The Dead Drop (11 page)

Gilda followed a rocky path that wound down the steep hillside among the tombstones. The air was still and hot, but here and there were sudden cool gusts rising up from the earth like little sighs of cold breath.

Gilda was suddenly very aware of being
alone
in this graveyard among people who had been dead for more than a hundred years. She had the strange feeling she was entering a new territory where she was outnumbered.

What if something more sinister than the ghost of Lincoln was beckoning to me in my dreams—luring me toward this cemetery?
Gilda’s mind drifted to a memory of a zombie movie she and her brother Stephen had watched on late-night television after the last day of the school year.

Get a grip!
Gilda warned herself. She reminded herself of a passage from
The Master Psychic’s Handbook
she had memorized:

Gilda navigated cracked and broken stone steps down a very steep hillside descent without a railing.
Clearly people don’t take leisurely walks around this part of the cemetery very often,
she thought.

A cloud passed over the sun and Gilda heard the whir of cicadas in the trees and the sad cooing of mourning doves. As she neared the tomb where Lincoln’s son had been buried, she felt suddenly cold. She walked alongside tombstones that had been toppled over, as if someone had risen from the ground and knocked them down.

Finally Gilda reached a family mausoleum built into the hillside: it was a tomb enclosed behind a heavy stone façade and an iron gate—the place where Lincoln’s son had been laid to rest.

I’m standing exactly where president Lincoln stood when he came to visit his dead son,
Gilda thought. She pictured Lincoln sitting next to the tomb while his guards looked on. He rested his head in his hands, tears streaming down his long, bony fingers.

“I had a dream about you, President Lincoln,” she whispered. “What did you want me to know?”

Gilda caught her breath at the sound of rustling behind her. She turned to gaze into a pair of wet, black eyes. For what seemed a long time, she looked directly into the hypnotizing eyes.
This is what writers mean when they say, ‘time froze,’
Gilda thought. The face had a black nose and soft ears: it was a small fawn who stared at her without moving, almost as if it wanted to say something to her.

Gilda recalled a passage from her
Master Psychic’s Handbook
:

Without warning, the spell was broken: the young deer turned and bolted, bounding down the steep hillside, stumbling and knocking over loose stones lining the path.

Gilda was about to take out her notebook to record the encounter when something on the ground captured her attention.
One of the large, brick-sized stones the fawn had knocked loose was not a stone at all!
It had broken open to reveal a secret compartment and a folded piece of paper.

I have a feeling it’s the message I’m supposed to find,
Gilda thought.

Gilda glanced around just to make sure nobody was watching, then picked up the stone container. Upon closer investigation, she saw that the stone was not natural at all, but made of some kind of painted plastic that had opened very neatly in half to reveal its contents.

Gilda unfolded the piece of paper and read:

I can’t make heads or tails of it,
Gilda thought. She sat down with her back resting against the side of the mausoleum to study the cryptic note more carefully.

If I found this anywhere else, I’d probably assume that it’s just the ramblings of some demented person
.
But this was concealed in a large fake rock—something a lot like some of the dead-drop concealment devices I saw in the Spy Museum
.

Gilda remembered how almost any object ranging from a fake tree stump to fake dog poop could be used to conceal secret information intended for pickup by a spy. She recalled how, instead of face-to-face meetings that could lead to arrest if anyone witnessed a direct exchange of information, spies used dead drops to hide secret messages and classified government documents. Gilda felt a surge of adrenaline as she contemplated the potential implications of her chance discovery. She whipped out the reporter’s notebook she always carried to scribble a note:

Gilda remembered reading about moles—traitors within the U.S. government like Aldrich Ames, who worked for the CIA and sold classified information to the Soviet Union for many years. Whenever Ames was ready to make a drop of secret documents to sell to his Russian spy contacts, he would make a simple chalk mark on a mailbox to alert his foreign handlers. He would print secret information from his office computer in the Central Intelligence Agency, then hide the documents somewhere in a suburban park.
A remote place like this,
Gilda thought. Ames’s Soviet contacts would pick up the information and replace it with a cash payment. Finally, the Russians would leave another signal mark to let Ames know they received the package. Ames’s activities led directly to the deaths of at least ten U.S. spies.

Gilda was about to stuff the piece of paper in her bag, thinking she would take it back to the Spy Museum to show Matthew or Jasper Clarke when she had another sobering thought.
If this
is
a real dead drop,
she thought,
then I could be in the middle of something dangerous. What if the mole discovers that I removed it? At the very least, I’ll never get to the bottom of the case because the spy would just change the dead-drop location.

Then Gilda remembered one of the things she learned at the Spy Museum: a spy wouldn’t remove a secret document; she would instead take pictures of the information so that nobody would discover anything missing. Grateful that she hadn’t yet removed her old Polaroid camera from her shoulder bag following her arrival in D.C., Gilda took several images of the message at various angles, then put the prints in her bag and the original message back inside the fake-stone concealment device.

The evening was dusky and humid as Gilda trudged up the long incline of Wisconsin Avenue. She felt uneasy as the guards in front of the Russian Embassy seemed to watch her with more interest than usual. Was it her imagination, or did they move a little closer to the gate as she passed by?

Gilda walked faster, eager to get back to her apartment and to get started decoding the message.

14

The Secret Code

Wearing her “Motor City” nightshirt, Gilda sat at her typewriter and studied the photos she had taken of the message.

She heard Caitlin enter the apartment, talking on her cell phone as she threw her keys on the table and tossed her backpack on the couch. Gilda knew that Caitlin was now sitting on the couch with her feet up on the coffee table as she continued her phone conversation. As far as Gilda could tell, Caitlin was virtually always on the phone—catching up with college friends who were establishing themselves in other cities, making plans to meet up with people for brunch or drinks in the city, planning dates with guys she met at work, at parties, and even through an online dating website. One of the things Gilda loved about the apartment she shared with Caitlin was that the walls were thin enough to allow for nearly effortless eavesdropping; she didn’t even need to lean against a door or a wall to overhear Caitlin’s conversations with remarkable clarity. On the other hand, Caitlin was proving to be one of the few people who could talk on the phone longer than Gilda could maintain interest in listening.

“So anyway,” Caitlin was saying, “my boss doesn’t like me. . . . I know, I said that before, but now he
totally
doesn’t like me. Remember that chick I told you about—the one I call ‘the princess’? She got actually got
promoted
today. I know! Here I’ve been copyediting about twice as many stories per week as her. . . . Yeah, she kind of flirts with him, but I think it’s more that she never ever disagrees with anything he says. Even when he’s totally wrong. He also loves her because she went to the same college as him. . . .”

Caitlin fell silent; it seemed that her friend had a story of her own to tell.

“Wow, so they promoted you to associate editor? That’s really great,” said Caitlin after a long silence. “And a huge raise too? Great.” This was clearly news that Caitlin would have preferred not to hear at that moment.

“Oh, but I forgot to tell the other part of the story,” Caitlin interjected, turning the conversation back to herself. “My boss’s boss
really
likes me. And I don’t think he likes Frank—that’s my boss. So I’m thinking I might complain to him.”

Gilda heard Caitlin turn on the television and flip to a news channel. “Yeah, I’m thinking of taking the LSATs, too—going to law school. But then I don’t know. Everyone goes to law school. . . .”

The combination of Caitlin’s anxious, competitive banter on the telephone, and the cryptic photographs sitting in front of her on her typewriter keyboard suddenly made Gilda feel weary and a little homesick. Spy Camp would begin the next morning—a week of day camp culminating in the Midnight Spy Slumber Party. Gilda realized she had better organize her wardrobe and supplies to get ready for her counseling job before going to bed.

Before going to bed, Gilda placed the dead-drop photographs under her pillow, hoping some clues might seep into her brain during the night.