Janie Crouch - Leverage

And it was far enough from Washington, DC, and Omega for him to stay away from his past there.

Dylan rolled his eyes. At least he thought Falls Run was far enough away. Evidently not, given the past few years. Dylan got dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, grabbed his keys and wallet from the dresser and headed out the door to his pickup truck.

What the hell. He’d enjoy a nice meal at Sally’s—he was tired of his own cooking anyway—and meet Megan’s friend. Dylan pretty much kept to himself, but he knew how to be polite and charming when he wanted to be. His mother had instilled that much in the Branson siblings when they were growing up. Shelby Keelan wasn’t at fault for Burgamy’s high-handed tactics; no need to blame her. He’d meet her and move on.

Get the codes. Deliver the codes. Get out.

No problem.

Chapter Two

For the first time she could remember, Shelby Keelan cursed her gifts when it came to math. Normally she was very appreciative of them: they allowed her to make a great living doing something she enjoyed—making games kids loved to play. But not this time. This time her abilities had brought her out of her nice comfortable home to a strange town to meet a strange person she had no real desire to meet.

Of course, Shelby rarely had the desire to meet anyone new.

She easily found a parking spot at the restaurant in Falls Run, although the lot was across the street from the diner due to the narrow shape of the town forced by mountains. Shelby had been told there was only one restaurant and she couldn’t miss it, but she’d still been a little worried. What kind of town had only one restaurant?

Evidently the town of Falls Run.

Shelby didn’t mind small towns. She didn’t mind big cities either. It was the people in both that tended to cause her stress. Shelby just didn’t do people very well.

Even now, pulling into a mostly empty parking lot, she was pretty stressed out. Shelby knew she would need to make small talk. With strangers. Multiple strangers maybe. She had many talents, but chatting with people wasn’t one of them. She was an introvert through and through.

Her introversion had driven her flamboyant mother crazy when Shelby was a child. Her mom wanted to show her off—as if people really wanted to hear some four-year-old recite pi to the two-hundredth digit—but young Shelby had just wanted to be alone.

Adult Shelby just wanted to be alone, too. Back at her own house in Knoxville, where everything had its place and was comfortable and safe and familiar. Where she didn’t have to think too hard about what she did or what she said or if she was coming off as rude or unfriendly or standoffish.

It wasn’t that Shelby was afraid of people, she really wasn’t. She wasn’t agoraphobic, as her mother tried so often to suggest. Wasn’t afraid something terrible would happen to her if she left her house. People just... exhausted Shelby. So she chose to be around them as little as possible. Fortunately, she had a job developing games and software that allowed her to spend most of her time away from people. Perfect.

Plus, she had plenty of friends in her life, just mostly of the four-legged and furry variety. And none of them were disappointed when Shelby wasn’t up to making small talk. They kept one another company just fine. And Shelby had a couple of the two-legged-friend versions, too.

But it took pretty grave circumstances to get Shelby to willingly leave her house and be around people she didn’t know for extended periods of time as she was doing now.

Like a terrorist-attack countdown in the coding of a children’s computer game. One that Shelby happened to discover two days ago. One that anyone else in the world would’ve missed.

But Shelby hadn’t missed it, the way she never missed anything having to do with numbers. She had known immediately the numbers she saw were not part of the game. They clearly had been planted, and once Shelby dug into them a bit, she realized they were, in part, a countdown. But she couldn’t figure out any more than that on her own.

Sure that she had stumbled on to something potentially criminal at best, downright sinister at worst, Shelby had emailed her computer engineering friend from their college days at MIT, Dr. Megan Fuller.

Except Megan was Dr. Megan Fuller- Branson now, and expecting a little baby Dr. Fuller-Branson in a couple of months.

Shelby had explained the coding she’d found and what she suspected. Most others would’ve scoffed or accused Shelby of overdramatizing, but Megan and Shelby had developed a healthy respect for each other years ago at MIT. They may not be the type to chat with each other over coffee, but they took each other seriously.

And it ended up that Megan was now working with her new husband at some sort of clandestine law enforcement agency that specialized in saving-the-world type of stuff. Quite convenient for the matter at hand. Especially since the codes had been planted by some terrorist group known as DS-13, who was evidently really bad news.

Spotting the codes and realizing their nefarious purpose had been the easy part for Shelby. The hard part had come when Megan had asked Shelby to travel to Washington, DC.

Shelby understood why Megan needed her to come in. The string of coding Shelby saw in the game had only come up for a moment before deleting itself. Very few people would’ve been looking at the game in its raw-data form, and nobody would’ve been able to catch the countdown codes and the coordinates embedded in it in the split second it was available.

Unless you were Shelby, who was able to memorize thousands of numbers at once just by looking at them. A complete photographic memory when it came to numbers. And coding, whether it be as innocent as games, or as deadly as a potential terrorist attack, was essentially numbers.

Shelby now had the numbers she saw permanently stuck in her head. She couldn’t get rid of them even if she wanted to. Megan had the decoding software that would help make sense of it all. They needed to put together Shelby’s brain and Megan’s computer. And fast. Because whatever the countdown was for was happening about sixty hours from now.

Megan knew about Shelby’s dislike of being around people. Driving to DC from Knoxville was too far, so Megan had mentioned her brother-in-law’s charter airplane service. The way Shelby saw it, one person in a small airplane was much better than airports and large planes full of people. And it was Megan’s husband’s older brother. That shouldn’t be too bad.

So here she was, pulling up to a restaurant based on a text message she’d received from somebody named Chantelle DiMuzio, personal assistant of Dennis Burgamy. The assistant had requested that Shelby call Burgamy, but Shelby couldn’t remember the last time she’d used her phone to talk into. Her outgoing voice-mail message pretty much summed up her opinion about phone conversations:

Sorry, I can’t take your call. Please hang up and text me.

Shelby could text much faster than she could talk. She could type twice as fast as that. She was off the charts on a numpad.

Finally, the Chantelle lady had left a message that Mr. Burgamy had arranged for Dylan Branson, Megan’s brother-in-law, to meet her at the town’s only restaurant. Branson would fly her into DC tonight.

Shelby put the car in Park. Okay. She could do this.

She was already a little shaky from an incident about fifteen miles back when some moron had literally driven her off the road. That was the problem with driving in the mountains: if someone wasn’t paying attention—or worse, doing something stupid like texting and driving—and nearly hit you, then it was pretty much game over. These mountain roads with their sheer drops were pretty scary.