Wild Fyre (22 page)

“And are they?”

“No,” Maco said.

“And then she said?”

“She said I should remember the faces of the kids in her class. Whenever I believe in a conspiracy I should remember—even her second graders are smart enough to dismiss a conspiracy theory that ludicrous,” Maco said.

“Good,” Kevin said. “Okay. What’s the data?”

The sadness left Maco’s voice, but he spoke slower and more clearly when the resumed.

“I think it’s from Jim,” Maco said.

“Jim?”

“Yeah. I think he set this data up to bounce around before he was killed,” Maco said. “It has his signature on it.”

“You mean his PGP encryption signature?” Kevin asked.

“No, that’s way too simple. She can crack one of those in a couple of hours with all the processing power she has. This is so simple that it’s brilliant. You’d only see it if you echo this block of data to an eighty-column monitor,” Maco said. He displayed the file.

# # # # #

 
JimsGhost();

/*****

“You see it?” Maco asked.

“Yeah,” Kevin said. “That’s neat. Where did you get this?”

“I spotted these packets bouncing around when I was messing with a couple of routers,” Maco said. “They’re really crafty. They’re addressed to an unassigned IP address, but it’s not just any address. When these packets get to a major gateway, the destination morphs because of a bug in the firmware. That sends them back across the world. It took me forever to capture them. They just keep bouncing back and forth.”

“What’s in them besides the signature?” Kevin asked.

“That’s what I haven’t figured out. I’ve tried the data against all of my decryption algorithms, but of course I didn’t find anything.”

“Why do you say, ‘of course’?”

“Because if I could decrypt them, then lots of other people could as well. You can’t generate a public key that can’t be eventually be decoded to the corresponding private key. It may take a lot of time and energy, but it’s always possible to figure out the key,” Maco said.

“So Jim wouldn’t have used a public key system,” Kevin said.

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Could it just be a secret key scenario? Like how you would store data locally if you were the only one who needed access?”

“That’s a thought,” Maco said. “But if it was stored with a secret key, then the secret died with Jim. Besides, why would he put it out to bounce around on the net if he had the only key to unlock it? Why not just put it on a flash drive, or upload it to the cloud somewhere?”

“So you think he wanted someone to find it?” Kevin asked.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. He knew his life was in danger, so he put his message in a bottle and set it adrift on the tides,” Maco said.

“That’s why you said you wanted me to see the submarine?” Kevin asked.

Maco laughed. “No, forget it. It was a weird analogy.”

“Oh. So we’re assuming that Jim wanted us to find this block of data. What’s the key then?”

“I’m guessing that he took the data, compressed it to remove any patterns, and then applied a symmetric encryption algorithm,” Maco said. “That’s what I would have done.”

“What do we need to decrypt it?”

“We need the algorithm and they key. For the algorithm, I was thinking I would try to decrypt it with Twofish. It’s popular with the AES people and it’s totally unpatented. As for the key, it could be anything,” Maco said. “I would guess it’s a password or passphrase.”

“You have the Twofish algorithm implemented?”

“Yeah, hold on,” Maco said. He tapped the keyboard and pulled up a command-line utility. “I just have to strip the headers and junk and pipe the data into it. Oh wait, I have to divide into blocks. Hold on.”

“Have you got a piece of paper and a pencil?” Kevin asked.

“Sure,” Maco said. He handed a pen and pad to Kevin and then returned to his keyboard. Maco wrote a little wrapper script to strip and prepare the data from Jim’s message. He funneled each block into the decryption algorithm and set it up to prompt him for the key.

Maco ran his script.
 

The screen read, “Please enter the key.”

“I don’t have any idea what Jim would pick for a key,” Maco said. “He would have known that the strength of the encryption relies on the strength of the key. You can either choose a short password and put lots of symbols and upper and lower-case letters in there, or you can do more of a passphrase. I like short collections of a symbols, but some people…”

He stopped talking when Kevin handed back the paper.

“What’s this?”

“It’s Jim’s favorite poem. A long time ago he said it was the only poem he had ever memorized. I memorized it too, back in high school.”

“And you still remember it?” Maco asked.

“Stuff like that sticks in my brain,” Kevin said.

Maco began typing, “Whose woods these are I think I know.”

“I don’t think it’s long enough,” Maco said.

“Try the first two lines,” Kevin said.

The program accepted the code and dumped the output to the screen. It was gibberish.

“Did it work?” Kevin asked.

“I don’t know. I have to send this output to a decompressor to know. Actually, without knowing which compressor he used—if he did use one—I’ll have to send it to a bunch of different ones and then scan the output for English words, I guess. I need to patch together some scripts to do that,” Maco said.

“Hand me that poem, will you?” Kevin asked.

While Maco wrote the script, Kevin worked on the poem. He copied it a few times and circled words and letters, trying to figure out different ways to represent the stanzas. The two worked for several minutes.
 

Maco stopped typing and the silence filled the room as he read back over his code.

“I think I’ve got it,” he said. “I’ll take the output of the decryption and try to decompress it with all the big methods. If the output has any English words or a significant percentage of the output is white space, the program will show it to us. Otherwise it just says it can’t decode. Does that make sense?”

“Sure, why not,” Kevin said. He handed the pad of paper back to Maco.

Maco typed the first stanza of the poem into the program.

Could not decode.

“Try it with no spaces,” Kevin said.

Could not decode.

“Okay, how about all lowercase?”

Could not decode.

“Take out the punctuation?”

Could not decode.

“Can you make it show us the output?” Kevin asked.

“Yeah, but it will just be nonsense. Trust me—if there’s a message in there, this thing will show it. I don’t think we have the right password. Hell, I might not even have the right encryption method.”

“You said you’re trying Twofish encryption?” Kevin asked.

“Yeah,” Maco said.

“Why did you pick it?”

“Like I said, it’s popular and its free,” Maco said.

“State of the art?”

“Yeah.”

“Then that’s it,” Kevin said. “Try the whole stanza just like this. Put in Oh-D, Oh-A for carriage return and line feed, like a C programmer would.”

Could not decode.

“Come on, Jim,” Kevin said. “You have any ideas?”

“I’m trying to think—I haven’t seen that much of Jim’s code. What does he do for variable names?” Maco asked.

“He’s a strongly-typed guy. I think he uses Hungarian typing with lower Camel Case,” Kevin said.

“I haven’t tried lower Camel,” Maco said. “Let me try that.”

Could not decode.

“Should we put types on the lines? Maybe null-terminate each line?” Maco asked.

“Wait, I’ve got an idea,” Kevin said. He tore the paper from the pad and started with the first sheet. He worked carefully, analyzing each letter of the stanza and then smiled. He handed the paper back to Maco. “Try that.”

The paper read, “wHosewoodstheseareIthinKiknow.hishousEisintheVIllagethough;hewillNotseemestoppingheretowatchhiswoodsfillupwithsnow.”

“I don’t get it,” Maco said. “We tried the whole thing with no spaces.”

“No, look closer. I capitalized some of the letters,” Kevin said.

“Randomly?”

“Nope. It spells, ‘Hi Kevin’ in the capitalized letters, see? He told me this was his favorite poem, and he might be acknowledging that in the code itself,” Kevin said.

“A message in a passphrase,” Maco said as he typed. “If this works…”

He hit enter and nothing happened. Maco and Kevin leaned forward waiting for the machine’s reply to appear on the screen.
 

Maco’s jaw dropped as the monitor filled with text.

“That’s really clever,” Kevin said as he read the words.

CH.13.History ()
 

{

 
Lunch();

/*****

J
ULY
, 2013 (1
WEEK
before Jim was killed)

“Harry,” Ed said. “What are you doing here?”

Ed set his bag down on the long table and pulled out a chair.

Harry was typing something on his phone. He glanced up at Ed and then returned his concentration to his typing. After he finished, he looked up.

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I was just in the neighborhood, so I didn’t figure I wanted to go all the way back to the office before lunch. I’ve been sitting here for an hour.”

“I can’t believe they let you in,” Ed said with a smile.

“Must be my winning charm,” Harry said.

Ed took his seat and stowed his bag under the table. He had planned to answer a couple of emails before the other guys arrived. The email could wait.

“I haven’t seen you around much lately,” Ed said.

“I was at Jim’s demo, remember?”

“Yeah, I mean these lunches, or Kevin’s cookout. And you haven’t been working,” Ed said. He didn’t expect Harry to open up, but he wanted to give him the opportunity.

“I’m just taking it easy lately,” Harry said. “I figure there’s no sense in doing a whole lot of shit I’m not interested in doing.”

“You still seeing Brendon?” Ed asked.

“Nope. We broke up,” Harry said. “He wanted to move back to Michigan.”

“That sucks.”

“I didn’t object too strongly,” Harry said. “He was one of those people who gets worse the more you know them.”

Ed nodded.

“I mean, that’s the worst thing about breaking up with him, is that everyone else thinks he’s such a great guy. It’s not until you start to get close to him and he opens up that he feels free to let his inner douche come out. He would get pissed off about stuff and then just not say anything. It would build and build. By the time he finally got so pissed that he couldn’t hold back, it would be a surprise emergency. He would say, ‘I can’t live with XYZ anymore,’ and I’d be like, ‘I didn’t even realize it was a problem until right this second.’ If he had just let me know before he was ready to explode, I would have gladly changed, you know?”

“Yup,” Ed said, still nodding.

Harry grunted and looked at his hands. He sighed and leaned back in his chair.

“You seem relatively normal, how come you’re not with anyone?” Harry asked.

Ed smiled.

“I mean, Maco I understand,” Harry said. “He’s too paranoid to have a girlfriend. I bet he doesn’t even let his hand get too intimate for fear that it would tell someone.”

Ed laughed.

“So what’s your deal?” Harry asked.

“I don’t know,” Ed said. “I was married for five years and then she left me. It wasn’t a huge fight or anything, we just never really had any fire. She’s married to a great guy now. I went to their wedding. I just don’t attract passion.”

“You haven’t met the right person,” Harry said. “You should try speed dating.”

“Have you done that?”

“No,” Harry said. “Gay guys don’t have to worry about finding partners, they just show up. I’ll probably be in another relationship before the end of the week.”

“That sounds convenient.”

“As long as you don’t count the centuries of repression that led to the revolution,” Harry said.
 

Ed nodded.
 

Harry rubbed his forehead and then dragged his hand down his face.

“Hey—you should meet my sister,” Harry said.

“We’ve met,” Ed said. “We met over at Dale’s that time. Remember?”

“Oh right. My nephew was on the same soccer team as Dale’s daughter. She’s lost weight since then. She looks good. You want me to set you two up?”

“That’s kind, Harry, but that sort of thing never works out well, does it?”

“It can,” Harry said.

“I don’t think I’m in the right frame of mind to start something.”

“Who said anything about starting something? I just thought you might go out to dinner. Never mind. I’m just meddling.”

Ed didn’t disagree.

After a minute, Harry changed the subject.

“Jim coming today?”

“I doubt it,” Ed said. “Last I heard, he was wrapped around the axle on some project.”

“He sent me a letter a few weeks ago,” Harry said.

“Oh yeah?”

“I mean an actual physical letter, you know? With stamps?”

“Really?” Ed asked, smiling.

“Yeah, it was funny. It was handwritten. I couldn’t believe it.”

“What did it say?” Ed asked.

“I don’t know. Oh, it had condolences about my grandfather. He died months ago. I just got the letter last week. Funny guy,” Harry said.

Ed nodded.

“I see him at these lunches, but I’ve never talked to him much. I sent him that code for email parsing a while back, but really we haven’t had very much contact.”

“He’s sincere,” Ed said.

“I know. I could tell. Anyway, I just thought that was funny. So he’s not coming?”

“No.”

The door slid open and Lister came in. He was followed quickly by Kevin and Dale. Maco came a few minutes later, and the lunch was underway. They took their time with the menus, making careful deliberations before placing the same orders they always settled on.

“I was telling Kevin on the way over, there’s someone using a couple of the major online retailers as a shell,” Dale said.