Page 58 of Cyn
A few minutes later, the five of them were seated around the table, food and drinks in front of them, and Cyn with the phone.
“It’s going to need a password,” Nora pointed out.
“Any ideas?” Cyn asked. The phone booted up and sure enough, it opened to a keypad requiring a code.
“McElroy’s birthday?” Devil suggested.
Six shook her head. “He was a shitty kid with even shittier morals. He would have picked a day like 9/11 or the date of some Civil War battle that the South won.”
Nora nodded. “I agree with Six. I bet it’s the date of something historic.”
“What about the day you met?” Joe asked.
Four sets of eyes turned to him. “I beg your pardon?” Devil asked.
“I never met McElroy,” Cyn said.
“No, not McElroy, but Meleak,” he clarified. “There was that weird last line in the letter Meleak wrote. He was waxing poetic about you, so it didn’t seemtoounusual for him to remind you of the day you met. But he had to have been in the phone at some point because he knows it has information you’d want or need. While he was in, he could have reset the password, and the reference to the day you met would be an obvious one that was meaningful only to the two of you.”
Cyn frowned in thought, but keyed in a number, then grinned when the home screen filled the display. “Six was right, you are a man amongst men,” she said, holding it up for everyone to see.
“Good, now start digging while the rest of us eat,” Six ordered, then promptly took a huge bite of a fajita.
The group fell silent as they ate, Cyn clicking through apps with one hand as she fed herself with the other. Ten minutes passed before she looked up. “Good news or bad news?” she asked.
“Bad then good,” Devil and Six said at the same time, while Nora said the opposite.
Cyn’s gaze skidded around the table before landing back on the phone. “The good news is, there are a shit ton of files on here, mostly photos and documents.”
“The bad news?” he asked.
She made a face. “Most are encrypted, and we’ll need to hook it up to my computer to see if we can decrypt them. Well, I know wecandecrypt them. It might take my program a little while to figure out the key, though.”
“I hate to be the harbinger of doom, butifsomething is planned for MLK day, we have less than forty-eight hours to figure it out,” Nora pointed out.
There were several solemn nods, and Cyn pushed back from her seat, grabbing the phone as she rose. “I’ll get it going, then come back down. It will take a while, so we should have plenty of time to finish eating.” And with that, she was gone. Leaving him with Six, Devil, and Nora. All of whom were looking at him, even as they continued to eat and drink.
Joe knew the power of silence, though, and wasn’t about to be intimidated by Cyn’s friends, despite their best efforts. Ignoring the pointed looks, he dug back into his own food, occasionally looking up to find them still staring at him. By the time Cyn came back downstairs, less than eight minutes later, not a word had been spoken.
She paused at the landing, her hand resting on the doorframe. “Everything okay down here?” she asked.
When her friends nodded, her gaze moved to him. He lifted his shoulder. “I don’t know. Your friends were trying to do this weird intimidation by silence thing. If I hadn’t seen the PsyOps folks do it a hundred times before, it probably would have worked and I would have started babbling about my childhood and all of that kind of shit six minutes ago.”
Six snorted a laugh, then covered her nose—no doubt the bubbles from the sip of beer she’d just had had climbed up. Devil gave a hint of a grin, and Nora smiled.
Cyn rolled her eyes and rejoined them. “Seriously guys, you are going to have to get more creative than that. Former military, remember?” she said, gesturing to him with her beer bottle. “Now, I don’t know how long it will take for the program to break the encryption, but I suggest we all finish quickly in case it’s sooner rather than later.”
It turned out Cyn’s prompting hadn’t been necessary, and an hour later, the decryption program was still doing its job. Nora left shortly thereafter, needing to check on the puppies, then Devil and Six trailed out thirty minutes later, each with orders to call them if he and Cyn found anything.
Once the house was quiet again, and he and Cyn had finished tidying up the kitchen, they wandered back up to the office to see how things were progressing. Interestingly, two files had been decrypted, but all the others were still in progress.
“He had more than one type of encryption on his phone,” Joe noted, mostly to himself. Obviously, McElroy had at least two different encryptions, or else the key that had decrypted the first two files would have decrypted them all.
“I thought it was sophisticated that he had encryption at all,” Cyn said, printing the files the program had managed to open. “Knowing this, I think hemusthave had access to some pretty good tech people. Which means more than our three stooges are involved.”
“Any ideas?”
She shook her head. “I’ll look in the university system tomorrow to see if he took any computer science classes, but I think I may send everything to Lucy, too. We’ll probably have everything decrypted by the morning, so won’t need her for that, but she may pick something up from the style used to protect the files, and that might give us some leads on who helped him.” She paused and absentmindedly tapped the papers on her desk. “Although, to be honest, knowing who did the tech work probably isn’t going to help us stop whatever McElroy and the others had planned.”
