“The symbols in the tomb are a base-twenty mathematical system,” Falcon told Edwin and Cat Talavera at breakfast. “The major and I worked on it all night. It wasn’t until Theresa showed up that everything fit into place.” He thoughtfully scooped scrambled eggs onto his springy plastic fork.
“I don’t get it,” Edwin said from where he sat beside Cat. “Base twenty?”
Cat told him: “Our mathematics are base ten. Every time you count to ten, you add an integer, and start over. In our case, after you reach nine, you restart with one-zero, one-one, one-two, which you know as ten, eleven, twelve, and so on. Then, at nineteen, you restart with two zero, which is twenty.”
“Well, yeah!” Edwin arched his neck slightly, irritated, “I mean, how else you count?”
Talavera’s expression pinched. “If you count in base five, the Arabic numerals are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, and so forth. With 10 equal to our 5, 11 equal to 6, and so on. The numeral 20 would represent 10 in the actual count. In base twenty you have separate integers up to nineteen. Then you restart.”
“That’s the dots and bars,” Falcon told them. “Different symbols that count to nineteen, and then add the odd, football-shaped character which is a zero.”
“Why not just do it the way we do?” Edwin wondered. “It’s easier.”
Falcon shrugged. “I’m not sure. Something about positioning hasn’t made sense yet. In some of the photos the dots and bars are consistently horizontal, and in others, vertical. As to why they did it one way versus the other, I haven’t been able to figure out. And I’m pretty sure the patterning is a means of either multiplication or division. And then there are other symbols with numerical values I haven’t deciphered.”
Edwin gave him a wide grin. “If I had a computer, I could run every permutation for you in minutes.” The grin fell. “Used to be as much as ten hours a day I’d spend programming, slipping through the systems. I ever tell you ’bout the time I set up a transfer? Had 1.2 billion tagged in the European Central Bank. I’d just initiated a transfer to the Cayman Islands, only to have Lieutenant Higgins stick his damn head in the door and yell, ‘Shut it down, ET. You can email your girl later. I need you on duty now ’cause Private Verzano just hurled his lunch all over a keyboard.’”
“Now that’s prize bullshit if I ever heard it,” Winny Swink growled as she hooked a chair on the other side of the table and pulled it out with a toe. Balancing breakfast in one hand and coffee in the other, she slipped gracefully into the seat.
“No bullshit, Major,” Edwin told her, using his truth face. “Banks transfer money all the time. It’s all initiated by email, monitored, special authorization codes, the right account numbers, tracking, and routing. The bigger the bank, the more they wire back and forth. We’re talking tens of billions of dollars a day. The trick for me was to get inside the system, monitor who was sending what to who and which account. But see, you gotta know which accounts are flagged for those receipts. If I’d tried to transfer say, into my own account in Detroit? Wham! They’d a slammed the door on my ass before I even started. But from bank to bank, with the right authorization, and into a previously okayed account number? Piece of cake.”
“But you still did not get the money?” Talavera asked as she sprinkled pepper onto her eggs.
“Had to learn the system first,” Edwin said with a shrug. “Would have taken a couple of weeks to do it right. Now, if I’d had time, I’d a sent the money back with a little interest a couple of hours later.” He gestured with his fork. “Got to keep the books balancing. Got to use the right authorization code. Got to pick the times of day when transactions are heavy. They’ve got smart people watching all this, and they’re looking for someone like me to slip in. You can bet they see that transfer. But they see the right authorization code, and the money comes back with interest, it means the transfer’s approved, made money, and came back. All legit, right?”
Winny took a forkful of overcooked eggs. “You’re telling me no one would notice when you opened an account with 1.2 billion in it?”
“Major, you don’t just dump it into a personal account and expect to get away with it. Got to run it through investment firms, buy bonds, T notes, funnel it through giant corporations. How you think these big banks been losing so many billions?”
“You could do it.” Falcon’s eyes focused on infinity. “It’s a simple stochastic manipulation within what should be a complex deterministic system.”
Edwin stopped, toast halfway to his mouth. “What he just say?”
But Falcon was gone, his expression blank, head slightly cocked. It happened when his brain got sidetracked.
“Forget it,” Swink muttered. “Next thing you know he’s going to be conversing with the air again.” She gestured with her fork. “Now, ET, if you really wanted to do some good with that computer of yours, you’d be figuring a way to transfer all of us out of here and back to active duty.”
“So you could steal another airplane?” Karla Raven, her steel-gray eyes on Swink, dropped into the seat next to Talavera.
Swink gave Raven a slit-eyed appraisal. “Let’s just say they pissed me off.”
“My kind of pissed off,” Raven agreed. “You knew you were on a one-way flight even before you climbed into that cockpit.”
“What did you do, Major?” Talavera used her napkin to carefully clean grease from her thin fingers.
Raven tried to spread icy margarine over dry toast with the rubbery excuse of a knife. “The major, here, failed her psych evaluation. Not that they hadn’t known for years, but Swink has a gift to go along with her ‘You better kiss my ass ’cause I’m better than you’ attitude.”
“Fucking A, Chief.” Swink turned her gaze from Raven to Talavera. “You see, kid, if it’s capable of getting off the ground, I can fly it.” She extended her arms, hands flat, fingers fluttering. “It just flows right out of my center, down these arms and legs, as well as right through my ass and into the seat. Can’t tell where I stop and the machine begins. A merging, you know? And it’s like . . .” Her eyes closed as if savoring an out-of-body experience. “You just gotta live it.”
Edwin arched an eyebrow. “Man, I heard they tagged you with antisocial personality disorder, Major. I looked that up in the DSM. Axis II, code 301.7. Then it go on and list seven misbehaviors. Which three of them seven you guilty of?”
Swink stiffened. “You looking for trouble, Private?”
Chief Raven growled. “You’re antisocial, not stupid, Major. Nobody normal steals an F-22 Raptor from Andrews, buzzes the Capitol and White House, then flies rings around the DC air defenses. And you weren’t happy to stop there, let alone go out in a flame of glory as they shot you down. Nope, not Major Winny Winchester Swink.” Raven leveled a hard finger. “You had to land the damn thing on I-95 northbound, taxi it up the interchange to a fucking convenience store. By the time the cops got there, you were sitting on the wing, sucking down a bottle of wine.”
“I remember,” Talavera whispered. “They said it was the airplane! That it had a malfunction. That the pilot heroically landed it and saved lives. That was you?”
Swink’s thin lips bent in a crooked grin. “Call it the ultimate ‘fuck you.’ Worst part of the whole thing? The best wine they had in that crummy convenience store had a screw top.”
Out of the blue, Falcon interjected, “They tolerate and condone a certain amount of reckless disregard—as long as you have the requisite skills to back it up and don’t destroy the airplanes.” He cocked his head. “But that’s why you washed out of NASA. It’s a different culture.”
Swink seemed to bristle. “The shitheads I had to deal with at NASA couldn’t find their dicks with two hands and a flashlight.”
Raven added, “But it made you perfect as a test pilot for the skunk works, didn’t it?” She glanced at Talavera. “Those are the black programs, the ones developing experimental aircraft. They’ll put up with some insubordination in return for genius at the stick, composure in the face of disaster, and sheer guts.”
Swink winked at Edwin. “I could give a shit how they categorize me in the DSM. I went out as the greatest legend the USAF has ever known.”
“And—” Raven gestured with her fork, “—now we’re the ones stuck with your charming, self-centered, warm and fuzzy personality.”
“Gee, Chief.” Swink went back to her eggs. “Maybe the Skipper will up your citalopram, and life will just get rosy all over.”
Edwin glanced sidelong at the chief, a flicker of anxiety building. Baiting Karla Raven just wasn’t done. At least not by anyone figuring on a long and pain-free life.
Then, to Edwin’s amazement, Chief Raven threw her head back and laughed.