Chapter 5

Eine Kleine Nacht Hacking

June 23: San Francisco

Passing through clouds at thirty-three thousand feet, slumped in the window seat, I watched tiny drops of water hit the glass, instantly elongate into impossibly thin streaks of silver, then dissipate, leaving nothing behind to show that they were ever there. I imagined each droplet as a human soul in an eternal cycle of birth, brief flash of life, death, coalescence back into the aether, formless waiting in between. It was maudlin but it was something to focus on while, in another part of my brain, the pieces of Julian Wolhardt’s story drifted slowly, forming and reforming. I searched the story for patterns, angles, wrong notes but it all seemed to hang together.

As was often the case, as soon as I was on a plane, on my way home, everything I had experienced while away began to take on an unreal dreamlike quality. My memory had always been highly visual. It has been reported, but never scientifically established, that some people have photographic memory—the ability to recall with exact precision anything they have ever seen. My memory wasn’t quite that good but I could often run through past experiences like watching a video in my head or pull up high fidelity images in my mind’s eye and examine them for details I might have consciously missed in the moment. However, my memory of Wolhardt’s house—where I had been just a few hours before—had a kind of intense, washed out, prismatic quality as if the harsh summer sunlight of southern California had overdriven my visual perception.

Wolhardt had seemed on the surface like a normal, rational guy. There had to be a bit of crackpot underneath though. If his story was true, he had been working on breaking Elgar’s enigma for close to fifty years. No normal person pursues such a fruitless, disappointing hobby for so long. I liked him but also felt like there was something missing. He came across like a latter day Parsifal, eternally seeking the grail, obsessed but dignified, an incomplete human until his quest is resolved.

Before I left his house, he had given me a few leads. There was the web address of the forum where he and other enigma enthusiasts posted their questions and progress updates. Then there was the name of the wealthy banker who had offered the reward for breaking Elgar’s code. Finally, he had also given me a list of people who, over the years, had offered solutions to the enigma, what their solutions were, and why they had been rejected.

I had already texted Ashna while waiting to board my flight:

—Free tonight? Possible job.—

—Yes. After 8 pm.—

—Okay. Come by my place? Want dinner?—

—Yes! See you then.—

I trusted Ashna’s judgment on whether or not to take the job. The case was cold, as they say. Wolhardt’s notes had been stolen over two weeks before. There was little chance of identifying or catching the thief via conventional means. If we were going to find any clues we would probably have to rely on her specialty rather than mine. I had an intuition that she would find the case intriguing though. The combination of great art, mystery, cryptography, genius, and a sizable reward appealed to me and it would appeal to Ashna too if I knew her special interests at all.

I settled back in my seat and opened my laptop. I could do some preliminary research while the plane did its thing.

I arrived home from the airport late in the afternoon, left my suitcase inside, and hopped on my bike. Cooking for Ashna meant I would need supplies. I rode by the nearly deserted Caltrain station, then up Brannan all the way to Division. The freeway hummed above me and the gritty exhaust filtered down. As I rode I thought about the Wolhardt job in an abstract way, not considering the merits of the job itself but just thinking about my shift in profession and whether or not it was really what I wanted. I had spent many years as a successful burglar. I had stolen a lot of art and I had never been caught. My unusual choice of career had netted me my home, my leisure, and a reasonable portfolio of investments but it had always been something I did without much self-examination. I had started out believing that I was a kind of social justice warrior, taking from the rich to support my spartan lifestyle while I pursued Art with a capital A. Then I moved on to thinking of myself as a kind of craftsman or master thief on the order of Leonardo Notarbartolo, Bill Mason, Vjeran Tomic, or Hajime Karasuyama. I romanticized my pursuits as a way of deflecting the censure of my own growing moral qualms. Slowly, though, as I became economically stable, stealing art from rich people went from something I did out of necessity to something I did simply because I had the skill and it was what I was used to doing—like an accountant who dreams of a career as a school teacher or a standup comic but can’t let go of the comfort and safety of his profession. Half a year before, when my girlfriend of sorts Valerie asked me to help recover a stolen painting, it had started me on a new path. I had done two recovery jobs now and it seemed like a good compromise. I got to use the talents I had developed while pursuing a life of crime while reuniting people with things that mattered to them.

Wrapped up in these thoughts, I wheeled up to my favorite grocery in San Francisco: the Rainbow Co-op. It was deep hippie territory—ten-thousand square feet of bulk, fair-trade quinoa, spelt bread, valerian root supplements, and the freshest, most delicious produce in the city. I snaked slowly around a fancy lady in a luxury SUV and a square jawed guy in an Audi wagon, both waiting to enter the tiny garage but held back by the parking attendant who couldn’t let them in until someone else left. A common sight now, there was never a line of people in expensive cars waiting to park at Rainbow in the old days. Just one more reminder of the changing face of the city—hippies, artists, freaks, gutter punks, bodhisattvas all moving out and tech money people moving in. I parked my bike at the rack just inside the garage and headed for the entrance to the store.

Inside, I made my way through the crowd of blissed out yoga people, patchouli scented gurus, and three percent body fat Lululemon ladies, shopping as efficiently as possible given the no hurry vibe. I picked up a variety of vegetables and some firm tofu. Rainbow didn’t carry any meat but Ashna had gone back to vegetarian so it wasn’t a problem. I had known her to switch back and forth between vegan, vegetarian, and omnivore multiple times in a single year.

Back home, I relaxed for a little while, catching up on email and social media, then started dinner. Ashna arrived just as I was pulling pans of roasted carrots, tofu, brussels sprouts, and fingerling potatoes from the oven. The air outside was warm and still, wind and fog held back temporarily, so we ate on the roof, looking out over the bay. We had just passed the summer solstice, retreating from the longest day of the year, and the sun was taking its time dipping down behind Potrero Hill. We sat there in the golden light and long shadows, listening to the faint sounds of a baseball game at Oracle Park, while I told her the story of my trip to LA.

“So, Valerie killed two birds with one Justin?” She said when I was finished.

“I guess you could look at it that way.”

“Tell me more about this Julian Wolhardt.”

I told her everything Wolhardt had told me, closing my eyes and throwing myself back into the prismatic weirdness of Wolhardt’s world.

“So somebody broke in and stole his notes? But not the real notes?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think it’s weird that they hung around for a few days before? Watching him. Tipping him off that they were watching him. Creeping around and scaring his kitty. Then finally breaking in and taking the notes he left on the desk without doing a thorough search and finding the safe?”

“Not really weird if you assume it was an amateur or maybe amateurs. Going through the whole sequence the way Wolhardt laid it out makes me think it must have been another Enigma fanatic who broke in and stole his notes, somebody who didn’t really know what they were doing.”

“So our first stop would be the message board where he made his announcement. Find out who would have seen it and research them.”

“Yeah. But is it worth it?”

“Hmmm.” Ashna was thinking, eyes narrowed.

“Is it interesting? Worth pursuing? We should make sure we’re on the same page before we get started, if we get started.”

“The cryptography part is cool. I’m not going to lie, I’m a crypto nerd. I wonder if anyone who really knows their shit has ever tried to break this? He said there’s a hidden, unplayed theme or counterpoint that matches harmonically? It’s got to be some fairly well-known piece of music written some time before he composed the variations. So, why not put all the pieces of music Elgar would have known about into a database then use a routine to loop over them all and analyze them using music theory logic to determine whether or not they would create a pleasant harmony if played together? I don’t know that much about music theory but it can’t be that difficult.”

“Good question. I don’t know. You’d probably have to ask Wolhardt.”

“Yeah. I will. But first let’s take a look at the message board. It’s probably some PHP script from ten years ago we can hack in two minutes.”

“Some light hacking for our digestif?”

“I’ll take an actual digestif too if you have anything that’s not crap.”

Back inside, seated at my kitchen table, I watched while Ashna did her thing. I had found one of Wolhardt’s film scores and streamed it while Ashna worked. The music was slow, elegiac, and poignant—from a movie about the wreckage and disintegration of a family. Ashna had her laptop open and was slouched in her chair, body still and eyes intent while her fingers moved rapidly on the keyboard. The URL was enigmavariations.net and it was an old school bulletin board system where people could register for accounts, choose anonymous screen names, and post questions and comments about some area of obsessive interest. I was familiar with the type of site. One of my areas of obsessive interest was lock picking and the sites I visited to read up on new techniques were similar.

There was an active moderator who seemed to be the owner and maintainer of the site. His or her screen name was enigma_admin and it popped up here and there on threaded conversations reminding people, in bitterly sarcastic terms, to stay on topic, keep their posts polite, and search before posting to make sure a question had not already been answered. Occasionally, enigma_admin also asked questions or replied to posts. He or she was clearly not running the message board on a lark. They were deeply interested in the cryptography angle. Ashna browsed through the site for a while, poking around, then ran a search for Wolhardt’s screen name which was jw48. The system showed a number of his posts and comments going back ten years. The results were sorted in date order and the one we were looking for was at the top. The post was short and to the point.

JW48: Enigma Co-Enthusiasts, After many years of seeking I believe I may be very near to solving this riddle. Expect big news from me within a few short weeks.

It seemed both in and out of character based on what I knew about Wolhardt. I could imagine his triumphant feeling of being near the end of his quest and his need to share the feeling with people who would understand. At the same time, he seemed like a careful, methodical person and the post was anything but careful. His emotions must have overruled his common sense. About ten people had replied to the post, most with some variation of congratulations. There were four longer replies.

Bender39: Congratulations JW! I can’t wait to hear your solution.

Crowley1875: I await your announcement with anticipation and dread.

NB: Congratulations. Very interesting. Your solution is eagerly awaited. However, as with all other solutions proposed over the years, yours will have to stand up against the combined intellects of the community. Past solutions, as you know, have not fared well.

enigma_admin: Fascinating. I look forward to your announcement. Did any of the techniques we discussed in your last post prove useful?

“Interesting,” Ashna said, reading through the replies. “I think we have four good suspects right here. Maybe more. Although it seems like the ones who took the time to reply with actual comments are the ones most likely to be our culprit.”

“Agreed,” I answered. “It’s like when people just click the little heart on the photo you post of yourself accepting the Nobel peace prize. Those aren’t the bitter losers who are going to write angry letters to the selection committee.”

“Yeah, that happens to me all the time.”

“Let’s search up these four and see what we find.”

I looked on as Ashna searched them one by one. Aside from enigma_admin, it quickly became clear that, together with Wolhardt, the other three were the most prolific users on the site. Their contentious relationship also became quickly obvious. In post after post they bickered with each other, cut each other down, and belittled each other’s theories. The only one who was above the fray was Bender39. He—I found myself assuming they were all men based on subtle clues in their writing—often tried to calm the rhetoric and keep the discussion civil, usually to no avail. He also seemed the most deeply competent with music theory—often displaying his breadth of knowledge when arguing obscure points. Crowley1875 had a sardonic style and sometimes alluded to mysterious occult theories. NB was on the attack at all times, never backing down and often inciting arguments.

“This is running on Drupal,” Ashna said after right clicking and choosing the View Page Source option. She pointed to a line in the HTML header. “You can tell by the directory structure. It’s loading these javascript files from folders under the modules directory.”

“What’s Drupal?”

“Content management system. Basically a web app that lets you create a sophisticated website without having to write any code. Drupal is pretty well broken. It was big back in the day bit nobody uses it anymore. I’m sure there’s a known exploit we can use to gain admin credentials. It looks like this is version seven. No one ever upgrades Drupal—too much of a pain in the ass. Half the time you would end up bricking your site. I remember hearing about a privilege escalation exploit for version seven.”

Twenty minutes later Ashna had gained admin rights to the system and was viewing user profiles and log files. The profiles didn’t tell us much beyond the email addresses they had used when creating their accounts. The log files showed recent logins to the site.

“It records their originating IP address when they log in,” Ashna said, pointing at a string of numbers on her screen. “With that we can find their general geographic location.” She pulled up another site and began copy/pasting the addresses. “Bender39’s in the Seattle area,” Ashna said. “Crowley1875 is in Philadelphia. NB is in London. And enigma_admin is right here in SF.”

“What was Bender’s email address?”

“J benderick at seattlephil dot org.”

“So he’s a musician. He plays for the Seattle Philharmonic. That’s why he knows music theory.” I opened the Seattle Philharmonic website on my phone and clicked through to a page that listed all the musicians. I scanned the list but no J. Benderick appeared. On a lark, I tapped a link labeled Meet the Director and there he was: Johann Benderick, Music Director and Principal Conductor of the orchestra. “He’s the music director!” I exclaimed.

“Fancy,” Ashna answered.

“Wait, they’re performing the Enigma Variations.”

“What the actual fuck?”

“Yeah, This coming weekend. Three performances. Matinee on Sunday.”

“You’d better get your tuxedo dry cleaned and book some tickets.”

“You think I should go?”

“Of course. You need to figure out how to corner Benderick and ask him about Wolhardt’s stolen notes. I think we need to eliminate all four of these people before we look at other suspects, don’t you?”

“They seem like the best leads we have. What about the other three? Can you figure out who they are?”

“Probably. Give me a few days. My team at work has a deadline coming up so I’m going to be pulling long days next week but I can try to crack them. It might be next weekend before I can give you anything.”

“All right. I’m going to let Wolhardt know we’re working on it. This one’s a little weird because he can’t pay us up front expenses. We get paid if we get his notes back and he wins the reward for cracking the enigma.”

“I guess I better get in touch with him then and make sure his supposed solution isn’t a bunch of bullshit.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“Okay,” Ashna said, rising and closing her laptop. “I’ll email him. Let’s check in before you go to Seattle.”

“Can’t wait. I love our little chats.”

Ashna flipped me off on her way out the door, then stuck her head back in. “Thanks for dinner by the way.”

“Always my pleasure.”