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

Ellie put her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, Hank, I wasn’t thinking.”

Hank wiped his nose with a shirt sleeve. He looked at me morosely. I looked back at Ellie.

I said, “Spit it out.”

“It was the doctoral supervisor. He confirmed that George Abrams is one of his students. He confirmed the trip out here. There was a bunch of malarky that I couldn’t understand, but there was interesting stuff. He told me that Abrams was not out here working on his PhD project. He was working on something else.”

“Like what exactly?”

“According to the professor, Abrams was working as a consultant for an outfit called the USNRC. Ever heard of it?”

I said nothing.

Ellie said, “No shit, you haven’t. I don’t know if anyone has. USNRC stands for United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

“What’s a physicist who specializes in non-linear acoustics doing as a consultant to the nuclear regulatory commission?”

Ellie did a thing with her hair. Pulled out the elastic holding it all up, and then shook it all out. “Right, good question. Short answer is, the professor wasn’t sure. Said it wasn’t any part of Abrams’ doctoral research. The most he could say was speculation that this USNRC outfit required Abrams’ particular skill set. So, it wouldn’t necessarily be his doctoral research, but it would be something related to his scientific expertise.”

Hank stepped forward. “What does this crap have to do with what happened here, with my mom getting shot?”

I said, “We’re trying to figure that out, Hank.”

“Why aren’t the real cops figuring that out?”

Ellie gave me a look. “Hank, the police aren’t looking there yet, because there isn’t enough evidence to convince them of where to look. That’s what we’re trying to piece together.”

Hank said, “Piece together what exactly?”

Ellie pursed her lips and kept quiet. She looked at me, like she didn’t know what or how much to say. I figured the kid was smart enough and old enough to know.

I said, “Some people were killed the other day, Hank. Then they tried to have me killed. Now they’ve killed your mom. The bad guys are getting away with murder, and we’re trying to stop that. The guy we’ve been talking about, George Abrams, seems like he’s a lynchpin in this. He’s a young scientist who’s gone missing. Ellie just spoke to his academic supervisor over at MIT in Boston. You heard what she said. We’re trying to figure out what’s at stake here.”

Hank said, “If we need to know more about this Nuclear Commission, why don’t we go do that?”

Ellie said, “What do you mean, Hank?”

I said, “He means on his computer.”

I started to walk back to the house. Hank followed directly, no longer concerned about running into the corpse of his dead mother. It took Ellie more of a moment. She said, “Got to make this fast, guys. I need to make some calls.”

Back at the house, Hank helped me move his mom’s body onto the couch and covered her with a blanket. I figured that might be a cathartic moment for him, contact with the object that used to be his mother. Ellie wasn’t too thrilled about that. I figured it was no big deal since the cause of death was not a mystery. Hank and Ellie went back into the computer geek cave. I stayed in the kitchen and made coffee.

I found the coffee and filter for the drip machine. When I reached up for the box of filters I felt the rustling of paper in my inside jacket pocket. And then I remembered the yellow pad and the top sheet that I had torn out of it in Abrams’ apartment. I set the coffee to brew. Then I removed the sheet I’d taken from the apartment was now a small folded square. I unfolded it on the kitchen counter.

A blank sheet of lined yellow paper, like others. I had removed it from the pad for a reason. I went to Helen’s office and found a stick of charcoal among her art materials. Back in the kitchen I lightly rubbed it across the yellow sheet. Once the page was covered, I lowered my face and blew gently across the paper. The charcoal powder was swept away from the surface but remained within the indentations made when the sheet above this one had been marked by the pen. That sheet had been torn off and thrown away. But now I could see what had been written there.

TGN8462.

It would be something modern. Like a password, the serial number of a manufactured object, or maybe the identifying number of a vehicle. I memorized the number. Then I burned the sheet of paper over the stove. The ashes got flushed down the drain and the coffee was ready.

I brought three mugs back. It was quite a balancing act, but neither Ellie or Hank paid any attention to my talents. They were glued to Hank’s big computer screen and accepted the coffee without comment.

I pulled a chair over. I said, “What do you have?”

Hank said, “We don’t have the new, but we’ve got the old.”

Ellie shifted over to make room for me. “Hank couldn’t get into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission computers, so I suggested that he go for the Department of Energy. Looks like he got it."

Hank said, “It’s no big deal. These are old web pages that have been cached. Like, backups. It’s not top secret or anything. All I needed to do was guess about the directory structure.”

I said, “Whatever that means. Can you just spell it out for me?”

Hank flipped to the website we had already seen. Zarembina’s photograph with the flag and the Department of Energy logo, but nothing else. Then, like a magic trick he flipped to the same web page, but this time with a whole lot more information.

He said, “See what I mean? They changed the page, just taking off all the information, but the old one still exists on the server.”

Ellie said, “Zarembina was an investigator with Energy.” She pointed