Here's to Us (Blood Money #2)

Chapter 13 - A New Morning

The first sketch Silas had produced was of The Mona Lisa, the famous painting only lacking Da Vinci's excellent strokes of colours. The second sketch was of mine, sitting on a lounge chair on the balcony, a colourless revamp of the similar painting he had made of me. The third sketch was of the sapphire necklace & the last one was a symbolic rose.

Four of the papers laid on the mahogany desk, each of them giving nothing away. I had gathered them into one place just like he had implied. Unity is the only way.

Besides, before the feds went back to checking the CCTV footages, I needed to find out his message. They would definitely want the sketches for themselves once they knew.

But these were cryptic, each one bearing a different topic. My eyes darted to the first sketch.

The Mona Lisa.

Leonardo da Vinci.

What could be the message there? The Mona Lisa was hung in the Salle des États inside the Louvre museum, which was situated in Paris. Was that it? Was he in Paris? Then why did he give me the other sketches as clues? I took a sip of my neat scotch, muttering to myself. All of these sketches certainly had something in common.

Nothing looked appealing enough as a lead as I observed them. Rubbing my temples ruefully, I stared, wondering what he was thinking of while making these.

We had a fight that night on the balcony about Megan. The second sketch could refer to that. Perhaps Megan had something to do with that. I rotated the paper several times and halted when finally something caught my eyes. It was the date. There were numbers instead of an actual date below his tiny signature. One could be easily fooled by its size.

It read:

8-13-5-4-17-13-14

The bizarre series of the number looked like some kind of cypher. It could be a password, a telephone exchange, a social security number or even an account number. I ran my eyes over the digits, thinking of any symbolic meaning. But these only looked random to me. Or was it some kind of sequence?

I wanted to think simple.

But nothing remarkable came to my mind. In the end, I felt like a fool, drooling over some mathematical hogwash. Standing up from the Aeon chair, I grasped my glass, gulped the rest of my drink and paced back and forth. My eyes landed on the bookshelves, tempted to look for a book on cryptography.

There was the 'Wild Horses' record, misplaced on the shelf. Recalling that I was the one who did this mistake over a few weeks ago, I placed it back where it belonged. Setting them in the proper order, I turned to the desk, suddenly surprised with myself. Perhaps, the numbers weren't in the proper order.

Feeling silly, I counted the alphabets and wrote a letter down each of the numbers. When I finished, I didn't feel so anymore.

8-13-5-4-17-13-14

I-N-F-E-R-N-O

This was a monoalphabetic substitution cypher, wherein each letter of an alphabet was mapped to its numeric equivalent. How simple! He meant Inferno. Hell? Was I reading too much into these numbers? But it was a simple code. The simpler a thing was, the harder it was to realize. How did the word 'Inferno' appeal to Silas anyway?

He thought he deserved to be in hell. Nevertheless, he couldn't literally mean that he was there. What else?- I asked myself & thought of the fourteenth-century poetry 'Dante's Inferno'. Could it be the same? He had once quoted 'Inferno' while he told me of his misfortunes. This felt like the right path.