For a moment no one spoke.
Then Julian grabbed a notebook and a pen. “Give us everything you’ve got. Let’s go over every word, look at every possible meaning.”
An hour later, they’d made no progress, the message just as incomprehensible as it had been when Kat first read out the strange list of words.
“Maybe we should call it a night.” Julian leaned back, rubbing his eyes. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but my mind’s not getting any sharper.”
“I hear that,” Marc muttered. Then he frowned. “What if these aren’t just words. What if they’re a mix of words and words that stand for letters that spell other words?”
Kat looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“Well, ‘Escape from’ makes sense. Then it turns into gibberish. What if the other wordsspellwords?”
“But how do we know which letters to use?”
Marc turned to a new sheet of paper. “They wanted us to be able to figure this out, so let’s make it simple and use the first letter of each word to start with.”
“So that’s ‘Escape from a-l-t-a-r.’ ” Kat frowned. “Are they in a church?”
And then Joaquin knew.
He looked up, met Julian’s gaze. “No, not analtarlike inside a church.Altar.”
He saw understanding dawn in Julian’s eyes. “That’s it.”
Marc shook his head. “All-tar? What’s ‘all-tar’?”
Joaquin answered. “It’s a town not far from the border, a jumping off place for drug smugglers and others trying to cross illegally into the U.S.”
“Way to go, Joaquin.” Julian raised an eyebrow and looked at Marc as if impressed. “Well, I’ll be damned, Hunter. You might earn your paycheck this week.”
“Fuck you, Dickangelo.”
“Not gonna happen, Hunter. Sorry.”
Joaquin knew they weren’t really angry at each other. For all their insults, they were as tight as brothers.
To his right, Kat was working furiously, scribbling words. Then she looked up, eyes wide. “I think I have it.”
Julian’s head whipped around. “Let’s hear it.”
“Escape from Altar. Then the words ‘infiltrate,’ ‘shadow’ and ‘wolf.’ Then ‘Tohono.’ ” She looked around the room at them, the expression on her face telling Joaquin these words meant something to her.
Julian’s face went dark like a thundercloud. He stood. “Son of a bitch!”
Joaquin looked at Marc. Marc looked at Joaquin.
They both looked at Julian and Kat.
“So do either of you feel like filling us in, or are you having a private moment here?” Marc asked, clearly irritated and as much in the dark as Joaquin.
“Escape from Altar. Infiltrate Shadow Wolf. Tohono.” Kat put the message together, worry on her face. “I think it means they’re going to try to make a desert border crossing from Altar onto the land of the Tohono O’Odham.”
“The toe-ho-no oh-damn . . . what?” Marc looked at Joaquin as if to see whether this made any sense to him.
But Joaquin was too appalled at the thought of Natalie trying to cross the unforgiving desert in the heat of high summer to say anything. People died out there every year, their lives lost to hunger, dehydration, heatstroke, not to mention cartel violence. As Joaquin had learned during the SPJ conference, the Sonoran Desert along the border was a no-man’s-land of cartels, coyotes, and fugitives.
It was Kat who answered Marc’s question. “The Tohono O’Odham—an Indian nation whose land extends into Mexico. They have a border guard unit known as the Shadow Wolves, Indian federal agents who are the best trackers in the world.”