Free The Cassandra Conspiracy by Rick Bajackson Page B

lost.”
    “But you said that you didn’t anticipate any results. Why?”
    “Because these repetitions are most easily found in long messages, and yours is too short. But it was still worth the try.”
    By now, Payton had learned more about encryption than he’d ever wanted to know. “I presume from that look on your face that you were finally able to crack the code?”
    “Lucy helped me.”
    “Lucy?”
    “As in a Russian spy ring that operated in Switzerland during World War II.”
    “Now you’ve lost me.”
    “The group was Stalin’s eyes and ears. They provided him with much-needed intelligence about Hitler’s plans. The historical details aren’t important. Their encryption method is. Although the Lucy ring used a three-stage cipher, the file that was dumped into your E-mail box only used two. Remember I told you that certain letters appear more often in English?”
    Steve nodded.
    “There are a total of eight such letters, and sixty percent of the English language can be written using them. Lucy assigned a number code to each letter starting with 0 and ending with 7. Each time one of these letters, A, S, I, N, T, O, E, or R appears, it’s given the single number equivalent.”
    “All right, but what about the rest of the alphabet?” Steve asked.
    “With eight already committed, that leaves eighteen left to be encrypted. These are written in the same sequence they appear in the alphabet in a matrix.”
    Janet went over to the blackboard.
     
 
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
 
A
S
I
N
T
O
E
R
 
 
5
B
C
D
F
G
H
J
K
L
M
6
P
Q
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
.
/
    “The Lucy ring added the period and slash–for punctuation. Once you have the basic table, all letters other than the baseline eight are encrypted using a two-digit sequence taken from the table. For example D   becomes 52 and P   is 60. Once the message is enciphered, it’s collapsed into five-figure groupings.”
    “Then the message I got is a set of five figure groups taken from the table?”
    “It would have been, but someone decided to complicate matters. Watch.”
    Janet turned and wrote the phrase “Dog is lost” on the marking board. “Let’s go through the example of encrypting this.” Using the matrix, Janet wrote the following sequence of numbers: 52554 21585 14680.
    “This...” she said pointing to the three groupings, “...represents the first encryption stage. The originator then added a common number, in the case of your message, 12345, to each grouping, and thus created a second stage of encryption. If he had really wanted to screw things up, he’d have used a one-time pad. That’s where a different number is added to each successive grouping. Unless you have the exact one-time pad, it’s impossible to decrypt the message.”
    Payton was more than impressed with Janet and her ability to fight her way through the maze he had dropped her in. “So where does all this leave us?”
    “Right here,” Janet said handing him a sheet of quadrille paper. The plain -text message appeared below.
    PROCEED WITH CONTRACT AT AGREED UPON FIVE MILLION. TARGET/SHANGRI LA/NOV. 1ST. HAVE CRITICAL INFO. MEET HERE TUES AT NINE. RENDEZVOUS IN PINE LAKES. C.
    Payton looked at the sheet of paper, slowly letting the significance of the letters on it sink in. “Jesus Christ!”
    “Exactly,” Janet replied. “Exactly.”

CHAPTER 4
     
    “Now you understand why I was so upset,” Janet said, as Steve regained his equilibrium.
    Payton gently placed the sheet of paper on the coffee table, handling it as if it were a vial of nitroglycerine. “You know, this still could be someone’s idea of a practical joke.”
    “The only problem with that logic is that someone really knew what they were doing. Even though I managed to crack it, the encryption’s too sophisticated. Why would anyone bother going to all that trouble when they intended the message to be read?” Janet thought for a moment, then added, “Even I wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell of