Chapter 6
Ava looked at Jake as if he had lost his mind, but the raw urgency burning in his eyes silenced any protest. She walked to the open door of the truck, reached inside, and gently stroked Nora’s messy golden hair.
"It wasn't even a song," Ava whispered, her voice cracking under the weight of a hundred buried memories. "Ethan used to rock her by the window when she had colic. He’d hum this repetitive, awkward rhythm. It had no melody."
"The words, Ava," Jake insisted, leaning his hands on the truck’s window frame. "Recite them."
Ava took a shuddering breath. "Four bells over the iron sea, three blind gulls in the rigging tree. Seven cold fathoms beneath the floor, nine black nails in the captain’s door."
Jake closed his eyes. His breathing stopped. "Say it again."
"Four bells... three gulls... seven fathoms... nine nails," Ava repeated softly. "Jake, it’s just a silly nursery rhyme he made up to make her stop crying. Why does it matter?"
"It’s not a rhyme," Jake said, his eyes snapping open with terrifying clarity. "It’s a numerical grid. Four-three-seven-nine. That was Ethan’s personal armory locker code at Camp Pendleton. And 'captain's door' isn't a metaphor."
Jake reached into the truck, his large hand gentle as he touched the silver chain resting against Nora’s pink pajama collar. "Sweetheart, can I see your daddy’s shiny necklace for just one minute? I promise I'll give it right back."
Nora blinked her heavy blue eyes, clutching her fluffy bunny with one arm while offering the silver tag with the other. "Don't break it, Mister Grumpy. It keeps the bad dreams away."
"I won't break it, kiddo," Jake murmured.
He carried the dog tag into the beam of the truck’s single working headlight. He pulled his ceramic combat knife from his belt and brought the razor-sharp tip against the outer rim of the steel tag.
"What are you doing to it?" Ava asked, coming up behind him, her hands clenched in her pockets against the chill.
"Standard issue tags are stamped from solid cold-rolled steel," Jake muttered, his blade working with millimeter precision along the notched edge. "They weigh twenty-eight grams. When I held this in the hospital room, the balance was off by less than two grams. I thought it was just the missing rubber silencer."
With a soft, metallic snick, the outer casing split.
The dog tag wasn't solid. It had been hollowed out with an industrial jeweler's lathe. Glued inside the recessed interior was a wafer-thin, rectangular sliver of black carbon composite—a military-grade microdot storage drive, no larger than a grain of rice.
Ava gasped, clutching Jake’s tactical vest for balance. "The key..."
"Not the key," Jake whispered, his thumb resting beside the tiny black chip. "The key requires an activation cipher. That’s what Ethan left in her head. The nursery rhyme is the decryption string."
Suddenly, the disposable burner phone Jake had taken from the dead man in the hospital vibrated in his vest pocket.
It didn't ring. It produced a single, sharp alert chime.
Jake pulled the device out and hit the speaker button.
A distorted, mechanically scrambled voice rasped through the tiny speaker, cutting through the drumming rhythm of the rain:
May you like
“Lieutenant Navarro. You always were too slow on the breach. We have the harbor perimeter locked down. Bring the girl to the salt docks in twenty minutes, or Ethan Vance dies on live camera.”
The connection abruptly severed.
