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    Chapter XIX – Empire State of Mind – Gunshot

     

    New York, present day
    Bette slowed about five feet from the cross-walk and checked her watch. It was nearly 10:30 in the evening. Given that many of the shows in Broadway would have just ended their evening show times, she anticipated the four block radius around the entire Times Square area would soon be filled with theater patrons and the usual summer tourist crowd. She could melt into that crowd, hop into the subway, and then alight in the stop nearest to their duplex in the Upper East Side. Once she got there, as agreed with Dave, she would wait for Dave’s signal, who would in turn get a sign from Veronica. Veronica would do the final visual check around the perimeter to see if it would be safe for Bette to approach the duplex.

    Bette gingerly massaged her temples — her head pounded with a dull ache, and she was beyond tired. She’d been working away on the files, the ledgers, the numbers, and symbols for 10-days straight, ever since arriving from New York, trying to put together a seemingly gigantic puzzle that was literally worth over 10 tons of gold. But it seemed like there was too much that was unknowable, despite all her efforts. To speed the process, she’d begun to share with Sylvia, Tom’s mother, more of the various sets of data she’d managed to pull together, including a sample of pages that she’d photographed in the ledgers that she left behind in her storage unit in Luxembourg.

    Sylvia had previously admitted that she’d been some kind of polymath and code-breaker who’d worked for a government agency for over 20 years, and had already tried to help Bette figure out the underlying code or codes in the files Spencer had left her, before the brunette had departed for Luxembourg.

    She’d felt they’d made some progress with some rows, but when Bette had tested the filter on other rows, the additional logic had made little sense with the majority of the rows of numbers and symbols in the ledgers. The harder Bette worked at it, using patterns Sylvia had developed, the faster the “codex” they’d jointly developed broke down.

    As Bette bent over now, in the shadows of a street corner, leaning on her knees while she waited for the light to change, she blew out a frustrated breath. The equations were becoming more complex; variables were steadily mounting. Nothing seemed to be working. Still, she felt in her gut that she was tantalizingly close to pulling it all together. She just didn’t have enough of the tools she needed to get to the solution that seemed to lie just beyond the reach of her mind, right now.

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