The Shadow Cipher

by Laura Ruby

  Jaime typed the verse into his phone.

  “I wish Mom had gotten us cell phones for our birthday,” Tess grumbled. “Every other thirteen-year-old has one.”

  “Did you guys have one of those blowout bar mitzvahs?” Jaime said. “Like with dancers and a DJ and everyone dancing the hora and stuff?”

  Theo said, “Oh no. Just a small ceremony. We don’t like big parties.”

  “Our parents don’t have that kind of money, anyway,” Tess said. “And we don’t have that many friends. I mean . . . .um . . .” Tess’s face flared red. “What did you do for your thirteenth birthday party?”

  “Haven’t had one yet. I turn thirteen in September. I got this phone when I turned twelve,” Jaime said, grinning. “Benefits of having a dad who feels guilty about taking a job overseas.” He held up the phone. “We should have done this search first. The verse on the stove was written by Nathan Hale around 1776.”

  Theo nibbled on the fry. “Hale was a part of the Culper Ring.”

  “He was seen wandering around New York City taking notes whenever he passed a British barracks. He was caught by the redcoats and hanged,” Jaime said.

  “I didn’t say he was a very good spy,” said Theo.

  “There were other spies who got away. Cato, an enslaved man who worked for a dude named Hercules Mulligan. Cato was questioned, but nothing was ever proven.”

  “He was a good spy,” said Tess.

  “And it looks like there were some lady spies, too. Anna Strong. And another lady who was never identified. People still call her by code number: 355.”

  “She was a very good spy,” said Tess.

  “The number 355 could mean something,” Theo said. “Or maybe 355 was a woman the Morningstarrs knew?”

  Tess frowned at her burger, mumbled, “I feel bad for the bugs.” She gave the rest of it to Nine, who swallowed it in one bite. “Researching this could take forever. I wish we could ask Grandpa.”

  “Well, we can’t,” Theo said. “We’ll have to keep reading.”

  Tess bit her lip. “You know who else might know about the spies of George Washington.”

  “We can’t risk it,” said Theo, knowing immediately who she was talking about. “If they knew we’d found something they’d start investigating, and if they start investigating, then everyone will start investigating. Even Slant.”

  “We’ll have to see them sometime.”

  Theo dropped the fry to his tray. “We should go to the library, find what else they have on the Culper Ring, and—”

  “We don’t have time for that, Theo. Not when our home is on the line. Not when there are people around who already know all this stuff.”

  “Which people?” said Jaime.

  Theo watched a mechanical snail make its lazy way across a window, leaving a sparkling rainbow on the glass in its wake. How could he tell his sister that one or two small discoveries didn’t mean that they’d be the ones to solve the Cipher? How could he tell his sister that, even now, he wasn’t sure that the Cipher had a solution? And that Grandpa had never been?

  “But we’ll have to be careful,” Tess was saying. “Really careful. We can’t let on we’ve found something. They’ll be all over us. In a nice way, but still. We could pretend that one of us has a summer project about Revolutionary spies or something.”

  “Careful around who?” Jaime asked again.

  Tess had already made up her mind. She grabbed the rubbing, folded it neatly. She handed it back to Jaime. “Don’t show this to anyone.”

  “I wouldn’t. But are you guys going to tell me who we’re talking about?”

  “My grandpa Ben’s old friends.”

  Jaime finished his burger, crumpled the wrapper into a ball. “I’m guessing you’re not talking about his pals at the bingo hall or the bowling alley.”

  “No,” said Theo. “His friends at the Old York Puzzler and Cipherist Society.”

  They caught the M103 solarbus. It sat up high enough that they could look down on the solar “wings” folded neatly on top of each passing car. Jaime was sitting diagonally in front of Theo, so Theo had a great view of his latest sketch; a superhero-like character balanced on top of the nearest car like she was riding a surfboard. She was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and what looked like a bandolier of sledgehammers.

  Tess peered between the seats. “I thought that lady superheroes wore high heels and short shorts.”

  “Here we go,” said Theo.

  Jaime said, “You want me to draw her in short shorts?”

  “No! I just thought when boys draw lady superheroes, they put them in dumb outfits.”

  “Hey, now,” Jaime said. “Plenty of girls draw them that way. And the guy superheroes wear tights and other dumb stuff.”

  “Not as dumb as the outfits the girls wear. Metal bikinis or whatever. I hate that. Unless the women have skin made of diamonds, any idiot could stab them in the femoral artery with a pencil and they’d bleed out.”

  “That’s why she’s wearing the armor,” Jaime said. “Stylish yet practical.”

  Tess laughed.

  Jaime tucked his sketchbook away when they got closer to the Old York Puzzler and Cipherist Society, located in what was once the Five Points neighborhood and the site of the Morningstarrs’ first home when they arrived in New York City in 1798. The bus dropped them right in front of the massive circular Croton Fountain with its four “rivers”—streams of water in waist-high marble troughs flowing east, west, north, and south. Behind the fountain was the Embassy of the Five Hundred Nations, flying the colorful flags of First Nations from the Abenaki to the Comanche, Pawnee to the Sioux. A man with two neat black braids and a sharp blue business suit sat on the edge of the fountain, eating a vanilla ice-cream cone. He nodded a greeting as they walked by. They nodded back.

  A few minutes later, they arrived in front of a largish building that looked more like a warehouse than the home of one of the oldest and most secretive organizations in New York City.

  “Big,” said Jaime.

  “They need the space,” Tess told him.

  “For what?”

  “You’ll see,” Theo and Tess said at the same time.

  “Do you guys practice that?”

  Together, they said, “Ha.”

  Next to a pair of heavy wooden doors there was a small plaque and a buzzer.

  THE OLD YORK PUZZLER AND CIPHERIST SOCIETY

  BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

  He didn’t miss this place, that’s what Theo had told himself when Grandpa quit the society, what he kept telling himself when it became clear Grandpa wouldn’t be coming back. But it was strange to be standing outside the building, contemplating the buzzer, strange to be standing without Grandpa—Grandpa, who used to stroll right in, who used to consider this old building a second home, Grandpa, who never needed an appointment.

  “Theo, are you calculating the volume of the building or are you going to ring the buzzer?” Tess said.

  Theo pressed the button.

  After a few moments, a bored female voice said, “Yes?”

  “It’s, um, Theo and Tess Biedermann? We don’t have an appointment, but were wondering if maybe we could—”

  “Theo and . . . SWEET MOTHER OF KITTENS, STAY RIGHT THERE, I’M SENDING HIM UP,” said the voice, then cut out.

  They waited. And waited. After about five minutes, the door flew open and a large white man with thinning wheat-colored hair, bright blue eyes, and the kind of muscular physique ideal for violent sports or movie gladiators stood there, breathing as if he’d just come in from a run. He looked from Tess to Theo back to Tess, then opened his arms wide.

  “Hi, Uncle Edgar!” Tess said, flinging herself into them.

  Edgar Wellington caught her, laughing. “I wondered when you two would come knocking. How long has it been?”

  “Almost six months,” Theo said. I don’t need this place, I won’t miss this place.

  “That’s way too long. How are you?”

&nbs
p; Tess blurted: “Darnell Slant bought our building.”

  Uncle Edgar held Tess by the shoulders. “I heard.”

  “We’re not going to let anybody take our home.”

  Uncle Edgar nodded. “I believe that.”

  “We’re not going to live in a car!”

  “Excellent news.”

  “We don’t have a car,” said Theo.

  Uncle Edgar let go of Tess and clapped Theo on the back. “Which is just as well. You can’t live in your car if you don’t have a car.” He turned to Jaime. “And who is this?”

  “Jaime Cruz, sir.”

  Uncle Edgar shook his hand firmly. “Jaime! Nice to meet you! Have you ever been to the archives before?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Jaime said.

  “Come in then, and take a look.”

  They walked into a small, oak-paneled lobby with a few couches and chairs arranged around a low coffee table. Except for the newspaper articles about the Old York Cipher framed on the walls, it could have been the waiting room at the dentist’s.

  Uncle Edgar strode across the small room to a plain wooden door on the opposite side. It seemed ordinary in every sense of the word, but when he opened it, he revealed a steel wall with a keypad in the middle of it. He punched in some numbers and the door slid open. Behind the door was a steel box that appeared to be an elevator but was really a sort of holding area. Edgar motioned them all inside. As he waited for the door to close behind them, he said, “I suppose your grandfather couldn’t drop by?”

  Theo didn’t have to look at Tess to know the expression she must be making. Her whole face screwed up tight, balled fist banging on the side of her leg. “Grandpa isn’t traveling much these days. Not even in the city.”

  “Ah,” Edgar said, as if he had known exactly how Grandpa was doing, which he probably did. Edgar Wellington had been friends with Grandpa Ben for decades. Plus, the cipherists seemed to know everything, even things that didn’t have anything to do with the Cipher.

  Once the steel door had closed behind them, Uncle Edgar moved to the back wall, where another keypad was mounted. He raised his hand to punch in more numbers, but before he did, he turned back to Theo, Tess, and Jaime. “Are you guys ready?”

  “Yes!” said Tess and Jaime. Theo said nothing. He was telling himself that he didn’t need this place, didn’t miss this place.

  Then a hole opened up in the steel, dialing bigger and bigger until the hole had erased the steel, and the only thing Theo could tell himself was that he was a liar.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jaime

  The first glimpse of the archives punched the word out of Jaime: “Whoa!”

  Instead of being on the ground floor—the way you’d expect to be—they walked out onto a large platform where they could look at the cavernous spaces both above and below. The building had all its interior floors removed, leaving only four narrow walkways ringing the perimeter. The walls of the entire structure were lined floor to ceiling with shelves, those shelves packed with books and manuscripts. At the bottom of the structure, tables and chairs were arranged around cases displaying artifacts, scrolls, puzzle boxes, and gizmos. Though the shelves lining the walls and the tables and chairs were wood, much of the rest of the structure was metal—metal guardrails around each balcony, a wheelable filigree staircase that curled from the uppermost balcony to the ground floor three stories below. In one corner was a single birdcage in which a large black mynah bird whistled and flapped. A bunch of people sat at tables and in chairs, talking and bickering.

  The mynah suddenly squawked: “Cat! Cat! Cat!”

  Three stories below, more than half a dozen faces looked up, all of them grinning like clowns. “Wellington! Why are you dawdling up there? And why are you all grinning like clowns?”

  Jaime didn’t know if he was grinning like a clown, but he did feel like leaping out of his own skin. He had never seen anything so close to the secret lair of the superheroes he’d spent so much time drawing. If Batman’s Batcave and Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum had a baby, it would be the Old York Puzzler and Cipherist Society’s Archives.

  They took the tiny staircase one at a time, the whole thing vibrating with each step. Jaime wondered if they had picked this whirling staircase to make the trip into the heart of the archives doubly dizzying, so you never knew where to look as you made your descent.

  A woman with a light brown face, bright pink hair, and a flowered dress like something out of the 1950s stood at the bottom of the staircase, beaming. She elbowed Edgar Wellington out of the way.

  “Hey, Ms. Sparks,” Theo said.

  “Ms. Sparks, Ms. Sparks, who are you calling Ms. Sparks? I’m Imogen, you little fuzzball,” she said, and gathered him up in her arms. “And you, too!” She squeezed Tess. Then she turned to Jaime. “And who is this handsome young man?”

  “Jaime Cruz, ma’am.”

  “I’m a ms., I’m a ma’am—you kids are killing me. Nice to meet you, Jaime,” she said, and gave him a squeeze, too, so tight that it could have doubled as the Heimlich maneuver. Then she placed both palms on her knees and made her face level with Nine’s. “And hello there, kitty. How are you? How many lives do you have left? Eleven or twelve, I bet.” Nine mrrowed and rubbed against Imogen’s combat boots.

  Another woman charged over to them, a nose ring glinting against tan skin. “I’m Priya Sharma,” she said, giving them another round of hugs. “You can call me Priya,” she told Jaime.

  “Keep hugging them like that and they’ll need an oxygen tank,” a white man with salt-and-pepper hair said from his wingback chair.

  “Oh, just because you’re a cold fish doesn’t mean everyone is, Gunter,” said Imogen Sparks.

  “Just because I don’t feel the need to squeeze the life out of children doesn’t make me a cold fish. I’m Gunter Deiderich.” He nodded at them all. “I’m sorry about your home.”

  “We all are,” said another man, whose bushy beard began right under his dark eyes. “Do you remember me? I’m Gino Ventimiglia.”

  “And that,” said Priya, “is Gino’s beard, which is making a bid for world domination.”

  “This is Theo’s hair,” said Tess, “which is giving Gino’s beard a run for its money.”

  “Maybe they can all join forces and defeat Slant,” said an olive-skinned and elegant man who introduced himself as Omar Khayyám, and gave everyone brief and elegant handshakes. After that, they said hello to Adrian Birch, Flo Harriman, and Ray Turnage, and got a shoulder clap, a fist bump, and a high five, not necessarily in that order. The only society member present who didn’t greet them with a hug or a high five or a handshake was a yellowy-pale woman Edgar introduced as Delancey DeBrule. The woman said nothing, simply sucked her teeth in disapproval.

  Tess leaned over and whispered, “I once compared her to a walking stick. I don’t know why she was so insulted; phasmids are amazing insects. To escape predators, some give up a limb, some feign death, and some release a foul-smelling fluid. What’s not to like?”

  Delancey stood up from her chair with an operatic flourish, turned the chair around so that it faced the shelves instead of the people, and then flounced back into her seat, ignoring them all.

  The mynah said, “So there!”

  Jaime said, “What’s the bird’s name?”

  “Auguste Dupin,” said the bird, cocking its head and fixing Jaime with a remarkably intelligent looking eye.

  “Auguste Dupin is the name of a detective invented by my namesake, Edgar Allan Poe,” Edgar Wellington said. “Poe had an interest in secret writing. We thought it would be a little less obvious than naming our mascot Cipher or Code, right, Auguste?”

  “Cipher or code,” said the mynah.

  “Speaking of ciphers and codes,” Jaime said, tapping one of the glass display cases, “why do you have an egg in a case?”

  “You can write a message on a hard-boiled egg using ink made from vinegar,” said Theo. “The ink leaches through the shell and leav
es the message on the egg underneath without a trace on the outside. It’s called steganography. Hiding messages rather than enciphering them.”

  Jaime said, “Well, that’s—”

  “See this little ball? Did you know that the ancient Chinese wrote secrets on scraps of fabric? And they balled up the fabric and dipped it in wax? And then the wax balls were swallowed?”

  “How would they deliver . . . oh, uuugh,” said Jaime. “I would not want to be the one to get that message.”

  “Sometimes Greeks would shave the heads of their messengers and tattoo messages on the scalp. Then they would wait for the hair to grow back, and send the messengers on their way. When the messengers arrived, their heads would be shaved and the messages read. That is, if the messengers didn’t die of blood poisoning first.”

  “Not in a big hurry, then?” said Jaime, staring at a curling scrap of leather with a strange tattoo in one of the cases.

  Edgar Wellington said, “Invisible ink on paper is another way to hide a message. Benedict Arnold, the Revolutionary spy, wrote messages in invisible ink between the lines of letters his wife wrote to John André of the British army. We’ve found invisible writing in books and even on paintings. But that’s not the only way to hide messages. Here, take a look at this letter in this case. This is a letter from World War II. Look at the hidden message!”

  Jaime squinted at the document. “I—”

  “Fourth line down, twelve words to the right,” Theo announced. “A microdot. Germans could shrink a page down to a tiny dot and then drop it into some random letter. The first one was found in 1941 because of a tip that—”

  “Okay, Theo,” said Tess. “We’ve all heard about this stuff.”

  Theo sort of gulped, as if the entire history of cryptography were backing up in his throat like a bezoar, as if he just couldn’t help himself. “People have been speaking in code, writing in cipher, and hiding messages in all sorts of ways for thousands of years. This whole case has papers and manuscripts and books from the Arab cryptanalysts, who were working in the golden age of Islamic civilization. They basically invented cipher breaking.”