The Cassandra Conspiracy

by Rick Bajackson

  “Who?” Payton asked.

  “Janet Phillips. She used to be with the government, testing their classified computer systems. After fifteen years, she decided to go it alone and started her own consulting company. She handles all kinds of computer security problems–both hardware and software. It sounds like this is right up her alley. Besides, she’s like a bloodhound on a scent. Once she gets going, nothing–no hardware or software problem–stands in her way.”

  It sounded exactly like what Payton needed. Evanston gave him Janet Phillips’ telephone number, and wished him luck.

  Payton punched in the phone number Evanston had given him. In spite of the hour, Janet’s voice was fresh and cheery. After introducing himself, he quickly explained his problem.

  “Matt Evanston said that if anyone can figure out what happened, it’s you so here I am.”

  “Well, Mr. Payton...”

  “Please, call me Steve.”

  “Most likely Matt’s right, and this monstrosity of a computer database dumped some system overhead stuff right into your mailbox. But I’ve got some time, and it certainly won’t hurt to take a quick look at it. Call me back on my modem line, and you can transfer the file right over to my computer. I’ll look it over and give you a call back as soon as I can.”

  “Thanks. Mysteries always bother me. I appreciate your help.”

  For the second time that evening, Payton sent the garbled E-mail message from his MacBook, across the phone lines, to someone who just might be able to make heads or tails out of it. Once Payton’s computer received the acknowledgment from Janet’s machine, Steve shut down the MacBook.

  Having decided that he’d done enough damage for one day, Payton put all of his paperwork aside, turned off the lights, and headed for his bedroom.

  CHAPTER 3

  September 27th

  He was on a raft, floating languidly. The warmth of the ocean breeze swept the beads of perspiration from his back leaving only a feeling of well being. Then the bleeping of Payton's alarm clock demanded his immediate attention. Payton reached over to silence it, but the damned thing refused to yield. Finally, he realized that his phone was ringing. Payton reached for it.

  “Hello,” he said through a sleepy mouth.

  The fatigued voice on the other end said, “Steve, its Janet.” Payton strobed his memory, but before he could place the name she added, “Janet Phillips. Are you awake?”

  “I am now,” Payton replied slowly.

  “Sorry to wake you, but I figured you’d want to know. I tore that file apart. Worked on it all of last night and most of this morning.” Payton glanced at the digital clock radio. It was only six forty‑five.

  “Anyhow, I’m ninety‑nine percent convinced it’s not garbage.” Janet paused waiting for Payton to catch up.

  “Then what is it?” Payton asked.

  “I think the file’s encrypted.”

  “Encrypted? Why would anyone bother encrypting their E‑mail?”

  “There could be a lot of reasons. Maybe its highly sensitive commercial correspondence, or simply a couple of hackers playing around with the latest set of passwords to some corporate megalith’s computer system. Who knows?”

  “Did you try to crack it?”

  “I’m working on it. But so far, I haven’t gotten anywhere. Want me to keep at it?”

  Payton thought for a minute. He doubted that anyone he knew would place an encrypted file in his electronic mailbox. Therefore, its presence had to be a mistake. Besides, he vaguely remembered someone saying that gentlemen didn’t read other people’s mail. On the other hand, the secret held those few lines of five digit numbers tore at his curiosity. Besides, it wasn’t as if he’d ripped open an envelope for a peek at its contents. This was different. If the sender didn’t want him to read it, he or she should have made damned sure that their message didn’t end up at his E‑mail address. Screw it!

  “Go ahead and see what you can do.” There, he was committed.

  “Fine, I’ll continue working on the file. Call me back this afternoon, and I’ll give you an update.”

  Payton replaced the phone in its cradle, and then glanced again at the clock. Any thoughts he might have had about getting a few additional winks were dispelled. Payton got up, and started about the business of getting ready for work.

  . . . . . .

  The flutter of case‑related filings kept Payton busy all morning and well into the afternoon hours. As a result, returning Janet Phillips’ call totally slipped Payton's mind.

  Around four, his secretary buzzed him informing him that a Ms. Phillips was on the line. Payton slapped his forehead as he reached for the phone.

  “God, I’m sorry, Janet. Things have been so hectic around here today, I forgot about...”

  “Can you get over here right away?” Janet snapped.

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “I’d rather tell you in person–the sooner the better.”

  Payton checked his watch, then his appointment book. “Give me your address. I can leave here in fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.” He scribbled her address on a sheet of legal sized paper.

  . . . . . .

  Janet Phillips’ apartment was near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, a part of the city that had been renovated along with the downtown revitalization. Payton left the taxi, walking briskly, unsure of what could have caused Janet Phillips’ reaction.

  When he reached her door, he knocked once. Before his hand dropped, he heard the deadbolt snap open. As Payton entered the apartment, he noticed that Janet glanced out into the hall checking to see if anyone else was there.

  Janet Phillips had a delicate face, a creamy complexion, deep blue eyes, and full lips set off against sculpted cheeks. Her blonde hair fell to her shoulders. She wore jeans and an oversized sweatshirt emblazoned with “Caltech”. A hint of some exotic perfume wafted over to where Payton stood. Payton guessed her height at about five feet five inches–definitely good-looking. Only a blind man would fail to take notice.

  “Hi, I’m Steve Payton.” As if introductions were needed.

  “I’m sorry for the rush, but I think we’d better discuss this file,” Janet said, her blue eyes latching on to Payton's.

  “What’s the problem?” Steve asked, placing his suit jacket on the back of one of her dining room chairs. When he turned around, one look at Janet’s face and he knew trouble was brewing.

  “Is this some kind of a joke?” Janet flared. “Did Matt Evanston put you up to this? He’s always playing practical jokes on me.”

  Steve looked puzzled. “What are you talking about? Everything’s exactly as I explained last night. I only called Matt because he’s the one that got me set up with the MacBook and UniNet. Maybe you’d better start at the beginning.”

  Janet motioned for him to take a seat. Payton looked for some place that wasn’t covered with books, computer manuals, or sheets of quadrille paper–some with cryptic scribblings, others blank. Finally he found a wing chair unencumbered with Janet’s paraphernalia. She sat on the couch across from him, folded her legs up under her, took a deep breath, and began.

  “First, I figured that the file somehow got garbled in transmission. That happens occasionally in spite of all the parity and message verification checks. But the number sequence kept bothering me. If a message or file got trashed in the system, the symmetry wouldn’t be there. And your file had perfect symmetry. Each part of it consisted of five-digit groups–no single numbers, no letters, nothing else.

  “Around one this morning, I gave up, and decided to look for another explanation. Since most people don’t go around sending meaningless gibberish to each other, the only feasible explanation was that the entire file had been encrypted. So I started with that premise and went on from there.”

  Before Janet could continue, Steve asked, “All right. Let’s say it’s encrypted. If that’s the case, then the file landed in my E‑mail box by mistake. Right?”

  Janet nodded.

  �
�How did that happen?”

  “That’s easy. A system like UniNet processes millions of E‑mail messages, file transfers, and the like every day. At last count, there were over twenty million computer terminals connected either directly to UniNet or through the hundreds of other networks that tie into the system. Every time one of those users wants to send a file or transmit E‑mail, the main processor, or processors if they’re redundant, take over and route the file to the addressee.”

  “So what you’re saying is that somehow, I got a message intended for someone else?”

  “Exactly. Maybe the address was wrong–a number or two inverted. It could be any one of a hundred different things. Maybe the computer slipped a bit somewhere along the line. The originator may have entered a wrong address. Who knows? What matters is that you got it.”

  Payton shrugged. “It’s no big deal, right?”

  “Let me continue,” Janet said. “I don’t know if Matt Evanston told you, but my background’s in computer and software security. That doesn’t mean that I’m proficient in code-breaking, just that I’ve had some exposure to codes and ciphers used to protect computer data.”

  “What’s the difference–between a code and a cipher?”

  “Codes operate on complete words, sometimes phrases. A cipher works on single letters. Your message appears to have been enciphered, and there are two ways of accomplishing that: transposition, where the letters in the original or plain‑text are jumbled, yielding the cipher text; and substitution, where the original letters are replaced by new numbers, letters, and sometimes symbols. Obviously, we can rule out the last two.

  “If you want to really throw a monkey wrench into the situation, you use a combination of substitution and transposition, which effectively doubles the message security. Morse code is one of the best examples of a substitution cipher. Dots and dashes replace all the letters of the alphabet, the numbers from zero to nine, and a fair number of punctuation marks.”

  Janet looked over at Steve. His face told the story. “Am I losing you?”

  “Let’s say I’m running real hard.”

  “I’ll give you an example.” Janet walked over to a pedestal‑mounted, white marking board that she had set up evidently for Payton's benefit.

  Janet wrote “dog” on the board. “If we first did a simple transposition on the word, we’d have “god”. That’s a transposition cipher. Now, let’s see what we get when we use a simple substitution cipher on the already‑transposed word. For instance, each letter of the alphabet could be assigned a number from one to twenty‑six. So let’s see where that takes us.”

  Underneath each letter, Janet wrote the numbers 7, 15 and 4. So ‘dog’ becomes “god”, and “god” becomes 7‑15‑4.”

  “But the message I got consisted of all five digit numbers.”

  “Right, because whoever encrypted that message ran the enciphered text together–no breaks between words and no punctuation. That makes things even more interesting,” Janet said as she returned the marker pen to the board ledge.

  “I banged away at that stupid file for hours and got nowhere. Although I didn’t expect a miracle, I analyzed it to see if certain numbers appeared more than others.”

  “Why?” Steve interjected.

  “In the English language, certain letters show up more than others. The most frequently used letter is E. In a thousand words, it’ll appear almost six hundred times. In a thousand letters, well over a hundred. Then comes T, followed by A, O, N, and R. Certain double letter combinations, or bigrams, also occur more frequently. These include: he, an, re, er, in, and on.”

  Payton smiled. “Let me guess. There are three letter combinations that you look for too.”

  “Right. We look for con, ent, ers, eve, for, her, ing, ted, ter, the, and tio. And when I say that we look for these single letters, bigrams and trigrams, I mean the computer looks for them. Without the computer, we’d be lost.”

  “But you said that you didn’t anticipate any results. Why?”

  “Because these repetitions are most easily found in long messages, and yours is too short. But it was still worth the try.”

  By now, Payton had learned more about encryption than he’d ever wanted to know. “I presume from that look on your face that you were finally able to crack the code?”

  “Lucy helped me.”

  “Lucy?”

  “As in a Russian spy ring that operated in Switzerland during World War II.”

  “Now you’ve lost me.”

  “The group was Stalin’s eyes and ears. They provided him with much‑needed intelligence about Hitler’s plans. The historical details aren’t important. Their encryption method is. Although the Lucy ring used a three‑stage cipher, the file that was dumped into your E‑mail box only used two. Remember I told you that certain letters appear more often in English?”

  Steve nodded.

  “There are a total of eight such letters, and sixty percent of the English language can be written using them. Lucy assigned a number code to each letter starting with 0 and ending with 7. Each time one of these letters, A, S, I, N, T, O, E, or R appears, it’s given the single number equivalent.”

  “All right, but what about the rest of the alphabet?” Steve asked.

  “With eight already committed, that leaves eighteen left to be encrypted. These are written in the same sequence they appear in the alphabet in a matrix.”

  Janet went over to the blackboard.

  0

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  A

  S

  I

  N

  T

  O

  E

  R

  5

  B

  C

  D

  F

  G

  H

  J

  K

  L

  M

  6

  P

  Q

  U

  V

  W

  X

  Y

  Z

  .

  /

  “The Lucy ring added the period and slash–for punctuation. Once you have the basic table, all letters other than the baseline eight are encrypted using a two-digit sequence taken from the table. For example D becomes 52 and P is 60. Once the message is enciphered, it’s collapsed into five-figure groupings.”

  “Then the message I got is a set of five figure groups taken from the table?”

  “It would have been, but someone decided to complicate matters. Watch.”

  Janet turned and wrote the phrase “Dog is lost” on the marking board. “Let’s go through the example of encrypting this.” Using the matrix, Janet wrote the following sequence of numbers: 52554 21585 14680.

  “This...” she said pointing to the three groupings, “...represents the first encryption stage. The originator then added a common number, in the case of your message, 12345, to each grouping, and thus created a second stage of encryption. If he had really wanted to screw things up, he’d have used a one‑time pad. That’s where a different number is added to each successive grouping. Unless you have the exact one‑time pad, it’s impossible to decrypt the message.”

  Payton was more than impressed with Janet and her ability to fight her way through the maze he had dropped her in. “So where does all this leave us?”

  “Right here,” Janet said handing him a sheet of quadrille paper. The plain‑text message appeared below.

  PROCEED WITH CONTRACT AT AGREED UPON FIVE MILLION. TARGET/SHANGRI LA/NOV. 1ST. HAVE CRITICAL INFO. MEET HERE TUES AT NINE. RENDEZVOUS IN PINE LAKES. C.

  Payton looked at the sheet of paper, slowly letting the significance of the letters on it sink in. “Jesus Christ!”

  “Exactly,” Janet replied. “Exactly.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Now you understand why
I was so upset,” Janet said, as Steve regained his equilibrium.

  Payton gently placed the sheet of paper on the coffee table, handling it as if it were a vial of nitroglycerine. “You know, this still could be someone’s idea of a practical joke.”

  “The only problem with that logic is that someone really knew what they were doing. Even though I managed to crack it, the encryption’s too sophisticated. Why would anyone bother going to all that trouble when they intended the message to be read?” Janet thought for a moment, then added, “Even I wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell of decrypting it either if it hadn’t been for the fact that the initiator included the common number as part of the number groupings. No, I think it’s real. The problem is What are we going to do about it?”

  “We could call the police,” Steve suggested.

  “And what? Tell them that you got a mysterious E‑mail message on your computer, which when it’s decoded, is about some sort of contract killing. They’ll hang up on you. Besides, with millions of users on UniNet, we can’t guarantee that this murder, if there’s going to be one, will take place in their jurisdiction.”

  Janet was right. They had so little to go on. “You’re the computer expert. What do you suggest?”

  “I need to look into this some more. Maybe I can do a network trace and get some idea who originated the message or maybe where it originated. UniNet probably keeps track of all file transfers, uploads, downloads, and E‑mail by assigning a network message number to each one. If I can pinpoint the account, then at least we’ll be able to give that information to the police.”

  “Has that been done before?”

  Janet nodded her head. “Remember when that college student inserted a virus that spread like wildfire throughout one of the government‑run computer systems?”

  Payton vaguely recalled the case. The hacker hadn’t intended to cause serious damage, just have each computer tied into the network display a funny message. But things got out of hand, and some of the users lost considerable amounts of the data on their disks.