Page 79 of Tightrope

Hazel started to say something but the phone on the front desk rang again, interrupting her.

“Probably another reservation for the tour,” she said.

She turned and hurried away to take the call.

“Call me psychic,” Matthias said, “but I’m getting an eerie message from another dimension that tells me the Hidden Beach will be giving away a lot of free shortbread cookies this afternoon.”

“The plan will work,” Amalie said. “It has to work.”

Hazel rushed back into the kitchen.

“We’ve got five more reservations and this was just delivered on the front step,” she said. She held up a copy ofHollywood Whispers.

The headline was in a very large font. Amalie had no trouble reading it from the far side of the big kitchen. She groaned.

Willa read it aloud.“Mobster’s Gun Moll Promises Tours of Psychic Curse Mansion.”

Matthias looked at Amalie. “Evidently you forgot to tell Lorraine Pierce that you’d prefer not to be called a gun moll.”

“Don’t worry,” Willa said. “That headline will be great for business.”

Amalie winced. “What makes you think so?”

“People are fascinated by mobsters because of all the movies about them,” Willa said. “And we’ve got our very own celebrity mobster staying right here at the Hidden Beach.”

Hazel brightened. “You’re right. We need to add Mr. Jones’s room to the tour. It would be perfect if we could arrange to have his gun sitting on top of the dresser.”

Matthias choked on his coffee.

The phone rang again.

Chapter 40

“Here you go, Jones,” Chester Ward announced. “Far as I can tell, this little box is the one thing that doesn’t look like it came from a hardware store or a junkyard.”

Matthias took the metal box. It was not very large. He could hold it easily in one hand.

They were standing in Chester’s workshop. They were not alone. Luther and Oliver Ward were also there. Futuro lay in neatly arranged pieces on a drop cloth that had been spread out on the floor.

It had taken hours to untangle the nest of wiring inside the robot. He and Chester had worked slowly and methodically so as to avoid accidentally destroying or overlooking something that might be significant. The metal box had been hidden in the nest of wires that had filled the interior of one of the robot’s aluminum legs.

Luther eyed the box. “Don’t keep us in suspense. Open the damn thing.”

Matthias unlatched the box and raised the lid. At the sight of thefour small, wheel-shaped metal discs inside, a whisper of certainty swept through him.

“We just found the missing keys,” he said.

Chester peered into the box. He whistled softly.

“Son of a gun,” he said. “The rotors.”

Oliver Ward studied the discs. Each was marked with a series of letters and numbers.

“I’m no expert on cipher machines,” he said, “but I do know that the rotors are the guts of the things.”

“Yes,” Matthias said. “It’s the wiring inside the rotors that make it possible to swap out the letters and numbers so that messages are encrypted as they are typed. Once you know how a machine is wired, you’ve got a good chance of cracking any code typed on it, or on one of similar design.”

“Pickwell removed the rotors of the Ares and hid them inside Futuro,” Luther said.