The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [79]
She said the two codes together. Each was an alphanumeric; joined, they made a combination of twenty numbers and letters that long ago her father had written down for some reason and now couldn’t remember but needed to know.
Nine digits followed by an N, then three numbers, then two letters. N678ST. She repeated it: N678ST. N678ST. Easy. It was an airplane identification code. It had to be.
And NX211. That was also an airplane’s ID number. Every plane in the United States had such an ID. It was federal law. The number painted on the side of the King of the Sky was, for example, NC48563. (The old designation, NC, she had once mistakenly thought stood for North Carolina.) A solitary “N” meant that the plane was registered in the United States. The N was always followed by alphanumerical characters of varying configurations, normally five of them. So N678ST would identify itself to air traffic as “November, six, seven, eight, Sierra, Tango.”
All right, then, one of her father’s passwords had to do with the FAA registry of two airplanes, either real or contrived. N678ST and NX211. She just needed to look up those numbers to find out to whom the planes belonged. But there were nine more numbers: Three, six, two, four, eight, four, zero, seven, zero. She broke them into combinations: There was something familiar about the final four numbers. Four, zero, seven, zero.
Her calculation was interrupted by the faint stutter in the engine again. But the gas gauge showed a quarter tank remaining. She checked the mixture but it was fine. All warning panels seemed to be working. Everything looked okay. Annie patted Malpy, who licked at her hand.
She was thinking about a remark made earlier by her father’s friend Rafael Rook during his odd phone call from Miami. “If it’s a password of Jack’s,” he’d said, “It will have something to do with you, he is so proud of your accomplishments—”
Four, zero, seven, zero. Annie flipped the numbers around as if she were looking at them in a mirror; something she recalled her father doing—he’d hold up a piece of paper to a mirror in a motel room in order to read it. She remembered how he’d done so once as he’d been smoking one of his long thin cigars. He’d puffed out smoke rings at her and said, like the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, “Whooooo aaaarrre yoouuuu?” Afterwards he’d set fire to the piece of paper in an ashtray.
“That’s it, Malpy.” Annie gave the dog a squeeze. “It’s zero, seven, zero, four. It’s the Fourth of July.” July Fourth, her (at least alleged) birthday. The rest of the numbers in the code were inverted as well. Three, six, two, four, eight. They should be eight four two—8:42, her time of birth—and six, three—6 lbs., 3 oz., her birth weight. She only recognized the numbers because her father had mentioned her birth certificate on the phone earlier this evening and she’d checked it. Had his mentioning her birth been a signal? But to what?
Annie was almost letting herself think that it was sweet of her father to remember her birth weight and the exact time of her birth, sweet that he had kept her birth certificate and then enclosed it with twelve thousand dollars in the blue suitcase he’d left with her in the Pilgrim Rest’s yard.
She stopped herself. What was she doing? Her father hadn’t remembered her. He’d left her there in his sister Sam’s front yard and vanished, just as he’d made up the passwords and then had forgotten what they were. Nothing stayed with Jack Peregrine. Nothing held.
Below Annie, the lights of St. Louis sprinkled the far horizon. The name of the city had always given her a good feeling because it was the city that had believed in Lindbergh, whose citizens had come together