Blown Circuit by Lars Guignard

nothing. One. Another up.

    Six. Six more stones to the right.

    Four. I counted up again.

    I counted through the whole sequence that way. When I hit the first nine, it got tricky, but I treated the crack as a barrier and doubled back on myself.

    I counted all the way until I ended with a stone a couple feet below the crack.  

    If my reasoning had been anywhere near correct, if my line of inquiry was going to lead anywhere, it was to there. To that single stone. The most likely explanation was that it was a dead drop. I felt it with my hand. The stone was rough to the touch. But it was solid. I hit it with a rock to be sure. The stone was as solid as it got. No markings. No secrets. Nothing. Another dead end.  
    I thought about the coordinates again. They were the position of the ship. What was a ship? A vehicle. A transport system. It moved goods. The location of the ship itself was ever-changing. One thing was certain, my father would have to have known where the ship would be moored. And in a busy channel like the Bosphorus, the ship wouldn’t drop anchor, it would be tied up to a permanent mooring buoy. But even then, there would be room for error, depending on the current, and the tide, and where the stern was fastened. If my father wanted to send me a message, even with a stationary mooring buoy, he would need to discount the exact position of the freighter—he would need to throw away the last two digits. So I counted again, ignoring the final two decimal values in both the northern and eastern portion of the coordinates.  

    I came upon a stone that was roughly quarried like the other one, but it didn’t sound the same when I hit it with the brick. It sounded hollow. And it moved a fraction of an inch. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my Swiss Army knife. I hadn’t upgraded to the new version of the knife with the integrated USB drive and I was happy for that, because what I needed in this situation was a good strong lever. I found one in the serrated saw. I could already see the hairline cracks in the mortar around the stone, and when I inserted the saw blade, more of it broke away. It looked like paste or dirt had been rubbed over the cracks in the mortar to cover them up.  
    I felt my heart beat a little faster as I dug the blade farther into the crack and levered it out, slowly working my way down. About two-thirds of the way down the crack, I had enough purchase to feel the entire stone shift. I pushed the knife in a little more and the stone broke loose from the others. Really it was only the top layer of the stone that broke free. The face of the rock had been cut, sheered off. And behind it was a cavity that contained the object that was about to make my life a living hell.

Chapter 11

    T HE OBJECT WAS a book. A slim, leather-bound book. There was no plastic bag or protective cover over it. Nothing to indicate its value. I reached into the cavity and removed it, opening the worn cover. I had to be careful because the pages were damp. It rained in Istanbul and that rain moistened stone buildings. I immediately saw handwriting in the book, written with a fountain pen in elaborate cursive. It wasn’t my father’s hand, I knew that. But it was a journal of some kind. It looked like it was written in Cyrillic.  
    The journal contained technical drawings. Very old technical drawings in black ink. But there was also a second set of drawings. In addition to being in a completely different style, they were in a different color ink, from a different pen. It looked as though someone had doodled in somebody else’s journal. Except they weren’t doodles. They were sketches. Very good sketches of sculptures and pastoral scenes. Some had Cyrillic phrases below them. But some of the sketches weren’t so bucolic. Some featured scenes of torture and mutilated body parts. Some were downright frightening.
    It was utterly confounding. Why the elaborate drawings? The sketches of sculpture? I was fairly