Days from the past crept in and took center stage. She remembered her father teaching her things, things most fathers probably never thought of or knew existed. He spent hours with her every night before she went to bed, working through old codes from wars long since ended. She learned other languages, even ancient ones that no one had uttered for thousands of years. Then there was the combat training. Adriana began learning to fight when she was only six. To her, it was a normal part of life. She didn’t know any better until she started meeting other kids. Whenever a bully picked on her or some other child in school, she was the one who ended up standing at the end of the fight. One time, she remembered, four older boys had trapped her after she’d put a stop to them picking on one of the other kids. They all pounced at once. When she was done, one of the boys had a broken arm, and the other three had a variety of scrapes and bruises. The school’s principal had requested she not return.
The thought made Adriana laugh for a second as she continued to unconsciously pace back and forth in a ten-foot span under the cemetery’s shady tree.
She stopped and walked over to the bench where Koenig was watching her every move. Taking a seat next to him, Adriana continued to enter searches into her phone, scouring the Internet for a solution to the riddle.
The memories in her head cleared a little and zeroed in to some of the things her father said when she was young, lessons he’d taught her, and principles that would guide her through life. Of them all, one of the most interesting and fun to her were the times he’d given her riddles that had to do with ciphers. Letters, numbers, phrases, sentences, all written in a code that usually required a tremendous amount of patience to deal with were things Adriana thoroughly enjoyed. She was always excited when her father would come up with a new cipher for her to figure out. Usually, the reward on the other end was a piece of candy or a trip to the toy store. Occasionally, though, figuring out the cipher resulted in finding a small treasure. For a little girl, that treasure was a gold coin. She’d never really known the value of those coins until later in life when her father explained they’d come from a Spanish galleon, shipwrecked off the coast of Ibiza. As her fingers pored through the search results on her phone’s screen, the shipwreck and its treasure disappeared. Everything suddenly cleared in her mind, and the answer appeared like the first rays of morning sunlight.
“If I didn’t know better,” she said finally, “I’d say this is a cipher.”
“A cipher? You mean a code of some kind?”
“Mmhmm. Did you consider that as a possibility?”
He scoffed. “I’m a professor of art and philosophy. I’m afraid I do not know much about such things.”
Adriana’s feet shifted, and she tilted her head sideways. “Well, Professor, when people want to hide something in plain sight, they often use codes or ciphers. Many of the leaders in world history did this. If Graupe meant what he said on that record from the archives, these two words are probably the clue. And most likely, it’s a cipher, not a direct name or location.”
“Now that you say it, I suppose it wouldn’t have made much sense for him to simply put the name of the buyer on his gravestone.”
“Wouldn’t have made sense on any level. Doing such a thing would have exposed the buyer right away, or at least to someone who’d done even the smallest amount of research.” She could see he was slightly offended by the comment. “Not that you only did a small amount. I’m saying that anyone who’d happened to be looking for that painting would have realized that the buyer’s name was on Graupe’s tombstone, especially if they’d seen the sales record from the archives.”
“I have to admit, I never really considered the idea that it could be a code for something. I mean, maybe the thought popped into my mind, but without the key, ciphers are difficult to interpret. Aren’t they?”
She nodded. “Usually.” She walked over to a bench under the nearby tree and sat down, setting her phone down in her lap.
Koenig followed her and occupied the space next to her. He watched over Adriana’s shoulder as she typed out the letters into her digital notepad.
“In a typical cipher, at least ones like this, each letter actually represents another letter of the alphabet. It can take large amounts of time for people to try to figure them out without advanced computer software.”
“We don’t have that kind of time.”
“No. We don’t. Fortunately,” she tapped on the screen, “this cipher is only two words with a total of eleven characters.”
“Is that good?”
“I’ve seen worse. Notice that in the second word, there are two Ns.” He nodded and kept staring at the screen. “And of course, there is one in the first word as well. Right away, we know that if we can solve what the letter N represents, we’ve figured out three parts of the puzzle. The more intricate ciphers are difficult to figure out. The letters are often represented by huge gaps in the alphabet and can sometimes even be changed depending on the rules the key establishes.”
Koenig’s eyes were wide. “Do you think this is one of those?”
“We will know soon enough.”
Adriana set to work on the Ns and worked down first. “I find the easiest way to work with a cipher is to start with the letters closest to it first and work out from there. For example, the next letter in the alphabet is O. We write down two of those here,” she tapped on the screen again and recorded the letters. “And one in the first word. Then repeat the process for the letter above it in the alphabet, which is M.”
“This could take forever,” Koenig said and leaned his back against the bench’s support.
She didn’t answer. Adriana was deep in thought, and already her hopes were high. She wrote down the three Ms and decided to try one of the other letters in the first word. Recalling something she’d learned long ago, she tried out the two vowels in the first word. She jotted down a few new vowels for each of her words and looked at them for a second.
Koenig frowned and leaned forward again. “Those aren’t the letters before and after those vowels.”
“No. One trick that was used when working with these kinds of codes was to treat the vowels as a separate part of the alphabet.”
The professor pressed his lips together and blinked his eyes rapidly. “Do the last letter here. I believe it will be L.”
She did as requested and wrote down the two possibilities. One word didn’t make much sense while the other spelled out a name. It was as plain as vanilla ice cream.
“Emil,” Koenig exclaimed. “That is a very common German and Austrian name, especially from that time. That has to be the answer.”
“Not so fast,” she said, trying to keep a little perspective. “That might be the name, but it could also be a ton of other names. Let’s see how this matches up with the second word.”
Adriana repeated the process for the next ten minutes, writing down the letters for the two words until she finally had a last name to go with the first.
“Unbelievable,” Koenig said, aghast. Shock filled his face. “Emil Hummels.”
“You recognize that name?”
“Hummels? Of course. He was a Nazi commander and rumored to own a vast art collection, one that was rivaled only by the Führer himself.”
The information zipped through Adriana’s brain. “Someone like that would have had knowledge of the government’s plans, including what they were going to do with many of the great pieces of classical artwork.”