Bette raised her eyebrows.  “There’s piped-in music also?”

“Yes, ma’am.  State-of-the-art system.  And there are emergency buttons you can press, all around the area, in case of emergency, by the way.”

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Sylvia hung up after Bette called to alert her briefly that she’d made it back to the 57^th street flat Brooke was using.  The brunette’s words were coming out in a tumble, with Bette’s barely contained excitement still audible even in the briefest of exchanges that they’d just had over the phone just now.

Sylvia tapped the handset on the bridge of her nose absentmindedly as she mentally went over the stupendous information that they’d just uncovered.

Bette had called Sylvia that morning to ask if she could come over and run a new codex past her.  It seemed that she’d stumbled onto a veritable treasure trove of information a few days ago, and had worked on the information nonstop since then.

Although Bette said her new source material had been incomplete, she’d explained that there were large enough sections in it that allowed the brunette to take a stab at reconstructing the structure of the codex, once she incorporated what she’d assembled already.  And after Sylvia refined it slightly, she’d agreed with Bette that they may have finally cracked the code. 

To Sylvia’s amazement, the reconstructed codex had successfully decoded every single row of the random sampling of rows that Bette had photographed in the ledgers that she’d left behind in the antique chest, and that she’d left in storage in Luxembourg.  The results had come out consistently, and they could see that the rows of numbers in the ledgers referred to markings on gold bullion.

The brunette had also brought along a new set of data, printed out data sets, arranged differently, but bearing a similar structure to sequences to that of the photographed pages from the ledgers.

When they put the samples together, they both saw that some of the rows referred to gold bullion dating to the 1850s.  There were other rows that referred to bullion dating to 1924; others to the early 1940s; to the mid-60s; and finally, to the late 80s.

The brunette was also excitedly telling Sylvia that beyond the sequences, the new trove of information she’d uncovered a few days ago had allowed her to begin to piece together a story of the strange, fascinating journey that she’d guessed the gold bullion being referred to in the rows they’d decoded, had taken.