Luke’s cell phone went off. The music signaling he had a text message jarred him from his sleep and he sat up quickly, unsure of his surroundings. He had been dreaming and in it he and Ellie had been swimming in the pool with Jimmy and John. Nothing ominous or threatening in that simple act, yet the dream left him feeling disjointed and uncertain. It had been too happy considering all that was happening at the moment. His head still throbbed and he had a brief wave of dizziness as he reached for the phone on the nightstand.
The sender’s number was all zeroes and his heart skipped a few beats.
“Gotcha’ you bastard,” he whispered as he opened the text. It read simply, ‘Bring it, kid!’
Luke called John and Jimmy immediately and told them to get their butts over to his house. Worthington had just sent him a message. They were over in less than two minutes.
Luke was plugging his phone into the computer with a USB cable and loading the program up Bodey had e-mailed him when they both bounded in out of breath.
“What did he say?” Jimmy asked.
“He told me to ‘Bring it,’” Luke said.
“That’s it?”
“That’s all it takes,” Luke said grinning. “I don’t care if he texted me one letter. As long as I receive anything from him, we’ll know his new number. Watch.”
Luke hit a few keys like Bodey had instructed and the program went to work. A few seconds later a whole list of numbers filled the screen and John said, “Whoa! How do we know which is his?”
“Hold on,” Luke said, and clicked a button on the screen. The page changed and more numbers popped up, but an offset area displayed what he needed. He pointed to it and smiled.
“There he is.”
Jimmy and John moved in closer and just stared at the ten digits in awe. Luke wrote the number down and closed the program out opening the software they had used to track Worthington before. He input the cell phone number into the program and clicked ‘next.’ The screen that popped up was not what Luke expected and he felt deflated.
SEARCHING……..QUERY A13244997 EXECUTED……..UNABLE
TO LOCATE GEOSYNCHRONUS POSITION AT THIS TIME………
RESCAN AUTOMATICALLY EVERY 30 SECONDS?
“Shit!” Luke said.
“What does that mean?” Jimmy asked.
“I think it means the program can’t find the cell number. He must have the phone off. Dammit!”
John pointed to the screen. “It looks like it can keep scanning for it. See?”
Luke looked at the screen closer and saw it. He typed the letter ‘Y’ into the box and pressed enter and the screen changed.
AUTO SCAN ENABLED……….AUDIBLE NOTIFICATION WHEN FOUND?
Luke typed the letter ‘Y’ again and hit enter. The system would give some sound when it found the signal. Luke sat back and sighed.
“We wait?” Jimmy asked.
“All we can do,” Luke said, and stood up. “I need a drink. Anybody want a soda?”
They stood with him and went downstairs to the kitchen.