Gideon glanced over dubiously. “Blaine’s no dummy.”

“True. But that doesn’t mean he’s technically savvy.” Fordyce snugged the flash drive into one of the laptop’s USB ports and rebooted the machine. “This little honey can try two hundred and fifty thousand passwords a second. Let’s see just how paranoid Simon Blaine really is.”

For the next ninety minutes, Gideon drove the Jeep at precisely seventy-nine miles per hour, passing Elk City, then Clinton, then Weatherford. The sun would soon be setting, and a starry sky would fill the night dome of the prairie. As they neared Oklahoma City, without progress, Gideon began to feel increasingly restless. Fordyce, too, was growing impatient, peering at the screen and muttering under his breath. Finally, with a curse, he yanked the flash drive from the laptop’s slot and powered down the machine. “Okay,” he growled. “Score one for Blaine.”

“So we’re screwed?” Gideon asked.

“Not yet we’re not.” When the laptop rebooted and the login prompt appeared, Fordyce rattled off a quick blast of keystrokes:

LOGIN: root

PASSWORD: ****

Immediately a storm of text scrolled up the screen.

“Bingo!” Fordyce said.

Gideon looked at him. “Did you get into his account?”

“No.”

“Then what good is it?”

“I got into the system account. Just type root for both the login name and password and, presto, you’re super-user. You’d be amazed at how many people either don’t know enough or are too lazy to change the default system account passwords on these older UNIX systems.”

“Can you get into his account or his files from there?”

Fordyce shook his head. “No, I can’t. But maybe I don’t need to.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because as super-user, I can access the standard UNIX password file.” He plugged the flash drive back in, typed a long string of commands, then sat back in his seat, beaming. He pointed at the screen. “Check it out.”

Gideon looked over.

BlaineS:Heqw3EZU5k4Nd:413:adgfirkg

m~:/home/subdir/BlaineS:/bin/bash

“That’s his account name and password, the latter scrambled with DES.”

“Data encryption standard? I thought that couldn’t be cracked.”

Fordyce smiled.

Gideon frowned. “Uh-oh. Let me guess. The government built a back door into the encryption standard.”

“You didn’t hear it from me.”

For about ten minutes, Gideon drove while Fordyce typed, sometimes pausing to peer at the screen, now and then muttering under his breath. Finally, with a withering curse, he punched the back of the seat.

“No joy?” Gideon asked.

Fordyce shook his head. “I can’t break the DES algorithm. Blaine’s a lot more sophisticated than I thought. He or someone used a hardened DES variant. I’m totally stuck. I can’t think of anything else to do.”

The Jeep fell into silence.

“We can’t just give up,” Gideon said.

“You got any ideas?”

“We can try guessing the password.”

Fordyce rolled his eyes. “My dictionary attack just tried over a billion passwords in twelve common languages, including words, combinations of words, names, and place-names, not to mention a compilation of the million most commonly used passwords. It’s the best brute-force attack program in existence. And you think you can do better by guessing?” He shook his head.

“At least we know what not to guess at. Your dictionary attack is just a dumb program. We know a lot more about Simon Blaine than it does. Look, it’s worth a shot. We’ve already got his account name, right?” Gideon thought for a moment. “Maybe he used the name of one of the characters in his books. Get on your BlackBerry, find his website, and grab the names of any characters you find.”

Fordyce grunted approval and got to work.

A few minutes later, Fordyce had compiled a list of a dozen names. “Dirkson Auger,” he said, looking at the first on the list. “Blaine really gets paid for making up names like that?”

“Try it.”

Fordyce lifted the lid of the laptop. “I’ll try Dirkson first.”

Error.

“Auger.”

Error.

“Try them together,” Gideon suggested.

Error.

“Try the names again in turn, only backward this time.”

Error.

“Son of a bitch,” Fordyce muttered.

“Do the same with the rest.”

Before Gideon had driven another fifteen miles, Fordyce threw up his hands. “It’s hopeless,” he said. “I’ve tried them all. Even if it was one of these names, if Blaine had any sense he’d have thrown in a few extra characters to add some noise, or changed letters to numbers, or something. There are just too many variants.”

“The thing about passwords,” Gideon said after a minute or two, “is that, unless you’re using a password manager, you have to remember the damn thing.”

“So?”

“So maybe it isn’t a character in a book. Maybe it’s the name of a real person. He wouldn’t be likely to forget that. And the most obvious person would be Alida.”

“Obvious, all right. Way too obvious.” Fordyce typed in the name anyway, tried a bunch of variations. “Nope.”

“Okay, so do what you suggested a minute ago. Change some of the letters to numbers or symbols.”

“I’ll change the l to a 1.” Fordyce tried this password. “Nada.”

“Try something else. Change the i to a dollar sign.”

More typing. “Strike three,” said Fordyce.

Gideon licked his lips. “I remember reading that most decent passwords are composed of two parts, a root and an appendage. Right? So add something on the end.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Xyz, maybe. Or 00.”

Still more typing. “This is getting old, fast,” Fordyce told him.

“Wait a minute—I just thought of something. Blaine has a pet name for Alida. Miracle Daughter. He sometimes calls her MD. Try that after her name.”

Fordyce typed. “No go. Not in front, in back, or in the middle.”

Gideon sighed. Maybe Fordyce was right. “Just keep trying all the variables.” He concentrated on the road ahead while Fordyce typed quietly beside him, trying one variant after another.

Suddenly the FBI agent gave a whoop of triumph. Gideon glanced over and saw a fresh welter of text scrolling up the screen.

“You got in?” he asked in disbelief.

“Damn right!”

“What was the password?”

A1$daMdee. Kind of sentimental, don’t you think?” And Fordyce settled in to browse the computer’s files as the skyline of Oklahoma City came into view.

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