Mercy's Chase

by Jess Lourey

  “Another seventeenth-century architect,” Salem murmured.

  He pointed in the direction of the Heel Stone without moving his eyes. “Some researchers believe the Heel Stone was named that after the Anglo-Saxon word for conceal: helan.”

  Salem squinted toward the Heel Stone, wondering again how he knew so much about Stonehenge. “You think there’s a code in there?”

  “I don’t know.” Charlie looked at her, measuring her. “My dad was a stonemason. He taught me everything I know about this place.”

  She hadn’t been expecting that. It brought a smile to her face. “Mine was a carpenter.”

  “I know.”

  Her face must have reflected her annoyance at him knowing that detail about her when she knew nothing about him because he stood, hands palm forward. “It’s not my fault you’re famous among us computer nerds.”

  She noticed his dimples for the first time. “Is your dad still alive?”

  He shook his head.

  “Mine neither.” In that moment, she made up her mind; he had shared something personal with her and she would return the favor. She said it all in one breath before she lost the courage. “When I saw that replica Stonehenge in Ireland, it wasn’t just that it had an extra rock, one that isn’t standing here now. It wasn’t even that the extra rock had the word ‘mercy’ carved on it.”

  Charlie’s eyebrows shot up.

  “It’s what that extra rock made me see.” She dropped the B&C to the ground and opened her purse, rifling around until she found what she looked for. She yanked the plastic clamshell out and held it toward him, snapping open the top.

  “It made me see that Stonehenge is arranged just like a packet of birth control pills. Well, the ones that come in the clamshell, anyhow. Do you see it? The circle of pills on the outside are the birth control. The ones on the inside are placebos, for your … period.”

  She didn’t dare look at him. She let her hair fall over her eyes. “Once I saw that Stonehenge is shaped like a packet of birth control pills, it made me think there must be a feminine explanation for this site, that it’s related to a woman’s cycle, somehow.”

  There. She’d said it all, every stupid word.

  Had he heard?

  His silence became too much. She pulled up her eyes.

  His face was shifting.

  21

  Stonehenge

  Charlie couldn’t contain his laughter, but he had the good grace to turn away from her until it was under control. Once he calmed himself, he faced her again. “I’m sorry. I know the best ideas come from brainstorming. It’s just that you caught me off-guard with that.” He indicated the clamshell she still held. “My mom used the same brand.”

  Salem snapped it closed and shoved it in her purse. The tips of her ears grew hot. She swiveled and walked toward the nearest opening. She didn’t really have a destination other than away.

  “Salem, I’m sorry! Don’t be like that. I shouldn’t have laughed.”

  She was mad at herself for saying her stupid theory out loud. And now a guard was walking toward them. Their time was up. She had wasted their precious access talking. Glancing around, she sighed. It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d had all the time in the world. She didn’t have any idea what she was looking for. At least she’d gotten photos.

  “No luck?” The guard, a different one, a female in her early sixties, asked as Salem exited through the same trilithon she’d entered.

  “No, but thank you for letting us in.” The gray of the sky darkened. A possible storm.

  Charlie was still trying to catch up with Salem.

  “If you’re motoring back to London, you’ll want to leave soon, avoid congestion hour over lunch,” the guard said. “I take the train back to Piccadilly, near my house, but I saw you have a car.”

  “Thanks,” Salem said. Charlie reached her side. They walked toward the private parking lot, heads lowered in misery.

  The guard called after them. “You might want to pop in the visitor’s center if you haven’t yet. You can’t see it from here, but it’s only a short tram ride. You’ll find some pottery, jewelry, animal bones, the like, all from this site.”

  “Thank you,” Salem said over her shoulder.

  Charlie walked alongside her, keeping his distance. “You mean it, yeah? It’s a good idea. We’ll check out the center. I haven’t been since they built the new one.”

  The need to save Mercy outweighed Salem’s shame by a long shot. She nodded curtly, then realized it served no one for her to ignore him. “If they have a museum, or information on the structure, we might be able to find where they could hide a code in a way we couldn’t see standing inside of it.”

  “That’s right, now!” Charlie was visibly pleased. “I’m sorry again for that bit back there. It was dumb. Why couldn’t women have had input into Stonehenge? Pre-agricultural societies had less gender stratification, and a woman’s cycle would certainly have appeared mystical to a people without an understanding of anatomy. Maybe you are right about what the henge was built to represent. What do I know?”

  “Sounds like we’ll have a better idea once we get inside,” Salem said.

  “Certainly.” A new wave of Stonehenge arcana spilled from his mouth, stories of the explorers who’d discovered the stone, the men who’d come to measure it. The more he talked, the more Salem moved from her shame and toward a hunch. There was something inherently feminine about the site. Having Charlie laugh at the possibility had strengthened her belief in it.

  They boarded the tram that would deliver them to the visitor’s center, Charlie still talking. She studied the monument as they pulled away. The feminine wasn’t obvious, but it was whispered in the way the stones rode the land and seemed to interact with the curves of the hill and the stain of the poppies. She felt it somewhere low in her hips, but her brain wouldn’t let her see it. It was programmed for data, facts, and codes.

  “Here’s the plan,” Salem said, interrupting Charlie. She kept her voice pitched low even though their fellow passengers appeared deep in conversation. “With the Beale train, the codes were hidden by women throughout history. We’re going to look for the same thing here, for any evidence of women being connected to Stonehenge, and we’re going to follow it no matter how stupid it seems.”

  “Salem.” Charlie stopped her by squeezing her shoulder. “I don’t think the feminine is stupid. I—” He glanced around, studying their fellow passengers. He must have seen something he didn’t like because he dropped his arm and shifted the conversation. “You tell me what to do,” he finished. “I swear I’ll do it, no questions asked. Let’s find your girl.”

  22

  Stonehenge Visitor’s Center

  They waded through a cluster of thatch-roofed Neolithic houses, each of them designed to replicate the homes the Stonehenge workers would have occupied. They were single-room dwellings with chalk walls, the interior rimmed with wood and woven furniture, a fire pit in the center. Real-life children ran in and out of the replica village, giggling, chasing each other toward an enormous stone tilted on its side. Its placard declared it the size and weight of one of the original sarsen stones. It had a rope embedded on one end.

  No one could move it.

  A tow-headed girl was hopping beside the stone, a raggedy bunny doll clutched in one hand. She reminded Salem of Mercy, which brought a wave of grief that felt like a gut punch.

  Salem forced her attention away, striding past the stone and through the sleek metal poles of the visitor’s center. The structure was steel and glass, but cleverly constructed to blend seamlessly into the English countryside. The gift shop to her right had a line snaking out the door. The museum to the left required tickets, but Charlie flashed identification to the guard, and they were immediately ushered inside.

  The museum’s interior was dark and crowded. Salem kept to the p
eriphery, her eyes scanning the bones and blades under glass, the landscape murals behind them, the interpretive signs all around. An informative lecture was playing on a background loop.

  She’d known since she was young that she saw the world differently than most kids. Where her classmates would charge the playground at recess and fight over the swing set, Salem would study the ground, searching for patterns. It had soothed her even back then.

  The jungle gym was a tetrahedron.

  In winter, she could spend hours studying the six-fold symmetry of snowflakes.

  In summer, she’d search out the Fibonacci petals of a black-eyed Susan and drift into its endless possibilities. Or she’d duck into a shady spot and search out ferns, counting the fractal pattern, thrilled if it was pinnate beyond four.

  When her mother introduced her to patterns in code—starting with simple substitution ciphers and working toward more complex sequences—Salem realized she’d finally found her world, the place where she wasn’t an odd duck and where everything could be broken down into mathematically precise logic. She’d been excited to discover how many women had been pivotal in the development of computers. Jean Jennings Bartik was one of six women who created programs for ENIAC, the first electronic general computer, in the 1940s. A decade later, Grace Hopper led the creation of COBOL, the original widely used computer programming language. Computer science had been built on the work of women, who in the early years entered through the field of mathematics.

  But it wasn’t just that it was a field that accepted women. With computers, Salem felt like she was home.

  Bel had always made her feel loved—beautiful Bel, who was as kind as she was popular—but computers introduced Salem to a world where she could fly.

  Her pattern-finding gift grew rusty, lazy even, once she hit her teens. Her talent became almost exclusively focused on computers. That changed when she was forced to crack the Beale Cipher.

  She needed to call on that latent skill again.

  Charlie disappeared and then returned to her side, guiding her toward another room. “I asked a docent. The re-creation of the henge through all its iterations is back here. Maybe we’ll see something in there?”

  Salem nodded. “When was the last time you were on site?”

  “Maybe five years ago. Right before this center opened in 2013. It’s grand, isn’t it?”

  Salem nodded, studying the artifacts in the room as they made their way to the next. The stone implements used by the workers on site thousands of years ago didn’t seem helpful. The plaque sharing the Stonehenge worker diet—pig, whose charred foot bones suggested they were cooked over an open flame, sloe and blackberries, hazelnuts and honey—was worthless. Same with the pottery shards, the stone axe heads, and the re-creation of Neolithic man, which reminded Salem of a young and confused Charlton Heston.

  She dismissed each of these bits of information as irrelevant, but the truth was, Salem could be staring right at a clue and have no idea. Her heart sank with the realization. She couldn’t do this without Bel.

  She probably couldn’t do it even with Bel.

  “Hey.” Charlie was at her side, looking concerned. “You okay?”

  Salem’s voice was high-pitched. Her Ativan was wearing off. “I’m worried I can’t do this. Not alone.”

  A woman standing next to Salem tossed a worried glance her way. She must have spoken louder than she’d thought.

  Charlie smiled, transforming his features, softening him. Salem realized that her guess back at the Mayflower Pub had been spot on; he was not even ten years older than her. “But you’re not alone. I’m here with you. This failure lands squarely on both our shoulders, should it come to that. Same with a success, you know. We share what we find.”

  Salem drew a ragged breath. He was right. It didn’t matter what she thought she was or was not capable of. Besides, she had more Ativan in the car. “Is this the model the docent told you about?”

  They were standing in front of a reproduction of the original Stonehenge, all ninety-six stones in the definitive circle, erected around 3000 BC. They stared down at it. Unlike the actual stones outside, these lacked the graffiti and the pitting. Salem was disappointed to confirm that Charlie had been right—the full model contained the stone that she’d seen in Muirinn Molony’s tiny Stonehenge, only in this version, nothing was carved on it.

  It was merely Stone 28.

  The word carved in Mrs. Molony’s version had made the stone seem more prominent, causing the trick of the eyes that made Salem see a way to mark a woman’s cycle where the rest of the world saw a stone circle.

  Charlie spoke firmly. “We can do this. We’re looking for a simple code. What was the timeline of the Beale Cipher, the 1800s? Probably that would be the latest the code was placed here, more likely earlier, but in any case, pre-computer as we know it. Something basic, maybe akin to a Morse code, or along the lines of a Playfair Cipher? Or if it was put here by the Neolithics—and I can’t see how that would be—it would …”

  But Salem wasn’t listening.

  She wasn’t even breathing.

  His word—pre-computer—had shaken loose what she should have noticed all along.

  She saw it, clear as a clarion, and her mind was exploding with the realization.

  She wasn’t looking for a code in something.

  Stonehenge itself was the code.

  Jason watched her dispassionately.

  She’d cracked it. He could see it in her eyes. He knew no one else had been able to, guessed the Grimalkin would be livid that Wiley had done it so quickly. That planted a small smile on his face, one that didn’t mar the bland mien he’d cultivated, his appearance rendered even less remarkable by a pair of round-rimmed glasses and a baseball cap.

  She turned to Agent Charlie Thackeray, hands shaking as she pointed at the replica of Stonehenge. Thackeray hooted, lifted her up in the air, then set her back down before turning on his heel toward one of the guards, likely to acquire a private room so they could verify whatever Wiley had discovered. The genius cryptanalyst turned back to the replica, visibly trembling with her discovery. Her fingers twitched at the zipper of her portable computer.

  Jason wondered briefly what it would be like to possess a mind like hers.

  He returned his attention to the pig teeth he’d been pretending to study, his heartbeat drumming pleasantly. The plaque said that deterioration suggested the pigs had been fed honey until they were harvested at nine months old for an apparent feast. He guessed they were delicious.

  He slid his cell phone out of his pocket, his thumb dialing as he brought it his ear.

  “She’s got it.”

  There was an intake of breath, small and sharp, followed by a moment of silence. Finally, “Call the Grimalkin.”

  Jason’s second call was a hair longer. The Grimalkin spoke first. “You’re calling because she’s broken the first wall of the Stonehenge train.”

  “Yes.”

  Jason thought he heard wheezing close to the phone, the hum of a crowd behind. He realized it was the Grimalkin laughing.

  “She’s going to Blessington next, count on it, to finish what the old witch started for her there.” The Grimalkin sounded happy, which disappointed Jason. The assassin must have already cracked this part of the code.

  The Grimalkin continued. “I’ll meet you at the Dublin airport. I will be in the country when she explodes this. I want to see her face at that moment, right before I kill her.”

  Jason hung up.

  The Grimalkin knew Jason would follow his orders. There was nothing more to say.

  23

  Stonehenge

  Binary was a deceptively simple word originating in the fifteenth century. It meant dual, or a pair. A light switch is a binary system because it consists of two options: on or off.

  A question that can be answ
ered true or false was binary.

  Black and white were binary colors.

  But when most people think of “binary,” none of that comes to mind. What we think of are computers, which run the most complex of data using a binary system of 1s and 0s.

  In 1679, Gottfried Leibniz invented what modern humans know as the binary system. Leibniz was looking for a way to organize verbal logic into mathematics. It turned out that 1s and 0s were the bridge. His breakthrough was popularly credited to his Christian search to represent the concept of creatio ex nihilo: out of nothing, creation.

  Less well known was his true inspiration: the I Ching.

  The I Ching was a Chinese divination text dating to 1000 BC. The manuscript contained collected wisdom examining the ultimate binary choice—chaos or order—and created a method for seeking guidance on the most complex and philosophical of questions. Consulting the I Ching was so effective that it was used throughout history to answer questions of state, warfare, money, and love.

  The first step of the method was to frame a focused question. Next, the seeker threw a bundle of yarrow sticks into the air and read how they landed. They could either fall as a broken line or an unbroken line, thereby, at their most basic reading, becoming the oldest known use of binary data.

  At least, that’s what had been believed.

  What Salem was looking at would shred that theory. Stonehenge had been built at least 1,500 years earlier than that. Her mouth was dry, her senses heightened.

  Stonehenge was a binary code.

  The circles, and there were two—the outer and the inner—were the zeroes.

  The stones were the ones.

  The ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, had assigned binary numbers to the letters of the alphabet. Lower case a was 1100001, for example. The builders of Stonehenge wouldn’t have used the same categorization, would not have even spoken English, a language which didn’t emerge in its earliest form until at least 550 CE. They would have their own language and code keys, but once Salem saw it, it was impossible to deny the binary nature of Stonehenge.