Encrypted (49 page)

So this was the infamous jungle room.

When Quirk didn’t answer, apparently so enthralled with the carved wooden furniture and strangely
,
a teddy bear in the far corner, Ronnie elbowed him.

“Quirk!”

The young man had to shake his head several times before being able to focus on her annoyance.

“What the hell are we doing here?” she pressed.

“Um,” Quirk said
,
regaining his composure. “We needed to get to the back of the house. We are at the back of
the
house.”

Several sets of squealing tires announced the arrival of the main security service.

“We must burn it. Now,” Francois said. “If we are to be captured, we must all know the symbol, quadrupling our chances of spreading our knowledge.”

For an old guy
who
spent half his time mumbling in Latin, he did have a point. Guess he had been at this hidden angelic script thing the longest.

Ronnie nodded to Zach, but Quirk stepped between them. “Please. Let me.”

Normally
,
Ronnie would have shut her assistant down
.
H
owever
,
she heard
something in his tone. Not pleading or desperate, not how Francois had been, but reverential. Even Zach must have sensed the change
,
because he simply handed over the can of Aqua Net and the lighter.

Ronnie whipped out her phone, hitting the video record button. Who knew what Elvis was going to reveal
?

* * *

Quirk gently leaned the painting up against the jungle pool. Elvis must have known it would come to this. Or at the least
,
his father Vernon,
who gave him
the painting. They meant for Elvis to be a part of this angelic legacy.

Picasso had already burnt, but you know, it was Picasso. Who but a bunch of chai
-
loving intelligen
ts
ia would care
?
But Elvis?

Quirk had to be strong
,
though. For the King
,
and for the world.

He struck up the lighter. He squeezed the spray nozzle. Fire shot out in front of him. As the flame licked the saintly image, he began to hum,
and
then sing, “Love
M
e
T
ender.”

The canvas caught fire, crackling before them. Only Elvis’ visage didn’t melt or distort. He stayed ever the
K
ing as the fire consumed the painting.

To Quirk’s surprise
,
another voice took up the song at “Take me to your heart…”

He turned to find Zach’s tenor added to the melody. Soon
,
Francois and even Ronnie were singing along as the last of the painting flared before the symbol sparked to life. Only this time
,
it wasn’t just a single angelic script in the center
.
A
host of musical notes surrounded the symbol.

So fitting for the King.

Then it was all gone. Vanishing with a final spark that floated down, extinguished only when it hit the pool of water.

A car screeching to a halt just outside the window shattered the eloquent moment.

Was Quirk surprised that
their pilot drove the SUV
? Not in the least.

“Need a ride?” he shouted.

Zach nodded as he picked up a chair to break the elaborate leaded-glass window.

“Guess he really does know you,” Ronnie admitted as the pane shattered.

Yes
, Quirk thought,
yes
,
the pilot did
.

* * *

Ronnie caught hold of her laptop as the SUV bounced over the back acreage of Graceland
,
and
then smashed through a wooden fence. They raced onto other property
,
angling toward a side street exit from the neighborhood.

At this point
,
she trusted the pilot to get them out of here. Her focus had to be on this latest symbol. She had seen it before. Or at least the three angelic script runes that made up this altered symbol. Rapidly
,
she scrolled through her burgeoning inventory of angelic script.

There the three symbols were. Each
was
the head of a major line of script. Ronnie followed a hunch and took those three lines and overlapped them. Nothing
--j
ust garbage. The sequence made no sense. Even with the information Francois had contributed on how to decipher the mess, this newest symbol still made no sense.

Finally
,
the tires hit asphalt
,
and they fishtailed onto a two-lane road. Ronnie’s elbow knocked into Zach’s side. Flinching he angled his body away from her
.

“So sorry,” she mumbled feeling like all she had in her for Zach were
apologies
.

“It’s okay,” he said
,
but his clenched jaw said otherwise. “Find anything?”

“I’m not sure…”

Ronnie tried to concentrate on the screen but that would
be
a hec
k of a lot easier if Zach weren’t
sitting right next to her. Things had been simpler when he was in the front seat. However, when they were all piling into the car after the jungle room
,
no one had challenged Quirk’s claim to the passenger’s seat.

Now she was either worried about accidently ramming some part of her body into his black and blue rib
cage
,
or missing him being closer
, with
t
heir body heat mingling.

Ugh. See? It was thoughts like that kept her from solving the puzzle.

And quite a puzzle it was. This latest set of symbols definitely wasn’t fitting into her very limited view of angelic script. She looked to Francois
,
but his eyes were already closed
,
despite the sharp right and left turns the SUV was making.

“Junk DNA,” a voice from the front seat said. Quirk poked his head between the seats, showing her his screen. Of course
,
he had hacked into her feed, reading her work. “Doesn’t it look like junk DNA?”

In too much of a hurry to care about Quirk’s lack of boundaries and scold him for it, Ronnie studied the garbled text with a new eye. Could her assistant be right? Was this sequence intentionally left undecipherable?

Zach shifted next to her, reading over her shoulder. “I thought DNA was pretty damned important?”

“It is,” she answered as she brought up an image of the double helix. “Only scientists have found large chunks of it that didn’t make any sense. It is considered ‘non-coding’ DNA
,
since didn’t make any proteins.”

Quirk chimed in, “Hence the ‘junk’ part.”

“Only now
,
they don’t believe it is ‘junk’ at all,” Ronnie said as she searched the definition of the term. There it was. “Many believe that it has a
translational
role.”

Translation
:
Yes. That pile of “junk” script was really a placeholder. It told her that something needed to go there. And she knew just the something. Rapidly
,
Ronnie brought up a sequence she had built back in Mexico. While she couldn’t break the entire set of symbols, there were a few that at least made a little sense. She plugged this set into the gap of the “junk” script?

As her mind sought to decipher this new line, Ronnie sensed people talking around her. She could feel Zach move toward and away from her, but her mind whirled with possibilities. Her fingers tapped at the keyboard, dragging this symbol into place,
and
then rejecting it for another,
and then
bringing it back, only to reverse the order.

The gilded symbols became like water, malleable and fluid under her touch. They swam across her screen, diving and gliding into place. They pulsed in beat with Elvis’ tune
,
seeming to want to assemble themselves in the right position.

Then, there it was. A list. An indisputable list glistened back at her.

She looked
at
Zach, or where Zach should be. She looked
on
the other side. No Francois. Both driver and passenger seats were empty.

What the…
?

“Hey!” Quirk called out. “I think she’s rejoined us mere humans.”

Ronnie blinked
,
trying to make sense of Quirk’s words as Zach leaned back into the car.

“Hey there, sexy
.
”

His playful tone drained her anxiety. “Hey there, yourself.” She looked out the door to find they were at a small airstrip. “How long was I out?”

Zach looked
at
his watch. “A little over an hour
and
fifteen
minutes
. The pilot
’
s got the plane ready. We just need a destination.”

She frowned. While she had cracked a large part of the code, it had only given her an extensive list of painters
’
names. No locations. Just names.

“Monet, Renoir,” Quirk read from his screen. “And Charles
Schulz
?”

Yes
,
strangely
,
the
Peanuts
creator was on the angels
’
list, but after the Elvis painting, nothing would really surprise her. Quirk went on reciting a veritable
W
ho’s
W
ho of famous painters. Which was great
,
but that didn’t exactly give the pilot a direction to head
in, or a new destination
.

“Well, over
70
percent of these artists are represented at the Met,” Quirk turned his computer screen
,
showing them the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York
. “I mean
,
it’s not
100
percent, but…”

Ronnie turned to Zach. “I don’t think we can expect
100
percent assurance for any of this. But based on the amount of ‘junk’ code I’ve got, we are going to have to find a whole lot of paintings very quickly.”

“Then the Metropolitan Museum of Art it is.”

“Of course,” Francois stated matter
-
of
-
factly, walking past them toward the plane. “Isn’t that where you thought we were heading?”

Seriously
?

After all that time
,
effort
,
and code breaking?

Ronnie glared at the old man’s back as he made his way to the twin-engine plane, never wanting to throttle one of her elders so badly in her life. Zach squeezed her shoulder, somehow diluting her anger.

“If Francois knew it all, he wouldn’t need us, right?”

Damn
right, Ronnie thought as they headed to the plane. She felt like shaking the old man back to his senses until she saw the drops of blood following behind
him,
like an injured puppy dog.

Ronnie sighed. Francois was giving as much as he could. After carrying this burden for so long, it was pretty surprising
that
he could give anything at all.

* * *

“There has been a break in at Graceland,” an acolyte announced as he rushed into the room.

Very slowly, rising from his meditation,
Lino
opened his eyes to receive the agitated messenger.

“A man fitting Brother
Loboum’s
description set afire a portrait.”

Of course
,
Francois had. The man was cagey and sloppy all at once. He was privy to some of the Hidden Hand’s most sacred truths
,
yet still could not find his way through a straight
-
lined maze. For every painting
that
Francois torched, he lit a beacon in the night for
Lino
to follow.

And the Presley painting…