He was beaming. He was also crazy. “Marco, we’re friends—or we used to be friends, before you betrayed us all,” I said. “So I have to be honest with you. That’s the most unbelievably ridiculous thing anyone has ever said. Sorry.”
Marco’s smile faded. For a moment he just stared down at the table.
Then he looked up, and I flinched from the flat, hard look in his eyes.
“You think I’m ridiculous?” he said, his voice as cold and deadly as his expression. “Fine. I’ll do it without you. Go tell Brother Dimitrios. Tell him you want nothing to do with any of this. You’d rather back away from the opportunity of a lifetime. Your loss.”
“Marco . . .” Cass pleaded.
Marco stalked into his bedroom. “I’ll celebrate my fourteenth birthday without any of you. Because I’ll be alive.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
THE PHONE
I DIDN’T FALL asleep until three.
King Marco?
He was serious. And he had gone off to a sound sleep. Me, I didn’t think I would ever sleep again. But I did, because an alarm woke me up out of a restless dream.
I looked at the clock on the table: 5:13.
Two hours.
I slapped the snooze button, but the alarm kept chiming. I sat up and shook myself awake. The noise was coming from the bed. I could feel the vibrations. I kicked back the sheets. Nothing. I lifted my pillow.
A smart phone glowed bright blue, beeping, with a screen that announced WAKE UP! in happy yellow letters.
I swiped at the off button. The place fell quiet, except for the mechanical whir of the lounge refrigerator and the whoosh of the air-conditioning ducts. I held the phone and stared at it. It wasn’t the same make as mine. Besides, I didn’t have a phone anymore. Hadn’t had one since the moment I got to the KI.
The alarm app had vanished. In its place was some kind of map. A tiny blue dot pulsed inside a small yellow box. I pinched to zoom out. The box was part of a larger circle.
Dot, box, circle—the phone, this room, the lounge. Outside the lounge was a network of parallel lines leading in different directions—hallways. At the top of the screen, an arrow pointed diagonally to the right. It was labeled “N” for north.
I pushed open the door of my room, stepped warily into the lounge and the hall. No one was there.
But someone had been here. While I was asleep. Someone had put the phone under my pillow, knowing I’d find it and see the map.
Who? And why?
Keeping my eye on the screen, I walked. I moved back from the hallway into the lounge. The place smelled like banana peels and orange rinds, and Marco’s uneaten container of Chubby Hubby still stood on the counter.
The blue dot moved into the circle as I walked. I slid my fingers around the screen, examining the maze of pathways. The plan of the Massa hideout revealed itself. The paths ranged much farther afield than I thought. The place was huge, dozens of rooms, a crisscrossing maze of corridors. The map was flat, but if I pressed a button labeled “3D,” it tilted to reveal a three-dimensional cross-section of paths on many different levels.
I sneaked into Cass’s room and put my hand over his mouth. His eyes popped open in fear, but I quickly put my finger to my lips in a shushing gesture. I flashed the phone’s screen to him, and he bolted up out of bed. “Where did you get this?” he whispered.
“Under my pillow,” I said. “And I don’t think it was the Tooth Fairy. Somebody here is on our side. Follow me.”
“Wait,” Cass said. “Find out who this is.”
I tried to access mail, photos, browser, settings. All of them were locked. “Just the alarm and map are public,” I said. “No. Wait . . .”
I’d hit the contacts button. It was showing a list. All the names were in number code.
“Got it,” Cass said.
“Got what?” I asked.
“The numbers,” Cass said. “Committed to memory.”
“Doesn’t do us much good,” I said. “They look pretty random to me.”
Cass scratched his head. “This is where we need Aly.”
He was right. This was going to be impossible. “We have to channel our own inner Aly,” I said lamely.
“I don’t have the brain for this,” Cass said, staring at it intently and shifting from foot to foot, as if that would help. “Memorize, yes. Analyze, not so much.”
“It’s an internal code,” I said.
“Duh,” Cass replied. “So?”
“So maybe it’s not that hard,” I replied.
“How does that make sense?” Cass asked.
I was thinking about something my dad and I talked about, when I was studying American history in school. “Back in World War II,” I said, “the English stole a code machine from the Germans. If they could figure out how it worked, they could break all the enemy secret codes. They got everything except one part. Every German machine operator had to set each machine by keying in ten letters at the top. If the Brits could figure out those ten letters, they could crack the whole thing.”
“Ten letters, twenty-six letters in the alphabet—that’s like guessing the winning lottery numbers,” Cass said.
“Worse,” I said. “But that’s when someone realized that it was German soldiers who had to pick the letters, not cryptologists. They weren’t going to pick anything too sophisticated, or they’d forget it. Well, the English realized Heil Hitler was ten letters—and it turns out almost all the soldiers had used that!”
“Really?” Cass said. “You think there are Nazis here? I hate Nazis.”
“The point is, everyone in this place has to read internal code,” I said. “The leaders and the goons. So think simple. That’s what Aly does. She starts with the obvious, then works from there.”
Cass and I stared at the numbers on the screen. “They look like email addresses,” he said.
“And the last part of each address is the same,” I added. “After the dot.”
“Either com, net, or org,” Cass said.
I nodded. “The first number after the dot is a three. The third letter of the alphabet is c. So I’m thinking that’s a com.”
I grabbed a pencil and paper from a desk drawer and quickly wrote down a key:
“Com is three, fifteen, thirteen!” Cass blurted out.
“Give me a minute . . . ” I said, trying to match all the numbers to letters. “Aly could probably do this in her head. I mean, you don’t know for sure about these double-digit letters. Like a one next to a seven. That could be the first and seventh letters, AG. Or it could mean the seventeenth letter, P. Hang on . . .”
“Baaron . . . Baddison . . . Salicia . . . Sanna?” Cass said.
“I’m thinking the B stands for Brother and the S for Sister—like Brother Aaron and Sister Alicia,” I said. “Monkish names.”
“Sounds like the way Marco normally speaks,” Cass said. “He’s made for this place.”
“The person who left this wanted us to see it—but why?” I exited out of the app and kept tapping other ones. Each was password-protected. “Great. Can’t open any of these.”
“Any other great insights from World War Two?” Cass asked.
Finally I tapped an app marked RS. It opened to reveal an image that made us both jump back:
“Whoa,” Cass said. “Big Brother is watching.”
“I guess someone was trying to take a picture but pressed the button that turns the camera backward,” I said, flipping back to the maps app. “Let’s use this and see where it leads us.”
Cass took the phone, examining the map. “Where do we go if we do escape?”
“We try to find Aly, if she’s nearby,” I said. “We hack off the iridium arm bands, and hope that the KI finds us before the Massa.”
Cass’s expression darkened. “You mean, if the KI still exists. . . .”
“We can’t think about what happened at the Euphrates camp,” I said. “But you heard Brother Dimitrios. He still doesn’t know the location of
the island. Whatever his people did to the camp, the KI will be fired up. And the geeks will be trying to find us.”
“So best-case scenario, we leave this prison and go to a nicer one,” Cass said glumly. “I guess I can live with that.”
I took a deep breath. “It’s all we’ve got. Think about what Dimitrios did, Cass. He knew what would happen when we took the Loculus. He didn’t care about all those people. About Daria. She gave her life for us. At least Professor Bhegad tried to do something. Shelley didn’t work, but he spent time and money to create that thing. Both organizations have lied to us. But for all its weirdness, only one cares enough not to kill innocent people. And that’s the one I plan to stick with.”
Cass’s eyes wandered out to the common area. “Okay,” he said softly. “I’ll go wake Marco.”
“What?” I grabbed his arm. “No, Cass. Not Marco. He’ll rat us out.”
“He won’t,” Cass said. “Seriously. He brought us here. He knows we’re a family. He wants us to stay together.”
“Cass, I’m sorry, but you are in a fantasy world—” I said.
Cass jerked his arm away. His face was beet red. “Fantasy? Is that what you’d say if I told you, weeks ago, you’d be trying to find the Seven Wonders? Real is real. We break up and we die. Nothing is more important than staying together, Jack—nothing!”
From inside Marco’s room, I heard a sudden snort. I leaned in to look. He was fast asleep on his back, snoring.
“Cass, listen to me,” I hissed. “When this is over, we will go back to different places. Yeah, maybe when we’re old we can move to the same town. But maybe not. Because you make new families when you’re old. Real families. This is about survival, Cass. If we tell Marco, we’re giving up. Betraying Aly. Deciding to stay here and become the kind of zombie that they’re making Marco into. If that’s your definition of family, you can have it. But give me a chance to escape on my own.”
Cass’s eyes burned into mine. The sides of his mouth curled downward and for a moment I thought he was going to spit, or scream.
Instead, his eyes rose to a small, spherical camera wedged into a corner of the ceiling.
He grabbed the container of Chubby Hubby ice cream that had been sitting out all night. Taking off the top, he heaved the container toward the glass.
A lump of brownish goop flew through the air, saturating the camera. “Promise me that if we get out, we’ll come back for him,” Cass said.
“Promise,” I replied.
Without looking at me, he headed for the door. I grabbed the first things I could get my hands on and threw them into a plastic bag: a knife, a flashlight, a canister of pepper, a bottle of vegetable oil, and another tub of ice cream from the freezer.
I glanced back into Marco’s room one last time. His back rose and fell.
Silently, I slipped out after Cass.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
HACK ATTACK
“I DON’T LIKE this,” Cass whispered. “It’s too quiet.”
“We’re in an enclosed stairwell,” I said. “Stairwells are quiet.”
I jammed the kitchen knife into a small, square metal door on the wall, about eye level. The lock wouldn’t give, but the door bent outward enough for me to peer under it with the flashlight. “Circuit breakers,” I said.
Cass nodded. “Aly might be able to hack into their system,” he said, “but you’re MacGruber.”
I slipped the knife into the box, said a prayer, and began sliding it right to left. The angle was bad, the torque was weak, but I managed to flip most of the switches from on to off. “Either I just shut off some lights,” I said, “or I disabled the washing machines.”
We pushed open the door from the stairwell to the hallway. It was pitch dark. “Hallelujah,” I said. “The security cameras won’t pick us up. I think we’ll be okay if we stick to the light of the phone.”
Cass eyed the map app, staring down the long hallway. “At least I know the dimensions of this hallway. I memorized them. The map is showing a lot of closets in this area of the compound. Small rooms. Mostly supplies, I’m guessing. We’re far away from the main corridors—the control rooms and all. That’s also where the exits are. I’m thinking we can wind around back, where it looks like there’s a delivery exit.”
Cass led the way. We felt our way through darkened hallways, zigging right and then left twice. The reach of the circuit breakers ended there. We were entering an area lit by fluorescent lights above. I looked around for overhead cameras and saw nothing here. “We go right next, and we’ll be close,” Cass said.
But as we neared the next hallway, I heard footsteps.
We plastered ourselves against the wall. At the end of the corridor, where it came to a T, voices were talking in Arabic.
My back was against a door. At eye level was a sign labeled in several languages. The third line read SUPPLIES in English. Under it was a simple keypad with numbers from one to nine.
In these bright yellow uniforms, there was no hiding. We looked like two giant bananas. Cass turned to me, his eyes wide with fear. Run, he mouthed.
But I was thinking about the workers who had to get in and out of this supply closet. And about the German soldiers who had to code the secret-message machines.
I turned toward the door. I thought fast.
Massa.
That equaled 13-1-19-19-1.
I pressed each digit. Nothing happened.
Cass was pulling me away. Simplicity, I thought. Something easily remembered. A number they would all know.
On a hunch, I keyed in five digits.
Click.
The door opened. We hustled inside and pulled it shut behind us.
I willed my heart not to fly out of my chest. We listened for the guards. Their conversation was growing more animated. But they were staying put. They hadn’t heard a thing.
Cass flicked on an overhead light. “How did you do that?” he whispered.
“Smart guessing,” I whispered back. “Remember the code for ‘com’—three-one-five-one-three? It’s a number palindrome, the same back and forward. Easy to recall. Something they probably all see on their cell phones. So I tried it.”
“I don’t believe this,” Cass said. “I can’t wait to tell Aly.”
I glanced around. The shelves contained all kinds of caustic liquids. I jammed small bottles of bleach and ammonia into my bag.
Cass was eagerly taking down a pile of neatly folded uniforms from the top shelf. Massa uniforms. Brown and institutional. They looked exactly like the things Brother Dimitrios and his goons were wearing here.
Cass’s eyes were saying exactly what I was thinking. We would be much less noticeable wearing these.
We each took one that seemed about the right size and changed into them. Another shelf was stocked with matching baseball-type caps, each embroidered with a lambda.
Perfect. With these outfits, especially with the hat brims pulled low, we could pass for employees. Well, from a distance. A long distance, where no one would notice that we were thirteen.
“I have another route,” Cass whispered, staring at the phone. “Left at the intersection, then right at the fork. There’s a big room we have to go through. On the other side of that room, we’re pretty close to the exit.”
Slowly, silently, we opened the door and stepped out. We stepped quickly down the hallway, passing a lounge arrangement like the one we’d just been sleeping in. Then an intersection.
“What fork?” I said. “This is a four-way!”
Cass was fingering the screen like crazy. “Sorry. There are all these levels. They overlap. Maybe the fork is on the level above us. Or—or below . . .”
“Pick one!” I said.
“Straight,” Cass shot back.
We headed down a long passageway toward a big, domed room. Some kind of control center. No door, just an archway. We could hear humming, beeps, shouts, an occasional burst of something in English—but even that was gibberish. Sector Five atmospheri
c control . . . waste systems redirecting to path 17B . . . clearing air traffic . . .
A man burst through the opening, tapping furiously on a tablet. He was heading right for us. If he looked up, we were toast. Two kids who happen to exactly match the descriptions of the recently captured Select.
I pulled Cass toward me, pretending to show him something on the phone. We hunched over the screen, our backs to the guy.
The guy rushed past us without even looking up.
“We are so close,” Cass whispered. “But this room—it’s huge. Like some kind of command center.”
“Keep your head down,” I said. “Pretend you have something important to do. Don’t run. Walk like a grown-up. When we get to the other side—”
“Wait,” Cass said. “You want us to walk straight through there? We can’t do that!”
“They don’t know we’re missing yet,” I said. “This is the last place they’d expect to see us.”
“But—”
“Think about Aly,” I insisted. “She did the exact thing no one expected. It takes guts. Which is what we need right now.”
Cass looked into the room and swallowed hard. “I hope you’re right.”
We barged inside, keeping our heads down. The place was crawling with people. Most of them looked like they’d just awakened. From the walls, enormous monitors glared down at us like the schedule boards from airports. They showed hallways and rooms, lounges and storage spaces, satellite maps, cross-sections of pyramids. An enormous Jumbotron-type screen loomed over everything, tiled with all the different views of the compound, inside and out. This place was their security center.
I scanned the room quickly. Best to stick to the shadows as much as possible. I pulled Cass to the wall, where the traffic was lightest. We made our way around, hugging the wall as close as we could. I could see an archway at the other end. It led into another corridor that looked no different from the one we came from. I let Cass lead. Cass knew the route.