31
Twenty minutes later, Wellington and Nikki arrived at a Starbucks with wireless Internet access that just happened to be on the way to Virginia Beach. Nikki ordered a cinnamon spice mocha with a double shot of espresso. Wellington wanted water. Nikki checked her purse but was low on cash, though she had a few donation buckets full of it in the backseat of the Sebring. “Guess I’ll have to use a credit card,” she said, waiting for Wellington to take the hint.
Sure enough, her sidekick reached into his pocket just as she handed the card to the cashier. “Here,” he said, holding out his pen.
She frowned, took the pen, and signed the receipt. “Thanks,” Nikki said with a healthy dose of sarcasm as she handed the pen back.
“You’re welcome,” Wellington said.
Back at the table, Wellington lectured Nikki as he fired up his laptop. “They’ve done extensive germ studies, you know. Guess what surface consistently has the most germs?”
“The toilet handle,” Nikki said. “That’s why I use my foot.”
“Nope. It’s the pens at stores and restaurants that you sign credit card receipts with. You know how many people have left their germs on that pen? You know where their hands have been?”
“It’s a dangerous world,” Nikki said.
At Nikki’s request, Wellington turned his laptop toward her so she could log on to the Westlaw site. She suspected that a guy as tech savvy as Wellington would be able to retrieve the password later even if he didn’t see her enter it. Still, she didn’t have to make it easy for him.
Nikki checked under the tab marked Research Trail and took a sip of her drink. She sat forward. Finney had left a fresh research trail, complete with a number of words capitalized. Now that they knew the key for the introduction, deciphering this message using that key would be a piece of cake.
“Here it is,” she said, feeling like a CIA agent. “Write these capital letters down.”
Wellington took out his pencil and a pad of paper he had brought from the car while Nikki looked at the first search Finney conducted in this recent series:
da (after 1/1/03) Hearsay and “Proof of Resurrection” and “firsthand Knowledge”
“H-P-R-K from the first search,” Nikki said. “And here’s the second one: R-M-G. And the third is just I-L. Three searches. Must be a short message.”
Nikki sat back and took another sip of her coffee as Wellington decoded the letters using the atbash key they had discovered. She noticed the edges of his mouth turn down in worry. “What?” she asked.
Wellington looked at his paper as he spoke. “It says, ‘Skip intro.’” He began double-checking the letters.
It took a second for the implications to sink in. “You have got to be kidding,” Nikki sputtered. “‘Skip intro’? What kind of message is that?”
She leaned forward and Wellington turned his paper toward her. Skip intro? she thought. Now’s a fine time to tell us!
“I was afraid of that,” Wellington said calmly. He hadn’t even opened his bottled water yet. “The problem is that the atbash cipher ends up replacing all the popular letters of the alphabet with letters that are hardly ever used. A becomes Z. C becomes X. E becomes V. It’s very difficult to use letters like Z, X, and V in a Westlaw search request without looking suspicious. Judge Finney probably thought he would be ill-advised to use this cipher to send us a long message.”
“He’s the one who told us to start with the intro!” Nikki said, her voice rising. She loved Finney, but this was ridiculous.
“I know,” Wellington said softly.
Nikki needed to vent, but it was hard to argue with a guy who didn’t fight back. And even harder to argue with a judge who was thousands of miles away. “All that work we did,” Nikki complained.
Wellington looked at her like maybe she had used the word we a little loosely.
“What?” she shot back, though Wellington hadn’t actually said anything. “I deciphered the first message and helped with this one.”
“I didn’t say you didn’t.”
Nikki sighed and slumped in her chair. What was the use of getting upset if nobody was going to put up a fight?
“Well,” she said, “at least we know it’s not a huge crisis, or Finney would have had the next message waiting for us.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Wellington said. But Nikki wished he would argue with something. Anything. Right now she just needed a good argument so she could get rid of her frustrations.
Instead, Wellington was still focused on the details of the code. “We need to put some Westlaw searches in as a reply,” he told Nikki. “That way Finney will at least know we’re with him.”
Nikki found it hard to disagree with that logic, though she tried to think of a reason to do so anyway. It took Wellington about fifteen minutes to construct and send two simple Westlaw searches that conveyed to Finney their own message: “OK.”
That done, Nikki was ready to head to a certain Virginia Beach dance floor.
“Do you mind if I take the book home so I can work on the next cipher?” Wellington asked.
Nikki eyed Finney’s book and suddenly felt territorial. In her opinion, she was in charge of this espionage outfit. Wellington was just a decipherment specialist. “Tell you what,” she said. “Let me write down the code letters for chapter 1, and you can take those with you. I’ll call if we get another message on Westlaw.”
Nikki opened the book to chapter 1 and began writing. This batch looked every bit as jumbled as the one before, but she had no doubt they would solve it. It read:
SANHOVVORYBUNKSAQLTYA
JLRNRGTSYQOFNOKISQTSAFOJN
SAQLTYACNRTRFAQBRS
Nikki suddenly had an idea, one inspired by her memory of Farnsworth’s corgi. “How far is this Starbucks from your house?” she asked.
“Twenty-five minutes.”
“Good—about halfway. This will be our rendezvous. If I call and we decide to meet at a certain time, we’ll both know without saying it that this will be the spot.”
“Is that really necessary?” Wellington asked.
Nikki looked around as if national security were at stake. “You can never be too sure,” she whispered.