Glen Allen - The shadow war

"Oh, yes, they do," said Wolfe. He looked at Benjamin. "But he complained. Wanted to know what had happened to the other two they'd sent over."

"Two?" asked Benjamin. He looked about the room again. "But there's only the one on the floor."

"As I said, interesting."

Wolfe went into the hallway, brought back the small black briefcase Benjamin had noticed earlier. As he opened the briefcase, he pointed to the windows. "If you wouldn't mind, the curtains."

As Wolfe extracted something from the briefcase, Benjamin went to the two windows and drew the curtains closed. When he turned back, he saw that Wolfe was leaning over the laptop's keyboard with a small aerosol can. He moved the can back and forth above the keys, a fine, white mist coming from the can's top. He put the can back in the briefcase, then brought out a small flashlight, but a rather strange one, with a rectangular blue plastic screen affixed over the lens.

"I thought that only worked for blood."

"The spray reacts to perspiration, not blood, but the principle is the same. Now," and Wolfe switched on the flashlight.

The laptop's keyboard reflected the black light dimly, the letters appearing as stark blue outlines against the dark keys.

"Nothing," said Wolfe, disappointed. He reached over and pressed the Power key of the laptop. There was a quiet whir as its hard drive spun up and the system messages moved across the screen. After a moment, a message appeared.

ENTER PASSWORD it read.

"Ah," said Wolfe. "The plot thickens."

At that moment there was a knock at the door. A young man was standing in the darkened doorway, a detachable computer keyboard in his hands. He looked around the room curiously. "Somebody called for this?" he asked.

"You said you'd already sent over two others?" Wolfe asked, accepting the keyboard.

"Well, yeah," the young man answered. "Dr. Fletcher said he didn't like using the laptop's. Said his wrists crimped on the edge. You know, carpel tunnel." The young man held up an arm, drooping his hand limply at the wrist.

"But he'd been using this," Wolfe pointed to the laptop, "for some time. Didn't he already have a detachable keyboard?"

"Yeah. But then yesterday afternoon he called over, said it was missing, could I bring him another one."

"That one?" Wolfe asked. He pointed to the keyboard on the floor.

"I guess so. I'd have to look at the serial number."

"All the keyboards' serial numbers are logged?" Wolfe asked.

"Computers, too. You know, Hauser-"

"Yes," interjected Wolfe. "And what time did Dr. Fletcher call you?"

"Uh, maybe three, three thirty, some time around then."

"One other question before you go. Did Dr. Fletcher's computer have access to the Internet?"

The boy smiled. "You're kidding, right?"

"Not at all," replied Wolfe coldly.

The boy looked nervous. "Sorry, I just thought everyone knew. Too much hush-hush stuff going on for just anybody to plug into the Internet. You have to put in a special request, use a special computer, one with these hardened firewalls and protocol filters and 128 encryption-"

"All right," said Wolfe, patting the young man's shoulder. "Well, thank you very much. That's all we need for now."

The techie shrugged, went off down the hall.

Wolfe went to the table, set the new keyboard carefully in front of the laptop, and plugged its USB cable into the side of the computer.

"Well, now all we need is the password." He looked to the keyboard on the floor.

"You still haven't explained why it's on the floor," said Benjamin.

"Imagine Fletcher sitting in that chair." Wolfe motioned toward the tipped-over Chippendale. "Now imagine him typing. Suddenly his left arm goes numb, his chest cramps, he jerks back, knocking over the chair… It must have been a massive coronary, to kill him so quickly. He's still gripping the side of the keyboard, and as he falls from the chair-"

"He takes the keyboard with him?" said Benjamin. "But that," he indicated the aerosol can in Wolfe's hand, "shouldn't work. If Dr. Fletcher had been using the keyboard all this time, wouldn't all the keys have fingerprints on them? How can we possibly know which ones were the password?"

"If Young Master Techie is telling the truth," said Wolfe, "and this isn't the keyboard originally registered to Dr. Fletcher, then yesterday would have been the first time he used it. And if I'm right about the most curious aspect of this entire incident, then perhaps his password was the only thing he managed to type."

"The most curious aspect?" asked Benjamin skeptically.

"Fletcher's age," Wolfe responded absentmindedly.

"His age?"

"Patience," said Wolfe, as if that answered Benjamin's question.

Wolfe hunched down over the keyboard and took the aerosol can, held it a few inches above the keyboard and, pressing the red tip down with his thumb, ran it slowly back and forth as he had with the laptop. As Wolfe shined the flashlight over the keyboard, several of the keys responded with a shiny smudge of eerie blue.

"Ah," he said. "We're in luck." He leaned back to the briefcase, took out a small spiral notepad and a felt-tip pen, handed them to Benjamin. "Write down what I dictate." Scanning the keyboard from left to right and top to bottom, Wolfe read off the glowing keys: "I, O, P, S, N."

"That's all?" Benjamin asked. "Nothing else? No numbers?"

Wolfe ran the black light over the keyboard again. "No, that appears to be all. Of course," and he switched off the flashlight, stood up, "that doesn't give us the order of the letters."

"Well, it's like a game of anagrams, isn't it," said Benjamin. He sat down on the bed, stared at the letters in the notepad. "I-O-P-S-N. Well," and he began writing combinations in the notepad, saying them out loud as he wrote them down. "Sopni, sonpi, sipno, sinpo, nospi, nopsi, nispo, nipso…"

"We're methodical, aren't we," said Wolfe.

Benjamin smiled nervously. "Frankly that's the only way I know how to do these things. The answers never jump out at me. I can't stand crossword puzzles… where was I… posni, pisno…"

Wolfe leaned over and took the notebook and pen from his hand. He wrote something, handed the pad back to Benjamin.

Benjamin read what he'd written.

"Poisn?" he asked.

"The fingerprints give us the letters, but not their order. Or their frequency. "

"So…"

"So he might have used one of these letters more than once. And if he did… say the O," Wolfe added a letter to the last word Benjamin had written, gave the pen back to him.

"Poison," Benjamin read. He laughed. "Isn't that just a little too Agatha Christie?"

Wolfe shrugged. "It's the only combination so far that's actually a word. And there's only one way to verify it."

He stepped over to the small table, switched on a banker's lamp next to the computer, and raised his hands above the new keyboard like a maestro over a piano.

"Of course, three wrong entries and the computer will lock out his account, perhaps permanently. Well, here goes." And Wolfe tapped out the word P-O-I-S-O-N on the keyboard, placed his finger over the Return key-then struck it.

INVALID ENTRY-PLEASE ENTER PASSWORD read the screen.

"That's one," said Benjamin.

Wolfe turned to the window, threw open the curtain, and stood staring out.

Benjamin moved over to the table. He looked from the keyboard to his little notepad. He began writing combinations again, and after a few more attempts sighed.

"That's really the only word that makes sense. If he didn't use a word, just those letters in some random combination that only he knew…" He began scribbling again.

Meanwhile Wolfe was still staring out the window. "Unless it wasn't his password," he said faintly, almost to himself.

"Damn!" exclaimed Benjamin. He slapped his forehead. "Idiot!"