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Please 6
Speak 7
Quickly 8
Look 9
Be Quick 10
All the same words used in the message! No wonder the email couldn’t be translated. It used the Houdini Code from more than a hundred years earlier. And only a magician would know where it was from or how to read it!
A magician…and her.
She printed up the page with the code, then set it side-by-side with the email page and set to work. She noted on the subject line that “Be Quick Twice Tell” was the first phrase before a hyphen. Well, if “Be Quick” equaled ten, twice would be the number twenty. Combine that with “Tell” which was the number five, and you had twenty-five.
She turned to the computer and did a search on “numbers equal letters code.” The first entry was a code used by the Boy Scouts and listed it like this:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
She printed that page up too, put it next to her other papers, and set to work. If “Be Quick Twice Tell” was indeed twenty-five, that would be the letter “Y.” She assumed the hyphen was the break between letters, and that anything between hyphens were to be added together. She also decided that the commas represented the spaces between entire words.
She worked away, and it was slow going, as she caught mistakes in her technique and had to refine it. However, about forty-five minutes later, she had this message handwritten across the paper with the email:
Subject: Your Fee
Message: The Fee is as we agreed. I will cut you in.
A smile came across Pro’s face. Not only had she broken the code, she had been able to translate it into a message that made sense.
She glanced at the phone on her desk, wanting to call her partner, but realizing that perhaps a night with the auburn-haired Ms. Barker was exactly what he needed.
She quickly looked at the list of emails and proceeded to locate and print up the individual ones the Cyber Unit had sent to them between [email protected] and [email protected]
As the printer made noise creating finished documents, Pro realized two things: she was famished, and her father had been right.
There was someone else involved who might indeed be the murderer.
And he was definitely a magician.
10. DeKolta Chair
Pro grabbed a greasy burger and even greasier fries at the bodega near the subway stop for her Brooklyn apartment. With her leather attaché under one arm and her purse under the other, she unwrapped the paper and took bites of the meat and bread combination as she walked toward home. She made little humming noises of pleasure in the back of her throat as she went.
By the time she’d reached her brownstone, the burger was gone, and she wiped the grease from her hands with a wad of napkins as she got her key.
Once she was through the outer door, she headed up the three floors to her studio, munching on fries one at a time.
She undid the three locks on her door—two were deadbolts and one opened a lock that held a metal bar in place. The bar was jammed into a holder on the floor and made the door impossible to break through.
The joys of life in NYC.
She came in and dumped her things onto the coffee table in front of the sofa that was her pull-out bed. She stuffed another fry into her mouth as she headed toward her tiny kitchen, then paused. The sofa was closed, and she was sure she left it open and her bed a mess when she headed out to get coffee for her mother that morning. Now it was closed and there was even the blanket she used on cold nights neatly folded on top.
