Read Online The Secret (The Scinegue Series Book 1) by S.R. Booth - Free Book Online Page A

pen off of the antique desk that had once belonged to his great-granddad. It was one of the only extravagances he and Sarah had in their simple home.
    He started writing down the letters that jumped out at him. “What are you doing?” Sarah squinted over at the paper he was writing on before slipping on a pair of reading glasses.
    “I’m not sure.” He wrote and then scribbled through a few letters from the code, changing their positions on his paper. “There is something about this that I can almost see. But I can’t quite grasp it.”
    Sarah picked up another pen and started arranging the groups of letters Billy had made into different configurations. Suddenly, she went back to her computer and started searching through pages she had bookmarked.
    “Did you find something?” Billy asked looking up from his paper.
    “Maybe.” She glanced over at his page of letters. “The way you grouped those letters reminded me of a code I saw somewhere online. See how each group has one or two numbers, and they each start with the same two letters? It seems like I saw something where the code changes after a certain repetition, in this case maybe the r and w that keep showing up together. Then the numbers had to do with which letter was the first letter of the word, and which letter stood for the correct letter of the alphabet.”
    She pulled up page after page on her computer, scanning through them trying to find what she was searching for. “This is it.” She and Billy both read the decoding information, then Billy picked up his pen again and started to work with the letters in the way the page explained. It was a fairly simple code that had sometimes been used in periods of war.
    “Too bad there isn’t a code breaker on this page that would do the work for us.” Billy paused in his writing. “There are just so many variables. It’s going to take a long time to find one that works. If we have to do that for each section, this could take forever!”
    “Keep doing what you’re doing and let me see if I can find something else online. It would be much faster to have a computer run through all the possible variations of the letters. I wish I knew how to write computer programs,” Sarah said in frustration. “I could just tell the computer what I want and make it do the work for us.”
    “What about Ritchie?” Billy asked suddenly. “He’s a computer whiz. Don’t you think he could make a program like that?”
    Sarah stopped typing and considered the talents of her brother who shared her fascination with computers. Ritchie had followed his interest by pursuing a degree in computer technology. “I think he could. Would it be safe to have him know whatever the note says? We’ve stumbled into something very weird. I don’t know if we should pull anyone else in with us. You know?”
    “Yes, I do know. We’ll hold off on asking him about it for now. That reminds me though, I didn’t tell you about Ben.”
    “What about Ben?” Sarah swiveled her chair to face him.
    “He wasn’t at work today. There was a new guy named Michael driving. He was very tight-lipped, said he didn’t know anything about Ben. I meant to ask someone about him after work, but once I found this note it was all I thought about. I’m guessing it’s going to be just like when Jerald didn’t show up for work, though. No one was saying anything.”
    “Do you think he’s okay?” Sarah gasped, and her eyes widened in a combination of concern and fear. Mysterious coded messages were exciting, but people disappearing was just scary.
    “I want to think so.” Billy ran a hand through his hair leaving a spiky trail. “A company can’t just go around making all of its employees disappear without someone getting suspicious, right?”
    “Enough money lets people do pretty much what they want” Sarah turned back to stare at her computer screen. An icy feeling was growing in the pit of her stomach.
    Reaching over, Billy gently pulled Sarah’s