“No joy?” Gideon asked.
Fordyce shook his head. “I can’t break the DES algorithm. Blaine’s a lot more sophisticated than I thought. He or someone used a hardened DES variant. I’m totally stuck. I can’t think of anything else to do.”
The Jeep fell into silence.
“We can’t just give up,” Gideon said.
“You got any ideas?”
“We can try guessing the password.”
Fordyce rolled his eyes. “My dictionary attack just tried over a billion passwords in twelve common languages, including words, combinations of words, names, and place-names, not to mention a compilation of the million most commonly used passwords. It’s the best brute-force attack program in existence. And you think you can do better by guessing?” He shook his head.
“At least we know what notto guess at. Your dictionary attack is just a dumb program. We know a lot more about Simon Blaine than it does. Look, it’s worth a shot. We’ve already got his account name, right?” Gideon thought for a moment. “Maybe he used the name of one of the characters in his books. Get on your BlackBerry, find his website, and grab the names of any characters you find.”
Fordyce grunted approval and got to work.
A few minutes later, Fordyce had compiled a list of a dozen names. “Dirkson Auger,” he said, looking at the first on the list. “Blaine really gets paid for making up names like that?”
“Try it.”
Fordyce lifted the lid of the laptop. “I’ll try Dirkson first.”
Error.
“Auger.”
Error.
“Try them together,” Gideon suggested.
Error.
“Try the names again in turn, only backward this time.”
Error.
“Son of a bitch,” Fordyce muttered.
“Do the same with the rest.”
Before Gideon had driven another fifteen miles, Fordyce threw up his hands. “It’s hopeless,” he said. “I’ve tried them all. Even if it wasone of these names, if Blaine had any sense he’d have thrown in a few extra characters to add some noise, or changed letters to numbers, or something. There are just too many variants.”
“The thing about passwords,” Gideon said after a minute or two, “is that, unless you’re using a password manager, you have to remember the damn thing.”
“So?”
“So maybe it isn’t a character in a book. Maybe it’s the name of a real person. He wouldn’t be likely to forget that. And the most obvious person would be Alida.”
“Obvious, all right. Way too obvious.” Fordyce typed in the name anyway, tried a bunch of variations. “Nope.”
“Okay, so do what you suggested a minute ago. Change some of the letters to numbers or symbols.”
“I’ll change the lto a 1.” Fordyce tried this password. “Nada.”
“Try something else. Change the ito a dollar sign.”
More typing. “Strike three,” said Fordyce.
Gideon licked his lips. “I remember reading that most decent passwords are composed of two parts, a root and an appendage. Right? So add something on the end.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Xyz, maybe. Or 00.”
Still more typing. “This is getting old, fast,” Fordyce told him.
“Wait a minute—I just thought of something. Blaine has a pet name for Alida. Miracle Daughter. He sometimes calls her MD. Try that after her name.”
Fordyce typed. “No go. Not in front, in back, or in the middle.”
Gideon sighed. Maybe Fordyce was right. “Just keep trying all the variables.” He concentrated on the road ahead while Fordyce typed quietly beside him, trying one variant after another.
Suddenly the FBI agent gave a whoop of triumph. Gideon glanced over and saw a fresh welter of text scrolling up the screen.
“You got in?” he asked in disbelief.
“Damn right!”
“What was the password?”
“ A1$daMdee. Kind of sentimental, don’t you think?” And Fordyce settled in to browse the computer’s files as the skyline of Oklahoma City came into view.
62
Twelve hours later they were crossing Tennessee. Fordyce slouched in the passenger seat, nose buried in the laptop. For twelve hours, he had been poring over it, browsing its many thousands of files, with no hits; nothing but book drafts, endless chapter revisions, correspondence, outlines, movie treatments, notes, and the like. The computer seemed completely and totally devoted to writing—and nothing else.
Gideon glanced over. “Any luck?” he asked for about the thirtieth time.
Fordyce shook his head.
“What about emails?”
“Nothing of interest. No exchanges with Chalker, Novak, or anyone else up at Los Alamos.” It seemed more and more likely, Fordyce reflected, that there had been another computer in Blaine’s office that Gideon had failed to grab. But he didn’t say anything.
In the background, Gideon was listening to NPR, which—as usual—was spewing a mixture of news and speculation about the impending nuke attack on Washington. The investigation had managed to keep the presumed N-Day—today—a secret, but the massive movements of troops, the evacuations of Washington, and all the other preparations in major cities around the country were garnering frantic media attention. The country was in a state of intense and escalating anxiety. People knew that things were coming to a head.
Anxiety and outrage ruled the airwaves. A parade of self-appointed experts, pundits, talking heads, and politicians offered their conflicting views, one after the other, excoriating the stalled investigation and offering their own insights. Everyone had a theory. The terrorists had abandoned their plan. The terrorists had shifted their attack to another major American city. The terrorists were lying low, biding their time. The terrorists were all dead from radiation poisoning. The liberals were to blame. The conservatives were to blame. The terrorists were communists, right-wingers, left-wingers, fundamentalists, anarchists, bankers, you name it.
It went on and on. Fordyce couldn’t help but listen with a kind of repulsed fascination, wanting to ask Gideon to turn it off yet unable to.
He glanced out at the road ahead of them. They were approaching the outer suburbs of Knoxville. He stretched again, looked back down at the laptop. It was incredible how many files a writer could generate. He was about three-quarters through them, and there was nothing to do but keep going.
As he opened the next file—something called “OPERATION CORPSE”—he was jolted by the sudden whoop of a siren and flashing lights in his rearview mirror. He glanced over at the speedometer and saw they were still going seventy-nine—in a zone where the speed limit had just dropped to sixty.
“Oh shit,” he muttered.
“No driver’s license,” said Gideon. “I’m dead.”
Fordyce laid aside the computer. The cop whooped his siren again. Gideon put on his blinker, slowed, eased over into the breakdown lane, and came to a stop.
“Play it by ear,” said Fordyce, his mind working fast. “Tell him you had your wallet stolen, that your name is Simon Blaine.”
The cop got out of his car, hitching up his pants. He was a state trooper, big and square, with a shaved head, knobby ears, mirrored shades, and a frown on his thick lips. He came up, tapped on the window. Gideon rolled it down.
The trooper leaned in. “License and registration?”
“Hello, Officer,” Gideon said politely. He reached over into the glove compartment and rummaged around, pulling out the registration. He handed it to the cop. “Officer, my wallet was stolen at a rest stop back there in Arkansas. As soon as I get back to New Mexico I’ll be getting a replacement license.”
A silence while the trooper glanced over the registration. “Are you Simon Blaine?”