Cries of the Lost by Chris Knopf Read Free Book Online Page B

and even the ghostly white shape of a sailboat running downwind toward the southeast tip of Tortola, and then maybe on to the U.S. Virgins and beyond.
    “Now what, chief,” said Natsumi.
    “I find postcards from the South of France irresistible.”
    “C’est bon,” was all she said, pulling me over to the big bed under the lazy ceiling fan, where we found a way to put aside all conflicting impulses and obsessions by focusing on the one area where full agreement was a sure thing.

C HAPTER 4
    A t sunrise I was on my computer, where I spent a few hours burning down and wiping out all the evidence I could find of Florencia’s money laundering activities. There was no such thing as permanently destroying data, but I could slow down any investigation considerably.
    Of course, the best way to stay hidden was for no one to be looking for you. I’d relied on that from the beginning. But things had now changed irrevocably. If pursuers had the safe-deposit box, they likely had some or all of the fraud scheme, which could well lead back to Florencia despite my best efforts.
    Though not necessarily to me. There were other players entangled in her underground operations who could draw attention, create diversions. But there was no way for me to know that, so I always had to assume the worst.
    At least I had a distraction: the content on the flash drive taken from the bank on Grand Cayman. It was a Word document, a single page filled with numbers set within little boxes.
    Code.
    Before being smashed by a bullet, my brain was uniquely suited to code-breaking, something I did as a hobby, though sometimes it came in handy in my professional pursuits. The brain injury caused a thing called dyscalculia, which is a technical way of saying I’d lost most of my math skills.
    As it turned out I was able, through persistent practice, to rewire my neural circuitry well enough to regain basic arithmetic, and even get a grasp on certain algebraic formulas, but that was about it. Looking at that sea of numbers on the computer screen caused a surge of loss that was almost nauseating. But it passed in a moment, as I realized I didn’t have to be a great code breaker. I simply needed someone, or something, that was.
    As in all things today, the solution began with the Internet. I searched for “codes and cyphers” and settled in for a lot of reading.
    Natsumi woke an hour later and made us coffee while I explained the situation. She looked over my shoulder at the code and said, “Reminds me of roulette, only with more numbers.”
    “Indeed. Though a spinning wheel isn’t going to help us here.”
    “What will?” she asked.
    “I think it’s some sort of substitution technique. Presumably, the numbers stand for letters, though it’s not a simple 1 = A formula. Different combinations of numbers, running forward or in reverse, or diagonally, form part of the process. I’ve downloaded some off-the-shelf code-breaking software, which is running in the background, but I don’t have much hope.”
    “How come?”
    “There’s probably a key, something that generates the numbers, but not inherent in them. In her scam, Florencia had used the phone number from the apartment she rented during grad school. If I hadn’t guessed that, it would have taken a powerful computer to crunch all the possibilities within a string of ten numbers.”
    “But it’s doable,” she said.
    “I think.”
    I spent the rest of the day on the code, pausing for about a half hour to arrange the trip to Europe. Which is all it took, online booking being the easiest code in the world to crack. The next morning, the guy at the front desk whistled at a cluster of cabs and their drivers, who were playing some sort of board game under a big shade tree. Through an unspoken selection process, one of them took us to the ferry in Road Town, which roared across the whitecaps and swells to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. We made it to the airport and boarded a plane that