Flash Point

by Colby Marshall

  ‘Shh,’ Jenna said, working fast. ‘I don’t know yet.’

  She wrote the phrase the bank killers had told Ashlee Haynie to relay. Next to it, she wrote the name of the play the reference was meant to invoke: The Importance of Being Earnest.

  The phrases were similar but obviously different. ‘Grey, what does the word ‘earnest’ mean exactly? As many definitions as you can think of,’ Jenna said. She knew the definition, but for some reason, she felt like hearing Grey’s words might help the thought click.

  ‘Earnest,’ Grey said in a sing-songy voice. ‘Resulting from or showing intense conviction. Serious in intention, purpose, or effort. Showing sincerity of feeling. Depth of feeling. Seriously important. Demanding attention. You want the noun or just the describer?’

  ‘No, no. Adjective is plenty,’ Jenna said, staring at the two phrases.

  ‘Whatcha thinking, Doc?’ Dodd asked quietly.

  Jenna didn’t take her eyes from the paper. ‘If every word was chosen with intense purpose. Zeal. Intense effort, then would we be doing them due diligence if we discarded the fact that each letter might also be seriously important?’

  Dodd leaned over and looked at the scrap, and she felt Porter peeking over her shoulder.

  ‘The letter did say “strength in numbers.” Maybe the number of how many letters are in the title but not in the phrase?’ Porter suggested.

  ‘Or vice versa. The number of letters in the phrase but not the title,’ Dodd said.

  Jenna glanced at the scrap. ‘That would leave very few numbers. Why go to the trouble of including fifteen literary references and forty-four digits between them if you only need to hide three measly digits?’

  ‘Ass-holery? These people did just slaughter a bunch of innocent people. I doubt our convenience is on their mind,’ Porter said.

  Jenna shook her head.

  Dodd sighed heavily. ‘Stop thinking with the part of your brain that’s annoyed by this situation and think like a profiler. They’ve given us everything they have because they think a certain way. Because they are a certain way. Get your head out of your ass and do your job, Rookie!’

  Through the thick silence, a shrill giggle cut the air.

  Every head turned toward Grey.

  She shrugged. ‘Someone had to say it.’

  Jenna smirked, turning back to the matter at hand. But it was Porter who spoke first when the silence broke.

  ‘They’re elitists. Intellectually superior in their minds, though they are obviously classically educated and most likely have some reason to believe it. So, high IQs and elitism suggests a degree of narcissism. We talked before about how they hid the clues in the letter so someone could find them if they were as smart as them, even going as far as to suggest they wanted McClendon to do so. They left another piece at the crime scene, though. If The Importance of Being Earnest and their reference to it is the crack to whatever the code is with these, how would McClendon know it? She wasn’t privy to that information.’

  Jenna shook her head, confused. ‘They brought her in because, in the past, she’s been smart enough to get answers. Broken rules. Maybe they figured she’d get privy to it.’

  ‘Nope,’ Grey said from the backseat.

  Jenna shifted to look at her ex-patient, still tracing abstract shapes in trails of fingertip oil on the window. ‘What do you mean, Grey?’

  ‘Maybe the reporter would’ve gotten the memo from the bank in her reporter-ing, but she didn’t need it. They gave it to her.’

  Jenna sat up straighter. ‘What? Where?’

  Grey now turned from the window, held up the scribbled on printout of the e-mail McKenzie had given them. She pointed at the top. ‘The address. YourBankStory2_14_1895. That’s when The Importance of Being Earnest opened in London.’

  Lapis Lazuli flashed in, followed once again by that familiar, showy Russian violet. What her ex-patient was pointing out made sense. ‘Grey, you’re amazing,’ Jenna said.

  When she had marked the two phrases as they’d decided she should, she stared at her paper:

  ‘IT IS IMPORTANT TO BE EARNEST’

  THELEAVEOUT3 IMPORTANCELEAVEOUT2 OFLEAVEOUT1 BEINGLEAVEOUT3 EARNEST

  TAKE 8 TAKE 1 TAKE 2 TAKE 7

  ‘Take a picture of that,’ Jenna instructed. ‘I’m going to forget it entirely when I flip this paper over.’

  Porter snapped a photo on his phone, and Jenna turned the scrap over, her list of numbers staring back at her. Porter read her own formula to her from the picture he’d taken, and Jenna marked the numbers as he went. Leave out three. Take eight. Leave out two. Take one.

  When they finished, Jenna could barely read her own writing:

  51

  5-3000

  95

  147

  7-2521

  1

  0-0009

  274

  214

  3

  4-8818

  4

  11

  169

  207

  ‘So, what about everything after the two in two hundred and fourteen?’ Dodd asked.

  ‘For that matter, what the hell just happens to be eighteen digits?’ Porter asked.

  Jenna shook her head. She honestly wasn’t sure. She just had to trust they were on to something.

  ‘Let’s hope Irv can tell us that,’ she said, and she whipped out her phone and dialed.

  As she stared at the numbers on the paper while she said a silent prayer for Irv would answer, Russian violet flashed in again. It had many times since the bank.

  The bank was for show. The living witness, the warning note. And now this letter was too. She wasn’t sure what the performance would be, but these numbers had been meticulously laid out so that somebody could have a ticket.

  Twenty-five

  ‘Let me get this straight. Porter’s sending me this picture, and I’m just supposed to “find something.” Anything. With absolutely no direction whatsoever,’ Irv’s voice said through Yancy’s headset.

  Typing flew across Yancy’s screen. He’d spent the better part of the day with Irv setting up the backdoor access into the tech analyst’s office rig. Even now that the link was established, he still chewed his lip, all nerves, and reminded himself for the hundred thousandth time that Irv himself was the one who would catch him at this, and he had the man on his side.

  At best, when Yancy had spewed his tale of woe at the skate park, in his wildest dreams he’d hoped to avoid jail time. Irv had listened silently, face devoid of any expression that might have given a clue as to how it was going over, until Yancy had fallen silent, exhausted and defeated.

  ‘OK,’ Irv had said.

  ‘OK as in you’ll bring Oboe to visit me in jail at least once a month?’

  ‘OK, as in, that’s good enough. I’m not going to rat you out. I’m going to offer you a job. And if you accept, I have only one rule: I won’t tell Jenna what you did if you won’t tell Jenna you’re working for me.’

  ‘What?’ Yancy’s brain had turned to oatmeal. For some reason, the first thought that had come to mind, of all the countless thoughts he could have used to try to cope with the fucked up twist of a crazy thing he had just heard, was that he should warn Irv how shitty not telling important things to Jenna always turned out to be.

  Irv’s hands flapped at his side in a shrug. ‘I didn’t come here to find my reason to send you off to prison. I already had that, man. I came here looking for you to give me a reason not to use it. You’ve done that. For now, I choose to believe you did what you did for a good reason, and I think you’re a talented guy. Too talented to be wasted on a desk job at emergency dispatch. Not when you coming along now is so convenient for me.’

  The man had secrets.

  Irv had a job for Yancy, for sure, and that involved teaching him a lot more about the FBI’s databases than he’d had to know to hack into them. For this one, for instance, he had to know everything Irv did.

  Which meant that now, to keep Irv from telling
Jenna and Saleda and The Department of Homeland Security about his attempt at the Ocean’s Eleven of FBI data breaches, he sat at his own home office connected to Irv’s fancy shmancy FBI office computer systems via a remote setup, intent on learning everything he could. Now that he knew what Irv wanted to do, the benefits of the gig seemed two-fold: he’d walk away from the breach, and it presented him even more opportunity to dig into Claudia’s little favor and find out what she was really doing. Ensure Jenna really didn’t have anything to worry about.

  Not to mention, his newfound mentor had good reasons. Better than his, actually.

  A new window popped up on Yancy’s – Irv’s – screen, this time, a message to Yancy: JENNA AND TEAM ONLINE. SENDING EIGHTEEN RANDOM DIGITS. THEY NEED ME TO ‘FIND SOMETHING.’

  Irv’s laugh came through the headset. ‘I’ll take the gig, but only because it’s my job, and I’m game for a challenge. Hang tight.’ Then, ‘I’m off.’

  The last words were for Yancy. He gulped, adjusting his headset. Just knowing Jenna had just been on the line made his ears hot. Maybe the FBI wouldn’t find out about their remote setup – after all, like Irv had said, he was the one whose job it was to look for that kind of thing – but Yancy couldn’t help but feel like, somehow, Jenna would sense his presence through Irv’s phone to his computer screen and all the way to him sitting here with Oboe asleep where normally his metal hook foot would be if it wasn’t off right now.

  ‘Eighteen digits, huh? Not a bank account, not—’

  ‘Hm. No, not a bank account,’ Irv said, and windows popped up all over the screen.

  Yancy struggled to keep up with what Irv was doing visually, but the one thing he wasn’t privy to in that office was the inside of Irv’s brain. ‘Buddy, hey. Give a bro a break. At least give me a vision. I can follow along with the subtitles, but I have to know what language they’re in.’

  ‘Sorry, man,’ Irv said as windows and writing continued popping up and flying across the screen. ‘Bank account gave me an idea. These bastards might’ve last been in a bank, but I’d be willing to bet they’ve spent a lot more time in libraries.’

  Yancy watched in awe as Irv pulled a few flashy moves, library data from various systems within a hundred-mile radius of the bank crime scene scrolling across his vision faster than he could keep up.

  Yancy screencapped an image of one of the segments of text that seemed to be the eighteen digits Irv was looking for, left it open in the corner of his screen to reference as the system tried to throw out any and all combinations of them.

  ‘Whoa, stop!’ Yancy said, noticing the numbers on his screenshot and the numbers scrolling in another window sync up, forming a pattern.

  The text in another window stopped as Irv halted typing. ‘Whatcha got?’

  ‘The numbers in the far right database. Whatever library that is, that’s our location. All of the card numbers start with 3 0009. Those are the first five digits of our eighteen!’

  Irv clicked on the far right window with the matching numbers, and it burst in front of the others. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘Every card here only has fourteen digits, but let’s give it a whirl.’

  The keys Irv hit manifested on Yancy’s screen. ‘Could it be that easy? As easy as them being in order?’

  Irv continued typing, windows shooting up all over the screen again. ‘Hey, sometimes the simplest answer is the most likely. Besides, from what I hear about what it took to get these numbers to me, if they hid this bitch in a code so only the worthy could find it, the fact that we have the digits to plug them in makes us worthy.’

  The search done for the first fourteen digits of the eighteen, Irv’s fancy footwork had yielded a single result now glowing at Yancy from his own computer screen: a picture of a library card.

  Irv’s voice cracked in Yancy’s ears. ‘Shut up now, I’m on the phone.’ Then, ‘Hey, Dr Dangerous. I had to try a few things, but I’ve got something for you. Head back toward Bethesda. I’m sending you an address.’

  Twenty-six

  After about forty minutes on the highway and ten minutes too many of Grey’s whistling, Jenna led the group from the SUV down the sidewalk toward the building that housed the Suellen B. Holloway Memorial Library, which just happened to be attached to an elementary school in Falls Church, Virginia.

  ‘Google Maps informs me we could hit a nice, spacious public library in this area approximately … I don’t know, every time we turn around, but these creeps send us to an elementary school’s media center,’ Porter whispered to Jenna as they walked. ‘You think this is some kind of sick threat?’

  Jenna’s throat tightened, and for a moment, Ayana’s smiling face popped to mind, the expression the exact one she’d been wearing when Jenna had ducked out of dropping her off in her classroom to book it toward the bloody bank scene left by the killers. She stopped walking, her eyes on the ground.

  Bloody handprints. Charley’s face, blue and pale. So limp next to the toilet.

  Footsteps! Go! Run!

  Charley!

  ‘Whoa, cowgirl,’ Dodd’s voice jogged her back to reality, his hands clasping her biceps on either side, firm.

  It felt good. She hadn’t even realized until his steady pressure had rooted her that she’d been swaying on the spot.

  She shook the thought away, breathed in and out, two deep, cleansing breaths, shaping her lips into a thin O so she’d be forced to exhale more slowly than her rapid heartbeat told her to. After a few seconds, she nodded to no one in particular. Opened her eyes.

  ‘I’m OK.’

  Dodd squeezed her right shoulder, and they all continued for the building. If the location was a threat, time was of the essence.

  Stop worrying. A is safe.

  I think.

  They passed through the glass doorway and were met by a young, attractive blonde woman with a grin so huge and eyes so wide and bright, either she’d just downed a whole case of Red Bull or she was a fembot.

  ‘Hi, there! I’m Hattie Zimmerman. I’m the media specialist here at Eagle Stone Elementary.’

  Dodd introduced them all, and Jenna shook hands with Hattie Zimmerman when it was her turn. She took in the plump, rosy cheeks, the eager-to-help demeanor that seemed to exude from every pore the same way the uncanny sheen from her skin did.

  Dodd finished by presenting Grey as a special guest consultant on the case.

  If it was possible, Hattie Zimmerman smiled even wider and more intensely at the mention of Grey’s expertise in linguistics and literature. ‘It is such an honor! My parents just never have understood why I chose the career I did. You know what they say, though. You have to do what you love.’ She turned her back, waved them along. ‘Come on over to the desk. Not sure what exactly y’all are gonna need from me, but I’ll do my best to accommodate in any way I can.’

  The group followed Hattie’s curvy hourglass frame past tables and chairs set on colorful rugs, then several rows of waist-high bookshelves. Jenna fleetingly thought of whipping her phone out and shooting Charley a quick text to check on Ayana but fought it. A was fine. She’d checked in with all three parties on patrol twice since meeting McKenzie McClendon in the parking lot and gotten the all-clear responses. Concentrate.

  The round service counter that apparently served as the hub of the media center came into view. As Hattie slipped through one of the swinging doors and had a seat at the first of two inset cubicles, Porter caught up to Jenna and propped his elbows on the counter.

  ‘You have to do what you love?’ he said. ‘I wish someone had told me that. I love eating bacon.’

  Jenna looked around for Grey, expecting a jab, but Grey had wandered over to one of the shelves they’d passed and was now seated on the floor with her legs crisscrossed, a colorful picture book about butterflies open on her lap. Jenna turned back to see Hattie continuing to peck away at keys on the computer.

  Finally, she tapped a key hard, then turned the monitor to face them, saying, ‘There! You should be all set.
This is the library card account your data analyst requested, and if you scroll through, you can view all activity on the card. When it was applied for, when received, which books were checked out, in, any late fees, etc. I still don’t entirely understand how it’ll help, but I guess that’s why we leave it to the professionals.’

  Hattie slipped through the little doorway but scooted a stool inside the command center to prop the door from clicking shut. ‘Anyhoo, feel free to go on in, peruse, find whatever you need. If you run into something you need my help with, holler.’

  As Hattie strolled away carrying an armful of books to return to their individual homes, Jenna entered the library command center and sat behind the computer. Irv had figured out the eighteen digits were this fourteen digit library card number and the four leftover digits after you took away the fourteen for the card were the pin number on the account. They’d have to figure out the next steps, but before they could do that, Jenna pressed Saleda’s speed dial on her smartphone. She needed to relay some info, and she also needed orders.

  ‘What do you have?’ Saleda asked as she picked up.

  Jenna relayed all the information she could about the individual the library card was registered to. Name, birthdate, mailing address, phone numbers, e-mail address, and then some.

  ‘Irv sent you the picture, right?’ Jenna asked.

  ‘I have an image of the whole card on my tablet, and yes, he also sent a picture of the card’s owner. You think Paul Neary is involved with the terrorists?’

  Jenna stood up and paced in the confines of the round media center hub. ‘No, I really don’t,’ she said, picturing the clean-cut face of the middle-aged, balding guy with sandy-colored sideburns who they now knew had taught sixth grade Pre-Algebra here at Eagle Stone Elementary for seven years and counting. ‘I have Irv checking on him in depth, but no. I’d seriously doubt any of our UNSUBS even know the guy. If they made us dig through a letter so loaded with code that you can’t find it for all the code, it wouldn’t be their style to bring us straight to them.’

  ‘Go ahead and send Porter to his classroom to interview him just in case. You and Dodd can tackle whatever you need to do there. Which, speaking of, do you have any idea what that is?’