Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
“I don’t know what that means,” I said, feeling my brain stretching to try to make sense of what Emmett meant.
“Here, let me show you. Hold on a second.” Emmett left the conference room, grabbed something off a desk in a nearby office, and returned. “We work with ciphers more than you’d think. In the old days, I came across them a lot. Check this out.” He opened an app on his laptop that was a hell of a lot slicker than what I’d cobbled together. “Give me that.” He looked at the cipher on the index card, typed it into a box, and clicked a few menu items. “There’s a key to the key, basically. We have to figure out what it is.”
So, I’d been on the right track. A spike of warm gratification shot through me.
“I’ve looked everywhere,” I said. “With every other cipher Forrest’s father left, there was a hint or a clue of some kind. With this one, it’s just the card with the cipher.”
Lucas leveled his gaze on Forrest. “Then the key is probably something that you would have known. Right?”
“That makes sense,” Forrest said. “So far, it’s felt like my dad expected us to do this together. Except for the clue that ended up being a decoy, I’ve either known or recognized everything, even though I thought I’d forgotten a lot of it. It seems like he planned for us to do this a long time ago.”
Lucas and Emmett exchanged another extended, silent look. I wondered what they were communicating.
“All right,” Lucas said after a moment. “This is the fun part. Let’s start going through things you would have known back then. Do you remember your street address growing up?”
“I do,” Forrest said and told them.
Emmett typed it into the search box. First, just the numbers, then only the street name, finally, everything together. Nothing.
“Middle name,” he demanded.
Forrest answered. Nothing.
“Childhood dog.”
Still nothing.
“Cat.”
Dead end.
They went at it for a while: Forrest’s school, his favorite book, Alan’s favorite band.
“What about your mother?”
“Emily,” Forrest said. “Back then, she still used my father’s last name.”
Emmett typed in “emilybuckley” with no capitals or spaces. For the first time, something happened when he hit enter. The cipher rearranged itself into a different alphanumeric code, then to Morse code, and then into something entirely new. Treasureislandp178
“Treasure Island page 178,” Lucas said. “What the fuck are you supposed to do with that?”
Forrest sat back in his chair, letting out a long, weighty sigh. “We read it together,” he said. “The year before he died. He had an old edition. It was illustrated. It was really cool, actually.”
“Do you still have that copy?” I asked, my stomach clenching at the thought that we might lose the trail simply because so much time had passed. The book could have been donated, thrown away, or lost.
Forrest closed his eyes for a long second. When he opened them, he said, “If I do, it’s at my mom’s house.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket, looked at the three of us. “Do you mind if I step out and make a phone call?” Without waiting for an answer, he rose and left the room.
I watched him through the glass—the light in his eyes dimming as I assumed his mother answered the phone, the way his brows pulled together while he waited.
“So, what are your plans?” Lucas said, interrupting my study of Forrest.
I dragged my eyes to Lucas’s and raised my brow, not wanting to assume I understood what he meant.
“Hawk says you’ve been taking coding classes,” he clarified. “And that you’ve studied a little cybersecurity, and you liked it.”
“Yeah, I, um…” Hawk’s words echoed in my mind again, and I sat up straight. Lucas had said I was clever. He hadn’t laughed. This was a shot for me, a chance to be this new Sterling. I wouldn’t know what could happen unless I opened my mouth and talked to him. “As you can tell from my program,” I said, “I’m still a beginner. But I love it. I’ve been checking out how the security system works at Heartstone, and I want to know more. I was hoping, um, Hawk said that you two might be able to tell me what I need to learn.”
“That depends on what you want to do,” Emmett said.
“I don’t know,” I countered. “I don’t know what all my options are, but whatever it is you guys are doing in here looks pretty cool. And Hawk said you wrote all the code for the system we have. Is that true?” I asked Lucas.
“Yeah, I did. Emmett has done similar work, but that’s not all we do here.”
“I want to know all of it,” I said in a rush, my brain driving my mouth, leaving no room for insecurity or fear. “I want to learn everything.”