Walker looked at Paul. Paul looked back, his blank stare quickly fading to one of being caught out.
“She told you?”
“No,” Walker said. “But you just did.”
“Damn.” Paul turned back to his screen, and stared absently at the running code. “Yeah, he knew. Kind of. He knew I liked her. He knew we’d hooked up. It was—it started out a kid thing, you know? We hooked up once in high school, at a party—I mean, she was a freshman, I was a senior, there was booze, and I was a teenage guy, right—I had sex on the mind the whole time. And, well, she was bangin’. Still got it, too, but I don’t think about that much anymore.”
Walker let that slide. He didn’t much care what Paul felt these days. He wanted to know as much as he could about Jasper, and the relationships that he had. Walker was looking for patterns. Behavioral traits. Choices made in the past that might influence decisions taken in the present and the future.
“Then,” Paul said, snapping back to reality, “a few years later, in college, we went out for a semester. She was doing her masters in psych. Jasp and I were doing computer engineering. It was before our stuff took off. Before we ditched college. It didn’t work out.”
“What was Jasper’s reaction?”
“He didn’t know about that.”
“Just high school?”
“Yep.”
“You kept a six-month thing secret?”
“Yep.”
“And you were dorming with him?”
“Yep. I’d visit Monica.”
“What did he think you were doing?”
“Going to the gym.”
“Really?” Walker didn’t see it.
“Fencing, okay? I was pretty good too. I sparred with the Olympic guys and had my share of wins.”
“And you’re sure he didn’t know?”
“I never communicated with her electronically.”
“What—you think he’d keep tabs on your comms?”
“Not mine. I know he watched hers. He’d read her emails and phone messages. This was pre-Facebook, right? Times were simpler, it was easier to be discreet. Now, no one can hide anything.”
Walker nodded, not quite believing that Paul had managed to have a covert affair with his best friend’s sister right under his nose with no way of traditional communication. If Jasper really hadn’t noticed it, either Monica and Paul had been very good, or Jasper wasn’t as good at deciphering patterns and behavior as his job and clearance would suggest.
“How did you communicate?”
“We had some set times. Plus we’d made an arrangement to go to the library each day, between two and three, I think it was; if the books in a certain section were arranged a certain way, it’d mean a day and time and place to meet up. And I’d ride by her apartment off campus late most nights, and if there was a lamp on in the window . . .”
Paul sat up. The code had stopped. He tapped away at the computer.
“Oh . . . oh,” he said, smiling. “Oh, you’re good.”
“What is it?”
“It’s Jasper. He’s left crumbs—and chucked a few in front of him.”
“You know the next target?”
“Not yet, but I will. I think.”
“Where?” Walker said, leaning forward. The random letters and numbers meant nothing to him.
“When the—” Paul stopped.
“Is it . . .” Walker prompted; all he could see was that the data had stopped streaming down in a ceaseless waterfall of information.
“Yes,” Paul said. He highlighted a number at the end of the code. “This is it. It doesn’t belong here—it has no purpose. Numbers.”
“And?” Walker said. “It could be random.”
“It means he’s leaving us crumbs—breadcrumbs, you know, like the nursery rhyme.”
“Fairytale,” Walker said. “Hansel and Gretel.”
“He was obsessed with fairytales,” Paul said. “That and Greek mythology. Anything where the forces of evil were big and complex but overcome often by an everyman-type character.”
“Where do the breadcrumbs lead?” Walker asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Can you track them?”
“I wouldn’t be as good as I think I am if I couldn’t.”
Fingers whirred over the keyboard.
Paul hesitated, then said, “You want me to find where Jasper is being held captive?”
“I doubt they’d have let him see where they took him,” Walker said.
“It’s more like where the next planned attack is occurring—whether they’re keeping him alive to stop the attacks, or they made him code them all and then they killed him, he’s letting us know where the next is. It’s somewhere on the west coast.”
“Look it up on a map of—”
That’s when he heard the scream. A woman. Monica.