فصل 04

CHAPTER 4

MAGILL’S MESSAGE

“LET ME SEE IT!” said Sarah, grabbing for the piece of paper.

“Not here,” said Aidan, pulling it away. “He’s watching.”

Sarah looked back toward the consulate and saw the security officer standing at the top of the steps, regarding them curiously. They walked quickly away, not looking back until they had gone two blocks.

Aidan motioned her into a coffee shop. She ordered a decaf latte. Aidan bought something with a complicated Italian name that tasted like a vanilla milkshake.

“Okay,” said Sarah. “Now let me see.” Aidan handed her the tracing he’d made from the floor. It was covered with strange lines, very much like the document they’d found in the desk.

Sarah studied it for a moment, then said, “Great. Before we had one piece of paper with a bunch of random lines. Now we have two. We’re really making progress.”

“Okay,” said Aidan, “but it has to mean something. I mean, this guy Magill went to all that trouble…”

Sarah dug into the backpack and pulled out the paper from the desk. She laid it down next to the tracing.

“Same thing, right?” she said. “Random lines.”

“But they’re not the same,” said Aidan.

“No,” said Sarah.

“Maybe you have to fold them,” said Aidan. “Let me…” He reached for the papers; in doing so, he bumped his drink, splashing some out of the cup. Sarah yanked the papers away from the spill.

“Watch it!” she said.

“Sorry,” said Aidan. “I was just gonna—”

“Hey,” said Sarah. “Look.”

Aidan looked. Sarah, in pulling the papers away, had held them up to the window, one atop the other. The sunlight was streaming through them both.

The dark lines were now intermingled.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” said Sarah.

“I have no idea what you’re thinking,” said Aidan, mopping up his spill.

Sarah, ignoring him, had pressed the two papers against the window and was now manipulating them—sliding them back and forth, flipping them over, rotating them, trying various combinations.

Suddenly, she stopped. She was now holding the papers still, pinned against the glass.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Aidan, look.”

Aidan looked—and gasped. The random-looking marks had aligned to form numbers and letters.

“Whoa,” said Aidan. “What is that? Are those numbers money? Because if they’re money, we are rich.”

“We don’t know it’s money,” Sarah said. “What’s this star supposed to mean? And the arrow? And what about ‘Feed guards’? What guards?”

“I dunno,” said Aidan. “Maybe they’re guarding the money? I really hope it’s money.”

Sarah got out a pen and carefully traced the floor marks onto Magill’s document, which now carried the full message. They both studied it some more.

“I don’t think the numbers are money,” said Sarah. “It seems like they’re too exact.”

“Maybe it’s foreign money,” said Aidan. “Like pounds, or kilograms.”

“Kilogram is a weight, you moron.”

“Oh yeah? Which moron figured out what was under the eagle?”

Sarah, not having a good answer to that, said, “We’ll have to figure this out later. We need to get back or Mom and Dad’ll kill us for making them miss the tour. And we don’t want Dad realizing we took our passports.”

“Good point.”

They left the coffee shop, walking back toward the hotel.

“So what tour are we going on today?” said Aidan.

“Some boat tour. On the Thames.”

“Great! We can ride past another batch of old buildings and Dad can get all excited about how old they are.”

“Yup,” agreed Sarah. She was still looking at the document. “But while we’re on the boat, we can try to figure out what this means.”

“Yeah, right,” scoffed Aidan. “Maybe the tour guide will give us a clue.”

As it turned out, that was almost how it happened.

They’d been on the tour boat for about an hour, motoring past the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, and many other points of interest—at least of interest to Tom and Natalie Cooper, who were fascinated. Sarah and Aidan, sitting in the row behind them, were not so excited—Aidan was playing a video game on his phone, while Sarah was surreptitiously studying Magill’s strange message.

As the winding Thames made a sweeping left turn, the guide, who’d been narrating the tour through the boat’s public-address system, announced that they were approaching Greenwich, site of the Royal Observatory. The guide spoke in a rich baritone voice with the kind of British accent that makes even the simplest statement sound brilliant to Americans. Tom and Natalie were hanging on his every word.

“The observatory,” intoned the guide, “is the location of the prime meridian, zero degrees of longitude. All longitude on Earth is measured from here.”

“How about that, kids?” said Tom Cooper, turning around to Sarah and Aidan. “Hey! No electronics, young man!”

“What?” said Aidan, looking up from his game. “Oh, yeah.” He quickly pocketed the phone before his father confiscated it.

“We’re at zero degrees!” Tom said.

Aidan’s brow furrowed. “What are you talking about? It’s got to be eighty degrees out.”

Sarah snorted.

“Not temperature,” said Tom. “Zero degrees longitude.”

“Whatitude?”

“Longitude. You know, longitude and latitude? For navigation?”

Aidan stared at his father blankly.

“Doesn’t your phone have a GPS?” said Tom.

That sparked Aidan’s interest. “My phone? Yeah,” said Aidan. “3-G, Wi-Fi, GPS.”

“So turn it on,” said Tom.

“I thought you said no electronics.”

“I’m making an exception for your edification.”

Aidan turned on the phone and GPS. It took a few moments to acquire the satellite signal; then a map of London appeared with a blue dot in the center indicating their location.

“There!” said Tom, leaning over to point out some numbers at the bottom of the small screen. “See? Zero degrees. That’s our longitude.”

Sarah’s interest was piqued. She leaned over to look.

“So…what are those numbers after the zero?” she said.

“Those are minutes and seconds,” said Tom.

“The what?” said Aidan. “It tells the time?”

“It’s not time,” said Tom, “not when you’re talking about latitude and longitude. Each degree is divided into sixty minutes, and each minute is divided into sixty seconds. The seconds can be broken down into tenths or hundredths. That’s how you can pinpoint exactly where you are.”

“Where I am,” said Aidan, “is confused.”

Sarah took Aidan’s phone. “So,” she said, “right now our longitude is zero degrees, zero minutes, and fourteen point zero-five seconds, and the W means…”

“West,” said Tom. “We’re just a tiny bit west of the prime meridian, which is zero degrees longitude.”

“And this other number,” said Sarah. “Starting with fifty-one. That’s the latitude?”

“Right,” said Tom. “Fifty-one degrees, twenty-nine minutes, and nine point ninety-two seconds north of the equator.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Sarah.

“It is?” said Aidan.

“Oh, yes,” said Sarah, handing the phone back to Aidan.

“Very.”

Tom Cooper, thrilled to have his children actually listening to him, launched into a lecture on the history of navigation. Aidan took his phone back and returned to his video game. Sarah, out of politeness, pretended to be interested in her father, but all she was thinking about was getting back to the hotel and turning on her laptop.

“So what you’re saying,” said Aidan, studying the document, “is that these long numbers—”

“—are not money, but latitude and longitude,” said Sarah, waiting for her laptop to come to life. “A location. A place. Didn’t you notice? The latitude on the boat was fifty-one degrees. That’s also the first number on the paper.”

“Which means…”

“Which means it’s the same distance north from the equator as we are. And the longitudes are close—it was zero degrees on the boat, and it’s only two degrees on the paper. So I think whatever it is, it’s around here.”

“Where around here?”

“That’s what we’re about to find out.”

“How?”

“Google Earth.” The laptop finished booting up. Sarah clicked on the blue-and-white orb that was the Google Earth icon; in a moment the screen was filled with an image of the Earth as seen from space. Sarah positioned the cursor over the box labeled “Fly to” and said, “Okay, read me those numbers.”

It took Sarah several minutes of trial and error to figure out the right format—she needed a north latitude and a west longitude, with spaces between the degrees, minutes, and seconds. When she did that and pressed enter, the globe began to move.

“Okay,” said Sarah. “Here we go.”

The globe rotated, stopping when south-central England was at the center of the screen.

“I knew it!” exulted Sarah. “It’s nearby.”

She and her brother watched intently as the screen zoomed in, closer and closer, revealing, in ever-greater detail, satellite images of towns and fields. It stopped over what looked like a forest, partially surrounded by fields. The location that Sarah had entered was at the center, marked by a small four-by-four grid.

“There it is,” said Sarah.

“There what is?” said Aidan.

“I don’t know,” admitted Sarah. She zoomed the view out, revealing more of the surrounding area, including nearby towns, their names appearing as labels.

“Monckton Farleigh?” read Aidan, chuckling. “Farleigh Wick? What kind of names are those? They sound like rock stars.”

“They’re towns,” said Sarah. She zoomed out a bit more. “Bath!” she said.

“What? All we have is a shower.”

“Not that kind of bath. Bath,” she said, pointing, “is a city. Right here. It’s only…” She studied the scale at the bottom left of the screen. “…a couple of miles from Magill’s location.”

“So?”

“So there are historic tours to Bath. There are brochures downstairs. Historic tours, as in you-know-who.” She nodded toward their parents’ room.

“You think Mom and Dad’ll actually want to go there?”

“I think they will after you and I tell them about all the fascinating history in Bath.”

“I don’t know about any fascinating history in Bath.”

Sarah had opened Google and was typing in historic sites bath england.

“You will,” she said.