Free A Girl Named Digit by Annabel Monaghan

do.
    I gulped down a bit of yucky coffee and boldly announced, “I’ll start.” But as I began with the first page and then flipped through the rest, I was shocked to see gibberish. They were all in some sort, or several sorts, of European, Middle Eastern, and Slavic languages. “What are we supposed to do with this stuff?”
    “I think the plan is that I translate and you decode.” John reached across our uneaten breakfast and took the pile from my hands.
    “How are you going to do that? Did they send an FBI language decoder ring?”
    “I speak most of these languages. I traveled a lot as a kid.” He didn’t look up. I recognized in him that spark of diving into something you love. It was as if I were no longer there. Which of course made him all the more attractive.
    “Why?”
    “It’s a long story. Let me get a few of these translated. These are mostly in Portuguese, Czech, and Farsi, and then you can do your thing.” All business.
    “But how could you . . . ?” I gave up. I didn’t want to disturb him by turning on the TV, so I decided to try for a little personal hygiene. I crammed myself into the tiny bathroom and washed my face and brushed my teeth. I undressed and washed myself as well as I could with a sink full of lukewarm water and a small washcloth. We seemed to be sharing a bar of soap that had both an industrial fragrance and a prior owner. Could the FBI have coughed up a new bar of soap for our efforts?
    When I was done, I got dressed and lay back on my sleeping bag, watching John work and playing math games in my head. I wondered how many cubic inches of air it took to fill a room that was twelve by six feet, adding in the two-by-three-foot bathroom and subtracting for the three pieces of furniture and the masses of our bodies.
    Just as I was close to the answer, my back pocket started to vibrate. I nearly jumped, hoping that John hadn’t heard that faint
zzzzz
sound. Who in the world would be calling a kidnapped girl? I got up and went back into the bathroom to check it out.
    “Olive Grossman Text.” I stared at my phone for a few seconds like it was going to bite me. Was this an old text coming in, or was she seriously texting me to crack the kidnapping case? I opened the text and read,
I think this is bullshit. Where are u?
I started to write back,
No. No. The kidnapping is legit. Promise.
But I couldn’t be texting her if I was really bound and gagged somewhere. So I just turned off my phone and hoped she’d lose interest.
    John looked up as I came out of the bathroom. “You’re good to go.”
    “Can’t the FBI get a computer program to do the translating?” I was looking through the sheets of handwritten translations he’d given me and noticed his odd but highly regular printing. Everything about it was so uniform that it almost looked as if it could be its own font. I could imagine it on the big list of fonts on my laptop: John Bennett Bold.
    “They can and they do. But conversations like these are really hard to translate that way. They are so conversational and the people speak so heavily in idioms that you really need a translator who has spent time in the specific area.”
    “Like what?” I couldn’t get my head around the fact that he knew all these languages. I felt like quizzing him, but he wasn’t in the mood to be made a show of.
    “I can’t think of one. You get started, and I’ll translate the next batch.” I decided to stay on my “bed” to read. John had commandeered the food crate for his feet, and I had no other place to recline.
    The documents were transcripts from intercepted cell phone conversations. I expected to read this:
     
Bad Guy 1: So we’re all set. I’ve got the dynamite, and you bring the matches
.
Bad Guy 2: Terminal Eight, JFK, see you there at ten a.m.
Bad Guy 1: Bye-bye
.
Bad Guy 2: Later
.
     
    Not exactly. I started reading through the most mundane conversations ever. “Honey, will you pick up my dry cleaning?” (Evil dry