by Jake Needham
“What did I ever do to make you hate me so much, Samuel?”
“Don’t be a drama queen, Mother. You know perfectly well I don’t hate you.”
Tay’s mother made a sniffling sound and Tay peered closely at her. Was she crying? Was it possible for a ghost to cry? This was all getting to be too much.
All at once Tay’s mother turned and looked directly at him, and he saw she was smiling.
“I do enjoy our bantering, Samuel, I really do. It’s the highlight of my day.”
“You have days in… well, in wherever you are?”
“Of course we have days. How else would we tell time?”
“Are your days the same length as—”
“I wish I had more time to sit and chat, Samuel. But I have to go. Things to do, places to be.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Now you will remember my warning, won’t you?”
“Yes, Mother, I’ll remember.”
“Then repeat it back to me.”
“What?”
“My warning, Samuel. Repeated back to me. I want to make sure you understood.”
“I must be very careful right now. Things are not as I think they are.”
His mother nodded.
“What things are you talking about, Mother?”
“Good night, Samuel. It’s been real.”
And with that Tay felt his mother’s weight lifting off the mattress and she was gone. Not in a puff of smoke, not in a puff of anything. Just there one minute, and the next… gone.
It had been something all right, he thought. But real wasn’t the first word he would have chosen to describe it. It wouldn’t even have been the last.
Tay punched his pillow into shape, closed his eyes, and went back to sleep.
Either that, or he stayed asleep and stopped dreaming he was talking to his mother.
Whatever.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
TAY WAS IN the kitchen when his cell phone rang. He was on his third cup of coffee, his second slice of toast, and his first cigarette.
Tay’s first reaction was a flash of annoyance, but then his first reaction whenever a telephone rang was generally a flash of annoyance. He thought he had turned his telephone off before he went to bed because he really didn’t like talking to anyone on the telephone early in the morning. The whole truth, he supposed, was he didn’t much like talking to anyone on the telephone at any time, but for it to be first thing in the morning just added to the general sense of injury a ringing telephone gave him.
“Hello?”
“This is Julie, Inspector. Have you looked at those files I sent you yet?”
Tay suddenly remembered he had left Julie’s laptop on a chair out in the garden and it had been there all night. Could that have damaged it? He didn’t know much about laptops, but surely just sitting outside overnight couldn’t have done any harm. Still, after Julie had gone to the trouble to load the four decrypted files onto a laptop and have someone bring it to him, he could hardly admit that he hadn’t even looked at the files yet, could he?
“Ah… Julie, I’m going to have to call you back in a few minutes. I’m on another line.”
“Sure, Inspector. I’ll be right here.”
“Five minutes.”
They said their goodbyes and Tay rushed straight out to the garden to retrieve the laptop.
Tay pulled a stool up to his kitchen counter, opened the laptop, and poked at the buttons until the unit gave a DING and the screen turned white. It was a sleek little thing, hardly bigger than a sheet of typing paper and not much thicker. Tay didn’t really know anything about Apple laptops, but then he didn’t know much about any laptops. He understood how central to life computers and the internet had become for most people. They simply weren’t central to his life.
If he needed to find out something, he looked it up in a book. The printed page had weight and substance, and Tay thought finding whatever information he was looking for on a printed page gave the information weight and substance as well. Looking at information on a screen felt, by contrast, somewhat ephemeral. He didn’t think information should feel ephemeral.
Tay got up and poured himself another cup of coffee, and then he returned to his stool and peered at the screen of the laptop that was now glowing with a snappy blue background. Down the right side of the screen was a column of tiny file folders neatly labeled as Decrypted File 1, Decrypted File 2, Decrypted File 3, and Decrypted File 4.
Well, Tay thought, this looks easy enough.
He clicked on the folder labeled Decrypted File 1. When nothing happened, he tried clicking on it twice. As soon as he did, a document opened on the screen. He put down his coffee and leaned toward it.
It looked just like Julie had described it. Lines of numbers interspersed with something that looked to Tay like gibberish, but what he recalled Julie saying was computer code. Whatever that was.
Tay quickly opened the other three decrypted files and found that they looked more or less the same. He had no clue what any of them meant.
He found his cell phone, looked at the last incoming call on the call list, and pushed the button that said Redial. To his amazement, a moment later he was talking to Julie. He was such a simpleton about technology he was always astonished when whatever he wanted to happen actually did happen.
“I don’t see anything here that makes the slightest sense to me, Julie. It’s just like you said. Nothing but numbers and… ah, computer code.”
“What do you think of the other files I sent you?”
“What other files?”
“The other twelve. You told me to concentrate on sixteen files. I put the first four on that laptop, but we found a way to decrypt the other twelve overnight and I sent them to you first thing this morning.”
“Sent them? How did you send them?”
“By email, of course. How else? Aren’t the files attached to that email I sent you?”
Tay said nothing.
“The email went to the address I set up for you on our server,” Julie added. “It’s in the Apple Mail inbox.”
Tay said nothing.
“You haven’t looked, have you?”
“I told you,” Tay said. “I don’t use email. It never occurred to me to look.”
“Okay,” Julie said. “No problem. Let me talk you through it. Is the laptop open in front of you?”
“Yes.”
“What are you looking at?”
“Ah… the screen is all blue and the four decrypted files are on the right-hand side.”
“Okay, that’s good. Now, is your Wi-Fi on?”
“I don’t have Wi-Fi.”
“What?”
“I don’t have Wi-Fi here at home because I don’t have a computer. If I need to use one, I either do it at the office or go to a Coffee Bean and use one of theirs.”
There was a short silence at the other end of the phone.
“Okay,” Tay sighed, “I admit I’m an old fart.”
Julie laughed, and Tay thought it was a nice laugh. He still felt like an old fart, just not quite as old as he had felt a few seconds before.
“How long will it take you to get to a Coffee Bean?” Julie asked.
“Five minutes,” Tay said. “There are two right up on Orchard Road.”
Tay spared Julie an explanation of his usual indecisiveness as to whether to go to the one on the left or the one on the right.
“Okay,” she said, “take your phone and the laptop. Call me when you get there and I’ll talk you through opening the other files.”
Tay followed Julie’s instructions diligently, and it took him five minutes and a third of his café latte to get all twelve new files open.
“What do you think?” Julie asked.
“It just looks like nonsense to me.”
“Yeah, it looks like that to me, too. I’m sorry I haven’t been more help.”
“Are you sure these files have been completely decrypted?”
“A
bsolutely sure. What you’ve got there is the raw content of all sixteen files.”
“Okay,” Tay said. “I guess now all I have to do is figure out what they mean.”
“Do you want me to keep working on the rest of the files on the drive?”
“Yes, very much.”
“Are there any in particular you want me to concentrate on?”
“Can you tell when all the files were last modified?”
“Yes.”
“Then start with the most recently modified one and work backwards.”
“Got it. I’ll email you each file as I get it decrypted. Do you remember how to open them now?”
“I think I can handle that.”
“Then plan to drink more coffee. I should have more files for you soon.”
Tay ended the call, picked up his latte, and stared at the documents open on the screen in front of him. What the hell was he looking at?
He had no doubt that the key to everything was right there in front of him. If he could only see it.
He had sixteen documents, each one of which Tyler Bartlett had secretly backed up, and each one of which somebody had opened after Tyler was dead. That was pretty good evidence that there was something in them that was important. Now all he had to do was figure out what it was.
Piece of cake.
Tay sipped at his latte and flipped slowly through the twelve documents Julie had decrypted most recently. They looked like utter gibberish to him. Numbers, symbols, and letters, but almost no actual words and absolutely no sentences. If Julie hadn’t been so certain the documents were decrypted, Tay would have assumed they were all still in code. These twelve made even less sense to him than the first four documents Julie had decrypted.
Those four documents, at least, were constructed in what looked like a pattern. Blocks of eight numbers arranged in pairs, followed by what Julie had called computer code, followed by more blocks of eight numbers arranged in pairs.
Tay went back to Decrypted File 1 and studied its top lines again.
1.36442, 103.991531
3.0527541, 101.689453
10.833306, 106.611328
11.544873, 104.892167
The left-hand numbers were in a numerical sequence, all right, but they didn’t even have the same number of digits after the decimal point. One had five, one had seven, and the other two had six. The right-hand numbers were more consistent, all of them had six digits after the decimal, but then they weren’t in a numerical sequence. On down the page there were six more blocks of similar numbers. Some of the columns were in numerical sequence and some weren’t.
The more Tay thought about it, the more his head hurt.
He read back and forth through the documents all afternoon and tried making notes. He changed the sequence of the numbers around, added them, subtracted them, and even listed them backwards, but nothing he did brought with it anything he recognized as understanding. In the middle of the afternoon, he went back to the Coffee Bean to check email, and then he did it again in the early evening. Julie sent him a total of nine more files, but none of them made any more sense than the first sixteen had.
Tay didn’t give up, but he knew he was getting nowhere. Finally, he made himself a sandwich, ate it while watching CNN, and went to bed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
TAY GOT BACK on the laptop first thing Sunday morning and started all over again. Two more trips to the Coffee Bean yielded him another eight files from Julie, but they all looked similar to the ones he had already been studying and he couldn’t see anything new in them.
He had four documents made up of blocks of numbers separated by gibberish, and then he had twenty-nine more documents that were nothing but gibberish as far as he could tell. He could read documents and count them as much as he wanted, but for all of the hours he had put into doing that, he didn’t have shit.
By the middle of Sunday afternoon, Tay was ready to admit he needed help. And he could think of only one place to turn for it.
He picked up his telephone, looked through the numbers marked as favorites, and tapped on one.
Sergeant Kang answered on the second ring.
“I appreciate you coming, Robbie. You’re better with this stuff than I am.”
“I don’t really know that much about it either, sir.”
They were sitting in Tay’s garden, the laptop open on the table between them. Tay was smoking a Marlboro. Between puffs he described to Kang the decrypted documents Julie had sent him. That took a while. Then he told Kang what he had been able to learn from them. That took no time at all.
“So all Julie has been able to decrypt from the whole drive is just thirty-three files?”
“So far, but sixteen of them are the ones we found that were opened after Tyler was murdered. That has to be important.”
“Don’t you think, sir, those files were just opened by someone at CID as part of the investigation?”
“The timestamps are too close to the murder. The investigation, such as it was, hadn’t started when someone used his laptop to open these sixteen files. My guess is that all sixteen were opened between the time Tyler was killed and the time his body was found.”
“So whoever opened them probably either killed him or knew who did.”
Tay nodded.
“You think they were checking Tyler’s laptop to find out how much Tyler knew, sir?”
“I think they realized what he knew before they killed him. They were just trying to figure out if he’d told anyone else.”
Tay pointed to the laptop’s screen with his forefinger.
“And if these were the files they checked,” he finished, “these are the files that contain whatever they killed Tyler over.”
“That’s a bit of a leap, sir.”
“Maybe.”
Tay exhaled. His cigarette smoke curled lazily into the air and added its mass to the crud that was already there.
“But it’s all I’ve got, Robbie, and I’m almost out of time.”
“Okay, sir,” Kang said, pulling the laptop toward him. “I’ll do my best.”
Kang displayed the decrypted files one by one on the laptop’s screen and read slowly through each of them. After a while, he pulled out his phone, tapped at the keyboard, and compared what he saw there to something on the laptop’s screen.
“This would go a lot faster, sir,” he grumbled, “if you had a Wi-Fi connection.”
Tay said nothing. He just sat quietly and left Kang alone.
Eventually Tay went inside and made coffee, mostly to have something to do. Kang never touched the cup Tay sat on the table for him, but Tay drank two cups and smoked two more cigarettes waiting for Kang to finish reading and tell him something he didn’t already know.
Kang worked silently at the laptop for nearly an hour. Then he pushed back his chair, stood up, and stretched.
“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” he said.
“You know where it is.”
Tay fidgeted while he waited for Kang to come back. He reached for his pack of Marlboros, then put it down again without taking another cigarette and sat drumming his fingers on the table.
When Kang came back and settled himself again in front of the laptop, Tay could no longer contain his impatience.
“Well?” he asked.
“I don’t know, sir. Maybe there’s something, but…”
Kang trailed off.
“I’m not sure what it means,” he finished.
“Tell me.”
So Kang did.
“These numbers here…”
Kang turned the laptop so that Tay could see the screen. He put his finger on the first group of numbers in Decrypted File 1. It was the same group of numbers Tay had tried over and over to make sense of.
“I thought at first that this might be a simple number code used inside the encrypted file.”
Tay waited. He knew there was nothing to be gained by pressing Kang to get to the point. Kang often took an indirect route
, but get there he always did. Eventually.
“While I was trying to figure out what kind of code it was, it occurred to me there was something familiar about how the numbers were written.”
Tay nodded and made a rolling gesture with his right hand.
“Don’t you see, sir? These numbers aren’t a code at all. They’re GPS coordinates.”
Tay had no clue what GPS coordinates looked like, but he didn’t want to admit that to Kang so he just nodded slowly and tried to look thoughtful.
He ran his eyes down the document on the screen. All seven groups of numbers contained four lines, and each line consisted of two numbers written the same way. A one or two digit number, followed by a decimal point, and then four, five, or six more digits. Was that what GPS coordinates looked like? He had no idea.
“What are they coordinates for, Robbie?”
“Well, sir, that’s what doesn’t make much sense. When I used Google maps on my phone to check the coordinates, they were all over the place.”
Kang pointed again to the first four-line group.
“These four,” he continued, “are all locations in major cities in Southeast Asia. But they’re all in different cities: Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Ho Chi Minh City, and Kuala Lumpur.”
“Maybe The Future is developing software to run driverless cars in cities other than Singapore.”
“That’s what I thought, too, sir, at first. But then I checked a few of these other coordinates.”
Kang ran his finger over the next three groups of numbers.
“These aren’t locations in cities. They’re not even locations on land. I haven’t looked them all up yet, but the ones I put into Google maps all took me to places that were in the ocean. Take this line here, sir.”
Tay put his finger on the second line in the third group of numbers.
7.493196, 103.579102
“When you put those coordinates into Google maps, you get a spot in the South China Sea that’s about halfway between Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala Lumpur.”
Tay thought about that and automatically reached for a cigarette. Thinking for Tay was helped along by the taste and smell of tobacco. Perhaps it shouldn’t be, but it was.
