The white corner of one of the photos sticks out from the album, jostled out of place by the fall. I pull at it and find it’s not a photo at all. It’s an envelope, sealed, white and crisp and new. I sit up straight, then work a finger under the flap and pull it open.
Inside is a single piece of paper, and I study it by the light of my flashlight. There are no words, no Dear Gwen, if you’re reading this, I’ve been kidnapped and this is what you should do next. There are only sets of numbers separated by spaces, 0130513 1192381 3271822, that go on and on and on, densely packed, single-spaced, covering the front and back. God forbid my dad do anything simply. God forbid he be straightforward. For the trouble he’s putting me through, is it too much to expect a little clarity? And how do I know this is even what I’m looking for? Because it’s hidden among the things that are most valuable to him? Why not, it’s as good a reason as any.
This—all this, everything—is beginning to feel like a game, like one of those murder-mystery parties where people dress up like gangsters and flappers and dole out clues to figure out who some pretend killer is. I flatten the paper on my lap and look closely, studying the numbers. They all seem so random, like a sort of code. Like a code. Because it’s a code.
I close my eyes. Bela was right; this was surely not meant for me. But who else? I don’t know what it says or what it’s for, but it is this that my dad was hiding here. It has to be. Please let it be. I fold the paper and push it deep into the inside pocket of my jacket.
From outside the storage locker, I hear the whir of an elevator motor and the chime of it opening its doors on another floor. I scramble out of the room, lock it up again, and feel my way toward the emergency exit sign. It’s just as I make it to the door leading to the staircase that the elevator opens and the guy with tattoos from the office steps out. In his hand is a baseball bat.
I slip through the door, run down the stairs, and exit on the first floor. For a moment, I can’t figure my surroundings; then I see I’m near the front office. I approach cautiously in case there’s someone else there now—but I can’t hear any movement. So I step into the room, push through the front door, and dash through the night toward the train.
Seven
It’s like a Fabergé egg inside the elevator that goes to Terrance’s apartment, with brass and mirrors and even a little velvet-upholstered bench along the back. When it reaches penthouse B, the elevator doors don’t open into a hallway but into a foyer paneled with wood and blue marble tile on the floor. There are only two doors, one that is very fancy, the other plain and marked SERVICE.
The fancy one opens, and a sleepy Terrance stands there in boxer shorts and undershirt. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I say. “Your doorman’s a dick.”
Terrance blinks at me. “Two in the morning. So—yeah.”
He gestures for me to come inside, and I follow him down a dark hallway. The first thing I notice about the apartment is the almost total silence. There’s a clock ticking somewhere, but that’s it. I can’t remember a single moment since we moved to New York that I haven’t heard sirens and car horns and shouts.
“Your dad home?” I say quietly.
“No. Dubai maybe.” He rubs his eye with the heel of his hand. “Or Shanghai. Anyway, you don’t have to whisper.”
I approach the windows that stretch nearly from the floor to the ceiling. Through them I can see the nighttime void of Central Park, ringed by the city beyond, distant windows filled with gold light hanging there like a tidy arrangement of stars.
Then it disappears as Terrance flips on a light. “Sit down,” he says, motioning me toward a cream-colored leather couch. “Can I get you something—soda, coffee?”
“No,” I say. “Thanks, but no.”
“Did they find your dad?” he says. “Is he all right?”
I settle into the couch, pull the sheet with the number sets from my pocket, and hand it to him. “I broke into a storage locker, and this sheet was stuck in the back of a photo album. It’s a code, Terrance.”
He squints at me with tired eyes. “Wait. Go back. You broke into a storage locker?”
“It’s my dad’s storage locker, so basically mine, too. Not important.” I stab at the sheet. “This, it’s a code, right? A secret code?”
Terrance looks at the sheet closely, bites his lower lip. Then a little laugh escapes him. “It’s—I don’t know. Maybe,” he says after a moment. “Come with me.”
I follow him to a room at the far end of a long hallway. It’s his bedroom and larger than my entire apartment. There’s an ancient armoire that looks as if it was stolen directly from Versailles, and a king-sized bed with a robin’s egg–blue upholstered headboard that sits beneath a couple of Japanese anime posters stuck to the wall with pins. But the centerpiece of the room is a gorgeous glass desk where a pair of enormous monitors seems to float above the surface.
I sit on the edge of his bed as Terrance paces the length of the room, studying the sheet in his hands. “All the sets are seven digits long.”
“I saw that, too,” I say. “And I was studying it on the train over here. The first number of each set is only ever zero through three. Never higher.”
Suddenly he stops pacing. “A book cipher,” he says. “Could be. It’s possible.”
“A what?”
“A book cipher.” He grabs a sci-fi novel from his desk and sits down next to me. “So, codes like this have existed since—pretty much since books were invented. Thing is, for all the NSA-level technology, if you do it right, a book cipher is still pretty secure.”
He opens the book and flips through it to a random page.
“Let’s say you want to write a message to someone, and the first letter of the first word is M. You find an M on the page, then—so, write this down.”
I take a pencil and legal pad from his desk.
He runs a finger down the page, then across it, counting quietly to himself. “Page two-one-one, fourteenth line from the top, twenty-seventh character from the left side of the page.” He looks at me. “You get that?”
“Yes,” I say, staring at what I’ve written. It takes me only a few seconds to figure it out. “So—the number set would be 211,14,27.”
“Exactly.” Terrance closes the book and stands. There’s an excited smile on his face. The geek’s smile. The smile of the thinker engaged in the joys of thinking. “You have to do that for every single letter. It takes a long-ass time.”
“But it’s secure,” I say.
“Yeah. If it’s truly random,” he says. “The thing is, though, the person receiving the message has to not only have the same book, but the same edition, the same print run, everything. Otherwise the numbers don’t point to the same letters.”
It’s all so clear to me as soon as Terrance’s words are out of his mouth. I pull the copy of 1984 out of my jacket pocket, and he takes it from my hand as if it were some sort of relic, delicately balancing it on his palms.