by Gavin, Rohan
The fact was, Tilly was a wild card—secretly admired by the girls, secretly fancied by the boys, and secretly feared by the teachers who were charged with her supervision.
The housemistress who was her appointed prison warden watched her suspiciously from across the room. Tilly pushed her food from one side of the plate to the other, then drained her cup of coffee and walked out without acknowledging her.
Tilly roamed the wood-paneled corridors past libraries and classrooms, her shoes squeaking on the waxed parquet floors. She hadn’t completed any of her homework assignments, but she usually managed to track down her test results online, and sometimes, for amusement, hacked her way to a higher grade. However, she did feel genuine remorse over Miss Khan’s science project: a tedious affair involving ticker tape and the velocity of a moving object that had been due over two weeks ago. Miss Khan was one of the more sympathetic teachers at Cranston, and Tilly felt obliged to explain herself privately rather than in front of the whole class, where it might be seen as an act of defiance or popular revolution. Miss Khan deserved better than that.
Tilly walked toward the postmodern-looking science department, crossed the atrium, and located Miss Khan’s classroom—where Tilly had observed the teacher spent most of her free time as well. Tilly peered through the window, but nobody was home. The whiteboard was blank, the chairs all arranged. Then she noticed that the door to the lab annex was slightly ajar. She knocked gently, nudging it open.
Miss Khan looked up from a lab table, wearing her customary white coat, square plastic glasses, and a mane of jet-black hair neatly tied back. Her light brown skin was younger than her twenty-nine years. If she let her hair down and adjusted her makeup choices, Tilly was convinced she was capable of being a stone-cold fox, although she doubted Miss Khan would ever submit to such a makeover.
“Oh, hello, Tilly,” she said, removing her glasses and setting down an electric soldering iron.
“Morning, Miss Khan.”
“I hope you’re having a pleasant half-term break,” she inquired gently.
“It’s fine.”
“If you’d like to have a chat, please take a seat. I was just finishing up a pet project of mine.” Miss Khan pushed aside a small device held together with clamps. It looked, at first glance, like an asthma inhaler of some kind.
Tilly focused on the task at hand. “Sorry about the velocity assignment, Miss Khan. It sort of”—she looked for the right words—“got away from me.”
Miss Khan nodded, trying to hide her disappointment. Tilly was one of her most gifted pupils—along with another student, Darkus Knightley. Both were unusual children, to say the least, yet they seemed to share an affinity for science, while being polar opposites in every other way. If Tilly would only apply herself. But the tragedy the poor girl had experienced, losing her mother at such a young age, and left with only that murkh of a father . . . Miss Khan silently chastised herself for judging Tilly at all.
“Well, never mind. If you’re here over half-term break perhaps you could work on it now,” she suggested, glancing down at her own project, as if to remind herself that her talents weren’t entirely wasted.
Tilly followed her glance and noticed that one half of the asthma inhaler was open and contained a miniature circuit board of some kind. It was like no inhaler she had ever seen before.
“What is that, Miss Khan?”
“Oh, it’s just a little gizmo I’ve been working on,” she said modestly. She picked it up and turned it around in the light, inspecting her handiwork. “It’s a self-defense tool. Very simple, really,” she went on. “Instead of salbutamol or fluticasone propionate, this canister contains pepper spray foam, stored in a highly pressurized state. On contact with an attacker it expands and sticks, blinding the person for up to half an hour. I had to modify the delivery system, of course.”
“To increase its effective range?”
“Exactly right,” she replied. “It is effective to over five yards.”
“Nice.”
“Yes, it is.” Miss Khan nodded humbly, then felt obliged to explain. “My father was an armorer in the British army. I was an only child, so as you can imagine, I spent most of my free time in his workshop . . .” She realized she was, in modern parlance, “oversharing.”
“What else have you got?” asked Tilly.
“Like this?”
“Anything, really.”
“Well, I’ve developed some night-vision goggles that Mr. Burke is using to monitor the playing fields.”
“Ah,” said Tilly, realizing any future escape attempts would be significantly hampered.
“Other than that,” said Miss Khan, thinking to herself, “nothing that’s near completion.”
“Well, keep up the good work,” said Tilly, raising her hand in almost a salute. She quickly lowered it again.
“Thank you, Tilly,” the teacher replied, genuinely touched. They exchanged a smile, both realizing the conversation had gone off-road and taken an unexpected turn. Miss Khan brought them back on track. “I look forward to seeing your velocity assignment, when it’s ready,” she said sincerely. “I have high hopes for you.”
“I’ll get right on to it,” Tilly replied, feeling even guiltier than she had when she walked in. She headed for the door, then turned back. “And by the way—that gadget? Very cool.” She nodded once more and left the room.
The silence of the office was broken as Knightley looked up from The Code, exhaled heavily, and slammed it shut.
“I find nothing of substance. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing of any interest at all,” he said, discarding it on his desk. “Perhaps it is circumstantial. Or even a coincidence.”
“You always said coincidence is the last refuge of the weak-minded,” Darkus reminded him.
“Indeed I did,” he replied, with a troubled expression. “But I fear we may be approaching that last refuge rapidly. And we have to accept that there may be an alternative theory that covers the facts more accurately than our own.” He sighed and removed his feet from the desk. “Let’s lay out the facts as we know them. We can be certain of the following: Ambrose Chambers was the pseudonym of literary agent Bram Beecham. Presto sought to cover up this fact by stealing the signed first edition from the auction. QED.” Knightley tapped on his desk conclusively. “We know Bram Beecham was responsible for writing The Code, but he claims he was transcribing from an older text. That argument is supported by the Order of the New Dawn, who contend that the original text harnessed supernatural powers of some kind. But neither Beecham nor the Order can be considered reliable witnesses.” Knightley rapped his knuckles on the desk impatiently. “Beecham was murdered by his assistant, Chloe, for what reason we cannot be sure, but most likely to stop him from talking. So it’s likely that she and Presto are connected, possibly through the Combination.” Knightley paused. “Our only remaining clue is the name ‘Underwood,’ written in blood. I strongly believe this is a sign of Morton’s involvement, possibly proof of his membership of the Combination. But this last part is conjecture, I’ll admit.”
“Which means we still only have one solid lead,” said Darkus, rendering his father quiet for a moment. “The book.”
“Be my guest . . .” He handed it to Darkus, then slumped back in his chair and closed his eyes in meditation.
Darkus opened the cover and, once again, began to read—slowly, so as not to miss anything. The first line began:
He read on . . .
Chapter 18
Between the Lines
Darkus continued reading, looking and listening for any clue.
Darkus felt his brain was being bombarded—not by positive messages but by negative ones. Still he read on.
Darkus understood his father’s frustration with the book: its shallow pursuit of a superficial world, its reliance on expectation and luck instead of the hard-earned achievement of the individual, which was what good detective work depended on. Agitated, he read on.
Darkus stop
ped. Something about the last sentence caught his attention. He went back and read it again, slowly, letting the peaks and troughs of the letters burn themselves into his visual cortex.
There was more to the text than first appeared.
“Dad?”
Knightley opened one eye, to determine whether it was worth interrupting his rest. “What is it, Doc?”
“Can I use your microscope?”
Curious, Knightley prized himself from his chair and walked to the shelf that held his forensic microscope: a white metal apparatus with two eyecups, a slide, and a rotating head with multiple lenses. He plugged it into a small TV monitor. The monitor flickered to life, then snowstormed. Knightley smacked it sharply, and the snowstorm switched to a display menu.
“Proceed,” said Knightley.
Darkus held up The Code and quickly tore out the page he’d been reading. Knightley winced. He’d seen many dead bodies and witnessed many brutal crimes, but there was still something violent about ripping a book.
“Allow me to offer up a theory,” said Darkus.
“Continue.”
Darkus held up The Code. “If the book isn’t inherently ‘evil,’” he began, “and its message—while morally questionable—isn’t specifically telling the reader to commit a crime . . . then the answer must lie within the text itself.”
“Wrong,” said Knightley with conviction. “If that was true, the text would affect every reader the same way. Instead it only affects a select few.”
“Let’s have a closer look.” Darkus placed the torn page under the lens. A blurred image appeared on the monitor.
“Try this.” Knightley rotated the lens head to a different magnification.
The printed words appeared on the monitor in black and white. Darkus positioned the page to capture the line that had caught his attention.
“There,” said Darkus.
Knightley’s eyes narrowed; his nostrils flared. Then his face unwound again.
“Just a printing error. The typeface is corrupted.”
“Exactly.”
“There’s no method to it. No logic.”
“Look again,” said Darkus.
Knightley peered into the image on the monitor, genuinely puzzled. Then he moved even closer, the tip of his nose almost touching the screen as his eye picked out the odd letters, which now stood out boldly to him:
Knightley’s eyes lit up. “Certain letters are printed in a strange, slightly modified typeface, but not every time,” he noted. “Only when it spells r-a-e-f. You’re saying there’s a code in The Code?”
Darkus nodded. “The same letters are repeated in the same typeface, in the same order, every second paragraph.”
Knightley snatched the page from under the microscope and stared into it like he was staring into a void. The letters R, A, E, F stood out like the optical illusion of a face hidden in an abstract picture, or the haunted face of Jesus appearing on a household object. One moment it was ordinary, the next it was the vessel for a private secret.
Knightley’s eyes widened. Suddenly he wasn’t looking at a page of text, but a swirling vortex with the same four letters repeated over and over.
“r-a-e-f,” said Knightley. “If there’s a meaning, it’s lost on me.”
“You’re reading left to right,” said Darkus. “Try reading right to left.”
Knightley blinked, astonished. “Fear,” he said under his breath.
“Precisely.”
“But no one reads right to left,” argued Knightley. “Not in the Western world.”
“Not true. A boy in my class was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. He had trouble focusing on words and reading basic sentences. He said it was just the way his brain worked.”
“Involuntary saccadic eye movements,” said Knightley, quoting the medical term. “Some people can’t read consistently left to right. Their eyes have a tendency to run ahead or lag behind instead of traveling smoothly. In theory, that would make them susceptible to the hidden message.”
“The theory’s sound,” said Darkus. “The message only affects readers whose brain chemistry prohibits them from giving the book their full attention.”
“Once again, Doc, you’ve out-reasoned me.”
“I like to believe there’s always a rational explanation rather than a supernatural one,” said Darkus.
Knightley felt his brain racing to catch up with the steel-trap mind of his son. It was a sobering but fascinating pursuit.
“Then tell me this . . . ,” said Knightley. “What makes the reader commit the crime?”
Darkus stared into space for a moment, turning the problem over in his mind like a sphere spinning suspended in an electromagnetic field; he observed it from every angle. “The continual repetition of the word ‘fear’ would create feelings of anxiety and paranoia in the reader, without them ever consciously knowing why. For Lee Wadsworth it manifested as his worst phobia: the fear of insects. For every reader it would be different.”
“That still doesn’t explain why Wadsworth would want to target a bank. Or what he intended to do with the proceeds.”
Darkus turned the problem over in his mind again, divining the answer from the soup of possibilities, negatives and positives, zeros and ones.
“You’re right,” Darkus agreed. “He had to have received an instruction.” A thought struck him like a bolt of lightning.
“What is it?” asked his father.
“Underwood has a stutter.”
“Yes.”
“Lee Wadsworth said the voice that told him to rob the bank cut in and out. And you said Underwood practiced hypnosis.”
Knightley realized where he was heading. “Underwood delivered the instruction.”
Darkus nodded. “What if ‘fear’ is a keyword? Underwood uses it to place the subject in some kind of hypnotic state, then gives his instruction. In theory, the instruction could be anything,” Darkus went on. “The Combination could assemble an army of thieves, assassins . . . whatever they require.”
“But how would Underwood contact them? And how would he know which readers to recruit?”
Darkus quickly leafed through the book until he reached the back cover. At the bottom of it, a tagline read:
“The readers contact him.” Darkus reached for his phone and dialed the number.
They both listened as an automated female voice said: “Your call is being transferred. Please hold.” The line continued ringing for another thirty seconds.
“They’re bouncing the call, redirecting it so it’s impossible to trace,” said Knightley. “They’re covering their tracks.”
Then an automated male voice announced: “Please leave a message with your name and telephone number after the tone.”
Darkus ended the call. “That’s how Underwood locates them,” he said. “The readers are perfect criminals. They have no knowledge of one another . . . or of who gave them the orders.” He realized, not without irony, “They would think the book told them to do it.”
He looked to his father for congratulation, but Knightley’s face had suddenly clouded over, appearing more troubled than ever. Darkus opened his mouth to speak as Knightley held up a finger and urgently pointed to the doorway.
A single white dove had entered the room, strutting across the carpet, blinking at them impassively. It looked like some kind of sentinel, or sign.
“Dad . . . ? What’s it doing here?” whispered Darkus, lacking a suitable explanation for what was in front of him.
“Bogna!!” Knightley cried out. For once, there was no response. “Stay back, Doc. It’s a message.”
Knightley knelt down and picked up the bird, finding a small paper scroll attached to its neck. The dove flapped its wings as he gently removed the scroll and unfurled it. The message read simply:
“Doc,” said Knightley, feeling his heart thudding in his chest. “I want you to go and find the best hiding place you can.”
Chapter 19
Cutting the
Cord
Darkus couldn’t disguise the panic in his voice. “But, Dad—”
“Don’t argue with me. The Combination is here, and I can’t guarantee a satisfactory outcome.”
Knightley walked to the open window and released the dove. He looked down to see a long black sedan with tinted windows parked outside. It resembled a hearse.
Darkus stood frozen.
“Do as I say,” Knightley ordered. “Whatever happens, I want you to stay hidden and don’t come out.”
“What about you?”
Knightley grabbed Darkus by the shoulders. “Let me worry about me.”
A creaking noise came from the lower staircase. Knightley silently gestured to Darkus to scram, then went to a wood-paneled cupboard and took out a short baton. He pressed a switch, and the baton telescoped out to a length of two feet. He pressed the switch again, and a low electric hum emanated from the tip.
Darkus didn’t have time to ask what it was. He looked around as if playing a bizarre game of hide-and-seek, only this time the stakes were exponentially higher. He crossed the landing to the bathroom.
Behind him, Knightley descended the stairs softly, the baton trained in front of him.
Darkus looked around the bathroom, scanning for options, but found none. He looked back at the office, but it was too obvious, surely. The catastrophizer began ticking and vibrating, generating a variety of possible outcomes, none of them good. He felt the familiar sensation of fear, draining his adrenal glands, quickening his pulse, leaving a dry, sour taste in his mouth. He looked around the room again for a hiding place.