Chapter Two
Two
Today, the first day of the conference, is the biggest, and there’s an anticipatory sense of urgency in the air as I walk in.
I’m early, despite all that’s gone down this morning, and a few people with conference lanyards mill around getting coffee from a little cart near the registration tables.
Exhibit booths are still being set up for the day under a large atrium in a line stretching back into the building toward the stairs.
I’ve heard a mix of people attend: hackers, security experts, cryptologists, and academics like me.
I look down at my comfortable gray sweatshirt with a silhouette of a rabbit on it that I wore on the flight.
The airline lost my bag, so this is all I have.
Not exactly conference attire, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.
I slide my lanyard around my neck to display my badge.
The conference center is, like what I’ve seen of Madrid, stately and beautiful.
Huge plants and potted trees fill the hall.
Despite my regrettably casual clothes, I feel important here.
It’s the biggest conference I’ve been to in my career.
I tilt back my head to read the huge panels hanging down from the upper level, advertising some of the speakers.
I recognize Paolo Marini on one, an Italian professor of cryptology out of the University of Milan.
His work on historical ciphers has been particularly helpful to my research, and I wish Eric had set a meeting with him instead of whomever he dredged up from the conference schedule.
Programs for today are already neatly stacked by the entrance to the exhibitor area, and I grab one.
I find my session: A Review of Ciphers in Modern Literature.
I’m presenting alongside a professor at Harvard, Dr. Devlin, whom I hope to talk with about his research into the ciphertexts of the English Civil War.
Dr. Devlin’s work has been cited by historians, and I’d love to get to his level, where I’m called on as an expert.
Someone bumps me with a murmured “Perdóname, senora,” and I realize I’m in the way of people coming into the exhibit hall.
I tuck the agenda away and move down the row of vendors, pausing at a small bookseller’s booth.
The man behind the table is unpacking books from boxes and arranging them on the table in front of him, preparing for the day.
The selection is a mix of Spanish and English books, and most of them are—no surprise—on cryptology and security.
There are several on acrostics and puzzle solving, the kind people attending this conference might pick up for the flight home.
I spy a few titles on codebreaking, all of which I own.
And there’s a small selection of Madrid and Barcelona city guides, which is nice. The bookseller knows his audience.
I brush a longing finger over the city guides.
One of the guides, smaller than the others, has an unassuming gray cover and small white type spelling out Celia’s Guide to Barcelona.
There are only a few copies. I pick one up, but it’s shrink-wrapped in plastic, so I can’t thumb through it.
I would have loved to visit Barcelona. I’ll do it next time.
“You want that?” the bookseller asks.
“I’m not going to Barcelona, unfortunately,” I say, putting the little book down.
“Ah, but it’s a good price. I sell it to you now. This one goes fast. One euro.”
That’s a deal. Celia might be a local who covers things most tourists wouldn’t know. I can’t tell because it’s wrapped, but it’s only a euro.
“Okay,” I reply. I already know I want to come back to Spain, so I’ll use it next time. I hand over a euro coin and walk away with the guide.
The first session of the day won’t start for another half hour, so I buy a large coffee from one of the carts and lean against a wall out of the way, where I can people watch.
I keep an eye out for the American, as I’m pretty sure he was at the statue for the code.
I wonder again what the hell happened back there and where the man with the knife is.
It’s all so strange, which I guess is fitting for the mystery of the Enigma Challenge.
An intense itch to work on the numbers from the sign at the statue hits me.
I turn over the agenda sheet and jot the numbers down.
Something about them reminds me of the famous encrypted message on the Number Stone, one of the nine granite Listening Stones in a park in Cheltenham, United Kingdom.
It’s one of those fun puzzles in the community, although it’s been cracked, and what I like about it is that the artist who created the stones, Gordon Young, put his name into the ciphertext, which made solving the number-to-alphabet ratio tricky.
The number 15 was the most frequent number in the sequence on the sign, so I start with that as my high-frequency number, working through the numbers and matching them to the alphabet.
I’m so into it that I’m surprised to look up and find that an hour has passed, but I’m pretty sure I have the answer.
The alphabet isn’t linear—the word ENIGMA is listed first, and putting those letters before the start of the alphabet rearranges the order of letters.
Using this as the table,
E
1
N
2
I
3
G
4
M
5
A
6
B
7
C
8
D
9
F
10
H
11
J
12
K
13
L
14
O
15
P
16
Q
17
R
18
S
19
T
20
U
21
V
22
W
23
X
24
Y
25
Z
26
where 01 correlates to E, the string
08 01 14 03 06 19. 07 15 15 13. 20 15. 04 21 03 09 01. 25 15 21.
is
CELIAS BOOK TO GUIDE YOU
Which is definitely interesting, considering I just purchased a book titled Celia’s Guide to Barcelona.
A thrill goes through me at having solved this alleged difficult and dangerous puzzle.
Sticking ENIGMA in front of the alphabet was a nice element of difficulty, although there’s no need for the air of mystery when it’s just a simple cipher.
It’s the kickoff puzzle, meant to be a throwaway, but all the same, I’m a little disappointed.
My dad would be proud. A sharp urge to tell him about all this—about the puzzle, about the statue—hits me.
I haven’t felt it this strongly in years and can only attribute it to the morning’s excitement at finding the puzzle amid the delightful grandeur of Madrid.
I think about telling my older sister, Christine, instead.
She never shared our father’s love of puzzles, but we’re all each other has.
But this, like the urge to talk to my dad, is futile.
Christine and I are not close, even though we’re only a few years apart.
We share few interests and never seem to know what to talk about when we’re together, so most of our conversations end up being the stilted kind of awkward that end with Well, I have to get going.
We don’t even look like sisters: She’s tall and naturally lean, the kind of lean where she can eat a hundred donuts and they seem to go into a bottomless pit, whereas I am short and immediately pack baked goods onto my hips.
Her eyes are a gorgeous emerald green, and mine are a light hazel, and she has never once, to my knowledge, had to wrangle her perfectly wavy hair into submission, unlike my long, unruly straight hair that mostly gets shoved into a ponytail.
If it weren’t for the fact that she still lives in our family home, while I live across the Bay in my own apartment, we’d rarely speak.
As it is, she only calls to vent that the house needs a new roof and expensive foundation work that we can’t afford.
As I do too often, I push the problem of the house out of mind. Instead, I focus on the little table across from where I’m leaning against the wall. A few people have been approaching a long, rectangular black box on the table. They enter information and then walk away.
Curious, I push away from the wall and walk over.
There are symbols printed all over the screen—I recognize them as boxy pigpen cipher symbols.
The pigpen cipher and the letters aren’t hard to decode when you already know the key, which I memorized years ago.
They spell out ENIGMA around the screen.
A simple keyboard with letters and numbers sits below the monitor.
A cursor blinks on the screen, and as I watch, a line of text appears. Almost like it sensed me standing here.
Welcome to the Enigma Challenge. Enter the solution to the kickoff puzzle. Press # if you have not solved it.
I stare at the words for a moment in excitement. I never saw mention of this little kiosk in any of the Reddit threads I scoured. I look up and around, but no one is watching. The setup is a tad hokey, honestly, but I type with my index finger CELIAS BOOK TO GUIDE YOU.
Text appears again.
Correct! Enter your full legal name.
I enter
Zoe Alicia Wilder
The cursor blinks, and then text spins out:
Thank you. Enter your phone number, starting with country code.
I enter mine.
The screen says,
Thank you. Create a four-digit PIN.
I’m guessing you have to set up an account to get your prize.
Rumors of it being a significant cash award are probably vastly overblown.
This is a professional conference, after all, not Vegas.
There’s nothing that suggests danger or even much of a challenge about this. I enter my birth year as my PIN.
Thank you. You have solved the kickoff puzzle. There will be five additional puzzles to solve. Players have five minutes to confirm PIN after locating the final solution. All others will be deleted. The Enigma Challenge begins now.
The screen goes blank.
I repeat the lines about the five puzzles to myself and wonder what it meant by “All others will be deleted”? That seems a little dramatic.