25

The e-mail arrived at approximately 10:35 p.m., and Nikki just happened to be online. She read the message immediately, her brow knit with confusion. Finney had ruled from the bench the day of the Stokes hearing. The drug case was already scheduled for trial, and as Nikki happened to know from bumping into Mitchell Taylor recently, Stokes was about to be indicted by a grand jury for conspiracy to commit murder as well.

So what was Finney doing? Why send a written opinion on the Stokes case out of the blue, especially when it was unnecessary? It obviously had something to do with the game show. And knowing Finney’s love of puzzles and codes, it probably contained a hidden message. She read the opinion a second time and tried to remember how the Stokes code worked. It had something to do with the dates—she was sure of that much.

Opinion in the Matter of Terrel Stokes

(Revised 6/7)

In our criminal justice system, things are seldom as clear as this case. A hearing was held in my courtroom on 5/9 with arguments becoming unusually tense. After hearing arguments, I took under advisement the issue of whether an out-of-court confession from an informant who was prepared to testify against Stokes but died on 4/11 under suspicious circumstances may be used at trial if prosecutors need it to prove their case.

The court is now prepared to rule on that issue.

Defendant Stokes, an alleged leader in a gang called the Black Gangster Disciples, told other gang members that a man named Antoine Carter was a confidential informant on the government’s witness list. (Stokes passed along this information, which he had received from his attorney, in a letter Stokes wrote from jail dated 4/5.) Did the letter help enlist gang members in an assassination attempt? This court thinks so.

The 4/5 letter, addressed to Wellington Farnsworth by the defendant, contained coded language presumably understood by Farnsworth to authorize the 4/11 hit. Wellington Farnsworth and others made sure they would have no trouble in the future with gang members turning state’s evidence. They cut out Carter’s tongue and allowed him to choke to death on his own blood.

In a reply letter to Stokes dated 4/12, Farnsworth and the others confirmed the hit. Farnsworth decided he would use the same code in his letter as the one Stokes had originally used to authorize the hit.

In the last 4 weeks, through various Westlaw searches and a review of the cases cited by the parties, the court has examined the relevant case law on this issue. It is clear that defendant Stokes procured the absence of a key witness at his trial by ordering a coded hit on the potential informant. Stokes will not be allowed to benefit from his own misconduct.

Accordingly, this court hereby rules that the out-of-court statement of the informant may be used at trial as well as the 4/5 letter that may account for the death of the informant. The fact that the 4/5 letter is a coded communication does not make it any less culpable. Since all pretrial matters are now resolved, the clerk of the court is ORDERED to set this case for trial on an expedited basis.

Judge Oliver G. Finney

Nikki pulled out a sheet of paper and her pen. She was pretty sure she remembered how that Stokes thing went. She would look at the month and count down that number of lines. Then she would look at the day of the month and count over that many words within the line. When she had finished her decoding, Nikki was left with the following message:

rule called was made death others law _____ _____

She stared at her solution. The first blank represented a line that didn’t even have enough words to fit the pattern, and the second blank indicated that the message didn’t seem to have enough lines. She was obviously doing something wrong.

Maybe the days represented how many lines down she needed to go and the months represented how many words in. She checked that method. More nonsense.

She tried going up the specified numbers of lines instead of down. Argh! Why did Finney have to make things so difficult?

She read the opinion again. It said revised on 6/7—today’s date. Was that a hint that Finney had revised the code used by Stokes? If so, she’d never figure it out.

But there was another hint. Wellington Farnsworth. The name rang a bell. She knew it wasn’t somebody involved in the Stokes case, but she couldn’t quite place the name. She stood and started pacing around her apartment. She grabbed some celery sticks from the refrigerator. Maybe they would help.

Wellington Farnsworth. Wellington Farnsworth. His name might be in Finney’s contact list. She could access the judge’s computer tomorrow. In the meantime, she decided to read through the message one more time.

When the card game ended, Finney slipped inside his condo and, under the watchful eyes of wall-mounted cameras, lit a cigar, stripped off his shirt, and sat down at his computer. He knew that everything he pulled up on his computer screen, every keystroke he entered, was being mirrored on another screen monitored by one of the show’s assistants. These next few hours would be critical.

On the one hand, he was probably overreacting. Dr. Kline thought she heard the show’s producer and director talk about having some dirt on the contestants that could be used for blackmail, that could keep the contestants from going to the cops. This afternoon Finney and all the others had found out exactly what the show’s producers had on them. And Javitts had given a plausible explanation for why they were taping those segments—in case any of the contestants didn’t play by the rules.

But on the other hand, some things still didn’t add up. And besides, Finney loved a good intellectual challenge. If the producers wanted to play “gotcha,” it was a game two could play.

First, he logged on to Westlaw—a password-protected Internet search engine that Finney had been using for the past ten years. Like thousands of other lawyers, Finney paid a monthly subscription fee that gave him access to every reported case in the country, categorized by jurisdiction and subject matter. Big law libraries with impressive-looking books were a thing of the past. Westlaw now provided all the information formerly housed in thousands of bound case volumes and more—real estate records, periodicals, newspapers, scientific treatises, regulatory rulings, company information databases, people-finding databases, just about anything a lawyer would need to do his or her job.

Finney had already used Westlaw a few times yesterday when he had been performing research for his cross-examination of Dr. Ando. Whoever was monitoring Finney’s research would not be surprised if he used it again tonight for more research about Buddhism.

Finney’s idea to use Westlaw as a pipeline for messages hit Finney right after dinner, just before he drafted the encoded message to Nikki. It would be ideal for several reasons. Nikki used his Westlaw account when she conducted research, so she knew his password. Also, Westlaw stored the history of past search requests in sequence under a tab labeled Research Trail, so Nikki would be able to log on and see what Finney had typed in earlier. Plus, the cumbersome search engine worked better if you entered a date to serve as a cutoff for information. So, for example, typing in “da (after 1/1/05)” in the magazine database meant you were looking for all articles dated after January 1, 2005. Quotes were used to designate an entire phrase to be searched as opposed to individual words. The use of the word and to connect two words or phrases meant that the article had to contain both words or phrases. The use of or meant an article had to contain at least one.

For tonight’s message, the dates would be critical.

Finney opened the database for “allnews” and plugged in his first search request:

da (after 1/1/05) Change and Buddhist and “codes of conduct”

Westlaw generated one article from the Journal of Sex Research, and Finney decided not to spend much time reviewing that one. A few seconds later, he was typing in his second request:

da (after 1/1/01) “Frequently quoted” and Buddha

This search generated six results, and a few of the articles were actually helpful. As Finney scrolled through synopses of the articles, he realized that this would take a lot longer than he had anticipated. Altogether, he would have to plug in around twenty different search requests. And to make it look good, he would have to scroll through several of the magazine articles produced by each request.

But he was having fun trying to think up legitimate search requests that would get his message across. Once Nikki figured it out—if Nikki figured it out—they would have a much faster system in place. Plus, they would have dealt with the two greatest weaknesses of any encryption system: the vulnerability of the key and the issue of predictability.

The history of codes was also the history of stolen or intercepted keys. It was the lesson the Nazis learned with their World War II encryption system named Enigma. They thought it was unbreakable. And it might have been if the Allies hadn’t constantly been stealing the code books that contained the keys to Enigma.

But a second problem could be equally fatal. If the same encryption system was used over and over, it became predictable and easy to crack. It was an inviolate rule acknowledged by every cipher expert—the ease of cracking a code increases in direct proportion to the number of messages that use the same method. Sooner or later, your adversary would figure out one small piece of the puzzle and then the rest fits into place.

Finney was too smart for all that. In just a few short hours, he had concocted a system in which it would be impossible for his adversaries to steal the key and, even better, in which the code itself would change every day. There was only one serious flaw in Finney’s otherwise-brilliant plan.

Nikki Moreno. Code-challenged Nikki Moreno. If she didn’t understand enough about the first message to get Wellington Farnsworth involved, then the plan would be a nonstarter.

Which triggered one other ironclad rule recognized by every cipher expert, and even a man as smart as Finney couldn’t figure a way around this one. Your ability to communicate in code is only as strong as your weakest link.

He tried to ignore that thought as he typed in his third Westlaw search for the night:

da (after 1/1/03) “Use of capital assets” or “financial resources” and Buddhists

This time he got a message that said, “No documents satisfy your query.” But that was okay. The search request looked legitimate. The rest would be in Nikki Moreno’s hands.