Free October by Gabrielle Lord

fooled Zürich Bank’s scanner! But what for? ’ Boges stood up, shaking his head, and started pacing the room, tearing away all remnants from his Sumo outfit. ‘We have just over two months left to sort this all out, and we’re back to square one. Again!’
    Winter looked from Boges to me, her face concerned and serious. ‘What are we going to do now, Cal?’ she asked. ‘We can’t give up. We just can’t.’
    Disappointment seeped into every cell of my body. I didn’t know what to say.
    ‘Let’s think,’ she said. ‘We have to spy on everyone we suspect. I can increase my visits to Sligo’s place. The weather’s warming up, so I could start going round to use his pool. Maybe you two can watch Rathbone some more.’ Winter glanced up at Boges who had slowed his pacing. ‘You know what? Maybe we need to forget about this for a while,’ she said, waving her hands over Oriana’s fakes, ‘and focus back on old leads—the drawings, the words of the Riddle—things that we may have overlooked. We can’t give up. I won’t give up.’

23 OCTOBER

    70 days to go …

    I figured I should give Winter a break, so I was back at St Johns Street. I felt helpless and angry, like I’d been kicked in the guts—except the kick kept on kicking. We were back at square one. Worse, if there was some third party we didn’t know about, we were seriously behind the eight ball.
    My phone started ringing.
    ‘Cal,’ Boges began, ‘I have some information for you. Can you meet me at Winter’s tonight? Bring everything you have—I think I know why your dad drew Caesar on the Sphinx drawing.’

    ‘Come on, Boges, don’t hold out on us,’ beggedWinter. ‘Where does Caesar fit in?’
    ‘Patience, patience. All in good time.’
    Slowly he pulled out his notebook, snapping the rubber band that held it together a couple of times before finally opening it. He cleared his throat and began reading: ‘One of the simplest codes in the world is the Caesar shift—’
    ‘A code?’ I repeated. ‘There’s a code called the Caesar shift?’
    ‘You betcha.’ Boges snapped the notebook shut. ‘I won’t read the rest of it. Nobody really knows if Julius Caesar ever had anything to do with it, but anyway, that’s beside the point.’
    ‘Tell us how it works, already!’ said Winter.
    ‘It’s coming, it’s coming,’ said Boges, pulling out a large piece of butcher’s paper and picking up a pencil that was on the table. Very quickly, he wrote out the alphabet.

    ‘It works like this,’ he explained as he started writing the alphabet out again, but this time hebegan with the ‘A’ written directly under the ‘B’ of the previous line, writing the final ‘Z’ back under the ‘A’ in the top line of letters.

    ‘That’s a one-letter Caesar shift. So using the code, DBU becomes CAT. Get it? You can move it along as many places as you like. For instance, you could move the code along ten places and start your new Caesar code alphabet underneath the letter K of the original alphabet.’
    Again, Boges wrote out the alphabet, placing the A underneath K. ‘Now,’ he demonstrated, ‘CAT becomes SQJ.’
    ‘Well, what are we waiting for?’ asked Winter, excitedly. ‘Let’s try it! Let’s apply the Caesar shift to the Riddle. But do we try a one-letter shift, or two, or three? And where do we start? Do we apply it to every word?’
    ‘Yep,’ I said. ‘We should try every word and every shift—all twenty-six combinations.’
    ‘I could probably design a program to work it out for us,’ Boges said. ‘It could take a little while, but once it’s done, it’ll crunch the combinations in no time. Then we can search through the results for another message within the Riddle. For information embedded in it.’
    ‘What if,’ I asked, ‘the embedded information is in the last two missing lines?’
    Boges shrugged. ‘Could be. You know what we have to do …’
    ‘Go to Ireland?’ I asked.
    ‘Go to Ireland,’