“Your grandfather didn't want to make it too easy. I came up with the same result. Then I went back to the key word. D and R are four spaces apart in the word door. I wrote down every fourth word in the main verse, but my gut feeling told me that it was too much. So I tried every fourth letter. Still nothing I could sink my teeth in. Then I thought, D and R are fifteen letters apart in the alphabet. I used that formula in the poem and picked out every fifteenth word. Then I used the plain and cipher alphabets to attempt the cryptanalysis. Are you still with me?”

“No,” Austin said.

“Yeah, that's what happened to me too,” Barrett said with a grin. “So I cheated. I ran the whole bloody mess through a computer.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a computer printout. “This is what I got.”

“A mishmash of vowels and consonants, but no words,” Karla said.

“I tried everything. I called up an MIT professor who spoke Hungarian and ran it by him. No go. Then I remembered Kovacs spoke Romanian, and called up a guy who runs the Transylvania Restaurant back in Seattle. He couldn't make heads nor tails of it. I would have torn my hair out, if I had any. I went back to the words that I had discarded, particularly turvy-topsy. I thought maybe it applied to what I was doing.”

“How could you turn the message upside down?” Karla said with skepticism.

"I couldn't. But I could interpret the words loosely, and run it backward, like the second line of the poem. Which is what I did.

Still didn't make sense. Then I had an epiphany. As I rode around on my bike, I realized that it wasn't supposed to be words. It was exactly what it was, a string of letters, more or less. Once I jumped that hurdle, I figured that there were numbers in the message as well. Back to the computer. Certain letters were indicators that meant the next letter was actually a number. A preceded by another letter equals 1, B equals 2 and so on."

“You've lost me again,” Austin said. From the puzzled look on Karla's face, she was wandering around in cipher land as well.

Barrett set the computer page aside and picked up the napkin in both hands. “This is an equation.”

“An equation for what?” Austin said.

“By itself, the message doesn't make sense, but we've got to look at it in context. Kovacs intended that the message would be seen by only one person: Karla. He said she would always have the poem when you needed it.”

“Are you saying what I think you're saying?” Austin said.

“I just figured this out a few minutes ago, so I can't be sure until I put it to the test,” Barrett said. “But Kovacs could have given us a set of electromagnetic frequencies.”

“The antidote,” Karla whispered.