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“All right. Well. I just sent you the hash of your name. It’s on your phone.”
A text arrived.
49b14a858f2c023331d308310de984acad
097cd510ed2e5cb0185fab284be511
“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 backintothe password. Like you can’t turn ground beef back into a sirloin. Butwhat youcando 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 tryLincoln 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.”
“Is that … Are you joking?”
“Uhm, well, no, sir,” said the man who, it was clear to Rhyme, probably never joked about computer matters.
“You have to have a faster computer there.”
“Doesn’t matter. Even with Fugaku, in Japan”—he said this almost reverently—“you might shave off a few hundred thousand years is all. But maybe we’ll be lucky and he used something short.”
Ah, the damn L-word again.
Rhyme added another unnecessary: “Let me know the minute you find something.”
“I’ll do that, sir. Oh, just one question?”
“Yes?”
“That Detective Sachs. Just checking. Sheismarried, right?”
Was he really asking that?
“Uhm. Yes.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
They disconnected.
He ordered his phone, “Call Pulaski.”
A moment later: “Lincoln. How’s the case?”
“Taken some turns. It’s not real estate. The cranes’re a misdirection. He had us focus on the drones delivering the acid, when he was really using them to check his real target. Hale was hired to take out a U.S. senator. Edward Talese.”
“Why?”
“Not sure yet. And Gilligan’s computer’s a bust. The expert says it could take two hundred million years to crack it.”
“How many?”
