Have you read Devour yet?
You might want to stop right there before reading the rest of today’s blog, because for better or worse, things are going to get a little spoiler-y.
Don’t worry. The blog is still going to be here when you finish reading Devour. I promise.
Okay… I’m hoping that everyone here has read the book…
Let’s get to it!
In Devour, we finally got a closer look at Boris Jagger’s criminal empire — particularly how he managed to operate a child sex slave ring for years without getting caught by the cops.
Sadly, the first thing we have to understand is that Jagger was pretty damn brilliant. He knew that the cops would be on him eventually, so he had to constantly tweak and move his operations. He limited who had what information so that if the person was caught, he could potentially give up only a small bit.
When the Unbreakable Boys finally caught up with Jagger, they had in hand Jagger’s one true weakness — Ian.
Ian saw enough of the pieces that he could give the guys a head start to cracking Jagger’s empire. And the key came down to the code that they were able to unravel.
First, let’s look at the clue’s the Rowe wrote on the kitchen wall:
Golden — time to swim
Red — let’s sing
Blue — take flight
White —no stopping a rolling stone
Doesn’t seem to mean much does it?
Well, the first part is the colors. The colors take their names from abandoned mining towns throughout Kentucky and West Virginia. In particular:
Golden Pond
Red Bird
Blue Heron
White Rock
The names are linked to either the name of a town, a location in the town, or the mining company itself.
Next, the phrases were taken from the places themselves.
Pond = swimming
Bird = sing
Heron = flying
Rock = rolling
Yeah, it’s not perfect since we have two birds and a rock don’t really do much, but it seemed like enough to confound anyone trying to break his code.
Next, putting it all together. Noah actually hinted at this in the story. The comment is linked to essentially a list of binary questions.
If it’s time to move “cargo” into the Golden Pond location, then Jagger would tell his boys that “yes, it’s time to swim.” Or if they weren’t moving the kids from Golden Pond to auction yet, then he’s say, “no, it’s not time to swim.”
Or if they were moving kids from Red Bird and preparing White Rock as the next location, Jagger would just have to say, “Let’s sing. There’s no stopping a rolling stone.”
Since each location has a specific code phrase, Jagger could limit the use of colors and just say the phrase.
And that, in a nutshell, is Jagger’s code and how we came up for it in Devour.
In the meantime, Rinda and I are working on the next free Ian short story as well as the first book of Ward Security. (You can read the first free Ian short story here if you’ve missed it.)
Also, don’t miss out on the collection of short stories that we will be releasing for Rowe on June 20. You can pre-order your copy of Unbreakable Stories: Rowe here.