Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [109]
Bullseye finally gave up and told me not to bother him anymore.
Maybe Newton holds the key.
Adrianna used her surrogate son as the basis for several passwords in her life.
“What goes up, must come down,” I say.
I open a file in which I’ve kept some of the futile work Bullseye and I have done. There are a half dozen clumps of ones and zeroes. I start cutting and pasting various batches into the binary decoder. For instance:
00110010 00111001 00111000 00110100 00110111 00110010 00110110 01100011 00111001 00110011
The decoder spits out: “2984726c93”
Then I reverse the order of the strings of ones and zeroes and the decoder spits out: “39c6274892”
In other words, I get the same nonsense in reverse order. I try this with string after string that we generated.
Feeling tired and defeated I get up for some coffee. I take two swigs.
I cut and paste another batch:
01100001 01101110 01101001 01110010 01100001 010011010 0111001 00111000 00110010 00111000 00110110 00110101 00101101 00110100 00110010 00110001
I enter it into the binary decoder. It spits out: “aniraM98 2865–412”
Like a lot of my attempts, it seems to suggest some meaning, but nothing I can make sense of.
In keeping with Isaac Newton’s theory that what goes up must come down, I switch the order of the strings, and I get:
00110001 00110010 00110100 00101101 00110101 00110110 00111000 00110010 00111001 00111000 01001101 01100001 01110010 01101001 01101110 01100001
I enter this into the binary decoder, and it spits out: 124–5682 89Marina
This is intriguing for a Bay Area resident. I pick up the decoded string (124–5682 89Marina) and I paste it into a Google search box. I hit enter. Google returns a response: “See results for: 89 Marina.”
I feel a charge I’m pretty certain is unrelated to the coffee: 89 Marina is the address of the San Francisco Marina. It’s a modest dock under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge where people park their houseboats and yachts.
I click on an image of the marina. It looks familiar—for obvious reasons. I’ve jogged there dozens of times, and stared at the female joggers and the setting sun twice that many. But there’s something else about the image that pulls at me. What is it?
What’s down at the marina?
I cut and paste into Google the random string of numbers (214–5682) generated by the binary decoder. Google spits back hundreds of thousands of hits. None of them has particular meaning.
I shut my laptop and close my eyes to see if I can make sense of this puzzle.
I get more coffee, drink it, and pace. A half mile of living-room exercise later, it hits me. I know where else I’ve seen an image of the marina houseboat docks. It was in Chuck’s house. In his father’s room, on the desk. I squint and clench my teeth and rattle my head trying to remember its name. And then my neuro-chemicals and caffeine gel and it comes to me: Surface to Air. The name of the boat.
This can’t be all random.
I walk into my bedroom and pick up a pair of Levis that I’d actually taken the time to fold, rather than pile on the floor on top of the other clothes. Folding, I’ve been telling myself, is a step toward becoming more organized and a better father. What about heading out to a marina at dawn to chase my imagination?
“Where are you going?” Polly stirs.
“Coffee, donut, and closure.”
She smiles, and puts her head back down. She’s been feeling sick lately and not working fifteen-hour days.
“Don’t get killed,” she mumbles innocently.
I stand in chilly stillness. The marina is modest, and a throwback to a less-expensive time. Many of the boats seem to belong to bygone hippies. One boat is called Janis Joplin Floats, and another is Grateful Dirge.
I don’t see another soul awake and walking these planks. Some are still asleep on their boats; others probably come only on weekends.