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He nodded a greeting. “What have you got for me?”
“Take a listen to this.” Octavia passed him an earbud, being careful to keep her scars away from Kade. Although Jude didn’t seem to mind them, she wasn’t ready to reveal them to everybody else.
Kade grabbed one of the mugs of coffee from the desk without asking and downed it as he listened to the message. “You’re missing content.” He pulled the earbud out. “You won’t be able to decode this until you’ve got a complete message.”
“We figured that out for ourselves,” said Jude. “Isn’t there some kind of fancy program you’ve got that can do it for us?”
“All of my programs are fancy, but they’ll be best guessing.”
“Can’t you put your mega-brain to use and crack this?”
“My skills are in code breaking, not wordplay,” said Kade. “I will take a look, run it through a couple of programs, but I’m promising nothing.”
“This is what we’ve used so far.” Octavia showed Kade their programs.
“These are as good as mine,” said Kade. “If they haven’t figured out the patterns, then nothing I’ll do will make a difference.”
“We need that equipment.” Octavia raised her eyebrows as she looked at Jude. “I know it will help.”
“What’s that?” asked Kade.
“It’s a frequency tracker,” said Octavia. “It will follow the pattern the State use so we can collect all the data.”
“That sounds perfect,” said Kade. “Plug it in and start using it.”
“There’s one problem,” said Jude. “It’s not here.”
“But I know where it is,” said Octavia. “We can get it. The site is secure. The State know nothing about it.”
“How can you be so certain?” asked Kade.
“The alarm system on the air raid shelter. If anyone tries to get in, I get an alert pinged through. It’s out of the way, hidden in overgrown bushes. No one will ever find it. That’s where the equipment is.”
Concern clouded Jude’s face. “Can you build the device from what we’ve got in the bunker?”
Octavia looked around the room. “I might be able to make adjustments to the kit here. But if we can get our hands on what I already have, we can use it straightaway. It would take me a couple of weeks of tinkering to fix up what I need. That’s time we can’t waste.”
“How far is it from here?” asked Jude.
Octavia did a calculation in her head. “We can be there in an hour. It’s in Alpha zone eleven.”
“Not much goes on there. It’s a relatively safe zone. It could be just what we need,” said Kade.
“We’ll have to travel at night,” said Jude. “We can spend the rest of the day tracking these messages. We might have cracked it before we even need to leave.”
Octavia nodded, knowing that wasn’t true. She’d spent every waking minute she had listening to these messages and had hardly scratched the surface. “I’ll give you the coordinates, so you know where to go.”
Jude brought up a 3D map of Alpha zone eleven. “I’ll check in with Heath and Danni, make sure they agree to the mission.”
“There won’t be any trouble,” said Octavia. “Like I said, no one knows about the place.”
“Even so, we’ll need a small team with us,” said Jude.
Octavia sat back in her seat as she listened to Jude and Kade discuss the logistics of the mission and plan their route. She didn’t want to wait until night, even though it would be safer for them. A heavy, twisted feeling sat in her stomach. The State were planning something big, and that meant bad news for anyone who got in their way.
She planted an earbud in and continued to listen to the State babble. As she did so, she lined up some music and hit play, broadcasting it out to her Flame listeners.
She couldn’t do anything now to solve this problem, but she could give her loyal listeners something to enjoy while she figured out how to stop the State.
