Spy School - Salvation [3]

06: Codes

John Adams Lecture Hall

Academy of Espionage

Washington DC

May 16

1300 hours

The next morning, Mike was still gone. I tried asking the teachers about his absence but they hadn't told me anything other than that it was a "minor medical emergency" and that the information was not able to be disclosed to students.

Jawa and Zoe were planning to bug his office after today's classes would end. Their plan involved luring the principal out with free flapjacks and donuts, and then having Jawa crawl through the vents to place the bugs while Zoe worked on the tech end of things. Chip and I would be the ones distributing the free snacks.

During class, I couldn't focus on the material given; instead, I decided to focus my nervous energy on the annotations in the Introduction to Morse Code textbook. Since I was overanalyzing every mark on the page, it took me several classes to get where I was now- the end of chapter one. After all, since it was a legitimate textbook, any security guard who was tailing me probably thought I was doing homework for another class.

It was hard to concentrate, though. Ever since second period, there had been a very annoying tapping noise coming from the walls, probably more plumbing that would never get fixed. Not only that, but my professor was currently demonstrating martial arts with a student- thankfully, she decided to give me a break today- and the student's groans of pain didn't exactly help me focus.

The page I was currently on was talking about some of the history. "During times of war, officers sometimes had to send out the same message constantly to ensure that it was received, so the operators had to occasionally take shifts when transmitting messages via sound." Next to that area of text there was an annotation reading "four shifts" and I was almost driving myself up the wall trying to decipher it. Was it a random annotation? Probably, but I had to be sure that it wasn't important.

Eventually though, I gave up, and moved onto the next page, which was the beginning of the next chapter that showed the Morse Code Alphabet and the basic rules. Interestingly enough, the alphabet was kind of based on the actual shapes of the letters:

After that, it talked about the Morse Code Alphabet, but with tapping noises and flashing a light. "Tapping to transmit messages is a great way to transmit messages, since it is able to be heard by everyone but only understood by the one who knows to look at it, and therefore is a good way to transmit messages when one may be watched-"

The tapping noises from the plumbing interrupted me once again, breaking my concentration. What if...

Maybe somebody was sending a message through the pipes with morse code. After all, the textbook, whoever placed it, was left for me to find for a reason.

After a quick conspicuous look to make sure no one was watching, I opened my notebook and started jotting down the pattern with dashes and dots, until I heard the pattern start over. The pattern was rather long: