Rudy frowned. “Because some of the files were supposedly destroyed by moisture after Rasouli’s agent swallowed the drive, correct?”

Bug gave him a pitying stare. “Silly mortal. ’Destroyed’ is a relative term. Or, maybe it’s a term people who are a lot less super-genius smart than me use.”

“Bug,” warned Circe quietly.

“Yeah, yeah, okay. There’s more stuff on the drive than was openly indexed, and I’m not talking about real or faked damaged files. I’m talking about stuff that was coded to react like damaged files.”

“You lost me,” admitted Rudy.

“A file name is nothing but a piece of computer language. Zeros and ones, but arranged to create a readable name. When you give a file a name the computer writes that name in computer language, but here someone deliberately coded a few files so that their names appear as ‘read error’ warnings. That way they get hidden among the errors from the damage.”

“Devious,” Rudy agreed. “How many hidden files are there and what is in them?”

“There are ten files in two separate subfolders. One was marked BOS/SC, and I don’t think I have to go too far out on a limb to presume what that stands for.”

“You lost me again,” said Rudy.

“It was part of the verbal intel Ledger got from Rasouli,” explained Bug. “Rasouli made oblique references to two books, the Book of Shadows and the Saladin Codex. BOS/SC. Anyway, when I cracked the files I expected to find complete texts or abstracts, but instead I got nine scanned images saved as pdfs. Very low-res and muddy. The other file is weird. All I could find was a Word doc with two words written in English. ‘Fuzzy math.’ That’s it. I’m running some additional cleanup and deep extraction programs to see if there are other hidden layers, but so far, bubkes.”

“Fuzzy math?” asked Rudy.

Circe grunted. “The Codex is supposed to be questionable commentary on an exact science, right? That says ‘fuzzy math’ to me. Could be some code hidden there. You get anything from the Codex, Bug?”

“Not so far. We don’t actually have a copy of the Codex, so I can’t check to see if there’s anything buried in the text.”

“Damn. Who has one?”

Bug made a face. “There is exactly one copy and it’s in the National Museum in Tehran.”

“Crap,” said Circe. “Any full or partial scans online?”

“Not that I’ve found, but searching all foreign-language databases will take a little longer.”

“What about the other one?” asked Rudy. “The Book of Shadows. Surely I’ve heard of that somewhere…”

Circe nodded. “It’s the book of spells used in Wicca.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” complained Rudy, flapping a hand. “Really? We’ve done zombies, clones, and mutants, now the DMS is squaring off against black magic?”