Codebreaking

As soon as lunch is over, I part ways with Imelda and Sanchez. I make sure that they’ve left the mansion and on their way back into the forest to continue their work before I make my way down to the Bunker. I use the new passcode that Father’s given me to get pass the electronic lock.

A minute later, I’m back in the same conference room as last night. Vidocq is nowhere to be seen, but Irene and another one of the guys are there, chatting about something projected on the screen.

It abruptly goes dark as I enter the room, and they fall silently. I see the keystrokes that the guy put into the laptop just as I came in. Pity that I couldn’t catch what was actually on the screen.

“You bailed on us early last night,” Irene sneers. “Couldn’t figure out the code after five seconds? Don’t worry, you still won’t have it figured out after five years.”

“I was just tired after a long day,” I say, feigning a yawn. “So, what were you guys just looking at?”

“Stuff that you’re not qualified to look at,” the other guy replies. He stares at me, daring me to challenge him.

“Sure,” I shrug. “Mind if I take another crack at yesterday’s code?”

Irene stifles a laugh, and boots up one of the laptops lying on the conference table. She enters some credentials, flips through a few screens, and then turns the screen to face me. I stare at it. The same screen full of numbers from yesterday, complete with the team’s annotations, stares back at me.

“I can do anything that I’d like?” I ask.

“Yeah, we wouldn’t want to stifle your genius,” Irene says. “Just leave the screen there so we can keep an eye on it.”

I sit down in front of the laptop and get to work, reading closely over the notes that Vidocq and his team have made over the last few months. I’m not expecting much, but I soon realise that they’ve made a pretty damn good attempt at the problem. It occurs to me that what might seem like a simple cipher to Erin might actually be a devilishly difficult one to even experienced intelligence officers like the ones gathered here.

“You’ve got a cryptographer on the team,” I say, scanning over a particularly insightful set of notes.

They’ve been circling around a number of ideas, many of which I’m not familiar with. But that doesn’t matter, if they’re the wrong ones.

“That would be me,” the guy at the laptop says. I notice that he’s got his own copy of the numbers up on one half of his screen, the other half filled with some kind of code terminal. “Emmanuel, at your service.”

“This thing’s a bit of a stumper, isn’t it?” I say.

“Giving up already?” Irene says, a condescending smile on her face.

“On the contrary,” I say. “Just getting warmed up.”

Six hours later, I’ve got a mass of scribbled papers around me, mathematical formulae swirling heavily around me. I mutter darkly to myself and begin hand-shredding the papers.

People have come and gone from the room, but Irene has remained in her seat the whole time, keeping a watchful eye on me. She’s not quite close enough to make out every last detail of what I’ve been doing, but she’s surely seen my frustration growing in leaps and bounds. This is proving to be a devilishly difficult cipher to solve.

“Come up with anything original yet?” Irene asks, leaning on her one good arm.

“Hate to tell you the truth, but I think I’ve made more progress in one day than any of you have in the past few months,” I say.

“Yeah, right,” Irene scoffs. “That’s why you’re tearing all those papers apart.”

“That was good work,” I say. “Just, not quite the right work. But I’ve got it under control now. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

She rolls her eyes at me as I save the documents that I’ve been working on and shut down the laptop.

July 9, 2020. The next day.

Vidocq and Irene are waiting for me in the conference room when I come in after lunch.

“Tougher than you thought it would be, eh?” Vidocq smirks.

“Not really,” I shrug. “Erin has a reputation for being smart. It’s why you call her the Brain, right?”

“No, we call her that because she suffers from macrocephaly,” Irene says with a roll of her eyes.

She flips open a laptop and turns it towards me.

“You ready to waste another six hours of your life?”

“It’s not a waste if I solve it,” I counter.

Vidocq laughs at that, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it. He looks so nonchalant when he does it, but I notice that he lets the cigarette rest by the vent in the side of the room. Even he has to respect the property, somewhat.

Eight hours whirl by as I tackle the cipher again. Vidocq has left to run some kind of errand, but once again, Irene’s stayed in the room, joined by Emmanuel.

“So,” Irene says, leaning forward on her arm, looking over at my screen full of math. “Tell me what you’ve been burning time on.”

“Oh, now you’re interested in what progress I’ve made?” I ask.

“Interested in if you’ve made progress,” Irene corrects.

“We know that we’re working with a cipher from the text that Erin sent to Ricardo,” I say. “Or, at least, I assume it’s true because that’s what she said in the message, and you know, they were physically separated and this is the only way that they could communicate.”

“Astounding logic,” Emmanuel says, clapping his hands together. “Got anything else that’s revelatory?”

“The question is what kind of cipher,” I say. “Now, you probably also noticed that the next message that Erin sent was a random non-sequitur about the heights of the tallest mountains around the world.”

“Can you believe it?” Irene says, glancing at Emmanuel. “This guy can read at a third grade level! Maybe even fourth!”

“The most obvious thing to try would be the Hill cipher, using the heights of the mountains to construct the transformation matrix,” I say. “It’s one of the first things you guys tried too, with a bunch of different variations and unit conversions and other bizarre things that might have been in the message.”

“Yep, some big words there, definitely reading at a fourth grade level,” Emmanuel says.

I roll my eyes.

“But note how the message is signed - ‘love you to the moon and back’ - now surely that’s worth consideration,” I say.

“Your point?” Irene asks. “We know that’s there.”

“But you haven’t been able to work out why it’s there,” I say. “In fact, you looked briefly at ciphers with histories related to space and romance and nonsense like that, but you’ve never considered that it might interact with the cipher itself. That is, unless, you have already.”

Irene frowns.

“How would it factor into the cipher?”

“That’s not the point, you don't have to play dumb,” I say. “I’ve read the briefings. You’ve been in contact with Ricardo. You must have asked him for the solution to this cipher at some point. If you already know the answer, why waste my time like this?”

“What makes you think we asked Ricardo that?” Emmanuel says.

“Claude is confused, understandably,” Irene says, an amused smile on her pretty lips. “He doesn’t understand that Ricardo is a sensitive agent that could flip at any moment. He doesn’t understand that Ricardo shouldn’t be made aware that we’re monitoring his text conversations with Erin, and Claude certainly doesn’t understand that figuring out the cipher would allow us to verify whether Ricardo’s truly on our side or not.”

“They’ve kept up their conversation in cipher recently,” I agree, looking through the most recent chat logs. “But it might be that he’s trying to maintain cover.”

“We don’t know, and that’s a problem,” Irene says.

“Your problem,” I say, stifling a yawn. “I’m heading to bed. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“So all you’ve done is spent two days replicate our work?” Emmanuel says, sounding mildly peeved.

“Nah,” I say. “I’ve solved it. Just heading to bed because I’m tired. I’ll see you folks soon—and make sure Inspector Vidocq’s here too, because he’ll want to see the grand reveal.”

I hear them chuckling in disbelief as I make my exit from the room.