A Girl Named Digit (19 page)

“East River. She’s gone. We can get back to work.” Steven looked around at us for approval. I kind of did feel sorry for the guy.

“Good, because there’s a major hit today at two. Casualties in the hundreds, high profile. This is a breakthrough for us, so I’ll call you in thirty minutes with the details. It’s already set in motion, but we’ll need you on the back end for cleanup in case there’s evidence.”

“Fine, we’ll talk then.” Steven nodded at John to hang up. He was whiter than before.

I felt my body go cold. “There’s another attack tonight? Will we be able to stop this one? If we know about it in a half-hour, we’ll have time, right? Right?”

Mr. Bennett was as smooth as silk. “Of course, Farrah, Steven will help us. He is also going to help us gather all the documentation that we need to find, arrest, and convict every member of the Jonas Furnis organization. Steven, I assume you have been keeping some sort of records, just in case.”

“In case,” Steven repeated. “I’m tired. I’ve been hiding forever. John, I have heart medication in my front shirt pocket. Would you please give it to me, and then I will tell you what you need to know.”

John looked at his dad, who nodded. He reached into Steven’s pocket and pulled out a prescription vial and handed it to his dad. Mr. Bennett read aloud, “Nitrostat. It’s nitroglycerin. Steven, are you having chest pains?” Steven nodded and stuck out his tongue, waiting for it. It was eerie, a grown man cuffed with his hands behind him, seated calmly with his tongue out, incapable of even punching one fingerless fist into the other. John placed the pill on his tongue and Steven swallowed it and smiled. “That’s better.”

“John, if you go into my office, there is a set of seven filing cabinets behind my desk. The last one is labeled ‘Personal’ with a padlock on it. The code is 1-2-3-4.”

“Your secret code is 1-2-3-4?” I was appalled.

“I have wanted to get caught for a long time.” He coughed a few times before going on. “You’ll find a file called ‘Utility Bills.’ It’s everything you need to take Jonas Furnis down for good.”

He dropped his head again, but this time he seemed to be concealing pain. “I’m sorry, John. I betrayed you, and you are a good agent.”

“Thanks, Steven. I’m sorry about everything you’ve been through.” John put his hand on Steven’s shoulder. Could this get any heavier? Apparently so. John said, “Steven? Steven? Dad? I think he’s dead.”

Mr. Bennett got up slowly, almost like he didn’t want to get where he was going. He lifted Steven’s head and gently touched his neck and nodded.

Danny gasped. “Dude. He’s dead?”

“That pill he took must have been some form of arsenic or succinylcholine or something. Marked to look like Nitrostat. I wonder how long he’s been carrying it around in his pocket, fighting the urge to take it.” Mr. Bennett started to uncuff him.

My dad said, “Poor guy, it must be a lot of work to live a lie.”

Mr. Bennett, John, and I all responded at the same time; “It is.”

With Steven’s dead body lying in the middle of my living room, we all sat around and contemplated what to do. Dad immediately suggested we call the police or the FBI to get his body out of the house. I couldn’t have agreed more, but Mr. Bennett reminded us of the bigger issue.

“There’s another terror attack planned for today at two p.m. We have seven minutes until we receive a call that will reveal all of the details. No one must know that Steven is dead.” Mr. Bennett and John were fully in charge now, barely keeping my parents and me in the loop. They were pacing next to one another, nodding and talking. Danny and I were more than a little freaked out by the dead body and gave up listening early on.

We all jumped when we heard a knock on the kitchen door, followed by the sound of the knob turning and footsteps across the linoleum floor. John drew his gun but stopped when he saw Olive bouncing into the living room, clad in running shorts, a tank top, and
my
bikini. “What? Danny? Aren’t we going—” First she saw me, then she saw the dead body. “Farrah! Oh my God! I knew you were okay. Who’s . . . ? What’s going on here?” She stood there with her hands on her hips, as if the explanation that we owed her were the most urgent thing we had to deal with.

I tried to explain. “Yeah, we’ve had a bit of a situation here and I’ve had to hide, but it seems like it’s going to be okay now. Well, not for him. He’s dead. But he’s expecting a call . . .”

Danny stopped my rambling by leading her over to the couch and sitting her down. “She caught some bad guys; he’s one. She’s safe now, but the really bad guys are about to do something worse.” I marveled at his simplicity. That would have taken me twenty minutes to explain. But if I’d been doing the explaining, I wouldn’t have been holding her hand. What’s been going on around here?

Steven’s phone rang just as I was about to ask. Mr. Bennett flipped it to speaker and answered with an indistinct “Yeah?”

“Okay. You got a pen?”

“Yeah,” he mumbled.

John actually did have a pen and scribbled as the voice on the phone read from a list of letters: MODMIYKIFDBTAPZMDIBIVHY.

“Got it?” the voice asked.

Mr. Bennett looked at me for confirmation. I nodded. “Yeah,” he said, and hung up.

“Great. Another code. Like we have time for this. We have four hours until a major incident, and the guy can’t just spit it out.” John was finally losing it.

Mr. Bennett kept his cool. “Steven must have known how to crack this code. Farrah? Ben? Does this mean anything to you?”

Dad shook his head. “Not right off the bat. Farrah, let’s get to it.” We got up and walked instinctively to the game table, the same table that we sat at doing puzzles when I was two, solving differential equations at five. It was our table, a sacred space of thought. John handed us the sheet of paper and backed away, respectfully. Four hours and counting.

MODMIYKIFDBTAPZMDIBIVHY. We each sounded it out on our own. Mod Mike if the Beta Pez Midy Bivhy? We sounded it out backwards. We converted it into a numeric value using the alphabet, where A is worth one, and Z is worth twenty-six. Nothing.

Three hours and counting. The letters spun in circles in front of me, and the order was not coming. I didn’t know if it was the exhaustion, the stress, or what, but the part of my mind that normally takes over was not kicking into gear. I arranged the letters vertically, took out the repeating letters. Nothing.

Two hours and counting. I was starting to panic. It was like my computer was frozen, but this wasn’t a game. I’d be like the game show contestant who spits out the answer just after the buzzer goes off. But instead of a lovely parting gift, I’d have “casualties in the hundreds” on my conscience. I’d never sleep again.

John was pacing, playing the role of coach. “What do we know about these guys?” he asked. “You cracked their last code practically in your sleep, right? Maybe you’re over-thinking this. Could it just be another Fiorucci?”

“Fibonacci,” my dad corrected him. And he slowly lifted his gaze to meet mine. “Ever since
The Da Vinci Code,
” he said, smiling, “everyone’s a . . .”

“ . . . genius.” we said together. It was an old joke between us. My dad and I had been working through ancient puzzles and mysteries forever, but as soon as
The Da Vinci Code
was published, everyone in the world thought that they were a cryptologist. Jonas Furnis was a fan of Fibonacci for sure.

“I checked that. There’s no Fibonacci sequence in the numbers that corresponded to the letters, no matter how I arrange them.” But I figured I’d give Fibonacci another try. I started to plow through it, step by step. “Okay, try this. We take the basic Fibonacci sequence, under 26, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and convert it into letters using the 26-character alphabet: AABCEHMU. Right?”

My dad nodded and went on. “AABCEHMU. It could be a series of Caesar shifts. Write it vertically.” So I took the paper and wrote:

A

A

B

C

E

H

M

U

And then filled in the alphabet using a series of Caesar shifts, which begin the alphabet at the letter that begins each row on the left:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZA

CDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZAB

EFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCD

HIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFG

MNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKL

UVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST

“So, let’s apply the key of the correct alphabet and see if it gives us anything . . .”

John paced, as my mom, Danny, Olive, and Mr. Bennett sat on the sofa, watching. John stopped behind my chair and put his hands on my shoulders, offering a supportive rub. No one seemed to notice or care but me. He couldn’t stand being in the dark anymore. “Please, Digit, explain it to me.”

“Sure.” I slid the paper with the letters in the Caesar-shifted grid so he could see them. “I’m hoping that if I place the alphabet in its correct order above my grid and use it as a key, I can decode this by finding the code letter in each row and then marking the corresponding letter in the key above.”

“I have no clue what you’re talking about.” You could really love a guy who was that honest.

“Try it,” I said. “The first two rows were identical to the key so ‘M’ is ‘M’ and ‘O’ is ‘O.’ But in the third row, if you find the ‘D’ and go straight up to the key it’s really ‘C.’ Go to the fourth row and find the ‘M’ and go straight up, you get to ‘K’ and so on.

Key: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

   ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ M → M

   ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ O → O

   BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZA D → C

   CDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZAB M → K

   EFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCD I → E

   HIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFG Y → R

   MNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKL K → Y

   UVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST I → O

John stared over my shoulder as I worked through the grid. The answer was MOCKERYO. John was confused. “So that’s the attack site? Mockeryo? What’s that?”

“I’m not done. There are fifteen more letters in the code, FDBTAQZMDIBIVHY, so we have to repeat the grid twice.” I copied it again.

Key: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

   ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ F → F

   ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ D → D

   BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZA B → A

   CDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZAB T → R

   EFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCD A → W

   HIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFG P → I

   MNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKL Z → N

   UVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST M → S

Key: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

   ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ D → D

   ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ I → I

   BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZA B → A

   CDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZAB I → G

   EFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCD V → R

   HIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFG H → A

   MNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKL Y → M

“MOCKERYOFDARWINSDIAGRAM,” I read. “Mockery of Darwin’s Diagram.”

My dad had been watching me work from across the table, reading upside down so he was a little behind. “What does that mean? Is it something about natural selection?”

When I looked up, I had tears in my eyes. “I have no idea. We’re almost out of time. We’re not going to make it.” I’d used up a lifetime of mental energy decoding their string of letters and now this? Darwin? I knew next to nothing about Darwin.

John was pacing behind me, making me anything but relaxed. “Mr. Higgins? Does it mean anything to you? Where would we find a Darwin diagram?”

My dad was studying the decoded message when Olive popped off the couch, raising her right arm, like she was desperate to be called on to be the snack helper. “I know this!” She came over to the table, dangerously close to being within smacking distance.

“Olive, seriously, this is really important.” I was pleased with my restraint.

“No, really.” Hair flip over the shoulder. “I am in the Biology Club, you know.”