They picked up Casey Bellows on the return trip. Despite the fact that his role in the night’s disastrous events had been peripheral, he shared their sense of defeat. Now, back in the relative safety of the Mandalay op center, there seemed little left to do but lick their wounds.
Keasling continued to survey the team with a stern look, then turned on his heel and scooted a large blue Igloo cooler into the center of the room. He threw back the lid to reveal several brown glass bottles sloshing about in a bath of ice cubes.
As if by unanimous accord, the members of the team stared at the offering like it was a crate full of spent nuclear fuel rods.
Tremblay finally edged forward and picked up one of the bottles. “Samuel Adams Boston Lager. General, I could…” He stopped in mid-quip, as if recognizing that this most definitely wasn’t the time or the place, and instead he commenced distributing the beers. When he had completed that task, he raised his bottle. “To missing friends.”
Everyone raised their drinks to the toast, but when they finally began to imbibe, it was perfunctory. King just stared at the bottle and shook his head. He raised his eyes to Keasling. “Sir, I’d like a word with you and Deep Blue…in private, please.”
Keasling regarded him thoughtfully, as if divining King’s intent. “Want to call it quits, son?”
“I blew it, sir. Three men are dead, and nothing to show for it.”
“The fact that you made it out of there is a testament to your abilities.” He gestured around the room. “That goes for all of you. So you got your asses handed to you; shit happens. The important thing is that you took the fight to the enemy, and he’s the one that ran. You were ordered to run him down, and that’s what you’ve got to do.”
King remained unconvinced. “So, we’re just going to watch and see where he lands next, and then go charging into another little shop of horrors? Do we just keep doing that until we finally run out of bodies to throw at him?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
Parker spoke up unexpectedly. “Jack, it’s not just about beating him or getting payback. He’s got Sasha. As long as she’s alive, we have to keep trying.”
King looked like he was about to throw up his hands, but instead he just rubbed the bridge of his nose as if trying to massage away a headache. “Kevin told me something back there; he talked about a paycheck. He’s just the hired muscle. We need to know who’s writing that check and why they need Sasha. Maybe if we can figure that out, we can get ahead of him. That’s the only way we’re going to win this.”
There was a loud pop as Zelda smacked a hand against her thigh. She shrugged out of her backpack and rooted in it until she produced a laptop computer. “I completely forgot about this. I grabbed it from the room where we ran into Rainer. She was working on it when we walked in.”
Parker reached out for it, and after a nod from King, Zelda surrendered it. Parker opened the computer and hit the power button, but a moment later he let out a frustrated sigh. “Password protected.”
“If anyone can figure it out,” King said, “it’s you, Danno.”
Parker however wasn’t quite as enthusiastic. “Sasha Therion is a mathematical genius and a professional cryptographer. I think her password is going to be a little more complicated than the name of her pet goldfish.”
“Is there another way to get around it?”
Parker stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Well, Lew taught me a few tricks… He’s the guy you really want working on this.”
“Done,” declared Keasling. “It just so happens that Staff Sergeant Aleman has been assigned to the headquarters element of our new team. You should be able to link up with him using the equipment here.”
“Crack that nut, Danno.” King’s expression was no longer that of a defeated commander ready to tender his resignation or fall on his sword. Whether it was Keasling’s exhortation or Zelda’s revelation, he had a little of his fighting spirit back. “Figure out what that bastard wants, and where he’s going to go next, and just maybe, we’ll be able to get her back.”
THIRTY-FOUR
The password turned out to be child’s play, relatively speaking anyway. Sasha’s user settings were protected by factory-standard security software, which was not in itself unsophisticated. There was no way around the password lock without reformatting the hard drive and overwriting the disk’s contents, and the password options were virtually unlimited, but it had one weakness that Lewis Aleman was able to exploit, and in short order, he opened Sasha’s computer like it was Pandora’s Box. That weakness was that there was no limit to the number of attempts that could be made to enter the correct password.
Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have mattered. Even with unlimited guesses, it might take a lifetime to physically enter all the possible combinations. A skilled hacker might be able to accomplish the same task in a matter of days instead of decades, but it would nevertheless be a daunting task even for the fastest commercially available computers.
Deep Blue had given Aleman access to something even better: the National Security Agency’s XT3 Red Storm supercomputer.
The most time-consuming part of the process involved creating a virtual clone of Sasha’s computer inside the NSA’s system, a procedure that was limited by the download speed of the satellite Internet connection at the safe-house. The cloned version eliminated the laborious chore of manually entering all possible password permutations, or waiting for the laptop’s comparatively ponderous Intel Core processor to run the security subroutine.
It took all of three minutes.
Trying to make sense of the contents of the computer took slightly longer; about half an hour altogether.
“It really is about trying to decode the Voynich manuscript,” Parker announced after scanning the most recently created document files.
King, exhausted and sporting a veritably mummy’s wrap of bandages over cuts and abrasions too numerous to count, didn’t look particularly impressed. “Alright, Danno, you’ve been talking about this manuscript for a couple days now. What is it?”
Parker took a breath and affected his best professorial manner. “In 1912, a rare book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich came across a very unique book in a church in Italy. It was an antique, hand written on parchment and illustrated with full color paintings. That was pretty common for books from the Middle Ages, before the invention of the printing press, but what made this book really special was the fact that it was written in cipher text.”
“Symbols instead of letters? Like the page we supposedly found in Ramadi?”
“Right. At a glance, you might think it’s just another language or a different alphabet, but the symbols in the manuscript have never appeared anywhere else. Even so, there are ways to break a cipher, and usually the longer the message, the easier it is to crack. All you have to do is figure out which characters appear most frequently, and then compare them to the letters of the alphabet that are most often used, and you’re on your way to breaking the cipher.”
“Just like Wheel of Fortune; you start with RNLST and E. But what if it’s not written in English?”
Parker shook his head. “That’s not as important as it might seem. But in the case of the Voynich manuscript, professional and amateur code breakers from all over Europe have been trying to crack it for nearly a hundred years. The fact that no one has succeeded has led many to believe that it’s a fake — a randomly generated message, created by a medieval con man.”