Chapter 6
Two Minutes From Capture
Regan rushed to the door and tried to pry it open. Not surprisingly, it wouldn’t budge. She banged angrily on the door with the sides of her fists. “We’re trapped!” she yelled anxiously. They were in big trouble now.
Ryan fought to remain calm. “We still have two minutes,” he said quickly. “Let’s not panic. We can get out of this. Mom and Dad said that one of the new passwords they created was for an elevator. I’m betting it was for this elevator. Do you remember?”
“That’s right! Mom said the password was ‘We are in the middle of nowhere’. Good going, Ryan! Quick, let’s punch it in.”
Ryan shook his head. “The computer asked for a twelve-letter password, remember?”
“How many letters are there in ‘we are in the middle of nowhere’?”
“Too many. Let’s find out exactly. Count them while I start spelling.” He recited each letter in the phrase hastily and looked expectantly at Regan for a letter count.
“Twenty-five” she said, frowning. “You’re right. Far too many. As crazy as it seems, this must be the password for a different elevator.”
“I don’t think so. How many password protected elevators can there be? This has to be the right password. Somehow. There must be a trick to it. Dad wrote it down for Mom. If there wasn’t a trick to it he could have just told her what it was.”
“Right,” said Regan, encouraged. “And when Mom saw it she told him he was clever.”
Ryan rubbed his hand through his hair as if to stimulate his brain. “Is there any way to write this sentence using only twelve letters?”
Regan considered the question carefully. “Maybe there is!” she said, her eyes growing wide. “Last year Dad challenged me to write ‘I see you are a cutie’ using only seven letters.”
Ryan thought about this for only a second before he saw the answer. “I . . . C . . . U . . . R . . . A . . . Q . . . T” he said. Regan was on to something here. “Typical Dad puzzle. People do this sort of thing on their car’s license plates to shorten messages. I bet this is what Dad did with the password.”
“You have . . . sixty seconds . . . to enter a correct password,” announced the computer.
Regan refused to let the annoying computer voice distract her or to think about the seconds that were quickly ticking away. “Okay, let me give it a try. You count this time,” she said and without waiting began to work on shrinking the password. “WE. R. N. T. MID-L. OF. NO—”
“Still too many!” interrupted Ryan hurriedly. “And that’s using N for ‘in’ and T for ‘the’, which I don’t think Dad would do. Too sloppy.”
“You have . . . thirty seconds . . . to enter a correct password.”
“There have to be other tricks for shortening a message. What are we missing!” challenged Regan frantically.
Ryan continued to think furiously. She was right. There had to be another trick. But what was it? He held his head in his hands and tried to block everything else out.
“You have . . . fifteen seconds . . . to enter a correct password. Fourteen, Thirteen, Twelve—”
Regan felt sick to her stomach. If they had been caught outside they could have acted like innocent kids just looking for their parents to say hello. Now it would be obvious they weren’t innocent. Now there was no way they could just play dumb. She braced herself as the computer counted down the last few seconds remaining.
Ryan’s head shot up from his hands and his eyes widened as inspiration hit him full force. He had it! The password. At least he thought he did. If only he could enter it in time. His fingers raced over the metal keyboard as the computer continued its countdown to disaster. Regan looked on in astonishment.
“—Three, Two, One—”
Ryan stabbed at the last key as the computer calmly spoke what had suddenly become a horrifying word.
“Zero.”