The Lost Throne

7

If they’d had more time, Payne and Jones would have driven to MacDill AFB to do their dirty work, using one of the computers on the high-speed military network. The encryption level was so high and the speeds were so blazing fast that Jones could have floated around the Internet like a ghost, grabbing whatever data he needed without worrying about being caught. But as things stood, they had to make do with Jones’s laptop and the hotel’s wireless network.

That and the help of a well-connected friend.

As a computer researcher at the Pentagon, Randy Raskin was privy to many of the government’s biggest secrets, a mountain of classified data that was there for the taking if someone knew how to access it. His job was to make sure the latest information got into the right hands at the right time. And he was great at it. Over the years, Payne and Jones had used his services on many occasions, and this had eventually led to a friendship.

Payne offered to give him a call while Jones turned on his computer.

“Leave me alone,” Raskin snapped from his desk in the Pentagon. “I’m busy.”

“Well, hello to you, too.”

“Seriously, Jon. You shouldn’t be calling me. Today is the Sabbath. A day of rest.”

Payne smiled. “First of all, you’re Jewish, so don’t pull that crap with me.”

“What are you saying? Jews don’t deserve a day off?”

“Secondly, I called you at the office. Therefore you’re not actually resting.”

Raskin cursed, realizing he had lost the argument. “Dammit! How come you always win? Tell me the truth: Were you on the debate team in high school?”

“No,” Payne joked, “but I beat them up when they wouldn’t do my homework.”

“I should’ve known. I’m going to make note of that in your personnel file.”

“If you must. But before you do, I was wondering—”

Raskin interrupted him. “If I could do you a favor.”

“Crap! Am I that predictable?”

“Both of you are. Let me guess, D.J. is there, too.”

“You know it.”

“And you’re calling from… Florida. Am I right?”

Payne nodded. “How’d you know that?”

The ever-present clicking of Raskin’s keyboard could be heard in the background. “Because I’m tracking your call with Blackbird, our latest GPS satellite. Give me ten more seconds and I can shoot a missile up your ass. Seriously. Right up your ass.”

“Ouch! You’re one scary geek.”

Raskin smiled. “Don’t you forget it.”

“Okay,” Jones said from across the hotel room. He sat in front of his laptop, which was logged on to an encrypted system at his office in Pittsburgh. “I’m ready.”

Payne turned on his speakerphone. “Randy, you’re on with D.J.”

“So,” Raskin asked, “what kind of trouble are you in this time?”

“It’s not us,” Jones explained. “It’s a colleague of ours. And the clock is ticking.”

Raskin nodded in understanding. The joking stopped at once. “What do you need?”

“We need access to restricted phone numbers. Seventeen calls in the last twelve hours. All of them placed to Jon’s cell.”

“The line we’re on now?”

“Affirmative,” Jones answered.

“No sweat. I started tracking it the moment he called. Give me a few seconds to get through his network’s firewall, and I can retrieve everything you need.”

“Can you send it to my laptop?”

“If you’d like. Or I can just read it to you.”

Jones shook his head. “No thanks. I want a hard copy.”

“Not a problem. I’ll send it right now.” Raskin hit Enter, sending the file. “It might take a few minutes to arrive. My system is running slow today. I’m crunching some serious data.”

“In that case,” Payne said, “would you mind answering one question about the calls?”

“Fire away.”

“Where did they come from?”

Raskin glanced at his middle screen. It was flanked by several others, all of them filled with data for other projects. “As far as I can tell, the calls came from three different sources. But the majority of them were placed in one city: Saint Petersburg.”

“Saint Petersburg? We’re in Saint Petersburg.”

Raskin shook his head. “Sorry, dude. Wrong Saint Petersburg. I’m talking about Russia.”

Payne hung up, more confused than before. “Someone’s calling me from Russia? That makes no sense. I haven’t been there in years.”

Jones said nothing as he waited for the file to appear on his screen. When it did, he hit a few keys and the document started to print on his portable printer, which weighed less than three pounds and fit inside his laptop bag.

“Here you go,” he said to Payne as he handed him a copy of the phone logs. Then he printed a second copy for himself, so he could take notes in the margin.

According to the list, fifteen calls had been made to Payne’s phone from one number in Saint Petersburg, Russia. They had started at 3:59 A.M. and had ended at 11:01 A.M. That pattern changed at 11:28 A.M. when the caller switched to a pay phone — a fact confirmed by his final message.

“Any thoughts?” Payne asked.

“A few. Take a look at the last column.”

The phone logs were divided into six columns, five of which were pretty straightforward. The first showed the date of the call. The second showed the time it was placed. The third showed the duration. The fourth showed the caller’s number. And the fifth showed the location.

No problems reading any of those.

But the sixth was a different story. It was more complicated.

At the top of the column, there was a single word: TOW.

No description. No explanation. No help of any kind.

Payne and Jones tried to figure out what it meant by analyzing the column itself, but the data was an enigmatic mix of numbers and letters, separated by a dash. 18-A. 22-F. 4-C. And so on. A few of the combinations appeared more than once, always on successive calls, yet there didn’t seem to be a discernible pattern. At least not at first glance. And for all they knew, the letters might have been translated from the Cyrillic alphabet.

Payne asked, “Is TOW an acronym?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe time of something. Something that starts with a W.”

“Time of waking my ass up.”

“Somehow I doubt it. In fact, now that I think about it, time won’t work at all. It doesn’t correspond with the alphanumeric codes in the last column.”

“The what?”

“The things with the dashes.”

Payne smiled. “Any thoughts on what could?”

Jones shrugged. “It might be some kind of machine code — a basic set of instructions for the phone company’s central processing unit. I’m not sure why it would be listed, though.”

“It wouldn’t be. But I think you’re on the right track. We’re definitely dealing with a code. The only question is what kind. Why don’t you fire up your CPU and run a search? Who knows? Maybe Google can help us out.”

Normally, Jones would have told Payne to wait, insisting that he could figure it out on his own. After all, solving mysteries was a passion of his, which was one of the main reasons that he had opened a private investigations firm in Pittsburgh when he left the MANIACs. But in this case, time was crucial, so he sat in front of his laptop and ran an Internet search for TOW.

Hundreds of possibilities popped up on his screen, none of which seemed likely.

But Jones kept trying, searching page after page, until something clicked. And when it did, he shook his head in frustration, pissed off that he hadn’t thought of it sooner.

It was a look that Payne had seen many times. “Got something?”

Jones nodded. “It’s not an acronym. It’s an abbreviation. It stands for tower.”

“Tower?”

“As in cell phone tower. Each letter and number combo refers to a specific area in the city. If we get a tower map, we can figure out where our mystery caller was each time he called.”

“And how will that help?”

“If necessary,” Jones said, “I can access traffic cameras in each of those grids and look for familiar faces. Who knows? We might get lucky and get a picture of this guy.”

Payne frowned. It sounded like a lot of unnecessary work. “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we just call the number and talk to him?”