Page 147 of The Fourth Option
“Right.” She flipped a page. “If that’s the main product at Dorado, you can see lots of activity; a bunch of repeating numbers in these notebooks. There was a railroad nearby, right?”
“Yes. Same line that runs along the river to the ports. Dorado is one of the port stops, probably dating back to the facility’s Navy days.”
“Well, if you look at most of the pass-through inventory flowing through Dorado, you can understand how they track it. See? The first four alphanumeric digits are coded the same. The next ones are five-digit numbers.” She tapped the relevant entries with her black fingernail.
“I’m not following.”
“I thought you were a genius. What do they teach you guys in the CIA?”
“Not whatever this is.”
She opened her laptop and angled it in his direction. “I Googled the numbers. They’re zip codes: Baltimore, Philly, New York. Within each of those zips is a food processing center. When I searched for information on them, I found that their customers are food service suppliers. They deliver food to restaurants.”
“So?”
“So, if the bulk of the Dorado business is sugar, these were probably going off to those big consumer markets. That’s legit freight. This set of numbers,” she said, tapping one of her highlights, “is different. Only four digits. And it happens at irregular intervals. Every now and then, it’s there with the probable sugar shipments. In this case, it’s not.”
Walker looked as she flipped through the various dates and coded outgoing shipments.
“I feel like I’m missing something.”
“I told you I’m working on my master’s in management information systems, right?”
“I still don’t really know what that is.”
“And I mentioned that I studied accounting at LSU?”
“You did.”
“Well, this structure suggests that the first four digits are a different SKU and that the lack of a zip code means it was either a local shipment or set aside to be picked up at Dorado.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“Here,” she said, connecting her computer to the video surveillance server Walker had taken from the Dorado management office.
“How did you get this working?”
“It uses a standard USB-C power cable,” she said. “I connected it via a regular HDMI cable into my laptop, downloaded the public software, and voilà.”
“You didn’t need a password?”
“This is a closed security system, not cloud-based, probably because they wanted to be able to destroy any video evidence rather than let it get subpoenaed. I was able to pull it right up.”
“How do you know this again?”
“Management information systems, Chris. I kind of want a real job one day.”
“How does this help us?” he asked.
“Simple. We cross-reference the dates from those shipments without zip codes with the dates captured on the video and see who is picking up what.”
“Now that really is genius.”
“I already did it. Check this out.”
She tapped a date and then scrolled until she found a specific entry.
“Here’s one of those frames.”
