Chapter 8: Getting down to business

ALL TOLD, it was a better day. ‘Better than what?’ you ask. Well, better than sitting in my room crying. It appears that I still have a job—or a whole business—and I’d better take care of it.

Encrypted cryptos

I sat in the room I will always think of as Dag’s office. If what Lars told me is true, it was now my office. Lars would take care of the books and hold the agency license until I’d completed my three-year probation and tested but he promised the business was mine and he would hand over the accounts as soon as he verified them and reported the inheritance to the State. So, it wouldn’t be fair to Dag if I didn’t get some work done.

I opened the vault and located Simon’s thumb drive. I knew right where it was. I’d filed it when I transferred all Simon’s backup disks to the network. I might have returned the original backups to Simon’s desk for Jordan to find but I kept the data. Something told me there was data on those disks I’d need, even if I succeeded in cracking the encryption on the thumb drive. I shoved the drive in a slot on the workhorse computer, closed the vault, and sat down to work from the laptop. Like Dag would do.

I now had three 8-digit numbers. It should be easy to put them in the right order to crack the encryption. F8ed2d1e, 36Db00bs, and 1sB41d1e. It took a couple of tries before I realized I was dealing with hexadecimal numbers and not case sensitive passwords. f-8-e-d-2-d-1-e-3-6-d-b-o-o-b-s-1-s-b-4-I-d-i-e. The ‘5’ was ‘s’ and the ‘O’ was ‘zero’ and the ‘i’ was a ‘1’. It was a kids’ game to make up words out of letters and numbers. Being hexadecimal, he only had the numbers 0-9 and the letters a-f to work with. Every eight characters would yield a 128-bit encryption key. But twenty-four characters would yield a 384-bit key. I’ve never heard of a 384-bit key. Typically, you double, double, and double again. In light-weight areas, 64-bit encryption can be done with four characters. 128-bit encryption with sixteen characters, 512-bit with thirty-two characters, and if you were really paranoid, 1024-bit encryption with sixty-four characters. In every instance you double the number of characters and double the strength of encryption.

Somehow, I didn’t think Simon was nerdy enough from what Dag described to be able to generate a 384-bit encryption key.

So, what did I have to work with? I decided to try all combinations of the sets. I figured the key would not be a scramble of the 24 characters but could be any combination of the sets of letters. Order counts. It could be set 1, set 2, set 3 or set 1, set 3, set 2. The same was true moving set 2 to the first position and combining with 1,3 or with 3,1. Finally, it could be set 3 with 1,2 or 2,1. But what if it didn’t use all three sets? What if I had to pick the right one or the right two. A total of eighteen possibilities.

I tried plugging them in when the drive launched and asked for the key. Fifteen straight failures. We’d already tried the first one alone. I plugged in the other two and still nothing. I looked at the original notes. Dag had written the first two on a notepad in the hospital in his neat, precise lettering. The last one I photographed off Bradley’s dead body with my cell phone. I examined all three to see if there were any other letters that I could substitute for the numbers or sounds in the words. I came up blank. I didn’t know what Simon’s and Angel’s tattoos looked like, but if they were like Bradley’s, there must have been some elaborate artwork. Could that be a clue? I didn’t have enough data.

It was way past lunchtime and I was famished.

Driving Miss Maizie

About mid-afternoon there was a gentle knock at the office door. I called, “Come in,” and Maizie came bounding across the office and leaped into my lap at the desk. She began vigorously washing my face with her tongue. I was laughing as I looked up to see Mrs. Prior.

“She insisted that she wanted to come to the office,” Mrs. Prior said. “She’s been going on about it since Sunday. I told her, ‘Give Miss Riley a chance to get her bearings, now. Don’t rush things.’ But Maizie has a mind of her own. I finally had to give in and bring her down here.”

“Oh, Maizie,” I said. “You are wonderful. How could I not have thought of you without Dag? It must be terrible.” Maizie lay down on my lap and put one huge paw over her nose and whined.

“She misses Dag,” Mrs. Prior interpreted. “She was worried about you. She thought maybe you were gone, too.”

“No, Maizie,” I answered. “I’m here. And it looks like I’m going to be here for a while. You can come and visit anytime you want.”

“Mmmhmm,” Mrs. Prior stuttered. “You see, about that...” Oh, no. She was going to tell me that Maizie couldn’t come to visit. I’d miss her so much. How could she do such a thing? “Maizie was Dag’s dog,” she continued. “According to Mr. Andersen, Dag left everything he owned to you. That means Maizie is your dog now.”

“My??? Oh, my.” I was floored. I know my stupid eyes were watering again. Maizie lifted her muzzle and licked my cheek. How can I ever hope to be all Dag expected of me?

“Maizie jumps up and down in pink ribbons when she thinks of you,” Mrs. Prior said. “I think she is very happy you are hers.”

“But I can’t keep a dog in my apartment,” I said forlornly. “It’s a no-pets building.”

“Well, dear, Maizie and I understand you need some time to adjust. No one expects you to move straight into Dag’s apartment tomorrow. I’m happy to sit with Maizie when you can’t have her with you but she hopes you will come to stay with her soon.” Mrs. Prior talked so much like I expected Maizie to that I sometimes forgot Mrs. Prior was in the room. “Maizie goes upstairs at night to sleep, even though Dag isn’t there,” she said. “She is so sad. This is the happiest I’ve seen her since Wednesday night when Dag got home.”