Primed: A Kayla Madison Story

Primed Part 21

CHAPTER ELEVEN: BREAKING THE 43 4F 44 45 53 (CODES)

In the morning there was a soft knock on my door—well before the sun came up. It had taken a couple of hours for me to get back to sleep after Spyder had left. I had no idea what type of games he was playing, but he was certainly interrupting my sleep pattern.

The knocks on my door were louder this time and caused my head to hurt. My hearing must be improving if lack of sleep and the knocking hurt my head.

Who is it?"

"It's me, Michael. Your father and I have information for you about your next assignment."

"I'll be out in a minute." I forced myself out of bed and to get dressed.

I threw on some jeans and a white t-shirt before heading out to the living room. It appeared they'd both been up all night trying to make sense of the information in the journal.

I observed the piles of paper around them that seemed to have grown like stalagmites from every surface of living room furniture.

Apparently, the crazy scientist flair for appearance was similar on both worlds when I saw Dad with glasses askew, ascot awry and hair astray. I stared at the piles. "I'm guessing Mr. Wu didn't just write 'look for the next clue in the hidden cabinet behind the bookcase."

Dad peered up from the documents and straightened his glasses. "No, but fortunately he used a relatively simple cipher which gave us the information we needed."

"Cipher?" I asked. "You mean like a secret code?"

"Exactly." Michael walked in with a new pot of tea. "Mr. Wu is a fan of codes and puzzles. I would not be surprised if we encounter more of them in his attempt to prevent unwanted people from seeing his plans."

"I get it." I picked up one of the papers. "Since you don't have computers and software to encrypt files, you have to do it yourself."

"Correct. Although Michael and I were able to break this relatively simple one, cryptography is not our strong suit. Our TDT cryptographer went back east to visit family and will not return for a couple of weeks." Dad straightened some of the paperwork.

"By that time, it might be too late." Michael poured all of us some tea.

I thought about how long it must take to travel on this world. Back home, I could measure the time it took to travel across the country in hours instead of days or weeks like it would take here.

"Could you show me one? An easy one?" I asked.

"Certainly." Dad thought for a moment before taking a sheet of paper and drawing a tic-tac-toe grid. He wrote the numbers one through nine in the grid—one number per section starting with the top left to top right, then middle row and then the bottom row.

"Do we have to play tic-tac-toe to figure it out?"

Dad's laugh lines appeared briefly. "It is a simple substitution cipher. For example, do you see how the middle part of the grid where the five is located has a line on each side, like a square?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, whenever you see the square shape that means the number 5," He said, "If you look at the number three, you will see it only has a line on the left and the bottom. Its shape is somewhat like an "L". So, anytime you see an "L" shape, it means a three."

"Oh, I get it. So, the square "C" shape is six and a backwards "L" would be one," I said, "But what about number bigger than those? And what about zero?"

"Good question. Let's have 0 be "X". For number larger than nine, you would right them just like you do normal numbers only using the shapes instead. So, what would LX mean?"