Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

Chapman shook her head. “I don’t know. You think I should have asked?”

“I guess not.”

George was an alarm clock user. According to the clock, the time was ten to midnight. By one a.m. we had taken turns in the shower. After that we got dressed. Her in clean clothes that smelled like laundry detergent. Me in damp salty jeans and my old t-shirt. At least George’s socks fit. I got a clean pair from the dresser. His shoes were big on Chapman, but big is better than small in that department.

I started on the office. Stacks of papers and books were precariously placed on the desk and two shelves screwed to the wall opposite. Beside the desk was a filing cabinet. I sat at the desk and began to leaf through the papers. As far as I could make out, they were research papers related to George’s academic work. There were diagrams and mathematical equations with lines and symbolic figures that I didn’t understand. They were written in a secret language, that was for sure. There was a recurring phrase in the subtitle of many of the academic papers, ‘Non-linear acoustics’.

Abrams had pinned three sheets of office paper on the wall above the desk. They were color printouts with abstract imagery. Waves of neon in bright orange, red, green, and blue. One color melting into another, and so on.

I reached down to my right and opened the filing cabinet. It was empty except for a laptop computer, tossed in with the power cord. I pulled it out and pushed a few stacks of paper back to make room. I called Chapman in. She came over and stood behind me. I pressed the power button. We waited for the computer to turn on, whirring and beeping and buzzing. Once it had settled down, the screen was blank except for a place in the middle where I was supposed to enter a password.

I looked at Chapman. She looked at me with a raised eyebrow. I said, “Password?”

She said, “Try Abe and Louie. No spaces, all lower case.”

I said, “The steak house, Boston.”

“George was crazy about their rib eye.”

I said, “Spell that for me.”

Chapman spelled it out and I typed it in. Then I hit return. The little box in the middle of the screen shook violently. A new message popped up above it, ‘invalid password’. She said, “Try it all upper case.” I did, and we got the same thing, an angry vibration. She said, “I don’t know then, I guess George changed his password.”

I straightened up and turned around to look at Chapman. She was biting her nails again and her blue eyes were looking right at me. I said, “Anything else to suggest?”

She shook her head. “Not that I can think of, no. We don’t want to try too many, because it might do something bad.”

“Like destroy the contents.”

“I’m not sure, maybe. The rule of threes.”

I thought about that for a second. Closed the laptop. I pointed to the color printouts on the wall.

“Any idea what those are?”

Chapman leaned in and looked at them. She hemmed and hawed. “Acoustic modeling stuff. I don’t know exactly what, but they look like a shape that George probably wanted to memorize.” She ran a long finger over one of the images, tracing a curving line that separated the neon red from the blue. “I think these are the same thing, an object that George would have wanted to be able to recognize in the field. When he didn’t have his big computer.”

“What would he have, out there in the field?”

She said, “Oh, he’d have a portable unit. You know, a pelican case with a field laptop and the hardware.”

I said, “Hardware.”

“Acoustic sensors that you can put in the water.”

I left the laptop on the desk and tossed the rest of the office, looking for a phone mostly. Nothing there. Chapman was waiting in the living room. She looked at me when I came out. “Anything?”

I said, “No. Look for a backpack. We’re taking the laptop. Also, we need to wipe this place down. Make sure we don’t leave prints. And don’t forget the bed. Sheets, towels, old clothes. We take them with us.”

She said, “You serious?”

“Yes. We’ll burn them.”

Chapman went looking for a bag to carry the laptop in. I stripped the bed. Everything went inside the comforter cover. Then I tied the corners and had a large sack to sling over my shoulder. I threw that on the living room floor and took another look around.

Out the window, the view was the same, except the moon had come clear of the cloud. Its reflection made a line across Carolina Island, across the channel, and right up to the cruise ship.

I noticed the yellow legal pad again. Half the pages had been ripped out, half were still there. I carefully removed the top page and folded it into quarters. It went in my inside jacket pocket. There was something else. A glass bowl with a small key in it. It occurred to me that the key was for the mailbox in the lobby. I thumbed it into the coin pocket of my jeans. Chapman came out of the bedroom with a backpack. I put the laptop in it, zipped up, slung it over my shoulder.

We were ready to go.

I closed the door on the way out. The latch clicked into the bolt hole. The security plate was loose, but the lock still worked. We came out the way we had come in, down the stairwell and then down three steps to the lobby. I focused my attention on the grid of mailboxes. Each box was a small square in dull bronze with a keyhole in the center of each little door. I located number forty-six. Given that George hadn’t been around to collect the mail, I wondered if there would be anything interesting inside. I pulled the small key out of the coin pocket and tried it. Bingo. The little box