Codebreaker by Katherine Myers

Author:Katherine Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Salvo Press
Published: 2013-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

The city streets of Portland were glossy with rain, looking like a black ribbon shining under the glow of the car's headlights. Since it was late Sunday night, and the next morning started a new workweek, there was very little traffic. The closed city offices and stores made the town look sleepy. Meg, herself, felt anything but sleepy. She was exhausted, battered, and drained, but still too traumatized to relax. She and Ross had begun asking each other questions. He had wanted to know what branch of the government she worked for, and she had wanted to know how he'd tracked her down and found out her real name. He was just finishing that story, which explained the call on her answering machine from Belinda at the Half Moon Gift Shop.

"That's all there was to it. So when you get a very nice Fenton vase from the gift shop, don't be surprised."

"I'm impressed you were able to find me from such a small lead. Very clever."

"That's me. Clever. You, though, are probably some kind of genius," he said, looking over at her and smiling. "Yeah, don't give me that innocent expression."

"I'm not a genius."

"You broke into Signet's server the first week you were there, and then managed to break through Dent's two passwords and steal his files, which flipped him out, by the way. No average person could have waltzed in and done that. Which is why I'm guessing you've got an I.Q. that makes the rest of us look like pitiful apes."

"I'm more of an idiot savant than a genius," she said, smiling in self-deprecation.

"What do you mean?" Ross asked.

"I have a skill. Kind of a gift, maybe you'd say. That's all."

"And being gifted is different than being a genius?"

"I think so."

"What kind of gift do you have, if you don't mind an average ape asking?"

Meg studied the drifting shadows that crossed his face as they drove past well-lit shops. He had a likeable kind of personality that was surprisingly easy to talk to. It reminded her of chatting on the Internet, only live. "Well, for one thing, I can look at codes and see the patterns in them. Sometimes they jump out at me when I look at the figures, though not always. My boss says it's like playing the piano by ear instead of reading notes."

"Interesting. Did you know you wanted to do that kind of thing as a career?"

"No, actually I was going to school in Washington, studying criminal psychology when one of my friends told me about a contest on the Internet. She knew I liked cryptograms and thought I'd be interested. When I went to the web site it only had a brief explanation about the prize money and the contest rules, then a screen page that was filled with quarter-inch dots of color in tons of different shades. That was the code."

"Just dots of color?"

"Uh-huh."

"And you figured it out?"

"It actually had a pattern that seemed visible to me, though my friends couldn't see it.

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