“What? Oh, I’ll get it.”
Reluctantly, she released his hand and went for his shirt. She helped him into it and then buttoned it up for him. When she started to tuck the tail into his pants, he stopped her.
“I can do that myself. Let’s show Louie why we came here.”
“Yes, I’m very curious.”
“We’ll need your computer,” John said.
“Well, you know where it is,” Louie said, then led them from his kitchen.
They followed him to his office, which like the rest of his house appeared cluttered and unattended. On every surface, magazines and books lay open, held that way mostly by computer printouts and here and there by a few open containers of cookies. Louie apparently had a sweet tooth.
“What do you have for me?” Louie asked as he sat in the worn swivel chair in front of his monitor.
John motioned to her. Caitlin popped her bag open and took out the memory stick.
Louie held out his hand, and Caitlin laid it on his palm.
He held it up between his fingers and watched the light reflect off its shiny white surface. “All right. Do you want to tell me what I’m looking for?”
Caitlin said, “There’s an encrypted file in it.”
“And you’ve forgotten the encryption code?” Louie asked.
“No. I never had it. It was sent to me as is, with no other data.”
Behind his beard, Louie frowned. “Okay, let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
He swiveled the chair around and inserted the thumb drive into a USB port in his computer. He slipped a wand over his index finger and pointed at his screen. The monitor gave a brief view of what he’d been working on before the interruption. A second later, the screen shifted in three quick displays as he called up another program. The monitor displayed the general contents of the thumb drive.
Caitlin moved to Louie’s left shoulder while John looked over his right.
“One file,” Louie said. “It’s a large file all right. The last modification on it was three days ago.”
He touched the wand again. The screen shifted to show the hex code for the file.
“This appears to be a self-extracting file.” He eyed Caitlin. “Have you tried running it?”
“Yes. It wants a password before it will decompress.”
“Really?” Louie pointed, the screen shifted, went black, and then a single line appeared with a group of eight asterisks above it. Louie’s fingers went to the keyboard, and he typed in something Caitlin couldn’t read. Each time his fingers hit a key one of the asterisks disappeared. When they were all gone, he hit the enter key.
The asterisks reappeared.
“Not even a comment. Usually, these are done with a few statements to tell the user that you screwed the password up. That would seem to indicate that the file was not meant for general consumption.”
“Oh?” John asked.
“Sure, if it was meant for others to use the programmers would have added bells and whistles. Since they didn’t, it stands to reason that they never intended anyone but themselves to call it up.”
Caitlin nodded in understanding.
“What else can you tell me about the file?” Louie asked.
Caitlin gave him a brief rundown on how she received it and who sent it to her. Louie listened carefully without interruption.
When she finished, Louie said, “You say he was leaving Los Alamos when he was killed?”
“That’s right.”
“As in Los Alamos National Laboratory?”
“I’d guess. He could have been in town to see someone who didn’t work out at the Lab, but I can’t imagine whom. It’s practically a one-industry town.”
“Yes, I know. Los Alamos is operated by the University of California for the Department of Energy. That’s big money and the best encryption programs available. I’ll look into it, but I can’t make any guarantees. If your husband didn’t want anyone else to get into this, then no one will.”
“He must have wanted me to be able to open the file or why else would he have bothered to send it to me?” Caitlin asked.
Louie shrugged his shoulders and turned back to the monitor. Moving the wand around too fast for her to keep up with his selections, Louie called up first one and then another program.
“Well, at least he didn’t use one of the 128-bit encryption schemes like Rijndael or Twofish. Either of those would have made this practically impossible.”
“We used Serpent at the office, but I’ve already tried our office passwords. None of them worked,” Caitlin said.
“I don’t think he’s used Serpent either. I thought it might have been RC6, but that program isn’t often used since Charlie Levins broke its mathematical structure a few years ago. Give me a little time.”
A few minutes passed in silence as they watched him work. Then he turned around in his chair. He stood, walked across the room to another computer and powered it up. A minute later, he removed the stick and handed it back to Caitlin. She stared at it for a second.
“All right. That’s all I can do for now,” Louie said.
“What? That’s it?” Caitlin asked. “You’re giving up?”
“Giving up?” Louie repeated. “No, no. Of course not. I’ve started my decryption programs, now we have to wait.”
Caitlin watched the monitor’s display for a second.
“It’s counting up,” she said.
“Right,” Louie responded.
“You’re not going to just try every possible password are you?” she asked.
“Just?” Louie repeated. “My dear, lady. Nothing I do is just anything.”
“Then what?” she asked, her tone exasperated.
Louie’s grin split his face nearly in two. She noticed a trace of a smile on John’s face also. “I’ve isolated the section of the code that reads the password and copied it. You can’t do that with fully encrypted files, but when the password decryption sequence is in the file, it leaves it vulnerable.
