Lucas went back to Georgetown, which was close by and not a bad place to walk. He wound up in a diner, eating a short stack of pancakes with bacon, reading the Post. There was a short item on page three about the Smalls/Grant controversy, but with nothing new.
When he got the check, he paid with his last twenty-dollar bill, which was a mild surprise. He’d stopped using credit cards for small charges in unknown places—every exposure created another possibility of getting hacked—and so always carried a supply of cash. He rarely let the count get below a couple of hundred dollars. He left the diner with fifteen dollars and change, the lack of cash scratching at the back of his brain like a weevil on a cotton boll.
And he hadn’t figured out the next step.
* * *
—
HE’D SEEN a Wells Fargo Bank a couple of blocks away and walked over. He put in his ATM card and punched in his code . . . and noticed the Braille dots below the operating instructions. He wondered why they’d put Braille on a machine where a blind guy couldn’t find it easily.
A bell rang in his head.
He collected his cash, stuffed it in a pocket, and called Rae. “Go down to the business center, however that works—maybe you’ll need to take your own laptop—and download a Braille chart that shows letters and numbers and print it out. I need you to figure out how it works—Braille, that is. You know, how to read it.”
“You mean, with my fingers?”
“No, no . . . what each Braille pattern means—what letters they are, the numbers.”
“Well . . . Okay. What are we doing?”
“Looking for the key to Ritter’s laptop.”
“It’s in Braille?”
“Remember those weird dots on the back of his belt?” Lucas asked. He heard an intake of breath.
“Oh my God, you could be right. Why don’t I download it on my iPad? I can do that in a minute.”
“I won’t have the belt in a minute, but the iPad sounds fine. I’ll get back to you when I get the belt. Or we’ll meet back at the hotel and work it out.”
“I’ll download it now. The Stump will be amazed . . . which he usually isn’t.”
“We don’t know what we’ve got yet,” Lucas said, “but this feels right. A code on his belt could be as long and random as he wanted, would be handy, anyplace, anytime, impossible to misplace, and not obvious. People who know Braille would never see it because they’re, you know . . .”
“Blind.”
“Right. And people who aren’t blind probably wouldn’t recognize the dots as a code.”
“How did you recognize it?” she asked.
“Thought about it a lot . . . all the places I’ve seen different dot codes,” Lucas lied. “The Braille idea sorta popped into my head.”
“Someday you’ll have to tell me the truth,” Rae said.
* * *
—
WITH RAE GOING OUT on the ’Net to find a Braille chart, Lucas called the Frederick County medical examiner, identified himself, and talked to a Medical Examiner’s investigator named Gates. “You have a body there, a James Ritter.”
“Yup.”
“I need to come over and see his belt,” Lucas said. “It’s a gun belt, made for wide loops, like on jeans.”
“What are you looking at?” Gates asked.
“The back of the belt. There might be some . . . information . . . on it. That we can use,” Lucas said.
“Really? I didn’t see anything.”
“It’s my superpower,” Lucas said. “I can be there in an hour.”
“I could take photos with my iPhone and have them to you in four minutes, if that makes any difference to you,” Gates said.
“Well—yeah, let’s try it. I need the whole length of the back of the belt. I’m sitting on the side of a road in downtown Washington and I’ll wait for the call.”
“Not four minutes, though, more like seven or eight.”
“I’ll wait,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
LUCAS WAS WAITING with his iPad when the photos came in seven minutes later, three of them, all tight and well focused, with a note that said, “From left to right. Are the dots a code?”
Lucas didn’t bother to answer the question, sent “Thanks,” and headed for the hotel.
Back at the hotel, Lucas found Bob and Rae waiting in Rae’s room, and when Rae let him in, she waved her iPad at him, and said, “Bob and I have been figuring out Braille. It’s simple enough. You still think it’s Braille on the belt?”
“Sure looks like it to me,” Lucas said. He turned on his iPad, called up the photos, and they all crouched over the room’s desk, the two iPads side by side. Lucas asked, “How do we know which way is up or down?”
Rae explained, and Lucas said, “So you read them.”
She did, and wrote each letter or number on a legal pad as they scanned the belt photos: there were twenty-four symbols: “c3cejd24lstpv319qubdo6g9.”
“That’s nothing but a key to something,” Bob said.
* * *
—
LUCAS FOUGHT through the FBI bureaucracy to get on the line with Roger Smith, the FBI computer tech. “Do you have Jim Ritter’s laptop handy?”
“It’s in a lockup, but I can get it in a minute or two.”
“I got some numbers for you,” Lucas said.
“Hang on.”
* * *
—
LUCAS HUNG ON, and Bob said to Rae, “If this works, I’m probably going to have to kiss Lucas’s ass. You might not want to be here for that.”
“No time for it anyway,” Lucas said. “If this works, we need to get down to Quantico and check this stuff out.”
Rae: “Why? We’ll just have him email it to us.”
Lucas rubbed his face, and sighed. “Shit. You know, deep in my heart, I don’t understand that we don’t always have to go places to get things anymore,” Lucas said. “I was about to drive an hour over to the Medical Examiner’s Office to look at Ritter’s belt. The investigator sent me the iPhone photos in seven minutes. Kind of scizzes me out, the way it comes out of the sky now.”
* * *
—
SMITH CAME BACK to the phone, said, “We’re up and running. What’s your best guess?”
Lucas read the string of numbers and letters to him, and the tech typed them in, and said, “Nothing.”
“Maybe it’s backward, or whatever,” Lucas said.
“Or maybe I mistyped something. I’m going to read them back to you,” the tech said.
He did, and, toward the end of the string, said, “ddo6g9.”
Lucas said, “Wait. Wait. Toward the end of the string, it should be bdo, not ddo . . .”
The tech said, “Wait one . . .” and then, “Shazam! We’re in.”
“I could come down and look at it, but if you could send the stuff, it’d be a hell of a lot quicker.”
“I can send it. What’s that chick’s name, the one working with you?” Smith asked.
“You mean Rae?” Lucas looked at Rae.
“Yeah, the pretty one . . . the basketball player.”
“Rae.” To Rae, quietly: “He kinda likes your looks.”
“Well, naturally,” she said.
Smith: “Gimme her email and yours. I’m going to send her a string like the one you sent me . . . a different one, of course . . . and I’ll send all the texts and emails in one long file to your email. We’ll keep them separate so nobody can see both at the same time. You’ll need to enter the code to read them. It’s a onetime code, nobody else will be able to use it after you do. Not even you. Of course, if you open the files on your computer and save them in plain text, and somebody takes the computer away from you, they’ve got it.”
“I’ll open it on my iPad. I got Touch ID,” Lucas said.
“Didn’t this Ritter guy lose his fingers?” Smith asked.
“Yeah,” Lucas said. “I won’t do that.”
“Gimme Rae’s email.”
“Don’t hit on her,” Lucas said.
“Hey, I’m with the FBI. Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity—FBI.”
* * *
—
SMITH SAID IT WOULD TAKE a while to put a file together, and they sat and restlessly watched a Nationals game for twenty-five minutes, then Lucas’s iPad dinged, and the file came in. A minute later, a string of letters and numbers came in for Rae: “Hey, sugar bun, I’d gr8ly like 2 take U out 4 a drink someday.”
“That can’t possibly be the code,” Rae said.
Bob: “Sure it is. Remember what he said about using regular sentences as keys? And what Lucas told him about hitting on you? He’s delivering the encryption code and hitting on you at the same time.”
“He’s not a bad-looking guy, either,” Rae said. “Tall. Intelligent.”