Bearing a tray, Cat knocked lightly on Edwin’s door, asking “How are you doing?”
“Come on in.” He sat hunched over the computer, feeling like some bizarre dark spider. His lips were pinched, jaw muscles knotted. He wore only a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, his feet in flip-flops.
“You weren’t in the cafeteria. Since no one had seen you, I was worried. You didn’t come in for breakfast, either. I thought I’d bring you a tray.”
“Thanks.”
She placed it on the side of his desk and seated herself on the arm of his easy chair. Awareness of her presence faded until she said, “Earth calling ET.”
“Yo?” Edwin tapped a couple of keys, his frown deepening.
“Hey!” She clapped her hands, startling him enough to look up. “I’m here! Look! Live girl. In your room. Brought you food because she’s concerned about you. That mean anything, computer geek? Or should I pick up the tray and go look for someone who might actually appreciate the thought?”
He blinked a couple of times; the words weren’t quite registering. Then a slow smile crept along his lips. “Yeah, thank you, Cat.” He stretched, sniffed, and said, “Smells good.”
Shifting the computer to the side, he slid the tray before him and dove into the macaroni and cheese, the sliced ham, Texas toast, and green beans. “What’s up?”
“Karla evacuated a weirdo from Boulder last night, then blew up a car on Academy Boulevard that was tailing Major Savage after he picked up Dr. France and some skinny anthropologist. It’s all over the news. Dr. Farmer is missing, presumed arrested by the police in Boston, or captured by Skientia. He killed three Talon security agents in Boston with some kind of Mayan war club. That’s all over the news, too.”
“Exciting.” Edwin wondered when a meal had ever tasted so good.
Cat cocked her head, no doubt disgusted by the way he was shoving food into his mouth.
She added, “Savage wants us packed and ready to go. He says that Skientia’s going to be here knocking on our door any minute. The Skipper, Winny, and Raven are on their way to Peterson to see about a helicopter. You have to be ready to leave in an hour. That’s my update. What’s yours?”
“Skientia, man. It’s like they know I’m after them.” He gestured his frustration. “That’s okay. Part of the game, you know? What gets me is why I can’t break the damn passwords. I ran entire dictionaries against their system. Ran algorithms based on letters, numbers, dates, numerical codes. I did get one hit: something with a lot of ts, ls, ks, and zs, but it only led me to a purchase order.”
“Did you try running things from physics? Avogadro’s number, Planck’s constant?”
“Oh, yeah. I download an entire physics text and use a program to sort for phrases, special numbers, then try to combine mathematics. Tens of thousands of functions a second.”
“You can do that with that little laptop?”
“No way, girl! I’m using the NSA counter-cryptography computers. Not directly, you know, but through three different cutouts. Got to have heavy firepower. This laptop controls the computers that control the computers that control the computers that’ll break into Skientia.”
“And how’s it going?”
Edwin focused his bloodshot eyes on hers. “Got a highly technical term for you, girl: Jack shit. That’s what I got so far.”
“And if you can’t break it?”
He ran a long-fingered hand over his close-cropped hair. “Man, we might have to abort this whole damn thing.”