Strong Like the Sea, стр. 21
“Hey, guys, come look at this. Jack solved ‘Stand in the corner.’ Do you see any other ones?”
Ekolu and Kase crowd around the table with Malia, Jack, and me.
“So if we figure this out, does that mean we’re super spies?” asks Jack. “I solved the first one, so I get choke kine spy points.”
“Spy points. Yeah, brah. We should have code names.” Ekolu raises his hand. “I call Aquaman.”
“That’s not a code name.” Malia tilts her head—looking at the card from different angles.
“I’m gonna be Agent Double-O Ramen.” Jack smirks. “But that’s top secret, so don’t tell anyone.”
“What’s with the weird spacing?” Kase taps the card. “Janob is all spread out.”
“Oh!” Malia beams. “That’s because it has the word an inside the word job. It’s an inside job!”
“That’s got to be it.” I scribble notes on a page. “That sounds right. So far we have ‘stand in the corner’ and ‘an inside job.’ What else?”
“Maybe KOOL means ‘look’ but upside down?” Ekolu says. “Oh! You gotta do a handstand!”
“I can’t do a handstand. First, my glasses would fall off, second—doesn’t matter. It’s not happening.”
Ekolu holds his thumb and finger a half-inch apart and squints at me through the gap. “Maybe small kine handstand?”
“No—” Kase points at the sky. “It means up. Like LOOK UP!”
“Look up, yep. Sounds good. Next?” I underline the words.
“Check those two groups with the numbers—both have one word underneath the rest.” Malia twists the end of her thick braid around her finger. “That’s got to mean over or under or maybe on top?”
“The first one is under,” Jack says. “It’s like the stand-in-the-corner one—except with the HE under the STANDS 3.14 . . .”
“That’s pi!” Kase smacks his fist against his palm. “Three-point-one-four-one-five—HE understands pi!”
“But who is HE? And what’s with the choke numbers after that?” Ekolu grumps.
“Let’s see, SHELF three times, with a circle around the top one,” Malia says at the same time as Jack blurts, “Top shelf!”
I check my notes: Inside job, Stand in the corner, Look up, Top shelf, He understands pi. “It’s directions on how to find something, I think. But what’s the starting point?”
Kase pulls his phone out, and his thumbs patter against the screen. “This says that 1.618 number is something called the golden ratio.”
There’s only one person I know who loves that ratio, and with that, the rest becomes easy. “It’s my dad! He says the golden ratio is the BEST over ALL! And the last one is from the statue of Ahonui at Kahuku High and Intermediate School. The bronze plaque talks about Strength through Perseverance. I’ve seen it.”
I grin at my brilliant friends. “The next clue is inside, in a corner, high on a top shelf, at my dad’s work. We can take the bus there Friday right after school.”
“Agent Ramen and Agent Aquaman rule!” Ekolu fist bumps Jack and they pull away with squid-like fingers. “We definitely count as spies.”
Malia snorts, and Jack glances at the rest of us. “What? You guys didn’t even pick a code name.”
I pull my sun hat down tight and gather papers into my backpack. “I don’t need to. My mom’s already smarter than any spy. She’s cool, like Mavis Batey.”
“Bet a real spy could find the clue in like ten minutes flat,” Jack teases.
I narrow my eyes. “If a normal old spy could find it in ten minutes, I’ll do it in nine.”
“You’re on.” Jack rubs his hands, a wicked sparkle in his eye. “And winner picks the spy code name for the loser.”
Enigma: An inexplicable person or thing that is baffling, mysterious, and perplexing.
I underline the definition—twice.
Basically, Enigma is the perfect name for a German code machine that was supposed to be unbreakable. But maybe they should have called it the almost-unbreakable-machine, or the really-tricky-to-read machine.
Was it hard? You bet.
Unbreakable? No.
I study the pictures that Mrs. Keala, the librarian at Laie Elementary, let me print out for my poster board. One shows the Enigma machine from the outside, and another has it sliced in half to show all the parts inside.
Shaped sort of like a weird old typewriter, the Enigma machine had all these gears, wires, and rotors that randomized messages so no one could read them. Without the secret daily settings for the machine on the other end, no one could break the code—or at least that’s how it was supposed to work. But a bunch of smart people like Mavis Batey found human errors from enemy soldiers who sent the messages—patterns and mistakes that helped them out-think the machine. Sometimes they’d use their girlfriend’s name or a swear word for the key, and the codebreakers could use that to figure out the rest of the message.
One time, Mavis figured out the Italian Enigma machine’s code and saved loads of lives by warning of an attack before it happened. She was a civilian like Mom—and smart. Brilliant, even. And yet, she was sworn to secrecy just like all the other people who worked at Bletchley Park. They couldn’t talk about it—not even with their kids.
Wouldn’t that make parents—even the moms—enigmas to their own children?
For thirty years after the war, Mavis Batey couldn’t talk about her war work—at all. Way too classified. Her kids didn’t know anything about her codebreaker stuff. For all they knew, Mavis was just super good at Scrabble—she’d always win.
I lean back and run my fingers along the brim of my third-favorite hat, the newsboy. It’s poofy enough to stuff all my long brown hair up inside it if I want, and the front brim is wide enough to shade my eyes but not