.. How do I get into the cell phone?

Bridget's cell phone is on the table behind the couch. Click on it to find that it has, big surprise, an odd security system. Read to the end of this hint for a screenshot showing how to solve it.

When you pick up the cell phone, Nancy says, "Okay, I need to use the MacLorthen pattern here." That is, you need to reproduce the tartan used by the MacLorthen clan in the large screen. You can see the tartan you're aiming for at the top right of the screen.

It looks fairly simple, right? But look at that pattern again; you can see a slightly larger version of it in the Tartans Book you picked up from Moira's dining room table.

In addition to all those pretty colors, they're all interwoven. The horizontal green stripe at the top goes over the orange stripe, under the wide blue stripe, over the thin blue stripe, under the yellow stripe, and so on. Yipes!

That looks impossible to do with the program you have, but it's not. The trick here is to plan carefully which stripes go in before other stripes.

For example, the top horizontal green stripe is on top of the vertical orange stripes, so the orange ones have to go in first. But the horizontal green stripe at the bottom is under the orange stripes, so it has to go in before the orange ones. See?

Is this complicated and confusing? Yes, and you don't have a lot of time. The clock starting ticking when you entered Bridget's room, and you only have about seven minutes real time.

If you want to solve this one yourself, I recommend playing the game in a window so you can click outside the window to freeze the game while you work out what stripe should go next.

Also, you may not have noticed the blue in the four corners or the black that underlies the white. Those colors should go in first before anything else.

Sick to death of the whole thing? Okay, here's how I did it:

What you see when you get into the cell phone is something about a dead drop. Boy, just like a real spy!

How do I work the "dead drop" thing?