by James Ponti
“He still had three schools left to check when he met me,” she continued. “Or rather, when he got stuck with me.” She looked up at him, tears in her eyes. “I’m the reason you missed them. It’s my fault. I’m so sorry.”
“Sydney, that’s not how it is at all,” he said. But it was too late.
She tried to stop the tears, but she couldn’t. Instead, she darted out of the room and up the stairs.
Mother chased after her, but paused quickly to say to Brooklyn, “Thank you so much, Brooklyn, but I have to…”
“Of course,” Brooklyn said.
Mother chased after Sydney and caught up with her in her room. She was sitting on the edge of her bed sobbing, her face buried in her palms.
Mother sat down, put his arm around her, and pulled her in tight, his body rocking ever so slightly. “You are not to blame for anything. You must understand that.”
She went to reply, but she couldn’t make words come out. So she just closed her eyes and nestled against him, and continued to cry.
27. Bletchley Park
THE WORK DONE AT BLETCHLEY Park was arguably the greatest achievement in the history of the Secret Intelligence Service. During World War II, the mansion and its surrounding estate were converted into a clandestine code-breaking facility. MI6 staffed it with mathematicians, linguists, and even chess champions. At one point, the Service surreptitiously ran a crossword competition in the Daily Telegraph and then secretly contacted the winners to recruit them as well. That was how desperate the British government was to find people who were good at solving puzzles.
It paid off. It was thought by many that the work accomplished at Bletchley Park shortened the war by two to four years and swung the outcome in favor of the Allies.
Interestingly, although the heroes of war are often imagined as strong young men, seventy-five percent of the people who worked at Bletchley were women. There were nearly eight thousand in all, and after the war they were forced to keep their service a secret for more than thirty years.
That always bothered Magpie, whose grandmother had been one of them. She was a Wren, the name given to female members of the Royal Navy, and she worked in Hut Eight, which played a crucial role in Bletchley’s history. This is where the team led by Alan Turing first deciphered the unbelievably complex codes created by the German Enigma machine, which was the key to Bletchley’s success. Magpie had no problem idolizing a woman who’d help save Britain, while at the same time working with its present-day enemies to undermine it.
Now that it was finally declassified, Bletchley was a historic park open to the public. Tourists would come to learn about the vital work that took place here. Couples and families would come to picnic and enjoy a pleasant day walking around a grand estate. And Magpie would come for inspiration when a problem, or enigma, seemed too hard to solve. There was no better location for finding solutions than sitting on a bench and looking across the lake toward Hut Eight.
What’s the code, Nan? How do the pieces fit together?
The puzzle currently bedeviling Magpie had to do with Alexandra Montgomery.
After studying her MI6 employment record, Magpie knew that she was a supremely talented cryptologist stationed at a research center known as the FARM. Interestingly, the FARM wasn’t just an MI6 cover. It was also an actual working climate research station. And it had a peculiar outreach for young people from difficult backgrounds who aspired to be scientists.
That was the part that was vexing Magpie.
How do the children fit into all this?
They were officially known as the FARM Fellows, and Magpie tried to learn more about them by performing a quick phone search. There was some information on the FARM website, but it was vague and offered no indication of how children were selected for the program. Additionally, none of the current fellows appeared to have social media accounts, which seemed unusual for children of this age.
Magpie knew that two girls on the Sylvia Earle attended the elite Kinloch Abbey, which was close to the FARM. And it was the web search of Kinloch that yielded the breakthrough.
It was a viral video. An eleven-second clip titled “Stop-arazzi.” In the clip, a television cameraman slams into a student and comically collapses to the ground outside the front gate of the school. Magpie recognized the boy, having seen him with the others in London.
Magpie watched it over and over at least twenty times, laughing at each viewing. Laughing first because of the humor of the pratfall, but later because of the recognition of what the boy had done.
It was easy to miss.
At first glance, it appeared only that Paris had stood tall and the cameraman had slammed into him and fallen. But after repeated viewings, Magpie realized Paris had actually adjusted his feet and made a subtle turn. If he hadn’t, he would’ve been bulldozed, or they both would have crashed.
It was so reflexive that Paris probably didn’t even realize he’d done it. That’s what happens when you’ve been trained well. You do things automatically when a situation arises. This wasn’t an instinctive maneuver; it was something that had been taught and learned.
Magpie had learned the same maneuver at the MI6 training academy.
“Well, look at you,” Magpie said to the screen. “You’re not a boy. You’re a spy.” And if he was a spy, then perhaps the two girls on the ship were spies too.
28. This Operation Is Hot
OF ALL THE THINGS SHE did well, and there were many, one of the most important skills Monty had was the ability to inject humor and lightness into moments that otherwise felt overwhelming. The way she did this wasn’t by sidestepping problems, but rather by taking them head-on. That’s the approach she took as they drove from Aisling to the Edinburgh Airport in an oversize passenger van, well past its prime, painted ocean blue with the FARM logo on each side.
She was behind the wheel, as usual, and noticed that things were particularly quiet behind her. In the rearview mirror, she saw that everybody had their earbuds in and was lost in their own world, their faces deep in thought.
“Headphones out,” she called back. “You’ll have plenty of time to vegetate on the flight to America. Besides, if you want to listen to music, we have a perfectly good sound system on the Blue Whale,” she said, calling the van by its nickname.
“You call that a sound system?” asked Sydney. “It’s a cassette player. It’s from the 1900s.”
“Yeah, well, so am I,” Monty replied.
“I don’t even think they make cassettes anymore,” said Kat.
“They don’t have to,” Monty said. “Because I make my own.”
There was a groan throughout the van. Monty’s homemade mixtapes were filled with what they collectively called “old people music.”
“Here’s the deal: We can either talk or I can play one of my mixtapes,” offered Monty.
“Talk,” Sydney said quickly. “We can talk.”
“That hurts, Syd, but it’s good for us to talk,” she replied. “So tell me, why the glum faces? What’s bothering you guys?”
“I don’t know,” said Paris. “Maybe the fact that we’re undertaking a mission that’s incredibly complex.”
“Is it?” asked Monty. “Let’s break it down and see. Rio, why don’t you list off one of the objectives?”
“Objective one, figure out who killed Parker Rutledge,” he answered.
“Okay, sounds straightforward,” she said. “What’s so challenging about that?”
“The fact that he’s been dead for six months and there are almost certainly no remaining clues,” Paris answered. “Or that when he died, the authorities ruled it a death by natural causes so they didn’t look into things when they could.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that one,” Monty conceded. “Who can give me another objective?”
“Objective two, identify Magpie,” said Sydney. “That should be easy considering MI6 has been trying to do it for nearly a decade and has come up empty.”
“We’re also
looking for a bird book that was possibly hidden by a spy somewhere in greater San Francisco,” said Kat.
“Oh,” said Mother. “Don’t forget that we’re trying to track down a meeting between Rutledge and Dr. Berliner, you know, who died nearly fifty years ago.”
Monty flashed a comical frowny face into the mirror for them to see. “Okay, now I’m convinced. It does sound difficult.”
“And we’re forgetting the biggest objective of all,” said Sydney. “As soon as we land in San Francisco, Mother hops a plane for Australia to go look for Robert and Annie. That’s been the main objective from the beginning.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Monty. “That’s five virtually impossible objectives, spread across two continents, three if you count the one we’re on, with absolutely no support from MI6.”
“That sounds about right,” said Brooklyn.
“We’re going to have to change our saying,” said Monty.
“What do you mean?” asked Kat.
“This operation isn’t hot,” said Monty. “This operation is a hot mess!” Everyone laughed, and she let that feeling take hold for a moment. Then with all seriousness she added, “But we are still a go. And there’s no team better equipped to pull off this madness than the seven people in this ridiculous blue van.”
She reached over and pushed a cassette into the stereo, and the James Bond theme started playing. It was part of her Super Secret Spy mixtape that she liked to use to get everybody fired up. Mother reached over from the passenger seat and turned the volume up all the way, and even though the song didn’t have any lyrics, they all still sang along.
When they reached the airport, they followed their normal protocol and split up into separate groups for the flights: first Edinburgh to London and then London to San Francisco before Mother flew by himself to Australia. Rio and Brooklyn sat together, which was a positive sign for the growth of their friendship. They hadn’t hit it off at first, but they were slowly getting to know each other. Mother sat them in the same row, hoping that over the course of thirteen hours on a plane, they might find a few new things to talk and bond over. Kat wasn’t much of a talker, but like Monty, she found code-breaking thrilling. The two of them sat next to each other working with computer tablets on which they’d copied pages from Rutledge’s bird books. The better they understood his symbols, the better chance they’d have of figuring out what he’d learned about Magpie. Mother sat alone in a rear seat that let him keep an eye on everyone. The solitude helped him prepare mentally for the chance that he might see his children for the first time in five years.
That left Sydney with Paris, which was ideal for the mood she was in. Not only were they the oldest, but they were the first two to join the group. They had history, and there were some things that she could say only to him.
She was looking out across the Atlantic when she said, “This operation isn’t the only thing that’s a hot mess. I’ve been useless for months.”
“That’s crazy,” he replied. “You’ve been awesome since the day I met you. I haven’t seen any mess.”
She turned back toward him and smiled. “Then you’re blind. At first I think it was mostly jealousy about Brooklyn. I’m kind of ashamed of that. She’s been nothing but great to me. And I love her, but sometimes I get jealous of how good she is at all of this.”
“How do you think I felt when you came along?”
“You were jealous of me?” she asked, surprised.
“I don’t know if ‘jealous’ is the right word,” he said. “But it sure seemed like you were good at a lot of things that I wasn’t.”
“But you’re amazing at so many things,” she said. “You’ve got crazy good skills.”
“Exactly,” he said. “As do you. However talented and amazing Brooklyn is, it has no impact on how talented and amazing you are. We’re not competing. We’re conspiring, like the ravens. We’re a team. The better each of us is, the better all of us are.”
“I know,” she said. “But sometimes it feels like a competition.”
“Like when you thought Mother had picked Brooklyn for some secret mission and left you out in the cold?” he said. “But you were jealous of something that wasn’t real. It wasn’t a mission; it was all about the photograph. It was about his kids.”
“I know that too,” she said. “And that’s when it hit me. That’s when I realized what the big problem was.”
“There’s a bigger problem?” he said with a mix of humor and compassion.
She nodded. “Massive.”
“What?”
“Robert and Annie,” she said. “I mean, I hate myself for even thinking that, much less saying it out loud. It’s awful what happened, and I am literally praying that when Mother goes to Australia, he reconnects with them and they get to be a family again.”
“So am I,” said Paris. “Why is that a problem?”
“What about us? We’re the fill-in kids he stumbled across while looking for them. But when he finds them, he won’t need us anymore. What’s going to happen to us?”
“It’s not like that,” said Paris. “We’re a family.”
“I thought that too,” said Sydney. “But really we’re not. We’re like a family, but we aren’t one. There’s a difference. That’s what I figured out during that hearing at Parliament. We act like a family, but when that evil cow was attacking me, she made it clear that as far as the rest of the world was concerned, I was an orphan. I was less than.”
She sighed and turned back to the window to look at the endless ocean, and the sun setting over a distant horizon. “I never felt so alone in my life.”
29. Chinatown
SAN FRANCISCO WAS COSMOPOLITAN with diverse neighborhoods and a cultural personality built on contradictions. It was a global leader in the development of new technology, but the only city in the world that still used old-fashioned cable cars. Surrounded on three sides by water, it was compact and crowded, yet still home to massive public parks, including one where a small herd of bison roamed. And despite countless breathtaking vistas, its biggest tourist attraction was unwieldy and unattractive: a former prison known as the Rock. Even San Francisco’s nickname had an air of uncertainty.
Fog City.
Any questions as to why it was called that were answered the first morning the team was in town. They’d awakened early, their internal clocks out of sync eight time zones from home, and stepped out of their hotel into a hazy cityscape. The visibility was so poor that they heard their first cable car before they saw it, its bell ringing out through the morning mist.
The team split into two groups, hoping to reconstruct the final days of Parker Rutledge’s life. Monty, Sydney, Brooklyn, and Kat headed to Muir Woods where Rutledge’s body had been discovered, while Paris and Rio went to Chinatown to look for someone named Fay Chie Hong. According to his datebook, Parker met with Hong two days before he died.
“This is so cool,” Rio said as they hopped onto the cable car. Rather than sit down, he stood on the running board and hung off the side, one hand holding tight while the other cut through the air like the tip of an eagle’s wing.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Paris asked nervously. “If you get hurt, Monty will blame me.”
“All I’m doing is riding,” Rio protested.
“No,” said Paris. “I’m riding. You’re… dangling.”
“The whole reason this pole is here is so that people can hang on.”
Paris wasn’t in the mood to debate, so he opted for a surefire technique to get Rio to do what he wanted. “If you sit down, I’ll let you pick where we eat lunch.”
“Really?”
Paris nodded. “Really.”
Rio’s love of food trumped everything else, and he instantly sat on the wooden bench right next to Paris. “I’m thinking one of the big three: burgers, burritos, or pizza,” he said. “I know good places for all of them.”
Paris gave him a look. “You know good places? Here in San Francisco?”
“I’ve been researching a bunch of restaurant review sites,” he answered. “I loaded the best spots onto a mapping app on my phone, so I can always tell which one’s closest.”
Paris shook his head in amazement. “How is it you can do that, but you never seem to get your homework done?”
“Believe me,” Rio said, “if algebra tasted as good as a fajita beef burrito covered in queso, I would never miss an assignment.” He paused and savored the thought. “Wow, just saying that out loud makes me hungry.”
Paris couldn’t believe it. “You had a full breakfast of pancakes and bacon at the hotel not thirty minutes ago, and you’re already hungry?”
Rio smiled proudly and said, “I know. It’s a gift.”
They got off the cable car next to Zee’s Bakery and Confectionery. This was where Clementine had taken the photo of Robert and Annie. They looked around to see if there was anything nearby that hinted at a connection to Rutledge but found nothing. Still, Paris took three panoramic shots of the neighborhood so they could examine it later when they were together with everybody else. Kat had proven on many occasions that she noticed things no one else did.
Rio inhaled a lungful of the sweet smell of fortune cookies being baked in industrial quantities. “Do they put the piece of paper with the fortune on it inside the cookie before they bake it or after?”
Paris scoffed as if it was a ridiculous question, but then paused. “You know, I have no idea. You’d think the fortunes would burn if they went in the oven, right?”
“But if you wait until after, how do you slide it in without breaking the cookie?”
Paris did a quick search on his phone. “It’s in the middle of the process.”
“What do you mean?” asked Rio.
“They bake the cookies as flat circles,” Paris answered as he read about it. “Then they put the fortune in and fold the cookie while it’s still warm. When it cools, it holds its shape and the fortune is inside.”
“Look at us,” Rio joked. “It’s still early and we’re already learning new things. I wonder how Mother had the fortune cookie made when he proposed to Clementine.”