“OK,” said Nemo. “You won’t tell me who you are, then let me guess. You’re probably ex-military judging by how you kept your cool under fire, but you’re smart and you know something about cryptanalysis, so I’m guessing either military intelligence or CIA or NSA. If you were former CIA or NSA, given what’s happened in the last few hours, more than Fritz and Franz would be following us, so I’d go with military, and given that you’re named after two famous generals, you probably come from an army family, so that would mean army intelligence, most likely a signals intelligence analyst. But since you’re below retirement age and you took a job as a fucking librarian in the middle of nowhere, something must have gone wrong out there in the big bad world of warfare.”

Patton could feel a cold sweat breaking out on her forehead. She’d spent the last ten years hiding everything Nemo had just said from everyone she met. He had known her less than twenty-four hours and had deduced everything. She tried to hold his stare but couldn’t. As she dropped her eyes to the paper, Nemo smiled in a way that revealed a softness under the rough, loner exterior.

“You’re not the only person who’s good at figuring things out,” he said. “I would have made a good intelligence officer.”

“I didn’t,” said Patton.

“Want to tell me why?” said Nemo.

“Not particularly,” said Patton.

“Then tell me about your army family. It’s a long flight.”

“I want to work on this crib,” said Patton.

“Suit yourself,” said Nemo.

Patton sat in silence for a moment watching as the letters on the page in front of her swam around, refusing to coalesce into anything that made sense.

“My dad called us a friendly fire family,” she said in a low voice. “Boy, was that ever a stupid expression. Friendly fire. Trust me, there was nothing friendly about the misguided 105-millimeter Howitzer shell that killed my uncle in the Iron Triangle northwest of Saigon. Some poor bastard who hadn’t slept in three days transposed two digits in the firing coordinates. And friendship certainly doesn’t describe the relationship between my grandfather and the .50 caliber machine-gun fire that a P-47 Thunderbolt sprayed all over the unmarked train the Germans were using to evacuate Allied prisoners from their interrogation center in Diez after the Allies crossed the Rhine. The fire was a little more friendly to my great-grandfather. He just lost his leg in the Argonne in 1918 when friendly shells rained down on his battalion for a few hours before they managed to send a carrier pigeon telling the artillery to cease fire. Dad never told any stories about the Civil War, but I found a relative who died at Antietam—knowing our luck he was probably hit by some fellow Union soldier who didn’t know how to fire his musket.”