Page 25 of The 9th Man

“Trustworthy?” she asked.

“Impeccable.” He checked his watch. Midnight in Belgium was 6:00P.M., dinnertime, in West Virginia. He knew the number having called it several times before, and he dialed it on his secure Magellan Billet phone.

Marcia Pooler answered on the second ring.

He tappedSPEAKER.

“Miss Marcia, it’s Luke Daniels.”

“Little Lukey, haven’t heard from you in a while.”

“I know. I should have checked in.”

“If you don’t call your friends often enough, they forget who y’are.”

“I’m real sorry about that, ma’am. I’ll do better, I promise.”

“So to what do I owe the pleasure?Are youcallin’ to finally admit my apple cobbler’s better than your mama’s.”

“And cross her? No thank you.” Though Marcia did make a super cobbler. “I’m hoping you can help me with a computer issue.” He paused. “Off the books.”

As prodigies went, Marcia Pooler was a late bloomer. She’d gone decades without the faintest notions about random access memory or what a dual core processor did. And then on a lark, she’d signed up for a computer literacy class at her local community collegehoping to expand her horizons. By the second session she was obsessed. Fortunately, her instructor had been not only a patient soul, but also a retired Defense Department tech manager who lived and breathed the digital world.

In short order Marcia was all over cyber mumbo jumbo like pan gravy coated country-fried steak. Computers and their software underpinnings just made sense to her. Code sang songs she readily understood. Eventually, her skills developed to the point that her professor helped secure freelancing work for Apple, Deutsche Telekom, Raytheon, even the Department of Defense. Three years ago the Magellan Billet became a client. Now, at age sixty-eight, Marcia Pooler, grandmother andWheel of Fortunefanatic, was a certified IT specialist with a high security clearance. She’d helped him before with a favor, so he was hoping she would again now.

“Oh, little Lukey, you do love to push the envelope,” she said. “But I can keep a secret, if you can.”

Which meant they were now in don’t-ask-don’t-tell territory with Stephanie Nelle.

“I’ve got an email address that’s giving me trouble,” he said. “Can I give it to you?”

And he read off the odd combination of letters and symbols.

“Got it,” she said.

“It’s a Googlewhack.”

“I had no idea you were so computer-savvy.”

“I’m not. But that’s what I was told. In fact, it may be a super Googlewhack. I’m looking for everything you can give me on it. Especially, who owns it.”

“Anything for you, darlin’. How do I find you?”

“I’m on my Billet phone.”

“Speaking of that, have you called your mama?”

“Last Sunday, like always.”

“Good boy. Give me a few hours.”

He ended the call.

“She sounds like a character,” Jillian said.

“She lives on a goat farm and raises alpacas. I’ve been there. Her brain’s wired differently from the rest of us. She’s a friggin’ genius. Have you found anything useful?”

“A lot of diary entries from Benji’s time serving in Europe. Things he saw. People he met. I saw them the first time I was in this box. Like he was going to write a book or something. He seems to have been keeping notes for decades, but there are large time gaps. Then there’s this.”