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"I' you a ticket to Bletchley Park," Barrett said, referring to the British code-breaking headquarters during World War II

"Using the alphabets to write the word ibberish" Karla stared at the ith disappointment in her eyes

"Your grandfather didn't want to make it too easy I came up with the same result Then I went back to the key word D and R are four spaces apart in the word door I wrote down every fourth word in thetold me that it was tooI could sink ht, D and R are fifteen letters apart in the alphabet I used that formula in the poem and picked out every fifteenth word Then I used the plain and cipher alphabets to attempt the cryptanalysis Are you still with me?"

"No," Austin said

"Yeah, that's what happened to rin "So I cheated I ran the whole bloody h a computer" He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a coot"

"A mishmash of vowels and consonants, but no words," Karla said

"I tried everything I called up an MIT professor who spoke Hungarian and ran it by hio Then I reuy who runs the Transylvania Restaurant back in Seattle He couldn't make heads nor tails of it I would have torn my hair out, if I had any I went back to the words that I had discarded, particularly turvy-topsy I thought "

"How could you turn the e upside down?" Karla said with skepticism

"I couldn't But I could interpret the words loosely, and run it backward, like the second line of the poem Which is what I did

Still didn't make sense Then I had an epiphany As I rode around on my bike, I realized that it wasn't supposed to be words It was exactly what it was, a string of letters, ured that there were nue as well Back to the computer Certain letters were indicators that meant the next letter was actually a number A preceded by another letter equals 1, B equals 2 and so on"

"You've lost ain," Austin said Fro around in cipher land as well

Barrett set the coe aside and picked up the napkin in both hands "This is an equation"

"An equation for what?" Austin said

"By itself, the ot to look at it in context Kovacs intended that the e would be seen by only one person: Karla He said she would always have the poem when you needed it"

"Are you saying what I think you're saying?" Austin said