Unless his father had memorized the code—whatever it was—he would have needed a reference as he was writing.
Grayson closed his eyes, picturing the entire scene: the man, the pen, the journal, a reference of some kind… The box. Grayson’s eyes flew open. He knelt, running his hand over the now-empty compartment. And then he felt a seam.
And another.
Another.
The workmanship was flawless. None of the seams were visible. But they were there, in the shape of a square roughly the size of Grayson’s palm. That was the thing about puzzle boxes. You never really knew when the box’s last secret has been uncovered.
Grayson reached for the double-sided tool—there was no saying a puzzle couldn’t use the same trick twice. He ran the magnet end along the inside of the compartment, directly over the square he’d felt.
It caught.
Grayson pulled, and the square popped out. Turning it over in his hands, he saw two wooden disks, concentric, with a metal brad through the middle.
“A cipher wheel,” Grayson he told his brothers.
Nash and Xander were on him in an instant. This wasn’t the Hawthorne brothers’ first time encountering a cipher wheel—or even their twentieth—so all three of them knew what to look for. The larger of the two wheels had letters carved around the edge, A through Z, plus a handful of common digraphs—Sh, Ch, Th, Wh, Ck, Kn. The inner wheel contained numbers, 1 through 32, but not in order, which explained, along with the inclusion of digraphs, why Grayson’s initial rudimentary attempts hadn’t broken the code.
“All we need to know now,” Xander said buoyantly, “is where to set the inner wheel.”
Going through the options manually was a possibility, but the part of Grayson that had grown up racing to complete those Saturday morning games wouldn’t let him.
Sheffield Grayson had a system. A routine. He retrieved the safe-deposit key and faux USB from his office, then retrieved his fake ID. He went to the bank. He withdrew money and left the slips in the safe-deposit box. He went to his sister’s house.
Grayson skirted thinking about what, besides the slips, had been in that box. Instead, he asked a simple question out loud. “Why save the slips?”
The answer came to him like a lightning strike. He went back to the pile. On each slip, there was a date. The same dates in the journal? That would be easily enough to verify. What he was more interested in right now was the withdrawal amounts.
Two hundred seventeen dollars. Five hundred six dollars. Three hundred twenty-one dollars.
But according to Sheffield Grayson’s sister, he’d only given her even amounts.
“He set the wheel to a different position for each entry.” Grayson didn’t phrase that as a possibility or a question. “And kept the slips as a record to help him decode his own writing.”
17. 6. 21. Most likely, those were the numbers set to the A. All he had to do was match the dates on the slip to the date on the journal entries, turn the wheel to the appropriate spot, and…
Grayson put the pen that Xander had dismantled back together and retrieved his own leather notebook. Ignoring how similar it looked to his father’s, he turned to the first entry that Sheffield Grayson had written and began to decode.
At first, all he got was nonsense. Again. But this time, Grayson didn’t stop. He kept going, and eventually, the numbers on the page turned to words. Fifty thousand dollars to shell five, Cayman Islands, via shell two, Switzerland…
Eventually, the code settled back into gibberish. Noise. On the next page, Grayson found the same thing: meaningful content embedded in noise. The real message was in a different location on this page.
How was that determined? Grayson didn’t need to know the answer to that question. He had no actual need to understand exactly how his father’s mind had worked. But on some level, he wanted to, so when he noticed two subtle tears at the top of the current page, when he turned to the next and saw two more tiny tears in the paper—in a different position—he brought his finger to lightly touch them.
Not tears, Grayson thought, his gaze darting to the hotel desk, where the white index card he’d removed from Sheffield Grayson’s office still sat. Notches.
CHAPTER 75
JAMESON
Well done, my boy. Jameson didn’t just hear Ian say that; he felt the words. Physically. Like he’d been holding a breath too long, finally gasped in air, and discovered that breathing hurt.
He just asked me to hand over the keys. To hand over the entire damn game.
Avery shifted closer to Jameson, the back of her hip brushing his leg. Without a word, Jameson pressed the key he’d just discovered—with its shining, maze-like head—into her hand.