The Sleuthing Squad by Hamsini Peri

Author:Hamsini Peri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Notion Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

The Code Breakers

Once Ishaan and I got home, our moms insisted that we change so we wouldn’t catch a cold. “I thought the weather was very hot here,” Ishaan muttered to me. “It usually is, though sometimes it can rain heavily,” I replied. “Yeah, like the weather I’m used to at home,” Ishaan muttered.

Once we changed, I decided to read my book. Then, I realized I only had a few pages left. I decided to leave that book for later and looked around my cupboard for another book. As I searched, a small, thin book caught my eye. I pulled it out and looked at the cover.

It had a picture of the Rosetta Stone and some Mayan glyphs. The title of the book was written in big, black, bold lettering. It said, “Breaking The Code.” I flipped the book open to the first page. The book had ancient-looking lettering and the reader had to crack the codes to find a treasure.

“This looks cool,” I murmured. “What looks cool?” Ishaan asked. I looked up from the book and passed it to him. “Oh. A code breaking book. Should we try to solve the codes?” he asked, excited about the book. “Sure, why not,” I replied.

We started doing the activities in the book. It was lots of fun and also a bit challenging. We had to crack codes in braille, a code with the Alberti disk and read about other types of codes. In some parts, there were jokes, like – “Why do Egyptian mummies make good spies? Because they’re good at keeping things under wraps.”

Finally, what caught my eye was the part about the Morse code. The message we had to crack and the letters looked similar to those on the note we had found.

“Hey, this looks like the message we found earlier today,” I whispered to Ishaan.

“Yes”, he nodded.

We decided to go to my room and solve the code on the piece of paper that we had found. “Mom, we’ll be cracking the codes in my room. Like spies!” I told my mom.

“Okay,” she replied coolly, not taking much notice of this all.

Once in my room, I closed the door and took out the paper. The way the dots, dashes, and slashes were used, I was quite convinced that it was written in Morse code. “Why did they write it in the international Morse code? Won’t anyone know how to decode it?” Ishaan asked, with a confused voice.

“No, I doubt that many people know how to decode it. They stopped using it ages ago. It’ll probably look like gibberish or doodles to most people,” I said.

“Yeah, you’re right. Come on, let’s decode this message!” Ishaan whispered excitedly.

Using the Morse code keys in the book, Ishaan and I managed to decode the message. We figured out that one slash (/) is a gap between letters and two slashes (//) is a gap between words. It took us a while, but we finally figured out the code.

The code was: Meet me here this Saturday at dusk to plan.

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