The Fire by Katherine Neville Read Free Book Online

Having flown and driven a few thousand miles, I was standing in the snow on top of a mountain, trying to get access to my own house, desperate to know if anyone was inside. But I didn’t have a key.
    My alternative – wading through acres of deep snow to peep through a window – seemed a poor idea. What would I do if I got wetter than I already was and still couldn’t get inside? What if I got inside and no one was there? There were no car tracks, ski tracks – not even deer tracks – anywhere near the house.
    So I did the only intelligent thing I could think of: I yanked my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Mother’s number, right here at the lodge. I was relieved when her message machine picked up after six rings, thinking she might have left some clue as to her whereabouts. But when her recorded voice came on, my heart sank:
    ‘I can be reached at…’ and she rattled off the same number she’d left on my D.C. phone – still missing the very last digits! I stood before the door, wet and cold, and fuming with confusion and frustration. Where did one go from here?
    And then I remembered the game.
    My favorite uncle, Slava, was famed throughout the world as the noted technocrat and author, Ladislaus Nim. He’d been my best friend in my childhood, and though I hadn’t seen him in years, I felt he still was. Slava hated telephones. He vowed he would never have one in his house. Telephones, no – but Uncle Slava loved puzzles. He’d written several books on the topic. Through my childhood, if anyone received a message from Slava with a phone number where you could reach him, they always knew it wasn’t real – it must be some kind of encrypted message. That was his delight.
    It seemed unlikely, though, that my mother would use such a technique to communicate with me. For one thing, she wasn’t even good at deciphering such messages herself, and she couldn’t invent a puzzle if her life depended upon it.
    More unlikely still was the idea that Slava had created a message for her. As far as I knew, she hadn’t talked to my uncle in years, not since…the thing we never spoke about.
    Yet I was sure, somehow, that this was a message.
    I jumped back up into the Land Rover and switched on the engine. Decrypting puzzles to locate my mother sure beat all hell out of the alternatives: breaking into an abandoned house, or flying back to D.C. and never learning where she’d gone.
    I phoned her machine again: I jotted down the phone number she’d left there, for all the world to hear. If she was in real trouble of some kind and trying to contact only me, I prayed that I would decipher it first.
    ‘I can be reached at 615-263-94…’ my mother’s recorded voice said.
    My hand was shaking as I wrote out the numbers on a pad.
    I’d been provided eight numbers, rather than the ten numbers required to make a long-distance call. But as with Uncle Slava’s puzzles, I suspected this had nothing to dowith phones. Here was a ten-digit code, of which the final two numbers were missing. Those two numbers themselves were my hidden message.
    It took about ten minutes to figure it out – much longer than when I was running neck and neck with my crazy but wonderful uncle. If you divided the string of numbers into twos (hint: we were missing the last two digits), then you ended up with: 61–52–63–94.
    If you reversed those numbers, as I quickly saw, you ended up with each two-digit square number, starting with the square of four. That is, the product of four, five, six, and seven, when multiplied by themselves, resulted as follows: 16–25–36–49.
    The next number in the sequence – and the missing number – was 8. So the missing last two digits of the series were the square of 8 – that is, 64. In the real puzzle, of course, if you reversed the number, the answer would have been 46 – but that wasn’t it.
    I knew – and so did my mother – that 64 had another meaning for me. It was the number of squares on a