The Red Syndrome (13 page)

"Is that all they took?"

"I think so. Maybe a few more papers from his desk."

"All right. I'll call you if I hear anything, but I suspect you'll be the first
to know of any developments in the police investigation."

Fingerprints and hair samples. That sounded like they needed an identification. Had they found a body? I thought of my one meeting with
Helen Lipinsky; she had seemed so fragile, and now it sounded as though
she would be getting bad news, the worst.

I called Detective Mahoney at the station. "I heard you paid a visit to
Helen Lipinsky. Did you find the messages?"

"What messages?"

"I think I mentioned them in our earlier conversation. Lipinsky had
gotten some garbled messages and -"

"Right. Let me check, I just walked into my office." He put me on
hold.

When he came back on, he sounded somber. "Dan? We have a body
and it meets the description of Lipinsky, but the coroner will have to
make a final determination."

"Homicide or suicide?"

"You can't commit suicide by putting two bullets to your head and two
in your back," Mahoney said drily.

"Where was he found?"

"In a Dumpster in the South Bronx."

"The wife knows?"

"A squad car is on its way to her."

"Any suspects?"

"Still working on it."

"And did you come up with the messages?"

"We took a bunch of papers from Lipinsky's apartment. They could be
among them."

"Would you mind if I came over and had a look?"

"Not at all."

Twenty minutes later I was in the Midtown South Precinct at 357 West
Thirty-fifth Street. Police cars, including a few unmarked, were parked
perpendicularly in front of the building.

Mahoney - a skinny mustached fellow in his early forties - was
wearing a blue T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. His service revolver was
tucked in his jeans, and his NYPD badge was hanging from his neck on
a thin chain. "These are all the papers we took from the premises." He
pushed a thick envelope toward me across his desk.

I opened the envelope and emptied its contents on Mahoney's desk. I
sifted through the papers. Each was sealed separately in a plastic bag to
prevent contamination of the evidence. I immediately saw what I was
looking for: three standard yellow-paper, continuous-form computer
printouts with perforated holes at the edges. I pulled the three bagged printouts out from the pile and looked at them through the bag. They
were poor-quality carbon copies, probably the bottom ones. The top edge
contained the preprinted standard identification details of Eagle Bank of
New York with its logo. Below was the date and then forty blocks of letters, each with five letters, without any obvious meaning.

"Can I have copies of these?" I asked Mahoney, as if I didn't know the
answer already.

"Sure, but let me do the copying."

I nodded, continuing to rummage through the bagged papers. Nothing
else seemed to be connected to the bank, or to have any meaning other
than routine. There were personal letters from Lipinsky's sister, a few
utility bills, a to-do list with instructions to take the car for inspection, to
renew the subscription to a women's magazine, and to buy liquid detergent for the washing machine.

Detective Mahoney returned to his desk and gave me three crisp
copies.

I gave him my home phone number. "Please call if any developments
occur tonight."

"Like what?"

"Like you find a suspect, or you find that the homicide is definitely
connected to his work at the bank."

"Sure."

I hailed a cab and went home. I took off my shoes, uncapped a can of
beer, and sank into my couch. I pulled out the printout copies and
looked at them. But there was no need for any further scrutiny: The
messages weren't garbled, they were simply ciphered. I'd seen hundreds
like this during my service in the Israeli armed forces and later at the
Mossad. Somebody was sending encrypted messages to the bank; obviously they were out of the ordinary, or at least they'd gotten to the
wrong person. Otherwise Lipinsky wouldn't have been so surprised to
see them and broken the rules by bringing copies home. Had they
brought about his death? Did he see something he shouldn't have? If
you send an encrypted message, the recipient must have the key to deciphering the message. Who would that have been? An insider at the bank, or a client? I didn't know. Still, it was a beginning, and I liked the
challenge. Even Michelangelo's statue of David started out as a simple
block of marble.

My phone rang. "Dan? It's Laura. Is this a good time? I hope I'm not
interrupting anything."

"Not at all, not at all," I said, surprised and happy to hear from her.
"What's on your mind?"

"Nothing in particular ..."

I took up the tacit challenge. "Same here, I'm just bored, doing nothing.
What about you?"

"I'm going over the notes I took today, getting ready for tomorrow." So
she'd received my mental transmissions, and was responding.

"Would you like to do it together, or we could just have a drink, chat or
something? I'm having a quiet time at home. Want to join me and Snap?"

"Snap?" she asked.

"My playful retriever."

"Well," she said, slowly, "I don't know if it's appropriate."

"Oh, come on, I promise not to bite, and Snap doesn't, either."

Still she hesitated. "Well, I'm not sure."

"I have good wine and cheese and we could talk about anything. In fact,
I was just thinking of you. I had a visitor last night with a troubling story.
I have some interesting papers concerning that."

"Anything to do with our case?" she asked.

"Just a suspicion, nothing else. Further investigation is necessary before
we know if her story is connected to our case; I'll show you when you
come."

An hour later Laura was at my door. Snap was friendly, already wagging his tail. So was I - friendly, I mean. She was dressed in a short tight
skirt and a fluffy sweater that did little to hide her attractive body. I got
the impression that Laura was very conscious of her appearance and
enjoyed the looks it attracted.

She sat on the sofa across from my chair. I poured red wine into her
glass, my eyes on her.

She took a sip. "So tell me about your visitor."

I told her about Helen Lipinsky and showed her the copies of the messages I'd received from Mahoney.

"What do you make of it?" she asked, her eyes widening.

"Encryption, plain and simple. Something odd was going on. I have a
hunch that there's a connection to our mission, or at least to Lipinsky's
disappearance, now homicide -"

11-or to both," she finished. Normally I hate it when people do that, but
for Laura it was the first time. "Any idea what these messages might say?"

"No. I'll have to break the code first."

"Why don't you just give the messages to Hodson? He'll know what to
do," she suggested.

"Tomorrow morning, but until then, the night is young."

"Can I smoke here?" she suddenly asked, obviously ducking my comment.

"I'm afraid not, if you don't mind."

"Okay, I need to buy cigarettes anyway. I'll go to the corner deli I saw
coming here. I'm dying for a cigarette."

Before I could say anything she was gone, leaving behind a trail of her
feminine scent. Moments later, I looked out through the window. Laura
was standing next to the corner deli talking on her cell phone.

Fifteen minutes later she returned.

"Hi, welcome back, were you able to pick up cigarettes?" I asked.

"Thanks, let's continue," she said, failing to answer my question. She sat
next to me on the couch. "Did the NYPD do anything with these messages yet?"

"I have no idea," I said candidly.

"So only NYPD has copies?"

"As far as I know. Why do you ask?"

"Because if NYPD has forwarded copies to other agencies with codebreaking capabilities, we could be wasting our time."

"I agree. Even so, we could still score some points and beat them in the
race of breaking the code."

"Do you know anything about encryption?" she asked. Laura knew
nothing about my Mossad past, and there was no point in starting to
explain now.

"A little. I could try to break the codes, if they're not overly sophisticated."

"Meaning?"

"A cipher is like a locked door between you and the message. To open
the door you must have a key."

"I know that much," she said patiently.

"It all depends on the type of key they used," I continued. "If they used
a onetime pad, the encryption is unbreakable, unless you get the key first."

"What's a onetime pad?" asked Laura, turning toward me. "Have you
ever seen one?"

I nodded. "A onetime pad is a cipher book in which each page contains
a unique set of random letters. The sender and receiver have identical
pads. Each letter on the pad is used to determine a single letter of the
encrypted message. Since the letters on the pad are random, we can't just
apply the frequency method by studying the frequency of the letters'
appearance."

Laura said nothing, waiting for me to continue.

"The key letters on the pad, and the messages themselves, are typically
written in five-letter groups. This helps the communicators to collate and
verify the length of the message, and if something was misunderstood,
the person at the receiving end could ask for a particular group to be
repeated. On each of the onetime pads issued to the user, the key text is
printed in different colors: one color for encryption and one for decipher.

"You must link a letter of plain text with the next letter of the key text
in the pad to get a letter of encrypted text. There is a three-hundred-yearold system called Vigenere square based on a twenty-six-by-twenty-six
table of every single combination of possible mono alphabetical ciphers.
It's called a polyalphabetic cipher, because it uses many alphabets. Each
alphabet is staggered one letter over from the other, corresponding to a
different key letter. So, for example, in the first line,A equals B, the second
line A equals C, the third line A equals D, and the rest of the alphabet follows. Thus, success lies in using each alphabet only once for any letter."

"Smart," she said. She seemed to be genuinely interested - in the subject, at least, if not yet in me. I hoped there'd be a smooth transition to
that later.

"This is where the onetime pad comes in. It's a guide that tells the
recipient which alphabet to use to decrypt a certain letter. So if the first
grouping of letters is BCDEF - which it would never be, because that's
too simple a key - and you were decoding the word phone, then for the
letter P you would encode using the alphabet that starts with a B, then
for the letter H you encode using the alphabet that starts with C, and so
on, and the word phone would become QJRRZ. Decryption is extremely
complicated and it takes time," I concluded.

I realized as soon as I'd said it that I shouldn't have. From the look on
her face, Laura had caught my condescension.

"I'm sorry," I said almost voicelessly, but she heard. "I didn't mean to be
such a putz, sometimes when you know something you're impatient with
others who don't."

"How do you know these things?"

"I had a prior life," I said. "I'll tell you someday."

That didn't sound good, either. But what the hell, we had a job to do, it
was late, and I wasn't in the mood to be politically correct. As if I ever am.

"Please tell me," she asked. She put on a breathy tone: "I promise I won't
tell."

I smiled but moved on. "So unless we get our hands on the onetime pad
used to encrypt these messages, I'd have more chances of becoming royalty than of breaking it."

"So what's next?" She sounded impatient. "Since we don't have the onetime pads, we can forget about breaking the code?"

"No, because I'm not sure whoever took the trouble to encrypt the messages used onetime pads. Although the method is unbreakable, it has its
drawbacks."

"Such as?"

"You need to be a sophisticated user and have some means of communication with the other party. Onetime means onetime, but there should be
a way to tell the other side which page you're using. You could include it in
the message itself, or pre-agree to select a page according to dates. But,
again, that's complicated - which date to choose, particularly when there's
a time difference. Was it the date it was written, or the date received?"

"I see," said Laura. "Fine, let's leave it, let the police break it."

I needed no further proof that Laura was a rookie. The police wouldn't
have the tools to break ciphers; they would need to outsource it, probably
to a federal agency. This time I kept my big mouth shut.

"I don't give up that easily. It could be breakable. I want to give it a try.
Wanna help?"

I finally sounded cooperative. That was the right tone to use with Laura.
She agreed, but not too enthusiastically. I was somewhat surprised. Was
she raising a subtle objection in her behavior so that I'd ask her again?

"So, let's see if these guys are sophisticated enough to have used onetime pads."

"What would they do then?"

"A few options. Let's try the simplest form of encryption. It's called
mono alphabetical substitution. There's a single alphabet for the whole document, and each letter is scrambled to be another. The key to breaking this
encryption is checking the frequency of the letters, known as frequency
analysis. I only hope that the spaces and punctuation haven't been removed,
and meaningless spaces haven't been added after every fifth letter, for readability. That could make the text harder to decrypt as we progress."

"I see," she said.

"It's worth a try," I said. "What do we have to lose?"

"Fine."

"Okay, first we need to get some numbers of probabilities."

"This is something I know about," said Laura. "My minor in college
was statistics. What do you need to know?"