The sun was slowly dipping toward the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance as the Brooks van pulled into the driveway of their home in Culpeper.  The last half hour of their trip has passed quietly, with Jeff driving, Bev listening to music and dozing, Michael reading and the kids in back watching the rest of their movie.  No one had said anything further about the cryptex in its leather box (or, for that matter, gas prices, thankfully).  Now, as the Jeff stopped the van and turned off the engine, Michael turned toward the kids in the seats behind him.

"Okay, guys, we're home," he announced, opening the side door next to him.  Emily, sound asleep in the very back, didn't budge.

"Come on, Emily, we're home," Michael said again.  "Get your blanket and your stuffed bunny and come on in."

Emily stirred and stretched as the other kids unbuckled their seat belts, gathered their things and began making their way to the double doors on the right side of the van.  Their other van sat next to them in the driveway, right where they had left it the day before.

"Oh, boy, I'm tired," Bev said as she closed the front passenger door.  "I'm going in to take a bath.  Y'all are on your own for supper."  She headed toward the front door, the house key in her hand.

"We've got some pizzas in the freezer," her husband replied, making his way around to the back of the van.  "I'll throw a couple in the oven for dinner."

Michael opened the back door, making sure that nothing fell out as he opened it.  He grabbed the toiletry bag in one hand and their suitcase in the other, being careful because of the leather box and cryptex inside it.

"Come on, guys, finish getting out so I can lock up the van," Jeff said, brandishing the keyless remote in the air.

The rest of the kids dragged themselves out of the van, shutting the side door behind them.  Emily yawned as she walked toward the sidewalk, still half asleep.

"Jeff," Michael said, "I've got these bags.  Would you make sure everything else comes in?"

"Sure," Jeff said, walking toward the back of the van.

Michael mounted the couple of stairs leading to their front door and walked into the house.  A number of their fourteen cats greeted them with plaintive meows, obviously needing to be fed and to have their litter boxes serviced.  Outside the back door, Michael could hear the sound of their black cocker spaniel clawing at the door, whimpering to be let in.  He walked through the kitchen and into his and his wife's bedroom, putting the toiletry bag and suitcase down on the bed.

"Calm down, Cypress," Michael said through the closed back door, walking back through the kitchen and entering the laundry room.  "I'll let you in when everyone else gets in and we can close the front door."  He looked down at the cats' almost empty food dishes and water dish as the cats themselves twisted themselves around his ankles, meowing expectantly.  At the end of the room sat the litter boxes, desperately needing attention.

Just in time, Michael thought to himself as he refilled the food dishes and water dish.  The cats immediately forgot him and headed straight for their food.  He then turned toward the litter boxes and wondered whose chore it was this week to do them.  He was about to ask the kids until he realized that, given how tired they all were after the trip, if he didn't do the cat boxes himself now they might not get done at all, leaving their cats to turn to... other places... in other rooms.

"Okay, kitties, let's do this," he said, picking up the litter scoop.  "Better now than later."

Fortunately the litter was the scoopable kind, so the job wasn't as disagreeable as it otherwise could have been.  After his last trip to the trash can in the garage, though, Michael looked at the remaining litter in the boxes and saw how little was left.  There had been a respectable amount of litter in them before.  Tell me, kitties, he thought to himself as he opened the back door to let in the dog, how do you manage to poop out more than we feed you?  The cats continued to ignore him, concerned more with the food in their dishes.

"Here, boy," he said to Cypress as the dog jumped around him, "how was your night and day in the back yard?"  Cypress bounced around the room, quivering as his short stubby tail wagged a mile a minute.  "Okay, boy, settle down," Michael said, opening the bag of dog food.  "Here're your Kibbles and Bits."
 
 

The animals fed, Michael walked back into the kitchen, stealing a glance into the front room.  Four of the kids had already plopped down on the sofa and chairs, their attention focused on the TV.  Michael turned on the oven to 325 degrees and then opened the freezer and removed a couple of pizzas.  He unwrapped them them from their packaging, placed them both on a large non-stick pan and put them into the oven, setting the timer for twenty minutes.  He then turned toward the counter and picked up the coffee pot from its base to brew some coffee for himself and Bev.  Turning on the faucet at the sink, he filled the pot up to the "12 cups" line, poured the water into the coffee machine's reservoir and then put four heaping scoops of Folger's French Vanilla into the brewer.  He pressed the "on" button and then walked out of the kitchen and into the bedroom and looked at the answering machine. No messages, he thought, noting the steady light on the front of the machine. Good.  No jobs to do tonight.  He sat down in front of his computer and started up Microsoft Outlook, which took its time opening before finally filling the screen and then beginning to retrieve his e-mail.  From the kitchen he could hear the coffee machine start to gurgle and hiss.

"Receiving message 1 of 37," Michael read out loud as Norton Internet Security began scanning each of his incoming messages.  The new messages appeared one by one in his Inbox folder as they passed their virus and junk mail scans.  After a few seconds, the last one arrived and Michael began to scan the list.

A few new messages from Yahoogroups, he thought to himself, one from Bev's sister, a PC Magazine software notice... several from the C-Prog list about bleeping out cuss words in songs... and one from an unknown sender wanting to sell me something to enlarge my... WHAT?!  Michael moved the mouse pointer to highlight the offending message before clicking the "This is Spam" button on the Norton toolbar.  Bye-bye, he thought as the message disappeared into the ether.

"Now," he said quietly, "let's find Ryan's e-mail address."

He clicked on the "new" button at the far left side of the toolbar to open up a new e-mail message, and then clicked the "To:" button to open the contacts list.  Moving the mouse, he scrolled about two thirds of the way down.  O... P... Q... and R.  Here it is, he thought to himself.  Ryan Waldron.  He highlighted the entry, clicked the "To:" button and then clicked "OK."  The contacts list vanished as the "new message" window came back to the foreground with Ryan's name in the "To:" field.  Michael entered an appropriate subject line and began to type:

"And send," Michael said out loud, clicking the large "Send" button on the left side of the message window.  The window disappeared from view as Outlook's "Outbox" folder darkened, indicating that the message was on its way.  The Norton scanning icon appeared briefly in the task bar in the lower right corner of the screen before finally disappearing as the "Outbox" folder returned to its normal shade of black.  Michael clicked on the "Sent Items" folder and confirmed that his message had indeed been sent.

"All right," Michael said to himself, "let's see what happens now."

"Honey?" his wife called from the bathroom in the middle of the house.

"Yes?" he called out, trying to heard over the TV set that the kids were watching in the front room.

"Would you fix me a diet cola?  I'm taking a bath."

"I'm fixing some coffee," he offered.  "Would you rather wait for that?"

"Hmm... no, I'll just have the cola now," she replied.

"Okay," he answered, rolling back in his chair.  He got up and walked into the kitchen, retrieving a clean glass from the dishwasher.  He walked over to their new Maytag refrigerator, held the glass under the ice dispenser and pressed the "cube" button.  The mechanism behind the freezer door began clicking and rumbling until several cubes of ice fell down the chute and into the glass.  When it was full, Michael pulled the glass away from the dispenser and put it down on the counter.  He opened a three-liter bottle of Food Lion Diet Cola and began pouring the drink into the glass, being careful not to let it effervesce over the rim.

"Here, Honey," Michael said, entering the bathroom and placing the glass on the edge of the tub.

"Thanks," Bev said, "and would you hand me my razor?"

"Here," Michael said, reaching into the cupboard and retrieving one for her.

"So are the kids all watching TV?" she asked.

"I think Jeff's in his room lying down, but the others are in the front room watching TV."

"Close the door," she said.  "I want to ask you something."

Michael closed the door and leaned back against the counter, his back to the mirror.

"What, Honey?" he asked.

"What do you think all this Kansas and coded stuff means?" she asked, sitting up in the tub.  "You know... the messages, the album, the leather box, the cryptex... I mean, do you think we're safe?"

"Oh, sure," Michael replied, seeking to reassure his wife.  "Ryan's a good guy.  In fact, I just sent him an e-mail letting him know that we'd found the album and the box and the cryptex and that we needed to know what to do next."

"I just don't want to put the kids in danger," she said.  "Or us."

"Honey, there's nothing to worry about," Michael said, smiling.  "I'll bet that when this is all over and done we'll look back and wonder what we were worried about."

"I hope you're right," she said uncertainly, turning on the hot water to fill the tub some more.  "I mean, I'd die if something happened to you or the kids."

"It's okay, Honey," Michael said, leaning down and kissing his wife on the cheek.  "Everything's going to be fine.  Ryan will write back and tell us what's going on, and then we'll know--"

Michael's words were interrupted by the sound of Emily's voice yelling excitedly from outside in the hallway as she pounded on the door.  "Daddy!  Daddy!"

"Whatty?  Whatty?" he said, opening the door as Emily continued saying what she had been trying to tell him.

"Daddy!  Someone's here!" she said.

"Where?" he asked.

"Outside, on the sidewalk!  They just drove up!"

Michael looked back at his wife.  "Probably just a client of mine or someone dropping off a computer for me to look at," he said as he walked out of the bathroom.

Emily ran ahead of him into the front room, where the other kids were looking out the window.  On the street in front of their house there was parked a very expensive looking black sedan.  Michael looked at it for a moment but couldn't place it.

"Daddy!"  Katherine said.  "They're at the front door!"

"Okay, okay," he said. "Just put Cypress outside in back so he won't jump all over them."

Katherine got up and went to the back door, calling for the dog to follow her.  She opened the door and then closed it after him.

"Okay," she said, "he's out."

Michael pushed the button on the remote control to turn off the TV, then walked to the front door.  He turned the doorknob in his hand and pulled the door open.  Two people, a man and a woman, were standing on the sidewalk at the bottom of the front stoop.  The bespectacled man, who was dressed in a dark suit and tie, stood about six feet tall and looked to be in his sixties, his head completely bald except for bushy white eyebrows and a smattering of neatly trimmed white hair over his ears and around the back of his head.  On his face, however, he wore a thick white mustache and beard that looked to be over a foot long as it hung down over his chest.  Michael knew for sure that he didn't recognize him.

The attractive woman accompanying him appeared to be completely out of place next to him.  She was fair skinned with long brown hair that fell over her shoulders.  Obviously she was much younger than her companion, maybe half his age; Michael guessed that she was in her mid-thirties.  She was dressed smartly but casually, wearing a white blouse with a khaki jacket and skirt, complemented by a a pair of dark brown pumps, which added a few inches to her height.  Over her right shoulder hung what appeared to be a laptop computer case.  She looked to be the man's secretary.  Or his daughter.  Michael looked at her face for a long moment.  For some reason it seemed to him that he had seen her before, but he couldn't recall where or when.

"Please pardon our intrusion," the man said in a refined accent that Michael couldn't place, "but we are here on very important business.  Are you... Michael Everett Brooks?"

"Um, yes, I am," Michael replied, beginning to wonder if perhaps the man and woman were from the FBI.  Or the CSI.  Or the IRS.

"Good," the man said, taking a step up toward the front door.  "Ryan Waldron sent us."

Ryan Waldron! Michael thought so loudly to himself that we felt sure that the two strangers had heard him as well.  That was fast...

"Well," Michael stammered, "um, that's good to know.  Ryan's a... a friend of mine."

"Very good, very good," the man replied.  He and Michael locked eyes for a moment.  Michael was still sure he didn't recognize him.

"So, then," Michael continued, "how can I help you?"

"Perhaps it is I who can be of help to you, Mr. Brooks," the man said, stepping through the front door and motioning for the woman to follow.  Michael and the kids stepped back, giving the two strangers room to enter without really knowing why.

"What do you mean, you can be of help to me?" Michael asked, wondering if perhaps he had made a mistake in opening his door to these two.  "Who are you, anyway?"

The older man chuckled as he removed his coat and handed it to his companion, who draped it over her arm.  The man turned back toward Michael, an odd smile playing across his bushy lips.

"Mr. Brooks," he said, "my name is Kern Driveling."