The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [115]
Damn right he needed to come out here and start feeling this stuff for himself.
But as he took his first step off the concrete path and into the snow, he heard the faint rumbling of voices behind him.
Hobbling and hiding behind a section of trees that surrounded the edges of the wide-open graveyard, Laurent didn’t have any trouble staying out of sight. Out here, no one was looking for anything except the dead—which is why it made such a perfect drop point.
In the distance, two voices were fighting, arguing, and far too busy to see what was really going on in the cemetery.
Still, it wasn’t until they reached the top of the path that Laurent peered out from behind the apple blossom tree and spied who was making all the noise.
That’s him, the barber thought as the bitter cold settled between the thin bones of his fingers.
“Stop!” the girl called to the guy with the sandy blond hair.
The guy wasn’t listening. But there he was. The one who could take away everything they had worked for.
Beecher.
77
Beecher, stop…!” Clementine calls out, chasing behind me.
I keep running, my lungs starting to burn from the cold, my shoes soaked from the snow as I climb the concrete path and pass a double-wide headstone with an intricate carved stone owl taking flight from the top.
No doubt, Oak Hill Cemetery is for people with money. But if Nico’s right, it’s also for people with something far more than that.
“Beecher, you need to be smart!” Clementine adds. “Don’t jump in without knowing where you’re going!”
I know she’s right. But thanks to the GPS in my cell phone, I know exactly where I’m going.
“542 feet northwest,” it says in glowing green letters. There’s even a red digital arrow that points me in the right direction. Yet as I look down to check it, my phone vibrates in my hand.
Caller ID says it’s the one archivist who I know is a member of the actual Culper Ring. Dallas.
“Beecher, that’s it! You cracked it!” Dallas blurts before I even say hello.
I know what he’s talking about. The note. The invisible ink. Twenty-six years is a long time to keep a secret. Write back: NC 38.548.19 or WU 773.427. Since the moment we found it, we knew those numbers weren’t call numbers on books. So then we kept thinking, What’s NC? What’s WU?
Until Nico said it was another old George Washington trick.
“Nico’s the one who cracked it,” I remind him.
“The point is, he was right. One of our guys—he works at the Supreme Court of all things—he said Nico’s story checked out: Washington apparently used to write these long rambling letters that seemed to go nowhere… until you read just the first letter, or third letter, or whatever letter of every word. When we tried that here, it’s like he said: NC and WU became…”
“N and W. North and West,” I say, repeating what Nico told me, and I told Dallas a half hour ago when I said to meet us here.
As I head up the main path, I understand why no one wants to take Nico at his word, but even I have to admit, it was amazing to watch. Once Nico had the N and W, he played with the decimals and the message became a bit more familiar: Write back: N 38º 54.819 W 77º 3.427—a GPS address that converts to the same latitude and longitude system that’s been in place since Ptolemy put them in the first world atlas nearly two thousand years ago. That’s why we were stuck for so long. We were looking for book coordinates. These were map coordinates. “Where are you anyway?” I ask.
“Just getting to Oak Hill now,” Dallas explains. “I just passed the front gate. Where’re you?”
“I don’t know—where all the headstones and dead people are. Up the hill on the left. There’s…” I glance around, searching for landmarks. “There’s a wide-open field and a huge stone statue of a… she looks like a farm girl, but her face is all flat because the weather’s worn away her nose.”
“Hold on—I think I… I see you,” Dallas says. “I see you and—” He cuts himself off. “Please tell me that’s not Clementine