Dangerous Bet: A financial thriller

by Jack Gardner

  Once the man looked at the ID he handed it back to Eddie and pulled a small brown envelope from his jacket pocket. Eddie noticed that someone made sure the envelope was closed not only with tape but also with staples. Before the man handed the envelope to Eddie, he asked him to sign for it on a yellow form, and once he received the form he bid his goodbye and disappeared as quickly as he came.

  Eddie looked at the envelope. The work they did in the encryption department was quite thorough and would not have cast any doubt with any innocent man. The tape was glued on exactly where it was originally placed, but the staples were harder to recreate and Eddie noticed that one of the small holes was a little too wide. That was enough for him to know that the envelope has been opened. He expected to get the key to the cipher any minute, so he didn’t lose any time. Eddie removed the tape and gently took out the staples. The first part of the note he found in there was encrypted with letters and its second with numbers. Therefore, thought Eddie, Ram used two different ciphering systems. This led him to believe that the message had two different kinds of information. Eddie was quite proficient in ciphering systems and could recognize that the Vigenère cipher was only the top part of the message, the one encrypted using letters, whereas the other part was probably encrypted in some kind of book cipher. So he will require two different keys in order to read the message and for the moment he had nothing. And this entire game, he reminded himself, is playing with time. If this message includes any kind of explosive material and someone who wishes to keep certain things concealed decodes it, he himself might become a target… ‘How did I get myself into this mess?’ He thought to himself, but let go of that thought as quickly as it came. Eddie knew that all bets were on, and he was going to play the game to the end, whatever game that may be.

  His phone rang as he was thinking that. Eddie knew who it was.

  “I hear you,” he said.

  “Remember the distinguished institution right by where we first met?”

  “Of course,” said Eddie.

  “Your key is the first word of the name. You see?”

  “I see, but I’m going to need more than that,” said Eddie.

  “There’s a time for everything,” Ram paused. “First, get out of the hospital.” Eddie wondered if Ram emphasized those last words.

  “Okay,” said Eddie. He had no time to lose.

  “Good luck!”

  Eddie pulled out a table from his wallet, including the twenty-six alphabet possibilities for a Vigenère cipher. He did not write his keyword at the top of the table, as is commonly done, but translated the letters one by one. You can never be too careful, he reminded himself.

  He quickly began decoding the first line of the message.

  40

  Sammy’s phone rang two minutes after Eddie got off the phone with the target.

  “We’re on a conference call with the encryption department,” said the Head of Communications.”

  “Talk,” said Sammy.

  “We monitored the last conversation. It was completely clear. The content was passed on to Encryption,” said the officer on duty in the wiretap department.

  “Encryption confirms?” Asked Sammy.

  “Positive,” replied the Head of the Encryption Department.

  “Wait,” asked Sammy, then saying “Communications, I’ll get back to you later.”

  The Head of Communications got off the line.

  “Encryption, talk,” said Sammy.

  “We have a keyword; actually, we have a mention of a keyword. The word itself was not said,” said the officer on duty carefully.

  Goddamnit. The word was information the two already share, which is why there was no need to say it. It obviously pointed to the fact that the target suspected that Eddie’s line might be tapped, or maybe he was just being careful. Sammy didn’t believe in “just being” anything.

  “Let me hear their conversation,” he said. In the background, he immediately heard the sound of a switch, ensued by completely clear sentences, except for the fact that nothing preceded it.

  “When the accident happened, he was on his way to fill in a report where he would probably have written down the details of his meeting with the target; only that the accident took place before that, and the report was never written. The first word in the name of the institution right by where they met… Are you brainstorming?”

  “Of course, only that it’s a matter of luck. Had we at least known the area where they met, we could have written down the names of all institutions and businesses around and tried all of them. In any case, it’s only a matter of time. The question is, though, do we even have any time?”

  “I am sorry to say no,” Sammy replied without hesitation, “do everything you can, it’s a top priority.”

  “There’s another problem.”

  Another problem? Sammy was convinced someone up in the sky had stopped loving him. “What is it?”

  “The message we received was encrypted using two different ciphering systems. The second one seems like an encryption based on a text familiar to both sender and receiver. Without knowing that text, there is no chance we could decode it…”

  “A ‘book cipher’?” Sammy was hoping the answer would be negative, even though he knew it wasn’t.

  “Exactly.” Did he sense a pitiful tone in the man’s voice?

  “Start with the Vigenère and we’ll see what happens. I want a report every fifteen minutes. Clear?”

  “Clear,” said the Head of Encryption, who thought nothing was clear in that story.

  Sammy went back to his thoughts. They were dealing with a smart guy. Maybe even too smart. If gaining time was the name of the game, then he was already way ahead of them. He might even be able to win. But he can’t think that way. He had the best encryption experts on his side, as well as incredibly powerful computers. The Vigenère will be cracked—he was convinced. The question was only what that note held in it.

  Was it important information, or was it a trap, leading them directly into the “book cipher”? He knew their chances of decoding it were slim to none. It could be any text in any language in the world. And if it was a real book, he could have chosen any page in it and encrypted the message according to it.

  He looked at the geniuses at their workstations through a glass window. There were six people there, who were all working quietly and with remarkable concentration. He knew that they divided the task so that, while all searching at the same time, the process would take a sixth of the time it would have taken a single decoder. He stretched out his hand to grab his coffee, which was already cold. ‘This is going to be another long night,’ he told himself.

  41

  Eddie was stunned when he read the first part of the decoded message he was holding. He hoped Ram wasn’t kidding, or maybe it would have actually been better had the whole thing been a twisted joke—he couldn’t decide.

  The text read:

  Someone (of a very high rank) robbed the Millionaires’ Millennium Lottery (ten million dollars). They think I know that, which is why they are trying to kill me. I suppose the money is meant to be used for some kind of dark goals on the national level. Check the names in the second part. Does any of them belong to the Bureau?

  End of quote.

  Eddie read the note one more time. He memorized it and then tore the decoded part, put it in his mouth, and chewed the paper until he swallowed it.

  The prize for the Millennium Lottery was ten million dollars. He remembered that well. He also remembered there were six winners, and that it was never mentioned anywhere that they may be related. He was just told that someone—someone of a high rank—was supposedly fraudulent and deposited the prize in a secret bank account meant to fund illegal activity on the national level. Money could be translated into power, and on that level, power meant government.

  Eddie didn’t know whether he was feeling sick to his stomach as the result of the possibility that Ram was right, or if it was related to the pain
killers that were injected into his body. But how could the Millionaires be scammed? He always thought it was impossible. Everything there was transparent and under constant inspection. Could Ram have discovered the system used to do that, if it was indeed done? He will have to clarify that, otherwise there’s no smoke nor fire here.

  Only that the end of the message was even more bothersome. If the second part of the message includes names, and if these names are indeed tied to the Bureau, then this is a totally different story… But all that doesn’t help him right now; he can’t do anything without the second key. He knew the abilities of the people in the Bureau’s encryption department, and knew that his time advantage was running low quickly—and with it, just as quickly, the danger he was in grew rapidly.

  Assuming that what Ram wrote was true, he himself would become a target, just like Ram. He couldn’t sit there and wait. What did Ram say? “After you’re released.” Eddie felt as if in some magical way Ram knew his schedule, as if he were following him in real time. Therefore, he had to get out of the hospital in order to receive directions. The last thing he should do was wait there.

  Eddie carefully moved his leg from the bed to the floor and felt a sudden rush of pain to the stitched knee. He bit his lip, gathered his few things, and started limping toward the discharge station. As he was slowly walking, he decided that he couldn’t wait for a driver. His situation became dangerous all at once. He had to go underground until he realized what was going on. Outside the glass doors, he could see three taxis waiting for passengers by the exit. He stopped at the discharge station and approached the clerk assertively. His release form was ready; all he had to do was sign it. He picked it up and limped out, passing the first two taxis and walking into the third. The driver was about to say something about the line, but Eddie, experienced and ready, showed him a one hundred dollar bill that he had in his hand. The driver started the engine and left without taking note of the other drivers’ shouts, one of whom motioned a fist with his hand. He could make it up to them later. The man in the taxi knew what he wanted and had the right attitude to get it.

  Eddie looked at his release form. The top of the page stated “Release Form—103.” A bell rang in his mind. “There’s a time for everything. First, get out of the hospital,” Ram said. The missing key is a certain text, and that is what he is holding in his hand…

  Eddie took a deep breath and asked the driver to turn on the light in the back seat. He pulled the rest of the message out of his pocket and started looking for the right letters to place instead of the numbers in it, counting each and every letter in the form in order to match a letter for each number. Bingo! By the time he reached the fourth letter he knew he was holding the right key. One day he would buy Ram a drink. That is, if they stayed alive.

  Within a matter of minutes, Eddie memorized both names and phone numbers. He gave the driver an address in the western part of the city. For the first time, he leaned back in his seat and focused on the pain in his leg.

  42

  At station four in the decoding office, Leon looked at the photocopy he received and considered his options. Leon was a gifted mathematician, a genius in fact, who experienced the world of encryption not only as a profession, but also with of the true curiosity of a scholar.

  The way decoders usually work is by not preferring one system of encryption over another. This is done in order to assure the decoders’ maximal creativity, being that they work in front of people who are just as creative. But this time, they were specifically told to refer to the first part of the message as one that was encrypted using Vigenère. Someone must have given that information in a phone call that was eavesdropped, but was careful enough not to give the keyword.

  The Vigenère cipher was invented in the sixteenth century and broken in the nineteenth century by Charles Babbage, who left behind exact directions for decoding. The cipher was popular among many encryption professionals for times when they did not have computers available, working on the ground, writing short messages while pressed for time.

  Breaking a Vigenère cipher depends on having certain words repeat themselves in the text, and a keyword of a reasonable length. Before he committed his utter concentration to it, Leon looked up and surveyed the office. The other decoders’ body language taught him that, at that stage, none of them had a brilliant idea that could lead them to break the message quickly. It seemed that they had a difficult task at hand—and that is before they even considered the second part of the message, which—Leon immediately recognized—was encrypted using a “book cipher.” There, he knew, their chances were slim.

  The fact that the person used two ciphers in one message revealed that this was a sophisticated professional in encryption. But why two ciphers? Are these two kinds of messages? The “book cipher” was obviously harder to break. In all probability, it included information the person wanted to protect without fault. But the beginning was breakable, especially considering the fact that he or she gave away the cipher system, unless they didn’t know they were giving it away… Leon was fascinated by the possibility that he was going to enter someone’s head, so to speak.

  He started by searching sequences of letters that repeated themselves. Soon enough, he discovered two pairs of identical sequences. After he counted the number of letters between each sequence component and its other component, he recognized that in both cases, the supposed length of the keyword was divisible by four. For a moment, he was bothered by the fact that the keyword seemed quite short—which seems unsophisticated if one wants to make breaking the cipher hard, or quite smart if one wants to make it easy…

  Moving on with that assumption, he wrote the repeating sequences and the spaces between them in front of him. He quickly discovered two options for the length of the keyword. Once he ruled out the possibility of it being eight letters long, he decided it must be a four-letter word. The next phase was to discover these letters. If he knew the keyword, then he’d break the message.

  Here, Leon had a program written in order to analyze the frequency of certain letters and present them graphically. And indeed, a few minutes later, the screen in front of him showed matches that determined that the first letter of the key word was B. The same way, he discovered the second—A. The third was N and the fourth K. The keyword was “bank.” From that moment on, decoding the cipher was easy. Leon typed the keyword in, and within a second, the computer showed the deciphered message on the screen. Leon looked at it incredulously for a second, but then, being that content was none of his business, he pushed back his seat, picked the deciphered text from the printer, and brought it to the head of his department. The latter looked at it quickly. Leon did not pause to look at his superior’s facial expression, which was quite odd, because he rushed back to his seat and to the second part of the message.

  ***

  The phone rang on Sammy’s desk. It was the head of Head of Encryption Services.

  “We have deciphered half of the message,” he said.

  “Please send it over.”

  “I’m on my way,” he said and hung up.

  Sammy picked up a ruler and used it to scratch the back of his neck. He knew this was the critical moment.

  A weak knock on the door and it opened before he even got around to saying anything. The Head of Encryption Services pulled out a sheet of paper from his bag and handed it over. Sammy looked up with a question in his eyes.

  “The first half is Vigenère, and we have it. The second part is a ‘book cypher’ and it’ll take time.”

  “You did the Vigenère so quickly?” asked Sammy.

  “If you’re asking me, that was the writer’s intention. He didn’t make it too hard on us,” the man replied dryly. Sammy nodded thanks with his head, and the man left the room.

  He then dared to look at the text. He expected the worst and got just what he wished for. He looked at those sentences again and again, as if he couldn’t believe his own eyes. A moment later, thoughts were racing in his he
ad. Now there were two men out there who knew about the plot. They were both professionals and if they kept on investigating, there was no doubt that they would discover the truth. That was something he couldn’t afford. All of his big plans were in danger of being shattered.

  Sammy took the piece of paper with him and went to see the Head. He was not going to wait for the deciphering of the rest of the message. There was no more time to lose.

  43

  Once the taxi was in the western neighborhood, Eddie asked the driver to pull over by a payphone. He limped out of the cab, a horrible pain running through his knee now that the effect of the painkiller was subdued. He walked into the phone booth, dialed a local number, and heard a woman’s voice on the other side. Once he explained his wish and received a positive response, he walked back to the taxi, paid the driver, and sent him on his way.

  Four minutes later, a gray Volkswagen truck pulled over next to Eddie. He rushed into it, ignoring the pain in his leg. He kissed the redhead at the driver seat, who did not wait for another moment and drove off.

  The woman was about forty-years-old. She wore big sunglasses that concealed her face. She drove according to the speed limit, making sure she turned into cross streets once in a while. Eddie’s eyes focused on the side mirrors, looking to see if anyone was following them. After about fifteen minutes he looked away for the first time and said, “We’re clean. Drive home.”