Last Chance to Die by Noah Boyd (good books for 8th graders TXT) 📕

Keep your fingers crossed that Langston won’t want to see any of it.”

“I’ll make sure he doesn’t,” Kate said.

“How are you going to do that?”

She said, “We’ll give him Petriv’s name and phone number and tell him we need him to find out who Petriv really is and where he works. A little distraction.”

“It’s obvious that somewhere in your life someone taught you some bad habits.”

Vail pushed the code into the off-site’s alarm. As he and Kate climbed the stairs, he asked, “Did Langston seem satisfied with the division of labor on Mr. Petriv?”

“He seemed suspicious. I know he can be a little pompous, but don’t take him for a fool.”

“Define ‘suspicious.’ ”

“He asked me how we came up with the bank-box information. I told him we stumbled across it. He pressed me, and when I wouldn’t be more specific, I think he assumed we had done something illegal. Of course he didn’t want any of that to get on his shoes. But when I told him we’d look over everything from the box and let him know if there’s anything of interest, I got the feeling this is the last time we’re going to get away with disguising light lifting as heavy lifting.”

“Let’s worry about next time next time.”

After putting on a fresh pair of gloves, Kate handed a set to Vail. He spread the documents out on the table, and she asked, “How do you want to do this?”

“Let’s split them into two piles. You read one while I go through the other. If we don’t find anything, we’ll switch.”

After a few minutes, he said, “I think this document is talking about a wiretap. It refers to a target phone. Can you call and see what the number is?”

She dialed headquarters and after a short conversation hung up. “It’s an importer that specializes in items from Eastern Europe.”

“What government agencies specialize in wiretaps of East Europeans?”

“Which ones don’t?” She smiled. “I’d better call Personnel and make sure that Petriv isn’t a Bureau employee.”

Vail continued looking through the papers while she made the call. After hanging up, she said, “He’s not one of ours, at least not under the name Yanko Petriv. That leaves the likely suspects CIA and NSA.”

“Then your initial guess of NSA is probably a good one. Just make sure you act surprised when Langston calls.”

They both went back to reading the documents. After twenty more minutes, Vail pushed his last item across the table and leaned back in his chair and waited for Kate to finish.

Finally she set down her last page. “Any anomalies?”

“None. You?” he asked.

“Other than two blank sheets of paper stapled together with a couple of dates written at the bottom of one, nothing.”

“Let me see them?”

She searched through the stack of pages and pulled them out.

Vail held the two papers gently between his fingers. The bottom one was a common size, about eight and a half by eleven, but the one stapled on top of it was an eight-inch square. At the base of the full-size page were the dates 12/27 and 1/6. They were written with the same careful penmanship and medium-blue ink that had been used to inscribe “Ariadne” on the water-soluble envelope. “This is what we’re looking for. And these sheets have one additional anomalous quality: They’re glossy.”

“Which means?”

He turned them over a few times, finally holding each page up to the light at different angles. He took them over to the window and raised the shade. Tilting the larger page up to the bright sunlight, he shifted it around for a few more seconds. He held up the smaller one. “This is the same size as what else?”

“I don’t know, what?”

He went over to the desk, set down the pages, and put the fingerprint magnifier on top of the square sheet.

“A fingerprint card,” she said. “That’s why he cut it to that size. So we’d recognize it.”

Vail went back to the window and used the natural light to examine the smaller page with the loupe. Then he flipped it behind the full sheet and examined its surface. “I know that engineers have a reputation for not being creative, but I think Calculus is an exception. It’s so simple. And so ingenious.”

“What is it?”

Vail held up both his hands and spread the fingers apart. “What am I holding up?”

“Two hands,” she said. “Ten fingers.”

“Another name for fingers.”

“I don’t know . . . ‘digits.’ What?” Vail didn’t answer but watched her face. All of a sudden, it dawned on her. She took the loupe from Vail’s hand and locked her eye against it, running it over both sheets. When she straightened up, she smiled. “You’re right, it is ingenious. He’s using fingerprints as a code.”

“Each finger has a number on the fingerprint card we use. The right thumb is number one, all the way to the left pinkie being number ten—or, for code purposes, zero.”

After a few seconds, she again scanned the larger sheet. “The message is on this page, but we wouldn’t be able to assign a number to each one without a control set of prints. The fingerprint card, so to speak”—she bent over the smaller page and ran the magnifier across it to confirm what she was about to say—“has a set of ten in the same order in which they’d be rolled during an arrest. From them we know what number to assign to the latents on the big page, which is the code to lead us to the next mole,” Kate said. “But then what do the dates mean?”

“I don’t know. First we’ve got to get both of these pages fumed so we can see exactly what Calculus is telling us.”

Vail’s cell phone rang. It was Luke Bursaw. “Steve, remember we talked about seeing if the police department had any similar patterns of missing females? Well, they do. I got copies of their reports and was wondering if you could give me a hand for a couple of hours.”

“Hold on a second.” Vail covered the phone.