Her heart was beating furiously.  She swallowed drily, and then asked, “Brooke, may I have a look at what’s inside this box?”

Brooke nodded, and broke out a key from one of the drawers, that Bette guessed could normally be locked, and handed the key to Bette.  “I thought you would.”

Bette slipped on disposable gloves Brooke had given her, and popped the case open.  She blew out a breath, before carefully picking up the notebook, and extracted it from the protective casing.  She slowly flipped through the pages.  The first thing she noted was that the notebook was missing approximately under half of its pages, mostly the second half of the notebook.  She saw that the initial pages of the first half of the notebook contained a list of names, not alphabetically arranged.  Then  the pages after that had a column of numbers on one side, and a column of capital letters next to each number, and then a third column that bore various symbols.  But not all the numbers in the “numbers” column had a symbol across it.

Bette recognized some of the numbers and symbols from what she’d seen in the ledgers and her mind leapt, synapses firing, making connections between the numbers she’d been wrestling with over the past few weeks and what she was looking at right now.

The remaining pages had words written in them in one column, and then the same column of capital letters as the pages with the numbers, and the column of symbols, also.

Bette blew out a breath, trying to control her excitement, and refocused on what she could actually see in the pages of the small leather notebook, rather than imagined or hoped that she saw.

In any event, she knew she could use whatever she could glean from the notebook to construct a codex, and test it against what she had assembled already in her computers, where she’d saved several different combinations of information from what she’d gathered so far.

“I’ll construct a new codex, and take it to Sylvia, and test it against the samples that I’ve already shown her.  If we come up with consistent results, then …..”

An hour later, as she was taking inventory of what else she thought she could use in Phillip’s office, Brooke knocked on the door, and stuck her head in.  “Bette, it’s almost 7.  If you’d like to you can sleep here tonight, and continue working.  I ordered some food for us from the Plaza food hall, and Casey will be taking it up shortly.  That alright?”