “I just asked for a cappuccino.”

  “Here, Dad.” I pulled the plug, and everything went dark. After a few seconds, I plugged it back in. It pinged happily, and the words Guidant Caffeinator appeared on the readout below the dispenser. “See, to get a cappuccino, you just press this button for hot, then this one for the type of drink, then this one for the size. . . .” I set the machine and put a mug underneath.

  Dad chuckled as the machine perked away. “And here I thought automation would save me in the kitchen. It was going to be the best thing about living here.”

  I whirled around to face him. “You took the job?”

  “I could hardly refuse, Gillian. A guaranteed salary, great benefits, a place to live . . .” Dad paused and looked thoughtful for a moment. “And there’s something more. Elana and her team—they have a vision. And that’s rare these days. They have a vision for the future. I look at them and I see people like Dr. Underberg. People who are truly concerned about the good of humanity.”

  “That’s great, Dad.”

  The coffee finished perking and I handed Dad his mug.

  “Can you set it for cocoa or something?” Dad asked.

  I smiled. “Sure.” After we were settled at the dining room table with our steaming mugs, I started to grill him. “What happened with all that smart shopper stuff? Aren’t you worried about the way Guidant invades people’s privacy?”

  “I am, kiddo,” Dad replied. “And here’s the thing: Elana is, too. She listened to all my concerns last night, and shared that a few of the developers are worried also about how this technology could be abused by the people who use it. Guidant wants to help people, but not at the expense of their freedom. That’s why the program is in beta.”

  “What’s beta?” I asked.

  “It’s a term programmers use when they’re still working out the kinks in a project. Beta is the second letter in the Greek alphabet. So if alpha is first—the people who make up the program—betas are the second group, who test it and hopefully uncover problems the creators didn’t plan for. Like how can shoppers keep their personal information private, while still helping them to get what they need and helping the stores to eliminate waste.”

  “So until they’ve fixed the problems from the beta testing, they aren’t going to release the project?” I asked.

  “Exactly. The people who live and work here at Eureka Cove are the beta testers for everything Guidant invents. For instance, everything that happened with the Noland boys on the smart court yesterday is going to be beta testing for the smart courts.”

  “They have a lot more testing to do, then,” I said.

  “But the important thing is that they’re committed to doing it,” Dad pointed out. “They aren’t going to release a shoddy product on the world. That’s how Guidant became as large as it is. They don’t just want to make money, they want to make a difference. And after listening to Elana and understanding what she wants to do with this company, I want to help.”

  “As a history teacher?”

  “History is important for planning for the future, Gillian. Don’t tell me I’ve taught you nothing!” He flicked the end of my ponytail. “I’ll be teaching, yes. But the first project Elana wants me on is actually in my capacity as an Underberg scholar. Guidant is one of the most innovative technology companies on the planet. Who better to produce his inventions?”

  “So she does want the battery.” My grip on my mug tightened. Mom and Eric had been right. “Did you give her the prototype?”

  Dad looked at me. “This isn’t like Fiona, kiddo. Someone has to produce these batteries, and Guidant can do it very easily. The patent will still be in Dr. Underberg’s name, and they can make sure that some of the money goes into a trust that will belong to him . . . if he ever reappears. Or his heirs.”

  I must have still looked uncertain. />
  “You know it’s not our battery, either, right?”

  True. And what good was it in our possession, anyway? We weren’t engineers.

  “Dr. Underberg would have wanted it this way. He’d want his work in the hands of someone who planned to use it to help mankind. I believe that’s Elana and Guidant. I’m sure if he were able to contact us, he’d agree.”

  That reminded me. “But he is contacting us. That code book—”

  “Right,” Dad said. “I did want to find out who sent Howard that book.”

  “Well, it’s gotten more interesting. Howard was working on the numbers station codes last night after dinner. He says he solved one—”

  “Oh, yeah. I asked Elana about the station last night. She said her assistant Dani looked into it, and it’s one of the projects they’re doing at the campus middle school. Decryption is a huge part of tech, and sometimes the school sets up spy games and other projects. Last year it was some sort of geocaching experiment. Howard would have been great at that, too.”

  “Geocaching?”

  “Following GPS coordinates to find items.” Dad winked at me. “Like you did for Omega City.”

  Following GPS coordinates was the easiest part. It was finding out that the coordinates were based on Underberg’s riddle that had been hard. I’d like to see the Guidant Middle School kids do that. “But the message said, ‘Shepherds ready to move on target at Eureka Cove’! Why would kids doing a school project send messages about the Shepherds?”

  “Maybe because everyone here has read The Forgotten Fortress,” Dad said. “And they are playing a spy game about actual spies.”

  I considered that. If I were playing a code-breaking game, I’d definitely want to use the Shepherds in it. “You think that’s it? They’re just playing a game?”

  He smiled down at me. “Well, what I don’t think is that real spies use codes that can be broken by a couple of kids with their first code book. Even if those kids are you.” Dad gulped down the last of his coffee. “Nor do I think spies call themselves by name in their secret messages.”

  That was true. They’d probably just say, We are ready to move on our target or something.

  “But don’t worry, we’ll figure out who sent that book, I promise. As soon as we get home. But for now, I’ve got some meetings with the Guidant people to finalize plans. You have fun today, okay? Your cell is charged in case you need to call me?”

  “Yes, Dad.” I didn’t move to get up from the table as he departed. Had I kept Eric and my friends up half the night breaking codes that were nothing more than some Guidant Middle School cryptography club game?

  Soon after, Eric thumped his way downstairs, bleary-eyed. He grabbed some granola bars and made himself scarce, probably scared that I’d ask him to start code breaking again. Savannah came down later, shaking her mane of glossy blond hair over her shoulder and preening in triumph.

  “So the deep conditioning worked?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Just remind me to keep it low-tech next time.”

  I guessed that hairstyling machine was in beta testing, too.

  Savannah and I had breakfast, and I told her about my conversation with my father. I’d expected her to be mad we’d wasted last night code breaking, but she shrugged it off.

  “It was fun, anyway,” she said. “I wish they did projects like that at our school. If you end up going here, you can kick all their butts.”

  “Not really,” I said. “Howard was the only one who managed to break a code all night.” Besides, I wouldn’t be going to a Guidant school anytime soon. I wondered if they taught code breaking at whatever school Mom planned to send us to in Idaho. “And what about the other stuff? Do you think Guidant might be using Dad to get their hands on the Underberg battery?”

  “Using him?” Savannah cocked her head to the side. “How so?”

  “Like Fiona.”

  Savannah frowned. “Fiona was pretending to get close to your father so she could steal his notes about Dr. Underberg and find Omega City and claim the battery as her own.”

  “Right.” So what?

  “Well, Guidant is offering your father a house and a job so he can use his expertise on Underberg to help them develop Underberg’s battery. That seems like a huge difference to me.”

  “But they want the battery.”

  “Yeah,” Savannah said, nodding, as if that was obvious. “So do I. We all want the battery. Even if Fiona had stolen it and pretended it was her invention and made a billion dollars selling them, it still would have ended up being a good thing—”

  I gasped, outraged.

  “Because it would have meant the world had the battery.”

  Hmph. I crossed my arms over my chest. “You know, Fiona used that exact same argument on me, right before she threatened to kill us all.”

  “Well, that’s not what happened, is it?” Savannah said. “We got the battery, but we can’t just sit on it forever. I think your dad is doing the right thing.”

  “You think I’m just suspicious of everyone, don’t you?” I said.

  “Yes,” Eric said, coming in from the backyard. “What are we talking about?”

  “Dad’s going to help Guidant develop the Underberg battery,” I explained.

  “Awesome! Then you can stop hoarding ours.” He grabbed an apple from the bowl on the counter. Like everything else in the kitchen, it was polished to a bright shine. “Any idea when Howard’s getting up? I was hoping we could try the boats again today.”

  We headed upstairs to wake him, but found him already hard at work at the desk.

  “There was another message,” he explained without looking up from his papers. “This one was for ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.’ And I think I figured out where we went wrong last night.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, but Howard ignored me.

  “Most of the messages are gibberish,” he said. “They’re there to confuse us. It’s not just the code words you have to figure out, but which messages to use them on.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Eric.

  I tried again. “You can stop decoding. Elana Mero told Dad it was just a school project.”

  But Howard kept talking. “Well, the messages are about the Shepherds, right? So what if the only rhymes that mattered were the ones having to do with—”

  “Sheep,” Savannah finished. “Like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’”

  “And ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,’” added Eric.

  I groaned. “Didn’t you hear me? It’s just some stupid game. There’s nothing important in the messages.”

  Howard turned around and shoved a paper under my nose. “Wrong.”

  Like before, the code word was the first five-letter word in the rhyme—in this case, black.

  Seagret in place. Phase two to be launched on island.

  My brother peeked over my shoulder, then gave me a worried frown.

  If Dad was the target the Shepherds were after in their other message, what were their plans for him in “phase two”?

  Eric was already dialing Dad on the phone. “Straight to voice mail,” he reported.

  I did not like this, not at all.

  “Well, he has that meeting,” said Savannah, but she didn’t sound convinced.

  “Call Elana’s office,” Eric suggested. “Talk to Dani.”

  I did, but it wasn’t Dani who answered the phone. Instead, the call was rerouted to a receptionist in the executive office.

  “Hi,” I said to the receptionist. “I’m Gillian Seagret and I’m trying to reach my father, Sam. Do you know if he’s supposed to come into the office this morning for a meeting?”

  “Hmm . . . ,” the receptionist said. “There’s no one here. But I can check the car logs and see where your dad last went.”

  Right. They tracked everything here. “Thanks.”

  “Hmm,” the receptionist said. “I don’t have anything logged on Sam Seagret’s account this morning. Maybe somebody picked him up, honey?
”

  “Maybe,” I said, and hung up.

  Seagret in place. Phase two to be launched on island.

  Someone picked him up, all right. The Shepherds.

  13

  BAA, BAA

  THE MORNING SUN BEAT BRIGHTLY OFF THE SPARKLING WAVES OF THE cove and the silver material of our Omega City utility suits. We stood on the quay, holding our suits under our arms—except Howard, of course. Far across the water, the island sat, wooded and silent . . . and waiting.

  “You’re sure about this?” Savannah asked.

  I nodded. “The way I see it, there’s only one island, so if the message said something about an island, then this is the island it meant.”

  “But we already know the boats won’t take us there,” Eric argued.

  “The car didn’t take us all the way to the docks,” I pointed out. “And yet here we are.”

  I hadn’t wanted the self-driving car’s record to show that it had dropped us off here, so I directed it to the minigolf smart courts, and then we’d walked over. Now that I knew how easy it was for Guidant to monitor the self-driving cars, I didn’t want any Shepherds who might be watching to realize we were headed to the island. Even Elana Mero and her super surveillance didn’t have a lock on everything that went down at Eureka Cove. Now, at least, we could make it work in our favor.

  “You want us to swim all the way to the island?” Savannah asked, skeptical.

  “No.” I pointed at the inflatable kayaks stacked at the end of the dock. “Not everything in Eureka Cove is high-tech.”

  “Kayaks?” Eric whined. “Can’t we at least use a sailboat?”

  “We’re trying to keep a low profile,” I said.

  “Literally,” said Howard, zipping the code book into one of his utility suit’s waterproof cargo pockets.

  “Look,” I said as I zipped my cell phone into one of my pockets, “either Dad’s right and those messages are just a school project, in which case, yay, we meet a bunch of kids from Eureka Cove and have, like, a code-breaking club picnic or something.”

  “Really?” Howard perked up. “Is that a real thing?”

  “Or they’re from the Shepherds and we’re in danger.” Dad was in danger.