Charlie stepped through into the secret room, its walls covered in shelves packed with older books. Nausea abruptly constricted her throat. The memory of lying on the library carpet rushing back at her as though no time had passed between then and now, as though she were still a terrified kid. The rough texture of the merino wool against her cheek, the wetness from her vomit, the voice coming from the dark.
Don’t look behind you.
The smell of beets still made her gag.
Charlie stepped through onto the onyx tiles of the smaller chamber. Shelves lined the walls there too, with older and more precious books filling them. Memoirs, notebooks, and scientific journals, a hundred at least, all worth stealing. The Mystical Discoveries of Tovilda Gare sat beside Confessions of Nigel Lucy, Magus and Diarios de Juan Pedro Maria Ugarte. There were other books, in Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Latin, and Greek, as well as a whole half wall in French. Her fingers itched to choose a few at random and stuff them into her bag.
Pushing the bookshelf door closed, she checked for any additional wiring that might indicate an unexpected surprise.
Charlie didn’t find anything that seemed worrisome, and turned toward the back of the hidden room.
A trompe l’oeil of a dead goat, entrails spilling out and mingling with split pomegranates, hung above a club chair, the only piece of furniture.
Gingerly, she felt around the edge of the hideous painting. She found hinges, with no lock on the other side.
She swung it open to reveal the wall safe she remembered.
Made by Stockinger, who were known for offering solid, bespoke models with the bells and whistles of all the custom luxury safe makers like Buben & Zorweg or Agresti. There would be winders for watches, cloth-lined wooden drawers, but none of the ridiculous golden and bejeweled neo-Victorian extravagances of Boca do Lobo pieces. Stockinger made serious safes for serious people.
A dial rested on the front, beside a gleaming handle engraved with Lionel Salt’s initials. And beside it, a keypad.
Most modern safes were digital, offering none of the romance of breaking into the old ones. None of the listening for when the spin changed, the infinitesimal slotting into place, the softer click-click as satisfying as the crack of knuckles. If she could ignore the keypad entirely, she would. Digital safes weren’t just unromantic, they were nearly impossible to open without the code.
Taking a deep breath, she reset the lock by spinning clockwise, then started going counterclockwise. She heard the first notch at five. Then she reset and spun again and again until she had five numbers: 2–4–5–63–7. She was certain of them. She was as sure as sure could be.
But what there was no way to know was the order. And five numbers meant five tumblers, five interior wheels, and one-hundred-twenty possible combinations.
All she could do then was grind through them, while sweat beaded up at her forehead and in the hollow of her throat. She was conscious of the party going on, of time slipping away, of the possibility that someone might find her.
Charlie could hear the moment the fence fell and released the locking mechanism. She let out a long, unsteady breath and turned the lever.
It only moved halfway.
Then the digital keypad lit, green and bright and blinking.
Charlie stared at it in disbelief. This safe wasn’t digital or dial; it was both. Her heart rate kicked up and her mouth tasted sour with panic. She had no way to know if there was a timer on entering the code, and she’d be limited in the number of tries. Safes like this offered three, usually, before locking up and setting off an alarm.
Fishing a UV penlight out of the bottom of her backpack, Charlie turned off the lights of her glasses, pushing them up onto her head. Then she shone the penlight onto the keypad.
Very few people wiped down their keys after use. The light revealed the grease of fingertips, limiting the number of options for the combination.
2–3–4–5–6–7.
The same numbers as the other side. Relieved, she moved to type in the order that had worked on the dial. She stopped herself a moment later, finger hovering over the keypad. There were more markings on the two and the six than on the other numbers, suggesting they repeated. If that was true, then this was a seven-digit code, at minimum.
If cracking a mechanical safe was about understanding the machine, cracking a digital safe was about understanding the person who set it. Would they choose a random number and then hide the combination somewhere they could find it? Or would they pick something less random and therefore more memorable?
Lionel Salt was the kind of person who needed to be better than everyone else. With his carved stairs, his awful paintings, and his willingness to murder for his own amusement.