October (11 page)

‘That was way too close for comfort!’ said Boges, leaning over a chair and puffing.

Winter shook her head as she pulled off her jacket and practically ripped off her stockings. ‘It was a close call,’ she said, ‘such a close call. But we did it! Can you believe it? It worked!’

All three of us jumped up and high-fived each other.

Boges threw himself on the couch, grinning. ‘After what we’ve had to do to get this far, getting to Ireland will be a cinch!’

I didn’t exactly share Boges’s confidence, but at least we’d retrieved my family’s heirlooms. Our quest could start again!

‘Here,’ said Winter, passing me the packet from Oriana’s safety deposit box. ‘You should be the one to open it!’

Winter and Boges leaned forward as I emptied out the contents of the package on the table.

The three of us stared in disbelief.

‘Huh?’ said Boges. ‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t believe it!’ Winter cried in distress.

Instead of the amazing, one-in-a-million Ormond Jewel, we were staring at an ordinary oval brooch with a polished grey stone in the middle. I grabbed up what I first thought was the Riddle, only to find that it, too, was a fake.

‘Look,
all
the edges are frayed,’ I said. ‘It’s a copy! It’s a good copy, but it’s a fake! The
original
has a clean cut at the bottom—it’s not frayed on that bottom edge like this one.’ Slowly, I sank against the counter, all the excitement and energy drained out of me.

‘They’re not here,’ said Winter. ‘I can’t believe
this! After everything we’ve done—Boges, all your work on the fingerprint. Disguises. Getting the PIN. I can’t believe it.’

The moments ticked by with the three of us in stunned silence as we stared at the fakes in front of us. I tried to focus.

Something occurred to me. ‘Oriana went to all the trouble of stashing them in the bank vault. Do you see what this means? Oriana doesn’t know these are fakes! Someone else has the real Jewel and the real Riddle!’

Boges glared at me. ‘If she doesn’t have them, then who does?’

I looked at Winter, who suddenly seemed uncomfortable.

‘It has to be Sligo,’ I said. ‘Somehow he must have intercepted my backpack at the funeral
parlour
and done the switcheroo. Oriana takes what she thinks is the original Ormond Riddle and Ormond Jewel and she stashes them in the bank for safekeeping, not realising that what she has is worthless. Worthless!’ I said, shoving the fakes off the table with a sweep of my arm. ‘Either there’s a third party involved in this—someone we’ve never heard of and don’t know about—or it has to be Sligo.’

‘But why would Sligo do a switcheroo?’ said Boges. ‘He’d just take them, wouldn’t he? Why go to the bother of replacing them with fakes?’

‘So that Oriana would believe that she had them,’ I said. ‘That gets her off his back. She thinks she’s sweet with the goods, leaving Sligo to relax and get on with the next part of his plan.’

Winter, who’d been sitting on the floor quietly, piped up. ‘Or Rathbone has outsmarted them both,’ she said.

‘All my time spent in the fume cupboard in the science lab … all for nothing!’ shouted Boges. ‘And it worked, can you believe it? My fake print fooled Zürich Bank’s scanner!
But what for?
’ Boges stood up, shaking his head, and started pacing the room, tearing away all remnants from his Sumo outfit. ‘We have just over two months left to sort this all out, and we’re back to square one. Again!’

Winter looked from Boges to me, her face
concerned
and serious. ‘What are we going to do now, Cal?’ she asked. ‘We can’t give up. We just can’t.’

Disappointment seeped into every cell of my body. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Let’s think,’ she said. ‘We have to spy on everyone we suspect. I can increase my visits to Sligo’s place. The weather’s warming up, so I could start going round to use his pool. Maybe you two can watch Rathbone some more.’ Winter glanced up at Boges who had slowed his pacing. ‘You know what? Maybe we need to forget about
this
for a while,’ she said, waving her hands over Oriana’s fakes, ‘and focus back on old leads—the drawings, the words of the Riddle—things that we may have overlooked. We can’t give up.
I
won’t give up.’

23 OCTOBER

70 days to go …

I figured I should give Winter a break, so I was back at St Johns Street. I felt helpless and angry, like I’d been kicked in the guts—except the kick kept on kicking. We were back at square one. Worse, if there was some third party we didn’t know about, we were seriously behind the eight ball.

My phone started ringing.

‘Cal,’ Boges began, ‘I have some information for you. Can you meet me at Winter’s tonight? Bring everything you have—I think I know why your dad drew Caesar on the Sphinx drawing.’

‘Come on, Boges, don’t hold out on us,’ begged
Winter. ‘Where does Caesar fit in?’

‘Patience, patience. All in good time.’

Slowly he pulled out his notebook, snapping the rubber band that held it together a couple of times before finally opening it. He cleared his throat and began reading: ‘One of the simplest codes in the world is the Caesar shift—’

‘A code?’ I repeated. ‘There’s a code called the Caesar shift?’

‘You betcha.’ Boges snapped the notebook shut. ‘I won’t read the rest of it. Nobody really knows if Julius Caesar ever had anything to do with it, but anyway, that’s beside the point.’

‘Tell us how it works, already!’ said Winter.

‘It’s coming, it’s coming,’ said Boges, pulling out a large piece of butcher’s paper and picking up a pencil that was on the table. Very quickly, he wrote out the alphabet.

‘It works like this,’ he explained as he started writing the alphabet out again, but this time he
began with the ‘A’ written directly under the ‘B’ of the previous line, writing the final ‘Z’ back under the ‘A’ in the top line of letters.

‘That’s a one-letter Caesar shift. So using the code, DBU becomes CAT. Get it? You can move it along as many places as you like. For instance, you could move the code along ten places and start your new Caesar code alphabet underneath the letter K of the original alphabet.’

Again, Boges wrote out the alphabet, placing the A underneath K. ‘Now,’ he demonstrated, ‘CAT becomes SQJ.’

‘Well, what are we waiting for?’ asked Winter, excitedly. ‘Let’s try it! Let’s apply the Caesar shift to the Riddle. But do we try a one-letter shift, or two, or three? And where do we start? Do we apply it to every word?’

‘Yep,’ I said. ‘We should try every word and every shift—all twenty-six combinations.’

‘I could probably design a program to work it out for us,’ Boges said. ‘It could take a little while, but once it’s done, it’ll crunch the combinations in no time. Then we can search through the results for another message within the Riddle. For
information
embedded in it.’

‘What if,’ I asked, ‘the embedded information is in the last two missing lines?’

Boges shrugged. ‘Could be. You know what we have to do …’

‘Go to Ireland?’ I asked.

‘Go to Ireland,’ Boges repeated. ‘We need to talk to the Keeper of Rare Books, find out whether he really has information on the last two lines. Time’s running out, we can’t wait around for answers to fall into our laps.’

I looked around at the drawings. We’d finally discovered the existence of the Caesar shift—but was that what Dad was trying to tell me about? And Winter had matched the drawing of the little monkey with the painting of the young Queen Elizabeth—but was the Queen what Dad was
trying
to show us? Or did the monkey have more meaning?

‘By the way,’ said Boges. ‘Gabbi told me that they were all going away this morning—Rafe and
your mum have taken her down to Treachery Bay for a couple of days. For a break from the city …’

‘Really?’ Immediately I was interested—Rafe’s house was where I’d first seen the scribbled note about the Ormond Riddle. ‘That could be a perfect opportunity,’ I said, ‘for a thorough search of the place. Rafe could have information that we don’t know about. Even Mum might have something incidental of Dad’s that could mean a lot to us.’

‘You took the words right out of my mouth. I’m in,’ said Boges. ‘I guessed you might want to check it out, so I already told Gabbi—our new little spy—that we might “pop in” in their absence. She’s so cool,’ he said. ‘Straight away she switched into top-secret mode. She’s left the key out for us and she said she’d turn off the CCTV system and
sensor
lights. We just need to remember to turn it all back on again before we leave.’

I grinned. I was so proud of my sister. She was turning into a handy ally.

Boges and I ducked into the front garden, crept around the side of the house and onto the back patio, where we found the key Gabbi had left us
under the barbecue. The night was dark and an eerie wind was blowing, but knowing the house was empty had made us both pretty relaxed about breaking in.

Next door’s cat, who’d saved me last time I was here, rubbed our legs as we unlocked the back door.

I was ready. We were looking for anything—anything at all—that might give us more
information
about the DMO, and even if we didn’t find anything, we’d at least be sure that we’d
eliminated
every possibility from the ‘home’ quarter.

We stepped through the double doors with torches that we kept low, directed to the floor. I hesitated once I stepped inside. A lamp had been left on and, somewhere, a radio chattered softly. Mum had always done that when we went away, to make it seem like the house wasn’t empty.