Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

After checking to make sure no one was around to observe him, he wiggled the motorcycle’s seat cushion until it came free, revealing a hollow space underneath, which contained a few items of gear that he preferred not to have to explain at a police checkpoint: a SIG-Sauer 9 mm pistol, two fifteen-round magazines, a small set of binoculars and a PVS-14 night vision monocular. He loaded a magazine into the pistol and slipped it into his waistband, at the small of his back. The spare magazines went into a pocket and the PVS-14 went into the backpack.

The idea of the cross-country trek didn’t bother him in the least. Though he didn’t know exactly how far he would have to travel, he had a feeling he would catch up to the Toyota—and discover its occupants’ final destination—before nightfall. Dirt roads were difficult to travel, especially in this region, which was plagued by seasonal monsoon rains. It might take hours to negotiate the crevices and craters created by erosion. The vehicle might not be able to travel much faster than he could run.

But before he set forth, there was one last thing he needed to do.

He took out his phone and dialed a number. It rang once, and then he heard a familiar voice—her voice. “Hello?”

“Giselle, mon cheri. I am so sorry…”





FOURTEEN


4163…

Sasha ran through the factors in her head. She discounted three out of hand; the individual digits did not add up to any multiple of three. Seven? No. Eleven?

She ran through the division. Forty-one minus thirty-three leaves eight…eighty-six minus seventy-seven is nine…ninety-three… No.

Seventeen? Nineteen? Twenty-three?

Yes… Twenty-three from forty-one leaves eighteen, for one hundred-eighty-six. Eight times twenty-three is one-eighty-four…which leaves two…twenty-three!

4167…

The digits added up to eighteen. Three was a factor. Next.

4169…

Sasha already knew that the number was not a prime—she had memorized the first two thousand prime numbers—but when she was faced with a problem for which the solution was not readily apparent, she would work her way down the number line, testing every number to see if it was prime, a number that was divisible by only itself and one. The activity helped sharpen her mental subroutines and gave her brain a chance to process the problem in the background. Once in a while, the problem might relate to her work—a particularly tricky code that would not yield to a brute force attack—but more often than not, the problems that confounded her the most had nothing to do with codes or numbers or anything that could be expressed in the precise language of mathematics. Instead, her consternation arose from the chaos of human interactions. She would use the technique to stave off boredom, such as when forced to sit in a doctor’s waiting room. She was always punctual, and could never understand why medical professionals could not afford their patients the same courtesy. Other people would read magazines or play games on their cell phones… Sasha worked out the primes.

This situation was a lot like waiting at the doctor’s office, except it had gone on now for…how long? Long enough to get to over four thousand.

She knew she should probably be afraid. Rainer had killed Scott Klein, for no reason she could fathom, and it seemed likely enough that he would kill her too, but that prospect did not frighten her nearly as much as the ongoing uncertainty. More than anything else, she hated not understanding what was going on around her.

After leaving the helicopter in Syria, he and the other men had been polite, if a bit abrupt at times. She had not been mistreated at all, aside from the simple fact that she was their prisoner. Rainer had promised that he would explain everything once they arrived at their destination, so with every stop along the way, she had asked him again.

“Not yet,” he had told her as they deplaned in Yangon, and then they had moved through the airport to another concourse to wait for yet another flight. “Soon, everything will make sense. Trust me.”

Rainer seemed to understand that threats of violence were not the way to gain her compliance. He did not seem put out by her repeated inquiries; if anything, he regarded her almost playfully, as if he was in possession of a secret that he was dying to share with her.

Now, as she bounced between the other two men in the back seat of the Toyota, with Rainer in the front passenger seat along with the Chinese man who had met them outside the airport, she sensed the long-awaited answer would come very soon. Speculation about what it might be was almost as frustrating as the waiting.

She was contracted to work for the US government, and as such was privy to matters that were classified as Top Secret, but the men who now held her captive had access to the same materials.

Did they need her to break a code?

That seemed likely enough, and yet why the elaborate deception? Why lure her to Iraq and then subsequently spirit her off to Myanmar, when they could have just abducted her off the streets of Georgetown?

It was a human problem; imprecise and unpredictable. Human variables were too chaotic.