The guard reached him and put his hand on Aidan’s shoulder. “Sir,” he said, “I’m afraid I must ask you to leave.”
“Okay, okay,” said Aidan, making a few last pencil strokes. “I’m done anyway.” He gathered the remaining spilled items from around him and shot a look at Sarah as he stood, handing her the backpack.
“All right, then!” she said to the clerk. “You’ve been most helpful. Thank you.”
“What about the interview?” asked the clerk.
“I…ah…I just remembered,” said Sarah. “It’s not Spanish I’m studying. It’s Italian! I’m always getting those two languages mixed up. So sorry! Thank you! Bye!” She turned and followed Aidan, who was walking quickly toward the door. Once outside, Aidan burst out laughing.
“Italian?” he said. “Italian?”
“Hey, it was the best I could do. But what was with spilling everything? What were you doing there on the floor?”
“Tracing,” said Aidan, grinning proudly. “And you won’t believe what I got.”
“What did you get? Tell me!”
Aidan held up the piece of paper. “I have no idea,” he said.
CHAPTER 4
MAGILL’S MESSAGE
“LET ME SEE IT!” said Sarah, grabbing for the piece of paper.
“Not here,” said Aidan, pulling it away. “He’s watching.”
Sarah looked back toward the consulate and saw the security officer standing at the top of the steps, regarding them curiously. They walked quickly away, not looking back until they had gone two blocks.
Aidan motioned her into a coffee shop. She ordered a decaf latte. Aidan bought something with a complicated Italian name that tasted like a vanilla milkshake.
“Okay,” said Sarah. “Now let me see.” Aidan handed her the tracing he’d made from the floor. It was covered with strange lines, very much like the document they’d found in the desk.
Sarah studied it for a moment, then said, “Great. Before we had one piece of paper with a bunch of random lines. Now we have two. We’re really making progress.”
“Okay,” said Aidan, “but it has to mean something. I mean, this guy Magill went to all that trouble…”
Sarah dug into the backpack and pulled out the paper from the desk. She laid it down next to the tracing.
“Same thing, right?” she said. “Random lines.”
“But they’re not the same,” said Aidan.
“No,” said Sarah.
“Maybe you have to fold them,” said Aidan. “Let me…” He reached for the papers; in doing so, he bumped his drink, splashing some out of the cup. Sarah yanked the papers away from the spill.
“Watch it!” she said.
“Sorry,” said Aidan. “I was just gonna—”
“Hey,” said Sarah. “Look.”
Aidan looked. Sarah, in pulling the papers away, had held them up to the window, one atop the other. The sunlight was streaming through them both.
The dark lines were now intermingled.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” said Sarah.
“I have no idea what you’re thinking,” said Aidan, mopping up his spill.
Sarah, ignoring him, had pressed the two papers against the window and was now manipulating them—sliding them back and forth, flipping them over, rotating them, trying various combinations.
Suddenly, she stopped. She was now holding the papers still, pinned against the glass.
“Oh my god,” she said. “Aidan, look.”
Aidan looked—and gasped. The random-looking marks had aligned to form numbers and letters.
“Whoa,” said Aidan. “What is that? Are those numbers money? Because if they’re money, we are rich.”
“We don’t know it’s money,” Sarah said. “What’s this star supposed to mean? And the arrow? And what about ‘Feed guards’? What guards?”
“I dunno,” said Aidan. “Maybe they’re guarding the money? I really hope it’s money.”
Sarah got out a pen and carefully traced the floor marks onto Magill’s document, which now carried the full message. They both studied it some more.
“I don’t think the numbers are money,” said Sarah. “It seems like they’re too exact.”
“Maybe it’s foreign money,” said Aidan. “Like pounds, or kilograms.”
“Kilogram is a weight, you moron.”
“Oh yeah? Which moron figured out what was under the eagle?”
Sarah, not having a good answer to that, said, “We’ll have to figure this out later. We need to get back or Mom and Dad’ll kill us for making them miss the tour. And we don’t want Dad realizing we took our passports.”
“Good point.”
They left the coffee shop, walking back toward the hotel.
“So what tour are we going on today?” said Aidan.
“Some boat tour. On the Thames.”
“Great! We can ride past another batch of old buildings and Dad can get all excited about how old they are.”
“Yup,” agreed Sarah. She was still looking at the document. “But while we’re on the boat, we can try to figure out what this means.”
“Yeah, right,” scoffed Aidan. “Maybe the tour guide will give us a clue.”
As it turned out, that was almost how it happened.
They’d been on the tour boat for about an hour, motoring past the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, and many other points of interest—at least of interest to Tom and Natalie Cooper, who were fascinated. Sarah and Aidan, sitting in the row behind them, were not so excited—Aidan was playing a video game on his phone, while Sarah was surreptitiously studying Magill’s strange message.
As the winding Thames made a sweeping left turn, the guide, who’d been narrating the tour through the boat’s public-address system, announced that they were approaching Greenwich, site of the Royal Observatory. The guide spoke in a rich baritone voice with the kind of British accent that makes even the simplest statement sound brilliant to Americans. Tom and Natalie were hanging on his every word.
“The observatory,” intoned the guide, “is the location of the prime meridian, zero degrees of longitude. All longitude on Earth is measured from here.”
“How about that, kids?” said Tom Cooper, turning around to Sarah and Aidan. “Hey! No electronics, young man!”
“What?” said Aidan, looking up from his game. “Oh, yeah.” He quickly pocketed the phone before his father confiscated it.
“We’re at zero degrees!” Tom said.
Aidan’s brow furrowed. “What are you talking about? It’s got to be eighty degrees out.”
Sarah snorted.
“Not temperature,” said Tom. “Zero degrees longitude.”
“Whatitude?”
“Longitude. You know, longitude and latitude? For navigation?”
Aidan stared at his father blankly.
“Doesn’t your phone have a GPS?” said Tom.