by Jess Lourey
Salem’s whole world revolved around helping Bel heal. If she slowed down, she’d have to think about the chasm between her and Vida.
Only Bel understood.
Together, they went through Grace’s belongings, including, it turned out, the locket they’d discovered on the killer outside of Beale’s vault. Lu had shipped it to Bel with a note of encouragement and love, as well as a box of fortune cookies. Bel never removed the locket, even to shower. Salem caught her mom staring at the locket almost as if it scared her, but she didn’t ask and her mom didn’t tell.
Salem and Bel attended Grace’s funeral, side by side. Many of Bel’s former colleagues on the Chicago PD, plus most of the Minneapolis PD, and even some Amherst officers attended in solidarity with Bel, their sister, whose record had been cleared in light of her heroics. Salem even thought she caught a glimpse of Agent Stone at the funeral, but when she walked in that direction, he was nowhere to be found.
Bel paid her emotional dues as her mother’s coffin was dropped into the icy ground, weeping all the tears that she’d pushed down to keep her and Salem alive. Salem cried too. Everyone did.
They buried Ernest the next day, alongside Grace. Ernest’s funeral was much leaner. Only Bel, Vida, Salem, Mercy, and Dr. Keller attended. Mercy clutched the doll Salem had bought her, and Salem held the child close, their tears freezing on their faces as the lavender-honey sunset celebrated Ernest’s too-short life.
Christmas came and went. Salem didn’t have time to think about the future because she needed to get through each day. That’s when the invitation to Gina Hayes’s inauguration arrived. Salem had fallen into a routine, caring for Bel and tutoring North Minneapolis kids. She’d been happy enough.
Or so she’d thought.
When they’d received the invitation, though, she’d realized she wanted her world to be much larger. The cross-country scavenger hunt had been dark, terrible, soul-crushing. It had also polished some steel in her that she hadn’t known she possessed. She was no longer comfortable living in a small cage.
She was thrilled to discover that Bel felt the same way.
Which is how they found themselves in Washington, DC, on a chill January 20 morning.
“I can’t ever thank you enough,” Gina Hayes was saying to Bel.
Salem glanced out over the crowd of thousands, the front rows dominated by media. The stage itself held about a hundred chairs, all of them filled with famous actors, musicians, senators and representatives, and Supreme Court justices. It was surreal.
Hayes stopped at the seats closest to the podium and indicated that Mercy and Vida should sit in the second row, next to Matthew Clemens, and Salem should sit in the front next to an open spot cleared for Bel’s wheelchair. “I wouldn’t be standing here today without you, Isabel Odegaard.”
Bel smiled and tipped her head.
With the eyes of the world watching, Hayes exchanged a glance with Vida. Something passed between them. Salem guessed the two women had known each other for many years, but she’d resigned herself to maybe never plumbing all of her mom’s secrets.
“Or you.”
Salem started, realizing the president-elect was talking to her, and that Salem’s surprised expression was being broadcast on TV screens and computers all across the world.
“You’re welcome.” Up close, Hayes was impossibly solid and strong. Salem suddenly wanted to tell her all about Ernest, and even Ronald, to make sure the leader of the Free World knew about the courageous men who’d also helped to get her here. Salem wanted Hayes to promise that there would be no more tragic sacrifices.
But Salem couldn’t bring those words to her lips.
She did have one question that was burning her up inside, though, something that bullied its way to the surface even though she’d spent the last two months trying to tamp it down.
“Ma’am?” Hayes had already started toward the podium. She had to stop and turn. Salem continued, “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.” Hayes tone was gracious, but her posture was strained. Billions of people were waiting for her.
“That code we found in Beale’s vault with the true Jackson treaty. Did you see it?”
Hayes’s eyes flicked over Salem’s shoulder. Salem swiveled to see Agent Stone standing behind her, wearing a tuxedo. He was breathtaking. Bel’s hand shot out to hold her steady. Stone stood a respectful distance away.
“I saw it.” Some of Hayes’s warmth was gone.
“What was it?”
Anger-resignation-amusement flitted across Hayes’s face. “A one-time pad. You can ask your mother all about it.” With that, Hayes walked away from them and into history.
Salem took her seat, Matthew behind her and Bel on the other side. Agent Stone followed Hayes to the podium and stood behind her to her left.
“What’s a one-time pad?” Bel asked as the pomp continued.
“It’s an unbreakable code.” Salem pulled her fitted jacket tighter. “Unless you have the key, which is a series of random letters written on one single sheet of paper, which is then ripped off the pad and destroyed after the code has been cracked by the recipient. Hence the name.” Salem turned back to Vida, whose eyes were glossy. “Why should I ask you about it?”
Most of Vida’s wounds had healed, but her kidnapping had left her fragile. Still, Salem caught a glimpse of her mom’s old mettle under the surface. “That code you found in the vault was a clue to the true history of the Hermitage, which goes back further than Andrew Jackson, over two thousand years.”
Salem flashed back to Dickinson’s note to them, the one they’d discovered in the gravestone of Dickinson’s grandparents. Mrs. Lucretia Mott was forced to hide the names of the members, and the treasure of the Indians, and this: the Truth of the waltz the Dragon and the Underground had been dancing for 2,000 years.
All along, Salem and Bel had assumed that the Jackson treaty was the lightning bolt that would take down the Hermitage. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the true lightning bolt had been the code they’d discovered in the vault.
“That’s all I know.” Vida shaded her eyes against the January sun. “That’s all anyone knows or ever will without the key.”
Salem nodded thoughtfully and turned to face forward.
“You thinking about it?” Bel asked.
“What?”
“I know you still have the photo of the code that you took while we were still in the vault. Are you thinking about trying to crack it?”
Salem shook her head. “If it’s a one-time pad, there’s no way. Not without the key.”
Hayes was introduced. The crowd’s roar rolled onto the stage like an army. Hayes waited until it quieted to begin talking. Her speech from the very beginning was compelling, moving, brazen in its honesty. Salem bent her head toward Bel halfway through, no longer able to contain herself. “Hey, I knew he was easy on the eyes, but has Lucan Stone always been that sexy?”
Matthew Clemens cleared his throat in the row behind her. Salem prepared to be scolded. Instead, he leaned forward. “Always. At least as long as I’ve known him.”
Bel nodded. “He’s had the hots for you since the beginning too.”
Salem’s brow furrowed. “How come I never noticed?”
Bel smiled. “Running for your life will do that.”
They settled back into the speech. Hayes thanked Salem and Bel at one point. The audience, including those on stage, stood and applauded. Salem’s cheeks grew hot. Then the speech moved on, as they always do.
Bel leaned over near the end, about when Salem was finally getting caught up in the speech, and whispered out of the corner of her mouth. “How about when I’m walking again, we go after that one-pad code?”
Salem’s smile started small, but it moved to encompass her face, and then her chest, and then everyone around her. Her whole-hearted laughter was b
roadcast across the world. If anyone could accomplish the impossible, it was Bel. “Deal.”
They touched pointer finger to pointer finger and pinkie to pinkie before returning their attention to the inauguration of the President of the United States of America.
Acknowledgments
Without the editorial guidance of my agent, Jill Marsal, this would have been a very different book, and not in a good way (not that you’d have known because nobody would have bought it). She’s the best in the business, a great editor, able to clone herself so she can respond to emails at all hours of the day, and an all-round fantastic person. Thank you, Jill, for believing in my writing.
Mountains of gratitude to my editing team of Jessica Morrel, Terri Bischoff, and Nicole Nugent, whose insight and guidance, like water on a gremlin, multiply the good in my writing. Thanks also to Karin Slaughter, Catriona McPherson, and Chelsea Cain, whose writing I studied to figure out how to balance plot and character. You three make it look easy. (It’s not, so my gratitude is counterbalanced by general mistrust and resentment.)
Big, loving gratitude to the SuperFriends for coming to my rescue and telling me that I’m not, in fact, “a miserable fraud of a writer who should give up the dream and teach full-time even though that makes me cry.” I might be paraphrasing. In any case, all four of you propped up my sad ego in the spring of 2015, read the first 100 pages of this book, and gave me novel-saving advice. Terri, Catriona, Jessie II, and Linda, I’m lucky to have friends like you. Same with you, Dana Fredsti. You’re the best fight writer in the business, and your generous feedback tightened two crucial scenes in this book. Thank you, forever and always!
Tony Van Den Einde, I am grateful for the moiré idea as well as your research of the Gentileschi in the Uffizi. Ray and Diane Lourey, I appreciate the line editing you provide all my books. John and Ruth Jordan, I am not so much grateful for the challenge of naming a character “Michael Dingboom” as amazed that it turned out to be possible. Thanks, you guys, for running a con (Murder and Mayhem in Milwaukee, check it out) good enough to make me take on the Dingboomization of a novel. Johnny Shaw and Matthew Clemens, I’m sorry I’m so bad at coming up with names. Appearing in my books is a casualty of being my friend, I’m afraid. Thank you for the friendship, and I’m coming for you next, Simon Wood and Lou Berney.
The characters in this book traveled a lot more in 2015 than I did, and so I needed to call on friends for authentic setting descriptions. Thanks to the following for their contributions: Aimee Hix, Jeanne Bielke-Rodenbiker, Heather Ash, Dru Ann Love, Rachel Caitlin Quick, Lisa Alber, Tammy Kaehler, Mary Alderete, Steve Binninger, Douglas Cronk, Missy Davis, Amy Patricia Meade, Corinne Hosfeld Smith, Vallen Queen, Maggie Daniel Caldwell, Kristin Anne, Julie Ann Candoli, Marilyn Buehrer, Dana Fredsti, Sarah Cotter Hogroian, Sharon Dwyer, Jessica Morrell, and Amber Foxx.
Mostly, thanks to you, the reader of this book. Without you, my dream would be a lot lonelier.
About the Author
Jess Lourey is a Minnesota writer, sociology and English professor, and a leader of creative writing workshops around the country. Salem’s Cipher is her thirteenth novel.
Mercy’s Chase
In book two of the thrilling Witch Hunt series, fresh off saving now-President Gina Hayes, Salem Wiley lands a job
as an FBI cryptanalyst. Forced to leave behind her best friend, Bel, Salem and the enigmatic Agent Lucan Stone are sent to Europe to poke through the ashes of the Hermitage Foundation, the organization Salem and Bel exposed in their fight to protect the president. There, Salem learns that the Hermitage is very much alive and stronger than ever, the thwarted assassination attempt on President Hayes
only a small setback in their ultimate plan.
Keep reading for a preview.
1
Blessington, Ireland
“She was a witch, of course.”
Salem’s head snapped up. “Excuse me?”
She’d been sneaking a glance at her cell phone. Bel had texted her, this interview was going nowhere, and there was a ham, cheese, and mustard on fluffy white bread calling for her from the backseat of the rental car. All those distractions were suddenly forgotten, the unpleasant thump of Muirinn Molony’s words echoing off the rustic cottage walls.
“A witch. My grandmother.” Mrs. Molony, several times a grandmother herself, smiled, revealing tiny twisted teeth.
Salem guessed the woman didn’t receive many visitors on this lonely County Wicklow road. In fact, she’d assumed that’s why the woman had called the FBI. Forced Bedside Interrogations, is what Agent Len Curson, Salem’s current partner, called these visits. They had spread like a virus since the UN had advertised its threat line in advance of the First International Women’s Rights Conference to be held in London in three short weeks.
“Many women were considered witches back then,” Mrs. Molony continued, her smile still in place. “At least that’s what they were called by the people who didn’t understand the country ways. Really, my Maimeó was a midwife, not that it woulda mattered, would it have? Nurse, healer, cook. They were all labeled as witches. You sure I can’t get you a bit of tea?”
The woman spoke it all as one long word, her accent thick. Salem was still trying to catch up. “Your grandmother was a witch?”
Mrs. Molony released a sound of gentle disgust. Och. She stood, her head nearly brushing the low ceiling. “It’ll be easier to show you, won’t it?”
Salem glanced at her partner. Judging by his sour face, he was more convinced than ever that they were on a snipe hunt. He brushed imaginary dust off his ironed jeans and followed the woman outside her cottage.
Salem took up the rear.
Her initial shock at the mention of witches had passed. Mrs. Molony had been referring to country superstition, not a world conspiracy. Salem stepped out into a rolling green she had yet to get used to, surrounded by scrawny chickens, a low stone wall, and the smell of manure. The weather had changed three times since she’d stepped off the small plane at the Dublin airport.
Len had driven to Mrs. Molony’s house. While he’d input the directions into the GPS, Salem had swallowed an Ativan, a habit she’d re-upped since joining the FBI’s Cipher Bureau two months earlier. The Cipher Bureau—or, as it was more commonly called, the Black Chamber—had been dreamed up in 1919, when the US State Department and the army proposed a peace-time cryptanalysis bureau. The organization initially disguised itself as a commercial coding company and set up stakes in New York City. The front office produced commercial coding while the back office cracked the diplomatic communications of some of the most powerful nations in the world.
It’d been shut down after Secretary of State Henry Stimson famously declared in 1929 that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” President Gina Hayes, the first female US president, felt no such compunction. Her first unofficial act after taking office was to revive the Black Chamber as a top-secret branch of the FBI.
Only a handful of people knew.
The revived Black Chamber was licensed to operate across international boundaries in service of Americans. Len Curson and Salem Wiley were two of the first agents hired. Their assignment? Intercept and decode every threat coming in advance of the UN’s First International Women’s Rights Conference.
The conference was drawing leaders from all over the world, including President Gina Hayes, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, leaders of NGOs and progressive organizations, professors and researchers, actors from around the globe, and most exciting of all, Fereshteh, the sixteen-year-old Saudi Arabian activist so famous that the world knew the girl by a single name.
Salem had been living in a cubicle for the three weeks since she’d been stationed in London, spending her days sifting through piles of dead-end code before heading home to gray temp barracks not much bigger or brighter than her cubicle. When she and Agent Curson had been assigned their first field job—r
are for straight-up cryptologists—she’d jumped at it, even though it meant taking a four-seater plane across the water to Dublin.
A Mrs. Muirinn Molony had called the threat line, reporting that Fereshteh and President Gina Hayes would be killed at the conference. She insisted she needed to speak to agents in person, to show them the threat, that lives were at stake. These agents must be able to crack codes, she’d said.
Following the lonely country woman down the rutted garden path, Salem wondered what series of life choices had brought her to exactly this moment.
Mrs. Molony tightened her apron as she walked, raising her voice so Len and Salem could both hear. “The symbol is just ahead. It’s after I uncovered it that I had the dream about the assassination of Fereshteh and your president, of course. Straight from my dead Maimeó.”
Len tossed a glance over his shoulder. Told you so, it said. Snipe hunt.
Salem stepped past Len as they crested a small hill, determined to treat the woman with respect. So what if she wasn’t all there? She had gotten them out of their cubicle and into this lovely green countryside. “You weren’t actually informed of a threat, Mrs. Molony? You dreamt it?”
“Aye, at first.” She had a humping walk, as if one leg was longer than the other. She limped through the hedgerow and over a line of stones. “Then the visions came. I see them eyes open or closed now, I do. I wouldn’ta wasted your time otherways. Right around this bend we go.”
They stepped into a clearing surrounded by knobby, gnarled trees no taller than Salem. She smelled it before she saw it: fresh-dug brown dirt, loamy and alive. A headstone tipped three feet away. The trees cast fingered shadows over the grave.