Decker watched Gold’s eyes bore into the text. “Do you have a photographic memory?”

“Yes, I do. But also I’m one of those weird people with high superior autobiographical memory.”

“I read about that.” Decker smiled. “Uh, I don’t remember where I read it but it was an article about people who remember daily details about their entire lives.”

“Correct.”

Oliver said, “Is that a blessing or a curse?”

“I do remember the bad as well as the good. Lucky for me that most of the emotional valance is long gone. I can tell you the day and the date of what was happening for the last sixty years. But only in relationship to myself. If something historical had occurred and I wasn’t aware of it, I’ll have no direct memory of it. I remember Tyler McAdams well not only because I remember the boy, but also because I knew his father, Jack McAdams. I went to law school with him.”

“You’re a lawyer.”

“I’ve done everything except medicine. Poor kid. Growing up with a father like that could not have been easy.”

“He’s aware of his father’s peccadilloes,” Decker said. “He handles him very well.”

“Good. I admire people with spine.” Gold went quiet. “The Eastern letters and symbols—the Chinese, the Japanese, the Korean . . . this is Amharic . . . whoever wrote this is really all over the place . . . anyway, the symbols and sounds point to Latin phrases as well.”

“What about the Roman alphabet?” Decker asked. “They appear to be nonsense words but they must mean something.”

“They are actually transliteration for Russian words . . . Greek words as well. If I translate from Russian into English, the words mean nothing. But . . . if I translate from Russian into German, they appear to translate back into Latin phrases.”

The three men nodded solemnly. Mulrooney turned to Decker and Oliver. “You men ever work a case like this?”

“Never,” Oliver said. “Hardly ever worked with the FBI.” He looked at Decker. “What about you?”

“I worked with the spooks once in a multinational child porno ring back in Foothill. I remember it well because believe it or not, they did wear sunglasses. My involvement was minimal.”

“This is a first by me.”

“Anything else you notice, Professor?”

“A few things here and there.” Gold looked up and folded the codebook. “The parsimonious thing for me to do would be to translate all of what I can into Latin and then I can try to break the Latin code and see if it makes sense in English or German or Russian or whatever language the code was originally written in. I’ll tell you one thing. This was either done by a polyglot or more than one person. There are a lot of idiomatic phrases. And while I recognize most of the idioms, it would take me a while to write them up in code.”

He smiled and stood up. “I’ll do my best, gentlemen.”