Take the Fourth (14 page)

Chapter 22
 

T
wo hours had gone by and Jorja’s eyes were numb; she had been staring at the stream of numbers on her printout trying to gather some sort of relationship and nothing came to mind. She had a pencil in hand and scratched together various patterns and algorithms to give the numbers a purpose and nothing came to mind. She subtracted, added, divided, she tried modulo division, she played with prime numbers and Fibonacci sequences, she played with dates and time, and still nothing came to mind. She accomplished nothing, no sense of purpose; in fact she was no further along than she was at the beginning of her quest. Greg was very much in the same boat. He checked processes running on the machine, he checked the open ports of the machine, and couldn’t find the entry point of the data stream, leading him to believe the machine itself was generating this data. He was systematically picking off each of the running processes on the machine but still had a ways to go, a long way. It was closing in on eleven o’clock and this had to be one of the longest stretches that Greg has been in front of an array of computers and monitors without his green can of pick-me-up but he did find a substitute in Jorja’s now dissipating perfume; a whiff was all that was needed but it didn’t do a damn thing for his stomach. Greg was not going to cry uncle when it came to his hunger, not in front of Jorja and he didn’t have to—Jorja broke the concentration and silence with her stomach growling. Greg looked at her and before he could say anything, she asked, “What do you want on your pizza?”

“Pepperoni is fine, actually anything except black olives or anchovies will do, whatever you like is fine.”

She picked up the phone and dialed her favorite thin crust specialist. After she reconfirmed her pepperoni and Italian sausage pie with her phone number, she hung up the phone and stared at the paper with the list of numbers again.

“Greg, ten digits… . ten digits, that’s a phone number, where is the six oh seven area code?”

“Let’s find out… oh Google,” and within seconds they had their answer.

“Hmmm… in southern New York… I think we are on to something.”

“You might be right, let’s do a little investigating shall we… a reverse phone search using our computers… . and waiting… . waiting… . bingo… . Mr. Royerson, age fifty-eight, here’s his address, social, tax bracket, anything else you might want to know? He really doesn’t look all that interesting, runs a family bakery, married, two kids, has a nice chunk of money in savings, owns his house, no debt on credit cards, bought groceries last on his debit card… again I say not that interesting but… but rare.”

“Rare?”

“Yes, no debt, tell me what American in this day and age is debt free?”

“Okay, I get your point, rare, try the next number.”

“Waiting… . waiting… . hmmmm phone number not in existence.”

“How about the next number?”

“Waiting… . waiting… . same thing.”

“Maybe it’s not a phone number.”

“I think you are right about that, I think I remember that first set of numbers were shorter on up the list… . hey, your bathroom is?”

‘There’s one down the hall to your left, right before my bedroom.”

“Be right back.”

“Something to drink?”

“Well I’m sure you don’t have my usual, whatever you’re having is fine.”

Greg took a second or two to stretch his legs and disappeared around the corner. Jorja took the opportunity to make her way into the kitchen and unbeknownst to her, Greg made a little detour. He took a peek in her master bedroom and tried to commit his sights to memory for a later use, that and he just wanted to see where she slept. The light from the hallway was all that he needed for his sights into a wondrous world. He admired the no hanging pictures very stark olive colored walls, though not his first choice of color and he admired the bed itself. It was a very big bed, unmade bed, masculine to a point, dark wood, maybe mahogany, maybe walnut, he wasn’t a wood expert. He saw there were none of those frilly throw pillows anywhere—the ones just for decoration that no one uses, just two pillows in their proper places. There was some sort of t-shirt thrown at the foot of the bed and piles of shoes here and there, other than that, the bedroom looked pretty tidy. There was one nightstand with an alarm clock, a small light, and a box of tissues, there were no dressers to speak of, and he correctly assumed all her clothes were stuffed to the gills in the two walk-in closets. He gave the room one more quick once around and proceeded to his original destination. When he came back to Jorja’s office he found sitting on the desk his choice of drink and smiled.

“You know me so well.”

“Yeah, like no one ever notices the green pyramid of cans you have stacked around your monitors, just think if you applied all that cash into the stock of the company, well you’d be…”

“Tired… and probably fired, but thanks for the drink, had I known, I would have asked earlier… I didn’t know you drank the stuff.”

“I don’t,” leaving Greg with an even bigger smile, “So going back to what you said before, about being a rare American, let’s say that Mr. Royerson and his phone number where not a coincidence, that maybe, maybe this is a database contains more people just like him… . debt free… wait hear me out… . I mean a database with that type of data could be worth… . well a lot I’m sure… and…”

“Jorja, let me interrupt by saying first, I estimate there are billions of entries in this database, more entries than people on this planet so your theory is already shot, plus did you forget about the invalid phone numbers?”

“Maybe they are bank accounts? . . . Umm don’t answer that . .same thing… billions of entries… can you go back to the data again, the one where we got this screen print?”

“Sure thing,” and with a few keystrokes the numbers filled the screen again, scrolling and scrolling.

“Look, the second number, the length never changes… . it’s always nine.”

“Yeah, so far so good, always nine… . like the nine planets of the solar system.”

“Eight.”

“You know kids have it so easy today, back when I was a kid we had to learn nine… nine… . number nine, number nine… . number nine… . nine minute abs.”

“Seven minute abs.”

“Are you sure, nine minutes sounds right.”

“Seven minute abs, seven eleven, seven doors, you know, seven chipmunks twirlin’ on a branch, eatin’ lots of sunflowers on my uncle’s ranch.”

“I know, I know, Something About Mary… . I only saw it once.”

“Well, one of my favorite comedies, that and Groundhog Day.”

“Now that I love, Bill Murray, my favorite part, him sitting around the old folks with a bottle of JD watching Jeopardy for the umpteenth time, saying what is Lake Titicaca, what are the Finger Lakes, and even before they show the answer… what is the Rhone,” and from there they must have quoted almost the entire movie before the door bell rang with their pizza.

With the empty pizza box aside and a full stomach, things turned back to business. The mind is sharper with nutriments abound and it didn’t take long for Jorja and Greg to come up with new ideas.

“Where were we?” Jorja asked as she wiped the last bit of pizza grease from her lips.

“Number nine… . number nine… . number nine… . ”

“Oh yeah, right… nine, nine lives of a cat… . it’s a perfect square… The Ennead… . the…”

“The what?

“The Ennead… Egyptian mythology.”

“Sorry, the only things I know are the pyramids, King Tut, the Sphinx, that and they were aliens from a distant galaxy brought here by a stargate.”

“Well nine represents the Ennead, the nine deities, you have, Atum the father god or first god, his children Shu and Tefnut, then their children Geb, Nut… and I forget the rest but nine in all… and there was no stargate or Richard Dean Anderson.”

“Obviously you took a few history courses in college and filled your brain with a bunch of useless knowledge… . I don’t think it’s going to help us here my dear.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, well how about the fact nine is the limit of all numbers meaning all numbers can be comprised of digits zero through nine with nine being the limit.”

“How about the fact that a nine digit number has almost a billion possibilities?”

“Can we find a range of those numbers, see if there is a limit?”

“That’s going to take a bit of time, not much mind you, but I’ll have to write a little program first.”

“Wait,” Jorja remembered and was a bit hesitant, she went to her desktop, copied a program and gave it to Greg, ‘this might help.”

“What is it?”

‘A little program slash utility that a friend gave me.”

“What does it do?”

“It helps to traverse a mumps database a little quicker; he says his company uses it all the time.”

“Jorja, have you been holding out on me?”

“Just a smidgen, I did some digging this past week, not much, I just poked around and my curiosity got the best of me, I found this database and was unfamiliar with it… I did a bit of research to get up to speed.”

“Okely-dokely,” was his candid reply. Greg didn’t say another word on the subject; he knew she was the boss. He just took the program and followed the prompts when he started it and before long he had a range of numbers, a range from one million twenty thousand four hundred fifty-eight to seven hundred seventy-two million three hundred thirty-four thousand eight hundred seventy-seven, or one million to seven hundred seventy-two million, give or take.

“So, that range doesn’t start with zero or one?”

“Doesn’t appear that way, nothing smaller than a million, I don’t know how accurate that little program you gave me is but…”

“But can you see how many distinct numbers we have?”

“I’ll try, might take awhile, especially if there are about seven hundred and seventy million entries.”

While Greg was looking at the screen waiting for an answer, Jorja glanced at her inbox to see if there were any issues she needed to tend to and found none. There were just a few budget reports needing her approval but they could wait until Monday if they had to, there was one from her bank saying her pay had been deposited, two office memos, and a bunch of seemingly unimportant news snipes that the CIA tends to send out to keep everyone informed on the daily events. When she saw the email from the bank she had this nagging twinge in the back of her mind that stemmed from an HR problem she has had since her raise in salary regarding her pension fund deductions. She quickly opened a link to the internal payroll department to view her online pay stub and cursed under her breath. The same deductions were again wrong even after she talked to the head of the department. “How hard could it be?” she thought, then she compared her last pay stub to the present one. She compared every number and amount and sure enough they were the same—it wasn’t fixed so she would have to make yet another phone call, maybe even pay a visit this time. Before she closed the window to the payroll site Jorja noticed something on her pay stub and just like the bathing Archimedes proclaiming Eureka and running naked through the streets of Syracuse, she knew she might be on to something but she saved her euphoria and naked romp until she was sure. While Greg was still mesmerized by his blank screen still waiting for an answer, she opened another session into this machine and ran her own test. She ran the nice little utility and entered what appeared to be a random nine digit number. The screen filled with numbers and lo and behold the second number was always the number she had just entered, the nine digit number, the nine digit number that she knew by heart.

“Greg.”

“Yes?”

“Take a look at this.”

“Oooo… more numbers how nice.”

“No, take a look at the second number in the list, after the first comma.”

“They are all the same.”

“Yes, they are, do me a favor will ya, enter your social security into this prompt.”

“I don’t just give that out to anyone, you know it’s illegal for you to ask me,” in a sarcastic slur but he did as he was told. As soon as Greg hit return, the screen again came to life with scrolling numbers, his tax ID being the second number, “Coincidence?”

“Let me find a few more tax ID’s,” Jorja went to her employee files and picked another tax number at random, entered it and received more scrolling numbers. She entered another one, same results, thousands of entries, maybe even hundreds of thousands. She tried another employee and realized this was no coincidence. Every number she entered she got a reply—that is until she searched for her father’s social security number; she had that one memorized as well due to all the red tape she had to go through since he never had a will when he passed away. It turned up nothing. “Maybe just active numbers,” she concluded, so she searched for a few recently deceased individuals using the CIA’s computers at her beck and call. Within minutes she had a handful of more social security numbers. Older ones had no records but most of the recently deceased tax ID holders, more often than not, were contained in this database.

“One hundred ten million, one seventy eight thousand, four hundred and two”