“I wasn’t supposed to tell him over the phone. It could only be in person.”
Jolaine slapped the steering wheel. “Goddammit, Graham, whatever she told you is the reason we’re running for our lives.”
“You don’t know that. Mom told me that the only way to escape alive was to follow the protocol.”
“What protocol?”
“I don’t know!” he shouted. “Okay? I don’t know what any of this is about.”
“But you do know something,” Jolaine insisted. “The man on the ground outside his car—”
He shouted, “3155AX475598CVRLLPAHQ449833 D0Z.”
Jolaine reared back in her seat. “What?”
“You asked me and I just told you,” Graham said. “That’s what’s on the piece of paper. That’s what Mom told me. Do you want to know the phone number, too?”
No, she didn’t. What kind of code—
“It’s completely random,” Graham said. “I don’t see any pattern, the repeats are insignificant. There’s no dictionary code that I can find, and while I was alone in the motel, I tried to find some kind of Bible code, but couldn’t. Did you know they have a free Bible in the nightstand?”
Jolaine wasn’t interested in nibbling at the Gideon bait. “Say the code again,” she said.
“Why? Would you know if I missed something?”
There was the petulance that she’d come to know so well over the years. But he also raised a good point. “You mean, you really can remember all of that.”
He repeated the code. “Ask me in three hours or five days, and it’ll still be the same.”
“How?”
“The shrinks at school say it’s my gift.” The way he leaned on that word told her that he considered it to be anything but. “I just remember every friggin’ thing. Numbers are easiest and names are hardest.”
Jolaine processed all of that. At least, she tried to process it. “So, it’s numbers and letters,” she said. “What do they mean?”
“I don’t know!” His voice squeaked with frustration. “And I swear to God I’m telling the truth. I asked her, and she told me not to worry about it. She said I didn’t need to know what it meant. I only needed to remember it. So, now I’ve got this shit in my head, and a protocol to follow — whatever that means — and people are trying to kill me. Are we having fun yet?”
Something about his delivery made her believe him. He seemed genuinely bewildered by it all.
“What did the wounded guy say to you?” Graham asked.
Jolaine sensed the turnaround was an honesty check, and she wondered if the boy had done it on purpose.
“He said if you follow the protocol, all of this will end.”
Graham shrank in his seat. “So, I should have just talked with him. But you told me—”
“Don’t draw the wrong conclusion,” Jolaine said. “I’m not sure you did the wrong thing, and I’m really not sure that sharing that code — whatever it means — would do anything to take us off whatever hit lists we’re on.”
“What are you saying?”
Jolaine sighed again as she weighed the propriety of going where this conversation was leading them. Screw it. In for a dime…
“I don’t want you to panic about what I’m going to say—”
“Oh, crap.”
“—or even overly stress. But think about it. Those numbers and letters — that code — are what the people attacking us want. If it’s worth killing for, then it’s worth killing to protect after it’s revealed.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Think,” she said. “You possess a code that people really want to have. That’s motivation to keep you alive. But once you reveal the code to the people who want it, that motivation goes away.” She pulled up at a stop sign, came to a full halt, and then moved on. Little towns were famous for speed traps and overzealous cops.
Graham shook his head. “No, that can’t be right. Those people in the parking lot a few minutes ago weren’t trying to save me. They were trying to kill me.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” Jolaine said. “I think they may have been there to kidnap you. I think we surprised them by shooting back. In fact, I’m convinced of it.”
“So, what does that mean?” Graham asked. “To us, that is.”
Jolaine considered the question. “It means that we can’t trust anyone about anything.” She wasn’t sure that she could connect the dots verbally, but she gave it a try. “Whatever the code does — I assume it unlocks something secret and important, else why have a code in the first place? — it makes sense to me that it was as important to your parents to have it as it was for the shooters to guarantee that they didn’t get it.”
“Or maybe the shooters wanted it for themselves,” Graham offered.
That was good. He was on the same page as she. “Extrapolating out, then,” Jolaine continued, “whichever side wins in the struggle, the other side is going to want to destroy the code.”
Graham leaned his head back into the headrest and closed his eyes. “And the code lives in my head,” he said. He lolled his head over to look at Jolaine. “This is really, really bad, isn’t it?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
At this point in monitoring an operation, not much could pull Venice’s attention from her team’s radio traffic. The alert bell on her computer was one of them. The bell meant that based on the parameters she had established to track the actions of Jolaine Cage and Graham Mitchell, ICIS had found something worth reporting. She pulled up the screen, and her heart skipped. The police had been dispatched to a shoot-out in the parking lot of the Hummingbird Motel in Napoleon, Ohio. Multiple reports to the emergency operations center of machine gun fire with people dead in the street. Police were on their way.
This was not the time to interrupt Jonathan with such a new development — if ever there was a time for uninterrupted concentration, it was when he was about to crash a door — but she needed more details.
Generally speaking, ICIS ran five to ten minutes behind real time. It was a great way to dial in to fairly obscure events, but when something was this high profile, local television news was often the fastest route to a thorough overview. Reporters might not get the nuances correct in the early moments, but these days every station with more than ten kilowatts of power had its own fleet of helicopters, and they would shoot each other out of the sky to air the first live feed of a crime scene.
A CBS affiliate had a bird near the scene. Other networks had franchises in the area, but she’d long ago hacked the code to access the live feeds for CBS — their video was transmitted in real time, in unedited form — so whenever possible, she went there first.
At any given moment, dozens of live feeds flooded news networks from all over the world. They didn’t just beam from their own camera operations, either. Newsrooms monitored the feeds from every competitor, as well as those from Al Jazeera and BBC, and God only knew how many other news organizations. That required a fair amount of sifting, but she’d done this enough times before that she made fairly quick work of it.
ICIS dinged again. Police units were on the scene, and they confirmed six dead, with several of the motel guests unaccounted for. Officers were in the process of interviewing witnesses.
The no-coincidences rule lived on. Venice already knew who was on the other side of that gunfight, and because the original reports made no mention of a wounded child — always the headline, even for cops — she knew that at a minimum, Graham was well enough to not to have died on the spot.
The video feed she’d selected showed images from too far away as the news chopper approached the scene and the cameraman sharpened his focus.