35

To combat the heat, Nikki decided to go with a mocha Frappuccino light. Before getting in line, she checked with Wellington. “Water?” she asked.

Wellington glanced up from his notes. He had a spiral notebook with several pages of penciled charts. “Yeah, thanks. You need a pen?”

“I’ve got cash today, Wellington.”

When Nikki returned to the table with their drinks, she dug deep into her latest wardrobe addition—a Fendi Spy bag necessitated by the dictates of style and the recent Judge Finney escapades. Given the circumstances, she couldn’t even wait for the designer bag to go on sale as she normally would. It was an oversize black leather slouchy version with a hidden storage compartment inside, from which she retrieved a folded piece of paper and her trusty copy of the Cross Examination book. “Here’s the message from Finney,” she said, handing the paper to Wellington. “I wrote down all the capital letters.”

Nikki nursed her drink while Wellington studied the hodgepodge of letters in front of him. Nikki waited for him to pull out the key and translate.

“Well?” she asked after giving him five or six full seconds.

“I don’t know,” Wellington said. “I haven’t figured out the code yet.”

Nikki leaned back. What have you been doing all morning? she wanted to ask. But she knew she had to keep her cryptoanalyzer guy motivated. “It’s harder than the first one, isn’t it?” Nikki asked like an old code veteran. She opened the Cross Examination book to the page where the letters were embedded, turning it so that Wellington could see. “But I’ve got a few ideas.”

She tried to check her watch without being too obvious. She had told Judge Fitzsimmons that she might be a little late getting back from lunch. But she hadn’t planned on a full-fledged code-breaking session.

“Here are my preliminary results,” Nikki said, pointing to the page. She had used a red pen to scribble in her guesses on the first page of chapter 1. In a few cases, she had crossed out her first guesses and replaced them with others. Wellington frowned at the ink-covered page as if Nikki had drawn a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

“I didn’t really have time to do that whole frequency analysis thing,” Nikki admitted. “But I did notice that these three letters, S-A-Q, repeated a couple of times, so I assumed they stood for the.”

Wellington frowned. “That won’t work,” he said.

“I know,” Nikki said. “So then I figured that maybe they stood for and. That’s my second set of marks.”

“I don’t think so,” Wellington replied. “I tried that too. I’ve got two summer school classes that pretty much took up the whole morning, but I did take a quick run at some of the more obvious possibilities.” He turned to the second page of his notebook. “The most common trigraphs in the English language—” He must have noticed the look on Nikki’s face. “The three letters that appear together most frequently, in descending order, are the, and, tha, ent, and ion.” He shook his head. “None of those work.”

“Don’t look at me,” Nikki said. “I don’t know a trigraph from an atbash.”

Wellington thought about this for a minute. “How did you know about the atbash cipher in the first place?”

Nikki explained, as briefly as possible, about her conversation with the judge after the Stokes hearing. This put Wellington even deeper in thought, as if Nikki had simply ceased to exist.

“Well?” she asked at last. Being invisible was not one of her strong suits.

“I think reading the book might act as kind of a shortcut for deciphering the code,” Wellington said. “It might help me know what Judge Finney was thinking when he wrote the chapter in question.”

Nikki could see where this was headed and wasn’t excited about the idea of parting with her one copy of the book. “I don’t know . . .”

“Think about it, Ms. Moreno.”

She withered him with a look.

“Nikki, I mean. The atbash cipher was a religious cipher used by Old Testament scribes. Have you ever read the introduction to the book?”

Nikki shrugged. “Sort of skimmed it.”

“Well, I read the introduction last night during the party. The book is about how the lawyers and scribes cross-examined Jesus and, of course, His ultimate cross-examination by Pilate as well. It shows how Jesus turned their hostile questions into opportunities to teach or minister.”

“I figured that much from the title.”

“The point Finney made in the introduction is that he discovered a lot of himself in the Pharisees, particularly in the questioning and cynicism that characterized them. He said, ‘To become more like Christ, I first had to understand how much I was already like the scribes and Pharisees.’ Or something like that. In other words, this concept that Finney is unpacking in the introduction is counterintuitive, exactly the opposite of what you might expect.”

“Like A being Z and Z being A,” Nikki interrupted, finishing the thought.

“Exactly. And it seems to me that the key to understanding some of these codes might just be to read the book.” He glanced furtively at the book on the table. “I can run my frequency analysis techniques, but that might take a few hours. It might save us time if I just read chapter 1.”

Nikki found it hard to argue with Wellington’s logic—no surprise there—so she reluctantly left the book with him and told him she would call in a couple of hours. By tomorrow, her new Cross Examination book would probably arrive. She had already called several local bookstores, but they no longer stocked it.

Somehow, though, she would have to teach Wellington a thing or two about priorities. What was he doing going to class when there were codes to be solved?

Two hours later Nikki received the phone call while sitting in her small office adjacent to Judge Finney’s chambers. Wellington’s name showed up on caller ID, so Nikki answered in an appropriately secretive tone—not quite a whisper, but almost. “Wellington?”

“I solved the code, Ms. Moreno.”

Nikki ground her teeth. For a genius, this guy sure was slow at certain things. “Great,” she said. “But it’s Nikki, remember?”

“Oh yeah, sorry. Do you want to meet?”

Nikki thought about the prospects of driving a half hour to Starbucks. What if it was another one of those Skip chapter one–type messages? And what was the likelihood of someone’s tapping her cell phone, anyway?

“I don’t think we need to, Wellington,” Nikki said. “Nobody’s listening to this phone. You can just give me the message.”

“Are you sure?”

Just a few seconds ago, Nikki had plugged her credit card number into an Internet site, and for all she knew, some hacker might be accessing it right now. She was getting ready to do it again. Life was full of risks. “Yes, Wellington, I’m sure.”

“All right.” She could hear the sigh coming through the phone line. These cipher guys sure were paranoid. “But don’t you want to hear how I solved chapter 1?”

Not really, Nikki thought, but she knew she couldn’t tell Wellington that. “Of course.”

“Well, I assumed maybe it was another substitution cipher, so I started with a standard frequency analysis—checking out individual letters, digraphs, and trigraphs.” His tone conveyed the excitement of a morning deejay. “One thing that stood out was the letter combination S-A, which was used four times. Well, I naturally suspected that those letters represented T-H, since that combination is by far the most commonly occurring digraph in the English language.”

“Naturally.”

“Since the code started with the letters S-A-N, and I knew that S-A stood for T-H, I followed a hunch that N represented E, since a lot of sentences start with the. Another reason this made sense is because the code letter N also happened to be adjacent to more letters than any other code letter—behavior absolutely consistent with the most popular and sociable vowel.”

“Mmm,” Nikki grunted, showing her enthusiasm. She was distracted by the jean styles she was now checking out on the Internet.

“After I had those three letters, I used what’s called a crib. Since the first chapter is all about the cross-examination of Jesus before Pontius Pilate, I guessed that the message might have the name of Jesus in it. I already knew that N stood for the E in Jesus. And of course, the word Jesus uses the letter S twice—immediately following the E and again three spaces after the E. So I looked in the code text for a place where the same letter immediately followed the N and occurred again three letters after the N.”

“I see.” She had her eye on the low-cut Duchesse stretch denim jeans with a cool pink pocket embroidery and a light-blue vintage wash that made them look old as dirt.

“Sure enough, I found the word Jesus. And so now I knew all the letters in that word as well as T and H. From there, it was just a matter of time and a few educated guesses.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Sixty-eight bucks. She ought to be able to do better than that.

“Chapter 1 of Finney’s book is all about how Jesus maintained incredible dignity and grace in front of Pilate and how He answered through His actions the ultimate question that troubled Pilate: What is truth? So when you solve the code, the hidden message in chapter 1 of Finney’s book says this: ‘The law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.’”

Nikki clicked to add the jeans to her cart. You couldn’t stress out over price when you found exactly the jeans you’re looking for.

“Still there?” Wellington asked.

“Yeah, sure. Good work, Sherlock. Listen, I’ve got about a million things going on this afternoon, so why don’t you just go ahead and give me Finney’s new message so we can figure out what to do next.”

“Okay,” Wellington said. “But one more thing first . . . and this is the coolest part of all.”

Nikki bit her tongue. Hard.

“A lot of cryptologists use a key phrase when they’re doing a substitution cipher so they can remember how they did the substitution without having to write it down. That way, the cipher alphabet is the key phrase first and then the remaining letters of the alphabet in their correct order, starting where the key phrase ends. Are you on your computer?”

How does he know? “Um, sure.”

“Good, check your e-mail.”

Nikki pulled up an e-mail from Wellington.

“I figured even if they happened to be listening, they wouldn’t have access to your e-mail as well,” Wellington continued. “Check out the key phrase our friend used at the start of the cipher alphabet.”

Nikki glanced at the simple table in the message Wellington had sent. “Very clever,” she said.

“Just in case you had any doubt who wrote the book,” Wellington said.

“Sounds like the judge had too much time on his hands,” Nikki replied, “which is certainly not true of me right now. So what’s the message in Finney’s Westlaw searches using this key?”

“You want me to say it over the phone?” Wellington asked. “That’s why I sent you the key, so you could figure it out.”

“Okay.” Nikki started working through the letters one at a time. “Hold on.” Let’s see. F is the first capital letter in Finney’s Westlaw search, so that would actually be C. A is the second letter, so that would actually be H. Or is it the other way around?

“This is insane,” Nikki concluded after a few minutes. “Why don’t you just tell me Finney’s message?”

“Are you sure?”

Nikki grunted. “Do the words Black Gangster Disciples and cat’s got my tongue mean anything to you?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind, Wellington. Just read me the message.”

“Okay. Here’s what Finney’s message says: ‘Check ties between Murphy, McCormack, and Javitts and my speedy-trial cases.’”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Do you know what he’s talking about when he says ‘speedy-trial cases’?”

“Not yet,” Nikki said. “But I’ve got ways of finding out.”