Dark Zone

31

Johnny Bibleria paced around the conference room, walking the perimeter at a rapid pace. Every so often he glanced up at the numbers on the white board at the front of the room.

“Nothing is related,” he repeated. “Nothing.”

They were missing something basic.

“What information would make a murder worthwhile?” Rubens had asked him. It was an excellent question, Johnny thought — but not the sort that a cryptologist should ask. It wasn’t even something for a mathematician to contemplate. The answer involved morality or at least judgments separate from numbers. A mathematician needed a sequence.

Johnny stopped his pacing. He thought he saw part of a Fibonacci sequence in the updates of the weather site.

No.

Johnny Bib took one of the pens from the table and stepped toward the board. The key must be the change out of sequence, but the numbers were merely a digit or two off. He made a grid based on the days of the week, ran the numbers in a line, put them backward…

Maybe it was like a pointer in a codebook. Use this page…

If it was a pointer, then they could see who had accessed the site and follow that person to the relevant Web page.

Except that they didn’t have a record of the visits to the sites.

Johnny went back to the board. They were watching for another change on the weather site, hoping to see who accessed it and where the computer went from there. But that meant they were reacting, waiting. And there was no guarantee that they would be able to find anything useful if it did change.

There had to be a pattern somewhere that he could detect, surely.