Individually, Lachlan became Quickdraw, while Julius was Gunslinger. They loved their call signs.
At regular intervals on the journey, Jack checked the Lord of the Rings notice board for messages from Wizard, Zoe, or Lily.
For three days, no messages appeared.
But then, at the beginning of the fourth and last day, as Jack forlornly signed on, he found a single message waiting for him, from the user ID: “GANDALF101.”
Jack almost leapt out of his chair.
The message had been posted only an hour previously: a cascade of numbers; a coded message that could only have come from Wizard, Lily, or Zoe.
They were alive!
He turned and quickly grabbed the collection of books he had bought at Nairobi Airport, six paperbacks and one hardback novel.
The entire Harry Potter collection.
Jack’s code with the others was a “book code.”
Most book codes used three digits to find words in a single book: the code “1/23/3” means “page 1, line 23, word 3.”
For Jack this wasn’t secure enough. He’d added an extra digit at the start, denoting which Harry Potter book the code was coming from.
Therefore “2/1/23/3” meant “Book 2(Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) , page 1, line 23, word 3.”
Jack set about decoding the message on the chat-room screen.
When he was done flipping pages in the novels, he was left with:
MISSION TO JUNGLE A DISASTER.
WOLF CAUGHT UP WITH US AND NOW HAS BOTH PILLARS, PHILOSOPHER’S STONE AND FIRESTONE. RON TAKEN PRISONER. KINGSLEY SHACKLEBOLT DEAD.
REST OF US SAFE ON THE HIPPOGRIFF NOW, BUT SOUTH AFRICA CLOSED TO ALL AIR TRAFFIC.
OUT OF OPTIONS AND JUST HOPING YOU’RE ALIVE.
PLEASE REPLY.
Jack reeled at the message.
His worst fears had come true.
Wolf had the Second Pillar. That Wolf might lay the Pillar at the Vertex was disturbing but not disastrous: Jack only wanted to save the world from destruction, and so long as someone set the Second Pillar in place today, the world would be OK for another three months until the next set of four vertices required attending.
But as Jack now knew, Wolf had the suicidal Switchblade in his team.
“Oh, this is bad,” Jack said aloud. “This is very, very bad.”
He stared at the line KINGSLEY SHACKLEBOLT DEAD and sighed. Kingsley Shacklebolt was a tall black wizard from the fifth Harry Potter book and hence their code name for Solomon Kol.
So Solomon had been killed.Damn.
But worse still was the previous line:RON TAKEN PRISONER. Of course “Ron” was code for Alby—for just as Ron was Harry Potter’s best friend, so Alby was Lily’s.
Wolf had Alby.
Jack rarely swore wholeheartedly but he did so now. “Fuck.”
Consulting his Harry Potter books, he quickly typed out a reply, then clicked “POST.”
His message was:
STILL IN THE GAME.
ON WAY TO CAPE TOWN WITH FRED AND GEORGE AND SIRIUS BLACK.
CAN’T RISK CALLING YOU YET. WILL CALL WHEN I CAN.
SO GLAD YOU’RE SAFE. WILL GET RON BACK OR DIE TRYING.
Hidden beneath its false shell, the Indian Raider powered toward Cape Town.
As it happened, it would be the very last boat in a line of about a dozen South African fishing trawlers to be allowed back into South African waters that afternoon.
Then the sea-lanes were closed.
And as the sun set and Cape Town found itself shut off from the world, the night of the second deadline began.
AT LENGTH,the Indian Raider came to the eastern coast of the Cape of Good Hope, a rugged peninsula of densely forested mountains and valleys.
Blasted all year round by biting winds from the Antarctic, and featuring many impassable gorges, it was an inhospitable place and even in the present day, uninhabited.
