The Enigma Challenge

Chapter Fourteen

Fourteen

It’s late afternoon now, and we’re both starving.

Given that we threw off our possible tail at the Joan Miró museum and no one followed us to the cemetery, we decide to chance it at a café.

We take a taxi across the city to avoid anyone who might have seen us on foot and settle in at a little place with cheerful white tables and chairs under leafy trees that seems happy to stay open during siesta hours and cater to tourists who want to sit and have a drink in the shade to escape the heat of the afternoon.

Our server suggests a pitcher of sangria, and although we decline, we do order plenty of tapas: bunuelos de bacalao, or steaming hot codfish fritters, and jamón ibérico con pan con tomate, delectable slices of ham on crusty toast with thick slabs of tomato.

A perfect breeze covers our little table.

I start the cipher the way I always do, by analyzing the frequency of letters.

The letter M is the most frequent in this one, which doesn’t make much sense—usually it’s vowels that have high frequency.

I run through the different ciphers I’m familiar with: Caesar, substitution, homophonic, polyalphabetic…

I go back to polyalphabetic. One of the most difficult polyalphabetic ciphers is the Vigenère cipher, and I am not good at it.

My dad was a master, occasionally devising simple ones for me with a known key.

For my twelfth birthday, I’d been hinting for weeks to my parents that I wanted a pair of ice skates and lessons at Oakland Ice.

I had visions of myself spinning in toe loops and executing perfect lutz jumps.

On the morning of my birthday, my father gave me a puzzle to work out:

JKV LRDTCT

But I wasn’t able to solve it, because the cipher key was BIRTHDAY, which was too long of a word to use as a key.

I jumbled the solution and dissolved into tears, and even though my dad walked me through how JKV LRDTCT decodes to ICE SKATES, it was upsetting.

I can see through the lens of adulthood that my father was trying to train me on cipher types.

The familiar pang hits me that I don’t have his guidance now.

I did end up getting the ice skates and the lessons—though I failed to learn a lutz jump—but I’d give anything now to have him at the end of the phone to call.

Dane gives me room to work, staying quiet. Vigenère ciphers require several substitution tables. I write out the alphabet a few times and play around with letters, switching positions.

“This one is hard,” I mutter, more to myself.

“It’s not long, which is good because that would be difficult and I don’t know if I could do it.

” The BIRTHDAY ice skates fiasco still stings, but I’m determined to get this.

“It requires knowing a keyword, and that’s the thing—without knowing that, I can’t crack it. ” I read the lines again.

L JCXKSCM II NMYUM

1 ELMY, 0922

Obviously the second line is a date and a time, although I’m not sure what ELMY is.

“And I’m worried it’s in another language, other than English,” I say.

“It could be,” he says. “It would be just like them to put it in a different language.”

“Do they do that? Expect you to be multilingual?”

Dane shrugs. “Helps to have friends who speak different languages, I guess.”

I think about his assistant, Araceli, in Madrid. “You work with Araceli…and who else?”

He runs a finger along the rim of his Estrella. “A few others.”

“You may as well tell me,” I say. “It’s part of our secret-divulging treaty.” I realize that I like bantering with him. I think I’ve been looking forward to more of it since the cemetery.

He smiles. “Solve this first.”

I look back at the code. The last word in the first line—NMYUM—is what I focus on because the two M’s are conspicuous.

I’m fairly sure they correspond to different letters, but that means I can shift positions.

Easily more than an hour passes as I play around with a few different letters.

Dane is quiet throughout, letting me work. Until—

“Okay,” I say, my hands trembling in that way they do when I feel like I discovered something huge. And given my poor history with this cipher, I feel as though I have. “They definitely used the Vigenère cipher.”

Dane is watching me. “But you know what it is and how to do it.”

I don’t answer. My brain hurts a little as I scribble on the alphabetic table I made. I’m in that zone where I’m mentally pushing letters around, turning them in my mind, skipping ahead places. And…the first part comes into focus. Then the second letter. I make four more alphabet tables.

“Look.” I point at the first of the cipher tables I’ve drawn.

A

L

B

M

C

N

D

O

E

P

F

Q

G

R

H

S

I

T

J

U

K

V

L

W

M

X

N

Y

O

Z

P

A

Q

B

R

C

S

D

T

E

U

F

V

G

W

H

X

I

Y

J

Z

K

The second table shows a pattern of the first letters.

A

O

B

P

C

Q

D

R

E

S

F

T

G

U

H

V

I

W

J

X

K

Y

L

Z

M

A

N

B

O

C

P

D

Q

E

R

F

S

G

T

H

U

I

V

J

W

K

X

L

Y

M

Z

N

The third table does too.

A

U

B

V

C

W

D

X

E

Y

F

Z

G

A

H

B

I

C

J

D

K

E

L

F

M

G

N

H

O

I

P

J

Q

K

R

L

S

M

T

N

U

O

V

P

W

Q

X

R

Y

S

Z

T

I point at all six tables, with the first letter in each spelling LOUVRE, going down the paper in a vertical line.

“What am I seeing here?” Dane asks.

I point to the first letter in each table, under the alphabet.

“The keyword is LOUVRE. See? You can decode by shifting the alphabet, starting with the first letter in the keyword for each. So if the alphabet starts with L, then the letters of the normal alphabet correspond to the shifted letters. The letter L was my clue here, because it’s a single letter, so I thought it had to be either A or I.

Then you count the second alphabet from O, and that’s your second letter.

Et cetera. It’s good that the keyword isn’t long—those are almost impossible—but with this…

” I scribble out the lines of the code, which, when deciphered, is

L JCXKSCM II NMYUM

A VICTORY ON WINGS

1 ELMY, 0922

1 JUIN, 9:22

I stare at it in delight, even though I don’t know what the first part means.

Dane moves his thumbs around on his phone. He turns it around to show me. “There’s a Vigenère decoder online.”

I’m exhausted after pushing my brain to figure all that out. “Yes, but you have to know what the keyword is in order to use online decoders. Without that, you’re stuck.”

“But you’re right,” he says. “Using LOUVRE as the keyword.”

I look at his screen and see that he’s plugged in LOUVRE, which outputs my decoded plaintext. He takes his phone back, his thumbs moving again.

“According to a search, A VICTORY ON WINGS could refer to the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a statue in the Louvre,” he says.

A wide grin spreads across my face. “And 1 JUIN, 0922 is June first, at 9:22. They’d use international time, so it’s a.m. June is in French, so that follows.

Whatever is next, it’s apparently at the Louvre the day after tomorrow at 9:22.

” At least we have a day and a half before we have to be there.

“Then we go to Paris,” he says.

Paris. Another place I’ve never been and didn’t know if I would ever get to visit.

Our tapas are long eaten and our glasses are empty, and I realize I’m enjoying all this—the market, the Miró museum, the mercury fountain, the cemetery.

Even the cathedral. I’m getting to experience some of Barcelona, which I wanted, and now I’m going to Paris.

It’s thrilling. I look at Dane, relieved that not only has he been kind throughout all this but we work together well.

“What?” he asks.

For a few moments, I’m not sure how to say it.

“I’ve been sitting in front of computer screens for the past ten years, studying.

My nose was buried in texts. I’ve seen and done more in the past two days than I have in ten years.

This challenge is scary, but I’m…I guess I’m having a good time.

” I feel heat on my cheeks, as though admitting that I’m enjoying being chased is shameful. I’m certainly not going to admit that.

But he’s smiling in a way that suggests he understands. “I get it. I’ve been in situations that were less than safe, but the scenery along the way was great and I had good people by my side. Made difficult situations less nerve racking.”

“What kinds of difficult situations?” I press.

He gives a short laugh. “I do owe you some secrets.” When I nod enthusiastically, he lowers his voice theatrically and says, “Ever heard of Fancy Bear?”

I shake my head. “Is that a real thing? Sounds silly.”

“It is, but it’s the nickname for a Russian espionage group that’s associated with Russia’s military intelligence. ProtoDark battles Fancy Bear on a number of political maneuvers, and they wanted me to hack into one of their known phishing websites, which was set up to—”

I hold up a hand. “Explain it to me like I’m five.”

He snorts a laugh. “ProtoDark wanted me to out-hack one of the most sophisticated groups out there, and I did. I’m not going to lie—I liked doing it.

There’s only a handful of other people who can do this level of hacking, and three of them are serving time in a federal prison right now.

But doing it meant I was on Fancy Bear’s radar, and suddenly I had Russians trying to kill me. ”

I feel my eyes widen. “What did you do?”

“Evaded them. They chased me to Singapore, Mumbai, and all the way to the Rijeka port in Croatia, where they caught me and locked me in a shipping container. It was an ugly scene, and I’m pretty sure they thought I was dead when they locked me in. A lockpicking-expert friend managed to get me out.”

“So you’ve got the Russians on your tail now?” I look around the plaza as though I might see guys in tactical gear rappelling down from the surrounding buildings to shoot us with silencer-capped guns.

“I negotiated a stay on the order they had to take me out.” He makes a grim expression, and I understand that this isn’t as light as he’s making it out to be. I eye the scar on his forearm.

“How did you negotiate with them?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Please understand, I don’t want to do any of this.

I’d prefer to quietly run my own company and tend to my clients.

But I won the Enigma Challenge twice, and nothing’s been the same since.

I had to hand over ProtoDark secrets to the Russians.

It’s all I have for assurance that Fancy Bear won’t come after me. ”

A slightly sick feeling winds through me at the idea that nothing will be the same for me either.

I adored researching ciphers in literature and could have happily done it for my whole career, but dealing with Eric and his influence on my research is no longer feasible.

“Does ProtoDark know you told Fancy Bear their secrets?”

His expression is grim. “I don’t know. But I constantly worry that they do.” He looks out over the plaza, the breeze ruffling his hair. He’s devastatingly attractive, but if this is his life, I can see why he’s single—and lonely because of it.

“I’m not telling you any of it to impress you,” he adds in a low voice.

I can’t help teasing, “You’re trying to impress me?”

A slight stain appears on Dane’s cheeks. “Oh—no, I wasn’t…I mean, does it impress you?”

We laugh, and I choose to pretend it’s a rhetorical question. The answer is: yes. Definitely yes.

“We should go,” he says. “Given the eyes on us today, I’m surprised we got to sit here this long.

” He flags our server and pays. As we walk away from the café, I’m warm from both the pleasure of solving a Vigenère cipher and the conversation.

We cut through narrow alleys and wind our way back toward the hotel.

Dane calls Araceli as we go to book us flights to Paris tomorrow.

I’m a bit sad to leave Spain behind. Madrid bubbled with life, while Barcelona is beautiful in its contrasting architectural curves and lines.

Someday I’ll come back and explore every corner of it.

And then there’s Dane Seaver, walking slightly ahead of me as he confirms our bookings. He’s obviously involved in dangerous things, whereas the riskiest behavior I’ve ever engaged in was dating my boss and antagonizing my sister when she was already in a bad mood. Neither worked out for me.

Dane ends the call with Araceli and turns to me, grinning. “Paris is all set.”

I hesitate for only a brief moment before answering so I can think about whether I believe the words before I say them. But I do. I trust this. I trust him.

So I answer, “I’m ready.”