Flash Point (18 page)

‘Read the word group after “
know
” again. The letter says to remind others “
over and over again,
”
talks about the ability to “
ask themselves the same question, and often
.” It's talking about the question
itself.
The one it knows is said in the book four times. The number
this
time is four!'

Jenna didn't ask for more proof. Her gut said to trust Grey's weird process the same way she asked the team to trust her own. She jotted the number.

‘OK,' Grey said. ‘Last note.'

‘Praise Thor,' Porter said.

‘Go down one large letter grouping—'

‘Paragraph,' Porter mumbled.

‘—Part of the way through. Read “
I shall not allow them to turn me into something other than a human being where I have power of choice no longer.
” This one's easy after reading about the themes earlier, because it's mirroring a direct quote.'

‘Which quote, Grey?'

Or, rather, what page number?

‘“
They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer.
”
Page 169.'

Jenna jotted the number, then looked at her clusterfuck of scrap paper with its numbers not in order of where in the letter they were given, though she'd tried hard to keep track.
Grey, I don't know if you're a genius or a complete idiot.

‘So, we have a list of fifteen numbers. They don't readily point to anything in particular, but we're assuming they must,' Porter said.

‘The dashes in the names of the
Anthem
characters could be relevant,' Dodd suggested. ‘What types of numbers have dashes?'

‘Phone numbers, social security numbers …' Jenna threw out, still writing.

‘Birthdays …' Porter added.

‘Or for that matter, what numbers are fifteen digits?' Dodd said.

‘You don't have fifteen digits. You have fifteen numbers,' Grey said, staring out the window.

‘Shit,' Dodd said. ‘So how many
digits
do we have?'

Jenna tallied them. ‘Forty-four.'

Porter groaned. ‘No way we're supposed to use
all
forty-four. Not unless it's the longest GPS coordinate set on earth.'

‘They'd have to be exact to a decimal point I don't think even Google Maps would record,' Jenna said, thinking.

‘Some of them must be more important than others,' Grey mused absently, now tracing a cloud on the window glass with her finger.

The Russian violet Jenna kept seeing anytime she thought about the killers' messages flashed in, followed immediately by canary yellow: relevance. The quote in the bank note!

‘It is important to be earnest,' Jenna mumbled, flipping the scrap of paper over and scribbling furiously.

‘What's going on?' Dodd asked. ‘You have something?'

‘Shh,' Jenna said, working fast. ‘I don't know yet.'

She wrote the phrase the bank killers had told Ashlee Haynie to relay. Next to it, she wrote the name of the play the reference was meant to invoke:
The Importance of Being Earnest.

The phrases were similar but obviously different. ‘Grey, what does the word ‘earnest' mean exactly? As many definitions as you can think of,' Jenna said. She knew the definition, but for some reason, she felt like hearing Grey's words might help the thought click.

‘Earnest,' Grey said in a sing-songy voice. ‘Resulting from or showing intense conviction. Serious in intention, purpose, or effort. Showing sincerity of feeling. Depth of feeling. Seriously important. Demanding attention. You want the noun or just the describer?'

‘No, no. Adjective is plenty,' Jenna said, staring at the two phrases.

‘Whatcha thinking, Doc?' Dodd asked quietly.

Jenna didn't take her eyes from the paper. ‘If every word was chosen with intense purpose. Zeal. Intense
effort
, then would we be doing them due diligence if we discarded the fact that each
letter
might also be seriously important?'

Dodd leaned over and looked at the scrap, and she felt Porter peeking over her shoulder.

‘The letter
did
say “strength in numbers.” Maybe the number of how many letters are in the title but not in the phrase?' Porter suggested.

‘Or vice versa. The number of letters in the phrase but not the title,' Dodd said.

Jenna glanced at the scrap. ‘That would leave very few numbers. Why go to the trouble of including fifteen literary references and forty-four digits between them if you only need to hide three measly digits?'

‘Ass-holery? These people
did
just slaughter a bunch of innocent people. I doubt our convenience is on their mind,' Porter said.

Jenna shook her head.

Dodd sighed heavily. ‘Stop thinking with the part of your brain that's annoyed by this situation and think like a profiler. They've given us everything they have because they think a certain way. Because they
are
a certain way. Get your head out of your ass and do your job, Rookie!'

Through the thick silence, a shrill giggle cut the air.

Every head turned toward Grey.

She shrugged. ‘Someone had to say it.'

Jenna smirked, turning back to the matter at hand. But it was Porter who spoke first when the silence broke.

‘They're elitists. Intellectually superior in their minds, though they are obviously classically educated and most likely have some reason to believe it. So, high IQs and elitism suggests a degree of narcissism. We talked before about how they hid the clues in the letter so someone could find them if they were as smart as them, even going as far as to suggest they wanted McClendon to do so. They left another piece at the crime scene, though. If
The Importance of Being Earnest
and their reference to it is the crack to whatever the code is with these, how would McClendon know it? She wasn't privy to that information.'

Jenna shook her head, confused. ‘They brought her in because, in the past, she's been smart enough to get answers. Broken rules. Maybe they figured she'd
get
privy to it.'

‘Nope,' Grey said from the backseat.

Jenna shifted to look at her ex-patient, still tracing abstract shapes in trails of fingertip oil on the window. ‘What do you mean, Grey?'

‘Maybe the reporter would've gotten the memo from the bank in her reporter-ing, but she didn't need it. They gave it to her.'

Jenna sat up straighter. ‘What? Where?'

Grey now turned from the window, held up the scribbled on printout of the e-mail McKenzie had given them. She pointed at the top. ‘The address. YourBankStory2_14_1895. That's when
The Importance of Being Earnest
opened in London.'

Lapis Lazuli flashed in, followed once again by that familiar, showy Russian violet. What her ex-patient was pointing out made sense. ‘Grey, you're amazing,' Jenna said.

When she had marked the two phrases as they'd decided she should, she stared at her paper:

‘IT IS IMPORTANT TO BE EARNEST'

THE
^LEAVEOUT3
IMPORTAN
CE
^LEAVEOUT2
O
F
^LEAVEOUT1
BE
ING
^LEAVEOUT3
EARNEST

TAKE 8 TAKE 1 TAKE 2 TAKE 7

‘Take a picture of that,' Jenna instructed. ‘I'm going to forget it entirely when I flip this paper over.'

Porter snapped a photo on his phone, and Jenna turned the scrap over, her list of numbers staring back at her. Porter read her own formula to her from the picture he'd taken, and Jenna marked the numbers as he went.
Leave out three. Take eight. Leave out two. Take one.

When they finished, Jenna could barely read her own writing:

51

5
-
3000

95

14
7

7
-
2
5
21

1

0
-
0
009

274

2
14

3

4-8818

4

11

169

207

‘So, what about everything after the two in two hundred and fourteen?' Dodd asked.

‘For that matter, what the hell just happens to be eighteen digits?' Porter asked.

Jenna shook her head. She honestly wasn't sure. She just had to trust they were on to something.

‘Let's hope Irv can tell us that,' she said, and she whipped out her phone and dialed.

As she stared at the numbers on the paper while she said a silent prayer for Irv would answer, Russian violet flashed in again. It had many times since the bank.

The bank was for show. The living witness, the warning note. And now this letter was too. She wasn't sure what the performance would be, but these numbers had been meticulously laid out so that
somebody
could have a ticket.

‘Let me get this straight. Porter's sending me this picture, and I'm just supposed to “find something.” Anything. With absolutely no direction whatsoever,' Irv's voice said through Yancy's headset.

Typing flew across Yancy's screen. He'd spent the better part of the day with Irv setting up the backdoor access into the tech analyst's office rig. Even now that the link was established, he still chewed his lip, all nerves, and reminded himself for the hundred thousandth time that Irv himself was the one who would catch him at this, and he had the man on his side.

At best, when Yancy had spewed his tale of woe at the skate park, in his wildest dreams he'd hoped to avoid jail time. Irv had listened silently, face devoid of any expression that might have given a clue as to how it was going over, until Yancy had fallen silent, exhausted and defeated.

‘OK,' Irv had said.

‘OK as in you'll bring Oboe to visit me in jail at least once a month?'

‘OK, as in, that's good enough. I'm not going to rat you out. I'm going to offer you a job. And if you accept, I have only one rule: I won't tell Jenna what you did if you won't tell Jenna you're working for me.'

‘What?' Yancy's brain had turned to oatmeal. For some reason, the first thought that had come to mind, of all the countless thoughts he could have used to try to cope with the fucked up twist of a crazy thing he had just heard, was that he should warn Irv how shitty not telling important things to Jenna always turned out to be.

Irv's hands flapped at his side in a shrug. ‘I didn't come here to find my reason to send you off to prison. I already had that, man. I came here looking for you to give me a reason not to use it. You've done that. For now, I choose to believe you did what you did for a good reason, and I think you're a talented guy. Too talented to be wasted on a desk job at emergency dispatch. Not when you coming along now is so convenient for me.'

The man had secrets.

Irv had a job for Yancy, for sure, and that involved teaching him a lot more about the FBI's databases than he'd had to know to hack into them. For this one, for instance, he had to know everything Irv did.

Which meant that now, to keep Irv from telling Jenna and Saleda and The Department of Homeland Security about his attempt at the Ocean's Eleven of FBI data breaches, he sat at his own home office connected to Irv's fancy shmancy FBI office computer systems via a remote setup, intent on learning everything he could. Now that he knew what Irv wanted to do, the benefits of the gig seemed two-fold: he'd walk away from the breach, and it presented him even more opportunity to dig into Claudia's little favor and find out what she was
really
doing. Ensure Jenna really didn't have anything to worry about.

Not to mention, his newfound mentor had good reasons. Better than his, actually.

A new window popped up on Yancy's – Irv's – screen, this time, a message to Yancy: J
ENNA AND TEAM ONLINE.
S
ENDING EIGHTEEN RANDOM DIGITS. THEY NEED ME TO ‘FIND SOMETHING.'

Irv's laugh came through the headset. ‘I'll take the gig, but only because it's my job, and I'm game for a challenge. Hang tight.' Then, ‘I'm off.'

The last words were for Yancy. He gulped, adjusting his headset. Just knowing Jenna had just been on the line made his ears hot. Maybe the FBI wouldn't find out about their remote setup – after all, like Irv had said, he was the one whose job it was to look for that kind of thing – but Yancy couldn't help but feel like, somehow, Jenna would sense his presence through Irv's phone to his computer screen and all the way to him sitting here with Oboe asleep where normally his metal hook foot would be if it wasn't off right now.

‘Eighteen digits, huh? Not a bank account, not—'

‘Hm. No, not a
bank
account,' Irv said, and windows popped up all over the screen.

Yancy struggled to keep up with what Irv was doing visually, but the one thing he wasn't privy to in that office was the inside of Irv's brain. ‘Buddy, hey. Give a bro a break. At least give me a vision. I can follow along with the subtitles, but I have to know what language they're in.'

‘Sorry, man,' Irv said as windows and writing continued popping up and flying across the screen. ‘Bank account gave me an idea. These bastards might've last been in a bank, but I'd be willing to bet they've spent a lot
more
time in libraries.'

Yancy watched in awe as Irv pulled a few flashy moves, library data from various systems within a hundred-mile radius of the bank crime scene scrolling across his vision faster than he could keep up.

Yancy screencapped an image of one of the segments of text that seemed to be the eighteen digits Irv was looking for, left it open in the corner of his screen to reference as the system tried to throw out any and all combinations of them.