Need You Now

30

C onnie’s regular Wednesday-evening scout meeting ran from seven to nine P.M., and right after it ended, she caught up with me at Evan’s apartment. His 360-degree mural of Cushman’s fraud blew her away, but Evan was far more interested in hearing how her troop was ready to smash the competition in the upcoming Pinewood Derby. By ten P.M. I’d heard enough about graphite axles and other ways to make a five-ounce block of wood zip down an eight-lane track in record time. If I hadn’t cut her short and put Evan back to work, he might never have cracked the code on the BOS data files.

“Almost there,” said Evan.

He was still in the center of the room, keyboard clacking, matching wits with some other computer genius who had encrypted the BOS files from Lilly’s computer.

“How much longer?” I asked.

“He just said he was almost there,” Connie snapped.

Evan smiled at the way she’d come to his defense. Yet again, I had to wonder if poor Tom, her fiancé, was destined to run last in the proverbial Pinewood Derby of egghead romance.

Evan said, “The bank has different levels of security attached to different files. Lilly’s e-mails were relatively simple. You can review those on my laptop while I keep working on the tougher codes.”

Connie and I spent the next ninety minutes doing just that. The vast majority of e-mails were worthless or, worse, distracting. Our task was to unravel the trail of money from Gerry Collins through BOS/Singapore. Instead, I found myself reliving my relationship with Lilly through e-mails. It was funny to see how cautious the early communications had been.

How about lunch?

Coffee?

What Lilly didn’t know was how many drafts it had taken to come up with such brilliance and finally hit Send. If I wrote Starbucks instead of coffee , would she think it was a hot stock tip? If I wrote buy you a coffee , would she think I was cheap and limiting her to just one? If I wrote buy you coffee , would she think I was making a run over to the Food Stop and offering to bring her back a bag of beans? I could have written buy you a latte . But maybe she hated lattes-or, more likely, pretentious men who drank them. Coffee. That was perfect.

Too bad she was in bed by the time you finally sent it.

“Aw, this is so sweet,” said Connie. She was reviewing another group of Lilly’s e-mails on her smartphone, and apparently she, too, had found the personal stuff. “I didn’t know you had such a sensitive side, little brother.”

I approached Evan and quickly changed the subject. “Are we there yet?”

“Don’t rush me.”

“I’m not rushing you. Just wondering when you think you’ll be finished.”

Evan’s hair was standing straight up, shaped by the number of times he’d run his hands through it in frustration. “With this last group of files, it may not be a question of when,” he said.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

He wiped the sweat from his brow, then ran his hands through his hair once more. “I hate to admit it, but I’m not sure I can break this.”

I glanced at Connie, whose mouth was agape. It was as if Evan had just confessed that he’d never actually seen an episode of Star Trek .

Connie pulled herself together and said, “I’ll get Tom to look at it.”

“Who’s Tom?” asked Evan.

“My fiancé. He’s a genius. Would have graduated from MIT with a degree in engineering if he hadn’t skipped art class his last semester.”

“No offense,” said Evan, “but they don’t kick people out of MIT for skipping art.”

“Oh, yes, they do,” said Connie.

“Whatever,” said Evan. “The entire engineering department probably couldn’t crack this code.”

“Folks, can we focus?” I said. “It can’t be that tough.”

“Easy for you to say,” said Evan. “So far the only thing I’ve been able to determine is that the sequence of letters B-A-Q occurs with unusually high frequency in the encrypted data, which, of course, doesn’t mean anything.”

“That could be a code for something else.”

“Or it could reflect an error in my own mathematical computations,” said Evan.

A quick run of “BAQ” through a search engine on Evan’s laptop turned up a handful of hits, from trade names for pool-cleaning products to a Puerto Rican folk dance called el baquiné . Nothing meaningful.

Evan said, “I’m telling you, this last phase of encryption is of the highest order.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

Evan cleared his throat, and I had a feeling he was about to get professorial on me. “Well,” he said, “the actual cryptographic process is generally a complicated mathematical formulation-the more complex, the more difficult it is to break. A key is supplied to the recipient so that he can then decipher the message. Keys for encryption algorithms are described in terms of the number of bits. The higher the number of bits, the more difficult that cryptosystem would be to break.”

It was late, and my head was starting to throb. “Sorry, I wasn’t asking for a technical explanation of encryption. What I want to know is, when you say ‘highest order,’ what does that mean?”

“That’s what I’m getting at,” said Evan. “The one file that has me stumped involves a level of encryption that is on an entirely different order than anything else here. It’s as if it doesn’t even belong on the same computer as the BOS data.”

“Where would you expect to find it?”

Evan sat back in his chair, glanced at Connie, and then looked at me. “If you didn’t think I was a conspiracy nut job before, you will now.”

“I didn’t think it before,” I said.

Evan sighed and said, “All right. The level of encryption I’m seeing is more like something you would expect in a matter of national security.”

“In Lilly’s files?”

He paused, as if all too aware that he might sound ridiculous. “Yeah,” he said, “in your girlfriend’s files. There, I said it. You can start laughing now.”

My sister and I exchanged glances. Then my gaze returned to Evan, his face aglow from a computer screen filled with mathematical equations.

“Nobody’s laughing,” I said.

I checked the time. It was past midnight. I was about to suggest we break for the night when Connie shoved her smartphone in my face.

“Look at this!” she said.

The lead story for the online version of the Daily News included a photograph of a woman who had been strangled and found dead in her apartment. A sick feeling came over me as I recognized both her face and the uniform.

“That’s the park ranger who found me in Battery Park,” I said.

The story reported “no known motive,” and I couldn’t think of one. But I wasn’t foolish enough to think that her slaying and my attack, separated by a matter of hours, were disconnected. It wasn’t easy coming to terms with the fact that the ranger would probably still be alive but for the misfortune of having found me in the park. The Daily News also said that police were urging anyone with information to come forward. I realized that I would have to follow up with Agent Henning and comb over the details of my own attack-though I had no doubt that the FBI had already connected the dots, since Andie had shown up at our last meeting with a copy of the Parks police report.

I walked a complete circle in the apartment and took another start-to-finish look at Evan’s 360-flowchart of the Cushman fraud. I wondered where a photograph of the park ranger’s killer might fit in. I wondered who he was. And I wondered if, in some perverse way, he was enjoying the destruction of so many lives.

“Nope,” I said, revisiting Evan’s fear that I might think he was nuts, “no one is laughing. At least not in this room.”