Falcon sat in a chair and watched a bead of sweat trickle from Edwin’s brow.
“You foul piece of shit!” Edwin slapped his hand on the desktop beside the keyboard.
Falcon jumped as if from a gunshot.
“I just got backhanded,” Edwin said through clenched jaws. “Again.” He gestured impotence. “The closest I get, Falcon, is with random letter generators. Nobody uses those. Keyboard combinations like qazwsx or zsecft, sure. But, man, I keep hitting all these combinations like tlakaz. What kind of word is that?”
Cat picked that moment to step in, a bucket of fried chicken and a sack of sides hanging in her hands. “Got food.” She stepped over to the wet bar and started laying it out. “What other combinations came close, ET?”
“Almost had it with Yaxtun.” He stared at the flashing cursor.
Cat straightened. “How stupid can we be?”
“Whacchu mean?”
“You called it yax ton.” Cat smiled. “It’s pronounced Yash’toon.”
“Huh?”
Cat hurried over, bending down beside him to stare at the infuriating cursor. “Mayan! ET, pull up a Mayan dictionary. Run the Ch’olan and Yucatec dictionaries against their passwords.”
“Mayan?” Edwin asked in astonishment. “Who in hell use Mayan?”
“Gray, for one,” she told him. “And if you were Skientia, looking for combinations of letters that wouldn’t cue off any of the world’s major languages, what could be better? It solves your problem about memory. Look up the Mayan word for jaguar, and you can always remember it.”
“Of course!” Falcon cried, then he settled back into his chair, panic-stricken. “It’s my fault. The major, Theresa, and I, we’re just not thinking!” He blinked, heart racing. “I hope it’s not this new medication. If I lose my abilities . . .”
His hands were fluttering as his panic built. Rudy was laughing where he slouched against the wall, his face filled with disgust.
Rudy? When had he come in?
He barely heard Edwin say, “You’re doing fine, Falcon. You got us this far. Time you let the rest of us do what we do best.” His fingers where flying on the keys. “There, got every search engine on earth looking for Mayan. Ch’olan, you say? How you spell that?”