James Grippando - Need You Now

“My fiancé. He’s a genius. Would have graduated from MIT with a degree in engineering if he hadn’t skipped art class his last semester.”

“No offense,” said Evan, “but they don’t kick people out of MIT for skipping art.”

“Oh, yes, they do,” said Connie.

“Whatever,” said Evan. “The entire engineering department probably couldn’t crack this code.”

“Folks, can we focus?” I said. “It can’t be that tough.”

“Easy for you to say,” said Evan. “So far the only thing I’ve been able to determine is that the sequence of letters B-A-Q occurs with unusually high frequency in the encrypted data, which, of course, doesn’t mean anything.”

“That could be a code for something else.”

“Or it could reflect an error in my own mathematical computations,” said Evan.

A quick run of “BAQ” through a search engine on Evan’s laptop turned up a handful of hits, from trade names for pool-cleaning products to a Puerto Rican folk dance called el baquiné . Nothing meaningful.

Evan said, “I’m telling you, this last phase of encryption is of the highest order.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

Evan cleared his throat, and I had a feeling he was about to get professorial on me. “Well,” he said, “the actual cryptographic process is generally a complicated mathematical formulation-the more complex, the more difficult it is to break. A key is supplied to the recipient so that he can then decipher the message. Keys for encryption algorithms are described in terms of the number of bits. The higher the number of bits, the more difficult that cryptosystem would be to break.”

It was late, and my head was starting to throb. “Sorry, I wasn’t asking for a technical explanation of encryption. What I want to know is, when you say ‘highest order,’ what does that mean?”

“That’s what I’m getting at,” said Evan. “The one file that has me stumped involves a level of encryption that is on an entirely different order than anything else here. It’s as if it doesn’t even belong on the same computer as the BOS data.”

“Where would you expect to find it?”

Evan sat back in his chair, glanced at Connie, and then looked at me. “If you didn’t think I was a conspiracy nut job before, you will now.”

“I didn’t think it before,” I said.

Evan sighed and said, “All right. The level of encryption I’m seeing is more like something you would expect in a matter of national security.”

“In Lilly’s files?”

He paused, as if all too aware that he might sound ridiculous. “Yeah,” he said, “in your girlfriend’s files. There, I said it. You can start laughing now.”

My sister and I exchanged glances. Then my gaze returned to Evan, his face aglow from a computer screen filled with mathematical equations.

“Nobody’s laughing,” I said.

I checked the time. It was past midnight. I was about to suggest we break for the night when Connie shoved her smartphone in my face.

“Look at this!” she said.

The lead story for the online version of the Daily News included a photograph of a woman who had been strangled and found dead in her apartment. A sick feeling came over me as I recognized both her face and the uniform.

“That’s the park ranger who found me in Battery Park,” I said.

The story reported “no known motive,” and I couldn’t think of one. But I wasn’t foolish enough to think that her slaying and my attack, separated by a matter of hours, were disconnected. It wasn’t easy coming to terms with the fact that the ranger would probably still be alive but for the misfortune of having found me in the park. The Daily News also said that police were urging anyone with information to come forward. I realized that I would have to follow up with Agent Henning and comb over the details of my own attack-though I had no doubt that the FBI had already connected the dots, since Andie had shown up at our last meeting with a copy of the Parks police report.

I walked a complete circle in the apartment and took another start-to-finish look at Evan’s 360-flowchart of the Cushman fraud. I wondered where a photograph of the park ranger’s killer might fit in. I wondered who he was. And I wondered if, in some perverse way, he was enjoying the destruction of so many lives.

“Nope,” I said, revisiting Evan’s fear that I might think he was nuts, “no one is laughing. At least not in this room.”

C lose to midnight, the BOS limo dropped Joe Barber at his estate in Greenwich. To him, the fresh blanket of snow on the wooded acre made his house atop the hill look like a Norman Rockwell painting, though he had to concede that there was little nostalgia in a twelve-thousand-square-foot mansion with seven bedrooms, twelve bathrooms, two swimming pools, a clay tennis court, and a bowling alley built on a special “floating” foundation to keep the subterranean vibrations from disturbing the priceless bounty of the wine cellar. His wife was asleep in bed when he got home. Miraculously, she wasn’t on the treadmill. Metaphorically speaking, though, he sure was.

A management position with a troubled Swiss bank was not the capstone career move that Barber had hoped for after his tenure at Treasury as deputy secretary. BOS had barely survived the subprime crisis, its reputation forever tarnished. Its standing as the premier bank in Switzerland was in question, and in America, it was undeniably second tier. As his wife had so often reminded him, friends at firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley had offered Barber dazzling compensation packages. When he told them he was joining BOS, they had been shocked. When the journal reported that he was going there for less money, they feared that he had lost his mind. No one knew the real reason for his decision. No one could know that he was just following orders.

Most important, no one could ever know who was telling him what to do.

“Did you give them the data, Joe baby?”

Barber wondered why the question even needed to be asked, and he was getting fed up with the condescending tone and insulting nicknames like “Joe baby.”

“Exactly the way you told me,” said Barber.

They were in the first-floor study, just Barber and a man he knew only as Mongoose. He didn’t have any of the weasel-like features of an actual mongoose, but, of course, it was the point of any good cryptonym to bear no resemblance to its subject. This Mongoose had short blond hair and the rugged good looks of a movie star, with broad shoulders and muscles so thick that his neck bulged.

“So you called them into your office and…”

“And I delivered the packages. End of story.”

Barber shifted uncomfortably. He was seated in a chair that, tongue in cheek, he had always called “the hot seat,” a boxy Chinese antique made of rosewood that had an upright back and no cushion. Another pair from the same set of four had once graced his office at Treasury, and they were so uncomfortable that no meeting had ever lasted more than twenty minutes-the intended effect. Mongoose was seated in the leather chair behind Barber’s desk. Only Barber and the retired CEO of Saxton Silvers, who had passed it on to him, had ever sat at that desk. Until tonight.

“That’s my boy,” said Mongoose.

“You need to stop calling me ‘boy,’ ‘Joe baby,’ or whatever the insult of the day is. I’m tired of that shit.”

“This isn’t supposed to be fun, Joey. At least not for you.”

“Killing innocent people? That’s your idea of fun?”

Mongoose leaned back, put his feet up on Barber’s leather-top desk.

“The park ranger was a regrettable piece of collateral damage. I needed to know what she and Patrick Lloyd talked about.”