Page 128 of King’s Ransom

‘It’s a texting app, like Signal or Telegram, only with higher levels of encryption.’

‘I thought Signal and Telegram were impregnable, encryption-­wise,’ I said.

‘Nothing is impregnable,’ Monty said. ‘The Israelis cracked Telegram years ago and the Russians hacked Signal back in 2022. But EnigmaUltra is next level. You need some pretty high-octane processing power to penetrate it. Luckily, here at 60 Hudson Street, I have exactly that.’

‘And?’ I said.

Monty swallowed nervously.

‘You gotta be careful doing this sorta shit, Sam. It’s like when you’re tailing someone’s car. While you’re watching them, they might be watching you. And remember, this Modern Alchemical company is into some fucked-up shit.’

(I knew exactly what he meant. During my big case in the South, while I’d been tailing a truck, someone else had been tailing me.)

Monty added, ‘What I’m saying is, I tried to keep my digital fingerprints light. About an hour ago, I managed to extract some raw plaintext of encrypted text messages between Modern Alchemical and some of its clients on EnigmaUltra. I called you right after.’

‘Oh, nice,’ I said.

‘Don’t get your hopes up yet. It’s really raw and some of it is corrupted. This is what it looks like.’

He opened another window.

It was filled with three paragraphs of plaintext:

I stared at the dense blocks of text.

It was hard to make sense of it.

There seemed to be words in there, maybe even sentences, also abbreviations and lots of numbers, too.

Monty said, ‘From what I can see, what we have here are dates, user identification numbers and raw messages, all mixed in with random zeroes and ones. Truth be told, it’d be pretty straight­forward to decrypt it—it wouldn’t take long to remove all the zeroes and ones and add some spacing for readability; although as you can see, the second paragraph is still partially corrupted—but, dude, I don’t even want to copy and paste this shit, lest its owners know I’ve lifted it. If we decrypt it, we do it manually, and that’ll just take a shitload of time.’

I said, ‘You said user identification numbers. What do you mean by that?’

‘There are no names on EnigmaUltra, just user IDs,’ Monty explained. ‘I found six separate user IDs within this plaintext: USER 3765AZ, USER 4633QQ, USER 9101ZK, USER 4071AY, USER 4071FB and USER 4071VZ.

‘The main dude seems to be 4071AY. He’s from Modern Alchemical Solutions and he writes the most messages.’

‘Could you identify the others in any way?’ I asked.

‘Like I said, no names, but I did get an I.P. address for one of them, this one: 9101ZK. And if I can get an I.P. address, I can get a physical address, which I did. This user, 9101ZK, is working on a computer at an address right here in Manhattan, at 23 Doyers Street.’

‘Where’s Doyers Street?’

‘Sorry, I forget you’re not from New York,’ Monty said. ‘Doyers Street’s half a mile east of here, in the heart of Chinatown.’

‘Chinatown . . .’ I repeated.

Monty said, ‘You asked who would want the QuantumSpeed-7 chip? My answer: China.’

‘You might be more correct than you realise,’ I said. ‘Earlier tonight, an assault team tried to snatch Audrey on the Henry Hudson Parkway. They were members of the Chinese Ministry of State Security and they were after the QuantumSpeed-7 chip.’

‘Chinese intelligence?’ Monty said. ‘Then get this: 23 Doyers Street is the registered address of the Ernest Chang Employment Agency. An employment agency would be a great front for a foreign spy agency: people coming and going, staying for extended interviews.’

‘It sure would,’ I said.

‘Dude, what’s going on?’ Monty declared. ‘First it was riddles in a billionaire’s penthouse and now it’s scary companies on the darknet and Chinese spies going after a quantum computer chip.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘None of it fits. Not yet, anyway.’