With the crosswords all partially completed.
Something stirred at the back of Bridge’s mind. She took out her iPhone and swiped through the photos. She hadn’t exactly been thorough, but from what she could see of the newspapers she’d photographed, there was enough here to support a theory. Several pictures showed not just the date, but the crosswords in question. She checked the June 18th papers, as those were the first where she’d made the date connection, and saw there were three pictures where the crossword was visible. She pinched to zoom, magnifying each of them as much as she could, and noted which clues had been answered.
They were all clustered around the same group. 14, 15, 16 across; 8, 9, 11 down.
As Bridge had come across each piece of ASCII art in the newsgroup, she’d made a text file copy and saved it, along with the date it was posted. She scrolled through the folder now, looking for a file around June 18th. And there it was, right on the dot.
She opened the file, and was confronted with a 78 x 78 grid of seemingly-random letters and numbers that, if you squinted, looked like a Volkswagen Beetle. Her eyes darted to the end, to the strange sequence of characters that made up the end of every image, in this case *0 6 188 D16A.
The last five characters. 8D. 16A. 8 Down, 16 Across?
That left four preceding, all numbers: 0 6 1 8.
She could have kicked herself. A date, in American format: 06-18. June 18th.
Bridge exhaled, only then realising she’d been holding her breath. She leaned back in her chair and clutched her head, trying to bring her racing mind under control. Ten had said the ASCII posts were a code, and here was the proof, or at least a part of it. He’d figured out the recurring characters were references to a date, and crossword puzzle clues. It was logical to assume they referred to a newspaper. But there was nothing to indicate which newspaper, so Ten had gone out and bought every single one. According to her copy of the newsgroup post, the June 18th ASCII art had gone live at 1500 GMT. Bridge smiled as she imagined Ten running around local newsagents, trying to find the last copies of every newspaper he could find. The locals must have thought he was mad.
Why not go online? All the newspapers put their crosswords up on their websites these days. And what had he found, anyway? The references made sense. She opened more text file copies she’d made of the Usenet posts and realised that yes, they all followed the same format. Only the spacing changed.
* 0 51 5 21A 5 D (May 15th, 21 Across, 5 Down)
* 0 428 18D1 3 A (April 28th, 18 Down, 13 Across)
* 042 2 2 0D3 A (April 22nd, 20 Down, 3 Across)
But what did it mean? Even in just the three photos Bridge had of June 18th crosswords, the answers for ‘8 Down and 16 Across’ were all very different.
The Times: ‘Recalcitrant’, ‘Fallujah’.
The Guardian: ‘Tankard’, ‘Epistemology’.
The Daily Express: ‘Hughes’, ‘Europe’.
Bridge’s stomach rumbled. It was 9 o’clock, and all she’d eaten since returning home that morning was a cereal bar. But she didn’t want to turn away from this, and Ten, now. She’d done that the night before, and now Ten was dead.
She scolded herself. That wasn’t fair, and deep down she knew it. If she hadn’t gone to dinner with Izzy, what would or could she have done? Sit on the chat server all night, waiting for an alert that never came? The only way she could have helped was if she’d gone with Ten to that meeting, and that had been out of the question. He didn’t give her any real details about the phone conversation.
The phone number. Ten had said he found it after decoding one of the ASCII pieces. But none of these crossword solutions were numbers. She quickly skimmed the text files she’d saved, but saw nothing resembling a string of digits that could be a phone number in them. Perhaps they were distributed somehow throughout the characters in the 78 x 78 grid? But then what would be the point of the crossword references, if the information was right there in the ASCII? It wouldn’t need ‘decoding’ in the first place.
Bridge shook her head. This wasn’t doing any good. “Valkyrie needs food, badly,” she mumbled to herself, and put her monitor to sleep.
19
A halloumi burger, sweet potato fries, and processed orange juice probably didn’t count as ‘real food’, but it beat mainlining coffee while devouring the half packet of chocolate biscuits in her cupboard, which was definitely what Bridge would have been doing if she hadn’t left the flat.
The café had been here almost a year now. She hoped it would survive. East Finchley was hardly replete with veggie places, and it would be nice to have a local place where she could call herself a regular, although she did love the easy anonymity possible in London. The café was less than ten minutes’ walk from her flat, and she came in every couple of weeks, but almost never saw the same patrons twice. Even the servers turned over every few months. In a city of almost ten million people, seeing the same faces on a regular basis took effort. She’d grown up in Lyon, which was the third biggest city in France. But with less than half a million people, it was a minnow compared to the shark that was London, and as a child she’d come to know many people, shopkeepers, and neighbours. If she’d been raised here in London, would she have had that same
