Double Digit Read online

  I think we’ve established that I had an unusual childhood and an awesome dad. And do try this at home.

  “John, get my laptop.” John did as he was told. I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, but it’s really nice how he takes me seriously in these situations. Note to self: Try to avoid these situations from now on and find other situations to be taken seriously in. I stared at my page of numbers. “Go to Amazon. How many pages are in the paperback version of Silent Spring?”

  “Okay . . . Rachel Carson, Houghton Mifflin, 1962 . . . here it is, four hundred. Why?”

  Huh. Jonas Furnis was using a cipher text as his password. And I was guessing that it changed every five minutes to the first line of a different page of Silent Spring. That’s what the number at the end of the code was all about. “Can you find a PDF of the book? It has to be the paperback edition, so I know where the pages begin and end exactly.”

  “Looking, looking . . . yes. Here it is. What page?”

  I looked up at the code just as it was changing: RGFJHPWOL170. “Page one seventy. Read me the first line on that page.”

  John read, “The presence of any pesticide . . .”

  The countdown began.

  IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO DO, PLEASE DON’T DO IT HERE

  I HAD TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES ON THE CLOCK, which meant that I had five tries to get this right. I had to take the letter part of the code on the box and convert it to numbers and then take the first nine letters on page 170 (THEPRESEN) and convert them to numbers. Then I had to subtract the Silent Spring stream from the coded stream to get a new set of numbers, which I would then convert back to letters and enter into the keypad. I started and was too late. I was getting so close that I was getting flustered.

  The current code changed to HXVDQXLZB197. “John, read me the first line of page one ninety-seven. Hurry.”

  “And deceived the government chemists.”

  “I before e, or e before i?” This always baffles me, and if I was going to have to explain that question further, my head was going to implode.

  “E before i.” So the nine letters were ANDDECEIV. Those letters translate into 1, 14, 4, 4, 5, 3, 5, 9, 22. The current code on the black box was HXVDQXLZB, which in numbers is 8, 24, 22, 4, 17, 24, 12, 26, 2. If I subtract that from the first stream of numbers, remembering to add back 26 when it’s negative, I get 7, 10, 18, 26, 12, 21, 7, 17, 6. The answer is GJRZLUGQF, and I was thirty seconds too late to save Manhattan.

  By this time John was completely onboard. The next code was YDYEEUISJ48. John immediately got to page 48. “The first word is predators. It’s nine letters. Go.” And I started again. The room was completely silent, or at least it was to me. The camera angle in the movie version of my life was so tight on that piece of paper that there could have been an explosion in the room and I wouldn’t have heard it. As soon as I had it, I typed ILTADATAQ into the keypad. Three beeps and a green light. Disarmed.

  I sat back in my chair, with the adrenaline still raging through my body. I wasn’t sure if I could move or cry or even regulate my breathing.

  Mr. Bennett pulled me up out of my chair and hugged me. “You are an amazing girl. We’ve just got to get you working for the right people.”

  John was standing behind his dad, impatient.

  “Mr. Bennett, if you don’t mind, could I . . . ?” He let me go and I fell into John’s arms.

  Danny joined us. “Group hug! Not bad, Digit. Now I’m going for a walk. Anywhere.” As he went upstairs, I heard him ask Adam, “Who gets all that cash?”

  John led me out of the commotion, up the creepy staircase, through the now-ransacked first floor, and outside. I hadn’t been outside in three days. The light stung my eyes and the cool air overwhelmed me. I took several deep breaths and took off my boots. I had to feel the dirt under my feet. I became aware of a loud noise above me and started to duck before I realized it was just the birds.

  “I think I need to sit down.” We sat at the base of a giant sycamore tree. The roots were spaced perfectly to fit us, like a love seat. John took my right hand between his two. “How’d you get away?”

  “Knife in the sole of my shoe. Those guys are total rookies.”

  We both laughed, a little nervously. “So I’m starting to think maybe I need to get my act together.” I turned to look at him and got a smile. “Tone it down a bit.”

  “Maybe if you need to get your teenage rebellion out of the way, you can just dye your hair pink or pierce something or smash people’s mailboxes? Isn’t that what they do on TV? I feel like the whole felony hacking thing isn’t really working for you.”

  “It was stupid. And impulsive. Normal people just wait for stuff.”

  John started to say something and then shook his head.

  “What?”

  “It’s just . . . I think that’s what I was trying to tell you. I was upset and scared and so far in over my head in our relationship. I didn’t say it right. I want to wait for you. I want to wait until we’ve got things figured out and can be in the same place, building a real life together. Not just having two lives that we’re half living and trying to describe to each other.”

  “What if you meet someone else?”

  “I won’t. You might, but I won’t. My dad would kill me.” He smiled and put his arm around me.

  “Am I going to go to jail?”

  “We’ll figure it out.” Just then Danny walked outside, and the breeze caught his grass skirt and blew it straight up. We all laughed and the birds kept singing and the fresh air kept being fresh.

  Don’t you wish the story ended right here?

  PUT ON YOUR BIG GIRL PANTIES AND DEAL WITH IT

  IN WHAT I NOW LIKE TO think of as my big Katniss moment, I realized when I got to Langley that a lot was going on while I was underground. My parents had moved into a Holiday Inn Express minutes from CIA headquarters. Mrs. Bennett had acted as their host, escorting them to the CIA every day and keeping them informed. When I arrived at Langley (uncuffed, thanks to Mr. Bennett), I found them waiting outside the director’s office with Mrs. Bennett and my uncle Bob.

  I rushed over to my dad, and Danny rushed to my mom. We switched. My mom was pleased to see that I’d showered. We had each had a turn in Jonas Furnis’s rainwater shower, complete with homemade soap. I found several unused bars in his private chambers, each wrapped in burlap and seemingly uncontaminated by a lunatic’s DNA. Assured that we were alive and smelled okay, my mom started: “Darling, your new sweater. Danny, where are your pants?”

  Mr. and Mrs. Bennett were hugging and whispering to each other until John approached, the third wheel. Mrs. Bennett said how proud she was of him, and I could see that she meant it. She looked really tired and uncharacteristically un-put-together. I imagine that this is probably as close as she’s ever come to losing her entire family. To my surprise, she came over and hugged me, a real hug. “Dear, I’m very happy that you are alive. No more trouble. We need you.” I nodded, resisting the temptation to salute.

  I turned to Uncle Bob, trying to hide my “What in the world are you doing here?” expression. “Um, hi, Uncle Bob. Nice to see you.”

  “Digit, I’m going to be representing you.”

  “I need a lawyer?”

  “This is more serious than you may think. The CIA cannot and will not sweep this thing under the carpet. There has been too much media coverage, too much unrest on campus.”

  “Unrest? Why?” I hadn’t thought about anything at all going on at MIT. I only knew the students on my hall, so I figured most people wouldn’t even know I was gone.

  “It started with a small group of hackers who see your arrest as a human rights violation. They think you’ve performed a service to the country by revealing a chink in its armor. Their enthusiasm has caught on, campus-wide. They’re demonstrating for TV cameras; they’re sleeping outside. That kind of unrest. The CIA is mortified, I think.”

  I turned to Mr. and Mrs. Bennett. “But the director, I mean, is it up to him? Isn’t
he your friend?” They were all staring at me, though slightly over my head. I turned around to see a very fit, very well-groomed man standing in the door to the office behind me. His face was so angular that I imagined his cheek slicing a tomato on an infomercial. With everyone behind me, he had to greet me first.

  “Are you her?” He barked those words in a way that made me feel like he should have a clipboard in his hand and a whistle around his neck. The head coach of the CIA. Go, team.

  I nodded.

  “In my office. Now. Bring your lawyer.” I took a step toward the office, and Uncle Bob, my parents, and John did the same. The director held up his hand. “You’re an adult. Leave your parents, leave your boyfriend. Just bring your lawyer.”

  “He’s not . . . we’re . . .” I stopped myself from making a distinction that didn’t seem to matter here. This guy is John’s godfather? Are you kidding? Mine is my mom’s cousin Jeffrey, who runs a summer camp and always has cookie crumbs in his pockets. Who’d pick this guy? I glanced around to make sure I hadn’t said it out loud. All clear.

  When we were all seated, the director behind his desk and Uncle Bob and me in unusually low chairs across from him, the director spoke a single word: “Thoughtless.”

  Silence.

  “Do you know what the word means?” Silence. “It means without thought. It does not mean that you were unable to think, which you most certainly are. It does not mean that you intended to do harm, which I have to assume you did not. It means that you acted without thought—without thought for the law, without thought for the consequences, without thought for your country. Thoughtless.”

  Silence.

  Now usually when someone is thoughtless (and I now had a fairly clear understanding of the exact definition of the word), it’s something like they forgot to write a thank-you note or they ate the last piece of cheesecake. These things can usually be fixed with a heartfelt apology. I gave it a whirl:

  “Mr. Director, sir, I hope you can accept my apology. It was an impulsive thing to do, and I agree that it was thoughtless. I just wanted to get to a party because I had promised my roommate, who had a broken heart. And as you know, I was already granted access to the information, so it was kind of like a timing . . .”

  “Please don’t say ‘timing difference.’ You hacked into the DOD—this is not to be made light of. You will be charged with a whole bunch of things that the lawyers will come up with. In my mind, you are on trial for felony thoughtlessness. Your trial begins in two weeks.” Wait. What?

  “Trial? Is this a joke? I’m a college kid. I did something stupid.”

  “Again, you’re technically a college adult. And, yes, you did. Among other things, you have the right to a speedy trial. Now go.”

  You’re probably wondering what I’m paying that crackerjack attorney of mine. You know, the one who doesn’t say a single word in my defense. I knew two things for sure: You get what you pay for, and it didn’t matter at all. I had no case.

  By four o’clock I’d been read my rights, formally arrested, and released to my parents on $40,000 bail. I couldn’t tell by that number if I was a huge flight risk or a minor one. The CIA could move at warp speed if it wanted to, and they seemed to be in a huge rush to wrap this up.

  Quick reality check: Sure, I was in a pretty stressful situation, but stress is completely relative. There is no absolute value to stress. There was a time when I thought that picking a lunch table was stressful. Of course, that was before I had to crack Jonas Furnis’s asinine code to keep him from blowing up Disney World. So if you’re wondering why I’m not curled up in a ball sobbing because there’s a 99 percent chance I’m going to be thrown in jail for some period of my youth, it’s because of these facts:

  I am not dead.

  Danny, Mr. Bennett, and Adam Ranks are not dead.

  John is neither dead nor in love with stupid Spencer.

  No one in Manhattan died yesterday who wasn’t already going to.

  The U.S. government is still functioning.

  At this point, a quiet year in a white-collar prison with time to think about all that had happened and what I was going to do with the mess I’d made of my life . . . Well, it didn’t sound that terrible. And they don’t even make prisoners wear stripes anymore (deal breaker). I double-checked.

  WHAT A LONG, STRANGE TRIP IT’S BEEN

  MR. AND MRS. BENNETT INSISTED THAT my parents check out of the Holiday Inn and that we all come spend the night at their house. I’m done saying, What? You have a house here too? I’m at the point where I pretty much assume that wherever they go, there’s going to be a perfectly appointed home. This one was a normal-size house on a normal-looking street in McLean, Virginia. It had a welcoming porch with rockers and a freshly painted white swing with green-and-white-striped cushions on it. The front door opened to a wide staircase, with a living room on the left and a dining room on the right. Delicious smells came from the kitchen in the back of the house, and the fireplaces were lit. It smelled like normal.

  Mrs. Bennett led us upstairs to the four bedrooms. Theirs, plus one for my parents, one for John and Uncle Bob, and a room for Danny and me. “Sorry, sis, you’re bunking with me.” Danny gave me a too-hard nudge and a too-big wink that made me wish the tiny landing was an awful lot bigger. And darker.

  Mrs. Bennett saved me. “Danny, would you be averse to my offering you a proper pair of pants?”

  “Averse?” He looked to me for a definition. “I don’t think so.”

  After dinner I sat with my mom and Danny in the kitchen. We drank tea and talked about non-terror-related topics at home. Mom didn’t seem too concerned that Danny had missed a bunch of school, and I waited for him to announce that he wasn’t going to apply to college anyway. He didn’t.

  Instead he said, “Bet you never thought Digit would be the kid going to jail.”

  Mom looked up from her tea, eyes only. “At least she’s dressed for it.”

  “Ha-ha. I’ll be fine. Danny’s new hula-girl look would probably get him the wrong kind of attention in there anyway.”

  “Hello, I’m wearing pants now. Brooks Brothers khakis, no less. How could you possibly get arrested in these pants?”

  After tackling the big topics, I found John and Dad and Mr. Bennett on the front porch. They stopped talking when they saw me. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Just a couple of old guys meddling.” Mr. Bennett gave me a little smile.

  John put up his hands. “I found them like this. I’ve tried to switch topics, but my life is everyone’s business now.” He patted the seat on the swing next to him, inviting me to sit.

  “It’s not your life that we’re all that interested in, son.” Mr. Bennett gave John a nod and clapped his hands once. “So we’re all clear here? Good,” he said, and got up to leave.

  Dad took his cue. “Yes, good talk. Good talk. Good night.”

  I maneuvered myself so that John would have no choice but to put his arm around me. Some people may not be familiar with this move, maybe because I made it up. It involves a bit of nudging in the direction of the person next to you. So much nudging in fact that the victim’s arm feels a little short of breathing room. Invariably, the arm will rise up and rest around the assailant’s shoulders. Disclaimer: I’ve only used this move on one person, but it works like a charm. “So, you guys have all the world’s problems worked out?”

  “Just ours.”

  “How’s that?”

  “We wait.” Here we go. “Those two are more worried about you wasting your potential by hanging out with me than I am. It’s not flattering.”

  I took his free hand. “So, I don’t get to decide who I waste my time and potential with anymore?”

  “Guess not.”

  “Come on. Be serious. What were you talking about?”

  “I’m not sure if you’re too close to see what’s happened, or if you’re too far away.” He turned to face me. “We could have woken up this morning to a nation with no energy sour
ces and a dead economy. We would have been subsisting off of a couple thousand windmills and whatever crops we could grow without tractors and farm equipment. Either that, or Manhattan would have been blown off the map. Do you understand what you did yesterday?”

  “I cracked a code. It was a hard one, but it was just a code.” I understood, but I wasn’t comfortable pulling the camera angle back quite that far yet.

  “You’re smart, Digit. Lots of people are. But the government doesn’t have anyone with abilities like yours. I doubt the world does. You’re important to me, maybe everything to me. But yesterday you were everything to the world. See what I mean?” I really only processed “everything to me.”

  So I nodded, enthusiastically. “So what do we have to wait for exactly?”

  “I don’t know. But my dad is obsessed with my letting you be until you’re twenty-three, and your dad is obsessed with all of us just letting you be.”

  “Twenty-three?” Don’t make me do that math for you.

  “I thought that was crazy too. I agreed to twenty-one. And believe me, I just want to take you to the airport right now and be gone. Like not check back in for twenty years. But your dad just asked me, what if you and I had been at the movies yesterday or hiking in Nepal? Jonas Furnis got all that money and those weapons without you. He could have just launched them, to get things going.”

  “So, you’re saying if you and I are together, it’ll be the end the world.” I was getting the big picture here, but c’mon.

  “Maybe.”

  This wasn’t funny anymore. “So, really what’s going on here is that you’re breaking up with me because of my gift.” No air quotes, it is what it is. “That’s discrimination.”

  “Yeah, can we just get back to that? Breaking up? I’m not breaking up with you. I was trying to tell you that six weeks ago. Breaking up is what you do when you don’t want to be with someone anymore. Trust me, Digit, I want to be with you. I want to take up all of your time. Can you hear the problem there? You are, at eighteen, a threat to national security and the key to solving any number of the world’s problems. What if you had an education? What if you got to work with your precious Professor Halsey? Do you see? You can’t miss that.”