Double Digit (13 page)

I wiggled my fingers as if at a keyboard, and smiled. “I have no idea.”

I
KNEW MY PARENTS WOULD BE FREAKING
out by now. They hadn’t heard from Danny or me since Saturday. My guess was that Tiki would have confirmed that no one had seen us and that my parents would have then contacted campus security and learned that it was all being handled by the FBI. Yep, they’d be freaking out for sure.

I had two seriously half-baked plans, neither of which I could safely run by my co-captives because we were under surveillance. All I could do was wait until I was called to action. And maybe enjoy the surveillance aspect of it a little bit. “How old do you think Spencer is? She looks kind of old when she smiles, you know, around her eyes.”

No one was amused by me. Especially not Spencer, who swung open the door and announced, “That’s it. Break over.” Mr. Bennett squeezed my hand goodbye, and I followed her.

We walked down a long and poorly lit corridor that dead-ended into a set of wooden doors. Behind them was a state-of-the-art computer center with enough power to, well, take down the government for one thing. Computers and scanners covered one wall of the room, while the opposite wall was lined with neatly stacked twenty-dollar bills. A sole printer worked overtime spitting them out while one of the thugs made neat stacks of what was probably $10,000. It was a spectacularly simple operation.

The seat of honor was held out for me in front of three large PC screens. I sat down and stared at them. On top of the one on the far left was a small black box with its own alphabet keypad.

“We’ve wasted enough time, Squire.” Jonas was a little anxious. “Show us what you’ve got.”

A stomachache?
“What exactly do you want me to do?”

“Get into the DOD.” He must have seen my resistance-slash-horror-slash-nausea. “Or I’m going to slit your throat right in this chair. Got it?”

Loud and clear. I needed time and my laptop. “Let me see.” I started looking through the operating system on his computer. With each keystroke, I was looking for a solution. If I didn’t hack anything, he was just going to kill me. That I knew for sure. My only solution was to contact someone and let them know where I was. I needed my laptop.

“I’m sorry, sir, I’m not feeling it.”

“You’d better start feeling it, or I’ll have Wallace over there cut your feet off. We’ve done that before, and the stubs heal remarkably fast—you’d be surprised. But it sounds like it really hurts.”
What the . 
.
 . ? Sweating here.

“I told your, er, associate Spencer before. This thing that enables me to see the numbers and crack the codes, I have to slip into a sort of trance to do it. It’s very strange, I know. But even just thinking about you cutting off my feet is shutting down my whole system. I need to be relaxed.”

I saw it coming. Five, four, three, two, one. Jonas exploded. “Aaahhh! Do you think this is a spa weekend? I saw you do it. I watched you write the code myself. If I had known what you were doing, I would have recorded your keystrokes, and you would be decomposing in my compost heap already. You get yourself as damned relaxed as you need to be and do it.”
Okaaaay.

“I’m also used to working on my laptop. Your guys took it from me.”

“Of course we did, but we found no hacking program on it. So whatever you’ve erased, you’re going to have to reproduce. Now.”

“Would it make any difference if I just did it on my laptop? I already understand my operating system, and I’m just more comfortable . . .”

“Fine. Just. Stop. Whining.” He stormed out of the room and slammed the heavy wooden doors behind him. I started to consider what a powerful tool whining is, even more so than crying. Crying can appeal to someone who has an aversion to seeing you suffer, but whining is a whole different game. It’s universally irritating. And in this case, lifesaving.

Wallace the Foot Chopper snickered in the corner. I had the strangest sense that he was staring at my feet and maybe estimating the diameter of my ankles. Jonas walked in a few minutes later with my laptop. “We’ve disabled your email, and I’ll be watching your every keystroke. So don’t try to do anything cute.”

I flipped it open and got to work. I started building the most elementary hacking program, all written in C and completely convoluted. I asked Wallace the password to the wireless network so that I could try it out. He eyed me suspiciously. “Sir, how am I supposed to reach out and touch the U.S. government without access to the Internet?”

“Fine, the password is FurnisFire.”
Ooooo, spooky.

I decided to try my rudimentary program over and over again, attempting to gain access to various sites. My hope was that whoever had been monitoring my laptop for Mr. Bennett at the CIA was still doing so and would be able to locate us. After a while I remembered about the trance and moved my head from side to side with my eyes looking upward, Stevie Wonder style.

Wallace put his hands on my shoulders to steady me. “I’m fine,” I told him. “The code, it is being written through me.” Now I was just messing with him. “We don’t want to alert the government that someone is trying to get in until the program has proved successful. Let me try it on a less secure site, like a public university.”

“Fine.” His hands were still on my shoulders; no amount of shrugging was going to get him to release me.

Something was telling me that if I was going to get out of there alive, it would be my dad who’d save me. Thinking of John made me panic, and thinking of Mrs. Bennett made me feel guilty. But when I thought of my dad, I actually felt calm, like this was just one of our old challenges. I’ve been called childish, and thinking my dad was going to get me out of this might just prove it.

I easily hacked into the UCLA system, then into the Department of Mathematics and onto the platform that I knew would send automated messages to their central message board, careful to write only numbers. The first series of numbers I typed was my social security number, hoping that my dad would recognize it as me. Then I typed the first twelve digits in the Fibonacci sequence, hoping that it would remind my dad of the whole Jonas Furnis calamity. And then I typed 38.16, −81.19, desperately hoping he would recognize it as a latitude and longitude and come save me. It was a long shot, I know.

Finally, when I’d been online for over an hour and a half and was completely out of ideas, I knew I had to buy some time. I didn’t want to get Jonas Furnis any closer to the DOD before we were found. I turned around and used my new weapon on Wallace. “I’m sooo tired,” I whined. “I’m almost in, but I’m feeling dizzy and hungry, and I just can’t concentrate. Can you just ask Mr. Furnis if I can take a break and start again in the morning?”

“You’ve got to be kidding. I’ll let him deal with you himself.” He left laughing and returned with a visibly agitated Jonas Furnis.

“Princess needs a little nap?”

“My whole mind is shutting down. I mean, I’ve written a lot of code and it works, but I’m so tired that I’m making mistakes. The past thirty minutes of work have actually been counterproductive. Please. Just let me clear my head.”

“Fine. Throw her back in with the others. This is a joke.” Another door slammed. I was beginning to like the sound of it.

M
R. BENNETT JUMPED AT ME WHEN
I walked into our barracks. He put his hands on my face and looked me up and down to confirm that I was still whole. “Oh, thank God,” he said as he pulled me to his chest. I was really no closer to being saved, but I somehow felt safe. When I pulled away, I saw the dark, worried circles under his eyes and under the eyes of everyone else in the room. Okay, maybe just Adam Ranks’s. Danny seemed strangely fine.

“Dig, you okay?” Danny was kicking back on his bunk, a kid at summer camp between lunch and kayak races.

“I’m fine . . .” Mr. Bennett tugged feverishly on his ear to remind me that they were listening. “I’m just really so tired. I was stuck at first, but then they let me use my laptop, and I had a pretty easy time slipping into the trance and letting the codes reveal themselves.” I winked at a smiling Mr. Bennett. “But I did all I could do for today. I’m beat. I just need to lie down.” I whispered the rest into his ear. He smiled at the hope that someone at the CIA was still monitoring me, or that my dad would understand the numbers on his message board.

“Dinnertime!” Spencer burst into the room like a waitress on roller skates, fast and impossibly coordinated. She had a large tray of what looked like boiled chicken and a pitcher of water. No glasses. We all got up to eat, and Mr. Bennett sat close to Adam and whispered about what I’d done. Adam nodded and smiled as he listened.

Danny tore into the chicken like it wasn’t disgusting. “Man, I’m starving. How long have we been here? Mr. B., what time is it?”

Mr. Bennett patted his watch sadly. “You know I haven’t wound my watch since I was captured. I mean, what’s the point?”

“Dude. Mr. B., get a grip. We’re prisoners. They’ve taken everything from us, our freedom, fresh air. But they can’t take away hope. It’s all we’ve got. Now, you wind that watch and look toward the future, man. We’re not dead yet.”

Mr. Bennett actually started to laugh. “Okay, Danny. Here I go, winding my way into the future. Doesn’t this kid make you miss California, Adam?”

Adam Ranks smiled sadly. “He makes me miss everything—my wife, my kids, feeling like I had choices to make. Though I guess I did have a choice to make here, and I agreed to do what they wanted . . .” Mr. Bennett waved his arms and tugged his ear. Adam went on, “Which was the right thing to do. Digit, you and I are a powerful team.”

I knew he was just playing the whole pretend-we-are-on board-and-cooperating thing, but I started to feel the magnitude of the damage that could be done with our help. I longed to see the complete body of Adam’s work and to know how much beauty he could create if he got out of here. And I thought of the meeting I’d missed with Professor Halsey, and all that I might have learned and contributed there. I just hoped to God that someone at the CIA was still stalking me. I had a lot I still wanted to do.

Spencer came in to collect our dinner things and take us each to the bathroom. It was a small room with a composting toilet. I don’t totally understand what that means, but it has something to do with dehydrating our waste and reusing it? Let’s move on.

“Big day tomorrow,” she sang. Before she shut and locked the door, she turned back to me. “And, sweetie, we knew the CIA was monitoring your laptop, just like they knew we were. We took all that surveillance software off. They have no clue where you are, just so you know. Nighty-night!”

John and Dad were our last possible saviors.

The next morning we got to use the bathroom again. I’m just trying to think of the best parts of the day, and that was probably it. That, and the coffee. Jonas himself brought me a mug as I sat down to work. It even smelled better than normal coffee. He explained to me with pride how the water that they used was free of pollutants and that the organic soil was rich in nutrients. Everything you consume in harmony with nature tastes better. Apparently, he’d never had the chicken.

I went through six hours of the same old drill. I wrote code that made sense but that was so slow and cumbersome that it got in its own way. But all my keystrokes looked like progress to Wallace, who stood behind me and emitted an “Are we there yet?” sort of vibe. I finally asked to lie down for a few hours.

Back in the barracks, everyone was a little down. Mr. Bennett was lying on his bunk, silent and sullen. I sat down next to him and gave him a little nudge, saying, “Need Danny to give you another pep talk on hope?”

“No. One was plenty, thanks.”

“You okay?”

He took my hand. “I miss my wife, that’s all. And I’m concerned that I’ll never see her again, that she’ll never know what happened to us. And that she and I won’t be able to spend the rest of our lives together like we said we would. Every day for a month, she asked me to move a stack of papers out of our bedroom in New York into my office. And I never did. I keep picturing her in our room now, looking at that stack of papers and remembering me as someone who didn’t care to listen to her. And I should have. She’s been telling me to leave you alone since I met you. That John deserved to have a relationship that had nothing to do with me. I’ve really screwed up. Not the relationship—you guys did that. But everything else. And John. I’m a little worried, I hate to say. If he’d gotten away, help would have come by now.”

“I’m pretty sure you can just blame me for all of this. It’s like one idiotic thing has snowballed into the actual end of the world. How does a nice girl with a nice ‘gift’ (
oh, yes, I did
) end up doing all this?” I was more sorry than I could ever admit out loud. “If I’d never cracked Jonas Furnis’s stupid code, none of us would have ever met. We all would be fine.”

“I’m not sorry about all of it. I’m glad John fell in love, even though it got off track. I just wish the two of you had a shot at forever. Margaret and I have been so disconnected lately. I’ve been distracted by my own project, this project really. And I didn’t want to drag her into it because I knew she’d disapprove. But I couldn’t let you fend for yourself out there, you know? There was so much for you to do, personally and professionally.”

I remembered to whisper. “You think we’re going to die in here, don’t you?” The fog was starting to lift, and the obvious was revealed. Jonas Furnis was going to use my beloved jeans as insulation.

“Probably, Digit.”

“If I have to do something really horrible, something that will allow Jonas Furnis to kill people, I’m not going to do it. Okay? No matter what. Are you okay with that?”

“Yes. And I’m proud of you. Your dad would be very proud of you.”

This mention of my dad precipitated Major Meltdown #2. He had never pressured me and had given me so much room to grow into myself and my talents. He deserved more than to find me dead in a cave. And my mom, if she could see me and my dirty, snotty sweater, well, she’d probably die too.