Page 68 of Nixon’s Promise

“Yeah, I still don’t see it,” Weston remarked.

“Here.” I pointed to a line: nae#0prsterc lahl ir@gegd. “Take out the numeral and the grawlix—”

“The graw-what?” Chasin asked.

“Grawlix. So, they’re typographical symbols normally used to in place of swear words. But that’s what I always call them in my code. The hash mark and the at-symbol,” I explained. “If you remove them you’re left with letters that are transposed. Unscramble the letters: carpenters hall rigged.”

“Jesus. That easy. Wouldn’t the computer know to remove the—”

“No,” I cut off Jameson. “The computer is searching for sophisticated code. That’s part of why I use this method when encrypting. The first word and the last word had random characters, but the middle word didn’t. The next line: explosives set to detonate. The extra characters were first numerical only, no symbols, and they were in the second and third words with an unnecessary space in the word ‘detonate.’ The computer couldn’t find the pattern,” I explained.

“Jesus,” Alec muttered.

I didn’t need to look up to know that Nixon was staring at me. I could feel his eyes on me.

“McKenna?” he called.

“Huh?” I answered, but didn’t look up, too afraid to see what I’d find.

I still wasn’t sure if he was mad I’d snooped. Not that I meant to, but his work was important. Top secret if I’d understood correctly. I didn’t want to embarrass him, and a nosy neighbor barging in and intruding would totally embarrass him.

“Babe. Look at me,” he demanded.

My gaze lifted and he was smiling.

“I told you, you were amazing.” Damn, that felt good. “What else does it say?”

“Well, I’d need time to cipher most of it. It looks like monoalphabetic substitution was used, which is pretty easy, once I can puzzle out the E. The third encryption may be impossible to break without the cipher. Whoever wrote this, or came up with this system, is smart. They knew what they were doing to trick the computer.”

“What can you read, right now?” Alec inquired.

“What I already told you, Carpenters hall rigged. Explosives set to detonate.” I quickly scanned more and found another line. “Betsy Ross house.” I stopped and studied the document as a whole. The coding was ingenious, combining different methods together would make decoding difficult, but there were more sophisticated ways of layering code.

“What’s on your mind?” Jameson asked.

“I don’t know. As I said, whoever wrote this is smart. But it’s almost too easy. Which I guess was the point. Keep it simple and stupid and the computers won’t pick up on the encryption. But something feels off. Like I said, it’s too easy.”

“Walk us through that,” Nixon instructed. My eyes met his and I thought about how to articulate my misgivings, but was coming up blank. “What feels off about it?”

“When I’m testing network security, I always start with the question: how would I design the system? I work backward from there to break in. So, trying to decipher this message, I’d ask myself the same question. The answer is, not this way unless I was examining weaknesses.”

“Meaning?” Alec prompted.

“Assessing what was easily cracked.” I shrugged and went on. “First thing I’d do is challenge the system. Once I find where I’m weak, I can patch it and move on. The other thing I’d do is reroute or give misinformation. It’s all about checks and balances. If I can reroute a user who is trying to break into a system, I can retrace and figure out how they did it and fix the hole, too.”

“Goddamn. Testing loyalty of the forum members, or misdirection?” Alec asked.

“Million-dollar question,” Holden stated.

I had no idea what they were talking about and I didn’t think I wanted to know.

Nixon’s warm eyes had once again landed on me and he smiled. “So, breaking that down, the message would be used to see if there was a weak link in their chain. If the authorities show up at the locations, they’d know someone’s a rat. But why write it in code?”

“Can’t make it too easy.” I shrugged. “Test their system on communication? If there’s a mole in their organization, and the message was reported, they’d know someone could crack their codes. That’s how I’d do it if I was testing,” I confirmed.

“I understood before, but totally fucking get it now,” Holden muttered. “Fucking brilliant.”

I hadn’t stopped looking at Nixon, and when his smile got bigger, I felt like something big had happened. It was kind of freaking me out how happy he looked.