She and her father had spent many happy hours attempting to unravel them. It was well after his death when the solution to the first three was published—the fourth remained unresolved. And there were rumors of a fifth, a codified encryption that would only be revealed after the first four panels were solved.
Miranda ran her hand over the surface. Her father had commissioned a three-foot-tall replica for their home garden on Spieden Island. It seemed that Sam Chase still hovered there every time she sat out by it to watch the birds flit about the feeders her mother had placed all around. It was always a place of peace for her.
Standing at the real Kryptos was different. Here their mutual visits had been separated by decades, but they had both stood right here. In an odd way, it made her feel more connected to him than in the garden where they’d sat together so many times.
There she’d been the child.
Here they’d both been adults.
But she couldn’t place her mother. Their relationship had been so different from her and her father’s. She loved her mother, she remembered that, but the connection was dissociated from her memorial star, from Kryptos, even from the garden at home, though she’d often tended it while Miranda and her father had contemplated their copy of the sculpture.
No, her father was here…but not her mother. She was—
“What are you doing here?”
Miranda turned and had to look up.
Clarissa Reese, the Director of the CIA, stood five-foot-ten, without the high heels. She wore a sleek summer dress of white fabric that seemed to shine in the morning sunlight.
Aggressively white?
At Mike’s advice, Miranda had been practicing associating emotion to color, and, though the dress itself wasn’t severe, aggressively white seemed appropriate. It had a nicely fitted top and bell quarter-sleeves that emphasized Clarissa’s strong shoulders and bust. Then, from a wide white belt at her trim waist, it belled out slightly down to her knees.
Her white-blonde hair, while still back in its typical long ponytail, was less aggressively (that word again) slicked back than usual. It was actually the softest look she’d ever seen on Clarissa.
“My father loved Kryptos. I needed to come visit it.”
“Oh.” Clarissa fell silent.
Together they watched the sun shift through the hundreds of holes that the letters formed.
“I come here sometimes to think and…” Clarissa trailed off in a way that Miranda now understood meant that she didn’t want to finish the sentence.
Is that what she herself was doing here? Miranda wasn’t sure. It didn’t feel as if she was thinking more or harder in the presence of Kryptos than she did at other times. In fact, her thoughts felt quieter here that in most places. The final panel of Kryptos was far too complex to be solved by staring at it. And she had no other role here at the CIA.
“Perhaps…” And Miranda herself trailed off, the incompleteness of her own sentence curiously unsettling, yet strangely appropriate.
“Perhaps what?” Apparently incomplete thoughts bothered Clarissa as well. Miranda pulled out her notebook and noted down that it was possible there was some previously unconsidered degree of commonality between herself and Clarissa. But she’d think about that at another time.
“Perhaps…” Miranda considered after tucking her notebook away, “I come here to feel rather than to think.”
Clarissa turned to look down at her but Miranda kept her eyes on the puzzle that was so much a part of her past.
“I can feel my father’s presence in this place even though we never stood here together at the same time. Not even in the same millennium, as he died when I was thirteen in 1996.”
“You miss him?”
“Terribly. I loved him very much.”
The silence stretched so long that Miranda finally glanced at Clarissa, who seemed to be staring at nothing at all.
“You’re very lucky,” Clarissa finally whispered.
Was she? For thirteen wonderful years, she’d had parents who loved her. They weren’t around much and never for long when they were. On assignment as CIA agents she now knew. Working together as a team, and leaving her to be mostly raised by Tante Daniels.
But the moments her father was home had shone so brightly that they overshadowed the rest.
Until his death.
Had she been lucky?
Holly’s parents had disowned her. Mike never spoke of his as if he’d been born the day he joined her NTSB team. Jeremy’s parents loved him, though they were also confused and disappointed by him.
Rosa’s and Pierre’s had both been very close.
What little Jeremy had said made it sound as if Taz’s mother had been a very hard woman. Colonel Vicki Cortez’s effect on Jeremy had been profound, but he wasn’t speaking about it, which, she supposed, was the most surprising thing of all.
“Yes, I was lucky.” Miranda turned but Clarissa was gone.
She turned back to Kryptos as a sparrow flitted to a landing inside the center letter of the eighth row of the second panel. A Q, which, when the panel was decrypted, was a D in the word BURIED.
“Very lucky,” she told the sparrow before it chirped at her brightly and flew off.
71
Flight TWA 800 had departed JFK airport at 8:19 p.m. on July 17th, 1996, after a long, hot delay on the tarmac. At thirteen thousand seven hundred feet above the Atlantic Ocean, a stray spark in a mostly empty fuel tank had created a massive explosion in the sky that sliced the 747 in two.
In the largest and longest NTSB investigation in history, ninety-five percent of the debris was recovered from the depths of the continental shelf. The main fuselage was entirely reconstructed, one tiny piece at a time, until the investigators were able to trace the exact cause, and make numerous safety recommendations. Some of those safety measures would be implemented on every commercial airliner and military plane throughout the world. The death of her parents and the other two hundred and twenty-eight people aboard had gone on to save innumerable lives.
The critical eighty feet of the 747’s main fuselage, a long, open-ended, twenty-one-foot-four-inch-diameter tube, had been installed in the NTSB Training Academy’s lobby as a practical model for teaching students about such a complex investigation. Every piece that had been recovered was there: sections of the hull’s skin, the bits and pieces of the fuel tank, decking, and seats. Even most of the Plexiglas windows and overhead bins had been recovered and placed correctly.
Miranda had barfed violently in the bathroom before every visit she’d had to make here during training.
Not this time.
This time she sat in the foremost recovered seat on the left-hand side, Row 8, Seat B, one in from the hull. The bright room lights shone in through the rounded windows, the two open ends of the fuselage section, and a thousand cracks in the plane’s reconstructed skin: a mosaic of light.
Seven rows, an inch under thirty-four feet, ahead of where she sat had been her father’s seat 2B. The first-class section had been blown off the front of the plane and had fallen eighty-three seconds down to the sea. Not relevant to the explosion itself, it had not been retained and put on display here.
Yet, he had sat there, all those years ago. Flying to his next mission with Mom beside him. Perhaps they’d even been discussing their plan for Miranda to follow them in a week after her horse-riding camp was done.