The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (8 page)

“The Russians seem to be a factor,” Sky said.

“I've been looking at the numbers,” Dennis said. “It may go even deeper than you think.”

“What do you mean?” Lulu asked.

The six icons moved into a circle, and their conversation appeared near the top of the screen. At first it was like looking down at the tops of their heads. That is, it was an experience from the outside, but then I let my mind drift free until I was hearing the conversation rather than typing and then reading it. I got inside the experience.

“What are the two Russian pieces we have?” Dennis asked.

“Well, there's the Russian remailing service,” Sky said, “and now this software company that Gerald and Pablo were apparently doing some work for.”

“Okay,” Dennis said, “now let's look at the numbers involved in both of those. I mean four-e-four and
EES
.”

“Those aren't numbers,” Lulu said.

“She's right,” Scarface said.

“We may be on the wrong track altogether with this Russian business,” Dieter said. “There is a more obvious sinister secret group.”

Dennis hurried on before Dieter could turn the discussion away from the Russians. “In fact,” he said, “four-e-four is a number. It's just in hex. That is, it's in base 16. Look, it consists of 4 times 256 plus 14 times 16 plus 4 or 1252.”

“And what does that tell us?” Sky wondered.

“I don't know,” Dennis said. “Let's play with it and see what we get. First the prime factors.”

He pulled a line out of the air and stretched it open and it became a chalkboard. We formed a semicircle around Dennis, and he put some numbers on the board.

313 times 2 times 2 equals 1252

“Here we have the parts of 1252 that can be divided no further,” he said.

Lulu raised her hand.

“Yes?”

“I don't see where you're going with this.”

“You're missing the point,” Dennis said. “What we're doing is just poking around to see what the numbers might tell us. How do I know what we'll find until we find it? Let's go on.”

“Grumble.”

“Who said that? Oh, never mind. Look.” Dennis wrote on his chalkboard again.

2 313 2

“I've rearranged the factors symmetrically,” he said. “The other possibilities are these.”

22 313

313 22

“Let's take each one in turn. What are the prime factors of 23132?” He made a calculator appear and divided 23132 by 2 and got 11566 and divided that by 2 and got 5783. “Now is 5783 prime?”

We watched his eyes roll in his head while he figured it out. The rolling eyes in his superhero head were just for show. What he was really up to (and we all knew it but were too polite to say so) was slipping back out into Pablo's system, locating a programming language (C++ was all Pablo had on hand) and writing a quick routine that would take the square root of any number and then divide that original number by successive odd numbers until it either found a number that divided the original number evenly, in which case the original number wasn't prime, or a number that was bigger than the square root, in which case the original number was prime.

Dennis used the program on 5783 and found that it was prime and brought his rolling eyes to a halt.

“So 2 times 2 times 5783 is 23132,” he said.

“And that tells us exactly what?” Dieter said.

“Well, nothing, that I can see,” Dennis said. “Negative results can be productive, too, you know. Let's go on.”

“Sigh.”

“Who said that?” Dennis glared around at us for a moment. Then he turned back to the board, and using the prime routine on 22313, produced the factors 53 and 421 both of which turned out to be prime. Then he divided 31322 by 2 and got 15661 which turned out to be prime.

“This had all better add up to something,” Scarface said. He made something that looked like blood run off his bat fangs.

“Hey, that's a good idea!” Dennis said. “Let's add up one instance of each of the prime factors from all the numbers.”

“Wow, look at that. Three twos and two threes!” Dennis said. “Now if you apply three to the twos and two to the threes and multiply you get 66666.”

“Or maybe two groups,” Sky said.

“What.”

“Like this.” Sky wrote on the chalkboard.

666 66

“So we have the number of the beast,” Lulu said, “and a mostly defunct highway featured in an old TV show?”

“Or,” Scarface said, “the number of the beast and the number inked all over Randy Casey's body.”

“I think the Satan connection is barking up the wrong tree,” Dieter said.

“If you want Randy's number,” Dennis said, “you can just add up the three twos and get six and the two threes and get six and put them together to get 66.”

“Exactly,” Sky said. “That's a lot neater.”

“There is a sinister secret much closer to home,” Dieter said.

We ignored him.

“So, what are we saying here?” Lulu asked. “That the reason 66 was written all over Randy's body is that it is a secret number embodied in the name of the Russian remailing service four-e-four?”

“Nicely put,” Sky said. “But what about EES? Is it also embedded in there?”

Dennis erased the chalkboard and wrote EES on it.

“This is not a hex number,” he said.

“Maybe you could make that S be a five?” Sky said.

“We could try that,” Dennis said, “but it's not very elegant. Suppose we simply pull no punches and assume this is a number in base 26. Hang on a minute. I'll do the math.”

He filled the board with figures and the others waited. A moment later, Dennis turned back to the group. “It doesn't add up to anything,” he said. “Not only that but I tried using 5 for that S and still got nothing.”

“What if you use 19 for the S and just Hex for the rest?” Scarface asked.

“Why 19?” Lulu asked.

“Well, S is the nineteenth letter of the alphabet,” Scarface said.

“But that was the idea when we did base 26,” Dennis said. “And I already tried base 19, too. Nothing.”

“But you didn't try thinking of EE as a hex number.”

“Actually it would be EE0,” Dennis said. “Here. EE0 is 3808 and that plus 19 is 3827 and the prime factors of that are 43 and 89 and 43 plus 89 gives us 132. Doesn't help much.”

“Oh, no?” Scarface said. “Just what do you think half of 132 is?” He walked up to the board and wrote.

66

Everyone was quiet for a while.

We saved the calculation Dennis had made in a file. Lulu told us of her theory about Gerald's death being a crime of passion. We wondered how Randy fit into that theory and she admitted she hadn't worked that out yet.

“I think we may be onto something with the Russians,” Scarface said. “Maybe Gerald and Randy were both moles. Now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, someone is cleaning up the loose ends. That would explain the Evil Empire business.”

“But if Evil Empire Software really was evil,” Lulu said, “they probably wouldn't call themselves the Evil Empire.”

“I think it's all the doing of you know who,” Dieter said. No one could think of another delaying tactic, so we let Dieter go on for a few minutes about the Secret Society of Mexican Food Cooks who, he was convinced, was the true power behind the scenes.

“It seems clear to me,” he said, “that Gerald and Randy were responsible for the posting of the secret ingredient on the net.”

“But no one even noticed,” Sky said. “There were hundreds of posts offering other ingredients. No one would be able to pull out the real secret ingredient from that mess.”

“That bombardment of other ingredients was pure genius on the part of … well, someone in the society,” Dieter said. “But the society must have figured Gerald would just keep posting it until someone believed him and then the cat would be out of the bag.”

“So to speak,” Scarface said.

“But what about Randy?” Lulu asked.

“Somehow he must have been in on it,” Dieter said. “Maybe when he was working for Gerald, Gerald told him the secret.”

“But how did Gerald know the secret in the first place?” Sky asked. “I don't think the Secret Society of Mexican Food Cooks has anything to do with this, Dieter. The fact that someone posted the secret ingredient is probably a coincidence.”

“That won't be the case,” Dieter said. “Mark my words.”

“We're always marking your words, Dieter,” Lulu said, “and you're almost always wrong.”

“Here's what I think,” Sky said. “We really
do
have Russian involvement. I don't know about the Mexican Food and the passion and the Satan angles. We need to find out more about four-e-four and Evil Empire Software. Looking at the numbers, I think the connection with four-e-four is clearer than the connection with EES. That mixing of bases seems a little shaky to me.”

“You're probably right,” Dennis said.

“What we probably have here is an international conspiracy,” Sky said. “It obviously has something to do with advanced technologies and probably the Internet. Gerald and Pablo screwed up somehow, and Gerald was murdered for it. Pablo, fearing for his life, went into hiding. Maybe Randy learned something while he was working here, and it got him killed.”

“That's nice, Sky,” Lulu said, “but that doesn't tell us who the killer is nor what happened to Pablo Deerfield.”

“No,” Sky said, “but it's progress!”

In fact, I felt so good about our progress that I closed down the chat room and jumped over to the newsgroups. My thought was to post our theory to alt.dead.gerald and maybe mass mail it to the BOD list. Maybe include the insights we'd come to through the math Dennis had done. I thought there was a good chance the killer would see the message. Maybe we could smoke him out.

The newsgroup alt.dead.gerald had vanished. It took me a few minutes to discover that since we now had two dead computer people, alt.dead.gerald had evolved into alt.dead.nerds, and I wasted time wading though a flame war about the name change—reams of anal bickering and backstabbing and what's in a name and I'll tell you what's in a name you hereditarily challenged clown! And on and on. I was finally able to conclude that no one knew more than I already knew about the murder of Randy Casey. No one was talking about the BOD mailing list, so that at least was not common knowledge. I decided not to mention it.

I composed a message explaining our international conspiracy theory for the murder of Gerald Moffitt and Randy Casey. I spell-checked the message and read it over one more time. I was pleased. I was encouraged. I posted the message on alt.dead.nerds. I thought it ought to light some fires.

Now if there were just some way to make this explain what Frank was up to at the Quack Inn, life would be perfect.

Well, you can't always get what you want.

We spent some time congratulating ourselves, back pats for everyone. We were filled with the happy glow of accomplishment.

We left GP Ink, but we got lost on the way back to the office.

Still Dennis, still carrying the mop and bucket, we must have taken a wrong turn and ended up at a club called Twinkle Toes on the east side. We hadn't been there in a while, but everyone seemed to be happy to see us.

You don't want to be poking around in the head of an addicted tap dancer, but let me tell you that all dances are the same dance and when you come home to the dance it's as if you never left. I mean you could lift your foot for a step and be suddenly yanked away to another life—you get a job, say, and meet a woman, you get married, you have kids, you raise the kids, get them into good colleges, and then one day for no reason you can articulate, you walk back into Twinkle Toes and put your foot down, and it's the same step, and no one even notices the time that may or may not have passed from the moment you lifted your toe to the moment you tapped it down again. Dance clubs are all different; dance clubs are all the same, one club, one time.

Dance time is a train on an entirely different track.

So we had this nifty mop and bucket and the possibilities were endless. Twinkle Toes was dark and smoky, but there was a well-lighted stage. The bartender tonight was a woman I couldn't name—big blond hairdo and perpetually astonished eyes and a small frozen smile. What distinguished Twinkle Toes was mostly the glitter on the big mirror behind the bar. We got a drink and went backstage and got in line. Things got fuzzy until we came onstage and entered the crystal dance time loop.

We knocked them dead at Twinkle Toes. Improvised with the mop and bucket then got back in line to wait for the chance to perfect it. We danced and waited to dance again, and every time we danced, the routine got a little better.

People came and went. Maybe outside the sun rose and set again, I couldn't tell; I didn't care. The mop became an extremely precise instrument for expressing my place in the universe. The bucket became the focus, the anchor, the locus to dance around.