The Story of Blood and Roses

"What are these radiating lines?" I asked pointing at them. He hummed in acknowledgment and then concentrated on my question again.

"Those are the possible routes that can be taken to transport the cargo to each of them and within themselves. I believe that there will be more than one storehouse occupied because of the sheer size of the cargo that was stolen, so it will have to be in close proximity to each other. Transportation costs are high and selling them and redeeming the cost of production isn't an option Darcy has for those shipments. I'll easily catch hold of him if he acts as stupidly."

"So, it's idle stock, which makes it easier for us to locate," Eric voiced the obvious. He was back from his mission, possibly having news of some sort.

"That defeats the purpose of stealing the shipment. We never really found out why they would do it in the first place!" That was Alec. He seemed to be the ever clueless lot who was good at his side of the work. But it seemed that he had not done his job well, hence the shipment went missing. Anthony seemed to think the same. He turned to Alec with a furious look as if to say that it was none of his business (or his fault that they were tangled in such a tricky situation, which was probably true), but answered instead.

"Darcy is threatened by the rise in sales of my goods; hence, he is acting out. It is merely a problem of ego and nothing you should worry about." His answer was ambiguous and he was clearly equivocating. An honest opinion about Anthony's relationship with Alec would be described in one word—cold. This distance between Anthony and Alec was uncanny. Anthony seemed to be pretty close to the other head's and frequently let them into the plot, but Alec had, for a lack of a better term, seemed to have been a disappointment to Anthony. Clearly, Anthony lacked trust in the man. I wondered if the reason was only the recent lapse, or something more.

'Something I could find out and exploit, maybe?'

"Which brings us back to the primary concern: where is the cargo, exactly?" Ethan. He was intently going through the map trying to figure out something. "Let me get this straight. If this is some act of ego and clearly a challenge or compensation for lost business, Darcy would want to protect the stocks so that he can use them in the future or disintegrate the stock and sell it separately." That made sense. "Hence, we should be looking for someplace where the stock is easily protected with fewer guards."

"Hence, the lines would be coming in handy." I shook my head when someone voiced that assumption.

"The lines will come in handy only if we consider the cost of transportation for the shipments. It won't be of much help if he were looking for safer locations. Those would be two conflicting theories. The easier it is to reach them, the more unsafe the cargo becomes," I try to convince the lot. After minutes of debate, we go on to considering other policies.

"Eric, what news have you brought us?" Anthony asks at the end of the futile discussion on the approach that we should take in pursuing the goods. Eric seemed to nod in understanding and then turned to Anthony.

"Would you mind passing me the sheets that I sent you over the past few days for everyone to see? I think those will be able to help." Anthony retrieves a pile of smaller sheets that he had neatly placed behind him. He keeps them at the center, over the map and goes back to his sitting position.

"As you already know, we have an undercover agent after Darcy. He can be considered low in rank but is good with getting the information in the organization. He has been noticing some erratic activity on the part of Darcy and his associates. They have been sending a large number of people towards Syracuse. This snitch is inclined to believe that these people are headed towards Syracuse to protect the cargo. I think we can all agree to that." Everyone did.

What shocked me that they had effectively planted a bug in Darcy's organization when the Organization hadn't been able to do it, yet. Anthony's spy might not be in a high rank, but he was alive and constantly sending in new information. That I believed was an impossibly miraculous achievement.

"Now, they have been communicating with their soldiers, but we couldn't figure out what they were saying. We thought it was Morse, at first glance, but it just got more difficult." Both Anthony and I shared a glance at that, which the others seemed to notice. They all gave us questioning looks and Anthony pointed at me to clarify.

"The two of us suspect that it is the Caesar's Box," I said with a smile. They looked bewildered, so I went ahead and explained why we were assuming such a thing. "We found a code sent by Luke or his headquarters a while back in which we found Morse codes, but later on decoding, we understood that it was more complicated than that. So, we worked harder and found out that it was Caesar's Box."

"What is that?" I heard Alec voicing. Not many knew about codes and it had been a privilege of mine to be interested in such things from my childhood and be able to learn them.

Again Anthony motioned me to explain further. He didn't seem to hold any interest in what Alec was saying any longer; neither did he seem to have that angry yet disappointed look on his face. This was indeed intriguing.

"So, a Caesar's Box is a method of encryption that was invented by Julius Caesar. The purpose of the invention was to encode messages so that they wouldn't be able to be read if they fell into the wrong hands." They nodded in understanding. This was the easy part. "The primary rule of this coding is that the total number of characters has to be a perfect square." They grimaced at that. "It's a really difficult procedure if you ask me, but they went to a lot of work to get the news through without being revealed to us."

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