That sparked Aidan’s interest. “My phone? Yeah,” said Aidan. “3-G, Wi-Fi, GPS.”
“So turn it on,” said Tom.
“I thought you said no electronics.”
“I’m making an exception for your edification.”
Aidan turned on the phone and GPS. It took a few moments to acquire the satellite signal; then a map of London appeared with a blue dot in the center indicating their location.
“There!” said Tom, leaning over to point out some numbers at the bottom of the small screen. “See? Zero degrees. That’s our longitude.”
Sarah’s interest was piqued. She leaned over to look.
“So…what are those numbers after the zero?” she said.
“Those are minutes and seconds,” said Tom.
“The what?” said Aidan. “It tells the time?”
“It’s not time,” said Tom, “not when you’re talking about latitude and longitude. Each degree is divided into sixty minutes, and each minute is divided into sixty seconds. The seconds can be broken down into tenths or hundredths. That’s how you can pinpoint exactly where you are.”
“Where I am,” said Aidan, “is confused.”
Sarah took Aidan’s phone. “So,” she said, “right now our longitude is zero degrees, zero minutes, and fourteen point zero-five seconds, and the W means…”
“West,” said Tom. “We’re just a tiny bit west of the prime meridian, which is zero degrees longitude.”
“And this other number,” said Sarah. “Starting with fifty-one. That’s the latitude?”
“Right,” said Tom. “Fifty-one degrees, twenty-nine minutes, and nine point ninety-two seconds north of the equator.”
“That’s very interesting,” said Sarah.
“It is?” said Aidan.
“Oh, yes,” said Sarah, handing the phone back to Aidan.
“Very.”
Tom Cooper, thrilled to have his children actually listening to him, launched into a lecture on the history of navigation. Aidan took his phone back and returned to his video game. Sarah, out of politeness, pretended to be interested in her father, but all she was thinking about was getting back to the hotel and turning on her laptop.
“So what you’re saying,” said Aidan, studying the document, “is that these long numbers—”
“—are not money, but latitude and longitude,” said Sarah, waiting for her laptop to come to life. “A location. A place. Didn’t you notice? The latitude on the boat was fifty-one degrees. That’s also the first number on the paper.”
“Which means…”
“Which means it’s the same distance north from the equator as we are. And the longitudes are close—it was zero degrees on the boat, and it’s only two degrees on the paper. So I think whatever it is, it’s around here.”
“Where around here?”
“That’s what we’re about to find out.”
“How?”
“Google Earth.” The laptop finished booting up. Sarah clicked on the blue-and-white orb that was the Google Earth icon; in a moment the screen was filled with an image of the Earth as seen from space. Sarah positioned the cursor over the box labeled “Fly to” and said, “Okay, read me those numbers.”
It took Sarah several minutes of trial and error to figure out the right format—she needed a north latitude and a west longitude, with spaces between the degrees, minutes, and seconds. When she did that and pressed enter, the globe began to move.
“Okay,” said Sarah. “Here we go.”
The globe rotated, stopping when south-central England was at the center of the screen.
“I knew it!” exulted Sarah. “It’s nearby.”
She and her brother watched intently as the screen zoomed in, closer and closer, revealing, in ever-greater detail, satellite images of towns and fields. It stopped over what looked like a forest, partially surrounded by fields. The location that Sarah had entered was at the center, marked by a small four-by-four grid.
“There it is,” said Sarah.
“There what is?” said Aidan.
“I don’t know,” admitted Sarah. She zoomed the view out, revealing more of the surrounding area, including nearby towns, their names appearing as labels.
“Monckton Farleigh?” read Aidan, chuckling. “Farleigh Wick? What kind of names are those? They sound like rock stars.”
“They’re towns,” said Sarah. She zoomed out a bit more. “Bath!” she said.
“What? All we have is a shower.”
“Not that kind of bath. Bath,” she said, pointing, “is a city. Right here. It’s only…” She studied the scale at the bottom left of the screen. “…a couple of miles from Magill’s location.”
“So?”
“So there are historic tours to Bath. There are brochures downstairs. Historic tours, as in you-know-who.” She nodded toward their parents’ room.
“You think Mom and Dad’ll actually want to go there?”
“I think they will after you and I tell them about all the fascinating history in Bath.”
“I don’t know about any fascinating history in Bath.”
Sarah had opened Google and was typing in historic sites bath england.
“You will,” she said.
CHAPTER 5
THE WOODS
“WHO’S UP FOR ONE MORE TOUR?” said Tom, waving a brochure at his wife and children, who were sitting on a sofa in the living room of the bed-and-breakfast where they were staying in Bath. “It’s a walking tour. Bath by Night.”
“Wouldn’t Bath by night be the same as Bath by day, only darker?” said Aidan.
Tom sighed, then looked toward Sarah.
“Dad, I’m really tired,” she said, with a huge yawn. “All that pedaling today wore me out.”
“Well,” said Tom, “you were the ones who insisted on renting bicycles.”
“I know, Dad,” said Sarah. “And I can’t wait to ride around some more tomorrow. But I think I’m going to bed early tonight.”
“Me too,” said Aidan, stretching dramatically.
Natalie frowned and said, “Are you two all right?” It was unlike her children to go to bed early.
“Really, Mom, I’m fine,” said Sarah. She rose from the sofa. “G’night,” she said, heading for the room she and Aidan shared.
“Me too,” said Aidan, following his sister.
“We’ll see you at breakfast, then,” said Tom. He turned to his wife. “What about you, Nat? Up for a walking tour?”
“To be honest,” said Natalie, “I’m pretty beat myself. What I’m up for is a nice cup of tea, a book, and bed.”
“Okay, then,” said Tom, a bit disappointed. “I guess it’s going to be a quiet night.”
Sarah and Aidan waited an hour and a half to be sure their parents had settled in for the night. As the minutes crawled by, Sarah verified, for the fifteenth time, that Aidan had entered the coordinates correctly into his phone’s GPS. She also checked and rechecked her backpack to make sure it contained the supplies they’d bought earlier that day while their parents were antique-shopping—two flashlights, some cheese sandwiches, chocolate bars, four bottles of water, and, from a camping store next to the supermarket, a “Survival Kit in a Tin.” This was a small, vacuum-sealed metal container, about the size of a coffee can, packed with supposedly useful items—a whistle, duct tape, a fishhook and line, a compass, first-aid supplies, and so on. Sarah thought it was stupid—“What, you think we’re suddenly going to need a fish?”—but Aidan thought it was cool and insisted that they buy it.