To Sketch a Sphinx by Rebecca Connolly

Author:Rebecca Connolly [Connolly, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Amazon: B08CYB32N5
Publisher: Phase Publishing
Published: 2020-07-27T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

If only all things were as simple as one imagined they would be at the start, but then where would heaven and fate find their humor? Because it was clear that only heaven or fate could find humor in any of this. No one else would.

John couldn’t.

He should have known that things were more complicated than they appeared; they wouldn’t have brought him into this operation if things were simple. They wouldn’t have brought Hal in if the players were all known to those important enough to have influence.

They wouldn’t have brought either of them in if they could have intercepted, memorized, and decrypted these letters themselves. And if he’d forgotten that, the stack of letters before him would remind him, rather like a slap across the face.

He had nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

The letters were copies of the originals that Hal had picked and memorized, that mind of hers having far more ability than he’d ever expected. She copied them out for him the moment they returned home, and he’d begun to work on them.

He had yet to break a single one of them. Which made him a completely irrelevant asset to this mission. Hal could have done this on her own.

She should be doing this on her own.

He’d stay, of course, if for no other reason than to keep up the pretense of their marriage, and to ensure her safety, though he wasn’t exactly a towering example of impressive musculature. He would assist her in any way he could, though at the present, that wouldn’t be much at all.

How could he find nothing?

Six letters. Six in the space of two weeks, and nothing at all to show for it.

Every single cipher he could think of, he had applied to the letters. He’d looked at them individually, he’d looked at them collectively, he’d looked at them in batches… He’d even gone so far as to question Hal as to the accuracy of the words.

She had recited each and every letter verbatim without looking at them, then hadn’t spoken to him for an entire day after that inquiry. In the tight quarters of their rooms, the silence had been deafening, and it had felt much, much longer.

He wouldn’t be questioning her memory again, that was for certain.

But he didn’t know what else to do. He hadn’t struggled with a project like this in his career, had barely struggled in the years prior to beginning his career, and this was a crushing blow.

There would be no advantage for the Shopkeepers against the Faction if he couldn’t break the cipher. There would be no regaining the ground lost in Rogue’s compromise and Trace’s capture. There would be no knowing what was planned, and every office that had operatives investigating the risk would be working half blind. It could very well be the fate of England herself in his hands.

And he had nothing.

John groaned and put his head in his hands, the pressure and the weight of such a responsibility seeming to pull him further and further into the earth, yet refusing to actually swallow him whole.

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