Chapter 282

Andy LeClair spoke in a dull, lifeless voice as he recounted the chain of events—from splitting up at sea, to staying for a time at the home of a police officer named Anna McCarthy, then returning home and finally being admitted to Stone Creek Psychiatric Hospital.

He said he’d checked himself in to investigate the link between Baekgyeong’s disappearance and the men who had abducted him, and to receive treatment at the same time, but now he mostly just lay in bed, too drained of will to move.

“No one... believed me when I said I’d been abducted to an island... and used in alien rut experiments. Naturally, they didn’t believe what I said about you either. I kept telling people again and again that I’d met you on that island after you disappeared.”

Baekgyeong listened to Andy LeClair’s slow, halting voice on the other end of the line.

The man who once babbled like a machine gun, spouting frantic nonsense—the Andy LeClair registered as 3547—no longer existed in this world. It felt as if he had been excreted and washed away along with his psychiatric medication.

“But... when I saw your face on the news... I was sure what I’d gone through wasn’t a delusion. No one believed I’d been kidnapped to that island... but I knew it was real.”

“I’m sure. Andy, I understand. Who would believe the words of a mental patient?”

Baekgyeong answered as if sympathizing deeply, careful not to irritate him. But something in those words still rubbed Andy the wrong way; his tone went rigid.

“Ha... I am mentally ill. But such blunt labeling... hurts, you know. I’m not doing great right now—can we talk later?”

Goddamn it.

He wanted to throw his phone across the room.

Instead, Baekgyeong forced himself to grovel, soothing the man’s temper just enough before cutting to the chase.

“You know Tessa Spencer, right? The New York Times investigative reporter who died in the Langford Bridge collapse. She worked like hell to find you when you disappeared.”

Baekgyeong half-expected the man to burst into tears, but Andy answered flatly.

“...Yeah. I knew her. We wrote articles together.”

Back when Andy LeClair worked as a reporter at The New York Times, they had met during an editorial meeting. The science piece he presented overlapped with an environmental-pollution case Spencer was covering; they shared data, collaborated on a feature report, and quickly became friends. Their sense of humor and temperament meshed perfectly.

A few years later, Andy left the paper for health reasons and turned freelance, but he kept in touch. When Spencer went on family trips, he looked after her dog.

Speaking in that same hollow tone, Andy suddenly exhaled a long, empty breath—the sigh of someone drained to the point of hanging up mid-sentence.

“I’m... a little tired right now. Maybe we can talk tomorrow—or next week.”

Panicking, Baekgyeong shouted.

“Damn it! Just hold on, I’ll get to the point! I’ve got Spencer’s USB drive! She was writing a story about the people who were abducted like us. Remember those huge men on the island? It’s about them. Those damn alien rut experiments! The drive’s in my hands but it’s locked, and I don’t know the password. Help me. Is there any way to find it? I need to open it, I have to see what’s inside!”

He spilled the words like a burst of gunfire, then held his breath and listened.

“...Why do you even want to open it? Planning to write an article?”

“That’s your job! I saw your Twibber. You were going to write about what happened to you.”

“...I don’t know. I can’t tell what’s delusion and what’s real anymore.”

Silence. Then a low, heavy sigh flowed through the static.

“If you’re not writing anything, why open it at all?”

“Someone’s been kidnapped. S-—I mean, 3543. That guy!”

Baekgyeong blurted it out, unable to contain his frustration.

“I just need a lead, anything. I don’t know what might be in there.”

Forcing himself to stay calm, he asked in a roughened voice,

“Will you help me or not? No, first—can it be done? Can the password even be found?”

He staked everything on a pinpoint of hope.

But the only thing that came back was suffocating silence so long he wondered if the line had gone dead.

He couldn’t even curse; Andy’s moods were too unpredictable. He pleaded instead.

“Do you know or not? Please, if you don’t, just say you don’t.”

The stillness dragged on.

Baekgyeong waited, swallowing his irritation.

“How would I possibly know the password?”

That was all. After such a pause, that.

He nearly drove to Stone Creek right then to beat the man senseless, but he swallowed the impulse and replied evenly,

“Fine. Got it. If you ever remember anything later—”

“Not sure it’s useful, but...”

The opening made Baekgyeong snap the phone tight to his ear.

“When we worked together on a story... Spencer and I shared passwords. She was investigating an illegal radioactive-waste burial by a construction firm, got death threats for it. So she used to make backup drives. If anything happened to her, someone else could finish the report. If she’s still using the same pattern... the drive might be decryptable.”

Baekgyeong wet his lips and asked carefully,

“So what’s the pattern?”

“...Complicated to explain.”

“Then explain the complicated part.”

A dry sigh came through the speaker.

Andy sounded on the verge of hanging up again, but spoke instead, his voice flickering like a candle in wind.

“You... know what ‘kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species’ means?”

Frowning, Baekgyeong answered after a pause.

“Taxonomy?”

“Guess you do have some general knowledge.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Then you know the classification for humans?”

“Uh... primates, Homo sapiens?”

Rubbing the back of his neck, Baekgyeong replied half-heartedly. Was this really leading to the password? He began to suspect he was humoring a lunatic.

“More precisely, Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata, Class Mammalia, Order Primates, Family Hominidae, Genus Homo, Species Homo sapiens.”

Baekgyeong groaned.

“You actually memorized that?”

“I only know Homo sapiens. It’s human. That’s common knowledge, isn’t it?”

Annoyed by his interference, Andy snapped back.

To him it was basic human knowledge; to Baekgyeong, it wasn’t at all. Still, the thought struck him that alphas and omegas might someday need their own biological classification.

He remembered his mother’s old notes on her phone—her theory that alphas differed from Homo sapiens by 0.6 percent of genetic code. That gap, she’d said, placed them at the extreme end of the human spectrum. Despite their flaws, she had wanted to call them a divine and transcendent branch of humanity: Homo supernus.

Alpha—humanity endowed with divinity and transcendence—Homo supernus.

He wondered if the day would ever come when that new species definition would be accepted, and listened as Andy continued.

“Spencer had her own cipher system. She assigned prime numbers in reverse alphabetical order, from Z to A.

‘Z is 547, Y is 557, X is 563...’ She matched each letter, backward, to the n-th prime starting from the 101st. Got it so far?”

“Yeah. Got it.”

When encrypting a story, she took the first letters of a species’ taxonomy connected to her investigation and replaced them with primes according to that reversed alphabet.

Baekgyeong looked up the primes online and wrote them out in his notebook, duplicating her system.

“If human is the keyword, you’d assign the reverse primes to A C M P H H H.”

“653, 653, 653, 607, 619, 683, 701. Right?”

He checked his notes and said it with confidence. Andy’s voice stayed indifferent.

“Sure. Sounds right.”

Baekgyeong leaned back with a scowl, folding his arms.

“But what’s the point of a system? Random gibberish would be harder to hack. Using primes just wastes effort.”

“I invented that system.”

Without missing a beat, Baekgyeong wedged the phone between shoulder and ear, clapping his hands in feigned admiration.

“No wonder it felt intelligent.”

Andy let out a staccato laugh—ha, ha, ha—dry as static.

“Oh, really?”

“If you don’t know what a prime is, you’d just get frustrated. Idiots blow up at what they don’t understand. But we’re different. Higher-grade intellects.”

Andy snorted, then sighed again, his mood sinking. His voice dropped as he explained how the cipher had come to be.

“Spencer hoarded information, stared at it until the puzzle clicked. Her mind was always busy, so she made passwords on the fly—and forgot them constantly. Projects stalled. I finally suggested the prime-number scheme.”

If he had built the system, then maybe he could unlock it.

Suppressing the urge to press harder, Baekgyeong asked lightly,

“Smart move. Then do you know how she chose her keywords?”

“That part... ha... another time. My phone’s overheating. The EM waves are making me feel sick.”

Baekgyeong shot to his feet, shouting,

“Just hang on a little longer! EM waves, whatever—I’ll cover all your treatment costs! Any special therapy you want, name it!”

Maybe the promise touched something in him, because Andy drew in a deep breath, gathering what little energy he had left.

“The keyword... will be hard to find. She based it on one of the animals in whatever case she was investigating.”

“For example?”

A dull thudding came over the line, as if he were pounding a table with his hand.

He gave a few low groans, then forced the words out.

“When she investigated polluted streams in Arizona mountains... the local species Apache trout was the keyword. When she covered that multinational pharmaceutical company running clinical trials in underdeveloped countries without compensating victims... the keyword was green iguana.”

“Iguana? The company logo was an iguana?”

“No... the company’s chairman kept a green iguana as a pet. Had it for nearly twenty years.”

Listening, Baekgyeong was dumbfounded.

“She used that? Just because the chairman had one? It’s not even relevant to the case! What kind of keyword is that?”

Andy ignored the protest and changed the subject.

“So the hospital bills go to you, right? I’ll tell the Director that?”

“Yeah. But one last thing—do you think Spencer was still using that same cipher recently?”

“God, you’re persistent. I don’t know! I’m not Spencer, how would I know!”

Sounding suffocated by the barrage, Andy ended the call before Baekgyeong could stop him.