The Lost Throne Read Online Free PDF Page B

ready.”
    Payne turned on his speakerphone. “Randy, you’re on with D.J.”
    “So,” Raskin asked, “what kind of trouble are you in this time?”
    “It’s not us,” Jones explained. “It’s a colleague of ours. And the clock is ticking.”
    Raskin nodded in understanding. The joking stopped at once. “What do you need?”
    “We need access to restricted phone numbers. Seventeen calls in the last twelve hours. All of them placed to Jon’s cell.”
    “The line we’re on now?”
    “Affirmative,” Jones answered.
    “No sweat. I started tracking it the moment he called. Give me a few seconds to get through his network’s firewall, and I can retrieve everything you need.”
    “Can you send it to my laptop?”
    “If you’d like. Or I can just read it to you.”
    Jones shook his head. “No thanks. I want a hard copy.”
    “Not a problem. I’ll send it right now.” Raskin hit Enter, sending the file. “It might take a few minutes to arrive. My system is running slow today. I’m crunching some serious data.”
    “In that case,” Payne said, “would you mind answering one question about the calls?”
    “Fire away.”
    “Where did they come from?”
    Raskin glanced at his middle screen. It was flanked by several others, all of them filled with data for other projects. “As far as I can tell, the calls came from three different sources. But the majority of them were placed in one city: Saint Petersburg.”
    “Saint Petersburg? We’re
in
Saint Petersburg.”
    Raskin shook his head. “Sorry, dude. Wrong Saint Petersburg. I’m talking about Russia.”
    P ayne hung up, more confused than before. “Someone’s calling me from Russia? That makes no sense. I haven’t been there in years.”
    Jones said nothing as he waited for the file to appear on his screen. When it did, he hit a few keys and the document started to print on his portable printer, which weighed less than three pounds and fit inside his laptop bag.
    “Here you go,” he said to Payne as he handed him a copy of the phone logs. Then he printed a second copy for himself, so he could take notes in the margin.
    According to the list, fifteen calls had been made to Payne’s phone from one number in Saint Petersburg, Russia. They had started at 3:59 A.M. and had ended at 11:01 A.M. That pattern changed at 11:28 A.M. when the caller switched to a pay phone—a fact confirmed by his final message.
    “Any thoughts?” Payne asked.
    “A few. Take a look at the last column.”
    The phone logs were divided into six columns, five of which were pretty straightforward. The first showed the date of the call. The second showed the time it was placed. The third showed the duration. The fourth showed the caller’s number. And the fifth showed the location.
    No problems reading any of those.
    But the sixth was a different story. It was more complicated.
    At the top of the column, there was a single word:
TOW
.
    No description. No explanation. No help of any kind.
    Payne and Jones tried to figure out what it meant by analyzing the column itself, but the data was an enigmatic mix of numbers and letters, separated by a dash. 18-A. 22-F. 4-C. And so on. A few of the combinations appeared more than once, always on successive calls, yet there didn’t seem to be a discernible pattern. At least not at first glance. And for all they knew, the letters might have been translated from the Cyrillic alphabet.
    Payne asked, “Is
TOW
an acronym?”
    “Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe
time of something.
Something that starts with a
W
.”
    “Time of waking my ass up.”
    “Somehow I doubt it. In fact, now that I think about it, time won’t work at all. It doesn’t correspond with the alphanumeric codes in the last column.”
    “The what?”
    “The things with the dashes.”
    Payne smiled. “Any thoughts on what could?”
    Jones shrugged. “It might be some kind of machine code—a basic set of instructions for the phone company’s central processing unit.