by Caron Todd
As she worked, Liz kept glancing from the shortbread dough to her grandmother’s face. No one in the family seemed worried about her health. She needed to rest often and she took pills of some kind each morning. Not unexpected at her age.
“Are you sick, Grandma?”
“You’re rolling the dough too thin. You need to be gentle with it, or the cookies will be tough.”
Liz tried not to press the rolling pin so hard. “Like that?”
“Much better. Remember, you’re not tanning leather.”
She cut a row of bells and still her grandmother hadn’t answered her question. “Grandma?”
“You won’t fuss?”
“It depends what you call fussing.”
“I’m not sick. My heart is putting significantly less effort into its job than it used to, that’s all.” She said it calmly and went right on talking. “You’ll be able to take Jack a tin of shortbread when you go over this afternoon. Tell him it’ll be a couple of weeks before they have much flavor. They have to ripen. Isn’t it nice that we can send him baking for a change?”
“He can have the cookies another day, Grandma. I’m not going to visit him this afternoon, not after—”
“Elizabeth. Look at me.” Eleanor waited until she had her granddaughter’s full attention. “Jack’s expecting you, and you’re going.” From her tone, it was safe to say her strength was back.
THREE POINT THREE ONE…3.31—no matter how he looked at it, it was days before Reid got an inkling of where Jack might be pointing him. He looked up revolutions of planets, half-lives of elements, statistics about family size in the fifties…then, it finally occurred to him. The Dewey Decimal system. He was looking for a book, a library book. If he discounted the decimal, three-three-one was the classification for books on labor economics.
First he checked the downtown library, then the East Kildonan branch where they’d gone when they were kids. “Yes, we do have a book reserved for you,” the librarian said, sounding pleased with herself. What, had she found and solved Jack’s next problem?
Labor Economics, An Analysis. Reid sat at a long, empty table and started flipping through the pages. Why was he doing this? He could quit. Maybe he would. He’d take one look at the problem and if he didn’t like it, that’s what he’d do. He’d quit running around at Jack’s bidding.
There. He’d almost missed it. A folded paper. Reid opened it and found a message in Jack’s handwriting.
Hey, Reid
I was going to come up with something that would keep you busy till your fortieth birthday, but I just don’t feel like it. Sorry to bail on you. Why don’t we skip the rest of the work and go straight to the beer? You know where to find me.
The note wasn’t signed.
He didn’t feel like it? Until Reid remembered he wasn’t really playing the game, he was indignant, even annoyed. Still, what did Jack mean? That he was bored, or that he couldn’t be bothered with his old friend, or that he was a little bit busy setting up a sting operation with the police? Who loses and who wins… He couldn’t quite get that out of his head.
Reid pocketed the note and left the book on the table. When he got back to his office, he found an extra person hanging around with Croker’s regular bunch. Webb and his constant throat clearing had come to visit. He looked relieved to see Reid. Croker’s goons had a very low social IQ.
Webb accepted a cup of coffee, but waited until Croker arrived to say what was on his mind. A telephone call was considered good enough for most news, so he must have picked up something bigger than usual to rush into the city like this.
“Well?” Croker said, as soon as he saw Webb sitting by Reid’s desk. “What is it?”
“He knows.” Webb treated them to a half-coughing, half-throat clearing sound that made Reid want to beg his doctor for preventative antibiotics. He’d have to remember to put a little bleach in that coffee mug. “At least I think he knows. He got a guy in town to check his house for bugs. A retired Mountie.”
Reid’s heart pounded. He’d only been joking about the sting operation.
Croker wasn’t jumping to any conclusions. “He’s a step ahead of us this time.” He started pacing. “Maybe we’ve been going at this all wrong. It’s been two months, and we’ve got nothing. I can’t waste any more time. Why are we looking for a disk or a CD or a computer or a printout? We could have McKinnon easily. The code came out of his brain, didn’t it? It’s got to be in there still. You said he has a bad memory, but if he invented it once, can’t he invent it again?”
Sure he could. Knowing Jack, he could invent three or four unbreakable codes, all before breakfast. Unlike other people, who couldn’t invent any. He’d tried. Ever since Jack did it in grad school, he’d tried. No luck yet. Maybe tomorrow.
Reid kept his voice calm. “Those are valid questions.” They weren’t, but it was always a good thing to say. “We’re talking about, I don’t know, a page and half or so of equations for the algorithm, maybe five pages for an implementation program. The algorithm is the most important thing to get our hands on. I can guarantee you Jack doesn’t remember it. He’ll recall roughly what he did, but figuring out the details again could take three, four, five weeks. That’s a whole lot of kidnapping and unlawful confinement. You say you don’t want to waste any more time on this. How do feel about ten to twenty years?”
LIZ COULD TELL RIGHT AWAY that Jack had bought a vacuum. “No dust, Jack.”
“No nail holes, no dust,” he agreed. “No insulation, either.” He was warmly dressed in the navy fleece top he’d worn the night they met, with a turtleneck of almost the same color underneath. He handed her a large mug of coffee.
There had been no sudden rush to romance since they’d talked about courting after the Grey Cup game, but right now he barely seemed to notice she’d arrived. “Is something wrong, Jack? You seem distracted.”
He looked ready to issue an automatic denial. Instead, he apologized. “A problem’s cropped up. I had a busy morning dealing with it. I guess I’m still a bit worried.”
Liz sat beside the table. “Can I help?” He hesitated, so she added, “I know you don’t like to talk about yourself, but you’ve listened to me for days. Come to think of it, for enough days to make it weeks!”
“It’s not the same. This isn’t a personal problem.”
“That should make it easier, shouldn’t it?”
He downed half his mug of coffee before he joined her at the table. “You’re not going to like it.”
“All right.” A cash flow problem would be manageable. She might even be able to help. If it was a health problem, bad news from a doctor, she didn’t know what she’d do.
“I’ll need to give you some background first. I told you I used to develop computer programs. In grad school, I specialized in encryption. So did Reid.”
Liz relaxed a little. This didn’t sound so bad. “You mean you’re the guys who make it possible for me to use my credit card on the Internet?”
“That’s one application of encryption techniques. If you can’t encrypt and decrypt information safely and efficiently, you can’t do business online whether it’s retail, banking or government. Reid and I both started our own companies when we got out of school. I focused on programming and he went into computer security.”
“Okay.” She was a long way from seeing what was bothering him now.
“I told you about the game we used to play.”
“You told me there was a game, but not how you played it.”
“It started in high school and got more elaborate as we learned more. It was sort of a mathematical treasure hunt. You had to find the first clue, work out a solution to a problem and figure out what the solution was telling you, so you could find the next clue, and so on. It could take weeks to prepare and weeks more to solve.”
They did this for fun? It sounded like a nightmare. “What kind of prizes did you have?”
“Whoever won bought the other one a beer. And whoever lost
bought the other one a beer.”
Liz laughed.
He sat forward, tense again. “So, here’s the problem. While I was still at school, I came up with a method of encryption. It was kind of a fluke. My method was stronger than the RSA code most people use today. Strong enough that in some countries it couldn’t be used legally.”
Liz didn’t know the first thing about encryption, but it sounded like something he shouldn’t have been able to do without years of research and help from other mathematicians. “I’m impressed.”
“So was Reid, I think. He seems to be trying to steal it.”
Liz stared at Jack while she put the rest of the pieces in place. “So when I saw those men outside your house and my instincts went into overdrive—”
“It may not have been your imagination.”
“And the car that whizzed out of your driveway?”
“Reid, in a hurry for a good reason.”
“The creep!”
Jack gave an unamused laugh. “My thoughts exactly…if that’s what he’s doing. I don’t have absolute proof. Just a series of odd events. Maybe I’m worried about nothing.”
He didn’t strike Liz as a man who worried about nothing.
“The night the car nearly ran into you,” he said grimly, “I saw signs that someone had been in the house. When I decided it must be Reid letting me know he wanted to start the game again, I made a disk for him to find. It had an encrypted message that would lead him to another clue. It also had a virus that would temporarily disable his machine and delete the message on the disk.”
“You made a virus?”
“It wasn’t much of a virus. I thought he deserved it. He broke into my house, he ran you off the road.” Jack sounded a bit defensive. “I wanted to know how he got in, so I bought some surveillance equipment from Daniel Rutherford—”
“Oh! That must be what he meant.”
“Daniel?”
“At the first hockey game he wondered if you’d told me something and then said I should be careful. I meant to ask you about it, but I forgot.”
“He was fishing. Anyway, maybe I’m wrong about Reid. I’ve added more protection for the algorithm, just in case.”
Liz’s mind was racing. “So you have this code, but it’s a secret? You don’t use it? No one uses it?”
“That’s right. You can use any code you want in Canada, at least for now. The world is still adjusting to online business and all its repercussions, so there’s disagreement about what the laws should be. Even if I could use the code here, or sell it here, businesses don’t operate within borders. I don’t want to break another country’s laws. I also don’t want to upset the balance between security, personal privacy and crime fighting.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If the wrong people got hold of it, they’d have an encryption system police couldn’t break.”
The wrong people. He meant organized crime, or terrorists.
“On the other hand, if the government had it, I’d be concerned about how its use could affect citizens. If a corporation used it, how might that affect consumers or stockholders? They could collect and store personal information with no safeguards, no way for anyone to oversee what they’re doing. The codes we have now are strong enough. Usually they develop slowly. People who make codes respond to people who break them, and so on. If you have a code that can’t be broken, that process is ended.”
It was like listening to a stranger. Jack’s tension, his expression, his outlook all were so different from what she’d come to expect.
“Only a couple of people knew about my algorithm,” he went on. “Reid and another friend who works in Brandon now. I told them I’d destroyed it.”
“Told them?”
“I was going to do it. But it’s a beautiful thing, Liz.”
“The code?”
“I told them I’d wiped the hard drive of my computer clean, then I smashed a diskette right in front of them. It was blank, but they didn’t know that. Reid must have realized I kept it.”
“But, Jack…why? It seems risky. And that’s an understatement.”
“A code, a code this strong, is like a work of art. Would you burn a manuscript or a set of paintings? Most likely, I’d never use it—”
“Most likely?” He’d just explained all the reasons he shouldn’t use it.
“Definitely, I wouldn’t. Of course I wouldn’t. And if I wait long enough, someone will come up with a stronger algorithm, or with a decryption method that’ll make my code useless. Sometimes, though…” He stopped.
“Sometimes what?”
“Sometimes I like the thought that I could use it. Can you imagine the power and wealth an unbreakable code would give you?”
Liz shook her head.
“Me, neither. It’s fun to try, though.”
She stared at him, at the dreamy look on his face. He was tempted. Jack was a pirate. Her mysterious otherworld hero was a pirate.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
LIZ HAD SPENT THE MORNING visiting, first at Pam’s, and then at Aunt Julia’s. Christmas preparations were well underway in both households. For Pam that meant plum pudding and mincemeat and nineteen varieties of perfectly shaped and decorated cookies, handmade Christmas crackers stuffed full of little gifts and jokes, and cards addressed to everyone she’d ever met. For Aunt Julia it meant reading about the origin of Christmas traditions while Emily filled the freezer with holiday baking. In between houses, Liz had dropped in on Jennifer and found her stretched out across a bed of bales with the kittens, reading while they slept.
As soon as she stepped into the kitchen, Eleanor came to greet her. “Jack called. He’d like you to go to dinner tonight.”
Liz unwound her scarf. “Just me?”
“Just you. He said to dress warmly.”
“Why, has his furnace quit?”
“All he said was to dress warmly and to arrive around six o’clock.”
More mystery. She was still uncomfortable with Jack’s revelations about his code. It wasn’t just that he’d kept it and was tempted to use in spite of any problems it might cause. It was that he’d made it. That he could make it.
At five minutes to six, wearing a long winter coat Eleanor had dug out from the back of a closet, thermal underwear and two pairs of socks inside her boots, Liz turned down Jack’s driveway. She slowed her grandmother’s car, a twenty-year-old Buick that Uncle Will called a sofa on wheels, and took in the scene before her.
The oak grove sparkled. White fairy lights wound through the trees’ bare branches, and under the biggest oak stood a table covered with a snowy-white cloth and set with silver and crystal that caught the light and held it. She didn’t see Jack at first, but then she noticed movement, and he appeared as if from the oak’s trunk.
Liz got out of the car and hurried to meet him. “Jack? This is magical!” Votive candles nestled in the snow, with little melted circles around them. Paper snowflakes seemed to drift from the trees, moving on air currents. She cupped her hand around one. “Did you make these? Or did you commandeer Pam’s class?”
“It was my favorite craft in grade one. I’d forgotten all about it until Halloween, watching the snow fall while I waited for kids to come. It took me a whole morning to figure out how to fold the paper.”
Pirates didn’t make snowflakes.
Jack pulled out a chair for her. As she sat, she noticed a second table deeper in the grove, filled with serving dishes and insulated carafes. Music came from a small CD player out of the way of the dishes. Spanish guitar. The sultry, hot-weather sound made her smile.
They had mulled wine to start, then shrimp and scallops tasting of lemon and dill, served on ice. Chilled tomato soup with a touch of mint followed, then tandoori chicken, kept hot in a slow cooker.
“You didn’t make all this, did you?”
“There’s more to me than pumpkin pie, Liz.”
“How did you learn to cook so well? I know you’re an independent s
ingle guy, but this goes way beyond what I’d expect. You didn’t just make the food. You made it wonderfully.”
Jack smiled at her enthusiastic response. “I started cooking when I was eight or nine. I got home a couple of hours before my uncle, so it seemed reasonable to have his dinner ready. After a few years, we got tired of macaroni and cheese and tinned beans.”
They finished with homemade lemon ice cream, fluffy and almost as white as the snowbank in which Jack had packed the serving container. Each spoonful melted in her mouth, creamy and tart at the same time. “You are the kindest, most thoughtful man in the world. All this work to make something so special. Thank you.”
Jack looked embarrassed. “I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it. Want to go in and get warm?”
“Please.” The ice cream had undone the good of thermal underwear. “I’ll help you clean up.”
“Tomorrow’s soon enough for that.” He whipped out a white cotton sheet and let it float down to cover the table. The mess was gone, blended into the snow.
Inside, a fire burned in the Franklin stove. Jack had cranked the oil furnace higher than usual, but Liz still kept her coat on in the kitchen.
“Are you that cold?”
She peered at Jack over her turned-up collar and nodded.
“Maybe I’m not so kind and thoughtful.” He rubbed her arms briskly, then her back. “Espresso to warm up, or brandy?”
“Brandy, please.” She waited for her glass, then carried it into the living room. Another surprise waited for her there. “Jack!”
The books and newspapers had been tidied away, and instead the tables were full of flowers and fruit. He’d arranged bare branches inside and decked them with the same miniature lights he’d used on the oaks. The drapes were open so they could see the outside lights outside, too.
“I wish I had my sketchbook. This would be perfect for the woodland fairies!”
“I was thinking about that, too.”
She had shown him her sketches. The characters and plot were continuing to have an undeniable similarity to her own experiences since coming back to Three Creeks. The female fairy had an old score to settle, and there was a knight and a wise old woman who helped her. There was an evil thorn-tipped character who, it turned out, didn’t sleep well and wished only to undo all the harm he’d done in the past. “Imagine the woods after the battle, when they feast and celebrate. It could look like this, only the lights would be low to the ground, high for them, of course.”