Two: The first section of the various sections of the cloud Spencer had given Bette access to had 17 files – these were the files that held the strange series of numbers and letters. And Tycho had said that there were 17 different cargoes of gold involved in the series of shipments. But each of those files also had a separate subfile, that required unique passwords to open, and which Bette had only recently been able to crack, after solving intricate puzzles Spencer had left in the “open first” documents of each of the 17 files. When she’d used those passwords to open the subfiles, she found the subfiles were filled, again, with a series of letters and numbers, but whose configuration seemed different from the letters and numbers in the 17 main files the subfiles had each been attached to. And each subfile’s series was unique, too, but some letters were similar to the others’. So Bette clearly still had work to do to make sense of the information in those subfiles.

Three: The small notebook that she’d taken from the chest contained a couple of pages that looked like the beginning of what appeared to be Nelle’s analysis of the numbers in the ledgers.   From her quick review of the information in the ledgers, none of the puzzling letters, diagrams, and numbers neatly inscribed in each row of the pages of those ledgers correlated at all with the numbers in Spencer’s files.

So the first thing Bette needed to do was correlate the three data sets: the numbers in the 17 files, the numbers imprinted in the gold bars, and the numbers in Nelle’s notebook.

Fourth: And most importantly, if those numbers were similar, then it was clear that the ledgers were, to pardon the pun, more than their weight in gold. They would be the incontrovertible proof that would establish the provenance of those gold bars, once Bette could figure out the code to the information they contained. Nelle had somehow cracked that code. It was possible she’d scribbled somewhere in the small notebook clues about how she’d down so.

Bette’s thoughts turned to Nelle: heavy with child, frightened and alone in the chaos of postwar Paris, threatened at gunpoint. Yet she’d done a seemingly impossible thing in the worst possible conditions. Why’d she embark on this enterprise? How’d she do it?