Lock In (Lock In, #1)(57)

It was the last two who had been making Redhouse jittery when he spoke to me earlier in the day. It’s one thing to have your boss breathing down your neck about a case. It’s another thing to have the two most powerful people in the Navajo Nation doing the same thing.

I glanced over to Redhouse. He still didn’t look entirely thrilled to be in the room.

“I don’t know any password,” May Sani was telling Redhouse. “Janis doesn’t either. Johnny never told us any passwords.”

“We don’t think he did,” Redhouse said. “We think maybe he wanted to give it to you but then he died before he could do it. But we do know he wanted the two of you to see this. So maybe the password would be something that meant something to you, or something only the two of you would know.”

Janis looked over to me. “You couldn’t just break the password?” she asked.

“We didn’t want to do that,” I said. “It would be disrespectful to Johnny, and to the two of you. If you want, we can try. But it might take a long time. I agree with Officer Redhouse here that before we try doing that, you should take a few guesses.”

“When people make passwords, they sometimes use the names of family members or pets,” Redhouse said, and went over to the keyboard that was wirelessly connected to the display. “For example, ‘May.’” He typed in the word. It came up wrong. “Or ‘Janis,’” Redhouse said. That one also came up blank. “Any pets?”

“We had a dog when Johnny was a boy,” Janis said. “His name was Bentley. Our mom named him.” Redhouse tried it. It came up blank. Several combinations of the three names likewise came up uselessly.

“We’ll be here all day,” Roanhorse whispered to Becenti, who nodded.

“Did Johnny know any Navajo?” I asked. “Did he speak or write the language?”

“A little,” Janis said. “We were taught it at school, but he didn’t do very well in school.”

“He loved the stories about the Code Talkers,” May said. “The ones from World War Two. There is that old movie about them that he used to watch when he was a boy.”

“Windtalkers?” Redhouse asked.

“I think so,” May said. “I didn’t like watching it. Too much blood. One year for his birthday I got him a Code Talkers dictionary. He would read that a lot.”

I pulled up a Navajo Code Talkers dictionary online. It had several hundred words in it, a number of categories, including names of airplanes, ships, military units, and months.

“Tah Tsosie,” I said.

Everyone in the room looked at me strangely. “What did you just say?” Redhouse asked me.

“Tah Tsosie,” I repeated. “I just looked up the Code Talkers dictionary. The month of May is Tah Tsosie. I am aware I’m pronouncing it terribly.”

“You really are,” Redhouse said, smiling.

“Johnny called me that for a little while after I gave him the book,” May said.

“It’s worth a shot,” I said, to Redhouse. He typed it in.

The file opened.

“May, Janice,” President Becenti said. “Do you want to see it alone first?”

“No,” May said. She reached over to her granddaughter, who took her hand. “Stay.”

Redhouse hit the keyboard again to play the file.

And there was Johnny Sani, alive to me for the first time.

“Hello, Grandma. Hello, Janis,” he said, staring into the lens, which he held close to his head so that it obscured most of the background. “I think maybe they can hear what I do on my phone so I went and bought a camera. I’m going to hide this for now, so if something happens to me you’ll find it.

“I think there’s something wrong with me. I think maybe something they did to me is making me sick.

“You remember I went in to look at a job for a janitor. After I did that I got a call from someone who said he was a recruiter for another job. Said that it would pay really well. He said to go back to the computing facility and that there would be a driverless car waiting for me. All I would have to do is tell it my name and it would take me to my job interview. So I did and the car was there and I told it my name.

“The car drove me to Gallup, to a building where a threep was waiting for me. He said his name was Bob Gray and that the job would be acting as a personal assistant for an important man. I asked them what that meant, and he said it mostly meant running errands and taking him to places he wanted to go. He said I would get to travel and see the world and it would pay well, and all that sounded good to me.

“I asked Bob, why me? And he said it’s because I was special in ways I didn’t even know about. Then he gave me two thousand dollars in cash and said that was the first week’s salary right up front and I could keep it even if I said no. He said the job paid cash so I wouldn’t even have to pay taxes on it or nothing.

“Well, I took the job right then. Bob said that the CEO liked his privacy so I shouldn’t tell people anything but that I got a job. So I did.

“And then after I said good-bye to you, the car drove me to California. Bob met me and showed me my apartment and said it was mine now. Then he gave me some more money.

“The next day Bob took me to meet my boss, who was named Ted Brown and who was also a threep. He said that as his assistant I would become an Integrator, which is someone who took people places in his head. They would need to put a computer into my brain for that to happen. I was scared at first but they told me it wouldn’t hurt and that Ted would only need me to do it every once in a while and the rest of the time I could do what I wanted. But because my job was secret they would have me use a code name, named Oliver Green.