The Inner Circle

77

"Beecher, stop…!” Clementine calls out, chasing behind me.

I keep running, my lungs starting to burn from the cold, my shoes soaked from the snow as I climb the concrete path and pass a double-wide headstone with an intricate carved stone owl taking flight from the top.

No doubt, Oak Hill Cemetery is for people with money. But if Nico’s right, it’s also for people with something far more than that.

“Beecher, you need to be smart!” Clementine adds. “Don’t jump in without knowing where you’re going!”

I know she’s right. But thanks to the GPS in my cell phone, I know exactly where I’m going.

“542 feet northwest,” it says in glowing green letters. There’s even a red digital arrow that points me in the right direction. Yet as I look down to check it, my phone vibrates in my hand.

Caller ID says it’s the one archivist who I know is a member of the actual Culper Ring. Dallas.

“Beecher, that’s it! You cracked it!” Dallas blurts before I even say hello.

I know what he’s talking about. The note. The invisible ink. Twenty-six years is a long time to keep a secret. Write back: NC 38.548.19 or WU 773.427. Since the moment we found it, we knew those numbers weren’t call numbers on books. So then we kept thinking, What’s NC? What’s WU?

Until Nico said it was another old George Washington trick.

“Nico’s the one who cracked it,” I remind him.

“The point is, he was right. One of our guys-he works at the Supreme Court of all things-he said Nico’s story checked out: Washington apparently used to write these long rambling letters that seemed to go nowhere… until you read just the first letter, or third letter, or whatever letter of every word. When we tried that here, it’s like he said: NC and WU became…”

“N and W. North and West,” I say, repeating what Nico told me, and I told Dallas a half hour ago when I said to meet us here.

As I head up the main path, I understand why no one wants to take Nico at his word, but even I have to admit, it was amazing to watch. Once Nico had the N and W, he played with the decimals and the message became a bit more familiar: Write back: N 38? 54.819 W 77? 3.427-a GPS address that converts to the same latitude and longitude system that’s been in place since Ptolemy put them in the first world atlas nearly two thousand years ago. That’s why we were stuck for so long. We were looking for book coordinates. These were map coordinates. “Where are you anyway?” I ask.

“Just getting to Oak Hill now,” Dallas explains. “I just passed the front gate. Where’re you?”

“I don’t know-where all the headstones and dead people are. Up the hill on the left. There’s…” I glance around, searching for landmarks. “There’s a wide-open field and a huge stone statue of a… she looks like a farm girl, but her face is all flat because the weather’s worn away her nose.”

“Hold on-I think I… I see you,” Dallas says. “I see you and-” He cuts himself off. “Please tell me that’s not Clementine with you.”

“Don’t even start. Y’know I needed her to get into St. Elizabeths.”

“And what about here? Why bring her here? We talked about this, Beecher. No matter what you think, we don’t know this girl.”

I hang up the phone, tired of the argument. It’s no different than what Tot said. But what neither of them understands is, without Clementine, I never would’ve made it all the way here. And like I told her earlier, she was in that SCIF too. I can’t leave her behind.

“Beecher, hold up!” a faint voice calls out behind us.

I turn, spotting Dallas just as he comes around the corner, halfway down the crooked path. He’s less than fifty yards away. He’s running fast to catch up.

But not as fast as me.

“Who’s that?” Clementine calls out, clearly freaked out.

“Don’t worry. Just Dallas,” I say.

“Why’d you tell him we were coming here?” Clementine asks, remembering Tot’s advice to not trust anyone.

I don’t answer.

On my cell phone, GPS says we’ve got another 319 feet to go. But I don’t need a snazzy cell phone to see my true destination.

An expansive pie crust of snow covers the ground, and a narrow minefield of footprints burrows straight at a single grave: an eight-foot-tall obelisk that looks like a miniature Washington Monument.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Clementine whispers behind me.

As I sprint from the paved path, my feet are swallowed by the ice. I stick to my left, careful to steer clear of the evidence. The footprints look new-like they were made this morning. There’s also another set of prints that leads back, back, back to the ring of trees that surround the field.

“You think someone’s out there?” Clementine asks, spotting the same prints I do.

I don’t answer. But what catches my eye is what’s sitting at the base of the obelisk: wet leaves… clumps of soil… and a neat little hole in dirty brown snow…

Like something’s buried underneath.

Scrambling forward, I dive for the little rabbit hole, stuff my hand down it, and pat around until…

There.

The beige rock is smooth and flat, perfect for skimming in a lake. Dallas and Clementine both rush to my side. But as I pull the rock out, I know something’s wrong. The weight’s not right.

“It’s plastic,” I say. “I think… I think it’s hollow.”

“Of course it’s hollow. That’s how they hide stuff in it,” Dallas says as if he sees this all the time. “Open it up. See what it is.”

I flip the rock over. Sure enough, the bottom swivels open.

All three of us hunch over it like mother birds over an egg.

And we finally get to see what’s inside.