A Girl Named Digit (16 page)

We sat, barely breathing for an excruciating ten minutes while whoever was there searched the shed and gave up. They walked back toward us, passing under our tree, and we could see that there were three of them, well covered in black clothes and baseball hats. There would be no way to identify them, except the first one stopped directly under our tree to make a phone call.

“Nothing to see here. They’ve disappeared.” Shudder, shudder, punch.

We waited exactly fifteen minutes before we jumped out of our tree and raced back to safety on Seventy-ninth Street. We paused, listening for John’s parents, when we got back into the warm foyer. We were relieved to see they were out, and John kissed me exactly six times before making a beeline for the intercom to the magic kitchen. I headed straight for my favorite spot in front of the fireplace, hoping someone would come light it for me. “I’m going to have another look in the diaper bag,” I shouted into the next room. “It looks like nothing but pages of numbers, and the terrorists don’t seem to want it. But if it was worth compromising Scarlet’s whole suicide bombing and may have something to do with people wanting to kill us, it has to mean something to someone.” I sat on the floor and spread the pages out in front of me. John called down to William for tea. Now, I feel like I’m old enough for an occasional beer, but tea? Am I really old enough to be sipping tea?

“You ready to fill me in?”

I jumped at the voice. John’s dad had walked in off of the terrace and stood behind the wing chair across from me. He was a very scary man, a fact that was amplified by his King Kong frame and his laser eyes. I imagined being interrogated by him and confessing to excessive body hair and impure thoughts about his son.

He saw that he’d terrified me and softened. “Listen, Farrah, I have a feeling you guys are in worse trouble than you bargained for. If you’re hiding from the good guys
and
the bad guys, you’re in over your head.”

John walked in with an actual silver tea tray and froze when he saw his dad. “Hi, Dad. I, uh, we didn’t know you were here. Where’s Mom?”

“Your mom got called out on a job. She’ll be out about three weeks, classified location.”

“Of course.” There was an awkward silence while John looked for someplace to put the tea and tried not to meet his dad’s eyes.

“Johnny, I think you need my help. You can’t hide here forever, and you have a lot of people looking for you, your girlfriend, and whatever’s in that bag.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.” Ouch. “She’s underage.”

“Until June.” Jeez! I wait this long to say a word, and this is what I come out with? Does anyone have a muzzle in this mansion? I might as well have said, “Mr. Bennett, right now I am seventeen, but in a few weeks I am going to legally jump your son.” No more talking for me; I went back to the papers.

Mr. Bennett was smirking like he was reading my mind. Maybe he could—doesn’t the CIA employ people who can do stuff like that? I didn’t stand a chance.

“June twenty-second, isn’t it?”

I didn’t say anything. He must have run a check on me while we were up our tree. It made sense. I was a stranger in his house who was compromising his son’s career.

“There are a few benefits to being in the CIA.” He let me sit with that for a bit and turned his attention to John. “I know your operation is compromised. And you have, as you well know, an underage girl in your care and are responsible for her well-being. Her parents could sue the Bureau or you. It’s not like you to deviate from operating procedure, and, as this is your first real field assignment, I’m more than a little curious as to the details of this operation and why you’ve picked now to go AWOL.”

“Dad, I have it under control.”

“You have a group of terrorists trying to kill your girlfri—sorry, your assignment—and you seem to be hiding from the FBI. Is that what passes for under control in your book?” Mr. Bennett was trying unsuccessfully not to raise his voice.

“No.” John sat down and put his head in his hands. He looked like it physically hurt him to ask for help. “Okay, Dad. This is what we know: There was a terror organization communicating through a Los Angeles television station. Farrah’s involvement began when she cracked their communication system. She can make a positive identification of one of their operatives, who is a known member of the Jonas Furnis organization. The FBI staged a fake kidnapping to get her into protective custody. This group was responsible for the recent events at JFK, and Farrah and I believe that two of their operatives working out of New York were at the heart of the operation. They’d been under suspicion, and their calls had been remotely monitored by the FBI for some time. We believe that the woman was the suicide bomber and that she left the diaper bag for her partner so he could continue to blackmail the person they call Britney, who’s been helping them but is also double-crossing Jonas Furnis in some way. That’s where we get a little murky.”

“What are those papers? They just look like numbers, no text?”

I realized he was talking to me. “Oh, yeah, they are just streams of numbers. The left column is a stream of nine-digit numbers. The right column has numbers of various lengths ranging from four to seven digits. At first I thought that these numbers were an encoding of names or locations, but now I see that the left column is a list of eight-digit numbers with a check digit at the end . . .”

Mr. Bennett shot John a
Huh?
with his eyes. John smiled a little. “She’s not normal, Dad.” He got up and started stacking wood in the fireplace.

Like it’s the first time I’ve ever heard that. I ignored him. “So the left column is probably a list of nine-digit bank routing numbers. Yes, you can see here that some of them appear more than once. The right column is probably the amount deposited to each bank. This could be some sort of accounting of how they are financing their operations.”

“So, that sounds incredibly valuable to the FBI—why don’t you just hand all this over to Steven and go home?”

John and I were quiet for a second. I finally spit it out. “Because Steven’s trying to kill us.”

John was squirming in his big leather chair. Not only was the chair oversize, but John seemed to be shrinking under his dad’s amused gaze. “I’m sorry, son. I’m trying to follow you, but now you’re telling me that the real villain is your boss? I’ve known Steven a long time . . .”

“I know. We don’t understand it either. But every time we tell him our whereabouts, a bunch of goons comes after us. It’s almost like he sent us to New York to get us out from under the FBI’s protection and into harm’s way. And the last time we checked in, we gave him a phony location and guess who showed up leading the goons?”

“Steven?” John’s dad was horrified and sat quietly for a while. “I remember how concerned everyone was when he was taken prisoner by those eco-nuts. He came home a hero when he was finally released, but he was never the same.”

John answered, “And isn’t it kind of weird that he
was
released? Why would they torture him and then send him home? I keep wondering if there was some reason that they wanted him safe and sound, back running the hunt for terrorists inside the FBI.”

“You’re saying Steven is a spy for Jonas Furnis.” It wasn’t a question, just a statement as Mr. Bennett ran through all the facts. “You’re going to have to come up with some pretty solid proof before you find yourself fired, arrested, or dead.”

“I’ve got none.” John looked exhausted.

“I might.” They seemed to have forgotten all about me, sitting by the fire, buried in paper. “Well, sort of. I don’t know how we prove that Steven is working for Jonas Furnis. Steven’s trying to kill us and Jonas Furnis is trying to kill us, so it’s safe to assume that he is working for them. He’s been trying to kill us ever since we got this diaper bag, and the only living people who know about this diaper bag are Luke and Britney.” Light bulb. I looked over at John and saw that he’d had the same thought. “Steven’s Britney. And I think he’s stealing from them.”

“Okay. Go on.” John’s dad was incapable of treating me like a fruitcake. I was starting to love this man.

“These papers are definitely a financial record. They are lists of bank routing numbers, as I said before, accounting for money going into international banks. On their own, I can see why the bad guys would want them back because they probably show how they’re paying for all their bombings and stuff.”

“Okay, so if Steven’s working for Jonas Furnis, I can see why he’d want those back. But why do you think he’s stealing from them?”

“Like I said before, bank routing numbers have nine digits, with the last number being a check digit at the end. The error-checking system requires that the sum of the check sequence has to be zero on a mod-10 clock. That’s how you know if it’s a real bank ID or not.”

“Lost you.” John was giving me the fruitcake look again, but his dad was expressionless.

“I might need paper.”

John got up to get paper and a pencil from a writing desk in the corner. Before he handed it to me, he turned to his dad and smiled. “You’re not going to believe this.”

We all gathered around the coffee table, and I started writing the numbers out as I was talking, going through each formula. I knew they were not going to take my word for it. “A mod-10 clock is like a regular clock, numbered 1 through 12, except that it’s numbered 1 through 10—10 and all of its multiples being equivalent to zero. Just like you never get to 13 on a regular clock, you start over at 1 instead, making 12 just like zero.” They were nodding. I went on. “If you label each of the nine digits as n1, n2, n3, n4, n5, n6, n7, n8, n9, and then you multiply each number by 7, 3, and 9, repeating three times, you get the formula:

7n1
+
3n2
+
9n3
+
7n4
+
3n5
+
9n6
+
7n7
+
3n8
+
9n9

When you work that out, the sum should be equivalent to zero mod-10. Or more simply, just divisible by 10. So look at this one. The bank routing number is 114706225. It’s a fake routing number.”

Mr. Bennett looked at John for a reality check. “I saw the SAT scores but . . .”

“She’s amazing, right?” John smiled at me, and I completely forgot what we were talking about.

“Go on.” Mr. Bennett was on the edge of his seat, like he was waiting for the punch line.

“You looked up my SAT scores?” I felt completely naked.

“Farrah, I’m sorry, but I had to know whom I was dealing with. It’s part of my job. And they’re certainly nothing to be ashamed of. Now keep going.”

I let it go. “Well, some of the check digits don’t check. This one in particular shows up six times. If you use the formula you get:

(7*1)
+
(3*1)
+
(9*4)
+
(7*7)
+
(3*0)
+
(9*6)
+
(7*2)
+
(3*2)
+
(9*5)

The sum is 214, not divisible by 10. The check digit should be 9, making the sum 250.”

“Let me try.” To my surprise, Mr. Bennett took the pencil from me and worked through the formula both ways, with 5 as the check digit and then with 9. Satisfied, he put the pencil down. “Okay, I see. And you’re telling me that you did all that in your head?”

“Yes.”

Amazing. He called me amazing. In front of his dad. Who knows my SAT scores. I had never been so fully out of the closet. Was I going to be his girlfriend and get invited on family vacations?

“Farrah, you’re saying that you have an accounting of terror financing with some deposits going into fake banks? How much money is missing?”

Oh, I checked back in. I took a few minutes to identify all the phony money orders and added them up. “Almost six million dollars. Someone’s going to be pissed.”

John stood up and started pacing, head down and hands behind his back. He really needed a pipe to make the whole thing work. He was thinking out loud. “And that’s why Steven’s been trying to kill us ever since we got the bag? It’s the only explanation that makes sense. Steven had sent Scarlet an accounting ledger, never thinking that she’d pick up on the fact that there was money missing. Didn’t she say she got it in an e-mail or something?”

I nodded. “I think so. It was supposed to prove to her that there was support for what they were doing. Which makes sense—he’d want her to see how much money they were putting into their operation if she was doubting how important the bombing was to the cause. And Steven would have never thought she’d pick up on the missing money, but then she started blackmailing him.”

We went through our options over and over again, weighing the risks (getting killed) and benefits (cleaning out the FBI and ending world terror). John and his dad settled into a relaxed dialogue, where they were both adults and professionals. It reminded me of how it was with my dad and the respect he showed me when I was working something out. I felt simultaneously a little homesick and a little grown-up. And besides the fact that I was being hunted by friend and foe alike, I liked the feeling of operating in this world where I could jump in and think as hard as I wanted.

John was running scenarios. “If we get a copy of these documents to the terrorists, they’ll have Steven killed immediately. If we get them to the CIA, they’ll spend the next five years conducting an investigation into bank accounts that will be closed in a matter of hours.”

Mr. Bennett agreed. “Going after the terrorists with this information is a waste of time. If we’re lucky, we’ll get three guys arrested. But I’m sure Steven has all the information the CIA needs to break this terror cell up on a large scale. He’d keep records for his own protection. His full cooperation will take years off of any investigation.”

John was pacing again. “But how do we have him arrested? These routing numbers on their own are not exactly a smoking gun. They prove that money is missing, but they won’t prove that Steven was the one stealing it.”