Chapter 2 - VIKTOR KNEW WHO MY FATHER WAS
I forgot about the ten million dollars.
I forgot about Dominic Russo.
I even forgot I was standing in a private dining room where one meal probably cost more than my mother’s monthly rent.
I stared at the journal.
“Let me see that page again.”
Viktor closed it.
Too quickly.
Dominic noticed.
“So did I,” he said.
Viktor smiled.
It was a bad smile now.
“This is becoming ridiculous.”
I looked at him.
“My father’s name is written there.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“You’re fourteen.”
“I know how old I am.”
One of Dominic’s attorneys coughed into his hand.
Viktor’s eyes hardened.
“Children confuse patterns.”
I almost laughed.
“My father used to say that people attack the reader when they’re frightened by the sentence.”
That shut him up.
Dominic extended his hand.
“The journal.”
Viktor did not move.
Dominic’s voice remained calm.
“Viktor.”
For several seconds, neither man blinked.
Then Viktor returned the book to the table.
Dominic slid it toward me.
I did not touch it.
“Gloves.”
He frowned.
“What?”
“The pages are old. Your translator was wearing cotton gloves.”
The translator suddenly looked embarrassed that a fourteen-year-old food runner had noticed proper manuscript handling before the billionaire.
Dominic nodded toward him.
He handed me a clean pair.
I put them on.
Then carefully opened the book.
The strange writing covered almost every page.
To anyone else, it looked like several alphabets had collided.
Some characters resembled medieval Latin shorthand.
Others looked almost Greek.
There were merchant marks.
Numbers.
Tiny geometric shapes.
Repeated clusters of dots.
But it was not an ancient language.
That was the first mistake all the experts had made.
“This is a cipher.”
Dominic leaned closer.
“What kind?”
“A private one.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Dad taught me something similar.”
Viktor spoke immediately.
“Similar is not the same.”
“No.”
I looked at him.
“But the substitution rules are.”
His face changed again.
My father, Benjamin Hart, had been a historical linguist and cryptography researcher at a small university in New Jersey.
Not famous.
Not wealthy.
He specialized in commercial codes used by immigrant families, private companies, resistance groups, and merchants who wanted to keep information away from competitors.
Five years earlier, he became obsessed with a strange notebook.
I remembered it because Mom hated it.
Dad would spread photocopied pages across our kitchen table.
He called the writing:
“The Palatine system.”
Not a historical language.
A layered cipher built from three systems.
Old Sicilian commercial abbreviations.
Nineteenth-century shipping notation.
And a custom phonetic substitution alphabet invented by whoever originally wrote it.
“How long did your father work on it?” Dominic asked.
“Almost a year.”
Viktor stood.
“This has gone far enough.”
Dominic looked at him.
“Sit down.”
“I have a board dinner.”
“Then miss it.”
Viktor did not sit.
Instead he looked at me.
“What exactly did Benjamin tell you?”
The fact that he used my father’s first name without asking confirmed everything.
I whispered:
“You knew him.”
Silence.
Dominic’s eyes moved toward Viktor.
“You told me you’d never found anyone who could read this.”
“I said nobody completed a reliable translation.”
Different sentence.
Very different.
I looked at Viktor.
“My father worked for you.”
He said nothing.
Memory returned in pieces.
Dad coming home late.
A black car outside our apartment once.
Arguments with Mom behind a closed bedroom door.
A man named “Mr. Hale.”
I had been nine.
Then ten.
I never connected it.
“You hired him.”
Viktor finally answered.
“My company retained many academics.”
“For this journal?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“He failed.”
I looked down.
The words BENJAMIN HART KNOWS remained on the page.
“No.”
I whispered.
“He didn’t.”
Dominic asked:
“What makes you say that?”
Because I remembered something else.
Three months before Dad became too sick to work, he gave me a notebook.
Cheap.
Blue cover.
He told me:
Never throw this away, even if you don’t understand why yet.
I thought it was another collection of language exercises.
After his death, I put it in a box with his books.
I had not opened it in almost three years.
Now I understood.
I looked at Dominic.
“My father translated this journal.”
Viktor laughed.
“No, he didn’t.”
I turned toward him.
“And I think you know exactly where his translation went.”
His face went still.
Dominic saw it.
So did everyone else.
Then Dominic asked me:
“Where is your father’s notebook?”
“At home.”
Viktor reached for his coat.
Dominic’s attorney spoke.
“Nobody is going anywhere with this child.”
Thank God someone remembered I was fourteen.
Dominic looked toward me.
“Your mother?”
“At work.”
“What does she do?”
“Night shift at Mount Sinai.”
Nurse.
Always exhausted.
Always trying to make one paycheck perform miracles.
Dominic nodded.
“Then nothing happens until she is here and you have an adult representing your interests.”
I stared at him.
That was not what I expected from a billionaire dangling ten million dollars around a restaurant.
Viktor looked annoyed.
“Dominic, this is absurd.”
Dominic did not look at him.
“No.”
Then he finally turned.
“What’s absurd is that the first person who recognized your journal is the daughter of a translator you somehow forgot to mention.”
Viktor’s jaw tightened.
And for the first time that night, Dominic asked the question that actually mattered.
“What did Benjamin Hart discover?”
Viktor answered:
“Nothing.”
I looked back at the first page.
Then I noticed something hidden along the inner margin.
Four tiny symbols.
I translated them silently.
My stomach dropped.
Dominic saw my face.
“What?”
I pointed.
“The journal says the full translation was copied.”
“Where?”
I swallowed.
“To two places.”
“One with the writer.”
I looked at Viktor.
May you like
“And one with my father.”
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