CHAPTER 36

 

Lumley didn’t know any mathematicians. In fact she didn’t know anyone, family or friends, who could even balance their own checkbook. But she did know how to use Google and within minutes at her computer she had the email addresses of half a dozen mathematicians who worked in New York City. She sent the same short email to all six and by the end of her shift she had received replies from four. All were intrigued and the following day she visited them one by one and left them thumbdrives containing Slater’s book.

All were male, all were in their thirties and all had facial hair, though one of them was bald and another had hair that had receded halfway across his scalp. All four wore glasses and all seemed to have trouble looking her in the eyes. Three were Doctors and the fourth was a consultant whose clients included the IRS, the ATF and the FBI. His name was Alex Brennan and he seemed the most normal of the four. He wore a dark grey suit and a tie and there was a photograph of a chubby blonde woman and three equally chubby children on his desk. His office was several floors below the FBI’s field office in Federal Plaza and on the wall behind him were framed commendations and plaques from police forces around the country. He had polished his horn-rimmed spectacles as he listened to Lumley and had nodded enthusiastically while looking out of the window. When she gave him the thumbdrive she’d noticed that his nails were bitten to the quick.

It was Brennan who got back to her first, just twenty-four hours later, to announce that he’d cracked the code. Cracked it and come up with three locations already. All of them in New York.