Bette got to the Kansas City warehouse all the way from San Francisco as fast as it was humanly possible, and found, when she got there, that Kaci wasn’t alone in the abandoned warehouse. At first there were roughly a dozen men scattered around the warehouse, all decked in black flak jackets, toting sawed off shotguns and semi-automatic firearms. Two men were holding on to a little boy, about four or five years old, scared to death, it looked like. Others were milling about, several were outside the warehouse, sharing a smoke, when she’d driven up, spraying pebbles as she hit the brakes and jumped out of her SUV rental.

Three of the men were crowded around a makeshift table that held various guns and a laptop. Kaci was standing on the other side of the table from the men, and had motioned to her.

The next few hours were a haze. Kaci had somehow convinced the three men, who looked like they led the others, to bring the frightened boy to the two women, and to order the rest of the men outside.

And then, as the two men holding the boy walked the boy up, Kaci brought up a story about something the she and Bette had done, back when they’d met on the beach as kids. The end of the story was something only the two friends knew – it had something to do with not telling Kaci’s older brother, who liked to brag to the two seven-year olds about knowing everything there was to know about Necker Island, the real location of a better coral reef than any the brother knew about.

Having one over the bully-ish boy became a source of never-ending delight for the two much-younger girls the rest of that summer. And it had been the first of many triumphs they’d shared over the years.

To this day, neither of them had told anyone else the hidden cove they’d found. 

As Kaci told the first part of the story to the puzzled men, pausing to insist that she wouldn’t continue until all but two of the men were sent outside, Bette immediately understood that, although Kaci was shortly going to make it appear that they would be divulging the secret code to the algorithms, they weren’t actually going to give them the code. Shortly thereafter, as one of the men insisted Bette start telling them about the code, Bette rattled off a string of numbers, letters, and symbols, none of which were remotely similar to the code.