Page 92 of Shadowfox

Or . . .

Had this come from the Soviets themselves? Were they baiting a trap, setting a snare? Had they become suspicious and decided to test my loyalty to them—to my daughter?

That thought made flames flow through my veins. How dare they—how dare anyone—question my love for Eszter. How dare they take her, threaten her, no doubt hurt her if I failed to follow their orders.

How dare they.

I turned back to the corner of the lab and began my morning routine.

Coffee.

A few calibration checks.

Heat measurements from the coil bank, which still vibrated from last night’s test run.

I sorted through numbers I didn’t care about and scribbled results that no one understood.

But my eyes kept drifting back to the book.

It lay there like a patient with no pulse—inert, inert, inert.

Until finally, I relented and pulled it close again, flipped through the chapters.

Again.

Still, there was nothing new, just circuits, voltage equations, impedance charts.

Damn it.

I slammed the book closed with more force than necessary, the clap of the covers ringing too loudly against the warehouse walls, then stood and tossed it toward the end of the bench where it landed with a dull thud, skidding before coming to rest face down.

That’s when I saw it.

On the back cover, printed in a line of cataloging numbers, two digits were circled in blue ink. The circles weren’t part of the book’s design, and I could barely see them, even in the blinding fluorescent light of the lab. The printed numbers had begun to fade, but the circles, while faint, remained fresh.

1 . . . 8 . . . 3.

One hundred eighty-three?

What could—?

I tore open the pages and found page one hundred eighty-three.

My breaths grew shallow.

At first glance, it looked like any other page, half filled with scientific prose, while the other half was covered with a diagram of phase shift in signal pathways and a graph detailing resistance curves under voltage load.

But then I saw them.

Circles. Small, faint, hand-drawn. Blue.

One around the letter L. Another down below, an I. Then an F, an A, a T.

Random letters, dozens of them, circled amid the sea of text and formulae. They made no sense. There was no pattern my tired mind could immediately decipher—but they were there.

I grabbed a notepad and transcribed the letters in order, careful not to miss a single one.

They werenotrandom.

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