Liquid Fire (20 page)

20. Virtually Uncrackable

“Well, it’s about time you called me,” said Special Agent Philip Davidson, voice rising from the speakers of the rental car as we shot across the San Mateo Bridge toward Burlingame. Philip was my ex-boyfriend, but his deep voice carried a warmth I still shared—a double benefit, since he was my contact in America’s mystical spooks bureau, the Department of Extraordinary Investigations. “After your little emotional incident in Oakland, followed by last night—”

“I knew if I didn’t call you, you’d call me,” I laughed.

“Seeing your name pop up on MIRCwood is one thing,” Philip said. “But our job is to prevent crimes and stop disasters, not snoop over the shoulders of every magical person in the country—no matter how much my bosses might like to. What can I do for you, Dakota?”

I filled him in—not that I needed to; thanks to MIRCwood, the DEI’s “Magical Incident Report Clearinghouse/Web-Oriented Database,” Philip already knew most of what I had to tell him. But when I revealed Cinnamon’s insight about the code, Philip had bad news.

“What do you mean, you can’t decode it?” I asked. It didn’t surprise me that Cinnamon hadn’t (yet) picked up codebreaking, nor that Professor ZQ didn’t know mathe
magical
codes. But a flat “no” was the last thing I expected from a superspook at the DEI. “Philip—”

“I didn’t say
impossible
,” Philip said. He’d
already
started looking into the mess in Union Square, and readily agreed to talk to Officer Brookstone in the San Francisco Police Department. But on the code, he was pessimistic. “We’ll take a look, but if we can’t—”

“Philip, come on,” I said. “If anyone can do this, you can. You’re the biggest spook I know. Heck, the DEI
specializes
in the study of hidden magic. Surely
someone
at the DEI is an expert in magical codes, that is, assuming you don’t have a whole department—”

“We do, but I want to be realistic. First off, we don’t even know it’s really a code—”

“Hey! No doubtin’ the me,” Cinnamon said. “
Fuck!
The symbols woven into the spell are cracklin’ with mana, but they’re cut off from the intent of the spell itself. So their meanin’s
everything
. I’ll bet someone who gots the counterspell could read it off in a snap—”

“All right, Cinnamon, I believe you,” Philip said. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky, find out they’re using a simple substitution cipher. But in my experience, magicians trying to talk in secret use sophisticated ciphers, or worse, mystic codes. It’s virtually impossible to—”

“Virtually impossible as in probably can’t be done, or as in against procedure?” The more I got involved in the magical Edgeworld, the more cautious he got about what he shared. “This isn’t some BS with the National Security Agency, some backdoor you can’t admit exists—”

“It exists,” Philip said.

That stymied me for a second. “Then—”

“
Virtually
impossible as in very-unlikely-or-at-least-impractical,” Philip said. “I’ll have our boys and girls look at the message, and I’ll also slip it under the door of the NSA—they love a friendly challenge. But deciphering a message can take years or even centuries. Some never get cracked. Even the best expert codebreakers can’t just ‘crack’ an arbitrary cipher, any more than a computer whiz can just ‘hack’ an arbitrary computer—”

“Or an artist can take a fuzzy image in Photoshop and just press ‘enhance,’ ” I said.

“Exactly,” Philip said. “If the message is short enough, there’s no way to tell what it is. Sometimes amateurs gaffe and use something that has a known key, but normally, codebreakers need a lot of text to start tackling letter frequencies or looking for patterns—”

“You can’t crack it,” I said. “because it’s a short code?”

“Cipher,” Cinnamon corrected. After the talk, she’d dragged me to Moe’s bookstore in downtown Berkeley and found a slim Gardner volume on cryptography. She was struggling even though it was written for a junior age level; however, the struggle was with her dyslexia, not her retention. “Jumbled-up letters is a cipher. A code means, like, code words and stuff—doubletalk, secret passwords, little red code books the captain takes down with the ship.”

“That’s what I meant by mystic codes,” Philip said. “They’re grimoires of secret words, a kind of hidden language known only to initiates. Good luck if that’s what we’re dealing with here—they guard those books like demons, and they’re usually enciphered as well.”

“It doesn’t feel like code words,” Cinnamon said, a bit uncertainly. “The way the letters all runs together, it feels like normal words all scrambled up, a transposition cipher. But we probably don’t gots enough of the cipher to descramble it—”

I shrugged. “So the ‘cipher’ is short. So what? The longer it is, the more complicated it could be. Somebody explain, in fifty words or less, why we can’t crack a short code—
especially
scrambled letters. Me and my dad used to solve Cryptoquotes all the time when I was a kid.”

“They wants you to solve it,” Cinnamon said, “It isn’t so easy when they don’t—”

“The intended recipient has the key,” Philip said. “The rule for unscrambling.”

“But can’t you, I dunno, reverse engineer that from the message?”

“OK, let’s try one then. What’s a cat?” Cinnamon asked. “C-A-T, cat?”

“I dunno,” I said, grinning at her hopefully. “A delightfully obscure daughter?”

“Mom! I’m serious,” she said. “It’s a scramble code. What’s CAT stand for?”

I stared ahead, out over the lanes of the bridge. “Uh . . . I don’t know. Act?”

“ACT, yeah, that’s a good one,” Cinnamon said. “But why not TAC, like a tic-tac?”

“Or TCA, part of a longer word?” Philip said. “CTA, some government agency?”

“ATC, maybe somebody’s—
fah!
—somebody’s initials, like Andrew T. Codebreaker?” Cinnamon said, her switching tail thumping hollowly against the glove box. “Or maybe, by some quirk of the scramble, a CAT is just a CAT.”

“The images you sent me looked like sixty character messages from a full alphabet,” Philip said. “Assuming it’s not something
more
complicated, that’s an astronomical number of possible transpositions, billions and billions—”

“Trillions and trillions,” Cinnamon said. She shook her head, ears canted. “Sixty factorial is, uh . . . fuck. Lots, even for me. Eight billion . . . trillion trillion trillion . . . trillion trillion
trillion
, and lots and lots of change.”

“So, good fucking luck, is what you’re telling me,” I said.

“Not that it’s totally impossible,” Philip said. “An agent in the field can’t use something arcane. The best ciphers rely on simple rules and some secret that only the agent and his contacts know. For all we know, it’s something rock bottom simple—”

Philip’s voice cut out briefly as my phone
blooped
, and Cinnamon jumped in.

“Like, scramblin’ a message usin’ a different Shakespeare sonnet each day of the week,” Cinnamon said, as I plucked the phone from its cupholder. She said, “If somebody kept that pattern up for—
hah!
—a month, we’d crack it like pecans on moonsday. With just two—”

“We’re screwed,” I said, staring at a San Francisco number I didn’t recognize.

“Unless we get”—another
bloop—
“more messages,” Philip said.

“Or finds the key,” Cinnamon finished.

“Figures,” I said, flicking the call to voicemail. All I could think of was that symbol—a vaguely Chinese mandala, with a dragon ouroboros, twisted over itself like an infinity symbol, coiling forever at its center. “Dragons are the best at keeping secrets.”

“I hate to say this,” Philip said, “but I hope it stays a secret.”

“What?” Cinnamon said. “But—”

“The messages were part of an organized attack,” Philip said. “You said Jewel called it a curse, but I’m guessing
death threat
. Even though more messages might help crack the cipher, I’d rather the ones we have remain enigmas than risk Jewel getting hurt in another attack.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“On that note, your stunt in Union Square was
spectacular,
” Philip said. “I’ve never seen
projectia
that large, and that’s saying something. Hopefully, they will have scared them off—”

“Not likely; they actually seemed more curious than scared when I was deflecting bullets on the streets of Oakland,” I said. “Wait a minute. How did you know it was spectacular?”

“Dakota, it’s all over YouTube,” Philip said. “And it got picked up on FOX and CNN—”

“Damn the Internets,” I said. “That’s all we need, pictures of the codes everywhere.”

“What’s the problem with that?”

“Well,” I said, “if this is a code . . . who’s the message to?”

The car went silent. My smartphone rattled in its cupholder—voicemail arrived. I looked; same number. But who? Not the police, at least not their cells; I’d entered full contacts from everyone I’d spoken to. I put the phone down, unwilling to drop this conversation.

“Well . . .” Cinnamon said, tilting her head. “
Eff—
”

“Jewel,” Philip said, filling in what Cinnamon or I would not. “The ‘ninjas’ don’t need it to talk to themselves, so she’d be the logical choice. I’ve seen this in cults—when members step out of line, enforcers deliver a ritualized warning, understandable only to insiders. The encoded message could be a gruesome threat—a magical equivalent of a horse’s head in a bed.”

“Ugh. That’s essentially what Jewel said the pictograms meant,” I said. “As for the code, either she doesn’t know or isn’t talking. But there are at least three other alternatives—first, it’s a message to a confederate elsewhere, like descriptions of the people with Jewel. The last thing we need is an encoded hit list plastered over the news—”

“Mom!” Cinnamon said. “A fire ninja isn’t gonna throw down a message and just
hope
the news will pick it up! What if the fire department had doused it, or the police had cordoned off the area? If they wants to send a message, they’d email or text it or something—”

“More likely, a phone call,” Philip said. “I agree with Cinnamon, sounds implausible—”

“OK, maybe,” I said, “but if Jewel doesn’t understand the message, and it isn’t plausible it was meant for someone else, that leaves the second possibility. That the ‘messages’ aren’t messages at all, but are part of a larger spell we haven’t grokked yet.”

“I don’t gets how,” Cinnamon said. “I went over and over the spell. It’s, like, hermetic—”

“I believe you, honey,” I said, “based on what
we
know about magic, but . . . what if the fire ninjas know something we don’t? And you said a magician might be able to read the message. What if a magician could cast a spell against it, like a lock and key?”

“A magic locker,” Cinnamon said. “Holdin’ a hidden intent, waitin’ to spring it—”

“Oh, great,” Philip said. “More unknown magic. What’s the third possibility?”

“That Jewel was right the first time,” I said. “That it’s a curse.”

The car went silent again. I shifted in my seat as my Dragon moved against my skin.

“So . . .” I said, “whether it’s a curse, a magic locker, or even just a simple message to other bad guys, we don’t need images of it splashed all over the news. And if it is part of a larger spell, we
certainly
don’t need videos showing copycats how to do it all over YouTube—”

“All right,
all right,
” Philip said. “I’ll contact the Oakland and San Francisco police, try to suppress details of the case, but—Dakota. This is America. The attacks have been public. If someone posts a picture to their Flickr accounts, there’s nothing we can—”

Philip’s voice cut out abruptly as my phone buzzed again, this time with a text message this time. I snagged the phone out of the cupholder, staring at the same San Francisco number I didn’t recognize . . . but a phrase that I did: CALL ME—DAKOTA FROST.

The same thing I’d written on that envelope at the airport—and said to
Carnes
.

———

“Philip,” I said quietly. “I’ve got another call. I think I need to take it.”

21. Never Out an Edgeworlder

Never out an Edgeworlder—it’s a firm rule. But I couldn’t just waltz off the phone with Philip “I don’t believe in coincidences” Davidson, world’s greatest spook. So, without naming the Wizarding Guild, I quickly explained the threat we’d received at the airport.

When I was done, Philip was quiet for a moment.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll . . . stay in touch, Dakota.”

“Thanks, Philip,” I said, and hung up. “So . . . Cinnamon. You think he’s—”

“—gonna tap your call?” Cinnamon finished. “When
doesn’t
he?”

I shook my head. There was not outing Edgeworlders, and then there was letting people get what they deserved. I dialed the text without listening to the voice message. When the phone picked up and the speaker answered, I said, “Hi, I’m returning your call. This is Dakota Frost—”

“—best magical tattooist in the Southeast,” Cinnamon finished.

The speaker didn’t answer at first. “How rude, Ms. Frost,” said an oddly familiar voice. “It isn’t polite to put someone on speakerphone without asking.”

I cocked my head. “Mr. Carnes,” I said. “My apologies, I’m driving.”

“I have private matters to discuss with you, Ms. Frost,” the wizard said. “If this is a bad time, we can speak again later—”

“No, no, this is a perfect time,” I responded. “You’re just the person I wanted to speak to, and if you object to my daughter’s presence, give it up. She’s my closest advisor.”

Cinnamon grinned at me.

“Very well, Ms. Frost,” Carnes said. “I keep
my
daughters out of the business, but it’s your funeral. That was a hell of a calling card you left last night; you now have my undivided—”

“Hang on—what are you calling a calling card?” I asked.

“The giant
dragon
symbol all over Macy’s in Union Square.”

“Actually, I cast the giant dragon
projectia
that
flew
over the Square while defending my friends from a magical assault,” I said. “The giant coded symbol on Macy’s façade was left by our assailants, whom
I
assumed were allied with you. Your first message failed, so you—”