The Unbreakable Code Read online

  “What’s wrong with him?” James whispered to Emily. The normal Mr. Quisling would have been calling out reminders to work silently.

  Emily mouthed, The unbreakable code.

  They stared at their teacher a minute more. Mr. Quisling intently wrote things down, then crossed them out.

  “I dare you to go peek at what he’s doing,” James said.

  “Right. He’ll subtract points from this assignment for goofing off.”

  “The normal Mr. Quisling would, but this is like a Quisling cyborg. He’s not paying any attention to the class. He probably won’t even notice you.”

  “If you’re so sure about that, why don’t you try it, then?” Emily asked.

  “I’m wearing my extra-squeaky shoes,” James said with a grin.

  Behind them, Maddie huffed loudly. “You two are pathetic. I’ll do it, since you’re both too chicken.”

  Emily hadn’t realized they’d been having their conversation loud enough for others to hear. Before either one could say anything in response, Maddie was already halfway to their teacher’s desk.

  “Mr. Quisling?” Maddie’s voice was a honey-soaked sugar cube. “Is this what you mean by an outline?”

  Mr. Quisling looked up and assessed Maddie’s open binder. “Yes, Maddie, that will do fine.” Then he looked to the class, his eyes glassy, as if he’d woken from a dream. “Read the chapter first before you start your outline,” he said. “The main topics of this chapter will be your headings. Supporting facts and important details are bulleted underneath.”

  Maddie made her way back to her seat. “He’s working on a puzzle,” she whispered.

  “What puzzle?” Emily asked.

  “One he printed from the Book Scavenger site. The logo was on the page.”

  “He’s working on a Book Scavenger puzzle?” James asked.

  Maddie nodded, now bored with the conversation, and flipped open her textbook to do the assignment.

  James scratched at Steve. Emily wrinkled her nose. They both studied their teacher, confused. At least he wasn’t racing ahead of them on the path to solving the unbreakable code as they had feared, but a Book Scavenger clue? During class? Really?

  * * *

  After school, Emily and James were still perplexed about Mr. Quisling’s odd behavior when they saw him round the side of the building and jog to the line forming for the approaching city bus.

  “He’s sure in a rush,” James said.

  They watched their teacher tug on his neon green jacket as he ran, then throw his satchel across his shoulder.

  “Let’s follow him,” Emily said.

  “Follow him? Won’t he be able to tell?” James asked.

  “There are tons of kids getting on. He won’t even notice us.” Emily sprinted toward the bus, James right next to her. “We’ll get off when he gets off, and if he sees us or says anything, we’ll act totally uninterested in him and make up an excuse for what we’re doing. We’ll say we’re meeting my parents somewhere nearby.”

  “I guess so,” James conceded. “Even if he notices us—so what? It’s not like anything bad could happen.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  THE BUS TOOK them to the Financial District, the crowd thinning along the way as more people got off than on. Emily and James sat in the front, where the seats faced sideways, while Mr. Quisling was all the way in the back. James slumped in his seat next to Emily, not wanting to be seen, while Emily kept an eye on their teacher. Mr. Quisling read a book the whole time, so Emily watched the gray-dusted, bristly top of his head jostle around with the lurches of the bus.

  When they neared the pyramid-shaped Transamerica building, Mr. Quisling reached up and pulled the bell cord. Emily whipped her head down, her ponytail falling like a curtain that she hoped concealed her face. When they’d first boarded the bus, it had been so packed that people had to stand in the aisles. That wasn’t the case now, and it would be tricky for James and Emily to exit at the same time as Mr. Quisling without drawing his attention. Fortunately, two other people also rose to get off, standing behind Mr. Quisling at the back doors. Emily and James trailed at the end of the line, and their teacher seemed none the wiser.

  When they stepped off the bus, Mr. Quisling was already almost a half a block ahead of them. He stopped abruptly, so Emily and James did, too. Emily half expected their teacher to spin around and shout, Caught you! But instead he stared at his reflection in the tinted windows of a restaurant, swiping his fingers at his hairline before continuing on. The approaching people curved around him like he was a boulder and they were a stream. It was funny, Emily thought, how some people were the boulders and others the water. She wondered what would happen if a boulder met another boulder on the sidewalk—would both refuse to change their course of direction, forcing them to collide?

  “Where did he go?” James asked.

  “What?!” Emily was pulled back from her daydream to see their teacher was missing from the sidewalk. They stopped walking. “How could he…”

  “I lost sight of him in a crowd of people, but he couldn’t have just disappeared.”

  They started walking again, albeit a bit more hesitantly, and soon came to a metal fence with an open gate. Through the bars was a redwood grove in between office buildings. An actual pocket of redwoods formed a little public park, smack-dab in the middle of all the hustle and bustle of the city. The trees shaded a paved courtyard bordered by lush bushes and mounds of clover. There was a fountain designed to look like a pond, complete with bronze sculptures of frogs jumping off lily pads.

  “In San Francisco?” Emily said, in awe. This was the citiest part of the city, with skyscrapers and glitzy business buildings and one-way streets packed with a variety of vehicles.

  “I didn’t even know this was here,” James said. Then he grabbed Emily’s arm and pulled her back behind the wall of the neighboring building. Mr. Quisling, he mouthed, and pointed around the corner.

  Their teacher was in the park, pacing around the pond. Several fountains of water shot up from the middle, drowning out the city noise and briefly obscuring him from view as he circled. Mr. Quisling’s eyes scanned the ground as if he was seeking a lost item.

  As they watched their teacher, Emily realized that if they were near the Transamerica Pyramid, then they must be where the Niantic had been uncovered. Were they standing in a part of downtown that used to be water? Could there be an ancient ship underneath her feet?

  Mr. Quisling now faced away from them, looking up at the towering redwoods. He crossed the courtyard and peered behind another bronze sculpture—this one of a group of children holding hands and jumping. There were a few other people in the courtyard, either walking through or seated on one of the many benches scattered around, but nobody else seemed interested in what Mr. Quisling was doing. They were too focused on their phone screens or open books or conversations.

  Their teacher stepped delicately onto a patch of clover, then disappeared behind a trio of redwoods. He reemerged holding a green zippered pouch.

  “What is that?” James asked.

  Emily pulled away from the wall, ready to move when Mr. Quisling walked in their direction, but then he stopped and sat on a bench. They watched as he unzipped the pouch and removed a paperback.

  “A book!” Emily said, even though James could see for himself. “This must be from the Book Scavenger clue he had in school.”

  “Why was the book put in that pouch?” James asked.

  Emily shrugged. “Because it’s green? Maybe it’s to help camouflage and protect it.”

  Mr. Quisling pulled a pencil and notebook from his school satchel and opened the found book. He spent some time flipping through the pages, running his pencil over the words and occasionally jotting something down. When he was done, he tucked his notebook and pencil back into his satchel, slid the paperback into its green bag, and placed it back in the shrubs where he had found it.

  James nudged her. “He’s hiding it again.�
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  “Why would he do that?” Emily wondered.

  Their teacher crossed to the exit on the opposite side of the park, leaving on the next street over. When he was gone, Emily tugged James’s shirtsleeve. “Let’s get that book.”

  While Mr. Quisling hadn’t drawn much attention, a few heads turned as Emily and James walked into the redwood grove. She supposed it was more unusual to see two kids with backpacks wandering through a business area of the city than a grown man looking for a lost item.

  “Let’s sit on that bench near where Mr. Quisling left the book,” Emily suggested. “We can pull out our binders, and people will assume we’re doing homework and waiting for our parents. Then I’ll get the book when people stop paying attention to us.”

  “Or I can just do this.” Before Emily could say another word, James tromped under the redwoods, thrust his hand into the shrub where Mr. Quisling had hidden the book, and pulled out the green pouch.

  “Would you come over here, please?” Emily hissed. Nobody seemed interested or alarmed by what James had done, but still. How would they get to the bottom of what their teacher had been up to if someone took the book away from them?

  James unzipped the pouch as he crossed back to the bench. He removed a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

  “Hey,” James said as they sat together, “it’s Tom Sawyer. That’s awfully coincidental. Mr. Quisling’s note mentioned the unbreakable code, which once belonged to Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer, and now he book hunts a copy of Tom Sawyer.…”

  An old memory pushed its way to the front of Emily’s mind. “Wait a minute,” she said as she flipped through her Book Scavenger notebook, going back to the puzzles she’d solved when her family had first moved to San Francisco. “There!” She tapped a page. “That’s what I thought! Do you remember when we first went book hunting together?”

  “At the Ferry Building? Sure. But the book wasn’t there. It had been poached.”

  “Poached by…” Emily prompted.

  “By Mr. Quisling?” James’s forehead wrinkled as he tried to connect the dots between that day and today.

  “Do you remember what book I was hunting?” Emily asked.

  James looked down at the book in his hands, then back to Emily. “This? You were looking for this book?”

  “Maybe not that exact one, but it was a hidden copy of Tom Sawyer, yes.”

  “But … if Mr. Quisling has already found this book once through Book Scavenger, why would he be looking for another one? And why didn’t he keep this one today after he found it?”

  “Good questions.” Emily whipped the pencil from her ponytail and gestured for James to hand her the Tom Sawyer. She flipped through the book, waving her pencil over the words as she scanned. Toward the end, she stopped on the opening page of a chapter where a sentence had been underlined.

  Emily read it out loud, “There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.”

  “Seriously?” James leaned close to read the sentence for himself. “This has to be about the unbreakable code, don’t you think?” James said. “Tom Sawyer? Mark Twain? Dig for hidden treasure? But what would two books hidden through Book Scavenger have to do with a centuries-old code?”

  Emily thumbed through the pages of the book one more time, but there was nothing else to find. “Let’s go check out the Book Scavenger clue. Maybe that will help us understand what Mr. Quisling was doing.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  THE PHOENIX wasn’t expecting the children to show up. He recognized them, of course, but he didn’t let on that he’d observed. Standing just out of their line of sight, he watched as they removed the book from the shrub.

  He couldn’t get over how grown-ups had fawned over those two like they were geniuses for figuring out Mr. Griswold’s scavenger hunt. And for what? Playing a game and being lucky. People were always getting rewarded for being lucky. You could be the most intelligent person in the room—in the world—and it got you nowhere. But luck? Hand the person a promotion, an award, respect, prestige.

  The Phoenix watched as Emily slipped the green pouch into her backpack, instead of putting Tom Sawyer back where they found it. He clenched his fists. This wouldn’t do at all. This wasn’t how his plan was supposed to go. Now what was he supposed to do? His dominoes had been lined up perfectly, ready to tap each other down in a satisfying succession. Removing that book threw off the whole grand design.

  He watched Emily and James turn and leave the park the way they’d come in. They were surely running home to mark their precious book “found” on Book Scavenger, which would ruin his plan even more. He needed to get to a computer first and hope this misstep didn’t foil his plan for revenge.

  CHAPTER

  16

  BACK IN HER ROOM, Emily sat crisscrossed on her bed and opened her laptop. James’s socked foot dangled over the armrest of the secondhand chair her parents had recently added to her room. Ever since she had told them she wanted a normal kid experience for once, without all the moving, with a bedroom that felt like hers and not temporary, her parents had been buying her random things to decorate her room, like that chair or the globe that appeared one day when she got home from school, or the hotdog lamp. Not exactly what she had in mind for a “normal kid experience,” and now that she knew they were worried about money, she wished they would stop. Even if it was a thrift store chair and not expensive, she’d been fine before, reading on her bed or flopped on the family room couch.

  James held the retrieved copy of Tom Sawyer open in front of him, but upside down. When Emily gave him a questioning look, he explained, “You already looked through it at the park, so I’m trying from a different perspective.”

  After logging into Book Scavenger, Emily typed in a search for copies of Tom Sawyer hidden in San Francisco. There was only the one they had found. Noting the name of the location, she asked, “Did you know that redwood park is in Mark Twain Plaza?”

  “I’m sure that wasn’t a coincidence,” James said.

  “Wait a second,” Emily said. “The book’s been marked found! Why would Mr. Quisling find a book, then re-hide it in the same place, and then mark it found? That makes no sense. And now we won’t know what the clue said.” She sighed.

  “If he marked it found, then he must not want anyone else to find the book,” James said.

  “Right,” Emily agreed. “But then why not just take the book with him? It’s not like it’s hard to carry a book. It makes no sense,” she said again. “I wish there was a way we could find out what he was up to and what this has to do with solving the unbreakable code.”

  “What if … we hid our own copy?” James suggested. “Like setting out bait. We could pick a hiding spot that would be easy for us to keep an eye on. We’ll hide a copy of Tom Sawyer, post a clue to Book Scavenger, and then watch and see what Mr. Quisling does.”

  “Genius!” Another idea sparked, and Emily typed something quickly into her computer. “I’m also setting an alert for hidden copies of Tom Sawyer, so we’ll know right away if someone else hides another copy.”

  “We can hide the book at school,” James suggested. “All three of us are there all the time.”

  “Don’t you think that might make Mr. Quisling suspicious? And speaking of, we should use my brother’s old account—Mr. Quisling will recognize me as Surly Wombat. Matthew’s had his account from when he and I first started playing the game years ago. He hasn’t hidden or found any books since we lived in Colorado. I’m sure he hasn’t updated his profile to say he lives in San Francisco. Mr. Quisling would never guess it’s us.”

  “Where should we hide it, then?” James asked. “It needs to be somewhere easy for us to keep an eye on it.”

  Emily clapped her hands together as the perfect place occurred to her: “Hollister’s,” she said.

  * * *

  Mr. Quisling was back to his normal teaching
routine the next day, but it was clear he was still distracted, although that could have been due to their class visitor. When Mr. Quisling introduced him as Mr. Sloan, an aspiring teacher who wanted to observe their class, Emily recognized the man from the book party. He was the one who’d told them about Mr. Quisling finishing the literary labyrinth in record time.

  Mr. Sloan dragged a chair to the front corner, the metal feet screeching along the linoleum. He smiled to the class and boomed, “Don’t mind me!”

  During work sheets, Emily kept an eye on Mr. Quisling, curious to see if he would be madly solving another puzzle. But if he had any plans to, she’d never know, because Mr. Sloan popped out of his chair and was talking to their teacher before he even reached his desk.

  “Great lesson, Brian. Just great.” Mr. Sloan made no effort to lower his voice, so it was easy to hear what he was saying. “But have you considered turning those work sheets into a small group exercise? I read a study that showed kids make more connections through conversation than—”

  Mr. Quisling held up a hand to indicate stop. “This is a quiet time.”

  “Of course, of course. But that’s really the point I was going to make—”

  “Harry.” Mr. Quisling’s voice was low, but patient. “The students need to concentrate. Please lower your voice.”

  They continued speaking in muted tones. James gave Emily an amused look. “Mr. Quisling is enjoying having his friend visit our class, don’t you think?”

  Emily grinned and shook her head.

  * * *

  After school, they stopped by Hollister’s. The door opened with the familiar ting-a-ling of bells looped through the handle, but an unfamiliar face greeted them at the counter. Greeted wasn’t really the right word for it. The college-aged guy scowled, then went back to reading his book. His ears were pierced with nickel-sized disks, and his face was covered with what Emily assumed he’d call a beard, but it looked more like coffee grounds clinging to his cheeks and chin.