The Loch Ness Legacy (17 page)

Alexa nodded, pulled out her phone, and read the email to them.

Dunham pursed her lips. “Why do you think the rest of it is a code?”

“What other reason could he have for making it so cryptic?”

“Do you know how to interpret it?”

Alexa frowned. “Uh, no.”

“Read the first part again,” Tyler said.

You must continue our search no matter the obstacles. You of all people should know that doubling the degree to which you work is important to reaching our goal.

Tyler pointed at Alexa. “’You of all people,’ he says. Something you in particular should know.”

“So she needs to double the work she does on this?” Grant said. “How is that relevant? His message is, ‘Work harder’?”

Alexa shook her head slowly. “André was always saying that he was so proud of how much effort we were putting into the job, taking our work to the nth degree. It has to be what he meant. He said it all the time.”

Grant turned to Tyler. “Didn’t we have equations about nth-degree polynomials in linear algebra?”

“Yes, but I doubt Laroche was giving her a math equation to solve. He was aiming this puzzle at Alexa. That means it should be something in her area of expertise.”

“Which is what?” Brielle asked.

“Zoology, with a specialization in taxonomy and genetics.” When she saw Brielle’s confused look, Alexa continued. “I study the classification and heredity of animals. That was the reason André said I was the best candidate to search for Nessie. Once we found it, he wanted me to figure out how to classify it in the animal phylum.”

“Keep going with the message,” Tyler said.

Alexa read the next paragraph.

At times the creature has been said to resemble a sea serpent, a water horse, a kraken, or a plesiosaur. Dinosaurs are extinct, so the key is in the cells of animals still living.

“About the only thing he left out was a yeti and a unicorn,” Grant said.

“He was making a juxtaposition with the mythical creatures,” Alexa said. “André must mean that the key is literally in the cells of these animals.”

“How?” Tyler asked. “Is he talking about genetically combining them?”

Realization dawned on Alexa’s face. Tyler knew the look well.

“Doubling the nth degree,” she said. “Double n, meaning 2n. The key is in their cells.”

Brielle looked confused again. So was Tyler. “What’s 2n?”

“It’s the diploid chromosome number for any living thing. It varies widely. Humans have forty-six chromosomes. Chickens have eighty. Fruit flies have eight.”

She read the next part of the message.

Hydrophis spiralis, hippopotamus amphibius, and Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni are all good candidates, but it can’t be any single one of those.

“It has to be what he means. The chromosome numbers for the sea snake, hippo, and colossal squid.” She tapped furiously on her phone touchpad. “There’s an online database at Harvard that I have access to. It’ll take me a couple of minutes to track all three down.”

Tyler shook his head in wonderment. “Laroche would have known that only a zoologist could have connected the dots.”

“But why send a scrambled message to Alexa?” Dunham said.

Brielle stared at the massive vault. “And what the hell is so important for him to protect?”

“Got ’em!” Alexa said triumphantly. “The sea snake chromosome number is eighteen, the hippo’s is thirty-six, and the colossal squid’s is a hundred and eighty-four.”

She read the last part of the message.

However, if you add the structures of these creatures together, that is how you’ll find the Loch Ness monster.

Tyler did the addition in his head. “That’s two hundred thirty-eight.”

“That’s way too short to be a code,” Grant said.

Brielle jotted the numbers on a notepad. “What if we put them side by side?”

“If we go in the order he used in the message,” Alexa said, “that’s 1836184.”

Grant looked at the baby grand. “How do you play that on a piano?”

Brielle shook her head. “Those numbers don’t correspond to notes. Besides, we wouldn’t know what key to play.”

Tyler stared at the mobile and the shadow it cast on the blank wall. Why was that wall bare and the wall next to it lined? It almost looked like a…

He suddenly whipped around, looking for a seam in the ceiling, but there was so much detail in the woodwork that it was impossible to see where Laroche might have hidden a recessed light projector.

He pointed to the lines and asked Brielle, “What do those look like to you?”

Brielle scrutinized the lines, which weren’t all evenly spaced. They were slightly separated every five lines. Her eyes widened when she recognized the pattern.

“Those are musical staves.”

Tyler picked up the remote. “And I’ll bet we can get some music from those lines.”

The touchscreen had a numerical keypad. He plugged 1836184 into it.

The light projecting on the mobile went out and rose back into the ceiling. At the same time another light lowered from a spot opposite the lined wall. When it clicked into place, the spotlight shone on the mobile from the perpendicular direction.

Dots appeared on the wall, perfectly spaced within or on the lines. Some of the dots were formed by two or more of the irregularly shaped hanging metal pieces. If Tyler hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he wouldn’t have believed they could blend together so flawlessly. Some of the dots even had lines extending from them, indicating quarter- or half-notes.

Tyler turned to Dunham. “Have you seen that before?”

Dunham shook her head slowly, a stunned look on her face.

“Can you play that?” he asked Brielle.

She squinted at the notes. “The chords are fairly complex for me, but I’ll give it a try.”

Brielle sat on the bench and flexed her fingers. The rest of them went back and forth between watching her and the vault door.

She played three slow chords, followed by two quick ones. Nothing happened.

“Why does that sound familiar?” Alexa said.

“Are you kidding?” Grant said. “That’s the opening theme from
2001: A Space Odyssey
.”

“It’s called
Also Sprach Zarathustra
,” Brielle said. “Everybody learns to play it. But it’s several keys off the normal one, so nobody would have played it by accident. I got some of the notes wrong. Let me try again.”

She played it twice more, getting more comfortable each time until she got it note perfect.

The third time did the trick. A deep hum emanated from the vault. Tyler could almost feel its huge steel bars being drawn from the door. The hum ceased, and the door swung open, a light blazing from beyond. A recording of the
2001
music played from the interior. Laroche certainly had a flair for the dramatic.

When the door was fully open, the music ended. Tyler and the others crept forward until they were at the entrance.

“Oh, my God!” Alexa shouted and dashed inside.

“Wait!” Tyler ran after her. She was already kneeling by a figure propped against a display case.

“He’s alive,” she said, her fingers pressed against the carotid, “but barely breathing. We need an ambulance.”

André Laroche wasn’t on the run. He had locked himself inside his own vault.

Brielle stood back while Tyler and Alexa tended to Laroche and Grant called emergency services. She looked around and saw that one person was missing.

“Where did Ms. Dunham go?”

She didn’t wait for a response and went to look for her. It wasn’t a good sign when the loyal assistant didn’t stick around to see what was inside the safe.

Brielle backtracked her way toward the entrance and saw Dunham emerge from a side hallway. Without hesitation, Dunham raised a semiautomatic pistol and fired.

Instinctively, Brielle ducked, and the first two shots went wide. As bullets whistled past her, she dodged left and took refuge behind Bigfoot in the alcove. Several more rounds slammed into the stuffed beast, and then heels clacked in triple-time toward the front door.

Brielle poked her head out to see Dunham climb into a BMW. It laid patches of rubber on the stones and was gone.

Tyler yelled from around the corner. “Brielle, are you all right?”

Brielle emerged from her hiding place. “I’m fine. It’s clear now.”

Tyler stepped out from behind the wall. “What happened?” Grant followed, inspecting the bullet holes in the wall.

“It was Marlo Dunham. She shot at me and took off. Silver BMW. I didn’t get the plates, but it’s probably her car.”

Grant shook his head in disbelief. “Why?”

“Because of what we found in the vault. She must have left the room when she realized we were about to open it and would find Laroche inside.”

“I’ll call the police and tell them to be on the lookout for her car,” Grant said. “With only two directions off Mercer Island, she should be easy to spot.” He made the call while they walked back to the vault.

As they waited for the ambulance, they checked out the vault’s contents. Display cases ringed the interior. Each held an artifact, all of them labeled. One claimed the item was a lock of Bigfoot’s hair. Another was the tooth of a Tasmanian wolf, dated 1956. The biggest display case was at the back and held a six-foot-long fish that had been stuffed and mounted. It was labeled a coelacanth.

“What is all this stuff?” Grant wondered aloud.

“It must be André’s treasure,” Alexa said as she cradled Laroche’s head in her lap. “He believed that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster were real, out there waiting to be discovered. Like the Tasmanian wolf, which was declared extinct a hundred years ago, but there are people who think a few still roam the wilds of that island.”

“And the big ugly fish?”

“The last coelacanth was thought to have died in the Cretaceous Period, but fishermen caught one off the east coast of Africa in 1938, proving the species was still in existence after sixty-five million years. Since then, they’ve been caught regularly. I had no idea he had one. I’ve only seen it one other time, at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in DC.”

“So he thinks the Loch Ness monster is like the coelacanth?” Tyler said. “It’s been around since the time of the dinosaurs, and we just haven’t seen it all these years?”

“It might not be a dinosaur, but the coelacanth does show we could be surprised by more species yet to be discovered. That’s what makes my job interesting.”

“I think
I’ve
found something interesting,” Brielle said, standing at a small pedestal with a case on it.

Tyler and Grant looked over her shoulder as she carefully flipped through a notebook. The pages were yellowed with age.

A single word was emblazoned on the cover above a swastika: Altwaffe. Old weapon.

Brielle felt a chill as she thought of Wade, who had aged fifty years in little more than two weeks.

Sirens wailed in the distance. The paramedics and police would arrive at the mansion any minute.

“Grant,” Tyler said, “did you bring that high-res camera?”

“Just like you asked.”

“Then let’s get a picture of every page in the book. We’re going to have to turn it over to the Feds, but I don’t want to be cut out of the loop.”

Brielle picked up the notebook to hand it over and felt a piece of paper underneath. She didn’t want to cede anything to the police that she didn’t have to, so she deftly swiped it to her side as she gave Grant the book.

Tyler flipped through the pages rapidly for Grant to capture the words on video.

“I’ll bring the paramedics in,” Brielle said and left them to finish documenting the notebook.

The ambulance stopped in the driveway, and two paramedics jumped out with their gear. She led them to the living room and pointed them to the vault. She stayed behind to read the page she had acquired.

Dear Alexa,

I pray that you are the one who found this note. If you are reading this, then you understood my email and discovered my body. I’m sorry for the mysterious email, but I couldn’t let Marlo Dunham know that you were the sole person with the code to get into the vault. If she had realized what I’d sent, she would have killed you. She has held me captive for nine days. I know she planned to kill me when she no longer needed me, and I thought locking myself in the one place she couldn’t get to me was the only option left.

I know she betrayed me and planned to unleash the Altwaffe. When I bought the canister and notebook, I thought it was simply a way to find the Loch Ness monster, and so did the unwitting seller. But when I realized what it was, Marlo convinced me not to turn it over to the authorities, fearing that it would be turned into a potent weapon by the government. Instead, I locked it away, unsure of how to destroy it safely myself. Little did I realize that I was being deceived by my trusted assistant.

She took the weapon, but left the notebook, possibly to implicate me. She didn’t know that the notebook also contains the formula for an antidote. It’s a fairly simple process, once you have the key ingredient, but no one on earth has it.

The reason is simple. To make the antidote, you must have a tissue sample from the Loch Ness monster.

As police rushed past her, Brielle shook her head and read the sentence three more times to make sure she had read it right. The next sentence was even stranger.

The Nazis claim to have acquired a sample taken by Charles Darwin himself. I know that’s difficult to believe, but you must. It’s the only way to undo the damage that I have done by not destroying the Altwaffe when I should have. If only I had recognized Marlo’s insanity sooner.

I can’t take the chance that Marlo has found a way into the vault, and that it is she instead of you reading this note. I can’t lead her to Nessie and help her destroy any hope for a cure. On the back of this page are clusters of numbers and letters. You must follow in the footstep of the Sun King’s Apollo. Place the sheet so that Apollo’s hallux is aligned with the 2n of your favorite animal and his lateral one is aligned with the 2n of that animal’s most feared enemy. Starting at three, the resulting connected code will lead you to a book at the current home of Darwin’s intellect. There you will learn how to locate the creature and find a cure.