Arthur, coming upon the bereft and weeping little girl who missed her family, had befriended her. The old man had provided a pocket of retreat for her when things had become too overwhelming.
And his stories of his adventures as a code talker, told in his lilting, soft tenor, had lit a passion in Kim that had never abated. When she proved to be gifted with both maths and languages, becoming a code breaker had been the obvious choice.
Arthur had always delivered his tidbits of knowledge while caring for the horses. Memories of him were now accompanied by scents of straw and dusty sunlight. She could see his hands, the color of pecans and gnarled into knots so the fingers looked like branches, grasping the currycomb as it moved through a pale blond mane. “The trick to seeing anythin’,” he’d say, “is to remember it’s not what it is on the outside. Code, woman, friend, dog—it’s all the same. Look through the top to the middl-a things.”
Look through the top.
Often that meant simply letting go of perceptions as they stood, to allow new angles to enter her brain. Kim let the reams of code float over the surface of her closed eyelids. The e-mails were exchanged in Arabic, or at least in Arabic script. The messages had almost certainly begun in the Arabic language, as well, although the words were now nothing recognizable in any language the computers could read.
The quirky dots and swirls of Arabic lettering moved on her eyelids, a dance. Along with computers that had been running the cipher text through programs all day, Kim and her partner, Scott, had been manually trying various approaches to decipher the code.
The Arabic letters turned into a swirling, Jasmine-and-Aladdin cartoon script, the dots exaggerated. She slammed her feet to the floor, jolting herself back awake.
“Damn,” she said. “Damn. Damn. Damn.” A sense of urgency built in her chest.
Solve the code.
The answer was right there. She could feel it. What was she missing?
Kim focused on the computer screen and punched some buttons on her keyboard to bring up the program running in the background.
From the radio on her desk came a somber female voice. “President James Whitlow endured questions from the press today regarding the Tom King-Puerto Isla scandal. Many Americans are beginning to question the connection between Puerto Isla and the current unrest in Berzhaan.”
To wake herself up, Kim said aloud, “Unrest in Berzhaan. There’s an unusual situation.”
The unrest wasn’t unusual, but some blamed the United States, or at least the current administration, for the trouble in the small Middle Eastern country. It didn’t matter to Kim whether the assessment was correct or incorrect—her concern was that there were terrorist cells that were determined to punish what they saw as the evil empire of the United States and make a statement by whatever means necessary.
With presidential elections coming up and the general unease about the world situation and the scandal of Puerto Isla hanging over the President, the situation offered too many opportunities.
Again she felt the urgency, that hollow sense of dread. Break the code.
On the radio, the announcer went on, “In other news, presidential candidate, Gabriel Monihan, appeared at a packed rally in New York City this afternoon, part of a ten-city election blitz that began yesterday in Washington, D.C.”
A window on Kim’s work computer popped up. In a blue box with red lettering, she read:
LEXLUTHOR: How’s the code chopping?
Kim grinned. Alexander Tanner was an FBI bomb-squad expert in Chicago who had assisted her with a case two months ago, when a young hacker used bomb schematics to encrypt messages through the upper reaches of government. Privately, Kim had been impressed with the kid, a bored seventeen-year-old with too much time on his hands and a brain that needed challenges. Lex had been the first to spot the schematics while working an unrelated case and had e-mailed Kim to ask her advice over whether the coding could be done.
Their cooperation—an NSA employee and an FBI agent—would have been unheard of several years ago. Animosity had been more the game in those days. But reporter after reporter had turned up examples of situations that could have been defused by real communication between agencies and the pressure to cooperate had become too powerful to resist. The top-level security agencies in the country were—at least officially—encouraging interdepartmental communication, including this connected link of instant messaging within the various agencies.
It was working. Sort of. The animosity between various agencies, the secretive and jealous ways they guarded their sources, the eternal race to see who would solve which problem first, would never entirely disappear.
Although she’d never met Lex in person, Kim liked his sense of humor and his breezy ways—such as using the name of a comic-book supervillain as his instant-messaging handle.
She typed:
WINDTALKER2: Hey, guy! Still chopping. You’re out late.
LEXLUTHOR: The same could be said of you.
WINDTALKER2: Trying to crack this baby. Feels big.
LEXLUTHOR: Yeah? Wanna brainstorm?
WINDTALKER2: Might be getting too scattered to think now. A.M.?
LEXLUTHOR: No can do. Big meetings.
Kim was overtaken by a yawn. She typed:
WINDTALKER 2: All right. How come you’re working so late?
LEXLUTHOR: Politicians up the wazoo in Chicago this week. Green candidate today. Prez appearing tomorrow. Monihan on Thursday.
WINDTALKER2: Bomb scares?
LEXLUTHOR: Dozens. Every lunatic in the greater metro area has a plan for saving the world. Gotta check ’em all. Been over the courthouse twenty times. The airport at least 452.
WINDTALKER2: 452? That would take a little time.
LEXLUTHOR: Well, maybe it was only six times. FELT like 452.
WINDTALKER2: Any bombs anywhere?
LEXLUTHOR: Nope. Real bombers don’t call ahead.
WINDTALKER2: Ah.
LEXLUTHOR: Hey. I looked up your picture on the company site.
WINDTALKER2: That’s creepy, Luthor.
LEXLUTHOR: Somebody told me you were hot.
WINDTALKER 2: It was probably me. I am hot, and don’t you forget it.
LEXLUTHOR: Kinda short. But then, I’m kinda ugly, so I guess we’re even.
WINDTALKER2: Short is a state of mind.
LEXLUTHOR: <clearing throat delicately> I might be in your area next week. You up for a cup of coffee or something?
WINDTALKER2:
