AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Japanese tapas.” He makes air quotes around the second word. “I happen to know that you like them, so…”
My stomach growls.
How ladylike.
I join Evan at the table and swiftly swallow a few yummy morsels to make sure my stomach stays silent from here on out.
“Where’s the treasure map?” I demand after the edge of my hunger is blunted.
Evan spreads two papers in front of me, looking rather reluctant for some reason.
Is he afraid I’ll crack the code and steal his treasure?
Whatever. I focus on the papers: one a map, one a page ripped out of a notepad, both weathered and smelling vaguely familiar. Something about their scent reminds me of New York, but I can’t place it.
On the map is a hand-drawn penis shape that I recognize. “This is the state of Florida,” I exclaim.
“That’s as much as I was able to recognize,” Evan says.
I frown. The map isn’t to scale, and there’s no X marking the spots, like on a traditional treasure map. And instead of a legend of names and places, to one side of the map are numbers going from north to south and from west to east. There are also numbers on the other paper, the one that I presume is the cypher.
I point to the map. “Could this be a number grid, like in cartesian geometry? And those numbers the coordinates on said grid?” I gesture at the numbers on the cypher.
Evan takes out a folder that is full of copies of the treasure map, each littered with dots. “I tried plotting the numbers, but there doesn’t seem to be a pattern as such.”
Hmm. I scan the numbers on the cypher, the taste of my yummy food growing distant.
“Have you tried converting these numbers to letters of the alphabet?”
Evan shakes his head. “I’m not really a fan of this sort of thing.”
Hey, if he were, he’d be too perfect and even harder to resist.
Eating my food ever more mindlessly, I scan the first line of numbers: “151317761565177618301776.”
“I could consider each number to be a corresponding letter in the alphabet,” I say, more to myself than to Evan. “But there’s no obvious divider number, like a zero, so I can’t tell if the first two numbers are 1 and 5 or 15.”
“Right,” Evan says.
“It’s a safe bet that the clusters of numbers will not form something higher than twenty-six, since there are only that many letters in the alphabet.”
“Obviously,” he says.
“So, taking just the first four numbers, I either get ‘aeac,’ ‘aem,’ or ‘om’”
“‘Om’ is the sacred sound they make in meditation,” Evan says.
“Right, but if I keep going in that way, I get ‘omq’ or ‘omagg.’”
He scratches his head. “Those aren’t words.”
“Nope.” Yet I keep going and write down every variation of the gibberish. This is when I notice something. The string “AGGF” turns up a lot, so I look it up on my phone.
Hmm. There’s a German medical society promoting women’s health that uses that acronym. As in, a dead end.
Or maybe not. Looking more closely, I realize that the string’s corresponding number, 1776, appears three times in one line.
I look up that number and then feel stupid for doing so. I studied this back in school. 1776 is year one for the United States as a nation.
