The Taken

“Hello?” said Wingate.

“Um, Hi.”

“Is this Verity Forms?”

“No, it’s Cynthia Kronrod. You’re looking for Verity?”

“I… yes, I am.”

“Do you know if she’s on this floor?”

“I beg your pardon?” said Wingate.

“If you think I’m knocking on every door in the res, you’re wrong, pal. Maybe you have the wrong floor.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Hold on,” the girl said, and he heard her cup the receiver. Her muffled voice reverberated through her hand. “HELLO? IS THERE ANYONE NAMED VERITY ON FOUR?” There was a long pause, and then the girl came back. “People live for phone calls here, so if no one answered, I think there’s no one by that name here. Sorry.”

“Okay,” he said, “thanks.”

“Are you in Carter Hall, too?”

“Um, no.”

“Too bad.”

“Okay, thank you,” he said, but she wasn’t ready to let him go.

“If your feet point you Carter-way, I’m in the west tower. Fourth floor. I have to buzz you in, but it’s no problem. You have a nice voice, you know.”

“Well, thank you -”

“Cynthia Kronrod,” she said, and she spelled her last name. “If you can get here for seven tonight, we’re having a hall party. Two bottles of Everclear, six gallons of orange Gatorade, and one garbage can, and you know what that means, right? We’re getting perfectly hooped. Come if you can, okay? What’s your name, by the way?”

“Um, Jimmy.”

“Awesome,” she said, and he hung up before she could get another word in.

“Good grief,” he muttered.

He walked over to Cassie Je

She looked at him strangely. “I’ve got plans.”

“Too bad,” he said. He put the paper with his notes down in front of her. “What do you make of this, then?”

She studied his scrawl. He noticed her checking out his clean fingernails and wondered if she could tell he wore a light gloss to protect them. “You dialled it?”

“I did.”

“I see,” she said. “I gather it was a dead end. Maybe it’s a serial number? A thing like that would need a serial number anyway, wouldn’t it?”

“I was thinking that, but the serial number’s for the model, isn’t it? It’s not going to get us anywhere,” he said.

“It’s all you got, Detective. Run with it.”

He bent over her and typed the number into Google, but the search brought up nothing. He stood staring at Je

“You want to borrow my microscope?” she said.

He pried open the knife and used the very tip of it along the top edge of the capital “F” in Forms. It peeled away cleanly and he lifted it off the plastic and held it out on the point of the blade to her. “Look at that,” he said.

She took the knife. “It’s an ‘F.’”

“It’s Letraset,” he said. “Someone rubbed these letters onto the ma

“Get out,” she said.

“Someone’s playing a game.” He went past her in the doorway, returning to her desk. He sat and looked at the numbers again. Then he remembered the GPS coordinates Constable Tate had made him write down. “How do we find out a location from its latitude and longitude?” he asked her.

Je

“The numbers Tate gave me were six figures each.”

“Just try some combinations,” she suggested.

He typed in 41.920 and -02.804 and they found themselves somewhere in the north of Spain. 4.19200 and 2.804 got them into the ocean off the coast of Nigeria. 41 92.0 and 02 8.04 moved them above the border between Spain and France. He entered 4 19.200 and -28 0.4 and plunged back into the ocean near Accra. “I don’t think this is going to work,” he said, sitting back heavily. “But someone put those numbers and that name there deliberately.”

“It was a good idea,” she said.

Then he had a flash. “Wait a second. Webpages have names so we can remember them, right? But don’t they all have numerical addresses too?”

“Try it,” she said. He typed HTTP:// 419.20.028.04 into her browser and after a couple of seconds, something began to happen. A page was loading.

“That’s it,” he murmured. “Come on…”

There was a box in the middle of the screen, like an abstract painting. The browser rendered it slowly, finally revealing a dirty whitish image. They stared at it, disappointed again, but then the image began to drift. “Whoa,” said Je

She was right. They were looking at a moving image. A camera was sca

“I can’t believe this,” said Wingate.

Je

“I saw someone’s dirty basement.”

“No,” she said. “At the end. Watch again.”

He leaned in closer to the screen and followed the camera’s gaze. As it got closer to the end of its movement, he noted again a shadow on the wall: it stretched to the left. But something was moving within it.

“There,” said Je

He hadn’t seen it, and he watched again. And on the fourth pass, he saw it. Just a flash, onscreen for less than a second, but unmistakable: the right leg and arm of a person, someone seated in a chair. Visible for an instant against the gloom of the wall behind and then gone, and it was moving: a jittery motion caught on its downbeat. On the fifth viewing one more detail popped out, and Je

“Good Jesus,” said Wingate. “I better get hold of the skip.”