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I wrote out TCCCCCCCG.

“Assume T means that the CCCCCCCG is creating a number. The sequence could stand for twelve or thirty-six. Or the T could be designating that the sequence is creating a letter, which means we do one more operation to get a letter of the alphabet. So then it’s L or…wait, no.” I scanned the code again, smiling now. “Yep. If my theory is right, I know what C and G are. G is one, C is five.”

“You sure?”

“Look at the second sequence. ACCCG. Let’s assume C is one. You would not write the number eight that way with Roman numerals. You’d write it GCCC.”

“So G is one, C is five.”

“Let’s assume that for now. Which means the only outstanding question is, what do the T and the A stand for. Based on our assumption that G is one and C is five, I just have to solve this code as if T represents a letter, A a number, and then do the inverse.”

“The T’s can’t signal letters,” she said.

I looked at the first sequence again. “You’re right.” Seven C’s followed by a G is thirty-six. Too high to correspond to a letter of the alphabet.

I made a pot of coffee, and while it brewed, I glanced outside again through the curtains. The snow had stopped. It was eight in the morning, and the town was waking up.

I returned to the table and started the process of transposing the nucleotides, making the T’s signal numbers, the A’s letters.

The first nine characters translated to the number 36.

The next five sequences spelled out the word point.

I raced to transpose the rest.

36POINT5625NORTH106POINT217777WEST



“Kara. I solved it.”

I took a sip of coffee as Kara walked over and stared at the computer screen.

“Coordinates?” she said.

“Yep.”

She pulled a chair over beside mine, took control of the laptop, and opened a search engine.

Into the query box, she entered: 36.5625N, 106.217778W.

We leaned toward the monitor, waiting for the next screen to load.

A map appeared.

A GPS pin-drop icon affixed to a patch of green.

“I can’t tell where this is,” I said.

Kara zoomed out.

Until the screen encompassed the words CARSON NATIONAL FOREST.

Kara zoomed out farther, and finally, I saw a name I recognized.

Santa Fe.

The coordinates were located in a national forest about eighty miles north-northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

We zoomed back in on the pin drop and changed the screen to satellite view. It was an ultra-res image of evergreen trees with a few pops of yellow that suggested aspen.

I moved the image around, looking for something, anything, of interest.

“I just see trees,” Kara said.

“Same.”

“What are the chances this cipher could have spit out random numbers that just happen to be GPS coordinates for a real place?”

“Infinitesimal. She spelled out point, west, and north.”

“But this is the middle of nowhere. I don’t see any buildings or infrastructure.”

“There could be something we’re missing in the shadows, or maybe it’s just an old image.”

Kara looked at the coordinates again. “One second of latitude is a hundred and one feet. One second of longitude equals eighty.”

“These coordinates only encompass eight thousand square feet,” I said. “Not a large area.”

“What is this?” Kara asked.

“I don’t know. Want to take a drive to New Mexico and find out?”

Kara’s computer flashed an alert—a drone had just left my package of dermal fillers in front of our motel room door.



* * *



—

I cut and dyed my hair at the bathroom sink. Went with black—a departure from the gray it had become after I turned forty. And having unintentionally gone more than three weeks without shaving since my imprisonment on the farm, I had a decent beard that still contained a blend of white, gray, and black. I dyed it all black to match.

The hair color change would help to conceal me from human eyes, but the CCTV-and drone-driven world of facial-recognition software didn’t scan for markers as mundane as hair or eye color. They measured more sophisticated, unchangeable aspects of physical features. Eye and earlobe shape. Millimeter distance between the corner of an eye and the corner of a mouth. Bone structure.

I’d sat through two seminars on emerging facial-recognition technologies in the last five years, and now had access to every single word in the memory landscape of my mind.

I used semipermanent eyeliner to artificially extend the length of my eyes and to create the illusion that they were larger and closer together.

As opposed to Botox (a neurotoxin that causes wrinkle-defeating paralysis in targeted areas of the face), dermal fillers simply filled age-related void spaces with a soft, gel-like substance that was injected subcutaneously.

Compared to my clandestine hacking of the GPA servers, getting up to speed on fillers was much, much scarier. Due to the risk of aesthetic and health-related complications, self-injection was forewarned again and again.

I watched every tutorial video I could find, with a focus on patients looking for dramatic facial changes. I studied how medical professionals held the syringes, which products were recommended for which features, appropriate injection doses, and locations.