Solution Method

July 10, the next day. The Najbreit Estate.

On a whim, I decide to head to the Bunker early in the morning, before Salome’s art lesson. I slip through the corridors of the mansion silently, turning over the key to the cipher in my mind, wondering what the message will yield.

The keypad flashes green as I input the correct string of digits, and the door guarding the staircase leading underground swings open. I take the steps down in twos, moving fast, and as I turn the corner at the bottom of the staircase, I almost crash into another figure leaving in a hurry.

We stare at each other for a second, sizing each other up.

“Holly?” I ask, knowing full well who she is. “They let you down here?”

“Why wouldn’t they?” she counters.

She brushes past me and heads up the staircase, leaving me to wonder at the answer to her question. But I can’t get hung up on it. It’s not relevant to the situation at hand.

I head over to the conference room, finding only Vidocq and Irene there. Does she ever leave the room? I wonder, and How does she always look so good, if she spends all her time in here?

Vidocq takes one look at me standing by the doorway, and he chuckles to himself.

“You wanted to sneak in a few extra hours of work before you unveiled your grand failure, eh?” he says.

“I know the solution already,” I say. “I just haven’t bothered to decrypt any messages yet.”

I pull open one of the laptops lying on the big table, finding my work from the prior days. I type on the keyboard as I speak, narrating my thoughts aloud.

“love you to the moon and back,” I repeat the enigmatic message that Erin sent to Ricardo. “I realised yesterday that the Hill cipher might not be using the heights of the tallest mountains on Earth, as in Erin’s message, but the heights of the tallest mountains on the moon, so I tried using that in my transformation matrix…”

I see the way that Irene pauses, her expression shifting subtly as she realises that I might have something interesting in my hands.

“But that didn’t work,” I say, still typing away at the laptop. “So I thought more about the message. to the moon and back. Why not just to the moon? Erin must have chosen those words for a reason. And once I realised that, the solution became obvious. Double all the heights of the lunar mountains, and then… voila!”

I hit a key on my laptop. A massive document pops up on my laptop screen, filled with line after line of text. But not just any text—unlike the incomprehensible garbage that Vidocq and his team had been producing with their failed attempts at decryption, this text forms real words, real sentences, real messages that Erin and Genevieve and Ricardo had been using to communicate.

I see Irene’s lips curl upwards, a surefire sign of her interest. Vidocq, for his part, is so shocked that he’s at a loss for words. He fidgets with his fingers, peering closely at the laptop screen, as if trying to confirm that I’ve really managed to do in three days what’s stumped his crack team for months.

“I’m not sure why you guys found this so hard,” I shrug. “So, does this count as a big enough contribution for your team to help me with my investigation, Inspector Vidocq? Although, I have to admit, with your track record, I’m not even sure I’d like your help.”

“Let’s see what these messages contain first,” Vidocq says gruffly.

“They’re pretty damn interesting. Nice job, Claude,” Irene says, giving me a quick smile before continuing to read the screen from over my shoulder.

Erin: Package dropped at 37.436, -122.137. Confirm when you’ve received.

Ricardo: Confirmed. This is a good one. Blossom twelve.

Genevieve: Excellent. We will have more news in a few days.

“This looks important,” Vidocq finally admits, after sitting and thinking for a minute.

As we scroll down through the freshly decrypted messages, we notice a clear pattern that emerges. Erin or Genevieve will announce the delivery of a package somewhere, and then Ricardo will confirm that he’s received it, followed by another short, semi-cryptic message. A quick search with some mapping software confirms what we suspect: the numbers correspond to latitude and longitude, invariably placing the packages somewhere in the vicinity of Palo Alto. Figures, since Ricardo has been visiting Stanford these past few months.

“Call the rest of the team,” Vidocq instructs Irene. “This is big news. Let’s see what we can pull from this. I’ll let the Boss know that progress has been made.”

While we wait for the rest of the team to arrive, we continue reading through the messages. Irene takes notes with her good hand, jotting down observations as we make them. Though there are a lot of texts to get through, the pattern that we initially observed holds through the remainder of the messages.

“The last package was sent just three days ago,” Vidocq remarks, as we finish going through the messages.

By now, all of the agents are huddled around my little laptop, madly speculating about what’s really going on with these messages. They now afford me a grudging respect, including me in the conversation, no longer deriding me with every other sentence that comes out of their mouths.

“It’s got to be ****,” one of the guys says. “The packages must be small, we’ve been tracking Ricardo, and what else would he need to receive with such regularity?”

“That makes no sense,” Vidocq says. “Why would Ricardo need to get his **** from Erin? And besides, none of his other actions indicate a habit. I think these packages contain further instructions, written. That’s why Ricardo’s replies are always so enigmatic—because they’re based on those new messages he’s receiving.”

“Great, another code,” Irene says, rolling her eyes.

“The first one was a good challenge,” Emmanuel says, rubbing his hands together. “Even if, you know… it stumped all of us but Claude.”

“One thing’s for certain,” Vidocq says. “We need to intercept one of these packages before Ricardo gets to it, and figure out what’s going on with them.”

I lean back in my chair, smiling. I know precisely what’s in these packages, because, of course, Erin’s told me already, just as she told me how to crack that cipher of hers.