The next contact was by messenger, an acne-faced teen with a voice that should have cracked and changed years earlier. He expected to hand over the envelope and be on his merry way, so he was surprised when Avery flashed her badge and made him come inside.

"Who hired you to deliver the package?" Avery asked as Frank tore into the sealed envelope.

"Mickey Quinn! Can you believe it? He's like a legend, man. Ma'am."

"How do you know him?"

"I don't. He came into the store where I work to buy some stuff. Can you believe it? Mickey Quinn buying electronics from me! He asked if I wanted to make some cash and I said sure. Paid me a hundred bucks to deliver it."

"Let him go," Frank said, eyes locked on the envelope contents. "He doesn't know anything and we've got work to do."

Avery took the kid's name and address anyway, then sent him out the door. When he was gone, she joined Frank at the dining table where he had the contents spread out before him. Two Polaroid photos and two pages filled with numbers and the words 'Your Father' written at the top of one and 'Your Brother' written on the top of the other. The most ominous thing in the package was a timer ticking down from ten hours.

"Some kind of code?" Avery asked as she skimmed one of the pages.

"Yeah. It must be instructions on how to find them."

"Two different pages. They're separated."

"Probably. And the clock's ticking." Which could mean a bomb or any number of booby-traps set to go off at a specific time. "God damn it. I don't know if I can do this."

"You can, Frank. Quinn wrote these codes specifically for you. He knows your abilities, which means you can crack them."

"Sure, given enough time but I don't have that. I don't even know where to start."

"The same way you start to crack any code. Look for patterns, keywords. . . "

"Right. Okay." Frank got up from the table, went to his desk then came back with a legal pad and a couple of pencils. He rearranged the contents so they formed a kind of pyramid. Blank paper at the bottom, the two pages above, the two photos above that and then the clock.

Avery took the clock away. "Forget that. Concentrate on the page. I'm going to call Hammond, see if he can get us some help."

"Use the phone in the bedroom." Frank absently pointed toward the door then he started making notes on the legal pad.

He started by writing the alphabet across the page sideways. The numbers in the messages were mostly double digits. Some were a single digit and a letter and none of them were lower than 20. That left out a simply 1 = A solution, which would have been too obvious, anyway.

Father and brother were similar words, so he tried scanning for patterns that matched on both pages. He found groupings that were identical, but mostly they were four characters or under. Probably often repeated words like 'the,' 'and' and 'are.' Hard to tell though, because there was no visible punctuation. The only thing that defined one grouping from another was a slight space, likely caused by the natural inclination to space between words and sentences.

This was Quinn's handwriting. Very precise. Very neat. All of the numbers sitting exactly in the space between the lines on the paper as if they'd been printed there by a machine.

This was personal.

He tried his birthday, Joe's birthday, their names as keywords. He kept working back and forth between the two pages hoping that one would lead him to the answer on the other.

Frank picked up both Polaroids. Fenton was stalwart as always. Joe on the other hand was wide-eyed and terrified. He was trying to cover. Aiming for brave, but Frank could see the truth.

"Hold on, little brother. I'm coming." He put the pictures down, then tore two blank pages off the legal pad. He folded the papers in half then used them to mask portions of the code. The first two lines on both pages were identical. After that, they differed wildly.

There was something familiar about the patterns but he couldn't figure out what. Something about the sequences. The numbers with the letters next to them – 4B, 6C, nothing further along than an F, nothing higher than 79. That meant something. But what?

He searched his memories for a phrase, or a book that meant something to Quinn. Some secret they'd shared. One of Joe's songs, maybe.

"Song!"

"What song?" Avery asked as she returned to the dining table.

"B, C, F." He pointed to the instances on both coded pages. "They're guitar chords. Maybe it's a musical cypher. "

"But 55? 32? How does that translate into music?"

"Pythagoras discovered that musical notes could be translated into mathematical equations. If we. . . if we. . take the numbers and add or subtract. . . " Frank picked up Joe's page, put it down then picked up Fenton's. "If we assume that each grouping. . ." He was reaching and he knew it.

Avery knelt down beside the chair and pulled him around to face her. "You have to concentrate. You have to forget what's at stake here and look at it as any other puzzle that needs to be solved." She grabbed both of his hands in hers and squeezed. "And you need to focus on one puzzle at a time."

He started to protest but she cut him off. "Frank, bouncing back and forth isn't helping either one of them. Pick one and work it through. The two codes are the same, right?"

"I think so. The first two lines are identical."

"See, then you only have to crack one. After that, the second one will be a breeze."

Easier said than done. To look at it, they were nothing but pieces of paper, but to Frank, each page represented a life.

"What if I pick one and the other one dies?"

"What if they both die because you can't concentrate? This is exactly what Quinn was counting on. That emotions would short out your brain. Don't let him win."

Frank sucked in a deep breath then made a decision he hoped he wouldn't regret for the rest of his life. He stuffed both pictures back in the envelope along with the page labeled, 'Your Father.' Then he got a clean sheet of paper, set it up next to the code marked, 'Your Brother' and got to work.

BR BR

Frank worked for what felt like hours pushing past the headache and the eyestrain until he couldn't take another second. With a growl of frustration, he pushed back from the table then went to the kitchenette where Avery was making coffee.

The timer was on the counter. Frank eyed it like it was a snake about to strike. The good news was that he'd only been working for about forty minutes. The bad news, that meant Fenton and Joe were forty minutes closer to whatever dire circumstance was going to befall them.

"Nothing, huh?" Avery asked as she poured water through the coffee machine. "You need to eat."

"Nothing here to eat," Frank replied. "We cleaned out the fridge before we left." Which was true, but really he didn't feel like eating at all. "I'll have coffee when it's done. I just need a break."

He wandered out of the kitchen and kept going until he was at the door to Joe's room. Since they'd moved into the apartment together, they'd been more cautious of each other's privacy and Frank couldn't think of the last time he'd stepped into this room when Joe wasn't in there.

The hesitation only lasted a few seconds, then he went inside and smiled slightly at the mess. Clothes on the floor, books piled everywhere, Joe's guitar lying across an unmade bed. Frank picked up the guitar and gently strummed the strings. He had no musical ability whatsoever, and never had the desire to learn, but right now he wished he could play at least one song from Joe's repertoire.

Quinn had been excited by Joe's music and Frank still wasn't convinced that the code wasn't based on chords and notes. Still holding the guitar, he sat down in the arm chair under the reading lamp and immediately jumped back up when something stabbed him in the hip. He set the guitar aside and felt around in the cushions until he came up with a Star Ship game console for the Atari. Dad had given them the machine as an apartment warming present.

Atari.

Video games.

That's it! Frank ran back into the living room.

"Video games!" he shouted. "That's what Quinn does. He's a video game designer. Damn, I'm an idiot." He kept on going, straight to the bookshelf by his desk. "It's Hexadecimal code. I knew, I knew it."

"It's what?"

"Hexadecimal code. It's a computer language. Programmers use it." He found the book he wanted on the shelf, pulled it loose then took it back to the dining room table. "There's a conversion chart in here, but I'm sure. It's based on sixteen digits, that's why you need the letters, A, B, C, D. . . to make up the rest of the numbers."

"I'm confused."

"It's too hard to explain but there it is." He pointed to a page in the open text book, a long chart with number sequences on one side and alphabet letters and punctuation on the other. "Give me a second." Frank tore off a clean sheet of paper and started working the translation. Letter by letter until the first sentence was clear.

"Begin where it all began."

"Where's that? Back at Quinn's place?"

"No, he wouldn't have had time to get there and still set this up. He has to be close by." Frank translated the next line of text. "Go down and cross the red line. The red line. The red line." He slapped his palm on the table. "The beginning is our house in Bayport. Joe and I were both born there and that's where they were headed when he stopped them."

"Or it could be that spot on the road. That was the beginning of all of this."

"No." Frank collected the papers into a hurried pile. "South of our house you cross the railroad tracks for the red line passenger trains. That's where we need to go."

Avery drove so Frank could keep working on the code. Using the radio in her car, they contacted the State Police and were turned over to a Sargent Mills.

"There are two locations," Avery told him, working with mic with one hand while she steered with the other. "They both begin at the Red Line train-crossing at 14th Street in Bayport. After that, they appear to split. We're still working on the exact locations but we could use some help. Over."

"Whatever you need," said Mills. "I'll send a couple of cars to the train crossing and they'll wait there for further instructions. Over and out."

She hung up the mic, started to say something to Frank, then changed her mind when she saw what was ahead of them. "Bear left." She nudged Frank to look up. "What do you think?"

The translated text told them that they must "bear left" in order to advance. But it wasn't specific about where to turn, exactly. Frank had advised her to pass several forks in the road, saying that when they saw the spot they'd know it and though she'd doubted him at the time, she didn't doubt anymore.

In front of them was a sign – a happy, yellow bear, advertising a wheel alignment service – and it was on the left.

"That's it," said Frank. "Turn at the sign and go straight on until morning."

"Straight on until morning," Avery repeated. She had no idea what that meant, but Frank had been right the first time, when they saw it, they'd know it. "How much do you have left to translate on Joe's?"

"I'm done. I'm working on Dad's." He grabbed the mic and called Mills back. "I've got the second line. From the train tracks, they need to go South and hear what the buzz is all about. That could be literal; some place along the road where you can hear a transforming buzzing or a sign or a street with bees, or hives. It's a riddle; you have to see it from all sides."

"I'll tell them and I'll let you know what they come up with. "

"And hurry. We're running out of time. Over and out." Frank hung up the mic then rolled his head to relieve the tension in his neck. He's been hunched over the papers since they'd left and he was getting car sick from concentrating. After completing Joe's page, he thought he had the code memorized so he'd attempted Fenton's without consulting the chart and that resulted in gibberish which meant no more short cuts. He had to get it right.

They drove in silence for several minutes then Avery asked him to read off the rest of the clues to Joe's whereabouts.

"Straight on until morning. Then, 'you almost missed your chance when he bought the farm.'"

"I don't like the sound of that."

"Me either. The last line says 'the family business goes on forever, can you dig it?'"

The radio came to life, startling both of them. Frank grabbed it. "Yeah, we're here. What did they find? Over."

"A couple of options. There's Parson's Sawmill. You can hear that buzz from a mile away. There's a fabric store called the Quilting Bee, but that's a little north of the tracks and there's an answering service that has a buzzing bee in the logo."

"I like that last one. Is it on a corner?"

"It is indeed."

Frank swallowed hard, all too aware of what a wrong guess could cost him. "Go with it. Tell them to turn there then follow the old man to his watering hole. I don't know what to tell you on that one."

"I understand. We'll work it out and get back to you. Over and Out."

Frank dropped the mic and half moaned, half sighed. "What if I sent them the wrong way? What if it was the sawmill or the quilt shop?"

Avery reached over and laid her hand on his arm. "Hammond said, you take what you've learned and you go with your gut. That's all we've got, here Frank. But I trust your decisions. You understand how Quinn thinks."

He shook his head. "It's just gamer stuff." He gazed out the window and this time he nudged her to look. "Straight on until mourning."

A funeral home.

Avery turned toward it, then two car lengths later, pulled over to the curb just in front of the entrance to the Internal Rest Cemetery.

"Bought the farm? Goes on forever?"

"No. I know it fits, but this isn't it. It can't be it," said Frank.

"Because you don't want it to be it? What was the last line? Can you dig it?"

"No! He couldn't be here. This is too public of a place. Quinn couldn't have been here. He'd need time. Seclusion. Keep driving."

Avery did as he said but Frank's stomach knotted another notch for every block they passed after that. Dig it. There was no mistaking that instruction. He had pushed it from his mind earlier, but now, after seeing the cemetery. . . knowing there was a ticking clock. . .

"He's buried, isn't he?"

"One step at a time, okay? You still have to finish the translation on father's code."

"I can't. I can't see straight. I'm going to be sick."

"Hang on." Avery threw her weight into spinning the car in a tight U-turn that only made Frank's head spin all the more.

"What are you doing? It's not the cemetery!"

"I know. It's not." She swung fast and hard again, this time into a dirt driveway. There was a wooden sign at the entrance. Cherry Wood Farms and over that, a real estate agent had nailed a "sold" sign. "He bought the farm, Frank. He bought this farm."

And he knew it was right.

She drove down the drive and kept going, passed the broken down farm house following fresh tracks that had carved ruts in the dried-grass ground. The rusted hulk of a pickup truck was parked at the end of the path. Across the side was a sign. Victor and Sons Since 1823.

"The family business that's been around forever," Frank said but his eyes fell on the object in front of the truck. A shovel sticking into a fresh mound of dirt. "Oh god." He stumbled out of the car vaguely aware of Avery calling for back-up.

"Joe!"

Frank grabbed the shovel and started scooping away the mound. It wasn't enough. He needed to move more dirt faster. Abandoning the shovel, he dropped down in the dirt and began using his arms and body to burrow.

Avery picked up the abandoned shovel and began clearing the area to his right. With dirt flying everywhere it got up his nose and in his eyes but he kept at it, desperately ignoring the musty smell which was so like death.

"Bastard!" He slammed his palms down and instead of soft earth, he felt hard wood. "There's something here!"

Avery jabbed with the tip of the shovel and there was no mistaking the sound. She scraped the metal scoop across the dirt, defining the edges of the box beneath.

Then Frank yelled for her to stop. "Be quiet for a second."

They both held their breaths and then they heard clearly what Frank hadn't been sure of. Pounding. From inside the box.

"He's alive. Joe! Hang on, we're almost there."

Two state troopers showed up to help when half the lid was uncovered. Rather than keep working at it, Frank suggested brute force instead. Finding positions that allowed them to grab an edge without blocking the rise of the lid was tricky, but with the clock still ticking on his father, Frank couldn't wait any longer.

One, two, three.

They pushed and pulled and the lid creaked open sending a shower of dirt down on Joe. His nose and mouth were covered by an oxygen mask but still he tried to raise his arms to protect his eyes. He never made it. He simply didn't have the strength.

Frank slipped down into the box, landing so his feet were on either side of Joe's legs. "Thank God. You're alright." He removed the oxygen mask, then, with the help of the troopers, got Joe up and out of the hole. Once he was in the clear, Frank tried to put the mask back on him but Joe batted it away.

"I knew you'd find me," he said, voice so scratchy it felt painful to hear.

"Glad I didn't let you down, little brother."

Joe reached out and ineffectually grabbed hold of his brother but his fingers couldn't latch on. "Help me."

"What? Sit up?" Balancing on one knee, Frank got his arms under Joe's shoulder and pulled him up to a sitting position. Again Joe tried to grab hold and this time he managed to knot the fingers of both hands in the front of Frank's shirt. This close, Frank could see the glint of tears in his brother's eyes.

Joe opened his mouth to say something but not a word came out, then he leaned in until his forehead rested on Frank's chest. His body was heaving as adrenaline mixed with a wild swing of emotions.

"It's okay. You're okay now." Frank ran a soft hand over Joe's back, feeling every shudder, every gasp for breath. Every ounce of fear and it cemented his resolve to get Joe out of the business.

And as much as he wanted to stay there, clutching his little brother, he knew he couldn't. His father was still out there, likely in the same predicament, waiting to be found.

"Joe. Do you know where dad is?"

Joe looked up with fresh horror on his face. "No. He put me here first. Where is he? Frank?"

"We'll find him. Okay? We found you. We'll find him."

And that was when Frank realized that he hadn't even finished the second translation and time was running out.