47

Early Tuesday morning, the Paradise Island Snorkel Club convened about fifty feet from shore, but this time Dr. Hokoji Ando joined them. They were chest deep in the water—nearly neck deep for Ando, who wore baggy swim trunks and a long white T-shirt hanging so low that it nearly covered the shorts.

Though they all had snorkel masks propped on their heads and most wore fins, they knew they weren’t fooling anyone. Gus, Horace, and a few other cameramen filmed the entire event from shore, no doubt zooming in on the participants’ faces.

Finney coughed, then said, “Cover your mouths when you’re talking about last night or do so with your backs to the shore. We don’t need any lip-readers.”

The others nodded, though Hadji couldn’t resist glancing over his shoulder at the camera crews.

“Why don’t you just wave and tell them what we’re doing?” Kareem sneered.

“Somebody needs a nap,” the Swami said.

“Boys,” Kline said, “this is not the time.”

“First of all, Victoria, great job spotting the kayak,” Finney said, bringing a thin smile of appreciation from Dr. Kline. The plan had been for Finney to make his “escape” in the Hobie—much easier to spot.

Knowing that the only cameras on them while they slept were the stationary cameras in the walls of their condos, Finney was to make his escape attempt precisely at midnight. Victoria was to be walking on the beach with McCormack, making sure that his back patio door had been left unlocked. Hadji, who was the most computer savvy of the group, had been assigned to check out McCormack’s computer.

Finney turned to Hadji. “What’d you find?”

“Not much,” the Swami said. “I was able to log on to his laptop, but his e-mail account is password protected. I checked his documents file and didn’t find anything unusual. I did learn that I won the first viewers’ verdict, which more or less restores your faith in the system.”

Kareem frowned, but Hadji pretended not to notice. “I searched around the condo a while but really didn’t come up with anything. In fact, it was weird because I didn’t even find the kind of stuff you might expect—concepts for the upcoming shows, files on the contestants, surprises they were going to spring on us, that type of stuff.”

Ando stood impassively while Victoria splashed water in her mask.

Kareem shot her a hard look. “I find that strange too,” he said. “Especially after what I found.”

“You got in?” Finney asked.

“Murphy must have been on his back patio when the commotion started,” Kareem said. “When I sprinted over to his condo, the back patio door was unlocked. His laptop, just inside the screen door, had been left on hibernate.”

This was a bonus that nobody had counted on. When they put the plan together, Kareem, almost as an afterthought, had volunteered to check out Murphy’s condo, just in case he left it unlocked in his haste to arrive at Finney’s escape scene.

“What’d you find out?” The question came from Victoria.

“Plenty.” The contestants huddled closer as Kareem filled them in. “There were e-mail exchanges with an AOL account user named Seeker discussing possible alternatives for the last two episodes, all of which assumed that one of the finalists on the island would be dead.”

Finney watched the group suck in a collective breath. This was a poker-faced bunch, but he could read the shock on every face but Ando’s.

“Murphy and this guy were discussing various scenarios for handling this ‘tragedy.’ They talked about having a tribute show to the dead contestant or just canceling the last two episodes and issuing a press release.

“They even discussed method of death,” Kareem continued. “How to make it look natural but still contain religious symbolism. And in one e-mail, where Murphy mentioned that all the contestants might be getting suspicious, they talked about staging a tragedy that would eliminate everyone but the eventual winner.”

“Eliminate—is that the word they used?” Kline asked.

Kareem nodded, while Hadji cast a wary glance toward shore. Finney could see the reality of the threat settle on the faces around him. Yesterday they were trying to win a reality show. Now they were trying to figure out if their lives were in danger. Everyone was on edge.

“If Kareem’s right,” Victoria said, “then meeting like this only arouses suspicions and puts us all in more danger.”

Hadji spoke next. “Amazing how I didn’t find anything like that on McCormack’s computer.”

Kareem’s expression was one of guarded distrust. “And your point is?”

Hadji threw his hands in the air. “I’m just saying it’s pretty convenient that the threat doesn’t materialize until the finalists are selected. What a great incentive for the rest of us to back off over the next three days and make sure we don’t make the finals.”

Kareem bristled at this assault on his integrity. For a second, Finney thought he might have to step in front of the big man in order to give Hadji a head start toward deeper waters.

“But it’s consistent with what McCormack’s been saying to me,” Victoria Kline interjected. The comment seemed to relax Kareem a little, and Finney saw a chance to call the Muslim’s bluff.

“Are you prepared to testify about what you found?” Finney asked.

“Of course,” Kareem said without hesitation.

“Then before Saturday arrives,” Finney said, “I’ll have this show shut down.”

“How?” Victoria Kline asked.

“Leave that to me.”

After the other contestants returned to the shore, Finney and the Swami stood in knee-deep water doing some stretching exercises that the Swami had conjured up. He assured Finney and the others the exercises included no religious components of yoga, but the other contestants declined anyway.

Just like Finney knew they would.

The two men faced the ocean as they stretched and slowly went through the motions of the Swami’s routine. Their mikes were still onshore, and they were out of earshot of the others.

“Do you believe him?” Hadji asked.

“I don’t know,” Finney said. “He didn’t blink when I claimed I would shut down the show.”

“C’mon,” Hadji replied. “Murphy just happens to leave his patio door open. And just happens to leave the computer on hibernate. And just happens not to delete incriminating e-mails?”

“It’s a stretch,” Finney admitted. He wanted to mull it over some more but knew they didn’t have much time. “What’d you find?”

“Nothing unusual on Kline, Ando, or Javitts,” the Swami said, describing what his Internet search had uncovered. Unknown to the other contestants, the Swami had used his time on McCormack’s computer to freely search the Internet, using Westlaw and other databases as instructed by Finney to obtain personal information on “persons of interest.” Finney was implementing the principle of redundancy: get some of the same information from two different sources—in this case, the Swami and Nikki—and then cross-check.

“Kareem?” Finney asked.

“Two things that made me suspicious of him even before he gave us that line about Murphy. First, the city where he grew up in Lebanon is right in the middle of Hezbollah country.”

“The Party of God,” Finney said.

“Exactly. And second, he’s served as a consultant to some of the defense lawyers representing the Guantánamo Bay detainees.”

Finney started processing the implications, but the Swami had quickly moved on.

“McCormack had a daughter who committed suicide. He sued the psychiatrist who was treating her at the time for post-traumatic stress disorder. Some kind of rape or sexual assault the prior year. Suit got thrown out before it went to court.”

One of the pushier associate producers called to the two men from shore. They needed to put their mikes back on, she said.

“How long ago?” Finney asked, thinking of the speedy-trial defendants whom Finney had released five years earlier.

“About six or seven years,” the Swami said.

Finney filed it away, realizing that the speedy-trial defendants were in jail at the time. “Murphy and Randolph?” he asked.

The associate producer shouted again. Finney and the Swami turned and started walking slowly toward shore. “Murphy’s got lots of stuff. Abused an ex-wife. A fundamentalist Christian father who’s boycotting this show. Daughters who would probably be about the same age as that store clerk you described, though there’s no indication any of them died recently.”

The Swami lowered his voice as they approached shore. “As for Mr. Preston Edgar Randolph, just like you suspected, he hasn’t done much agency work; he’s too busy suing everybody in sight. He’s been up to his eyeballs recently in cases against the Catholic church for abusive priests. I ran out of time researching the ages of his daughters.”

“Thanks,” Finney said, his mind already rapidly processing the new data. He was envisioning his trusted yellow legal pad, with a straight line drawn down the middle separating the incriminating and exculpating information for each person of interest.

“I could have just sent an e-mail to the Feds last night if I really thought we were in danger,” the Swami said.

“I know.”

“Are you really going to try and shut down the show?”

“I don’t want to,” Finney replied. “But I’m not sure we’ve got much choice. What if Kareem is telling the truth?”

The Swami’s twisted face registered his doubt. But he’d already made his case and apparently decided to just change the subject. “Just so you’ll know, Judge O, I took a peek at the results last night. You’re getting a lot of votes from viewers, but you’re not helping yourself with those cigars.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Before heading to work on Tuesday morning, Nikki logged on to Westlaw and discovered the new search requests. She called Wellington immediately. “We need the key for chapter 3,” she said. “Finney sent a new message.”

“I already solved chapter 3,” Wellington boasted. “I was up until one in the morning working on it.”

Nikki knew the drill, though she really didn’t have the patience for this. Wellington wanted to feel appreciated. She would have to listen to all the details of his brilliant deciphering of the code. Nikki had given up working on the codes herself. Some people had a gift for cracking codes; she had other assets.

“What kind of code is it?” Nikki asked. She found herself yawning, though she’d had plenty of sleep last night.

“Over the phone again?”

“Yeah. I think it’s safe.”

“Okay. Well, did you know that Edgar Allan Poe was a code freak?” Wellington asked.

“That’s a question, Wellington. You know I don’t do questions.”

“I forgot. Anyway, Poe was into cryptanalysis big-time. One of his most famous stories, ‘The Gold-Bug,’ revolved around the solution to a cipher. Plus, he concealed anagrams and hidden messages in many of his poems.”

“Fascinating.”

“He even conducted his own cryptographic challenge, boasting to readers in a magazine article that he could solve any substitution ciphers they sent to him. For the next six months, he solved every cipher but two. He ended the contest because he said that solving ciphers was consuming too much of his time.”

“I know the feeling,” Nikki said absentmindedly. She was sure this story had a point and equally sure that Wellington wasn’t coming to it anytime soon. Still, she had learned that rushing Wellington only seemed to prolong the process.

“He told readers that the two ciphers he couldn’t solve came from a gentleman named W. B. Tyler, whom Poe claimed to highly respect. He challenged his readers to solve those two ciphers. His readers couldn’t solve them, and scholars have never found any proof that this Tyler even existed. Many believe that these ciphers were written by Poe himself, hoping that nobody would solve them until after he died. Poe, as you may know, had an obsession for speaking from the grave.”

“Mmm,” Nikki mumbled.

“Poe eventually died, and for nearly a hundred and fifty years, the ciphers went unsolved. But then the public became fascinated with the ciphers again during the latter part of the twentieth century. A website and contest were established, and a gentleman named Gil Broza finally solved the last cipher in October of 2000. Think about that: Poe speaking from the grave more than a hundred and fifty years after the publication of his last book.”

“I never really liked Poe,” Nikki admitted. “I always thought Stephen King was scarier.”

“Yeah, but you can’t really compare Poe with King. Poe was a brilliant classical author who—”

“Wellington!” Nikki said sharply, gaining his attention. “How does this tie in with chapter 3?”

He hesitated, then picked back up with the same enthusiastic tone as before. “Chapter 3 is about how the Pharisees and lawyers tried to earn points with God by following a bunch of picky rules, but Jesus was more concerned about matters of the heart. You know what the title of the chapter is?”

Another question, Nikki thought, but Wellington caught himself before she could speak.

“That’s a rhetorical question, of course,” he said. “The title of the chapter is ‘Bloody Band-Aids and Telltale Hearts.’”

“So he used the Poe cipher,” Nikki said.

“Exactly.”

That established, Nikki pulled out the sheet of paper where she had recorded the capital letters from Finney’s Westlaw search. “Let me read you the capital letters so you can tell me what they mean using the Poe cipher,” she said.

“Um . . . it’s not that easy,” Wellington said. “It’s a complicated cipher using six different alphabets to encode the text. It uses regular capital letters and small capital letters and lowercase letters and even upside-down letters, though it appears Finney tried to avoid the inverted symbols where possible. That’s what made it so hard to solve—several different code letters for each plaintext letter. Frequency analysis didn’t work.”

“So what does that mean?” Nikki asked, checking her watch.

“I’ll need to see the Westlaw searches myself,” Wellington claimed. “Just to be certain.”

Nikki hesitated, a small voice urging her to be careful. There was something about giving Wellington the password to Finney’s Westlaw account that bothered Nikki. It wasn’t just that this would take her out of the driver’s seat; it was something more than that, though she couldn’t put her finger on it.

But she couldn’t think of any logical reason to deny Wellington the password. After all, Finney was the one who told her to get Wellington involved in the first place. Yet her emotions were generally more reliable than her logic.

“I can meet you at the usual place on my way to work,” she said. “I’ll pull up the search requests on my laptop and let you look at them.”

“Cool,” Wellington said.

Forty-five minutes later at the Starbucks, Wellington handed Nikki the decoded message.

NEED RELIGIOUS BACGROUND ON MURPHY MCCORMAC AND AVITTS

Nikki felt a surge of disappointment. She kept expecting some big revelation from Finney and instead kept getting more research assignments. It felt like her law-clerking days all over again. He would send her off on some wild-goose chase of research and never tell her why. Then, when he had all the information necessary, he would wink and unveil some dazzling resolution for the case.

But there was another issue that bothered Nikki about this cipher. She placed the paper on the table between them. “You sure this is right? Several of the words are misspelled, and the judge is usually pretty careful about things like that.”

“It’s the nature of Poe’s cipher,” Wellington explained. “There were certain letters not contained in the writing submitted by the mysterious Mr. Tyler. Since his underlying document didn’t use the letters J or K, for example, there is no code text for them. In Judge Finney’s book, he just substituted an asterisk for those letters, but he can’t do that using the Westlaw searches since we key in on capital letters. That’s why a few of the words containing those letters appear to be misspelled.”

That made sense to Nikki, at least as much sense as the decryption process usually made. “What do you make of all this?” she asked, thinking out loud. “First we get this message that things are tense and Finney needs our help. Then we’re told to check ties between Murphy, Javitts, McCormack, and the speedy-trial cases. Then Finney wants to know the location of the island and whether William Lassiter is connected to the show. In the meantime, Preston Randolph calls and he’s all bent out of shape about what’s happening on the island. And then, this morning, we get this message asking us to check the religious backgrounds on these guys.”

Wellington thought for a long time, and Nikki could imagine the big brain cranking away like a high-speed computer. He stared into space, processing the bits of information they had stumbled across—the secret messages, the shows they had watched, Preston Randolph’s concerns. Nikki took a sip of her drink and watched Wellington’s brow furrow deeper and deeper like a software program freezing your computer until you reboot it.

“Wellington?”

He shook out of the haze. “I’m not sure what’s going on, Nikki. Seems to me that Judge Finney is suspicious about the guys running this show and thinks they’re out to get some of the contestants. Maybe Judge Finney wants to know if he’s their target, so he’s having us check their connections to the speedy-trial cases and their religious backgrounds.”

Duh, Nikki thought. She didn’t need a computer to tell her that. She found herself wondering why God never seemed to combine book smarts and common sense in the same package.

“Out to get him?” Nikki echoed Wellington’s words. “You mean make the judge look bad and make sure he doesn’t win the show, or you mean really out to get him, as in eliminate him?”

More thinking by Wellington, but this time the computer didn’t freeze up. “I don’t think the judge is in any real trouble,” he said. “Otherwise, he would have just sent a message for us to get the cops involved.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Nikki said. Maybe it was just Finney being Finney—figuring out a way to outsmart the reality game producers. In that context it would make sense for Finney to inquire about their religious backgrounds. But their connections to the speedy-trial cases? Nikki had a much harder time explaining that one.