Silently, almost reverently, Paul slipped Trish’s bloodstained flash drive out of my fingers. ‘Why don’t you pour a couple of glasses of wine. I’ll be right back.’
By the time he returned to the kitchen, I had filled two glasses to the brim with Sauvignon Blanc. Paul eyed them critically.
‘It may be a long evening,’ I said.
‘Here,’ he said as he returned Trish’s flash drive. ‘I went over it with an alcohol wipe.’
I suppressed a shiver as I curled my fingers protectively around the freshly cleaned data storage device.
Carrying the wine for both of us, Paul led the way down to our basement office where we settled in, side by side, in front of our desktop computer’s twenty-seven-inch screen.
I plugged the flash drive into a vacant USB port in the back, and when its icon appeared on the desktop, moused over it. ‘Here goes!’ I said, double clicking.
A list of files populated the screen. We leaned in.
‘Oh, oh,’ Paul said.
‘What?’
Paul moused over one of the files: Page1.gpg. ‘See that extension? These files have been encrypted.’
The flash drive held forty-three such files, labeled Page1.gpg to Page43.gpg, as well as several files with .exe extensions, indicating that they might be files used to execute other programs.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked, although I feared I knew the answer.
‘It means that your friend Trish is more clever than I ever gave her credit for. She encrypted these files using an open source encryption tool called PGP, which you’ll be amused to learn stands for “Pretty Good Privacy”.’
‘So it means we can’t read the files without this Pretty Good Privacy program.’
‘Right.’
‘Can we get the program? Buy it? Download it from the Internet?’
‘We could, but it’s more complicated than that. Even if we had the program, even if we downloaded and installed it right now, unless we have Trish’s private key …’
‘We’re screwed.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You’re the mathematician in the family,’ I said. ‘Can’t you crack the code?’
‘Let’s look.’ Using the Text.edit program, Paul clicked on Page1.gpg and opened the file:
‘It’s gibberish,’ I said.
‘You noticed?’ He laughed. ‘Not even NSA could crack this file without having the key.’
‘Can you tell what kind of files they are by looking?’ I asked. ‘Documents? Photos? Emails?’
Paul shook his head. ‘Maybe the spooks over at NSA could, but I can’t.’
‘But Trish wanted me to give the files to a reporter at the New York Times. How the heck will he read it, without the key, I mean.’
‘Was she specific about that, Hannah? That you give it to the Times? Not the Washington Post or the Baltimore Sun?’
I nodded. ‘Very.’
‘Two possibilities. Either she made arrangements in advance and provided the reporter with her private key, or more than likely she encrypted the files using the New York Times’s own public key, knowing that’s where she was intending to send it.’ He hunched over the keyboard and tapped away. ‘Look, here’s the tips page from the Times. Anyone can download their public key from here. They give complete instructions on how to process and submit files. It’s designed to protect the identify of whistle-blowers.’
‘Well, damn.’ I reached over Paul to seize control of the mouse. I made a backup copy of the flash drive and saved it to my computer under a file folder named ‘Trip to Grand Canyon’, then ejected the flash drive icon and jiggled the device out of the USB port. ‘Maybe I won’t have to. There’s still two weeks to go before whatever it is that Trish said is supposed to happen happens. Or, it doesn’t.’
‘The only person who seems to be left out of this equation is our good friend Peter. Where the blazes is he?’ Paul said.
‘All indications are that Trish and Peter left their house together early on Thursday morning. But, when Trish called me on Friday, she said she just couldn’t do it anymore. I don’t know what “it” is, but if it was something Peter was involved in, maybe she’s left him to sort it out on his own.’
Paul frowned thoughtfully. ‘Peter’s a college professor who sells home appliances, he’s not an inside trader or running some sort of Ponzi scheme.’
‘That we know of,’ I hastened to add. ‘But I tend to agree with you. Trish told me that the case had something to do with the Lynx Media Corporation. I can’t think of any way Peter could be involved with Lynx, can you?’
Paul parked his reading glasses on top of his head. ‘Maybe in a past life.’
‘Which brings us back to Elizabeth Stefano,’ I said. ‘Clearly, it’s Trish who had a past life.’ I opened the top right-hand desk drawer where I keep paperclips, staples and Post-it notes and tucked the flash drive for safekeeping into a slot underneath my checkbook.
‘While you were fetching dinner, I Googled “Elizabeth Stefano” and came up with over four thousand hits. There are even more Liz Stefanos in this world. I narrowed it down some by eliminating the third grader on the honor roll at St Timothy’s Catholic School and the gal who sells real estate in Fresno …’
I was about to close the drawer, when my eyes landed on Trish’s cell phone. I picked it up and waved it in my husband’s face. ‘This! This! If there was some way I could hack into this, maybe we could figure out what the hell is going on, but none of her passwords worked. Here,’ I said, handing the phone over to him, ‘maybe you’ll have better luck. I’ve tried every trick in my rather limited repertoire.’
Paul powered on the phone and stared at Trish’s screensaver until it faded to black. He tapped the home button again and the photograph reappeared, one that I already knew by heart: a carnival fairground taken at twilight, its midway ablaze with color and light. ‘You tried all her passwords?’
‘Amazon to Zulily,’ I said.
‘Do you still have that address book?’
‘Of course. Shall I go get it?’
‘Please.’
When I returned with the book, Paul said, ‘Think about your own accounts, Hannah. Which one would be the biggest pain in the ass to reset?’
‘My bank,’ I said. ‘Everything I buy online is linked to BB&T. Remember when my credit card was stolen? I thought I’d lose my mind.’
‘So, what bank does Trish use?’
‘Wells Fargo. There at the bottom.’ I waggled a finger over the entry. ‘But that password was bogus, too. Wait a minute!’ I snatched the address book out of his hand so quickly that he flinched. ‘Another one I’d hate to change is my Apple iCloud account. All my Apple devices are synched to it.’
‘And Trish uses a Mac.’
‘Indeed she does. A MacBook Pro. I imagine the police have taken custody of it by now,’ I said, ‘but until this afternoon, it was sitting on that little desk in her kitchen.’ I scanned Trish’s list again. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t notice this before, but she didn’t write down her iCloud password.’
‘Maybe not any place obvious,’ Paul said, reaching out for the book. ‘Let me have a look.’
While Paul leafed through the pages, I trotted upstairs to top up our wine glasses. When I returned, he was wearing a look of triumph. ‘She’s a clever girl, your friend Trish.’
‘You found it?’
‘In the Cs. Imbedded in a recipe for cloud bread, disguised as a website URL.’ He smiled. ‘You do the honors.’
I commandeered the keyboard. At the Apple website, while Paul read out Trish’s login and the lengthy combination of letters, numbers and symbols that she had chosen for her password, I typed. ‘Moment of truth,’ I said, and hit return.
‘Good news, bad news,’ I grumbled. I was in, but Trish had taken the precaution of protecting her iCloud account with two-factor identification. ‘If I were Queen of the World,’ I said, ‘there would be no such thing as two-factor identification.’
From its face-up position on the desk, I could see that Trish’s phone was receiving messages from Apple containing the authentication code I needed, but I couldn’t unlock the phone to actually see the code. ‘Talk to me!’ I yelled, shaking the obstinate phone, demanding it cough up its secrets.
The corner of Paul’s lip turned up in a sly smile. ‘What do you do when you upgrade your iPhone, Hannah?’
I stopped threatening Trish’s phone. After a moment’s thought, I said, ‘You take the SIM out of the old one and put it in the new one?’
‘Bingo!’ Paul said, tipping an imaginary hat.
‘What are you getting at …’ I started to say before the penny dropped.
I aimed my finger at him, like a gun. ‘Hand over your cell phone, mister.’
Paul raised up on one hip and eased his iPhone out of a back pocket in his chinos. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
I scrabbled in the desk drawer for one of the paper clips, straightened it and jammed the tip into a tiny hole on the side of Trish’s phone, ejecting the tray where her SIM card lived. Once I had the tiny SIM in hand, I repeated the process with Paul’s phone, carefully replacing his SIM card with Trish’s.
When Paul rebooted his phone, it now had Trish’s telephone number.
Back on the desktop computer, I revisited Trish’s iCloud account. This time, I clicked the link that said I hadn’t received the two-factor passcode it sent earlier, requesting another one. Almost instantly, Paul’s phone buzzed with the code. When I entered the code into the site, voila! I could see her Apple Mail, her notes, her bookmarks, her photos, her tunes … everything that she’d synched to and stored in the Cloud.
With Paul looking over my shoulder, sipping wine, I spent the next half hour impersonating Trish. At every website, I said I’d forgotten her password. The website would obligingly confirm her identify by texting a code to Trish’s registered phone number which went, of course, straight to Paul’s phone. Once I was logged in using that code, I could change both the password and the trusted phone number associated with that particular account.
It took the rest of the evening, but by the time Paul had showered and padded back downstairs in his bathrobe to check on me, I’d gained control of Trish’s Amazon account, and her bank and credit card accounts. ‘I’ve just started on the retail accounts,’ I said, preening a bit.
Paul frowned. ‘Aren’t you overdoing it a bit, Hannah?’
‘Discovering that Trish bought a pair of hiking boots from LL Bean could be an important clue,’ I insisted. ‘At least we’d know she wasn’t planning a getaway to the Bahamas.’ I removed my reading glasses and looked him straight in the eyes. ‘Trish and I trust each other. If I were the one lying in a hospital bed and fighting for my life, I’d expect her to do exactly the same for me.’
‘What are you going to do when Trish asks for her phone back?’
‘I pray she does,’ I said. ‘In which case, I’ll give her the new password list. At least she’ll know I cared enough about her to stick my nose into her business. It’s not like I’m going to order a bunch of antique jewelry on eBay and charge it to her credit card.’
‘I didn’t imagine for a moment that you would,’ he said.
‘Privacy schmivacy. All bets are off. We need to find out who shot her, and why, in case they try to do it again.’
Paul stretched an arm behind the computer and the screen went blank. ‘This can wait, Hannah. I order you to get some rest.’ He nudged me up the stairs.
When we reached the landing, he turned me around by my shoulders, wrapped me in a bear hug then kissed me, good and proper. When we finally came up for air, he said, ‘I have a question for you, though.’
‘Yes?’ I said a bit dreamily.
‘What the heck is cloud bread?’