Last Chance to Die by Noah Boyd (large screen ebook reader .txt) 📗

far back as Detroit. The night before, in that secret room with the gunmen closing in and Vail about to set off an explosion of unknown intensity, it had never occurred to her that he wouldn’t get her out. And it hadn’t been any different tonight on that rooftop. The tough times would never be the problem between them. It was the danger, she supposed, that kept them close. But without it, even the simplest date invariably turned contentious.

9

When they walked into the observation room at the Sixteenth Street off-site, Vail dropped the DVD into the player and said, “We’ve got to be missing something.”

“Why are you so sure there’s something to miss? Maybe there are a bunch of clues hidden and Calculus didn’t have time to tie them together.”

Vail took a few seconds to consider what she’d said. “Good point. Maybe he was waiting to see if we would make the first payment before linking them up. Or maybe the relative at the Chicago bank has the key.” Vail picked up the phone.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m calling Langston and having him forward the payment for Pollock to Chicago.”

She took the phone from his hand. “I’m not sure he wants to hear from you just yet. I’ll call.”

Vail watched her as she argued with the assistant director.

“I know he’s dead, I was there, remember?”

She glanced at Vail, and he noted an unusual disdain in her eyes.

“This is why Calculus set up the alternative, in case something happened to him,” she continued. “We think there’s a possibility that the relative in Chicago may have the key to identifying more of them.” Her voice was gradually becoming insistent, its momentum unyielding. “I think we’ll get the next name if the money is sent. That’s what we were told.”

She looked at Vail again, and her mouth relaxed into a smile the way it always did when she was about to prevail.

“It’s not costing us any more than if Calculus were right here handing us the next name. . . . Then this investigation is over, Bill. We’ve got nothing else. . . .” After a few more seconds, she said, “Thank you,” and hung up.

“It’ll be wire-transferred first thing tomorrow,” she said.

Vail was smiling.

“What’s so funny?”

“How Langston never had a chance,” he said, his voice softening, no longer ridiculing. “How so few of us do.”

She tried not to blush, and then, to change the subject, she said, “So what now? You’re not going to search Pollock’s house?”

“If Pollock was in possession of the next name, there would have been no reason for Calculus to try to destroy the disc at the safe house.”

“So if there is a string tying names together, there’s only one place it can be—on the DVD,” she said.

Vail turned on the monitor and pressed the Play button.

Again they watched carefully as Pollock traded documents for money. Then the screen went to static. Wondering if Calculus had hidden something beyond the end of the video, Vail let it run for half an hour before turning it off.

Finally Kate said, “I didn’t see anything.”

“Me either,” Vail answered slowly, his voice containing that distracted hollowness that always meant that something beyond the obvious was being considered. He got up and retrieved the disc from the player. Holding it up to the light, he checked both sides, looking for anything that didn’t belong there. He sat down and rolled the disc back and forth between his fingertips. Something along the edge felt irregular, as if it had been scuffed. He went over to the desk lamp and switched it on.

“What is it?”

Searching through the desk, Vail found a fingerprint magnifier, the kind used by Bureau examiners. He held it up to the disc’s edge. “There are a bunch of tiny nicks on the edge.”

She got up and watched over his shoulder. “ ‘Nicks’ as in a pattern?”

“They’re very slight, but uniform. Evenly spaced. There are two kinds—cuts, like the edge was slashed, and then just points, like they’d been bored straight down to make a tiny round divot. A couple dozen of them.” Vail ran his finger around the disc’s edge again. “They’re hardly noticeable.” He picked up a pencil and put the magnifier up to the DVD again. “Write this down.”

Kate grabbed a pad of paper and a pen and watched as he ran the pencil point into each one to ensure he didn’t miss any.

“Line, line, line, line, dot, dot, dot, dot, line, line, line, line, line, dot, dot, line, line, line, dot, dot, line, line, line, line, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Okay, let’s see what we got.”

Kate gave him the pad and he studied the configuration.

||||• • • • ||||| • • ||| • • |||| • • • • • • • • • • •

“Any idea what it is?” Kate asked.

“With just two characters, maybe it’s a binary code, ones and zeros.”

“We’ve got code people. Why don’t we let them take a crack at it?”

“If we have to. Remember, the director’s mandate: the fewer people the better. But with just two characters, it’s got to be something fairly simple. Let’s try to figure it out ourselves first.”

Vail sat down at the desk and tore off the page. He copied it and counted the marks. “There are thirty-five characters.” He took the examiner’s loupe and, carefully rotating the disc, studied the edge again. “I see some spaces. It appears to be seven groups of five.”

Vail rewrote the characters with the spacing:

||||• •••|| |||•• |||•• ||||•• •••• •••••

He showed it to Kate.

“If this is going to identify or locate an individual, each grouping has to be either a letter or number,” she said.

“And since the first and fifth groups represent the same thing, as do the third and fourth and the last two, it’s more likely they represent numbers, because there are only ten digits as opposed to twenty-six letters in the alphabet, which would show more variations and less repeating.”

“Of course,” she said, “seven digits.