LOVE AND TREASURE | ❝I still love you, Ben after all this time apart.❞
━ IN WHICH Clara Bass is pulled back into the world of treasure hunting through her ex-boyfriend and this a new love grows between them.
| Clara Bass' Standalone Book
| Clara Bas...
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▌Chapter 17 ─ The Debt That All Men Pay ▌
━━━━━ CLARA STOOD NEXT to Abigail, while Ben stood next to her, the four of them had been staring at the computer screen, they hadn't found anything from the picture.
"We've been looking at this page for hours. There's nothing there." Riley mentioned, Clara shook her head and sighed, just as Ben took his glasses off and sighed as well.
"Ben, I really don't think we're gonna find anything on this page." Abigail said shortly after.
"Look at it this way ─ in a hundred years, no one's gonna remember anyone involved in the Lincoln assassination besides Booth."
"That's not true. Do you know the expression 'His name is mud'?" Ben asked him.
"Yes, of course."
"You do? Do you know the origin of the expression?"
"Does anyone but you?"
"I do." Clara said, briefly placing her eyes on Riley.
"Dr. Samuel Mudd was convicted of being a co-conspirator in the Lincoln assassination. The evidence was circumstantial, he was later pardoned, but it didn't matter. Mudd's name still lives in infamy, and I will not let Thomas Gate' name be mud."
"Ben." Clara and Abigail said, their eyes trained on the screen.
"What?"
"Look at this." Abigail said, pointing to the screen. Ben put his glasses back on to get a better look at the screen. "See that?"
"Oh. Oh, that's quite something, isn't it?"
"Yeah. It says smudge." Riley said, while Clara and Abigail turned their heads to look back at him. "It's nothing."
"Residual ink from the facing page. Flip it." Abigail typed on the keys allowing the page to be flipped. "The letters are backwards."
"It's a cipher." Clara breathed out, a smile falling onto her pink lips.
"Yes. It is." Abigail said, shortly after her.
"It's a cipher. See how the letters are coupled?"
"Uh-huh."
"Playfair ciphers encode letters in pairs. This could prove his story."
"Unless you decode the cipher, this does not prove your theory."
"No, that's okay. All we need is a five-letter keyword."
"What's the keyword?"
"I don't know yet."
"All right."
"Can I get a printout of this?"
"There's a billion words in the English language. There's gotta be a logical ─ Let's start from the beginning. A - aardvark..."
