Nikki took it from him, made a privacy survey of the tavern, and pulled the
furled sheets of paper out of the tube. She unrolled them, squared the edges on her
place mat, and then, with her heart pounding, held the four stacked sheets to the
candle. In her mother’s clean handwriting it read: Unlock the Dragon.
Her eyes went to the code breaker and then back to the message. Heat moved the
pages, scanning them in front of the candle, hoping for more. “This is all it says?
”
“That’s all she wrote, pardon my French.”
“May I?” asked Rook. She gave the sheets over to him, and he did the same thing,
trying to scan for more text. While he held the pages to the light, Nikki thought
about the Dragon. The word—obviously a code name—had first come into this case
only days ago when the skyjacked helicopter passenger heard Salena Kaye call someone
by that name on her cell phone. What had she said? “Dragon, it’s me.” So Dragon
was Salena Kaye’s controller. Also Tyler Wynn’s, by his dying declaration. But
now, in this code from the past, her mother mentioned him, too. All of which told
Heat that the Dragon was as alive today as he had been eleven years ago.
Her mother had no way of knowing it would take so long for her daughter to get this
message. But the code still left Nikki confused. And she sure didn’t have another
eleven years to figure it out.
She didn’t even have eleven days.
Puzzle Man said, “You two seem a little less excited than I’d hoped you’d be.”
“No, no,” said Heat. “You did great, it’s just…”
Rook finished the thought. “We don’t know what it means.”
“Well, that’s an entirely different task,” said Puzzle Man. “Times like these, I
go back to the wisdom shared by my shi’nali, the Windtalker. My grandfather used to
tell me there’s one code you can never break.”
“What’s that?” asked Nikki, holding the words to the light again.
“The one that’s only known by two people. The sender and the receiver.”
Cynthia Heat spoke to her daughter in the nonsensical way apparitions do in sleep.
Nikki saw her as she had countless times over the last eleven years, mostly in the
middle of the night, although sometimes at unbidden daytime moments as mundane as
when she reached for her MetroCard on her way down to the subway or smiled at a New
Yorker cartoon. Her mother usually spoke to her from her own pool of blood on the
kitchen floor. Over the years she’d said many things to her, mostly as much non
sequiturs as the appearances themselves. This time, from the leaden depths only
Nikki’s mattress seemed to possess, her mom sat playing her piano—the one in the
room right up the hall—and spoke the same two words again and again like a video
loop on an online avatar. Cindy Heat kept telling her daughter, “You know. You
know. You know…”
A hand on Heat’s shoulder nudged her awake. She blinked. Still dark. Rook sat
beside her, holding out her ringing cell phone. Heat cleared her throat and said her
name into it. Listened, then moaned.
“What?” asked Rook.
“He’s out. Rainbow escaped.”
Heat got to Bellevue in record time because she didn’t have to get dressed. In her
exhaustion at 2 A.M., Nikki had collapsed onto her bed still dressed. Four short
hours later, she and Rook strode into Glen Windsor’s room on the second floor of
the hospital, both wearing the same clothes as the night before. She looked at the
empty bed and said, “Somebody explain this to me.” An NYPD uniformed officer
standing with a pair of unis from Hospital Police lowered his eyes to the floor. She
went to him. “What’s your name?”
“Slaughter.”
“Your first name.”
“Nate.”
She canted her head to put herself in his field of view. “Listen to me, Nate. I
know this feels awful. But you’ve got to put it in your back pocket. This guy’s
very resourceful, so hold off on the blame. Just tell me how it came down.”
Officer Slaughter said, “About one-thirty, the night nurse came in to take his
temp. She didn’t realize it till later, but she had a pair of reading glasses in
her front pocket he must have boosted when she leaned over to check his dressing.”
The uniform indicated the eyeglasses on the counter.