Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Lucas led us to a conference room at the side of the big open room filled with desks. We sat around the table. “Do you have any pictures?” Lucas asked as I started to explain about the statue of Vitellius.
I looked to Forrest. He gave a nod, and I pulled out my laptop and opened the file where I’d kept my notes. I walked Lucas and Emmett through our progress, sharing the few pictures and notes we had, finally, sliding the peppermint tin onto the table between them.
“And then we found this one,” I finished. “But unlike the others, it doesn’t have a key. We thought we found a key.” I filled them in on the debacle of the root cellar and Callum Leary’s rescuing us.
“And you don’t know who at Heartstone Manor created the decoy clue?” Emmett asked.
“I have my suspicions,” I said, “but I can’t prove it.”
Lucas and Emmett shared a long look but didn’t say anything.
Lucas looked to me. “Show me what you’ve got for us.” His eyes narrowed and landed on me, and I felt my cheeks flush. I thought I knew what he meant, but—
“Show you…?” I asked, stalling.
“Show me what you’ve done to try to solve this one,” he pressed, his gentle tone encouraging as my stomach flipped with nerves.
“Well, I, um, I…” The heat on my cheeks grew, and I looked at Forrest, the fear from a few hours ago roaring back. I was embarrassed and terrified I was going to be laughed at. These people were some of the most elite hackers on the planet. Lucas Jackson ran the whole IT division for Sinclair Security. I didn’t know about Emmett, but Hawk had said this was what he specialized in. I couldn’t show them my amateurish fumbling, the code that hadn’t worked.
Lucas’s eyes narrowed. “Are you going to sit here and tell me you didn’t write something to try to crack it?”
I shook my head, swallowed, and heard Hawk’s voice: Don’t be afraid to be yourself. I closed my eyes, lines of code flashing in my mind, and knew there’d never be a better time or place to take the leap and show them what I’d been working on.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
STERLING
“No, I, uh, I wrote a program—” My eyes skipped to Forrest’s face and back to the screen, registering his look of surprise. But I quickly turned away, not wanting to see it change into anything else.
Clearing my throat, I started again, this time with more confidence.
“I wrote a program to try to crack the cipher. I tested it on a few ciphers I found online, and it worked. But it can’t do anything with this one. I’ve looked everywhere for a key, and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” I said, my shoulders slumping as I finished. The same frustration I always felt enveloped me, a feeling that swamped me every time I hit run on the program and nothing happened.
“Show me how it works,” Lucas said, leaning over my laptop.
I walked him through my rough code. “I tried it with this cipher.” I clicked and pulled up one of my test ciphers. “See, it works.”
I knew it was slow as programs went, but I was proud of it. Pushing aside my fear, I plugged in another cipher I’d used to test the program, a simple alphanumeric cipher that used a shifting alphabet code. Within forty-five seconds, my program spit out the answer.
“It worked on this one too.” I entered a different code, one that used a simple key, and again, this time in a minute and a half, my program spit out the correct answer. “But this—” For the millionth time, I pasted in the code on the index card in the peppermint tin. And for the millionth time, my program hung.
Emmett nudged my hand away from the keyboard and scrolled through the code. “You wrote this?” he asked, looking to Lucas and back to me.
I shrugged in agreement, my cheeks still hot.
“It’s not bad for a beginner,” Emmett said.
Lucas agreed. “It’s pretty damn good for a beginner. How did you figure this out?” He pointed to a section of code I had labored over.
“I, um, found some open-source code I thought would work and tweaked it,” I admitted.
“Clever,” Lucas said, scrolling through the rest of what I’d written. When he was done, he sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. “The problem isn’t with your program. Your program is actually pretty fucking good. The problem is that you’re not dealing with an alphanumeric cipher. This is a polygraphic substitution cipher.”
I’d seen the term but didn’t know what it meant.
“What are you thinking?” Lucas said to Emmett.
“Either a Pollux cipher or fractionated Morse,” Emmett said.
I’d never heard of either of those. “What’s the difference?” I asked.
“Both ciphers,” Emmett said, “have more than one key. Or rather, there’s a key to decipher the key. The Pollux cipher uses fill-in-the-blanks, in a sense, and the fractionated Morse cipher uses Morse code. You couldn’t solve it with your program because you were only looking for one key.”