Free The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces by Ray Vukcevich

from the outside, but then I let my mind drift free until I was hearing the conversation rather than typing and then reading it. I got inside the experience.
    â€œWhat are the two Russian pieces we have?” Dennis asked.
    â€œWell, there’s the Russian remailing service,” Sky said, “and now this software company that Gerald and Pablo were apparently doing some work for.”
    â€œOkay,” Dennis said, “now let’s look at the numbers involved in both of those. I mean four-e-four and EES .”
    â€œThose aren’t numbers,” Lulu said.
    â€œShe’s right,” Scarface said.
    â€œWe may be on the wrong track altogether with this Russian business,” Dieter said. “There is a more obvious sinister secret group.”
    Dennis hurried on before Dieter could turn the discussion away from the Russians. “In fact,” he said, “four-e-four is a number. It’s just in hex. That is, it’s in base 16. Look, it consists of 4 times 256 plus 14 times 16 plus 4 or 1252.”
    â€œAnd what does that tell us?” Sky wondered.
    â€œI don’t know,” Dennis said. “Let’s play with it and see what we get. First the prime factors.”
    He pulled a line out of the air and stretched it open and it became a chalkboard. We formed a semicircle around Dennis, and he put some numbers on the board.
    313 times 2 times 2 equals 1252
    â€œHere we have the parts of 1252 that can be divided no further,” he said.
    Lulu raised her hand.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œI don’t see where you’re going with this.”
    â€œYou’re missing the point,” Dennis said. “What we’re doing is just poking around to see what the numbers might tell us. How do I know what we’ll find until we find it? Let’s go on.”
    â€œGrumble.”
    â€œWho said that? Oh, never mind. Look.” Dennis wrote on his chalkboard again.
    2 313 2
    â€œI’ve rearranged the factors symmetrically,” he said. “The other possibilities are these.”
    22 313
    313 22
    â€œLet’s take each one in turn. What are the prime factors of 23132?” He made a calculator appear and divided 23132 by 2 and got 11566 and divided that by 2 and got 5783. “Now is 5783 prime?”
    We watched his eyes roll in his head while he figured it out. The rolling eyes in his superhero head were just for show. What he was really up to (and we all knew it but were too polite to say so) was slipping back out into Pablo’s system, locating a programming language (C++ was all Pablo had on hand) and writing a quick routine that would take the square root of any number and then divide that original number by successive odd numbers until it either found a number that divided the original number evenly, in which case the original number wasn’t prime, or a number that was bigger than the square root, in which case the original number was prime.
    Dennis used the program on 5783 and found that it was prime and brought his rolling eyes to a halt.
    â€œSo 2 times 2 times 5783 is 23132,” he said.
    â€œAnd that tells us exactly what?” Dieter said.
    â€œWell, nothing, that I can see,” Dennis said. “Negative results can be productive, too, you know. Let’s go on.”
    â€œSigh.”
    â€œWho said that?” Dennis glared around at us for a moment. Then he turned back to the board, and using the prime routine on 22313, produced the factors 53 and 421 both of which turned out to be prime. Then he divided 31322 by 2 and got 15661 which turned out to be prime.
    â€œThis had all better add up to something,” Scarface said. He made something that looked like blood run off his bat fangs.
    â€œHey, that’s a good idea!” Dennis said. “Let’s add up one instance of each of the prime factors from all the numbers.”

    â€œWow, look at that. Three twos and two threes!” Dennis said. “Now if