"Nice to meet you," the agent looked at the starring eyes of Erica. "You must be my new agent; I'm Special Agent Don Eppes." His hand extended to Erica.

"N..n..nice to meet you too." she stuttered as recognition flicked across her face.

"Something wrong?" Eppes asked.

"No, I just have heard a lot about you." Cr*p, this was not supposed to happen.

"Oh, let me introduce you to my team." Erica and James trailed behind him as he headed for the conference room.

Eppes held the door open for Erica and James. Inside two male, sat looking over a pile of papers. In the corner of the room stood a young man in front of clear whiteboard, doing math.

The agents looked up as they entered.

"Hey Don."

"Guys, I'd like to introduce our new agent, Elizabeth West," he turned toward Erica and James. "Elizabeth, these are Agents Colby Granger, and David Sinclair. Here is a copy of our latest case if you'd like to read through it, for now you'll be partnered with Agent Granger." Erica released a breath she hadn't known she was holding when she heard that she wasn't going to be partnered with Eppes.

"Umm, who is that?" Erica said pointing to the young man in the corner. The young man turned around and instant recognition ran rampant across Erica's face.

"Charlie, can you join us?"

"Yeah, Don," Charlie walked over to them after setting down the whiteboard marker, he held out a hand to Erica. "Hi, I'm Professor Charles Eppes…" he trailed off. "Have I met you before, you seem familiar."

"Umm," Erica gulped, "I don't believe so, but maybe."

Erica turned to the rest of the group, "I believe I should introduce, my friend Agent James Smith."

The agent Eppes had referred to as Colby, leaned back in his chair softly chuckling. "James Smith, is that your real name?"

James replied "Yes, Eri… Elizabeth I'll come back later, can you manage?"

"Yeah, but could I speak to you really quickly… Outside,"

"Come on, let's walk to the elevator." Erica looked around the room, all the agents had gone back to their respective jobs.

Once in the hall…

"Did you know about this? Please tell me you did." she asked meekly.

"Honestly, no. I heard that Don was an Agent, but I did not know that Charlie consulted."

"Cr*p, this is going to be hard, I hardly know who I am in this alias."

"I can bring you your file to read later." They had arrived at the elevator.

"Thanks, see you later."

"Yeah, I'll be back around six to pick you up and take you to your apartment."

"Okay, sounds good, bye." She turned and headed back to the conference room.

Erica re-entered the conference room, and went and picked up a copy of the case file. She settled into one of the chairs in the far corner of the room. She started reading through, five minutes later she was done. The case was a kidnapping, a young 8 year old girl, grabbed off the street. She shuddered at the similarity to her own story. The one thing different was that they were able to get the girl back.

Looking over at the agents, she saw that they continued to look through the files. Erica stood up and walked over, "What are you doing?"

The agents introduced to her as David Sinclair, looked up. "Hmm, oh. We are looking through old files relating to the family of the victim."

"What is he doing? She motioned to the corner, where Charlie was scribbling across the whiteboard.

"He's trying to decode a set of numbers that was delivered in a letter to the family of the girl. We figured that it held the clue to where she is. The family already paid the ransom, but the kidnappers said they would provide only the information necessary to find the girl, but not the actual girl."

"Really! Can I see it?"

"What, the numbers, sure, but I doubt you can make any sense of it, here" He handed her a copy of the paper.

Erica sat down and looked the sheet over. Almost instantly she recognized the pattern, she reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone, hitting speed dial #1.

"Smith,"

"James, I left my laptop in the car, can you bring it back? I need it right away."

"Sure, Erica, turning around now. I'll be there in about ten minutes."

"'kay, see you."

She looked up; the agents were staring at her. "What?"

"Just wondering what that was about."

Erica looked down at the paper, "not meaning to make Professor Eppes' work moot, but I can read this for you right now."

"Wait, WHAT?"

"I can read this; I came up with an algorithm to decode this stuff about ten years ago."

"You what?" this came from Charlie, who had heard her talking.

"Here, let me show you, this is the equation." she quickly jotted down the equation on the last blank whiteboard.

Ten minutes later…

"Wow, can you decode it right now?" Don asked, he had walked into the room just as Erica began explaining the equation.

"Not yet. I have a program on my computer that James, agent Smith, is bringing in."

"And I have arrived." James announced as he paraded in carrying the laptop bag over his shoulder.

"Good. Let me see the laptop." Erica reached strode over to James, and grabbed the bag out of his proffered hand. "Thank you."

"My pleasure." James replied in a voice which sounded as if he were her servant.

Sitting down at the table Erica reached in to the laptop bag and pulled out a computer, covered in an equation covered case.

A rather surprised "wow" came from the agents. Erica opened the laptop a signed in. She opened a section called "Houston" and opened up a program.

"You have the page scanned, right?" she asked to no one in particular.

"Yeah, let me get you a copy." the reply came from agent Granger.

"No need, I can get it." and as the agents hovered over her shoulder, she opened up a file called "Margaret" up came a list of FBI cases, both solved and unsolved, as well as current cases. "…And this is it," she announced opening up a document named "Eppes-221" above it was "Eppes-220". All the agents gathered behind Erica looked at the computer in amazement.

"How do you have access to all our case files? I thought they were all classified, and stored only in our system." Eppes asked.

Sh*t I shouldn't have done that, thought Erica. "My computer is hooked up to your server. And here is the decoded message."

All eyes turned to off of Erica and on to the computer.

Hello Agents,

Here is the location of the girl.

52 riverside lane

Ha-ha, not going to give you the rest

However you can see her in a video, by using the hidden IP address.

Enjoy

"Cr*p! Let's get that IP address found." Eppes said, his voice laden with anger.

"Got it! Pulling it up now." Erica announced.

"Elizabeth, how do you do this so fast?"

"It showed itself after a little info scrambling." Erica replied.

Again all eyes were on the screen as a live-streaming video began playing. Showing the young girl with her hands tied behind her back, gagged and blindfolded in a shed.

"Can we trace that, Elizabeth?"

"That's a little bit out of my specialty. Shouldn't we get some techs on it?"

"Yeah, Colby run this over to one of the techs."