Jax's engine was disappearing down the road, while the house, as all sealed houses do, gave one last creak and settled down, falling into intimate silence.
Alejandro was still strapped to his chair.
And I must admit that I tried to act like a real detective in all that business. Unfortunately, I didn't. I have seen plenty of photographs of dead bodies, one of which I saw so many times during the recent days that I can draw it blindfolded, but photographs do not have the smell of burning clothes.
"Stop staring at him," Scott pointed out. Not lifting his head from his work, he put a small table next to the couch and was typing on his laptop like he was filling his tax form.
"I am in my twenties," he said to me.
He was in his twenties, and he traveled with us across half of the country just for money." "That's fine, Marlon, but both statements are true. If you cling to just one, you will go crazy."
I did not answer. Jax's knots were done as thoroughly as all of his actions, and it took me some time to undo them. Asking for Scott's help to roll the legs, he did it in silence. Nothing else in this house could wind around a man except the dark red carpet under the couch, the one that I didn't understand and that covered the part of the floor that nobody ever walked on.
It fitted. I really disliked noticing that.
"Jax will send one of his men to pick him up before sunrise," Scott added, backing away. "This place is sealed up by the government. Nobody asks any questions here."
"Someone asked," I answered. "Two times over."
There was an equally short glance of Scott, which did not express either yes or no, and he immediately sat down. "Alright. We can start working now."
I was sitting next to him. On his laptop's screen there was a map with a thin red line jumping from one country to another as if it were a stone leaping across the water.
"This is their call. The call from Frowny. They had to redirect it through four relay stations in four different countries before getting to Alejandro. The one who made this understands how traces work because he has made the road each of the turns of which leads nowhere."
"But you had an address," I noted.
"The last station landed on the ground only in one place: the apartment building on the old cloth lane, to the east of Guyana." Scott wiped his eyes. "This is what is strange in the situation. There is no way a person who murders his own chauffeur, strangling him, can give his address on his record."
"What was the reason for sending John and Jax there?"
"He didn't send the invitations; I just told Jax the same thing I told you," he answered, almost smiling. "Jax says that he is already attending parties even before shaving and that all good parties have food!""
I laughed. My laugh was short and rude and ended because I could not stop staring at the carpet in the corner of the room.
Scott closed the laptop with a map inside and got another laptop out of his backpack. It was old and gray and scratched; it was the kind of laptop one could get only in an inexpensive repair center, and as soon as he turned it over, I noticed that the wireless card slot was plugged with metal square. He must have taken it out himself.
"Don't put anything in the one that is mine without fully trusting it," he warned and snatched the thumb drive from my hand.
He spent some time overcoming the first security barrier, but then he stopped and uttered a word that I would rather not write in this book.
"What?"
"Look."
The screen was mostly blank. Seven little squares in a line waiting for characters, and below them in bold white: ATTEMPTS REMAINING: 10.
"It is encrypted in hardware," Scott explained. "The lock is located in the controller chip, not in the software. I cannot copy the memory or do anything else with it. After ten attempts, this drive will destroy its key and become an extremely expensive chunk of plastic." He leaned back. "Whoever made this did not want it to be opened more than once or by anybody but him."
"Seven people," I mused. "Was there anything Lin was writing about?"
Scott stared at me, and I stared at him, and in that very moment we did our finger counting like two little schoolboys. F, L, Y, B, I, R, D.
"No way," I said.
"It's seven," Scott said.
"It's too easy."
"That's the choice fearful people make for easy stuff." He was already typing. "Lin knew that he was risking it in making this."
"Scott, stop—"
Each letter appeared separately in its square. Scott clicked enter. The screen lit up red for a second, and then, in the same cold white letters, read: ATTEMPTS REMAINING: 9.
Neither of us said a word. I grabbed his wrist.
That was one out of ten attempts. Number One. And it was the first thought that anybody would have, and this meant it was the first thing that the person who wants this drive will think of. The man who entered that room knew the combination of the safe. Three sixes. No hesitation, no second thoughts. He knew Lin, or at least somebody who knew Lin. Why would he not know the password too?"
"The safe might have been the easy part."
"Perhaps," I said deliberately, "it's not the easy part. He knows about it. He wants us to open it."
Scott did not change his face. "John made this comment in the car."
"John talks a lot when we travel. Perhaps, for once, he is right."
For just a few moments there was the soft whirr of the fan inside the computer. Then Scott half-lowered the lid.
"And then our ideas run out, and we get nine chances."
"No," I answered, getting up from my chair. "We are out of ideas regarding the drive, but we are not out of ideas regarding Lin. What he made, he made with intention to show everybody what he wanted to show. The windows, the rooms, the safe. This man did not leave anything to chance."
"And what happens if I discover something meanwhile?"
"You call me instead. No typing from you."
He raised his hands as if surrendering his weapon. "Away, detective."
* * *
Exactly like John and I discovered it, the third floor was exactly the same as we left it behind: the servers arranged nicely, the screens silent, the carpet torn, and the drapes torn to pieces. Four hours of tearing this place apart, and we managed to put it back together again like a couple of clumsy thieves who suddenly became sorry.
I was standing right in the middle of the floor, thinking as Lin would have.
This was a man who built a house in which each room was placed directly above the other one. Who put his safe behind a wall pretending to be a window? Who used the number 666 as the code for opening his safe, knowing that it is a number that nobody ever makes a mistake with? More than all, the man who used numbers 1, 2, and 3 on the same door while using these numbers for his rooms on each of the other two floors. Why would a man do that? What was he trying to say? That everything in this house is one thing at the end? That everything meets up at the top of this house?
I did not know this. But I knew something else, something that I had ignored for several hours now because of our excitement about the first window.
There were two windows in the room.
John had stood in front of the first one, yelling at me in the garden. We took the frame off, discovering the screen and the safe. But then it turned out that the safe was what mattered, and we forgot that a man like Lin never did anything just once.
The second window was on the opposite wall in the very corner and looked exactly like a window from the inside—same wooden frame, same dark glass. I put my fingers under the frame and took it off as John and I did, and after several seconds, the ancient nails yielded with a squeak.
Behind the screen was another OLED display, which showed the backside of the garden and the fence, which had been electrified once. I have nearly taken the screen down. I have nearly rushed downstairs and told Scott that I was wrong. But before I did this, I realized that the wooden wall was not completely clean.
There were words carved onto it.
Some deep cuts were made with whatever was not designed to become a writing implement—probably with the help of a key or a nail—which was cut into the wood so deeply that the latter broke under the pressure. There were three sentences, in capital letters, in handwriting that showed the trembling of its writer's hands, as if someone had written them in haste or in panic.
SEVEN LETTERS. NOT WHAT I BUILT. WHAT I LOST.
I read the sentences three times and pulled out my mobile phone to light up the wall.
Lin had known. Fourteen years before someone had walked into the room, he had known that someday there would be a man with seven empty boxes, and he left a message for that man, which would be found only where that man, who knew the code of the safe, would never expect to see it. For the man with the safe code only knew half of Lin—he knew the engineer but not the man who had carved the last messages into the wall with the help of the key.
Not what I built.
Not Flying Bird, not the name of the project or its components. Something that he had lost.
I recalled the folder the director placed on his desk and the sentence about the company reopening the case due to Lin's family. So absorbed were we in our hunt for the device that we had forgotten about the man the device belonged to, about who was waiting for him at home.
I would knock on the door of that family the next day.
I put my phone aside and, for the first time since we entered the house, gave myself an opportunity to stop.
Which was my mistake. For when I stopped, my thoughts went wherever they strived to go all along.
The second screen continued displaying the silent garden in darkness, and I stared at it as people stare through an open window at night when they cannot sleep. And I thought about the photo.
Lin had been stabbed twenty-two times, in the chest and in the stomach, with three cuts to the heart and two to the neck, with a normal kitchen knife.
The man in the photo in the box was lying on the snow, his shirt torn apart with the cuts of the same kind. Chest, stomach—so many of them that even in the photo it was impossible for me to count them.
Knife in both.
And the dates. Twelve-twelve, in both cases. Twelve-twelve-twenty-fourteen on the director's desk and twelve-twelve-twenty-ten on the note in my mother's box, four years apart, and I had tried to convince myself the first time I heard them that I felt them familiar and that I was just tired.
I was not tired. I was afraid.
I had not told John. I had not told Scott. I had told only my mother and got a perfectly constructed story in return: a detective had come to the door to inform her about the death and had left the folder behind, and the rest was just my father's old cases.
But think about it, I told myself. What detective comes to a widow to tell her about her husband's death and leaves the folder with the address of the house he lived in, with his and his wife's name and his daughter's birthday?
What kind of an old case contains the coordinates?
And the man on the street, with his sunglasses and black coat, who had told me with such gentleness that sometimes it is better to keep the things in the past in the past in order to protect yourself.
Protect you from what?
"Marlon."
I turned around so abruptly that I almost dropped my phone.
Scott was standing in the doorway. I had not heard him on the stairs. He moved silently for a man of his profession, and I remember thinking stupidly that this is something you learn only once in your life.
"You've been standing there at the screen for twenty minutes now," he said.
"Thinking."
"Aloud," Scott continued and stepped inside, moving slowly, and his eyes first looked at the screen and then at the wall with the scratched text. "You've been counting something."
My heart gave a heavy blow. "Counting what?"
"Twelve. Twelve," Scott watched me carefully while saying it. "Over and over."
For half a second, just half a second, something changed on his face. I do not know how to describe it to you. Neither was it surprise, nor was it concern. More recognition, the face of a person who suddenly heard the song he had not heard for a long time. And then it was gone, and his face returned to the usual tired and friendly face, which laughed at my jokes at John's house, and he turned to the wall and read the three lines of text in silence.
"Not what I built," he said. "What I lost."
"It's the password," I said. "Or at least its meaning. Seven letters, something personal. Something he lost, not created."
His family."
"Maybe."
"We will start with his family in the morning." He said it so quickly and effortlessly that I was not sure whether I imagined that quickness. "Well done, Marlon. Truly. John would be hitting that wall for the next six hours."
"Scott, what about those twelves—"
His phone started ringing.
He took it out and looked at the name on the screen, and I saw his shoulders relax a bit. "Jax," he said, put it on the speaker, and turned on the nearest server.
"Tell me you two are alive," Jax's voice came, flat and low, with the sound of the wind behind it.
"We are alive," Scott said. "Did you reach the address?"
"Yes, we reached it." A brief pause followed. In it I could hear John breathing quickly, thin breath somewhere close to the phone. "This is a flat above a closed launderette. The door is open. No lock, no alarm, the lights are on, and there is a pot of coffee on the stove, still hot. This man was not running from anything. He wanted us to find him."
"A trap?" Scott asked.
"A show," Jax replied. "Is Marlon there?"
"I'm here," I said.
"Kid," he said in a way that made my stomach freeze cold. He was not in his usual joking mood. "There is a wall in this flat. A whole wall filled with photos. Photos of us, of me, of Scott, of John. From the street, from the diner in Swords Town, from the motels. He's been following us for days, longer than that."
That did not surprise me at all.
"There is more," John's voice came, shaking, nothing like the voice joking at coffee. "Bro, there are photos of you, too, Marlon, but they are not recent. Photos of you from childhood. School. Park. A boy riding a bike. Someone has been taking photos of you for fifteen years, and they are ordered on the wall. From the oldest at the top."
I grabbed the server next to me.
"The last photo on the wall is a birthday party," John continued. "A little boy surrounded by a birthday cake with nine candles. Behind him, there are two adults, a man and a woman, smiling at the camera."
I needed no more description. I had seen that picture in my hands more than a week ago, sitting on the floor of my living room, in the box that my mother had hidden.
"And below the photo," Jax said in a whisper, "there is written a date in black marker. Twelve, twelve, twenty-ten. Kid, whose date is this?"
The connection crackled. On the other end, I heard the sound I had not heard before, some sharp click, like pressing a button, and the call was disconnected, leaving the room totally silent.
I stood there, my hand touching the cold metal of the server, staring at the phone, holding my breath.
"Marlon," Scott said gently.
I turned.
Scott was standing exactly where he was standing before, calmly, with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, looking at me with that tired and friendly face.
"What happened on that date?" he asked.
I could tell him everything. Every detail. The box, the folder, the photo, the shadow of a woman on the snow. He was my friend, one of the oldest ones.
"I don't know," I said.
That was the first lie I ever told Scott.
The strangest part, the part that kept me awake for a very long time that night, was that he did not look like a man who was in need of the truth.
He looked like a man who already had it.