Hidden Impact (Safeguard #1)(61)
“Only three to search through? And we know the addresses of each of them?” Maylin almost bounced in excitement. Then she caught sight of Marc wielding his spoon. “Ah! Don’t cut the noodles!”
Gabe paused midbite and slurped up the rest of his noodle instead, almost choking.
Marc slowly put down his spoon. “Okay. Why?”
Embarrassment burned Maylin’s cheeks but, well, they needed all the luck they could get. “To cut the noodles is to cut short longevity.”
Silence.
Marc’s eyebrows were raised, but after a minute he shrugged. “Okay. Good a reason as any. They’re pretty slippery anyway, so cutting ’em would be more trouble than it’s worth. It’s fine to slurp them, though, right?”
In answer, Maylin handed him an extra paper towel.
Lizzy chuckled next to him.
Maylin’s loaner phone screen flashed, catching her attention from where it sat on the counter. It was a game notification. Hope flared and Maylin headed for her phone.
Victoria managed to gather her noodle in her spoon and eat it all at once. After a moment to chew and swallow, she continued. “Montana, Oregon, North Dakota. All northern tier. We’ll analyze the three locations tonight to see which is most likely. It’s going to be time consuming if we need to do reconnaissance on each one.”
“I’ll see if we can leverage trainees to do some of the analysis in parallel. Can you work some satellite magic?” Gabe had directed his question toward Marc, who was working on slurping.
Maylin shoved her phone in the midst of them. “There’s a new message in my inbox. It’s from a new account. But it’s got to be An-mei. Got to be.”
“Are you sure?” Victoria sounded suspicious.
Excitement buoyed Maylin and she nodded vigorously. “My account is set to private. Only users who know my exact user ID can send me messages, and who is going to know an eleven-digit user ID off the top of their head?”
Gabe stared straight at her. “You have your sister’s memorized.”
“And she has mine,” Maylin finished with a grin. “Besides, look at the message!”
There it was on the phone screen:
aTaaaaGc aTTaaaaG aTTaGccG aaTaaacc aTaaGccc aTTTcGcG
Marc hastily grabbed a napkin and scribbled out the code. “Short and sweet.” He started the conversion on the napkin, writing the binary under the letters.
“So you say,” Victoria muttered.
Marc continued to scribble without acknowledging his partner. “So the DNA translates to binary code. And the binary code translates to letters. I got that far. But this is what it says—”
aTaaaaGc aTTaaaaG aTTaGccG aaTaaacc aTaaGccc aTTTcGcG
01000010 01100001 01101001 00100000 01001000 01110101
Bai Hu
“Why? That’s how I translated it too, but I thought there had to be some change to the code.” There was something tickling the edge of Maylin’s mind. “Bai Hu isn’t even a monster or character in the game.”
“What is it?” Lizzy asked.
“It’s a white tiger.” Maylin stared into her ho fun. Thinking. An-mei sent her the answer. “It’s one of four celestial gods. Creatures. It depends on how you translate it. They’re also a part of the Chinese constellations.”
Gabe had his laptop out again and Marc was scribbling notes as she spoke.
“Keep talking. Something will catch,” Marc encouraged her.
“None of the locations had a white tiger or even a stylized animal as a logo.” Victoria tapped her spoon against the side of her bowl.
“There’s Xuan Wu, the black turtle in the north.” Maylin scraped at her memory for the mythology. It’d been a favorite back when they were children. There’d even been a Japanese anime based on the mythology, which An-mei had watched over and over. “Then there’s Qing Long in the east. He’s the azure dragon. Zhu Que is the vermillion bird in the south and Bai Hu is the white tiger in the west.”
“Vermillion, red?” Victoria asked. “Like a Phoenix?”
“Yes, Zhu Que represents the fire element.”
“And it’s in the south.”
“Basically.”
Marc jumped up off his stool and leaned over Gabe’s shoulder. “Bring up a map of the United States.”
While Gabe complied, Maylin rushed around the counter to look too. She had to crane her neck and get up on her tip toes to see over Gabe’s shoulder.
“If Phoenix Biotech in California is the south—” Marc pointed “—we assign the other celestial god animal things to the other states: Oregon, Montana, North Dakota. Your turtle could be either Montana or North Dakota depending on whether north refers to the state or the actual facility location. But what we care about is your tiger in the west. Seems pretty simple to me.”
Victoria piped up. “Each of these facilities are leftovers from the cold war, believe it or not. A satellite check showed the Oregon site is underground. Couldn’t get close because there’s high-level security restricting access to detailed imagery.”
“More and more likely,” Gabe commented.
“Oregon.” Maylin whispered, because stating the obvious seemed unnecessary, but she needed to say it for herself. “All this time and An-mei might be so close.”