Dark Zone

67

Was there any number as perfect as 3?

Indivisible. Prime. Essential. Mystic in its many applications. Mysterious.

Very mysterious. Unfortunately.

Johnny Bib looked at the three blank pieces of paper on the large table in the center of the lab room. The pages represented the blank spots of a larger file that his team was trying to extract from the hard drive that Dean and Lia had taken from the French library. The drive had been corrupted by a power spike. It seemed to have happened as the drive was being overwritten, which was a bit of a break for the analysts, making it much easier to recover data. However, the scrubber program had succeeded in laying down its pattern more than three times over several areas — probably during an earlier session — and at least some of the files they wanted had been erased.

The recovery process in those areas was excruciatingly slow. The team used a device that looked at the magnetic recordings on the drive that were left by the very slight misalignment of the heads. These fluxes — Johnny saw them as tiny yes or no checks written on pieces of sand on a vast beach — were run through a series of programs that attempted to tease logic from them, looking for patterns that corresponded to computer language. This part wasn’t necessarily as difficult as it sounded; it was another way of thinking about encryption, after all. But the way that the computer stored files added another level of complexity, and in any event the flux reading was painfully slow.

Three large blank spots, unlikely to yield their secrets.

Three. The ultimate prime, the ultimate number.

Was that a sign that they would succeed or fail?

“Johnny, look at this,” said Blondie Jones, one of the computer geeks working on the project.

Blondie had earned her nickname a year before, when she’d come to work with her black hair dyed yellow. Her hair had since returned to its natural color, but her nickname had become permanent.

“This other set of calculations mimics the simulation we found earlier, but on a slightly smaller scale. The tower blowup. Some of the values are similar, but the impact area is closer and smaller. It wasn’t completely overwritten.”

Johnny Bib walked over to the console where Blondie was working.

“You’re sure it’s not just a small-scale model they tried first, to control the variables and get the concept down?” he suggested.

“Look at the dates. And there’s an access correlation here, when the library computer was taken over. See? We traced everything back and we found the computer used to initiate the connection. It’s part of a network, like a commercial thing or something. I think the queries originated there, but we may not know until we download everything off those drives. Right now we’re looking around. There’s a hidden file structure similar to what we’ve seen on the others. It’ll take a few minutes. Three or four.”

“Better three than four,” he said automatically. “Three is a much better number.”

He looked at the data. A smaller explosion, a smaller effect, but the result was—

Oh.

Oh!

The upper stage of the tower — an easier target.

“Excuse me. I have to talk to Mr. Rubens. Find out what else is on that computer.”