Secret Breakers: The Power of Three (5 page)

An indignant voice called down from the turret. ‘I don’t need saving, thank you very much.’

‘Doesn’t look like that to me!’

‘You think just because you’re a boy you can rescue me!’

‘No. I think just because I’ve got a
ladder
I can rescue you.’

Brodie tried her best to calm things down. ‘
Why
are you up there?’ she shouted, glaring first at Hunter in a way she hoped showed him she didn’t want him to speak.

‘Pegasus,’ the girl yelled, waving one arm towards the weather vane, causing a loose tile to skitter across the roof and come crashing down. ‘I got here at six and saw the winged horse and climbed up. That was a while ago.’

‘She’s trying to
ride
the winged horse,’ Brodie hissed.

‘Well, she’s not doing a very good job of it, is she?’ Hunter hissed back. ‘And I’m not being funny, but do you really think the note meant anyone should actually ride the thing?’

‘Got that right!’ came the voice from the tower.

Hunter craned his neck upwards.

‘You’re not being funny, I mean.’

‘Surely she knows it’s after six and the game must be over,’ said Brodie, a weird tightening growing in her stomach. Was there a chance they’d misunderstood the clue? A possibility that the game wasn’t over at all? That they still had time? ‘Six o’clock,’ she blurted. ‘Maybe it doesn’t matter where we were at six o’clock but where the
winged horse
was.’

‘Well, I’m here to tell you,’ called a voice from the roof which was becoming more than a little strained, ‘that the weather vane was here at six, firmly attached to this roof – that is why,’ she appeared to be spitting now, the words sharp and furious, ‘I’m up here!’

Brodie was trying to organise her thinking but ideas and words were crashing together in her mind. ‘Read the clue again, Hunter.’

‘
You must demonstrate true northerly direction when riding the winged horse in the shadow of six o’clock
.’

‘It’s talking about the
shadow
made by the vane!’ Brodie scrabbled for her stopwatch.

‘How long have we got?’ said Hunter.

‘Thirteen minutes.’

‘OK. It’s not over. So let’s focus. What else is in the clue?’

‘
Northerly
,’ said Brodie. ‘That’s got to be important.’ She peered up at the vane and the arrows below the horse pointing in each direction of the compass. ‘We need to think about where the shadow from that northern arrow was when it
was
six.’ Brodie glanced over in the direction of a low-roofed building to the left, where a shadow from the clock tower and the weather vane above it was stretching across the brickwork.

‘Perfect,’ said Hunter, following her gaze. ‘The shadows are on the wall. But they must have been a bit further back along the wall when it was six, don’t you think?’

‘Erm. Hello. Still up here.’

‘Thought she didn’t want rescuing,’ sniffed Hunter. ‘I say we leave her there.’

‘I simply meant you shouldn’t
presume
I couldn’t get down without you,’ the girl snapped.

‘Oh, this is ridiculous,’ said Brodie, dragging the ladder along the wall herself and propping it in reach of the girl’s feet. ‘You two haven’t even properly met. How can you be so mean to each other already?’

It was a question neither of the others seemed prepared to answer.

The girl worked her way down the ladder and reluctantly Hunter held out his hand to her as she neared the bottom rung. She seemed to take great delight in rejecting his offer of help and jumped the last few steps instead. Brodie sighed. ‘Look, you two, we have a clue to solve. And twelve minutes to do it in.’ She looked at the girl from the roof. ‘Are you with us or not?’

The girl appeared to be thinking.

‘It’s not a difficult question,’ snapped Hunter. ‘Are you in or out? Eleven minutes. Have to hurry you!’

‘OK. We’ll work together. I’m Tusia.’ She made a noise which sounded remarkably like a sneeze. ‘It’s Russian. Well, I’m Russian. Fourth generation. It’s said “
Too shka
”.’

Hunter struggled for a while trying to make his mouth form the word as Tusia wanted. He gave up. ‘We’ve got ten minutes. I’ll call you Toots,’ he said. ‘She’s BB.’

‘Brodie actually. And he’s Hunter. And it’s best not to ask about that now. We haven’t got time.’

‘Nine and a half minutes,’ pressed Hunter. ‘Let’s get solving. The shadows are changing all the time. They’re moving along the wall of that building. If we leave it too long we’ll have no idea where the shadow was falling at six o’clock.’

The arrows on the base of the weather vane worked like a sundial, and the shadow of the northern arrow was like a line against the bricks.

‘Well? We’ve got nine minutes, people!’

Brodie ran her hands along the brickwork, moving in the opposite direction from which the shadow was travelling fraction by fraction as the moments passed. ‘We have to go backwards and work out where the shadow was at six o’clock.’

Hunter scrabbled to his knees beside her. ‘What the cheese cracker are we looking for, exactly?’ he asked. ‘On a brick wall, I mean. Even if we do work out where the shadow was, it’s just a line of bricks, surely?’

Brodie’s mind was whirring. ‘Where are the arrows on the weather vane?’ she snapped.

‘Erm. Under the winged horse,’ suggested Hunter tentatively.

‘So. We’ve got to find where the shadow of the vane arrow was at six. And look
under it
,’ said Brodie. She wished she was as confident as she sounded.

Tusia was waving her hands around, pacing up and down.

‘Erm, Toots. Not helping.’

‘Actually, I’m
calculating
. About a third of a brick per minute, I reckon, and so …’ She moved Brodie’s hand along the wall. ‘There. Six o’clock the shadow would have been about there.’ She looked at Brodie. ‘Anything?’

Brodie’s fingers locked on a loose brick wobbly in the grouting. With a tug she pulled the brick free. Underneath was a small rolled-up note.

‘Perfect!’

‘What’s it say?’ urged Hunter.

Well done, my careful code-crackers. It seems you are not to be deflected in your quest for the truth. So now for the final task, in order to gain entry to the Station that seeks to welcome you.

Clue number three
: At the end you must return to the beginning.

Tusia repeated the clue then placed the note back beneath the brick. ‘Everything back in its place,’ she said by way of explanation.

‘Return to the beginning,’ mumbled Brodie, a sense of panic rising again in her stomach. ‘What’s that mean?’

‘Back to the box of stopwatches?’ offered Hunter. ‘We searched that. There was nothing else.’

‘Maybe it just means the front door?’ offered Brodie hopefully. ‘That’s where we started. It was the beginning.’

Tusia was shaking her head. ‘I’ve banged on the door. There’s no bell. The door’s locked. There’s no way of getting in without a key.’

‘We have to look again,’ urged Hunter. ‘We’ve got six minutes.’

They ran to the front of the mansion. Brodie noticed the candle in the lantern had shrunk in size. It was as if it mocked them, burning relentlessly lower as they searched for answers. For the second time since she’d arrived, the idea she should remember something nagged at her mind.

Hunter steadied himself against the griffin.

‘I read a story once about a griffin,’ Brodie said, trying to move the game back on to ground she understood.

‘Really?’ Hunter didn’t seem surprised. ‘Stories are her thing,’ he said to Tusia, ‘like clambering all over things is obviously yours.’

‘Shape and space is
my thing
, thank you very much,’ Tusia snapped. ‘I have a highly developed sense of organisation of locations,’ she said.

‘Nice,’ mocked Hunter. ‘Must be so useful. We’ve got five minutes. How’s your shape and space thing working for you now?’

‘Actually—’

Brodie cut them off. ‘This story,’ she said. ‘The griffin in it was a guardian of light.’

‘Could he stretch time, this guardian of light?’ asked Hunter. ‘Four minutes now. We’re into our last four minutes!’

‘Shh,’ Brodie hissed in exasperation. Something about her memory of the story had sparked an idea and she was sure if she didn’t grasp hold of it, the thought would drift away like smoke.

‘You all right, B?’ Hunter said, lifting his head to look at her.

Brodie sheltered her eyes against the glare of the sun.

‘BB?’

‘At the end we must return to the beginning,’ Brodie said again.

The stopwatch said three minutes.

‘How d’you get your invite to this place?’ Brodie asked.

‘Birthday card,’ mused Hunter. ‘A hundred and seventeen days late.’

Tusia’s eyes widened. ‘I got a card too,’ she said. ‘And holes had been spaced under the letters to let light through the message.’

Brodie clapped her hands. ‘Exactly.
That
was the beginning. And then?’

‘Message in a lamppost.’ Hunter grinned, finally cottoning on.

‘So at the end we must return to the beginning,’ confirmed Brodie. ‘And at the beginning of all this was the
light
.’ Her pulse was racing. They had two minutes.

She looked up at the candle lantern.

Glinting in the glow of the single flame was something metal. Brodie peered into the light to see. It was a key!

‘I guess it’s time to use that ladder again!’ yelled Hunter.

Dust lifted from his feet as he ran and the end of the ladder carved a snaking line in the gravel on the forecourt.

‘One minute, Toots,’ he shouted as Tusia climbed the ladder. ‘Fifty-nine seconds. Come on!’

Brodie steadied the base of the ladder. She tried to steady her nerve. A bead of sweat trickled down Tusia’s neck and dripped on to the floor of the porch.

‘Twenty seconds. We have twenty seconds, Toots!’

The lantern cage swung open. The flame of the candle guttered in the breeze. The key tumbled into Brodie’s hand.

She slotted the key in the lock and turned.

An alarm on the stopwatches pierced the air.

But the door of Bletchley Park Mansion swung open wide. They were inside the Black Chamber.

‘There’s only three of them?’ Oscar Ingham spat the words out before moving back from the window of the ballroom. ‘All this preparation and there’s only three of them?’

Smithies tried hard not to panic.

‘How many did you ask?’ Ingham’s voice was sharp like a blade.

‘I asked those I thought would come.’

‘And all we have is three?’ Ingham spluttered into his hand and then, taking an asthma inhaler from his pocket, he pressed firmly on the trigger and inhaled deeply.

‘I don’t think we should panic,’ offered Tandi. ‘I mean there’s still a chance some have been delayed, isn’t there, Smithies?’

‘Not really.’

‘Oh.’

‘So this is it then?’ Ingham stood up from the chair, his pyjamas held up today by a vivid red necktie which almost matched the patchy skin of his hands and arms. ‘Just three children.’ He coughed into his balled fist.

‘True. True,’ replied Smithies, in a voice he hoped sounded self-assured and confident. ‘I agree I’d hoped for more. I can’t pretend not to be disappointed. But it’s the calibre of the children we’ve got that’ll matter. The strength of their aptitude for the code and their love of a challenge that’ll make all the difference. After all, it’s our job to teach them while they’re here.’

‘They nearly failed against the clock to get inside.’

‘But they didn’t.’

‘So what about these children makes them worthy candidates?’ Tandi asked in an obvious attempt to be encouraging.

‘Well, let’s see. The boy on the unicycle, he has a way with numbers and his parents both lecture at Oxford so I’m sure we’re on to a winner there.’

‘He was reluctant to open the box, though. Till the girl arrived.’

‘So, he’s not a natural leader,’ said Smithies, ‘but we’ve time to work on that.’

‘And the girl on the roof ? We’ve time to instil some sense of safety in her, do we?’ mumbled Ingham, sipping at a mug of now very cold tea which he seemed reluctant to put down on the table.

‘She was a local chess master at ten,’ said Smithies, trying to sound impressive.

‘And the other one? She was quick to think she was beaten.’

‘Alex’s girl,’ said Smithies gently.

No one spoke for a while.

‘You think that’s wise, Smithies? After all that happened?’ Ingham was speaking but his voice was softer now.

Smithies refused to answer but walked instead towards the door.

Ingham coughed into his hand again before he spoke. ‘You still haven’t told us, Smithies, how this set-up will work with just three candidates. Do we tell them, what they’re up against? What they’re really involved in?’

Smithies looked at the ground. How could they with only three children? Explain everything and they could lose them all.

‘We tell them only what they need to know,’ Smithies called over his shoulder. ‘It’ll work.’ He added the last part in a voice that could barely be heard. ‘It’ll have to.’

‘Welcome. Welcome. So glad you enjoyed our little game.’

Brodie wasn’t sure ‘enjoyed’ was the best word to describe the panic of the last thirty minutes, but she said nothing.