Dexter, Michigan
Cal Mosley brought the rented Taurus to a stop beside Grin’s faded microbus. As he and Bart Cooper stepped out of the car, two overly friendly yellow Labradors ran up to greet them. They heard a loud whistle from the front porch of the farmhouse.
‘Buckley, Babs! Get over here!’
The two dogs bolted toward the porch, coming to rest at the feet of Martin Kilkenny.
‘Thanks,’ Mosley said, then introduced himself and Cooper as they approached the porch. ‘We’re looking for Nolan. He’s expecting us.’
‘Indeed he is. Go in the side door of the barn, there. Take the stairs up to the loft – that’s where you’ll find him.’
Mosley led Cooper into the massive renovated barn and up the spiral staircase to the loft. Nolan and Grin sat amid a field of debris from their all-night assault on Wolff’s encryption algorithm. Neither took notice of the other men’s arrival.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Mosley called out. ‘I believe we had an appointment.’
‘Morning, Cal,’ Nolan said as he rose stiffly from the floor. ‘I assume this is Bart Cooper.’
‘A pleasure,’ Cooper said as he shook Nolan’s hand.
Nolan then completed the introductions. ‘Can I get you guys something to drink? I’ve got a pot of coffee going or some juice.’
‘Coffee would be fine. Black,’ Cooper replied.
‘Same,’ Mosley added.
‘I could use a reload myself,’ Grin said as he slowly ambled into the kitchen. He filled his mug and the two that Nolan had set on the counter.
‘Judging from those dark circles under your eyes,’ Cooper commented, ‘I’d say you two have been at it awhile. What are you working on?’
‘We’re decrypting Wolff’s notebooks.’
‘You’ve cracked the code?’ Mosley asked, surprised.
‘It’s a lot easier when you have the key,’ Grin replied.
Nolan then explained how he acquired a copy of the ring inscription from the jewelry store.
‘How are you coming with the decoding?’ Mosley asked eagerly.
‘We’re making slow progress. Grin, give the man a demo.’
‘Sure thing, boss.’
Grin walked over to Kilkenny’s computer.
‘Gather ’round,’ Grin said, ‘but fair warning, this is not the prettiest piece of programming ever written. It’s downright crude compared with Wolff’s method, but it does get the job done.’
With Mosley and Cooper watching over his shoulder, Grin enlarged the decryption program window to fill the entire twenty-one-inch monitor on Nolan’s desk. The screen displayed two blank windows placed side by side.
‘I’m going to pick page six out of Wolff’s first notebook. We’ve already decoded the first five.’
The top window filled with a wide column of apparently random symbols and characters. After the encrypted text was loaded, the program highlighted the first row of text and the cursor changed from an arrow into a tumbling hourglass.
‘Wolff deliberately used a column format in recording information in his notebooks because it helped keep the information ordered in his mind. You see, he was using matrices, but in a multidimensional way like nothing I’ve ever seen. I am still floored that this guy could do in his head what Nolan’s top-notch computer is struggling with.’
The decrypted version of the first few characters began appearing in the window on the right side of the screen. The characters came in bunches, with the time between each character’s appearance being randomly shorter or longer.
‘Why is it so jumpy?’ Cooper asked.
‘It’s just the way our program was written,’ Nolan replied with a yawn. ‘The method Wolff devised to encode his notebooks is an offshoot of the mathematics that he invented for his research. How a piece of data is processed by this algorithm is governed by probability.’
‘What? You lost me, Nolan,’ Mosley said.
‘Don’t feel bad. Grin and I went round and round on this one until the fatigue set in and we suddenly caught a glimpse of how this thing really works. Most codes rely on some form of one-for-one substitution – A becomes Q, or Z or fourteen – whatever the method, the readable text gets transformed from one thing into another. It’s a very black-and-white kind of process.’
‘I’m following you so far,’ Mosley said.
‘Quantum reality is shades of gray. A can become Q, Z, and fourteen all at the same time. Effectively, each character has an infinite number of simultaneous possibilities. It then falls to probability to discover the answer you’re looking for.’
‘Thankfully, Wolff devised only a simple quantum algorithm – something he could do in his head,’ Grin added. ‘We were able to cobble together a very crude conventional program to simulate Wolff’s method – a lot like rescoring a Mozart symphony for a washtub bass and a kazoo. If we had a working quantum computer, it would’ve been done with a whole notebook by now.’
‘Why don’t you get one?’ Cooper asked.
‘A quantum computer?’ Nolan replied. ‘They haven’t been invented yet.’
Grin rapped a knuckle against Nolan’s computer. ‘For the time being, this is as good as it gets.’
Mosley and Cooper watched the first few strings of deciphered text emerge in the window on the monitor’s right side. Then he noticed the small stack of printed pages on the desk. ‘This the part you already finished?’
‘Yeah, have a look,’ Nolan offered.
Cooper put on a pair of reading glasses and picked up the loose pages. ‘It’s in German, which makes sense. It was Wolff’s native tongue. Unfortunately, that’s about all I recognize. Science was never one of my strong suits.’
‘I don’t think anyone in this room can truly appreciate Wolff’s work,’ Nolan remarked. ‘We’re all going to need someone to spoon-feed us on this stuff.’
‘Well, this is definitely beyond me,’ Cooper agreed, setting the pages back on the desk.
‘Enough about the notebooks,’ Nolan said. ‘What’s the latest on our kidnappers? Do we know who we’re dealing with yet?’
‘To answer your first question, we don’t have a fix on the hostages. I’ve been in contact with the FBI, and we don’t believe they’ve been taken out of the country. I also think we’ve confirmed that Elli does not have the ring with her.’
‘Why do you say that?’ Nolan asked.
‘The FBI has Elli’s house under watch, and they spotted a couple of guys snooping around. They ran the plates and found that a high-level boss in the Russian Mafiya owns the car. That tells me Orlov is still looking for the ring. Given that, I’m sure Kelsey and Elli are fine – they have to be, or Orlov doesn’t have anything to bargain with.’
‘Who’s Orlov?’ Nolan asked.
‘The man who’s responsible for this whole mess. Let’s have a seat, and Bart and I will walk you through what we’ve come up with.’
Nolan cleared an empty pizza box from his dining table, and the four men took their places around it. Cooper pulled a file from his briefcase and set it on the table.
‘First of all,’ Mosley began, ‘our people confirmed Grin’s trace of that E-mail you forwarded to me. It originated from an Internet server owned by a corporation named VIO FinProm. This corporation is based in Moscow and serves as a holding company for a widely diversified collection of financial and industrial businesses. FinProm is short for finanzava promuchistva, which is Russian for “financial-industrial”.’
‘And the VIO?’ Nolan asked.
