THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3) (24 page)

TAY GOT BACK
on the laptop first thing Sunday morning and started all over again. Two more trips to
the Coffee Bean yield
ed him another eight files from Julie, but they all looked similar to the ones he had already been studying and he couldn’t see anything new in them.

He had four documents made up of blocks of numbers separated by gibberish, and then he had twenty-nine more documents that were nothing
but
gibberish as far as he could tell. He could read documents and count them as much as he wanted, but for all of the hours he had put into doing that, he didn’t have shit.

By the middle of Sunday afternoon, Tay was ready to admit he needed help. And he could think of only one place to turn for it.

He picked up his telephone, looked through the numbers marked as favorites, and tapped on one.

Sergeant Kang answered on the second ring.

“I appreciate you coming, Robbie. You’re better with this stuff than I am.”

“I don’t really know that much about it either, sir.”

They were sitting in Tay’s garden, the laptop open on the table between them. Tay was smoking a Marlboro. Between puffs he described to Kang the decrypted documents Julie had sent him. That took a while. Then he told Kang what he had been able to learn from them. That took no time at all.

“So all Julie has been able to decrypt from the whole drive is just thirty-three files?”

“So far, but sixteen of them are the ones we found that were opened after Tyler was murdered. That has to be important.”

“Don’t you think, sir, those files were just opened by someone at CID as part of the investigation?”

“The timestamps are too close to the murder. The investigation, such as it was, hadn’t started when someone used his laptop to open these sixteen files. My guess is that all sixteen were opened between the time Tyler was killed and the time his body was found.”

“So whoever opened them probably either killed him or knew who did.”

Tay nodded.

“You think they were checking Tyler’s laptop to find out how much Tyler knew, sir?”

“I think they realized what he knew before they killed him. They were just trying to figure out if he’d told anyone else.”

Tay pointed to the laptop’s screen with his forefinger.

“And if these were the files they checked,” he finished, “these are the files that contain whatever they killed Tyler over.”

“That’s a bit of a leap, sir.”

“Maybe.”

Tay exhaled. His cigarette smoke curled lazily into the air and added its mass to the crud that was already there.

“But it’s all I’ve got, Robbie, and I’m almost out of time.”

“Okay, sir,” Kang said, pulling the laptop toward him. “I’ll do my best.”

Kang displayed the decrypted files one by one on the laptop’s screen and read slowly through each of them. After a while, he pulled out his phone, tapped at the keyboard, and compared what he saw there to something on the laptop’s screen.

“This would go a lot faster, sir,” he grumbled, “if you had a Wi-Fi connection.”

Tay said nothing. He just sat quietly and left Kang alone.

Eventually Tay went inside and made coffee, mostly to have something to do. Kang never touched the cup Tay sat on the table for him, but Tay drank two cups and smoked two more cigarettes waiting for Kang to finish reading and tell him something he didn’t already know.

Kang worked silently at the laptop for nearly an hour. Then he pushed back his chair, stood up, and stretched.

“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” he said.

“You know where it is.”

Tay fidgeted while he waited for Kang to come back. He reached for his pack of Marlboros, then put it down again without taking another cigarette and sat drumming his fingers on the table.

When Kang came back and settled himself again in front of the laptop, Tay could no longer contain his impatience.

“Well?” he asked.

“I don’t know, sir. Maybe there’s something, but…”

Kang trailed off.

“I’m not sure what it means,” he finished.

“Tell me.”

So Kang did.

“These numbers here…”

Kang turned the laptop so that Tay could see the screen. He put his finger on the first group of numbers in Decrypted File 1. It was the same group of numbers Tay had tried over and over to make sense of.

“I thought at first that this might be a simple number code used inside the encrypted file.”

Tay waited. He knew there was nothing to be gained by pressing Kang to get to the point. Kang often took an indirect route, but get there he always did. Eventually.

“While I was trying to figure out what kind of code it was, it occurred to me there was something familiar about how the numbers were written.”

Tay nodded and made a rolling gesture with his right hand.

“Don’t you see, sir? These numbers aren’t a code at all. They’re GPS coordinates.”

Tay had no clue what GPS coordinates looked like, but he didn’t want to admit that to Kang so he just nodded slowly and tried to look thoughtful.

He ran his eyes down the document on the screen. All seven groups of numbers contained four lines, and each line consisted of two numbers written the same way. A one or two digit number, followed by a decimal point, and then four, five, or six more digits. Was that what GPS coordinates looked like? He had no idea.

“What are they coordinates for, Robbie?”

“Well, sir, that’s what doesn’t make much sense. When I used Google maps on my phone to check the coordinates, they were all over the place.”

Kang pointed again to the first four-line group.

“These four,” he continued, “are all locations in major cities in Southeast Asia. But they’re all in different cities: Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Ho Chi Minh City, and Kuala Lumpur.”

“Maybe The Future is developing software to run driverless cars in cities other than Singapore.”

“That’s what I thought, too, sir, at first. But then I checked a few of these other coordinates.”

Kang ran his finger over the next three groups of numbers.

“These aren’t locations in cities. They’re not even locations on land. I haven’t looked them all up yet, but the ones I put into Google maps all took me to places that were in the ocean. Take this line here, sir.”

Tay put his finger on the second line in the third group of numbers.

7.493196, 103.579102

“When you put those coordinates into Google maps, you get a spot in the South China Sea that’s about halfway between Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala Lumpur.”

Tay thought about that and automatically reached for a cigarette. Thinking for Tay was helped along by the taste and smell of tobacco. Perhaps it shouldn’t be, but it was.

“Are all the locations in the ocean near each other or spread around?” he asked as he lit up.

“They’re all over the place, sir. The South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand, the Bay of Bengal, the Andaman Sea.”

“Then they’re all in Southeast Asia, too.”

“Yes, but they’re not—”

“Four cities in Southeast Asia and a bunch of locations in the ocean surrounding Southeast Asia. Do I have that right?”

“Yes, sir. That’s right.”

“Have you checked all the coordinates?”

“No, sir. It’s slow going with my phone. If you had Wi-Fi maybe—”

“Yes, I get it, Sergeant. I’m an old fart who doesn’t even have Wi-Fi in his house and that’s slowing you down. Give it a rest.”

Tay pulled the laptop toward him and clicked through the first four files Julie had decrypted for what felt like at least the thousandth time. They all still looked pretty much the same to him. Four lines of numbers that Kang was now calling GPS coordinates, some lines of gibberish, and then more lines of GPS coordinates. Were these directions to various locations with instructions to be executed at the end of each sequence of stops? But that didn’t make any sense. No one made a series of stops in the middle of the ocean.

“What about the numbers in the other files, Robbie?”

“I did a couple on each page of Decrypted File 2, Decrypted File 3, and Decrypted File 4, sir. I’m pretty sure they’re all GPS locations, too, but they’re all over the place. Some on land, some in the ocean.”

“But they’re all in Southeast Asia?”

Kang nodded.

Tay smoked quietly and thought about that.

“What do GPS coordinates around Asia have to do with designing software for driverless cars for in Singapore?” he asked after a few minutes had passed in silence.

Tay wasn’t directing the question to Kang. He was talking to himself as much as anything. But Kang answered anyway.

“Nothing that I can see, sir. Maybe you could say that the locations in cities had something to do with designing software for other countries, but what about the locations in the ocean?”

“Maybe they’re also designing software to sail ships automatically without the need for crews,” Tay mused.

“That might explain the locations at sea, sir, but it wouldn’t explain the locations in cities.”

“Could the city locations be ports?”

“They could be, sir, but they aren’t. The locations I’ve checked were all in the business districts.”

Tay nodded and stubbed out his cigarette. This was getting them absolutely nowhere. He got up from the table and went to the bathroom.

When he came back, he started clicking through the third and fourth batches of documents Julie had decrypted, not because he had any real hope of finding something in them, but mostly because he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

“What about these other documents, Robbie?”

“I didn’
t find any GPS coordinates in them at all, sir. I’m pretty sure those documents are computer code, but I have no idea what any of it is code
for
.”

“Can’t you just decode it or something and figure out what it does?”

“It doesn’t work like that, sir. Programmers call what they’re doing
writing code
, but code comes in a lot of forms. Code that a programmer writes is usually called source code, but after it’s been compiled it’s called object code. Code that’s ready to run is called executable code or machine code, and code that is—”

“Never mind, Sergeant. Just speak English. Can you work out what this gibberish is supposed to do, or not?”

“No, sir. Not without knowing what it was written to do.”

“That’s what Julie said, too.”

“There you go then,” Kang shrugged. “If Julie and the Wangster can’t figure it out, I’ve got no chance, sir.”

Tay clicked randomly through the documents, skimming them, looking for something recognizable. Anything, really, but all he found was line after line of letters, numbers, and symbols that meant nothing to him.

C GENERATE CR, CC, AND SC ARRAYS

   DO 30 J=1,NROW

   DO 29 I=1,NCOL

      SC(J,I)=SS(J)*AREA(I)*DELZ(J)

      IF(I.EQ.NCOL) THEN

         CR(J,I)=0.0

      ELSE

         CR(J,I)=2.*PI*KR(J)*DELZ(J)/ALOG(ALPHA)

   END

Tay stopped skimming and reached for a cigarette, but just as he did something caught his eye. He dropped the pack of Marlboros back on the table and leaned toward the screen.

Buried in the middle of yet another sequence of letters, numbers, and symbols were a few English language words.

The one that jumped out at him was
China
.

China 345, Compton 3 Foxtrot, squawk 6244

Tay pulled the laptop closer and continued skimming through the document that mentioned
China
. Now that he had something specific to look for, he started seeing other similar combinations of words intersperse throughout the gibberish.

China 345, clear to FL 360

And…

China 345, amendment to clearance, T3F departure

And then…

China 345, contact 132.6

Tay leaned back in his chair and chewed at a knuckle on his left hand.

“
China 345, Compton 3 Foxtrot, squawk 6244,”
Tay read. “What the hell does China 345 refer to?”

He wasn’t even aware he had spoken out loud until Kang answered.

“No idea, sir. Could be anything. But I think I know what
squawk 6244
means.”

Tay lifted his eyes from the laptop screen and looked at Kang.

“It’s an aviation term, isn’t it, sir? Those are the numbers an aircraft is told to dial into that little radio that sends out a signal so the airplane can be identified on radar.”

Tay said nothing. He just looked at Kang.

“And
contact 132.6
?” Kang went on, pointing at the laptop’s screen. “Isn’t that an instruction to an airplane about what frequency they should use to talk to the ground somewhere?”

GPS coordinates for Southeast Asian cities?

GPS coordinates for positions in the ocean between Southeast Asian cities?

Computer code that has embedded instructions for navigating an airplane.

“They’re not designing software for driverless cars,” Tay said. “They’re designing software to fly airplanes. That’s what they’re really doing.”

“Fly airplanes? You mean fly them from the ground rather than with pilots onboard?”

Tay nodded.

“I don’t understand, sir. There’s nothing new in that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The American military has used drones for years. For surveillance, even for combat. A guy sits at a computer in California, flies a plane around over Iraq, and blows the hell out of some terrorist’s truck like he’s playing a video game. Happens all the time.”

Tay rubbed at his chin. He was missing something. It was hanging there just out of reach.

What was it Emma had told him about why The Future wanted Tyler badly enough to hire him away from Google and move him all the way to Singapore?

“Tyler specialized in security protocols,”
she had said.

“Are you telling me they were worried about somebody hijacking one of these driverless cars by hacking into the computer that runs it? And Tyler knew how to hijack driverless cars?”