Bette, Luxembourg

If Tycho had expected Bette to dissemble upon hearing of this story concerning the missing gold, he’d have been disappointed.

In the ensuing moments after he’d told her the story, the brunette had merely picked up the glass of water she’d set down on the low-slung coffee table earlier, and drank from it calmly. Her lips were set in a firm line, and her eyes remained fixed on him, displaying the same concentrated focus as earlier. The only change to her demeanor had been the slightly furrowed lines that crossed her otherwise unlined forehead.

Didn’t she hear what he’d just told her?

After she swallowed and leaned back again on the high-backed winged antique chair, he opened his mouth to ask whether she needed any clarification on what she’d just heard from him.

She asked before he could say anything further, “Okay, you’ve told me about the gold. What about you? Did you have any role in that story you just told me?”

Inwardly, her mind was whirring, assembling all the information, analysis, and data she’d been collecting on this whole affair. His story was clearly a game changer. And she needed to re-categorize what she knew.

One: the numbers on the gold bars, if she could get a hold of that data set, and correlate them with the numbers in Spencer’s file, would confirm what Sylvia, Tom’s mom, had posited to Bette, when Bette had visited her in her Greenwich home. Before leaving for Luxembourg, Bette had shared with her a random sample of the numbers in one of the files Spencer had left in the cloud. Sylvia had taken almost the entire day Bette had spent in her home to study what Bette brought for her to look at, using methods and patterns that she’d come across during her years working in an intelligence agency, as well as newer methods and patterns that she’d heard about. Finally, when she felt she’d done the best she could under the compressed time frame Bette had given her, she described several different scenarios under which the numbers would make sense – and one of them was the scenario that Tycho had just described. More specifically, Sylvia had said the numbers could be a means of identification of physical, likely similar, objects, of high value. She told Bette there was a high probability that a portion in each of the series of numbers that consistently yielded results that correlated with monetary values. She’d found that when she’d run those portions against a World War II vintage “code pattern” that the East Germans had adapted to communicate with moles they’d implanted in Paris. She’d given Bette both the key of the original World War II code pattern, as well as that of the East German variation.