Dear Dad, it began, and he hoped this letter would be from Kate’s heart, something he’d have reason to cherish, unlike the envelopes of information he’d sent to his mother, classes are good, I got a new car, it’s been snowing a lot. None of the things he wished he’d said were in those letters, but somehow his mother had divined his intentions and kept a shoe box full of letters not worth keeping. Maybe Kate, in similar fashion, had finally come to understand and even appreciate the “tough love” that, in anger, she’d described as “no love at all.” His hand shook as he read on, but only because Kate’s first sentence was completely untrue:

  I know you think it’s a waste of my time to write a play.

  Was that the only message he’d been sending? He couldn’t have been more proud of her, and he’d been trying to convey that in his own way, but he wanted her to have options and make good choices. How could there have been such a disconnect between what she heard and what his heart was saying?

  “I’m not a heart reader or a mind reader,” Elizabeth had once said to him. “I suppose you never stopped loving me, but it would have been nice to hear it.”

  He continued reading. The pages were from Kate’s play, but she wasn’t sharing them for his approval or comment.

  I just want you to understand that Patrick and I have no intention of revealing vital company secrets. I want you to know what we mean by “Code 6.”

  The letter explained how she and Patrick had learned about the world’s first personal information catastrophe. How technology drove the Nazi concentration camps. And how the last thing a Jew wanted to be was “Code 6.”

  After the war, there were trials. At Nuremberg, the world witnessed a complete absence of remorse. The verdict was just. The death sentences were carried out. But Nuremberg was the exception, not the rule. In some places, there were no courtrooms. There was no trial. Sometimes men just . . . disappeared. One of those men was Herman Rottke. He was the general manager of IBM’s subsidiary in Berlin. Rottke knew what Code 6 was. This is my imagining of things, but here’s everything I can tell you about Code 6.

  He put the letter aside and picked up his daughter’s script. Actually, she’d sent only a portion of it. Act two, scene three. He read, and he saw, exactly as Kate had imagined: Mr. Rottke’s last moments on earth, as he sat with his head down and hands bound, bathed in the hot light of an interrogation lamp, facing a Red Army interrogator somewhere in the Soviet-occupied sector of Berlin in 1946.

  “Do you mourn for your friends who hanged today?”

  Rottke was silent, his gaze fixed on the floor. The Russian interrogator leaned forward, forcing the prisoner to look him in the eye.

  “You knew these men, didn’t you?”

  “Some of them.”

  The officer resumed pacing. “Wilhelm Frick. Minister of the Interior. Author of the Nuremberg Race Laws. You knew him?”

  “I met him.”

  “Ernst Kaltenbrunner. SS leader. Head of Secret State Police. Commander of Einsatzgruppen. Hans Frank. Governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland. Your company did business in Poland during the war, did you not?”

  Silence from Rottke. The interrogator removed a short stack of Hollerith punch cards from a folder and fanned them out like a poker hand before Rottke’s eyes.

  “My men sacked the Nazi Labor Service Office in Warsaw. We found thousands of Hollerith punch cards like these. Tell me, Mr. Rottke. Why would the Labor Service Office need so many Hollerith cards?”

  Rottke looked up with disdain. “I have no understanding of how they were used.”

  The interrogator held a Hollerith card up to the light, allowing light to pass through the punched holes. “These little rectangular holes: they’re not positioned randomly, are they?”

  “Punch-hole placement is by design,” he said smugly, as if pleased to show off his superior knowledge. “It delivers information.”

  “About people?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Let’s say the Nazis wanted to identify every person with a Jewish grandparent. They could search millions and millions of paper records. Months of work. Correct?”

  “Years.”

  “Or . . . they could transfer census data to punch cards like these, and let Hollerith machines sort the cards at—how many per hour?”

  “Twenty-five thousand,” said Rottke, too proud of his company’s accomplishments to deny it.

  “And if the Nazis wanted to know the street address of every man, woman, and child with Jewish blood, Hollerith cards could tell them.”

  “A very basic design for a German engineer.”

  “If the Nazis wanted a complete inventory of property taken from Jews, Hollerith cards could make such a list, no?”

  The head of the “German engineers” had no answer.

  “If the Nazis needed slave labor to build a wall around the Warsaw Ghetto, Hollerith cards could find Jewish masons. Right?”

  Rottke offered only an angry glare.

  “If the Nazis wanted every train to Auschwitz completely full and running on time, Hollerith cards could do that?”

  “Hollerith cards are used by railways all over the world,” said Rottke, speaking with even more contempt.

  “But for people stuffed in boxcars like cattle, their fate was in these cards, no?”

  “I don’t understand what you are asking me.”

  The Russian selected one of the Hollerith cards from the stack. “This card. Female. Twenty years of age. Student at university.”

  “So?”

  “This is what interests me about the cards we found. The coding might be different for age, sex, nationality, and such. But they all had one thing the same.”

  He held the card so Rottke could see the punch hole, then continued. “Column thirty-four: Reason for Departure. All punched in same place: Code Six.”

  The interrogator leaned closer, getting right in the prisoner’s face. “I want to know: What is Code Six?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I want you to tell me!” he shouted.

  Rottke tightened his jaw, refusing to answer.

  The Russian grabbed him by the throat. “Tell me what is Code Six!”

  Rottke groaned, his throat still in the interrogator’s grip.

  “Louder!”

  The Russian released his stranglehold. Rottke gasped for air and tried to speak.

  “Special . . . ,” he started to say, but his voice dropped.

  “In a voice as loud as mine,” the interrogator shouted, “special what?”

  “Special handling!”

  Rottke’s chest heaved with each breath. The interrogator stepped back, as if satisfied for the moment. Then he moved closer, tightening his glare.

  “And what is ‘special handling’?”

  Rottke summoned his last show of defiance and spat directly into his interrogator’s face. The Russian cocked his arm, ready to bludgeon his prisoner.

  “Blackout?” said Gamble, reading the stage direction aloud. He put the pages aside, his heart pounding.

  It was evident that his daughter could write, but that wasn’t Kate’s point in sharing these particular pages. Nor was it merely a history lesson—unless the lesson was that history repeats itself. Code 6 was a Nazi abomination of state-of-the-art technology. Good made evil. Gamble had given his speech a thousand times about the disconnect between technology on the one hand and forces of “good and evil” on the other. It was all packaged in his story about the famous fictional sled dog that was his company’s namesake.

  “Buck is neither good nor evil. Buck is pure. In the right hands, Buck can do wonderful things. Buck, however, is not always in the right hands. We do not control the sled driver. Our creativity and inventiveness can never be stifled by the unfortunate reality that, in the wrong hands, Buck can be a force for evil. Never.”

  He wondered if Kate’s play was her rejoinder. A strange memory popped into his mind, and he was suddenly at the kitchen table with a sixteen-year-old Kate, drilling her on SAT questions and those confounding analogies. He could almost hear her voice in his head, articulating the message behind her play in that singsong pattern: “Code Six is to IBM as Patrick’s ransom demand is to Buck Technologies.”

  It was a chilling thought, made all the more disturbing by the fact that he didn’t have clearance to know exactly what code the kidnappers wanted. Patrick did, but he was unreachable. Jeremy Peel surely did, but he was unlikely to share any secrets, even if he could have done so without breaking the law. There was only one person he could think to ask.

  He picked up his phone and dialed the women’s federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia.

  “I’d like to schedule a visitation with Sandra Levy,” he told the operator. “As soon as possible.”

  Chapter 53

  Patrick and Olga rode in the back of a box truck. Liu hadn’t told them where they were headed, but Patrick assumed it was Cali, the city Javier had chosen for the exchange. Obviously, Liu was doing all he could to keep Kate under the impression that nothing had changed.

  “He’s going to kill me,” said Olga.

  The truck was loaded with twenty-pound bags of rice, which Liu had rearranged to make room for his hostages to sit inside the double cargo doors, toes touching and facing each other. The floor-to-ceiling crack between the locked doors provided just enough ventilation for them to breathe and enough daylight to see.

  “Don’t say that,” said Patrick. “We’re going to get out of this alive.”

  “You might. Not me.”

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  “It’s not up to you.”

  “We have to keep hope.”

  “We have to be realistic. Tell me this. Why would Liu keep me alive?”

  The white noise of truck tires on pavement filled the silence between them. Patrick wanted to be positive, but it was hard to find convincing words of encouragement with Liu in control.

  “See,” she said. “You don’t have an answer. Javier was different. With him, there was hope.”

  “Sorry, but I never saw Javier as a beacon of hope.”

  “Javier had reasons to keep me alive. This venture into the business of kidnapping was a sideshow. His bread and butter was sex trafficking. I was his product. You don’t kill your product. This man has no reason to keep me alive, except to torture me and get you to do whatever he wants you to do. When it’s over, he’ll kill me.”

  Intellectually, it was hard to argue with her logic.

  “Then we need to find a reason for him to keep you alive,” said Patrick.

  “Yeah, well, I guess we know the only thing I’m good for.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “It’s the truth,” she replied.

  “That’s not the truth. That’s the lie they want you to believe.”

  “And who are ‘they’?”

  “The people who want to control the way you think. What you think. How you should think,” Patrick said.

  “People like Javier, you mean?”

  “No. People like Jeremy Peel.”

  “The johns?”

  Patrick had almost forgotten—or rather, almost put out of his mind—that Peel had been the first to violate Olga in her white string bikini.

  “No. I’m talking about people who really run companies like Buck Technologies.”

  Even in the dim lighting, Patrick could see the confusion on her face.

  “I don’t follow you,” said Olga.

  “Let me put it this way. Remember when you used to unlock your cellphone with your fingerprint?”

  “Yeah. Before there was face recognition.”

  “Exactly. And where do you think the fingerprints, the facial recognition, the retinal scanning, the voice recognition, and all the other stuff goes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you don’t. You just give it up, no questions asked. And Big Data just keeps taking, as long as you keep giving. I guess elbow scans and heartbeat recognition are next. Hell, by the time our kids are on social media, they’ll be down to belly button scans and fart recognition. How scary is that?”

  She laughed. “Very. I like you, Patrick, but I’m not sure I’m ready to have kids with you.”

  “Huh?” he said, and then his words “our kids” came back to him. “No, I didn’t mean our kids. I meant—”

  “I know what you meant. Just yanking your chain.”

  Patrick looked away, embarrassed, then back. He wasn’t necessarily trying to change the subject, but there was something that needed to be said.

  “Olga?”

  “Yes?”

  “What if I told you there is no Code Six?”

  She paused before answering. “Then I’d say I was only half right when I said he’s going to kill me when we get to Cali. He’s going to kill both of us.”

  “He can’t kill us. I came up with a phony name, but I know exactly what he wants. That gives me the upper hand. He can’t even begin to describe the code he needs from Buck. All he knows is that the part of the code he already has is worthless without the piece I called Code Six.”

  “Okay. Then I take back what I just said. He does need to keep you alive. But not me.”

  “We can fix that.”

  “How?”

  “I could tell you what I know.”

  She chuckled. “Sound great. Just put it on flash drive, stick it in my ear, and the top-secret code from Buck Technologies will just download into my brain.”

  “If I wanted to, I could put this in terms even Javier could have understood.”

  “Do you think it’s important for me to know?” she asked.

  “I do,” he replied.

  “Okay. Then I’ll listen. But only if you do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  “I’m freezing over here. Will you sit next to me?”

  Their hands were bound behind their backs, but Liu had left their feet unchained. “Sure,” he said.

  Patrick pushed himself up, fighting to keep his balance in the moving truck as he crossed to Olga’s side. He fell against the stacked bags of rice and, with his back to the wall, slid down to settle in beside her.

  “How’s that?” he asked.

  She moved a little closer. “Better.”

  It was better, and Patrick would have liked to put his arm around her, but for the bindings on his wrist.

  “So,” he said, “let me tell you how something called Project Naïveté evolved into the worst thing in technology since the real Code Six.”

  Chapter 54

  Kate took her morning coffee on the balcony to her room at the InterContinental Cali. The rain had stopped overnight, and she had a clear view of the Andes.

  Cali is surrounded in natural beauty, nestled in the Cauca Valley between the mighty Farallones de Cali mountain range and the Cauca River. Rough terrain challenged rock climbers and mountain bikers from across the globe. Miles of hiking trails and riverbanks offered an up-close glimpse of more species of flora and birds than most people would see in a lifetime. For more than half a century, however, it was akin to the biblical “valley of the shadow of death,” a stronghold for leftist guerrillas, drug dealers, and right-wing paramilitary groups. Kate wondered how many families, over the decades, had taken a room in Cali, a suitcase full of money on the bed, counting the hours until some criminal who claimed to have a worthy cause would bring a loved one down from the mountains for the most dangerous part of any kidnapping: the ever-problematic “exchange.”

  “You sleep okay?” asked Enrique. He’d spent the night in the adjoining room.

  “Not really,” she said.

  Enrique pulled up the other patio chair and sat facing the aluminum railing, sharing Kate’s mountain view.

  “I’ve been thinking about the exchange,” he said.

  “I have a plan.”

  “I’d love to hear it.”

  “You will. When I’m ready,” she said.

  He rested his muscular forearms on his thighs, leaning forward so that he could catch more than a sideways glance of Kate.

  “Your father chose me for a reason,” he said. “I have experience in these things. I negotiated with terrorists for the release of my own interpreter in Kabul.”

  “And it worked out okay?” she asked, hopeful.

  He looked away in silence.

  “I’m sorry,” said Kate. “I wasn’t asking to be mean.”

  “It’s all right. I have some success stories, as well. Interpreters were a different thing altogether. They were seen as the worst kind of traitors.”

  “Like a tech engineer who gives up company secrets?”

  “Except that Patrick isn’t giving up any secrets.”

  “Not willingly,” said Kate. “But everybody has a breaking point. I’m very afraid of what they might do to him if they figure out Code Six is a ruse.”

  “If? Or when?”

  Kate’s cell rang. It was the encrypted line that she shared with Jeremy Peel. Adjusting for the time change between Virginia and Cali, exactly twenty-four hours had passed since the last call, just as Javier had promised. Kate answered on speaker, expecting to hear Javier’s voice in reply, but it wasn’t.

  “Kate, this is Patrick.”

  A rush of relief came over her. “It’s so good to hear your voice.”

  “I wish I could say more, but I have a script. By now, you should have Code Six on a flash drive. I’m going to tell you exactly how the exchange is going to be made. So please listen carefully.”

  “No,” she said.

  Enrique did a double take, and even Kate was surprised by her own words.

  “What do you mean, no?” asked Patrick.

  She had no doubt he trusted her, but in his voice she heard more than a hint of hope that she knew what the heck she was doing.

  “Tell Javier to listen carefully,” said Kate. “We are going to do this my way. I’m here for one reason. That’s to get you. Jeremy Peel will deliver Code Six. We’ll talk again in six hours.”

  Kate hung up.

  Enrique’s eyes were the size of saucers. “What the hell was that?”