“What happened?”
I put my torta down with a heavy sigh. “Just … everything.”
I get back to searching through the backpack. My fingers land on the napkin where Ixchel wrote my mysterious postcard messages. The napkin is soaked through, on the verge of turning to mush, but I notice the writing. It’s fuzzy, but I can still read what she wrote. As I look at it upside down, the positions of the periods suddenly grab my attention.
WHAT.KEY.HOLDS.BLOOD.
DEATH.UNDID.HARMONY.
ZOMBIE.DOWNED.WHEN.FLYING.
KINGDOM’S.LOSS.QUESTIONABLE.JUDGMENT.
“What if … ,” I whisper.
Ixchel puts her bottle down. “What?”
“What if the periods actually mean something?”
“You mean, like part of the code?”
I point to the letters at the start of each word.
“What if this message is an acrostic? Where you just use the first or last letters of each word? What key holds blood—W-K-H-B.”
Ixchel shrugs. “It’s meaningless.”
“Yeah, but now,” I tell her breathlessly, “now that does look like a Caesar cipher word.”
“Caesar cipher? Like Julius Caesar?”
I nod. “He used it to encrypt messages to his troops. It’s one of the simplest, earliest codes. You shift each letter along three places to get the cipher letter. So an A becomes a D, a B becomes E.”
Ixchel’s eyes widen, impressed. She looks down at the writing.
I continue, pointing. “W in the cipher message … go back three in the alphabet … that’s T. Then K … that’s an H. H is code for E … and B is code for …”
I stop, momentarily stumped.
“It would have to be Y,” Ixchel points out. “Going back to the end of the alphabet.”
“That spells … THEY.”
We stare at each other.
“What’s the second word?”
We work it out together.
ARE.
We continue, until we’ve deciphered the message so far.
THEY ARE WATCHING.
I jump up, run over to the woman selling tortas, and beg her for a napkin. Ixchel digs around inside her backpack and finds her pencil. I scribble the decoded message. And we just stare at it in wonder.
“Josh,” Ixchel says, her voice hushed, “how long have you had this message?”
“Days …”
I think suddenly of Tyler. If we want to call him before he goes to bed, we have to hurry. I check my watch—almost six in the evening. That’s eleven o’clock in England. I walk to the other end of the field, far from anyone, and open the plastic bag containing the Adapter. I have no idea if it’s still giving off the poisonous gas, but better to be safe. I remove the iPod and both phones. I seal up the Adapter again, stuff it into my back pocket and return to Ixchel. Then I try my cell phone. It turns on okay—finally! But the battery is almost dead, so I use Ixchel’s phone.
We call Benicio, who almost has a fit when he hears my voice. He’s furious. I can’t say I blame him. But he’ll feel differently when he sees the prize we’ve captured—the Adapter.
We assure Benicio that we’ll be back by morning. Montoyo won’t know that we ever separated; Benicio won’t get into trouble.
I’m feeling my confidence return. This is working out. We’ve had everything thrown at us, but we’re still in the game.
We call Tyler. He sounds tired and grumpy. When I ask if he went to my neighbor Jackie’s and picked up today’s mail, he perks up.
“Yeah, there were two more.”
He reads aloud the latest two messages, in date order.
FINESSE.REQUIRES.PROPER.HEED.
Just before I hang up, Ixchel whispers, “Ask him what the photos are …”
I’m a bit puzzled but ask anyway. He tells me that they’re photos of Labna and Palenque, two more Mayan ruins.
“You think that’s important?” I ask Ixchel.
“Could be. Another way to give more information, maybe?”
“You mean there’s a clue in the photos?”
“Maybe.”
I’m suddenly angry with myself for not going back to my house for the postcards.
That’s the first place Ollie and Madison would have looked for me, but …
Without the actual postcards, it seems that I won’t be able to solve the coded message.
Ixchel and I concentrate on deciphering the next few words.
In cipher-text they spell F-R-P-H. In English, COME.
THEY ARE WATCHING. COME.
It’s definitely a message—with an instruction. But where?
“The clue to where could be in some more messages,” Ixchel comments. “Or it could be right here, in what you already have.”
“That would be the smart way to send a message,” I agree. “Give as much information as possible in each piece.”