“Nope. The NSA can’t. Nobody can.”
“So let’s say he wrote it down? What should we be looking for?”
“Well, anything that’s sort of out of place,” Smith said. “Most people don’t write ‘Hey, diddle, diddle, the frog and the fiddle and the moon jumped over the plutocrat’ on the typing tray of their computer desk. If you find something like that, it’s probably a key.”
“We’ve been all over this place, inch by inch, and haven’t found anything like that,” Lucas said. “Would it just be a regular sentence, though, instead of random stuff?”
“Oh, depends on how much he knows about computers. If it was that ‘Hey, diddle, diddle’ thing, and, say, thirty letters long, it’d be impossible for any computer to break through with brute force. At the same time, it’d be easy to remember,” Smith said. “Most non-techies don’t know that, so they create a long random sequence. But random sequences are a lot harder to remember, and they get written down. That’s what you’d look for—random numbers and letters that are out of place, that don’t connect to anything else.”
“Haven’t seen anything like that, either,” Lucas said.
“Then you’re SOL,” Smith said. “I’ll take the computer—let me know if you find anything. Maybe he’s got the key in a safe-deposit box or something and you’ll find it later.”
“That seems unlikely if he has to use it,” Bob said.
Smith shrugged: “You’re right. With all the encrypted emails, it looks like he used it quite a bit.” He paused, then added, “We had one guy who used the serial numbers on a dollar bill—ten numbers, two letters; once forward, once backward. He told us he almost spent it a couple of times. He finally tucked it into the back compartment of his wallet to make sure he didn’t.”
“That’d be impossible to see even if we had Ritter’s wallet, which we don’t,” Rae said.
“Yeah. We didn’t see it, either, with the dollar-bill guy,” Smith said. “He told us about it as part of a plea bargain.”
Lucas shook his head. “There’s gotta be a way to break it...”
Smith shook his head. “Sorry, man. There isn’t. That’s the way of the world now.”
—
SMITH WAS PACKING UPwhen the FBI phone technician called and said that Parrish’s phone had been turned on at his house all evening. A few minutes later, the Arlington cops called and said they’d found Ritter’s car a block from the Applejack’s. The doors were locked, but the car appeared to be empty, with no bloodlike discoloration on the fabric seat. They’d tow it and open the trunk, but the Arlington cop said the trunk was more like a lunchbox than a cargo hold, and nobody could have squeezed a body inside, with or without fingertips.
“But there could be documents,” Lucas said. “I want a callback as soon as you open the trunk.”
“We’ll call,” the cop said.
19
Forte ran the passports through the relevant databases to see where Ritter might have gone with them; he called back after dinner to tell Lucas that both had been used for trips to Europe and back to the U.S.
“He didn’t stay long—two days in France, three in Spain, for one of them; three days in France, two in Germany, for the other,” Forte said. “I could be wrong, but I suspect he was validating the passports with travel. Used passports already carrying visa stamps are less interesting than brand-new ones, if you’re working passport control. They’ve already been checked.”
The next morning, Bob called after his workout, and Lucas told him that he was going out to walk around for a couple of hours. “I need to think, that’s all. Figure out what we can salvage. Like you said, Ritter was our guy, and now we need a new one.”
Lucas went back to Georgetown, which was close by and not a bad place to walk. He wound up in a diner, eating a short stack of pancakes with bacon, reading thePost. There was a short item on page three about the Smalls/Grant controversy, but with nothing new.
When he got the check, he paid with his last twenty-dollar bill, which was a mild surprise. He’d stopped using credit cards for small charges in unknown places—every exposure createdanother possibility of getting hacked—and so always carried a supply of cash. He rarely let the count get below a couple of hundred dollars. He left the diner with fifteen dollars and change, the lack of cash scratching at the back of his brain like a weevil on a cotton boll.
And he hadn’t figured out the next step.
—
HE’D SEENa Wells Fargo Bank a couple of blocks away and walked over. He put in his ATM card and punched in his code... and noticed the Braille dots below the operating instructions. He wondered why they’d put Braille on a machine where a blind guy couldn’t find it easily.
A bell rang in his head.
He collected his cash, stuffed it in a pocket, and called Rae. “Go down to the business center, however that works—maybe you’ll need to take your own laptop—and download a Braille chart that shows letters and numbers and print it out. I need you to figure out how it works—Braille, that is. You know, how to read it.”
“You mean, with my fingers?”
“No, no... what each Braille pattern means—what letters they are, the numbers.”
