The Chaos Code Read Online Free

door at Matt suspiciously.
    â€˜Er, I think you have a letter for me,’ he said.
    There was a hint of a smile. ‘Oh yes. Matthew, isn’t it? I told the postman he’d made a mistake.’ She disappearedback into the house, her frail voice barely reaching Matt as he waited outside. ‘But he said no, look what it says. And I said well be that as it may …’ She reappeared, pushing the letter at Matt. ‘Very peculiar, I thought. I wonder who it’s from?’
    Matt took the letter, but Mrs Dorridge was reluctant to let it go until he answered. She raised her thin grey eyebrows encouraging him to reply.
    â€˜I think perhaps they knew Dad might be away and wanted to make sure I got it,’ he said. He managed to tug the letter free of the old lady’s shaking fingers. ‘I don’t recognise the handwriting,’ he lied.
    In fact, he knew the handwriting only too well. He forced himself to get back into the house before he tore open the envelope. He felt empty inside – like he’d not eaten for days. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper, and again he recognised the handwriting. It was his dad’s. Why was Dad writing to him and sending the letter to Mrs Dorridge? Why not just leave him a note, or give him a call?
    â€˜Dear Matt,’ the letter said, ‘You might find this interesting. Before she married me, your mother would have been able to help you with it.’
    He read it three times. Just two lines of handwritten text, followed by another line, printed in capitals. It started HTTP:// and Matt recognised at once what it was. Things were not getting any clearer, but for some reason Dad wanted him to look at a website.
    â€¢ • •
    Dad had a laptop, and Matt remembered seeing it on the desk in the study with papers blowing round it. Another thing that suggested Dad was expecting to come home soon – he wouldn’t leave his laptop behind.
    Typically, the laptop was half-buried, its silver metal casing gleaming through the detritus – papers, an old book, a dark, stone disc… Digging down to find Dad’s desk was like the archaeology that Dad did, Matt thought. All sorts of junk needed shifting before you got down to the important stuff. He swept the bits and pieces aside and opened the laptop. While it was powering up, Matt tidied the papers that had not actually been blown off the desk into a pile and looked for somewhere to deposit the things off the laptop.
    The stone disc, he found, wasn’t stone at all. It was clay. A copy of some relic or other, which Matt could feel squashing slightly in his grip as he picked it up. He had thought it was a plain circle, about four inches in diameter. As it caught the light though, he could see that there were markings on it.
    The symbols looked a bit like Egyptian hieroglyphs – tiny pictures of a man’s head in profile, a flower, a jug or vase. There were what might be tools of some sort, perhaps a shield, and more abstract shapes that were little more than lines and squiggles. One looked like the > maths sign while another was a small triangle filled with dots. The symbols were arranged between thin linesspiralling inwards. On one side they covered the surface, while on the other the symbols framed the main picture in the middle of the disc.
    The central picture was a strange, irregular shape – or rather two shapes, one about three times as big as the other. Matt turned the disc slowly as he looked at them, hoping to make out what they represented. But they were just shapes, he decided – like a child had drawn round something rather badly. Maybe it was a picture of something that had been broken apart in the middle?
    The computer loaded the welcome screen and Matt put down the clay disc at the side of the desk and clicked on the little picture of an archaeologist’s trowel that represented Dad’s user ID. It prompted him for a password, but Matt