“Sanskrit. Do you want your pain meds now? It’s a little early, but . . . ”

“I’ll wait. You’ve seen it? The bracelet?”

“With the elephant and the moon? Sure. Middleton sent it to me at the lab. I’ve got it with me.”

“You know what it says?”

“Yeah, sure. It’s a quotation, from the Buddha. “Irrigators direct the waters; Fletchers fashion the shaft, Carpenters bend the wood. The wise control themselves.”

“Where’s it from, the quote?”

“A text called the Dhammapada. It’s a compilation of the Buddha’s words.”

“Could that be the key word? Dhamma-whatever?”

Chang shook his head. “Too many repeating letters.”

“Well, could the quote itself be the encryption key?”

“It’s a long enough phrase,” Wiki said. “Let’s give it a whirl.”

“I think I remember how to do this,” Carson said. “You make a five-by-five grid, right?”

“Yeah. The most common way to do it is to take the first letter of each word in the phrase. So we’d start out ‘I’, ‘D’, ‘W’, ‘F’, then ‘A’, from the second letter of ‘fashion’, since we’ve already used the ‘F’, then ‘H’, ‘S’, and so on. You arrange the letters at the beginning of your grid, one to a square, followed by the rest of the letters in the alphabet, in order, with the Q, or sometimes the J, omitted. And if the first letter in each word doesn’t work, you try the last letter, or—”

“So there are a lot of possibilities. This could take a while.”

“Take me a few minutes to write a tiny Perl program. Really, it’s way quicker than filling in the grid hit or miss.”

“Perl?”

“Sorry. It’s this really easy computer language—I’m boring the hell out of you, aren’t I?”

“No, Wiki, I love puzzles.” She stopped. The pain was waking in earnest now; fire blazed down the length of her arm. “Maybe you better give me a pill or two?”

“Hey, I’m sorry. I forgot.”

Chang disappeared from Carson’s view with a clatter, using the wheeled desk chair to scoot around the van’s interior. He retrieved a vial of pills from a satchel, a paper cup and a bottle of water from the monitor shelf, before returning to the side of the cot. “You lie back and relax, okay? You’re turning paler every second.”

“But I—”

“Hey. Doctor’s orders.”

Obediently, Carson swallowed the pills. Chang scooted his chair back to the shelf, turned a gooseneck lamp to focus on his laptop keyboard, flexed his fingers and went to work.

“Not the first letter of every word,” he said. “Not the last. Dammit.”

Carson closed her eyes. It had felt right, basing the encryption key on the quote from the bracelet. “So much for hunches. Now what do we do?”