Salem's Cipher (26 page)

“Would have?”

Bel winked. “I think that relationship might have run its course.”

Salem smiled happily and stepped out of the shower to stand behind Bel. “I didn't like her.”

“Really?” Bel made a mock
no way
face. “I couldn't tell. Except wait, didn't you come right out and
tell
me so the only time you met her?”

“You asked me!” Salem's indignation would normally have caused her curls to fly into her eyes, but not any longer. They were too short, drying in an alarming fright wig pattern, a few canary-in-the-coalmine curls beginning to break free of the weight of water and test the air atop her head.

They locked eyes in the mirror. Bel opened her mouth to argue. A laugh escaped instead. “You look like Buckwheat.”

Salem was going to protest but caught her own reflection. She chuckled. The mirth was contagious, inciting more giggles from Bel, the first in days, and they grew to a full-on belly laugh. Soon, Salem and Bel were doubled over, sweet tears leaking out their eyes, howling so hard they could hardly speak.

“Or maybe you look more like Screech,” Bel finally managed.

Salem nodded in complete agreement as she pictured the lead from their favorite high school TV show, a cramp forming in her stomach from the laughter. Still, the giggles rolled on. “You did such a terrible job cutting my hair!” she managed to choke out.

“I really did!” Bel squealed. “But at least you look old enough to drive a car.”

That set off a new wave of howls. They'd have laughed all night if Lu hadn't knocked on the door.

“You girls too loud! This not a party!”

“Sorry,” Salem said, trying to hold her breath to halt the laughter. She snorted instead. They had the funeral giggles, which had to run their messy, healing, hilarious course. “It's getting a little hairy in here.”

Bel punched her arm, wiping laugh tears from her eyes. “That's dumb.”

Salem giggled in agreement.

“You know,” Bel began.

“Yes?” Salem said, falling onto the closed toilet seat to ease her side.

“I love you.”

“Olive juice too!” Salem said, harking back to a joke they'd passed around in junior high. If you mouthed “olive juice,” it looked just like you were confessing your love. They'd do it to the boys, and laugh and prance away. Salem waited for Bel to return it, or begin laughing again, but she didn't. “Bel?”

“I'm serious.” And she was. The happy tears were still on her face, but the laughter was erased. She faced Salem, placing her hands on her bare shoulders, and looked her straight on, the short, dark hair making her appear waifish. “I would do anything for you, Salem. I
will
. I don't know which of our mothers—”

“Stop.” Salem's mirth disappeared.

“No, I have to say this. I don't know which of our mothers is still alive, but my heart tells me it's yours.”

Salem's hand flew to her mouth.

“And I will survive that, because you will be by my side.”

Salem tossed her head side to side. “Grace is fine.”

“I don't think she is, Salem. You've heard everyone talk, Ernest, Lu. Vida's the leader of the Underground. It makes sense to keep her alive. She'd be more of a bargaining chip.”

Salem wanted to argue but couldn't find the words.

“You and me forever, right?” Bel held out her index and pinkie finger in the bloodsister's salute they'd invented about the same time as “olive juice.”

Salem touched her identical fingers to Bel's and sighed. “They should have told us, you know?”

Bel's sweet blue eyes deepened. Salem thought the lines around her mouth were new. She looked older than her twenty-nine years. “Our parents?”

“Yes.” A hot pool of emotion was swirling inside of Salem. “Our entire childhood was a lie, you know? They knew about this world, and they hid it from us, left us to discover it on our own.”

“You heard Lu. They were trying to protect us.”

“That made sense when we were little girls, Bel. Not now that we're grown women. They manipulated us. They chose what was easier for them, not what was best for us.” Her voice was spiraling upward. “They didn't have to stay in the Underground. They didn't have to risk our lives. One of our moms didn't have to die.”

“Stop.” Bel's eyes were blazing, her voice sharp. “They did the best they could. What's done is done. There is no advantage in looking backward.”

For the first time in her life, Salem felt like she understood people better than Bel. Or maybe she was behaving like a child. She was too exhausted, too disoriented to know. “All right.”

“It
is
all right,” Bel said. “Or at least it will be. Let's get to work and save Vida.”

Salem watched Bel exit the bathroom. She stayed behind to clean up. She needed to collect herself. She tossed her road clothes into the trash, tugging on the clean underwear, sports bra, khakis, and surprisingly low-key peasant blouse that Lu had provided. They actually fit reasonably well, the pants loose around her slimmed-down waist. She ran through the plan as she dressed. Now that she and Bel had disguised themselves, Ernest would drive them to Dolores Mission, where an evening wedding guaranteed a large crowd and relative anonymity.

Mercy would stay behind.

Once they'd recovered Beale's keytext from the bell, they would return to Lu's, where she promised them she would show them the “best computer bank in world.” Salem would use it, hopefully, to crack Beale's cipher, and she, Ernest, and Bel would fly to Virginia where the treasure was rumored to be. They would use the cracked cipher to pinpoint the treasure's location, retrieve it, and bring it back to Chinatown. Lu would know what to do with it, how to use it to save whichever of their mothers was alive. Mercy would continue to stay behind for her own safety. The girl deserved at least one day without running.

Salem thought for a moment about stealing a look inside the medicine cabinet. Lu probably had rows of exotic herbs and tinctures.
What the hell. Small satisfactions, you know?

Salem opened it and peeked inside. Noxema, a toothbrush, whitening toothpaste, and a tube of rash cream.

Hunh
.

She was closing it quietly when the door was yanked open and Bel stuck her head in, eyes wide. “You have to come see this. Now.”

74

Chinatown, San Francisco

A
gent Lucan Stone stood just inside the Powell Street grocery store on the northwest end of Chinatown. When he'd spotted a short-haired brunette Isabel Odegaard through the second-story window, there was only one reasonable reaction.

“Well, I'll be damned.”

Clancy Johnson was downtown San Francisco with Senator Hayes's people, going over the plans for the Alcatraz speech in two days. No one liked it. The photo ops would be brilliant—talking about prison reform on one of the starkest piles of rock in the country—but dropping Hayes on an island was a logistical nightmare. Stone didn't envy the Secret Service in charge of that security detail. Realistically, there was nothing Clancy or Stone could do to help, but the government liked to stack everything one too high.

Stone knew his speedy rise through the FBI ranks had pissed off a lot of agents that he'd stepped over. He'd made peace with that. He wasn't in the field to placate colleagues.

He was here to make his mother proud.

She'd died before he graduated Quantico, even before he'd gone to college, the victim of a stray bullet through her kitchen wall.

“Life gives you defeats,” she'd say, “but don't ever let yourself be defeated.”

That had gotten him through the first year after her death. Her second favorite saying, “Life doesn't work unless you do,” earned him a full ride to college, and his 4.0 GPA opened the door to Quantico. Turns out growing up in the streets of Detroit had prepared him well for FBI training. After that, there was no secret to his success. He worked hard, he listened to his gut like his mother had taught him, he always made good on his word, and, when possible, he kept his mouth shut and eyes and ears open. That's how he'd acquired the tip that had sent him here, across the street from the Golden Lucky Fortune Cookie Company.

According to Stone's contact in the NSA, a female agent he traded intel with (and sometimes more), the NSA had been collecting SIGINT from the Golden Lucky Fortune Cookie Company ever since a protocol search had intercepted unusual emails being sent from their server, messages containing words guaranteed to draw the government's attention:
state of emergency, executions, terrorism, Iraq, North Korea, fundamentalism
. The communications, once decoded, were vague enough that the NSA assumed they were still a code within a code, things like
the fundamentalists are funding North Korea, the executions have begun
. The messages were not yet grounds for a search warrant, but they were suspicious, coming from a fortune cookie factory.

But then came words that spoke directly to Stone's current mission:
Gina Hayes
assassination, Vida Wiley, Isabel Odegaard
, and one that threw him for a loop even though he'd read the decoded message four different times:
the Hermitage
. The NSA cross-referenced their files, found Stone and Clancy assigned to the Wiley and Odegaard case, and Stone's contact passed on the intel. Stone had skipped out on Clancy's San Francisco snipe work with Hayes to follow up on the lead, and here he was, discovering a whole lot more at the Golden Lucky than he'd bargained for.

“How about that.”

Salem Wiley had just passed in front of the same second-story window as Isabel Odegaard, her hair short enough to send her corkscrew curls into a straight-up halo, but it was her, nonetheless. Stone's heart thudded. He didn't think he'd ever see her again, not since he received word that she and Odegaard had escaped from the Amherst holding cell. He'd almost laughed when he'd heard about their prison break. Those two were either the worst double agents or the best women on the run he'd ever encountered.

Wiley and Odegaard squatting inside Golden Lucky spun the NSA's findings in a new direction. It also made Stone dislike even more the fat-fingered suit across the street.

The man'd been leaning against the melon stand adjacent to the Golden Lucky for far too long. Stone didn't like the lethal, compact shape of the man, or the girth of his fingers, each like a muscled sausage. Stone guessed from the way he squeezed an exerciser in each that his digits were as strong as they appeared.

The sun was beginning its downward trajectory. Stone estimated he had half an hour of natural light left. The creeping twilight brought out the natural witchiness that he'd always felt in San Francisco's Chinatown. He possessed a healthy respect for the culture and magic of the place, and there was a lot of it—people taking care of each other, family secrets passed down through the women, medicine that treated your spirit as much as your body. It reminded him of his MawMaw, his mother's mother, who cooked her own salve out of almond oil, beeswax, and boiled herbs. He could recall the acrid, green scent at will, and craved it even to this day when he was cut or burned.

An exultant yell caught his attention, yanking him out of his MawMaw memories. He glanced out the window to the north, up Powell. A parade was starting, probably forming to celebrate the Autumn Art Festival. Like most in displaced, close-knit communities, the people of Chinatown would find any reason to celebrate, and they'd do so often.

Children in red silk kimonos led the parade. Behind them, four women in heavy white face paint and ornate headdresses followed, and to the rear of that, one of Chinatown's famous parade dragons rippled and swelled, spitting sparklers running the length of it, tossing hot bits of light into the street.

He needed to figure out what he was going to do about Wiley and Odegaard and soon. They were known fugitives, and with the parade, this street was going to be chaos in a matter of minutes.

“Can I help you?”

Stone glanced at the shopkeeper. He'd been standing in this exact spot for twenty minutes, taking up valuable space. “Sorry. Can I buy some mango juice?”

“In back.” The man pointed toward a cooler humming against a far wall and returned to his till.

Stone nodded. His phone buzzed, and he yanked it out of his pocket as he turned back to the window. The fat-fingered man was also pulling his phone out and gluing it to his ear. A chill passed through Stone. Why did he feel like they were both about to talk to the same person? But of course that was impossible. Caller ID told Stone that his SAC was on the other end of his line.

“Hello.”

“Stone, where are you?”

Stone didn't answer immediately. He couldn't. Across the street, a dozen men in full SWAT gear were swarming upstream from the parade and toward the Golden Lucky Fortune Cookie Company factory, silent as mice, lethal as deathstalker scorpions.

75

Chinatown, San Francisco

S
alem hurried out of the bathroom after Bel. “What is it?”

“I can't even describe it to you. You won't believe it.”

Salem followed her across the apartment, weaving around the old couch, to the north end of the building. She noticed, for the first time, that Lu had pasted a strip of wallpaper imprinted with a photo of molding just below the ceiling in every room. They reached a door, its paint chipping, a red scroll emblazoned with gold lettering covering the worst of it. Bel tossed Salem a loaded glance, grasped the rusted door knob, and turned.

Salem felt the heat of the computers before the door was fully open.

Inside the room, the familiar smell of charged ions and stationary people greeted her. A tower of green lights to her left told her that Lu had her own server, which made sense given the ten computers inside, each one with its own person typing furiously. The space was dark except for the glow of ambient lights, quiet but for the sound of fingers clacking on keyboards and the hum of a heavy-duty air conditioner near the server. The windows must be painted on the inside to keep any natural light—or prying eyes—from leaking in. Salem thought she heard music outside the building, but there was no way to know.

She felt like a conductor walking into an acoustically tuned concert hall.

“If this doesn't teach me once and for all not to judge someone by how well they speak English, then nothing will,” Bel whispered into Salem's ear. “See the ID maker over there, by the camera? This is a full-service lab.”

“Out of my way!” Lu pushed past Salem to stand over the shoulder of a portly Asian man wearing round glasses. She commanded in Chinese that he do something. At least that's what it sounded like.

Salem coughed to get Lu's attention. “I thought you weren't going to show us the computers until we returned from the Mission.”

“We get new information,” Lu said without looking away from the man's computer screen. “Make it extra urgent that you get the code before Gina Hayes come to Alcatraz. Hermitage plan to kill her there. I'm eccentric, not stupid. I need to know if these computers work to break Beale's code so we don't waste time.”

“You have to tell the police,” Bel said.

Lu rolled her eyes. “No idea whose side they on. I tell Hayes, and she not even care. She said they trying to kill her all the time, what make Alcatraz special?”

Salem cocked her head. “You know Gina Hayes?”

“Duh. Now you tell me—these computers good for you?”

Salem walked over. The man was working on an HP Spectre laptop. It appeared to be the old model but running quickly. Next to him, a woman with her hair tied up in a pink bandanna was typing on a Mac. “I can't be sure until I see the keytext, but if it has access to the Internet and is fast, I'm sure it'll work fine.”

If the cipher is even crackable. People have been trying for 150 years.
But she didn't see a reason to express her doubts. Instead, she tried to see what the man was typing, but he had a privacy screen that made it impossible to read his screen unless she looked at it dead on. “Is everyone here working for the Underground?”

Lu's eyes were sharp and black. “Yes.”

Bel stepped next to Salem. “What are they doing?”

Lu sighed. She was wearing a 49ers t-shirt, sweatpants, and men's slide sandals in a camouflage pattern over Christmas socks. “Depends. Sometime, we intercept messages. Other day, we move groups of women and children to hiding, lobby for women's causes, deliver crisis supplies where needed. Mostly cleanup. We'd like to be in front of horse rather than behind one of these days.” She smiled. It creased the corners of her eyes.

Salem indicated the computers. “Who pays for all of this?”

“Bad guys not only ones with money.” Lu full-on cackled this time. Then her switch flipped, exactly like it'd done earlier that day in the kitchen. “You know someone try to kill Hayes in Iowa?”

Salem nodded. “We heard it on the radio driving here. Was that the Hermitage?”

“We don't think so. If it Hermitage, they don't fail. We think they going to try something else. We get text.”

What was it that Salem saw behind Lu's eyes? “Who was the text from?”

Lu glanced away. “No matter. You have your plan. If computer okay, you go to Dolores Mission. Now.”

“All right,” Salem said. “Should we—”

The commotion outside the painted-over windows became louder. At first, Salem thought it was more music, but then she realized it was coming from inside the fortune cookie factory.

“SFPD! Come out with your hands up!”