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The noon sun was just high enough in the sky to shine over the roofline and into the alley. It lit the imperfections in the quarried rock wall revealing the decaying mortar. I shelved the message and turned my attention to the exterior wall of the building containing the ironworks. There was an exhaust fan on the far end of the wall, the hiss of welding torches audible from within. The rock wall itself was in much better shape than the worn brick of the alley wall or the mottled plaster of the adjoining building. It was maybe thirty stones high by sixty wide. Good, solid stones, twelve inches long and nine high. The building was built to last.

My thoughts drifted back to the coordinates of my father’s ship. I had memorized the digits upon seeing them in Hanoi:

4101643329008169

Broken out into latitude and longitude they would read like this:

41.016433 NORTH

29.008169 EAST

Those coordinates had directed me to the ship in the Bosphorus, but I supposed there was no reason they couldn’t do more. With appropriate planning, they could harbor a code. And my father was a planner. He always had been.

I stepped back through the thorns and grass until I was flat against the opposite building. It gave me a little more perspective on the wall I was staring at. Numeracy had always been a priority of my father’s. He wanted me to be literate, sure. Nothing wrong with being able to read. But he also wanted me to be numerically literate. When the other kids were learning to add, he pushed me to learn to multiply. When they moved on to multiplication, I started algebra. I thought about the problem from my father’s point of view. From a numerical perspective. Then, instead of a rock wall, I saw a grid of stones.

I counted them. My initial estimate had been close. With a little legwork, I discovered that the building was fifty-eight stones wide. I began to count upward, but ran into a problem There was no way I could properly count to the top of a three-story building. Again, I could estimate, but that wouldn’t be accurate. And I’d need accurate numbers if I wanted to apply any kind of logic to the coordinates he had left me. Back to square one. I looked down in frustration, kicking at an old Coke bottle on the cracked, dried ground. Focus. This was my father. He wouldn’t have left a problem that couldn’t be solved. Not if he could help it. I stared back up at the wall.

That’s when I saw it. The line. The thin mortar crack that ran between the first and second stories of the structure. It hadn’t seemed significant before, but it did now. Because I needed a hard limit. — somewhere I could accurately count to, and the crack provided that. I counted down from the crack to the bottom stone. The grid was now twelve stones high. Twelve by fifty-eight. Six hundred and ninety-six stones to work with.

The grid could represent a map of Earth, but I didn’t think so. To plot the coordinates on such a roughly defined space would be too imprecise. No, my father would want each stone to represent a point on the grid. So I decided to treat the digits in the coordinates as though I was making a graph. The bricks were offset, so I knew that I’d have to establish a rule for vertical movement. I made the decision to stick to the right while counting upward and to the left while counting downward. It was an arbitrary designation, but there was no way to follow my hunch without establishing some simple rules.

I began with the X-axis, the horizontal. Four. I counted four stones along the bottom of the building.

One. I counted one stone up.

Zero. I did nothing. One. Another up.

Six. Six more stones to the right.

Four. I counted up again.

I counted through the whole sequence that way. When I hit the first nine, it got tricky, but I treated the crack as a barrier and doubled back on myself.

I counted all the way until I ended with a stone a couple feet below the crack.

If my reasoning had been anywhere near correct, if my line of inquiry was going to lead anywhere, it was to there. To that single stone. The most likely explanation was that it was a dead drop. I felt it with my hand. The stone was rough to the touch. But it was solid. I hit it with a rock to be sure. The stone was as solid as it got. No markings. No secrets. Nothing. Another dead end.

I thought about the coordinates again. They were the position of the ship. What was a ship? A vehicle. A transport system. It moved goods. The location of the ship itself was ever-changing. One thing was certain, my father would have to have known where the ship would be moored. And in a busy channel like the Bosphorus, the ship wouldn’t drop anchor, it would be tied up to a permanent mooring buoy. But even then, there would be room for error, depending on the current, and the tide, and where the stern was fastened. If my father wanted to send me a message, even with a stationary mooring buoy, he would need to discount the exact position of the freighter — he would need to throw away the last two digits. So I counted again, ignoring the final two decimal values in both the northern and eastern portion of the coordinates.

I came upon a stone that was easier to reach this time.

I felt its grimy surface. It was roughly quarried like the other one, but it didn’t sound the same when I hit it with the brick. It sounded hollow. And it moved a fraction of an inch. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my Swiss Army knife. I hadn’t upgraded to the new version of the knife with the integrated USB drive and I was happy for that, because what I needed in this situation was a good strong lever. I found one in the serrated saw. I could already see the hairline cracks in the mortar around the stone, and when I inserted the saw blade, more of it broke away. It looked like paste or dirt had been rubbed over the cracks in the mortar to cover them up.

I felt my heart beat a little faster as I dug the blade farther into the crack and levered it out, slowly working my way down. About two-thirds of the way down the crack, I had enough purchase to feel the entire stone shift. I pushed the knife in a little more and the stone broke loose from the others. Really it was only the top layer of the stone that broke free. The face of the rock had been cut, sheered off. And behind it was a cavity that contained the object that was about to make my life a living hell.

Chapter 11

The object was a book. A slim, leather-bound book. There was no plastic bag or protective cover over it. Nothing to indicate its value. I reached into the cavity and removed it, opening the worn cover. I had to be careful because the pages were damp. It rained in Istanbul and that rain moistened stone buildings. I immediately saw handwriting in the book, written with a fountain pen in elaborate cursive. It wasn’t my father’s hand, I knew that. But it was a journal of some kind. It looked like it was written in Cyrillic.

The journal contained technical drawings. Very old technical drawings in black ink. But there was also a second set of drawings. In addition to being in a completely different style, they were in a different color ink, from a different pen. It looked as though someone had doodled in somebody else’s journal. Except they weren’t doodles. They were sketches. Very good sketches of sculptures and pastoral scenes. Some had Cyrillic phrases below them. But some of the sketches weren’t so bucolic. Some featured scenes of torture and mutilated body parts. Some were downright frightening.

It was utterly confounding. Why the elaborate drawings? The sketches of sculpture? I was fairly certain, I had even seen a line or two in English from Shakespeare. The entire thing was bizarre. Until I got to the last page. That’s when I recognized one of the technical drawings. It was a drawing of a wooden-framed tower with a sphere on top. It was a well-known drawing, at least in technical circles. A sketch of a famous installation. It was then that I reconsidered what my father was trying to tell me with his message: