I switched the SIG to my left hand and worried the hundred-dollar bill out of my ticket pocket. I unfolded it one-handed, peering into the folds in the weak light afforded by the computer screen. I studied the serial number and Baaz’s spidery digits. They matched exactly. Baaz had written it out with compulsive accuracy, working it into a series of equations and computations that I didn’t even begin to understand. What I did know immediately, though, was that if I pulled the trigger I probably never would. I put the bill back in my pocket, thumbed the decocking lever on the 9mm and tucked it into my jeans.

And then I put my hand on Baaz’s shoulder and rocked him gently back into the land of the living.

23

‘I told you,’ Baaz said, drumming the middle fingers of his right hand against his temple, ‘it’s bloody crowded in there.’

I was sitting on the edge of his bed now. He hadn’t startled when I woke him, but he was clearly embarrassed by the situation, wrapping his hair up, struggling to make eye contact.

‘Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have forgotten it. It’s like …’ He struggled for a simile. ‘A worm! Just like a worm. You know when you hear a bit of a song and it goes round in your head, sometimes for days? Just like that.’

‘The banknote, that number on that bill, is like a song?’

‘Correct. But not just that number. All numbers. It’s like they have a rhythm, a tune. Lots of people can remember songs. My auntie knows hundreds of them. Always singing. My mother, too. But my father is a numbers man. Just like me. He says numbers are like the hymns of the gurus. They have patterns. And patterns have meanings. And meanings have solutions.’

‘And solutions …?’ Realization began to dawn on me. Baaz had figured something out. I felt a surge of adrenaline in my guts.

‘Solutions have applications.’ He pulled the covers up higher over his chest. ‘But only,’ he continued, ‘if you know what the problem is.’

‘OK.’ I spoke calmly – as much to coax him as to relax myself. It felt as if I was teetering on a cliff edge, about to find out whether or not I could fly. ‘So … what’s the answer?’

He looked at me blankly. ‘What answer?’

I tried again, slowly, thinking how best to frame a question I had no idea how to formulate.

‘What does it mean, Baaz? The number on the banknote. What does it … signify?’

‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.’