“My... Oh.” He fished in his pocket. He’d shut it off, per the rules of meeting with the president — so it could be used neither as a recording device nor as a homing tracker to guide a Hellfire missile.
“I’m Lon Sellitto.”
Peter said, once again, “I’ll see some ID, please.”
Talese expected the bulky man, in a wrinkled raincoat, to gripe. He was wearing a badge, after all. But without hesitating, he offered a card.
The guard examined it and sent a text. In a matter of seconds, the phone hummed. He nodded to his boss. “Legit.”
“Look,” Talese said, nodding over his shoulder, “there’s somebody—”
He didn’t need to finish the sentence because Sellitto was lifting a hand in greeting to the very person the senator was referring to.
The big somber man joined them and displayed his own badge. It resembled that of an old-time sheriff.
“I’m U.S. marshal Michael Quayle, Senator. Your phone’s off.”
“I know, I know.” Talese revived the unit and it immediately began chiming with texts and reports of voice mail messages.
“All right, Detective, Marshal. What’s this about?”
Sellitto said, “After we’re out of the open, Senator.”
“I really want—”
“Out of the open,” Quayle echoed in a tone that would accept no argument.
A black SUV pulled to the curb and squealed to a stop. The marshal gestured for the senator to get in first, which he did. This vehicle seemed a lot more than merely bullet resistant.
When the men were inside, Sellitto said to the driver, “Federal building.”
“Yessir.”
The Suburban galloped off, bounding hard on the uneven streets. No one wore belts and Talese had to grip the handhold firmly.
“Okay.” The senator looked pointedly at the detective.
Sellitto said, “You’re familiar with the crane accidents in the city.”
“Sure. A domestic terror outfit wants affordable housing units.”
“No. That was a cover. To keep us focused away from what the unsub’s really got in mind.”
“Which is?”
“You dead.”
Talese nodded slowly. So perhaps his concerns today were not so paranoid after all.
“Who is it?”
“We know the identity of the mechanic. But not who’s hired him.”
“My family...”
“They’re safe. We have a team in your house.”
“He’s... This man? The mechanic? Where is he?”
“We don’t know. We’re looking for him now.”
“How did you find out?”
“The cranes were sabotaged with drones. DHS gave us a map of other flights. He flew one over the block you live on, in Brooklyn, and also near your office here.”
“Jesus.”
Peter said, “You should know, Detective. An hour ago, little longer, we were on our way to a meeting and it looked like somebody was following us. I made him and he turned down another street.”
Sellitto pulled out a notebook, a battered one like detectives in TV shows always use. “Description.”
Talese and Peter gave it to the detective.
“Is there any reason somebody would want you dead? Whistleblowing? Any old prosecutions that may’ve come back?”
“No...”
But he was looking out the window, reflecting: Was what he’d thought of earlier possible? That someone wanted him dead because of his vote for the tax bill?
“I have no idea. I mean, yes, I put a lot of bad guys away. It was years ago. But a few of them were sociopaths. I can track down their names and see if anybody’s been released lately.”
Sellitto looked his way for a moment, then tucked the pad away and pulled out his phone.
Talese said, “I’m scheduled to go on TV in an hour. Can we stop at the studio?”
“No.”
“But it’s CNN,” Talese said.
Still texting, the detective said, “The answer’s still no. And do me a favor and sit back.”
“Sit back?”
“Yeah, away from the window. You’re putting me in the line of fire too.”
56
“Talese’s at the federal building.”
Lon Sellitto’s voice was coming through the speaker into the parlor.
Rhyme asked, “The theory? Who wants him dead and why?”
“He says he doesn’t know. But he was like sixty-eight percent he doesn’t know.”
Rhyme asked, “Can you up the dial?”
“I can try. He’s a politician. Either they’re evasive or they lie. Give me a mob enforcer any day. They sing like chickadees.”
“You stopped at the tech department, right?”
“It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever done for you, Linc.”
“But you did it?”
“Yeah.”
“More on that later.”
As soon as they disconnected, his phone hummed again.
“Rhyme here.”
“Detective, I’m Ben Emery. Emery Digital Solutions? Two of your officers dropped off a computer for us to crack. I wanted to give you an update.”
Ah, good. Rhyme still hoped emails on Gilligan’s laptop could reveal who’d hired Hale, for what purpose and where future attacks might be. Maybe even an alternative safe house now that his primary one had self-destructed.
“Do you have anything?”
“Afraid it’s moving slowly.”
Wasn’t this the day and age of supercomputers? Couldn’t teenagers hack into a laptop while texting and playing video games simultaneously?
Emery continued, “We’re brute forcing, but he used an SHA-256 hash.”
“Which is?” Rhyme’s voice betrayed his impatience.
“Secure Hash Algorithm 256.”
A sigh. “And ‘hash’ is?”
“Software that turns one string of data into another one. To passcode protect something, you create a password, right? Then you feed it into a hash generator and it becomes a string of data. Let’s say the password’s your name: Lincoln Rhyme. Loved that book about you by the way...”
“Mr. Emery,” Rhyme muttered.
“All right. Well. I just sent you the hash of your name. It’s on your phone.”
A text arrived.
49b14a858f2c023331d308310de984acad097cd510ed2e5cb0185fab284be511
“All right. The passcode’s your name. Somebody needs to crack it. It’s easy to find the hash — there’s no reason to hide it, since hashes only go one way. You can’t turn it back into the password. Like you can’t turn ground beef back into a sirloin. But what you can do is start typing characters into the hash generator. Randomly, hoping for a match. And after a few hours of typing words in you decide to try Lincoln Rhyme—”
“And bang. You see that that hash matches your password hash. And you’re in.”
“Exactly!” He sounded pleased Rhyme got it. “That’s what we’re doing now. Inputting words and characters, hoping to find a hash that matches. Not typing them in, of course. It’s all done automatically. We’re running about a trillion hashes a second.”
“Excellent. So, you’ll crack it soon? A few hours, you were saying?”
A pause. “Well, Detective Rhyme, that was just an illustration. Why I’m calling... If we don’t have it now, that means he’s probably using a mix of uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters like question marks and percentage signs.”
Rhyme frowned. “You’re saying it might take a day or more?”
This pause was longer. “Uhm. If he’s got a fifteen-character password, which isn’t unusual, about two hundred million years.”