The Pharaoh Key

4

THE BAR AT the top of the Gansevoort Hotel was quiet, the rooftop pool still shut down for the winter. Gideon had fetched his laptop from his room, and he and Garza slipped into a leather banquette in one corner.

Garza ordered a round of mojitos while Gideon fired up the computer. The drinks arrived. Garza pulled the USB stick out of his pocket. “Ready?”

“Go for it.”

Garza inserted the USB stick, called up a hexadecimal-to-ASCII converter, and fed in the downloaded data. An obviously nonsensical output resulted.

“Okay,” said Garza, “that’s strange.”

Gideon took a long drink of his mojito. “Are you sure the computer successfully decoded the Disk?”

“I told you—I’m sure. Try hex-to-decimal.”

Pulling the laptop toward him, Gideon ran the conversion utility again, but another list of apparently random numbers resulted.

“Try Unicode,” said Garza.

“How will that help?”

“Just try it.”

More garbage.

They tried Base64, octal, HTML numeric, binary, and Windows ALT codes.

Garza sat back. “Okay. What totally obvious thing are we missing?”

“Here’s what I don’t get. If the computer had really deciphered the Disk, why would yet another decryption step be necessary? Why did the computer output it in hex at all? Why not just in regular plaintext, or ancient Greek, or whatever the original language was?”

Garza didn’t answer.

“Maybe we just aren’t drunk enough to figure it out.” Gideon waved over the waiter, and they ordered another round.

“We’ve got to go back to the beginning,” said Garza, slumped in the banquette, twirling the ice in his empty glass. “There are two possibilities here. Either the Phaistos Disk was written in some sort of ancient ciphertext, or it is, quite simply, in an unknown written language.”

“Meaning that one is a real honest-to-God code, and the other a philological mystery.”

“Yup.”

The fresh drinks arrived as Garza fell into thought. “I dimly recall that the computer attack on the Phaistos Disk assumed, first, that it was in an unknown language. So it was programmed to look at many ancient forms of writing—Linear A, Linear B, cuneiform, Luwian, Egyptian hieroglyphics—and try to find parallels. If that failed, the program would go on to assume it was a ciphertext of some ancient language, and attack it from that assumption.”

“So what particular attack finally succeeded?”

“Good question. For that, we’d need the log file.”

“The log file?”

“It’s similar to that generated by an installer program. It keeps a list of what particular attack algorithm is currently running, and how long it runs, before giving up and moving on to the next. If we had the log file, we could check its last entry and discover exactly what algorithm succeeded.”

“So where’s the log file?”

“Still in the computer,” said Garza. “Back at EES.”

“So we break in. Steal it.”

“Are you kidding? That’s got to be one of the most secure buildings in New York City. It’s like breaking into the gold vault at the Federal Reserve.”

Gideon took a sip of his drink. “Good point. We won’t break in. We’ll get in by other means.”

“Other means?”

“Social engineering.”

“Yeah, right. Who are we going to socially engineer?”

“Glinn.”

Garza started to laugh. “That’s hilarious. Socially engineer the world’s expert on social engineering?”

“Why not? He’s just egotistical enough to believe he’s too clever. When you think about it, he’s a perfect target.” He paused. “You really want to get back at Glinn, right? Piss him off? So here’s your chance. We just need to find his prime weakness and work up a script.”

A long silence, and then Garza drained his drink. A broad grin spread over his flushed face. “Sally Britton.”

Gideon searched his memory. “The dead captain of the Rolvaag? What about her?”

“That’s his weakness. That—and the arrogance of always being right.”