The Copernicus Archives #2

by Tony Abbott

  Darrell laughed. “A twenty-letter word is my brain activity!”

  “Ha!” the woman said, raising her eyes. “Good one, but no. Emma! Your friends are here! And I need a twenty-letter word for a record of brain activity!”

  Your friends are here?

  I heard a laugh from the hall, and a slender, short-haired teenage girl swept into the room. “Oh, I don’t know, Grandmum. Probably electro-something—”

  “Ha!” The woman bent over the puzzle again. “Electroencephalogram!”

  “You’re good,” Wade said, and I remembered that before Galina had Wade’s uncle Henry murdered, the man had used coded crosswords to alert Guardians around the world.

  Emma thrust out her hand. “I’m Emma Gorley. Julian’s friend. He called to say you needed help with a German code. This sparkly lady is my grandmother.”

  The woman set down her pen and smiled. “I worked on the Bombe, you know. The Turing Bombe. I’m Mavis Gorley. Welcome to Bletchley.”

  “We’re so pleased to meet you,” said Sara. “Thank you for your service.”

  But that was all the small talk. The moment I told her that we had something called “the Holbein puzzle,” Mavis sat up sharply in her chair and her eyes narrowed.

  “Hans Holbein? A brilliant cryptographer if ever there was one. As we used to say, every minute we delay is another soldier killed. Show me what you have!”

  Everyone looked at me. I didn’t hesitate. There was no way—no way—that this delightful woman could be a friend of Terence’s, and her granddaughter a friend of Julian’s, and have anything to do with the Teutonic Order.

  I knew she was on our side. How could a Wren be anything else?

  “Hans Holbein made a puzzle. I saw it in a . . . dream, then drew it,” I said, opening my notebook. “This isn’t the original, but it’s pretty exact.”

  I showed her what I had drawn on the train.

  Mavis drew in a breath. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, my dear!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Mavis’s face went dark, concentrated, but her old eyes glowed.

  “And I thought you were going to give me something simple. This is quite fascinating. The Gothic-style letters”—she pointed them out with the retracted tip of her ballpoint—“proclaim it as indeed German, early sixteenth century. Holbein is very likely its author. The alchemical symbols are common enough.”

  “We think it tells the location of something Sir Thomas More called an algorism stone, which we think is code for a special box,” Wade said, glancing at me. “When he was executed, we think he gave this box to his family.”

  “We can tell you more, but there’s a bit of danger involved,” said Sara.

  “More than a bit,” Darrell added. “There’s a group called the Teutonic Order trying to stop us from decrypting this.”

  “By any means necessary,” said Lily.

  “They’ve already tried to kill us,” Wade said.

  “Kill you?” said Mavis. “Well, of course they have! You only know you’re onto something if someone wants you dead. I’m trained for that, you know.”

  She took a huge sloshing gulp of tea, pushed her cup to the side, bent over my notebook, then jumped to her feet. “I need the photocopy machine!” She bounded across the hall, where a copier was hidden behind a narrow set of closet doors.

  “Is there a restroom?” asked Sara.

  “I’ll show you,” said Emma.

  No sooner had they left the room than an elderly gentleman doddered into the library. I wondered if he had worked at Bletchley Park, too, and asked him.

  “Ah, no,” he said. “Thothe codebweakers were the weal hewoes.”

  His pant legs were clipped tightly around his calves, indicating that he had just been on a bicycle. He had a mop of bushy gray hair and thick glasses that kept sliding down his nose as he peered at the books. He grinned toothily. “Bookth! Thome of them you can’t find anywhere elthe in England!”

  I smiled back. “It’s a wonderful place, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, it ith,” he said. “It thertainly ith. Ta-ta!”

  After nearly knocking him down on her way back in, Mavis stormed over to us, waving a sheet of white card stock. “Scissors!” she shouted, even as she rummaged through the old drawers, wrenching them out until she had found a pair. In seconds she had trimmed her copy into a perfect circle.

  “You said this was Holbein’s puzzle?” Mavis asked.

  “Yes—”

  “Incorrect!” she said.

  “But, I’m pretty sure—”

  “This,” she said, “is one half of Holbein’s puzzle! It is, as you probably guessed, the base of a two-part cipher wheel. The other wheel will be smaller and fit over this one. You’ll also need a key to know the sequence of turns for the top wheel. The key could be a word or a number and could, in fact, be among the symbols on this wheel. But you won’t find the answer without the top wheel.”

  “Something else to look for,” said Lily. “Is there anything you can tell us?”

  Mavis nodded her head. “There is some code-breaking we can do. For instance, nine Gothic letters are interspersed with the symbols. They need to be unscrambled. There are several Latin letters here, too. They could spell a clue, or a number. For that, we will need the Bombe. And that is in Hut Eleven—”

  “Unweth you die wight here!” said a raspy voice.

  We wheeled around to see the mop-haired man with the bicycle clips on his pants. He tore off his hair and tugged out his set of false teeth.

  “Archibald Doyle!” Lily gasped.

  “Only me mum calls me Archibald!” he snarled. “You best call me ‘the last person I saw before I died’!”

  With one quick move Archie thrust Mavis aside. She collapsed gently on the carpet with a gasp. Then he lunged past all of us and stole the code wheel right off the desk!

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Without thinking, I grabbed Doyle’s outstretched hand and yanked it hard. He screamed and swung his free arm at me. Wade was suddenly there with raised forearms—a weird move, but it blocked the punch. I snatched the code wheel out of Doyle’s fingers and jumped back.

  Breathing hard, his face a wrinkle of pain, he drew a pistol from his tweed jacket. “Give me that thingy,” he growled, waving his gun around.

  I backed up. We all did. Darrell and Lily helped Mavis to her feet. Her cane was on the floor. She locked her eyes on Doyle.

  “One thing I dislike very much is a traitor!” she snarled. “And you, once a proper Englishman, I presume—whose parents my code mates and I defended with our hearts during the war—have sold your soul to a foreign power!”

  Doyle wiggled his gun at her, his eyes fixed on the code wheel in my hand.

  “During the war, eh? We’re still at war, ma’am. You”—he said to me—“give me that thing, whatever it is, or the old lady gets it.”

  While Lily and Darrell moved back to the window with Mavis, Wade was edging along the wall on their right. Another spy move. Spread out, distract the enemy. By now I was in the middle of everyone.

  “How did you even find us?” I asked, realizing that my nose had started to bleed again. I gently slid a napkin from my pocket.

  “You’re the genius here; you figure it out. But don’t take too long. You’ll soon be dead, you will.”

  At that moment, Sara and Emma returned from the restroom. Emma yelled what might have been a British curse word and pummeled Doyle with her fists.

  I crouched, snatched up Mavis’s cane, and swatted his legs. He fell to his knees. At the same time, Mavis heaved an antique telephone at him.

  Trying desperately to block it, Doyle threw up a hand—his gun hand. The phone made an ugly sound when it met his forehead, but worse was the blast from his gun. It blew a neat hole in the ceiling.

  “Bletchley Park is a registered national charity, you fiend!” Mavis squealed.

  Lily and Darrell now leaped at him from different sides, keeping him on the floor, while Wade t
ipped over one of the desk chairs and pinned Doyle underneath. Then Emma took Mavis by the arm, and we all hurried out.

  Slamming the library door behind us, we stumbled into the bright outdoors. At least a dozen security officers were running across the lawn toward the mansion.

  “Left!” Emma called, rushing around the house and down past a small post office and—surprisingly—a toy shop, right into a pack of visitors and a guide.

  “Scatter!” I yelled. “There’s a killer chasing us!”

  You’d be surprised, but that did nothing at all. People gave us looks as if we should mind our own business. Even the presence of a near-ninety-year-old woman running—running!—didn’t seem to alarm them.

  Then they saw Archie, who must have overturned the chair and squeaked by the guards, busting out a side window. He huffed past the post office with a gun in his hand, and someone decided to scream.

  “Aw, you hush!” Archie snapped, firing into the air.

  Darrell ran with his mother. Wade rushed ahead with Mavis and Emma. Lily and I followed. We could hear yelling now, followed by another gunshot.

  “This way!” Emma called, reminding me of Meg and Bucklersbury. We pushed into a closed-in yard that housed a rambling stretch of redbrick buildings. A long, low bungalow stood on one side, a string of cottages on the other.

  “Gran, where to?” Emma asked.

  “The garages,” said Mavis, pointing to a bank of open bays behind us. “We Wrens used to get the soldiers to give us lifts into town in their trucks. It wasn’t hard to convince them, after all. Everyone, inside—”

  We piled in. It was dark in there, but I could make out three or four restored antique cars, their moonlike hubcaps gleaming. Moments later, I heard footsteps rustling the gravel outside the garages, and we immediately crouched behind an old troop truck. Doyle crept past the nearest open bay, silhouetted against the light. He swung his pistol like a gunslinger, slowly side to side.

  “You can’t run away from me!” he growled from the opening.

  “How did he get away from security?” I whispered.

  “They don’t carry guns,” Emma whispered back. “Boys, come with me.” She nodded to the back of the garage, where a narrow door stood halfway open. While the rest of us stayed put, Emma, Wade, and Darrell inched out the back door.

  Doyle remained in the garage-bay opening. Then Lily slipped away and went out the back, too. Thanks a lot. It was only Sara, Mavis, and me now.

  My heart pounded faster. My head throbbed, felt suddenly heavy, then light as a balloon. Please, not that, not now. Archie stepped into the garage. All at once, I saw Emma and Wade tiptoe across the yard behind him. Emma purposely scraped her shoes on the gravel. Archie spun around, but Wade was ready with a handful of gravel to his face. Archie fired wildly. Then Lily and Darrell were there with the security guards. While the guards wrestled Archie down, we dashed across the yard and were hurrying past a memorial to Polish code breakers when Sara’s phone rang.

  “Roald? Where are you—” More shots thudded from the yard. “Mavis, my husband’s here—”

  “Tell him to head to the Block B parking lot!” Mavis hooted. She took hold of Sara now. “This way!” She toddled off among the greenery. “In case the traitor gets free again, we’ll lose him among the huts. Here. Hut Eleven!”

  Sara whispered into the phone, while Mavis pushed into a low wooden structure, like a single-story barn, where the code people had worked during the war. Sara, Lily, and I followed, while Emma, Wade, and Darrell stopped short.

  “We’ll stand guard,” Wade said.

  “Only we won’t be standing,” said Darrell. “We’ll be spying.” They darted around the back of the hut.

  “Emma’s nice,” I said to Lily when we got safely inside. “I’m not sure I like her just splitting off with the guys, though.”

  “You’re not sure?” Lily said. “I’m sure. I don’t like it. We’re the team. The four of us. Oh, no. I’m positive I don’t like it.”

  “Girls,” said Sara. “Some help, please?”

  The tables inside Hut 11 were piled with books and papers and folders, old phones, even an original Enigma. Mavis told us that the hut had been dressed for a television show about the Wrens and had just been in a film. Behind the desks stood a massive rectangular machine about seven feet tall. It was, Mavis said, “the Bombe.” The front was fitted with over a hundred color-coded circular drums in columns and rows. “Rotors,” Mavis called them. The open back side was a complete snarl of wires and pins and circuits.

  Mavis stood in front of it and seemed lost in history. “The thrill of building and using this magnificent device . . . Alan, Dilly, all the rest of us . . .”

  Then she was back with a start. “Now, then. Without the top wheel of the Holbein puzzle, the characters on the bottom wheel are no more than an alphabet soup of symbols and letters. We’ll need the Bombe to help us narrow down the possibilities of letter combinations. So . . .”

  For ten solid minutes, Mavis grumbled and groaned, beamed and frowned over the German letters, scratching the characters on a pad of paper, erasing, then rescratching. Then, after studying the drums on the front side, she busied herself rewiring the back until her old fingers couldn’t manage, so she enrolled Lily and me to connect the wires where she told us to.

  At last, Mavis said we were ready.

  “Ready?” said Sara. “For . . .”

  “For this!” Mavis flipped several switches on the left side of the cabinet, and the rotors began to turn. The roar of the machine at full tilt was incredible. Like a jet engine warming up. The drums spun around at different speeds, the top row going fastest, the second row down moving once every rotation of the top row, and so on. It was almost hypnotic.

  Lily and Sara looked at me anxiously.

  “This is what we did, you see,” Mavis said softly. “Hundreds like me, from 1939 to the end. It was a grand time. A serious time, of course. But so exciting.”

  When, after a couple of minutes, the Bombe’s rotors stopped, Mavis took a deep breath. She copied out a sequence of letters, then sat at a second machine that looked very much like an old typewriter. Only this one had lights, wires, and wheels on it in addition to the keyboard and another set of letters.

  This was the Enigma.

  One by one she tapped in the letters she had gotten from the Bombe. A second keyboard lit up with a different letter than the one she pressed on the keyboard. She wrote those on her yellow pad. Finally, she was done.

  “Hmm,” she said. “I believe it is an old Hanseatic code. The German letters A-B-E-E-H-I-L-L-L are scrambled, but there are two possibilities the Bombe has found. Halle, which means, well, ‘hall,’ and blei, which means ‘lead.’ A hall of lead, perhaps. Sounds most eerie. From the Latin letters, we have VID and VIVIM, which translates to ‘Vid lives,’ if that makes sense. I’m less sure about these. There are also three Xs. Possibly a number, a location, coordinates—”

  There was a tap on one of the windows, and we saw Emma and the boys creeping low past it, gesturing frantically to the door, as if to say, He found you!

  I couldn’t stand the idea of it, but there was no option. “We have to block the doorway,” I whispered. “Lily!” We grabbed both ends of a table and lifted it.

  “The BBC is going to be quite miffed,” said Mavis. “But this is war!”

  Just before we turned the table on its side, Mavis snatched the heavy Enigma off it. “This really is priceless!” she said. We overturned the table, and the telephone and papers and everything slid to the floor with a crash, but it barricaded the door. We shot toward the back, while Archie hurled himself through the front of the hut. He came in too quickly to stop. He struck the table and went head over heels over it. Mavis lowered the Enigma on his head, and he collapsed in a heap to the floor.

  The back door of the hut swung in suddenly, and Darrell appeared. “All aboard the escape train!”

  By the time we staggered out of the hut, alarms were go
ing off across the Park. Then we heard a loud snapping and popping coming toward the entrance. It was a small car that looked as if it had been in the same war as Mavis had. Both side mirrors were broken and dangling from wires. There was a serious dent in the passenger-side fender. The exhaust was smoking, the engine clattering.

  “Dad!” said Wade. “And Terence!”

  Mavis breathed hard, then finally hung on Emma’s arm. “Even I have my limits. Go, Sara, children. Search hard for the rest of the Holbein puzzle!”

  Roald jumped from the car and wrapped his arms around Sara. “My gosh—”

  “We have to get back to London, ASAP,” I said.

  “Get in. I’ll drive,” Roald said.

  “Please, Dad, look at the car,” said Wade. “We’re too young to die.”

  Then, against all odds, Archie was there, his face bruised, his hair a mess, yelling and firing wildly. Terence jumped into the driver’s seat. He jammed his foot on the gas and tore straight at Archie, spinning around in a screeching doughnut at the last second. The car struck an iron fence post. The exhaust exploded with a cloud, and the rear bumper sailed off, right into Archie.

  He flew—slightly—through the air and landed in a heap.

  Wade howled. “Serves you right!”

  Emma hooted, and Mavis cheered from the edge of the parking lot, where a team of security guards appeared, their batons drawn on Archie. Terence gunned the engine and swung the poor car around. We dived in. He punched the gas, and we raced away. As the guards charged Archie like an attacking army, he ran after us, still shouting. “You’ll never escape me in the long run!”

  Maybe not, I thought as we tore out of Bletchley Park, but we did this time.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  We motored at top speed back to London in the shot-up, bumperless, too-small car, and finally approached the city a little over an hour later. We were running out of time. The day was ebbing fast, it was sprinkling, lights were coming on.

  Wade had worked on the Latin the whole way with his father, not getting very far. “If we put aside the VID VIVIM possibility—if it’s not words at all, but numbers—it still doesn’t work out.”