Page 48 of Never Enough

“Feck you,” Demon said as he threw up his middle finger at his teammate.

“All right, you three, simmer down,” Waters warned. “Neither one of you speaks right with those goof-ass accents. Now focus your pea brains and get back to what’s important.” He turned his gaze onto their handler. “Now explain, Cherry. Why do you think that bomb was meant for you? And how do the Salieri, whoever the fuck, or feck, they are, fit into all of this?”

“I’ll try to be quick,” Cherry promised. “My father had many friends in the military even though he himself had never served. Not for lack of trying. He had a heart murmur that disqualified him from enlisting. But he believed absolutely in the military, even though they couldn’t use him personally, so he turned his skills in business and manufacturing to support the service branches in another way.

“The story of the day he disappeared is public knowledge, but what the public didn’t know was where I ended up and how I’ve made Tribe my life’s quest. I’ve spent the last twenty years building, financing, and running Tribe from my reception desk.

“In order to do this right, I knew I had to be willing to play the long game. Success depended on relationships being fostered. I knew that would slow things down further—time that my father probably didn’t have—but what other choice was there? The odds were already stacked against him being alive,so I accepted that if I was too late… if he wasn’t alive… then I wanted to ensure that everything was in place to catch and punish the men responsible for his disappearance.

“It also required that I remain in the shadows. I knew I didn’t have the skills to do it by myself, so I used my college years to hone my analytical skills. I learned everything I could about history, culture, finances, politics, and anything else I thought would be useful in running an operation like Tribe. Combine all of that with my family’s vast wealth, and I was able to hire people who could. I purposefully scouted out the best of the best, but there was a hitch. Those individuals had to be free of family ties. They had to be people who could walk away from everything because we couldn’t work out in the open. I started with God and worked my way to recruiting the rest of you.”

“So we exist because of a personal need for revenge?” TB concluded.

“Justice!” Cherry sniped. She took a calming breath. “My father deserves that.” She turned her eyes to TB. “Whatever the reason I created Tribe, you’ve all done a lot of good over these past five years. Good others couldn’t have gotten done.”

“We’ve also done some shady-as-fuck work,” TB reminded her.

She pleaded with TB to understand her choices. “None of it was assisting bad people. I ensured that nothing like that ever touched any of you.”

Steel brought the conversation back to the pressing issue. “What’s the connection between today’s bomb threat and the Salieri?”

“Years ago, when my father disappeared, I was going through his things, desperate to find clues as to who might have taken him. Buried in his personal cloud drive were folders and folders of articles relating to Mozart and his fellow composer,Antonio Salieri. Everything from research articles to reviews of numerous play performances around the theatrical world ofAmadeusby Peter Shaffer. I nearly deleted the files because I couldn’t figure out why my father would have something like that saved to his drive. He hated classical music, and live theatre was barely one step above it in his estimation.”

“The articles were breadcrumbs,” Waters deduced.

Cherry nodded. “In truth, I forgot about the files because getting Tribe up and running became my sole focus. When Gendry gave up the name, it triggered my memory of what I’d found, so I looked closer at those files again. They were all downloads of real articles from a worldwide database, but something about them looked… wrong. And then it hit me why.” She reached for a keyboard under the conference table and pulled up her files from her computer. “What do you see?”

Silence permeated the room.

Midas’ voice broke the silence. “The spacing is all wrong.”

“Very good,” Cherry complimented them. “I figured you would see it right away.”

“Pardon my limited brain power,” TB interrupted, “but what does spacing have to do with it?”

“The margins are off,” Midas explained. “When you download an article off the internet and save it to your drive, it follows the same default protocols to format the file to its new location. Text centers left, right, up, down, and spaces the lines at 1.15 lines.”

Haskell chimed in, “It’s similar to how I configure my body in a small space or if someone played the game of Tetris. The document is formatted to use the space allotted as efficiently as possible. When you copy over text from one source to another, unless you tell it otherwise, the formatting follows along with the text. Most internet articles are formatted to Chicago style formatting—the style journalists use—where the documentjustifies the text so that the margins are even on both sides and words are flush with both the left and right margins. In addition, there are rules for when and where a new page can be started.”

Midas picked up the explanation. “If you look at this particular document Cherry pulled up, the formatting is uneven. Also, if I were to print this document in its entirety, there would be”—he counted—“one, two, three extra pages at the end of the article that would be blank. In a professional setting, that wouldn’t happen. The fact that it does here suggests hidden text to me.”

Cherry nodded. “I finally came around to that as well.” She highlighted the entire article, and within the highlighting in the margins, a shadowy character like a medieval-style “S” inside a diamond appeared at the top left and the bottom right of each new page. The three blank pages that followed the end of the article showed shadowy writing in an unreadable font that was colored white and microscopic on the page.

“What are we looking at, exactly?” questioned TB.

“The authors, or the publishers more likely, used extremely low tech to hide a private message,” Midas explained. “Microscopic, white-colored font. Unless you knew what to look for, you’d just assume those last pages were extra and probably ignore them.”

TB rose from his seat and walked closer to the screen. “It’s brilliant,” he whispered. “How did no one see this?”

“Sometimes the best hiding place is in plain sight,” Cherry acknowledged. “Like hiding a specific needle in a stack of other needles. Hang on.” With a few more keystrokes, Cherry placed a second document side by side with theAmadeusarticle she’d used as the example for the group. The entire room could now view the new version of the document with the white text changed to blue and enlarged to size twelve font.

Haskell turned to Cherry. “Is this what I think it is?”

“Looks like gibberish,” Demon complained.

“To most people, yes. In reality, it’s Middle English,” Cherry informed him.

“Wow.” Haskell popped out of her chair and joined TB at the screen, her fingers tracing the lettering. “I haven’t seen this since I readThe Canterbury Tales.”

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