by Randy Singer
That’s a dumb rule, Nikki thought, but for once in her life she chose not to verbalize her every thought. Still, her silence must have conveyed the message because Wellington felt compelled to respond.
“Drivers who talk on their cell phones are four times as likely to have accidents injuring themselves,” Wellington said. “It’s why states make it illegal to talk on a cell phone and drive at the same time.”
“What do the studies say about talking on the cell phone while putting on makeup?” Nikki asked.
“While driving?” Wellington asked, as if the feat Nikki described were humanly impossible.
But Nikki didn’t have time to answer. They were walking through the door of Norfolk’s Finest Sports Bar, and Wellington was about to get carded.
“He’s my designated driver,” Nikki said, pulling Wellington past the bouncer. “He won’t be drinking tonight.”
The bouncer nodded. He knew whose party this was.
Thursday night’s show started slowly, in Nikki’s opinion. The first half hour seemed more like a documentary than a reality show. She had distanced herself from Wellington quickly so the eligible bachelors wouldn’t get the wrong impression, though they would probably think he was a little brother or a cousin rather than a date. She did walk over to check on Wellington a few times. He was sitting alone in a booth, sipping a soft drink while he watched the show with one eye and studied Finney’s book with the other. He would check something on a page in the book and then make a note inside the front cover, check the page again, and make another note.
“You having fun?” Nikki asked.
“Sure.”
“Making any progress?”
“I think so. But I need to slip outside and make a call. It’s a little loud in here.”
“Okay,” Nikki said, talking above the noise.
She felt a strong arm drape around her shoulder. It was attached to a killer body. Byron had finally noticed the vibes she had been throwing off. “There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said.
She tried not to act excited, but it wasn’t easy. Byron was an investigative reporter for a local television network—the consumer advocate for Hampton Roads. Nikki had always swooned at Byron’s hidden camera pieces. “He can hide a camera on me anytime,” she told her friends.
“I’ll check back a little later,” she told Wellington.
Byron introduced Nikki to a few of his cohorts, and she threw out some hints about dancing later. Though Byron worked for a different network than the one airing Faith on Trial, he seemed to be enjoying himself. He bought another round of drinks and critiqued the production values of the show for anybody who cared to listen. Most turned their attention back to the television as the commercials yielded to another segment of the show.
The producers had zeroed in on the relationship between faith and health. They raised the question of whether miracles of healing ever occurred, and they interviewed various experts. They did profiles on the terminal diseases attacking the contestants—all except Dr. Kline, who apparently didn’t need a terminal disease to be healed from since she didn’t believe in God anyway. They showed the interviews of the contestants from the cross-examination room, with Finney affirming his belief in a God who heals.
They concluded the segment by showing Judge Javitts’s challenge to the contestants, telling them that they would be examined by medical experts near the conclusion of their two weeks on the island, just to see if God had chosen a favorite in the reality show and had healed one of the contestants. They didn’t show the reactions of the contestants to Javitts’s challenge.
Nikki seriously doubted whether God was going to heal a man who had been a smoker his entire life. Especially one who refused to give up cigars even now. She was saddened, however, as she learned the full extent of her judge’s cancer. She knew he had been treated in the past, but she didn’t realize how much the cancer had spread. Finney had always been private about it. Now the whole nation knew.
She found herself with conflicting emotions. There was the spine-tingling thrill of sitting next to Byron, who was chock-full of insider tips about how to improve the show. Nikki was imagining herself later that night, cavorting around the Virginia Beach dance floors with God’s gift to women, a local celebrity desired by every red-blooded young lady in Tidewater. But then there was the judge, his face plastered all over the television screens in Norfolk’s Finest Sports Bar, talking about his inoperable and spreading cancer.
The morbid subject seemed to cast a pall over everyone. It didn’t stop the flow of beer; in fact, it probably increased it as the patrons thought about their own mortality. But there was none of the bawdy cheering and hollering that had characterized the place on Tuesday night.
Until the show entered the last twenty minutes.
On Tuesday the producers had promised temptation, and on Thursday they delivered. They focused first on Dr. Kline and the Swami, with hints that the others would have their day later.
Surprisingly, Dr. Kline’s temptation had been orchestrated even before she arrived on Paradise Island. Through clever use of hidden cameras, and the cooperation of some of Dr. Kline’s colleagues at the university, the show’s producers had set up a scenario tempting Kline to exaggerate some test results on a government grant proposal. Though the shading of the results would have virtually guaranteed the grant, Kline steadfastly refused to go along with her colleagues.
Boring, Nikki thought. She was much more interested in the temptation of the next contestant. The Swami, it seemed, had been falling under the spell of the ex-reality-show bachelorette, Tammy Dietz. Though the girl made a lousy host, she knew all the right signals to send to the eager Swami, enticing him to stop by her condo late one night. She shooed away the cameraman who had followed him and apparently neglected to inform the Swami that her condo had cameras hidden in the walls.
“Are you sure we should be doing this?” she asked, coming up for breath after a particularly long kiss. “I signed something saying I wouldn’t get involved with any contestants. I don’t want to lose my job.”
“Nobody will ever know,” the Swami said as he pulled her close for more.
It turned out to be quite a night for the Swami. He not only got the girl, but when the results from Tuesday’s audience verdict was announced, the Swami came out the winner. “Remember,” Judge Javitts said, “the results are based not on the total number of votes but on the number of converts, determined by the extent to which the contestants exceeded their baseline percentages.”
The verdict brought Norfolk’s Finest Sports Bar to life, with a hearty round of boos and widespread heckling of the television screen. Byron had a few choice words about the Swami that Nikki chalked up to jealous male testosterone. The lawyers at the bar tossed around talk of lawsuits and corrupt Hollywood producers. On the screen, Javitts was explaining that next Tuesday’s show would feature excerpts from the contestants’ cross-examinations of one another. Viewers could submit their own questions by e-mail. Javitts would pick the most interesting ones and ask them in the cross-examination room.
Things quieted down again for the stunning conclusion. There were pictures of Kline and Finney sailing, with hints of a May-December romance. A question was left hanging in the air: “Will other contestants fall to the temptations of Paradise Island?”
And then the credits rolled.
30
Nikki pried herself away from Byron half an hour after the show ended. She promised to return in a few minutes so they could head out to the Virginia Beach dance floors.
She found Wellington still toiling away in the booth and slid in next to him. She felt guilty for ignoring him most of the night. “How’s my partner in crime?” she asked.
He was staring at a chart of block letters in front of him. “I think I’ve just about got it figured out.”
“You found the key?” Nikki scooted closer and glanced at Wellington’s writing. It looked like hieroglyphics to her. Neat hieroglyphics, with
letters encased in perfectly formed boxes. “Where?”
“I didn’t exactly find the key,” Wellington said. He seemed to be blushing. “But I’m using techniques of cryptanalysis to unscramble the message without the key.”
“Oh,” Nikki said. Cryptawhat? She stared at the letters but didn’t know where to begin. “You gonna show me?”
“Sure.” Wellington actually slid a little away from Nikki, to give himself room to think, apparently. When is the last time a guy did that? He placed the book between them and turned from the page where he had been writing to the first page of the introduction—the page where the random code letters were hidden.
“I think this is a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher,” he began.
“I see,” Nikki said.
“You know what that is?” Wellington looked surprised.
“Some kind of code?”
Wellington’s face fell, as if Nikki had guessed wrong. “Yes. Well, it’s a particular type of code where one letter is substituted for another.”
No kidding, Sherlock, Nikki wanted to say. Instead, she just put her elbow on the table, chin in hand, and nodded.
“For centuries,” Wellington continued as if he were a university professor, “this type of code was considered unbreakable without a key. But then Muslim cryptologists were the first to realize that frequency analysis could decipher just about any monoalphabetic substitution cipher.”
“Frequency analysis,” Nikki repeated, her elbow sliding farther forward on the table.
“Yes. That’s why I needed to make a call,” Wellington said. “I had my mom check something on the Internet.” He turned back to the title page in the front of the book—a mostly blank page he had been using as his scratch pad. “I had her look up the average frequency results for the letters of the English language.”
Nikki slid up so she could see the chart.
E = 12.7%
T = 9.1%
A = 8.2%
O = 7.5%
I = 7.0%
N = 6.7%
S = 6.3%
H = 6.1%
R = 6.0%
“Now, these are just averages,” Wellington continued, “but they give us a good place to start.”
Who thinks of these things? Nikki wondered.
“The next thing I did was to count the various letters in the encoded message and see which ones occurred most frequently.” Wellington flipped back to the first page of the introduction and ran his finger along the code.
“You counted every letter in there?” Nikki asked in amazement.
“That’s just the start,” Wellington said, flipping back to the title page. “Here’s what I found.” He pointed to a place where he had carefully recorded his results. “I started by focusing on the top three letters. V occurred twelve times; H occurred seven; and I occurred six.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Nikki said, sounding unimpressed. But she actually thought it was clever.
“So if everything followed the law of averages exactly, which it never does, then V would be the substitution for E; H would be the substitution for T; and I would be the substitution for A. Do you follow me?” Wellington astounded Nikki with how much he was into this stuff, coming out of his shell when he talked about code breaking.
“You sure you haven’t been drinking?” Nikki mumbled.
“No. I haven’t.”
“I was just kidding, Wellington. I follow you.”
“Good. Next, I decided to test my assumption about V being the code text for the letter E. I did this by performing a before-and-after analysis. This is based on the well-known fact that vowels like E can be found adjacent to just about any letter of the alphabet, but consonants like the letter T—the second most frequent letter in the English language—tend to avoid certain other letters. For example, how many words do you know where T is next to the letters B or D or G or J or K or M or Q or V?”
Nikki let her head slump a little lower. “None. But then it’s not something I spend a lot of time thinking about.”
“Hey, Nikki, great party.” A few guys stopped by the booth and Nikki perked up. She noticed Wellington discreetly close the book and slide it under his forearm. She talked to the intruders for a few minutes and then they left. She thought about Byron and the Virginia Beach bands in full swing.
Wellington reopened the book, and Nikki returned her chin to her hand.
“So anyway, I found that the letter V acted like a vowel,” Wellington said. “It was next to a lot of other letters—thirteen to be exact. Pretty good confirmation that V probably does represent E, just like we thought.”
One letter down, twenty-five to go. Nikki made a conspicuous show of checking her watch.
“And it gets better. If V is truly E, then it usually doesn’t take long to figure out which letter represents the letter H. Do you know why?”
“Look, Wellington, to be honest, I don’t have the foggiest idea. This stuff is all fascinating, but it would probably go quicker if you just explained it rather than asking me questions.”
Wellington looked deflated, and Nikki immediately felt like a jerk. “Don’t take it personally,” Nikki continued. “You’re doing great. It’s just that I’m more of a lecture-at-me student than a question-and-answer student.”
“Okay.” He took a sip of soda. “No problem. Anyway, the answer is found in this quirky little personality trait of the letter H—it almost always comes before the letter E but never behind the letter E. Can you think of a word where H comes behind E . . . Oops, sorry. Like I was saying, there are very few words where that happens.”
“Exactly,” Nikki said, sensing the kid’s need for encouragement. She glanced over her shoulder. Byron was still where she had left him, but it looked like another woman had elbowed into his group.
“Here are the results of my before-and-after analysis,” Wellington said, pointing to another chart on the front page. “The one letter that occurred before V three times but never occurred after V is the letter S. So I was thinking that S in the code letters probably represents H in real life, or what we call plaintext. And I also noticed that S appears in this coded message four times, which would also be consistent with S representing H, because H is a frequently used letter.” Wellington paused and looked pleased. “That’s where I was when you sat down.”
Nikki looked down at his chart.
That’s it? she wanted to ask. All that for two lousy letters?
But Wellington slid forward on his seat, and Nikki had to admit that his enthusiasm was contagious. She took her chin out of her hand and sat up straighter. Was it possible they could solve this entire hodgepodge of letters without a key?
“What do you notice?” Wellington asked, forgetting the rule about questions.
“Can we buy another vowel?” Nikki asked.
“Don’t need to,” the young genius said. “We just need to look for repeating patterns. What is the most common three-letter word in the English language?”
“Sex?”
Wellington turned red, which Nikki thought served him right for asking another question. “Actually, it’s the. And if you look at our chart, you’ll see that the code letters G-S-V repeat themselves three times. Because we already think that S is a symbol for H and V is a symbol for E, it would make sense that G would be a symbol for T, thus spelling the word the several times.”
“Plus,” Nikki said, looking at one of Wellington’s charts, “G is one of our frequently occurring letters in the code message. You would expect it to be if it stood for the letter T, which is the second most popular letter in the English language.” Nikki smiled at herself. Not quite Mensa material, but she had her moments.
“You’re a natural,” Wellington said. He handed his pencil to Nikki to fill in the chart with their new discovery. She did so, resisting the urge to ask him why he was carrying a pencil around with him in the first place.
“Now we look for pairs where the same letter is repeated,” he said.
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“I see two,” Nikki said. “What does that tell us?”
“Since we don’t have spaces between the words, it’s a little hard to tell. It could just be coincidence—one word ending in the same letter that the next word starts with. But more likely, it’s one of the letters in the English language that we sometimes see as a pair—S-S, E-E, T-T, L-L, M-M, or O-O. So let’s take an educated guess at what plaintext the code letters HH stand for.”
Wellington pointed to the appropriate spot on his diagram. “We know it can’t be either E-E or T-T because those letters are already taken. And since the code letters H-H are surrounded with a code letter that represents E on one side and another E on the other side, we know they can’t stand for O-O either. I can’t think of any words that have the sequence of letters E-O-O-E. So that pretty much leaves L-L or M-M or S-S. And since the letter H occurs seven times in the code letters, it must be a popular letter.”
Nikki nodded, pencil in hand.
“Let’s therefore assume that H represents S,” Wellington said.
The chart was getting better:
“Now, focus on parts of the chart where we have a lot of letters filled in,” Wellington instructed. “Like right here.” He pointed out a section that had drawn Nikki’s eye as well. “Take a guess at the missing letters.”
Nikki stared for a minute, feeling like a contestant on Wheel of Fortune. “Do you know?” she asked Wellington.
“I think so.”
“Don’t tell me.”
Another minute passed . . . “I’ve got it!” She picked up the pencil and wrote in the letters.
“Now fill in those same letters on the rest of the chart,” Wellington instructed.
When Nikki did so, she realized they were almost there.
She was so enthralled with the chart that she hadn’t noticed Byron standing beside the booth. “Must be a fascinating read,” he said.
Wellington abruptly closed the book as if it were a Playboy magazine and Byron were his mother. Can we call any more attention to it? Nikki wondered.