Wade checked his watch. “He’ll get out at the next stop and come back, but we’ll be gone. He’ll have to track us all over again. Nice work, Lily.”
Darrell breathed out. “I second that. And I think the kids will be all right. The muscly one playing me looked like he could take Doyle. Here’s Mom—”
Sara had a strange look on her face when she hurried over. “I was like a spy, saying the words Terence told me to say. The woman at the counter blinked, then said, ‘The London Midland line doesn’t go to Bishops Stortford. You want to go here.’ And she pulled out an envelope with tickets from under the counter.”
“So cool!” said Darrell. “Terence has people everywhere.”
“He must,” Sara said. “The cashier said that because of Becca’s German puzzle, Terrence suggests we to go to a place called Bletchley Park and ask for someone named Renji. Our train leaves in nine minutes.”
When we told her about Archie Doyle, Sara went red with anger—for Doyle and for us—then pulled us into a tight group. I expected her to rip up the tickets and say we were going to forget about the relics. She didn’t.
“We have to take care of ourselves. Of one another. If we do, they can’t stop us. We can’t be stopped. . . . I love you all so much, you know. Now come on.”
That was it. She was done.
With only a few minutes before our train was to leave, we headed onto it and took our seats. They were comfortable, clean, bright green, and new. We settled right in, breathless and rattled, but safe. Wade was the first to speak.
“Renji is a mysterious name,” he said. “Sounds African or Japanese, maybe?”
Lily waved her tablet. “Renji Abarai is the name of a Japanese manga character. But he’s fictional, so it’s probably not him.”
“Probably,” said Darrell. “But Becca might see him in a trance.”
“Her trances are not fictional!” Lily protested. “They’re not, right?”
“Right,” I said with a laugh. After the Doyle thing at the station, it was strange how quickly we got to talking and joking as if we were regular kids. It amazed me that we could bounce back so quickly, but I found myself wanting to put the horror away. And the warning. And the blackouts.
“Bletchley Park”—Sara said, scanning the guidebook Wade bought at the station—“was the top secret setting for British code-breaking activities during the Second World War. That’s why Terence is sending us there. The men and women who worked there broke German codes and ended the war years sooner than it would have ended otherwise. That’s not at all fictional.”
A series of beeps sounded, then the doors on our car closed with a breath. The train began to roll smoothly out of the station, as if it rode on rubber wheels.
I breathed in and out slowly, and my pulse eased its rapid drumming. Archie Doyle and the Order weren’t an immediate threat. My nose was dry. I felt better.
After all the running, we were in a comfortable train on our way to a place called Bletchley Park in the English countryside to meet a mystery person by the unlikely name of Renji.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I don’t want to say that because the Order was after us, we were scared of the world. But we did have to be alert to what was around us. We had to observe and be careful. We had to notice everything or risk becoming victims.
Darrell would say we were leading the spy way of life. He’d be right.
Like on that train to Bletchley.
Without anyone suggesting it, the four of us—and Sara, too, now—had settled into two benches across the aisle from each other and facing opposite ways to allow us to see both ends of the car at the same time.
Lily and I sat with a view back toward London; the others sat across the aisle and looked forward. In case we needed to escape, we sat close to a set of doors.
Getting out of London was a good thing; my pulse slowed right down. Until I felt a trickle in one nostril and turned my face to the window. I took a napkin from my pocket and raised it to my nose. Only a drop. I put the napkin away.
“Um . . . guys? In my latest vision . . .”
“Did you see him again?” asked Darrell, leaning over Wade.
“Tell us,” said Lily.
“It was the day Thomas More was executed. We were in the Tower of London. His cell. Nicolaus told me the names of the horrors he discovered on his second journey. I looked them up. They’re really awful. A rebellion in China in 184 AD. A war in Europe in the seventeenth century. A huge famine in Ukraine in 1933, really huge. Millions died. Nicolaus said he didn’t go any farther into the future after he saw what he had done . . . what his time traveling had caused.”
Lily looked me in the eyes. “Wait. You don’t think you’re doing the same thing, do you? By going back in your mind?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do. You’re just passing through back there. Browsing, not buying.”
Wade was suddenly out of his seat, walking down the whole length of the aisle, then back again, without going anywhere. He wasn’t looking at passengers, not even at his watch. His face was all frowny. I leaned back with Lily.
“Plus, I’m kind of embarrassed by these vision things,” I whispered.
She laughed quietly. “You’re embarrassed? I don’t know what that means. I’ve never been embarrassed. Besides, we’d be useless without the clues you get when you go zombie. Just kidding. But what are you even talking about?”
“Not that it happens. But talking about it. I don’t think he believes me.” Wade had paused at the other end of the car. His lips were moving.
“You’re joking, right?” she said.
I breathed in slowly. My nostrils were dry. “I can’t make it sound real. It’s like hocus-pocus. All fantastic and magical. It’s like, ‘Look at me. I’m having visions from the past, so you have to take me seriously.’ But he’s all numbers and can’t believe any of it. As if it’s believable, anyway.”
Lily glared at me as if I were Darrell making a dumb joke. “Are you done? Because first of all, we don’t think any of that. Becca, you are so not flaky or . . . how do I put this . . . funny. We all take you seriously because it’s what we have to do. Second, who cares what Wade thinks? Third, he doesn’t even think that.”
“I see him staring at me—”
“Because he likes you, dummy!” she hissed in my ear. “And he’s worried about you and believes what you’re telling him, and if he’s having a hard time with your cryptical magical time-travel visiony thing, it’s because he’s trying to make his brain understand how you fit in with all his numbers, which he’s been nuts about since before he was born, and here you are shaking up his world but because he’s a boy all he can do is stare at you, if that makes any sense, which I think it does, but I’m not really sure.”
I felt like laughing or hugging her, but Wade suddenly stormed through the aisle and plopped down in the seat next to me. “I have a problem,” he said.
Glancing at Lily, I said, “A problem? I knew it—”
“It’s like this,” he said, not looking at me but at the ceiling of the car. “You saw Copernicus in 1517—and it had to be, right, because of all the Thomas More evidence—but you said Copernicus told you about both 1527 and 1535. So he must have seen those things on his journey.”
“The second journey,” I said. “When he saw the problems he thinks he made.”
“Right. His second journey. But . . .” He trailed off. He clamped his eyes shut, pursed his lips like he was going to play trumpet. Or explode. Either one.
Then he opened his eyes. “Copernicus took a third journey.”
“What? No. He told me only two.”
“He obviously must have taken a third journey,” Wade said. “He told you that he didn’t go forward in time after he saw Holodomor in 1933. But he also knew who you were. It’s so simple. He couldn’t have known about you unless he came up to the present on a third journey. Which makes me think he wasn’t talking about some ‘nightfall’ in the past b
ut about tonight.”
I stared at him. “I . . . so he went a third time. Maybe he made a mistake.”
“Mistake? Copernicus? No way,” Wade said, fixing me with his eyes. “He contradicted himself, plain and simple. And why would he do that? Don’t even answer, because I already know why. Because he’s giving us another clue!”
I kept staring back at him. “What kind of clue is that?”
He tore his eyes from me and turned to Lily. “You see. Lily, you see it, right?”
Surprisingly, she nodded. “I kind of do. But we won’t really know until tonight at the Tower of London. But then why did he go? If he realized from his second journey that horrible things had happened after his first, and would probably happen after his second, why in the world did he go a third time?”
“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Wade said. “It’s another clue for us.”
My head started to pound, but it wasn’t a blackout coming on. It was because Wade had realized something, and it was big. It was huge. And it was dark.
“Nicolaus didn’t lie to fool me,” I said. “He wants us to keep searching, so finding Crux must be a good thing. But maybe two people will die anyway.”
The train stopped at Watford Junction, and now Darrell came over. “I heard some of what you said. To me, the big thing is to keep searching. The bad thing happens anyway. But if we find Crux, we can do some good. If that’s true, then the most important thing now is to solve the puzzle Copernicus showed you.”
Sara had been resting during all of this, but she was looking over now and nodding. “That does sound right. Becca, what can you remember about it?”
“Well, it was pretty complex, with lots of symbols. Some were old German letters. Most of them I’ve never seen before.”
Darrell sat himself opposite and stared into my eyes. Lowering his voice, he said, “Rebecca Moore, think of nothing else. Listen to my words. And remember. The fate of the world hinges on what you remember right now—”
“Darrell, don’t scare her,” Sara said. “Let the poor girl breathe.”
I glanced at Wade, who was quiet during all of this, just biting his lip.
Then I closed my eyes and tried to bring up the puzzle in my mind. Don’t ask me how my brain did it, but it did. Out of the haze in my head was the image Nicolaus had shown me, in all its detail, a pizza of strange symbols. There were numbers around its edge, like a clock’s dial, but they were all out of order: 76, then 30, then 12 . . .
The Holbein puzzle.
It would show what happened to Crux after the death of Thomas More.
Moving back and forth between the image in my mind’s eye and my notebook, I drew everything he showed me. By the time I finished, the train had made three more stops—Hemel Hempstead, Berkhamsted, and Leighton Buzzard—and was on its final leg to Bletchley. There was nothing more to draw.
Sara leaned over the image and blinked. “You’re pretty sure that this is what Nicolaus showed you in Thomas’s room in the Tower?”
“I am,” I said.
Unfortunately, no one had the slightest idea of what we were looking at.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“It’s as exact as I can make it,” I said. “I’m amazed I could remember it. But really, it’s very close.”
“Right,” said Wade. “But close to what?” He didn’t say it snottily.
“I don’t know.” I shut my eyes to see if there was anything I’d forgotten. I envisioned Nicolaus in the prison cell’s candlelight. No. There wasn’t anything else. “This is it. Pretty exactly. A handful of Gothic letters, some Latin ones.”
Sara studied it. “Aren’t some of them astronomical symbols, too?”
Wade nodded his head slowly. “This thing that looks like a tilted number four”—he pointed at one—“is kind of like the symbol for Jupiter. But there’s also an hourglass and a kite, a diamond, some Xs. Maybe from alchemy.”
“The Latin letters could all be Roman numerals,” said Lily.
Sara smiled. “Good. Alchemy. Astronomy. Gothic letters. Latin. I’ve never seen this combination in a single document.”
“So it’s a kind of mash-up of different things,” said Darrell. “We’ve done mash-up before. Someone will solve it. Not me, of course. Maybe Renji can.”
The train began to slow, and a female computer voice came over the address system: “The next station stop is Bletchley.”
I closed my notebook, stood up, and stretched. “I hope so.”
As we gathered our things, we were instinctively on alert again. A safe, comfortable, murder-free ride had come to an end, and we were targets once more. Pushing out onto the open platform, I studied everyone: three women in business suits standing by themselves, a few middle-aged couples, one father wrangling two young children while an infant slept in a pack on his chest, and one older couple, the woman leaning on a walker.
“All clear,” Sara whispered, waving her guidebook. “Bletchley Park closes at five, and it’s nearly four, so we need to move along.”
We climbed the stairs to the bridge over the tracks and exited the station on the other side into a small parking lot. Right away, we spotted the sign—Bletchley Park—with an arrow pointing up the road to the right.
The sun was far past its peak but falling slowly, and even though it had been chilly in London, the air here was warm and smelled of green lawns and summer. The trees were in leaf, and little yellow flowers waved along the borders of the road. It was so astonishing to find myself so quickly out of the dangerous twisted city and into the warm countryside of an English novel, that it seemed impossible anything bad could happen here. Which I knew made it completely possible.
“The Germans used a coding machine called the Enigma,” said Sara. “It produced billions of variations and was very difficult to decrypt, but the people gathered here—cryptographers and mathematicians—were able to crack it. Terence could be having us meet an expert in German codes and puzzles.”
“Good,” said Lily, searching on her tablet now. “The machine they built to figure out Enigma was called the Bombe, a mechanical calculating machine—”
“Alan Turing invented the Bombe,” said Wade. “I remember Dad telling me about him. He’s like the father of computers. Lily, if it wasn’t for Alan Turing, your hands would be holding nothing right now.”
“Oh, they’d be holding something,” she said. “I just wouldn’t show you.”
“Ha!” said Darrell. “I don’t know what that means, but I like it.”
A ray of sun shot through the trees directly into my face. I was startled for an instant, but it wasn’t a blackout coming on, it was the sun. And since we’d covered our tracks pretty well with Archie Doyle, my only goal was to find out everything I could about Holbein’s puzzle.
The gate to Bletchley Park was bordered by a guardhouse, where a man pointed us to a low, rambling cinder-block building called Block B. The ticket booth was inside, along with a bookstore and gift shop. While Sara purchased entry tickets, Darrell mustered up courage to ask the clerk, “Is anyone named Renji here?”
I had my doubts, but the nice woman behind the ticket counter twitched excitedly. “How on earth did you know that? It’s rather a secret when they come, you know, and so delicious when one shows up. She’s just popped into the library at the main house. You can’t miss her.”
“So Renji is a woman?” asked Sara.
“Of course!” she said. “All the Wrens were. Among the many people here during the war with Turing and Dilly Knox and the rest were thousands of young women.” She leaned over—“They did much of the real work, you know”—then leaned back. “The G stands for Gorley. Mavis Gorley. But everyone back then called her Wren G, so we do too. Lovely dear lady is our Wren Gorley!”
“One mystery solved,” said Lily. “A hundred thousand to go.”
“Thanks so much,” Wade said. “We can’t wait to meet her.”
We took a paved path around a small, sun-dappled lake and head
ed toward the big main house, a rambling, arch-windowed brick mansion trimmed in white stone. It had a green copper dome on one end and an arcade and octagonal tower on the other, with a cluster of chimneys and gables in between.
It was charming, and odd, and homey, all at the same time.
“I already love this place and want to live here,” I said.
“Something told me you would,” Sara said as her phone rang. She answered it and listened. “Yes, Terence. Good. Tell him to be careful.” She hung up. “Your father and Terence will be here soon. Roald is driving. On the wrong side of the road for him, and, well, crossed fingers that he and Terence make it in one piece.”
We passed between two winged statues and under a shaded arch into the mansion. It smelled of wood and paper and everything old. On our left was a large, hushed room lined with glass-fronted bookcases, obviously the library.
Five desks were set up in a kind of semicircle facing us, a bay of large windows behind them, from where the sun shone down into the room, warming the carpet. The desks were fitted out with old telephones, typewriters, stacks of papers, hooded lamps, maps, and coffee cups, as if their occupants had just been called away to hear a breaking radio broadcast or an emergency briefing. The Second World War could still be on in this room. You could feel the history of thousands of people busily working in the blocks and huts—many of them young women—where breaking the enemy code was serious business. It struck me that we were doing the same thing: cracking codes, saving the world.
I felt strangely at home in that room.
And so did someone else.
Bent nearly in half over one of the desks was a tiny white-haired woman, mumbling to herself and tapping a pencil on the rim of a flowered teacup.
“Hello?” Sara said.
“Hush!” The woman had a newspaper spread out on the desk in front of her. “Think, Mavis, think!” she grumbled under her breath, and reached for the cup but didn’t lift it. “A twenty-letter word meaning a record of brain activity . . .”