Ned, show Franklin what you found.” Cruz walked up to the young man, who was crouching in his desk chair in what looked like a rather uncomfortable position.

He looked up, his eyes wide and uncertain. “Oh!” he said after a moment, shuffling through a stack of papers he had on his desk. Some of them were printouts of maps; others were loose leaflets with scribbled notes. None of it seemed to make any sense. “So… um… I’ve been trying to track down… what was his name?”

“Dean Moss,” I said as I glanced at Cruz, raising an eyebrow in question.

“Don’t worry, he’s the best of the best. We hired him right out of MIT. Graduated with a 5.0 GPA.”

I narrowed my eyes in envy. I had applied to MIT, only to get rejected. Later, when I had gone to college, I’d quickly learned that I was a horrible student. I flunked out, enlisted in the army, and now, here I was.

Ned ran his fingers through his messy brown hair. “Ah! Right, right!” he exclaimed, pulling out a large roll of paper. He jumped from his chair and rushed over to the conference table, spreading it out.

“So, Dean is pinging most of his stuff from Germany, but the pings are too consistent.” He pointed to Berlin. “But since you said that Dean is a puzzle-man, I figured there had to be something we were missing. He sent you a postcard, correct?”

I nodded, my arms crossed over my chest, trying to figure out where he was going with all this.

“So the first ‘non-postal’ postcard was introduced in Austria in 1869.” He ran his fingers through the map. “I started to play around with that number, thinking it was important. At first, I tried to find other key events that happened during that time, but then, it hit me – coordinates. Now, 18-69 gets you to the Arabian Sea, right off the coast of India, specifically Mumbai. I checked our databases, and there are a few warships out there, so I figured it would be too tricky for him to go there.”

“Right. So did you try to invert the coordinates?” I asked, my eyes roaming the map. I stepped forward, letting my fingers trace out the path. “Norway…”

“Specifically, an Unnamed Road in Sjøvegan. I thought that seemed like the perfect place for someone to hide, but there are absolutely no signals coming from that location… it’s technologically dead.” Ned added, “But the name interested me.”

“How so?”

“Well, in Sjøvegan, the first three letters look so foreign, but then it’s followed by ‘vegan,’ a word that has become so popular. You know, I actually tried it for a day or two, but I just couldn’t do it. Do you know how hard it is to give up scrambled eggs in the morning? There really isn’t a proper substitute.”

“Ned.” Cruz stepped in, halting his side note.

“Right. Sorry.” He pointed back to Berlin. “As it so happens, Berlin is the world capital of veganism. It has the most vegan restaurants per square foot than any other city.”

“So we’re back to square one?” I felt like we were just going in circles. “I hope you didn’t tell me all this just to admit you don’t have a lead.”

“No, no. I have something, just let me explain.” He grabbed a printout of the postcard I had sent Cruz. “Since the clues were all pointing back to Berlin, I decided to have another look at the postcard. At first, it seems like a normal painting by an unknown German artist. Unknown – Unnamed. I went back to Sjøvegan and found the exact address for the coordinates. There are only three houses on that road. The third most vegan city is Warsaw, famous for its Mermaid, and would you look here.” He held up a magnifying glass, concentrating it on the left-most corner of the painting. “A mermaid hiding in the waves. It’s very subtle, but it’s there.”

I waited for him to come to a conclusion, but he just looked at me, a look of excitement in his eyes.

“Don’t you see it?” he finally asked.

“What?”

“He wasn’t trying to point us to his location – he was sending us a message. Warsaw. He is trying to declare war. The birth of World War III.”

My eyes widened.

Just then, my phone started to ring. When I pulled it out of my pocket, there was an unknown number on the screen. Quickly, I rushed over to my desk and plugged it into the recording software. Ned was already behind his desk, trying to figure out where the number was coming from.

“Hurry up before they hang up!” I snapped at him.

“Just give me a second…” he mumbled before his expression fell to one of horror. “Oh… you aren’t going to like this.”

“Out with it!” Cruz slammed his hands on the desk, causing the man to jump.

Unable to speak, he turned his monitor toward me. The pin on the map was directly over my house.

Without a moment of hesitation, I answered the phone. “What the fuck have you done?” I growled, certain that Dean would be on the other side of the line. “I swear to God if you did anything to hurt them… I’m going to kill you… like I should’ve done ten years ago.”

“My, my, is that any way to treat your guest? I must say, this is a lovely home you have here.”

I ground my teeth.

Cruz was already making phone calls, commanding our units to surround the house, to stop Dean in his tracks.

“Now, if I had to guess, you’re at HQ, trying to find where I am. You’ve probably deciphered my little postcard, but it hasn’t done you any good because here I am, with your girlfriend unconscious on the floor and your son in my arms.”

“Don’t you fucking touch him!”

“Too late.”

“What do you want?”

“Hmm, what do I want? It would be nice to get back those ten years I spent rotting in prison, but since you don’t have a time machine you could lend me, I don’t think that’s a viable request…”

“Why are you trying to hurt them? It’s me you’re after.”

“Because this is much more fun. I love to see you squirm, and sure, I could do that by torturing you for a while, but this is much, much worse, isn’t it? You’ll blame yourself for the rest of your life. You’ll think that it was your fault – and it is. You should’ve protected them. You should’ve made sure they were safe, but you couldn’t. How can you look in a mirror and call yourself a man when you can’t even fend for your own family?”

Rage surged within me, threatening to consume me.

“But I also have other plans… I’ve been experimenting… homemade bombs are surprisingly easy to make, but you need a vessel to properly set them. You need someone who won’t arouse suspicion. Someone who blends in. Who better than a mother and a child?”

“You bastard! You wouldn’t!”

“Care to test that theory?” With that, he laughed and hung up the phone.

The second I heard the dial tone, I ran out the door.

I had to stop this.