Hayden snorted. “What do you think?” he said.
Sam gave him the ghost of a smile. “You already know my answer, Simon.”
Simon took a breath. The relief that flowed through him was a palpable, physical sensation. He smiled completely, sincerely, for the first time in days. “That is exactly what I wanted to hear,” he said.
Ryan frowned, thinking furiously. “Have you contacted the authorities?”
“No. What would I tell them? ‘Good lord, Inspector, I received a message from my father and he’s alive and well and seems quite happy! Help me!’”
Andrew snorted. “Besides, the ‘authorities’ have been lying to you all along, haven’t they? They’re the ones who told you he was dead. ‘Oh, ever so sorry, do forgive us, b’bye now.’”
Simon nodded. “Exactly.” He reached into the other pocket of his jacket. “And there’s more.”
“More?” Andrew crowed.
“Good,” Ryan said.
Simon pulled out the hand-bound book and put it on the end table where his father’s head had appeared moments before. “I was given this at the same time I was given the message from my father. It’s a diary of chess games.”
“Oh, come now,” Ryan scoffed. “The man never kept notes of any kind; the last thing in the world he’d do is keep a chess diary.”
“Exactly what I said,” Hayden told them. He crossed the room and held out his hand. “Let me take a look at that again.”
Simon gave it to him. “I’ve already played through all these games; I think there are some general…ideas? He was trying to convey to me with them, but I think there’s more. I think there is specific, important information hidden in here somehow, and I want your help to find it.”
Ryan also started leafing through the journal, concentrating hard. “Who gave this to you?” he said.
“I did,” said a new voice from across the room.
All of them in a single movement whirled around to look at the double doors that Sabrina had closed almost an hour earlier.
Jonathan Weiss, still in his tailored raincoat, was standing just in front of the closed doors, his hands in front of him, gently holding his sopping hat. “If you’re trying to be secretive, the first thing you need to do is to lock the doors.”
Simon was the first to move. He rose and walked over to Jonathan, overwhelmingly glad to see him. Samantha, who had never much cared for Jonathan, held back, her arms crossed, her expression skeptical.
Ryan had met Jonathan only a few times in the past, at holiday parties and large gatherings, and even those had been many months ago-now he sat quietly, wondering how he had managed to get in without a peep. Andrew, meanwhile, had no idea who he was at all. Once introductions had been exchanged, and assurances that Jonathan knew everything about Oliver’s disappearance-and probably more-had been made, he was welcomed as part of the group and given a place to sit.
“So what do we do next?” Andrew asked.
Hayden had lost interest in the social niceties almost immediately. He was concentrating on the diary instead. Now he looked up at Simon, his eyes glittering sharply. “You say you’ve played through these games?” he said.
Simon nodded, as he and Jonathan walked closer to the others. “First night I got it, yes.” He briefly described what he’d learned from playing through his father’s chess journal. He’d found that each of the matches had a message-a “moral,” so to speak-but he had to admit that none of it amounted to much. He showed the scientist a hand-written list where he’d recorded what he learned.
Hayden scowled at it. “Juvenile,” he said.
Simon frowned back. “What?”
Hayden stared briefly, intensely at each page of the diary, then flipped it over almost impatiently and moved to the next. As the others chatted about Jonathan’s arrival and Oliver’s disappearance, Simon realized that Hayden was playing each of the games in his head, one after another, at astonishing speed.
“A good chess game is like a Chinese puzzle box or a set of Russian dolls,” Hayden said as he read. “Layer on layer, a puzzle in a puzzle.” He gestured in frustration at the diary. “But these games are absurd, Simon. Oliver was a much better player than this. A brilliant player, actually, much as I hate to admit it. So why did he record this odd set of matches? And why, in every single one, did he lose on purpose?”
Simon glared at him, baffled as well. “What?”
“Look. In every single one, he moved the king into a specific, compromised position. He moved the king into an intricate but contrived checkmate.” He shook his head emphatically; the silver wings of hair swayed back and forth. “No, he was far too sophisticated a player to do that. Something else is going on.”
He looked around the room as if searching for something. “Ryan,” he said. “Do you have paper and a pen somewhere?”
Ryan turned to him, mildly surprised. No one actually used paper anymore. “Ah…I can call the notepad up on the console, if you like.”
Hayden shook his head, less emphatically this time. “No. Nothing electronic. Oliver only trusted ink on paper; I’m going to follow his lead.”
It was a more difficult task than anyone expected. Ryan searched the desk drawers and even asked the AI. They finally located an antique fountain pen-quite a lovely bit of craftsmanship-but sheets of blank paper were nowhere to be found.
Finally Hayden lost patience. He stood up, stalked to the nearest floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and pulled a book off the shelf almost at random. Simon noticed it was the largest book-in size, if not thickness-within easy reach.
“The Peregrinations of Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Facsimile Edition,” he read. He cocked an eye at Ryan. “You mind if I use this?”
Ryan blinked in surprise, then shrugged. “I suppose not,” he said. “I doubt anyone’s opened it since the turn of the century.”
Hayden opened it, flipped quickly to the back, and located three pages with printing on only one side. Without another word, he curled his hands around the edge and jerked. The pages separated from the binding with a loud rip.
Hayden replaced the book on the shelf and plopped down exactly where he had been sitting before. Quickly, almost carelessly, he drew a chessboard on one of the sheets-an eight-by-eight grid. Then, half from memory, half from referring to the diary-he drew an “X” and a number in the square where the king had been left at the end of the game: X1 for the first game, X2 for the second, until he ran out of matches to record.
As he worked he said, “Andrew? Draw another grid. You too, Sam. Rip that page in half. Simon, Jonathan: grids.”
They all followed directions; in a matter of minutes, just as Hayden was finishing his list, they were all staring at individual sixty-four-square diagrams.
He looked up at them, concentrating intensely. “All right then. Sammy? Put the letters A to Z in your boxes, one letter per box, beginning in the upper left. Left to right, top to bottom. It’ll repeat about two and a half times.”
“Got it,” she said and started writing.
“Andrew? Same thing, but start in the lower left. Bottom to top, left to right. Simon? Start in the upper right. Right to left, top to bottom. And Jon-”
“Bottom to top, right to left.”
“Right. Tell me when you’re done.”
It only took a moment. When the last of them had finished, Hayden said, “All of you know algebraic chess notation, I assume?”
All heads nodded. Most of them had learned it when they were children. Hayden smiled. “All right then. I’m going to start calling out squares. Write the corresponding letter at the bottom of the page, in the order I give it. My guess is that one of you is going to start seeing actual words, and the others will see gibberish. Ready?”
They all said they were.
“Good. Here we go. H8…G5…F4…B3-”
“Got it,” Samantha said. “Oh my god…”
Hayden looked away from his paper, and found all four of them were holding up their sheets. Three of them were showing him an indecipherable jumble of letters under their grids…but Samantha’s read: