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.”
PART FIVE
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?”