B003J5UJ4U EBOK (23 page)

Bowdler prodded Lucky with his toe. “I hope you’re worth
it. If nothing else, I’m sure you have a lot to tell me about your friends.”

Eddie was out there somewhere. But not for long. Bowdler uploaded images of the other four boys to his contact at the counter-intelligence facility. Then he placed a call to a number very few people had.

“Santee?”

“Yes.”

“Are you available?”

“For the usual fee.”

“Fine. Assemble a team that can neutralize five untrained individuals.”

“Terminate?”

“Negative. The goal is abduction. Terminate only as a last resort to prevent contact with the press or any authorities.”

“Understood.”

Bowdler told the man the remaining details and gave him direct access to his counter-intelligence contact. Santee would be expensive, but it would be money well spent. With him on the job, Bowdler could turn his attention to issues closer at hand. After a good night’s rest, and a terrible morning, the boy would be ready to answer some questions.

BOWDLER WOKE
, AS always, at 5:00
AM
. For the rest of the morning, he shook the boy awake every ten or fifteen minutes, but let him go back to sleep each time. Finally, at noon, he said, “Rise and shine, Dominic. We have a lot to talk about.”

“Let me sleep,” the groggy boy mumbled.

“You’ve slept enough.”

“When do I get my medicine?”

“Soon. I just want to talk, first.”

“I need my medicine.”

“You’re special, aren’t you.”

“No.”

“All your life. You’re not like other people. You’re so much better.”

“I’m normal.”

“You can do things. Tell me when you first knew you were special?”

Patiently, Bowdler began to dig.

Fifteen minutes later, his cell phone rang.
That was fast,
Bowdler thought. He hadn’t expected to hear from Santee quite so quickly, but that was one of the reasons the man charged such a high fee—he was frighteningly efficient at what he did. Bowdler flipped open the phone, then paused when he saw the call wasn’t from Santee. It was from a dead man.

Running his hand along the polished handle of a Colt .38 pistol that once belonged to General Eisenhower, Bowdler raised the phone to his mouth and said, “Yes?”

contact

I WENT TO
bed and slept so deeply I didn’t remember my nightmares. I didn’t even get up until it was almost noon. I joined the guys in the living room.

“Got any ideas?” I asked.

“This.” Martin pointed to the cell phone that was lying on the table. “I’ll bet the last call he got was from Bowdler.”

“So you think we should try that number?” I asked.

“It can’t hurt,” Flinch said.

You don’t know Bowdler.
Even the thought of talking to him made my muscles tense up, which made my arm ache. But Flinch was right. We couldn’t just sit around and wait to get caught again.

I picked up the phone and called the number. Whoever answered just spoke one word. “Yes?” It was enough. I recognized his voice. I felt like I was holding a scorpion in my hand. I had to grip the phone hard to keep from flinging it away.

“Let Dominic go,” I said.

I heard a small chuckle, like some freakin’ movie villain who’d just duct-taped the hero to a large stack of dynamite or the nose cone of a missile. Then Bowdler said, “Or what?”

“Or you’ll be sorry.” I realized I sounded pretty powerless.

“We could arrange a trade,” he said. “You for him. There’s so much more we need to do, Eddie. Think about all the good times we had. We could have a lot of fun.”

I remembered something my father always said:
Never negotiate from a position of weakness.
Right now, Bowdler had all the advantages. That needed to change. But it had to change quickly. It wouldn’t take him long to discover that Lucky’s powers didn’t have any sort of military use. I was afraid to think about what would happen to Lucky after that—or what was happening to him right now.

“I’d love to chat,” Bowdler said. “But I have dozens of fascinating tests to run on a very interesting subject.”

The line went dead.

“Well?” Martin asked as I closed the phone.

“He’s not going to let Lucky go,” I said.

“So what do we do?” Torchie asked.

“We do what we have to,” I said. “We go to war.”

where things
go boom in the night

corrupt files

I WENT TO
the laptop and looked at some of the files. “They can’t all be bad,” I said.

Martin hopped out of his chair. “I have a great idea. Let’s ask Livy to take a look,” he said. “I’ll see if she’s in.” He raced for the door.

“Down, boy,” I shouted after him.

“It’s not a bad idea,” Flinch said. “She’s smart.”

“That’s impressive, coming from a guy as smart as you,” I said.

Martin returned a moment later, along with Livy, who sat down at the laptop.

“So,” Martin said, “can you tell us—”

Livy held a finger up to her lips and shushed him. Then she clicked the mouse a couple times, ran some sort of diagnostic program, and examined the properties of the MP3 player.

“The checksum’s okay,” she said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s sort of like a running total. Basically, it’s just a way to make sure none of the data has changed. It hasn’t, so we
know the files on your flash RAM aren’t corrupted. Of course, you could have figured that out by playing some of the music.”

“Of course,” I said.
If any of us had thought of it.

She opened one of the files on the computer, scrolled through a few pages, opened several more files, then said, “Hmmmm. That’s what I thought.”

“What?” I asked.

“It’s not bad data. Do you see how it’s semi-cyclical? Bad data wouldn’t show that sort of scatter pattern. I’m pretty sure it’s encrypted.”

“Code?” My heart sunk.

“Yeah. Code.” She looked at the screen, smiled, and said, “Cool. I really should be studying right now, but I love a challenge.”

“It could be a top-secret unbreakable code,” Torchie said.

“He’s just kidding,” I said before Livy could ask why we’d have anything like that. “Can you crack it?”

“Maybe. But it would help if I had a bit of space.”

“On the table?” Martin asked, leaning over her shoulder and pushing aside a couple magazines that were next to the computer.

“No, not on the table,” she said.

We all took a giant step backward.

“A bit more?” she asked.

We took two more steps back—except for Martin, who took a half step forward. “I’ll bet you can beat most guys at video games,” he said.

I cringed. Martin might have talent, but he definitely
didn’t have timing. Livy didn’t bother to respond, even though I suspected she’d just heard him mention one of her deepest prides. She shook her head and went to work, studying the files.

Every minute or two, she’d say, “Ahhh,” or, “that’s interesting,” or “I see,” and open another file.

Finally, she looked over her shoulder. “Let me show you what I’ve found out.”

We all moved closer. Livy pointed to three open files that she’d lined up, one above the other, so they just fit on the screen. “Look at these. Based on the file names, they’re all business letters. The odds are, they’d have some text in common, especially at the start. At the very least, the header would be the same. And if the first couple words are the same, the coded versions should be the same. But they’re entirely different.”

She opened several other files. “Same here, with different expense reports.”

“So what’s that mean?”

“Each file is encrypted with a different key,” Livy said.

“Key?” Torchie asked.

“It’s like a password,” Cheater said. “The letters are used, in sequence, to encode stuff. And you need the same key to decode it.”

“So there’s no hope?” I asked. There were billions of possible words and numbers that Bowdler could have used.

Livy smiled at me. “Just the opposite.”

She let those words hang in the air for a second. Flinch was the first to figure out what she meant. “There are hundreds
of files. Nobody could remember a different key for every single one. And if you wrote them down, that wouldn’t be good, because someone could find the list.”

Livy nodded. “Right. So the key has to be here somehow. But still unique for each file. First, we need a program to test the keys. That’s pretty trivial. Give me a minute.” She hunched over the computer again and began typing, then glanced up and said, “Space.”

We moved back and waited. It took a bit more than a minute, but I don’t think any of us minded. She even typed cutely.

“So, smart guys, what’s the key?” she asked when she was done.

Martin started to open his mouth when Cheater blurted out, “How about the file name?

“Good thinking, Dennis,” Livy said.

“It just popped into my mind,” Cheater said as Martin glared at him.

Livy ran her program and clicked on one of the document files. The program asked, “
KEY
?” Livy used the name of the file. A second later, the screen filled with garbage.

“Nope,” she said. “That’s not it. But nice try. Any other ideas?”

Martin moved a couple steps away from Cheater. “How about using the file name backward?” he asked.

“Yeah. I like that.” Livy ran the program again, and this time typed the name backward.

The screen filled with words. Beautiful, normal, words. “Awesome!” I said.

“You’re amazing,” Flinch said.

Livy shrugged. “Everybody’s got to be good at something.”

I thought about the hundreds of files in the folder. “So we just have to do this for each file?”

“Are you kidding? Why go through all that work when you can write a program?”

“Well, maybe
you
can write a program,” I said. I didn’t bother finishing my sentence. Livy was already back at the keyboard.

“All done,” she said, twenty minutes later. “Everything’s in plain text, copied onto the hard drive. So, what are you guys doing with encrypted files?”

I was about to try to say something clever, but I realized there was no way I could outsmart her. So I decided to go with the simple truth. “It’s a long story,” I said. “I can’t really talk about it.”

I expected her to ask more questions, but she just said, “Okay,” and headed for the door. As she stepped out, she looked back and said, “Thanks, that was fun. But I gotta go study.”

The door closed. “I think I’m in love,” Martin said.

“Can you wait to start a family until after we rescue Lucky?” I asked.

“I’ll try.”

I sat at the computer and brought up the directory.

Cheater leaned over my shoulder and reached toward the keyboard. “Let me do it. You should sort them by date, first.”

“That’s a waste of time,” Martin said, reaching around
from the other side. “If we sort them by name, it will give us a better picture of what we’re dealing with.”

“That’s totally wrong,” Cheater said, wedging in closer, and pressing against my injured arm.

“Ow!” I got up from the chair and backed off from the computer. “Go ahead. You guys do it.” As eager as I was to see if there was anything useful in the files, I figured it was best to get out of the way. And, to be honest, I figured that even with the arguing, they’d probably come up with some answers quicker than I could.