Ransom X

Chapter 49 Battleship Plan

  It was almost time to start. Legacy knew that he was currently coloring outside the lines, working off site, bending rules. He wasn’t concerned about what others would think, particularly. That wasn’t what kept him glancing at his watch with a nervous urgency. He was on the clock now. There were only so many minutes until the next girl was chosen. After that, there were so many hours until she was taken.

  It was an odd pressure amplified by his recent work on the case with Wagner. Her dedication to every detail of the case brought with it a certain inertia. Her drive to see Laura safe was kinetic. Legacy sat peering through the darkness waiting for the three separate 2000-watt bulbs and millions of mirrors to illuminate someone whose features and form beckoned to Blue. Legacy could feel Blue’s impulse patterns surge through his own mind. It was a rigorously practiced estimation. Legacy spent hours going through the behaviors that he witnessed on tape. Not many people engaged in conduct that was remotely close to Blue’s, therefore his behavior became very narrowly defined by relatively few visible traits. The jump from behavior to the patterns of thought and decision-making was less of a science. He navigated the skewed synapses of depraved felony like a computer recognizes a face; in subroutines, unconscious thought as complicated as a weather pattern, fragile as any system software authored by Microsoft.

  On the balance, he thought, making his final preparations, he was not that different from Wagner. His own methods were cerebral, but the difference in effort was minimal. They both extended their reach in a thousand directions grasping at straws, and although they’d come up with nothing – Legacy gave grudging respect to Wagner. Her intuition was something he hoped to channel, as he was about to be watching faces, like tiles in some kind of living mosaic.

  He organized the screens along simple axis markers labeling them A-T along the bottom, then 1-10 along the y-axis. A1 was the lowest left corner, T10 was the top right. The stacked images like the rows and columns of an extreme Jeopardy game filled his vision.

  In the minutes leading to 4:00 Eastern time, when the clock really started ticking, Legacy practiced calling out his images. Tyke would freeze the feed, marking the digital recording so that they could go back to that image later with the touch of a button. Legacy knew that the odds of spotting the exact frame that caught Blue’s attention would be next to impossible. Instead, he would first keep all of the women who were remotely possible. Then, in the hours after, he would go through those images and decide if they fit all the criteria of symmetry, expression and age. Then he hoped he’d have a handful of faces that he could act upon. It was simple, actually, all he needed was to intercept one thought from Blue: “Her.” Get there before his men, then spend ten minutes interrogating the abductor and he’d have the location of Laura. This was a fact. Tyke counted down the moments before 4 pm, and then gave Legacy one last boost of confidence.

  “So, how are you so sure that he’ll use this same time slot and this same method after every media outlet in the country reported on it?” The clock read 3:59. He sure knew how to pick his spots.

  “I could be wrong.” Legacy said with an inward smile. Tyke belted out a long genuine baritone laugh.

  “Let’s play battleship.” Tyke began the simultaneous recording of 1531 channels and Legacy started calling out his shots.

  “C1, R5, T7.”