The Buck Stops Here (20 page)

I entered the guy’s address in my GPS and then drove back past the Brown Door on my way to his house. His truck was still there in the parking lot, though now there were about ten more cars and trucks parked around it. Hopefully, this was his after-work hangout, and he would be staying for a good while.

His ranch-style house was on a tree-lined street in a neighborhood of modest homes. The only people around were at the end of the block, a family barbecuing in their backyard. Otherwise, things seemed deserted for a Friday afternoon. My mind racing, I tried to think of some way that I could get into his house without attracting attention. I finally decided to park a few blocks over and then make like a neighborhood jogger. At least that way if someone saw me, they wouldn’t be able to call in my license plate or identify my vehicle.

I pulled shorts and a short-sleeved shirt from my gym bag and changed in a smelly gas station restroom. Then I parked my car in a parking lot nearby, shoved the gloves in my pocket, and took off running.

When I reached Weyford Lane, I slowed a bit and tried to look nonchalant as I jogged down the street. I reached number 179 and then veered off naturally, as if I might be cutting through his backyard to get to the street behind his. I jogged up the driveway and into the carport, quite relieved to see once I got there that the place was completely private, hidden from the houses surrounding it by all manner of overgrown bushes and trees. The only line of sight was from the house directly across the street, but with no cars in the driveway and no lights on, it appeared to be empty.

Heart pounding, I knocked on the side door, just to make sure no one was home here. When I got no answer, I pulled on the rubber gloves and tried the doorknob, and then I went around back and pushed on each of the windows. The place was locked up tight. I peeked inside where I could, but I couldn’t see anything other than the vague outline of furniture. I was just trying to decide whether or not I should dare check the front door and front windows when I heard his car in the driveway.

Quickly, I ducked down and ran toward the far side of the house, hoping he would have no reason to come around that way. I pulled off the gloves and shoved them into my pocket, pressing myself flat against the side of the building, grateful beyond belief that I had been unsuccessful in my attempts to get inside!

I listened for the house door to open and close before I chanced running away, but instead, after a moment, I heard the sound of the truck pulling back out of the driveway. I dared to peek around front, and I was surprised and relieved to see that it wasn’t the brown pickup after all—it was a Federal Express truck.

Catching my breath, I waited until the vehicle drove away and then decided that was just too close of a call; I needed to get out of there. The chances of finding some kind of relevant evidence inside the house were not great enough to risk this crazy scheme of breaking and entering.

I doubled back behind the house, hoping to go out the way I had come in, along the driveway. In the carport, I saw the FedEx envelope propped against the door, resting on a black rubber mat I hadn’t noticed before. I hesitated, wondering if there might be a key hidden under the mat. I decided to peek, knowing it would be smarter just to leave, but I was unable to stop myself. After all, was it still breaking and entering if the guy was dumb enough to leave a key out where I could find it?

I peeled back the mat and found nothing but dirt. It was just as well, I told myself as I laid the mat back down. I shouldn’t be doing this anyway.

It was then, however, that the return address on the FedEx envelope caught my eye, and I gasped. I didn’t recognize the name or the street, but the city it had come from was New Orleans, Louisiana.

My heart in my throat, I impulsively grabbed the envelope. I don’t know what possessed me, but I folded it in half and shoved it up under my shirt, holding it in place with my left arm. Then I took off running. As my steps pounded on the pavement, one thought raced through my head:
Callie, you just committed a federal offense!

Once I was safely back in the car, I simply started driving. I must have driven ten miles before I finally had the nerve to pull over and take a look at the envelope again. Ironically, the empty parking lot where I chose to make my stop was beside a church. I ignored the big, illuminated cross on the sign and guiltily proceeded with what I was doing.

The sun was setting, but there was still enough daylight to see without turning on an interior light. For a long while, I just sat there holding the envelope, knowing it might not be too late to turn back. I could drive to the man’s house and simply toss this thing toward the door and no one would ever know I had run away with it. But the address on the front kept screaming at me.
New Orleans. New Orleans
. This had to have something to do with Sparks.

I looked off in the distance, trying to think back to my first semester of criminal law. From what I could recall, though stealing the U.S. mail was a federal offense, taking a package that had been delivered by a privately owned company was more along the lines of simple theft. If so, then my going into a carport and taking a FedEx envelope had been about on par with going into a carport and stealing a rake or a bicycle. Though it was still theft, I thought I could live with that a little more easily.

Teeth gritted, I opened it as carefully as I could and looked inside. There was no note or anything, just a wad of paper towels. I pulled out the wad and unwrapped it to reveal…a small yellow asthma inhaler.

An asthma inhaler?

I turned the thing around in my hands, trying to see if it was real. It certainly looked real, and I almost gave it a squirt just to check. Something stopped me, however, and with a start I realized that this was the exact same brand of inhaler that Sparks used. What did this mean?

I wasn’t sure, but I had a feeling that this was bad, very bad. I could only come up with two possible explanations: Sparks was a drug addict who snuck his fixes into prison via a “doctored” asthma inhaler, or Sparks was about to become a victim of something much more sinister. Either way I was making a bit of a leap here, but I had a feeling that whatever was inside this inhaler was not what it was supposed to be.

Twenty-Two

Using the secure phone Tom had given me, I dialed the number of Paul Tyson, a young man I hired from time to time whenever I needed help of a particular nature. Officially, Paul was a “computer research consultant”; unofficially, he was a hacker, and he had ways of digging up information I could never seem to get anywhere else. I kept him on a retainer, and he simply charged me by the hour for any work that he did. Paul lived in Seattle, so I knew the timing of my call was good, that he would probably be sitting at his computer, available to answer some questions for me as usual.

Sure enough, he picked up the phone on the first ring. I identified myself and said I was calling from a scrambled cell phone.

“Oh, goody,” he replied. “That must mean this is a big one. What’s up?”

“A couple of things,” I said, wrapping the inhaler in the paper towels and sticking it back in the envelope. “I have a substance I need analyzed, and I’m wondering if by any chance you know anyone who could do it.”

He chuckled.

“Now why would you be asking me that particular question, Callie? You’re the PI. Don’t you have resources like that?”

“Yes,” I said, “but this one’s different. I need—”

“Let me guess,” he interrupted. “You need someone who’s maybe not quite as legit as usual. Am I correct?”

“Something like that.”

“What is it, illegal drugs?”

“I’m not sure. But I probably shouldn’t have it in my possession, and I definitely don’t want any findings reported.”

“Gotcha. All right, let me take a look.”

I could hear him typing into the computer, whispering softly to himself as he did.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Here you go. I got a fellow in Arlington who might be able to help. He’s—”

“I’m not at home,” I said. “In fact, I’m down in Georgia.”

“Georgia? I don’t know anybody in Georgia. Can’t you mail it?”

“I’d rather hand deliver, if I can.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“I don’t mind driving a ways,” I said, acknowledging in my mind for the first time the inevitable trip that was before me. “In fact, I’m on my way to Louisiana. How about Alabama, Mississippi…”

“Let me think. Hold on.”

I heard more typing and then he spoke.

“I don’t know if this will do you any good or not. There is a guy in Louisiana that I work for sometimes. He’s not a chemist by any means, but sometimes somebody knows somebody who knows somebody, if you know what I mean. I can call him for you, see if he can meet up with you somewhere in the area.”

“That would be great, Paul,” I replied. “Can you get back to me on it?”

“Give me a day or two. Sometimes he’s hard to reach. What else can I do for you?”

“Just answer some questions, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure. Fire away.”

“It’s about encryption, cryptography, that sort of thing.”

“Then you’re talking to the right guy.”

I reached for the paper I had scribbled my notes on this afternoon after my visit at the prison with Sparks. Reading from that list, and then adding more from memory, I told Paul all of the names Sparks had thrown out at me today.

“Can you tell me who these people are?” I asked.

Paul helped to straighten the jumble in my mind, giving me a sort of nutshell history of computer encryption. He said that each of those people was well known in the computer world. Some were mathematicians, some programmers, but all of them had made a great contribution to the field of encryption in one way or another. Paul said that Diffie was “the world’s first cypherpunk,” a man who actually predicted the information superhighway and the digital revolution long before the internet even existed. After him came Ronald Rivest and his pioneering work with “asymmetric ciphers,” and later someone named Zimmerman introduced “the world’s first secure computer encryption program.” Though I didn’t understand most of what he was saying, I finally at least got what Sparks had been trying to tell me earlier: A lot of mathematical geniuses had worked hard to pave the way for complete computer security.

My ears perked up as soon as Paul started talking about another one of those geniuses, a brilliant cryptologic mathematician named Tom Bennett. According to Paul, Tom was an expert in “number theory, abstract algebra, and logic and set theory.” Apparently, back in the ’90s, thinking he might have solved several significant encryption holdbacks such as “key generation,” Bennett had rounded up a team of four other people and hired them to implement his solutions.

“The group called themselves the ‘Cipher Five,’” Paul said. “And by the time they were finished they had created a masterpiece. Even now, all these years later, it’s still the program of choice for secure computer encryption. Amazingly, it almost didn’t see the light of day.”

“What do you mean?”

Paul went on to tell me how the Cipher Five created their unbreakable encryption program, but that once it was finished, Tom decided not to release it to the general public after all. Instead, Paul said, Tom destroyed the program and disbanded the company.

“But why?”

“Something to do with ethics. It never has quite made sense to me.”

He went on to say that one of the members of the group, James Sparks, had apparently kept a secret copy of the program for himself, because about a year after the company was disbanded, Sparks was arrested for selling it to a restricted country. There was a big FBI investigation, and he ended up getting convicted and going to prison. Eventually, the program leaked out over the internet anyway, and nowadays computer geeks passed it around all the time.

“Can you tell me,” I said, “other than Tom Bennett, what were the functions of the different members of the team? I mean, how did they contribute to the program overall?”

“Well, let me see. From what I recall, James Sparks and Armand Velette were software designers, both of them experts in optimizing code for speed—which was a real plus back then, because in the early nineties, CPUs were kind of slow, and encryption is a numerically intensive activity.”

“Okay.”

“Phillip Wilson, I don’t know. He probably either dealt with networking issues or database stuff. Oh, yeah, the user-interface specialist was Sparks’ wife, Beth. She did a bang-up job.”

“What’s that?”

“The user-interface specialist is the person who takes a program and makes it user-friendly, writing the part of the program that everyone sees. That person doesn’t have to know a lot about cryptology, but they have to be an expert in human interfaces. She was good.”

“I see,” I said, understanding that computer skills definitely ran in that family. “So what happened with everyone once the group broke up?”

“Well, Sparks went to prison, of course. Tom Bennett formed a new company and got rich off the internet. I don’t know about the rest. They all sort of faded into the woodwork.”