The Judge

by Randy Singer

  The only light which I can throw on this remarkable difference in the inhabitants of the different islands, is, that the very strong currents of the sea running in a westerly and W.N.W. direction must separate, as far as transportal by the sea is concerned, the southern islands from the northern ones; and between these northern islands a strong N.W. current was observed. . . . As the archipelago is free to a most remarkable degree from gales of wind, neither the birds, insects, nor lighter seeds, would be blown from island to island. . . . Reviewing the facts here given, one is astonished at the amount of creative force, if such an expression may be used, displayed on these small, barren, and rocky islands; and still more so, at its diverse yet analogous action on points so near each other.

  Creative force, Finney thought. He now had a theme. Every good cross-examination needed a theme. He began scouring the Internet with increased enthusiasm. Darwin had been more help than Finney had anticipated.

  At 8:00 p.m. Nikki called Wellington to find out whether he had solved chapter 2. Finney had posted a new series of Westlaw searches, and Nikki didn’t have a clue what they meant.

  “The normal spot?” Wellington asked.

  Nikki checked her watch. The nightlife wouldn’t really get started for a few more hours. She could do it over the phone, but the kid probably needed some encouragement.

  “Sure,” Nikki said.

  Wellington arrived later than Nikki, probably due to the fact that the Starbucks was actually about ten minutes closer to her place than to his. He wore a pair of khaki cargo shorts that thankfully weren’t as tight as the last pair, a button-down Hawaiian shirt that he had tucked in (contrary to every fashion dictate known to Nikki), and a pair of white boat shoes with no socks. He had his backpack slung over his shoulder and undoubtedly had a fresh supply of sharpened number two lead pencils as well as his computer and Judge Finney’s little book.

  “’S up?” he said.

  Nikki just shook her head. Some kids were better off not even trying to be cool.

  “You need to untuck that shirt,” Nikki said. “That’s what’s up.”

  Wellington looked mortified. “Why?”

  Because I don’t want to be seen with the world’s biggest nerd. Because tucking your shirt in went out of fashion with the Backstreet Boys. “Because if this mission gets any more intense, you may have to carry. And you’ve got nowhere to hide your piece when your shirt’s tucked in. Plus, you don’t want to suddenly change styles as soon as you start packing, or people will notice.”

  Wellington went white. “You’re kidding, right? I, um . . . I don’t even know how to use a gun.”

  “I’m kidding,” Nikki said, “about everything but the shirt. If you untuck it, at least people might wonder if you have a weapon. That alone could come in handy someday.”

  Wellington considered this as Nikki imagined that big cranium of his cranking through all the pros and cons. “Okay,” he said after a few seconds. He pulled his shirt out, the wrinkled tail hanging conspicuously exposed.

  “You look dangerous,” Nikki said.

  Since every table inside Starbucks was occupied, they took their drinks and Wellington’s pound cake into the Farnsworths’ minivan and cranked up the air-conditioning. The van had a wet-dog odor to it, though Nikki pretended not to notice. How does a guy worried about a few germs on a pen ignore the legions of deadly microbes generated by a slimy corgi?

  “Did you work on this cipher?” Wellington asked between bites of pound cake and sips of Pellegrino water.

  “I looked at it,” Nikki said, “but I was pretty busy investigating the speedy-trial cases.”

  Wellington mumbled something that was hard to understand since he had a mouth full of cake. He pulled out some charts as Nikki took a sip of her iced mocha.

  “Here’s the frequency analysis chart,” Wellington said after he swallowed. It looked exactly like the one Nikki had created on the Internet. “Notice anything?”

  Other than the smell of a corgi and the fact that you can’t remember not to ask questions? Nikki shook her head. “Not really.”

  “The percentages for the ciphertext match up almost exactly with the averages for the English language,” Wellington announced. He ran his finger along the chart. “There are a few exceptions, as you might expect, but look at some of these. A—7 percent in the ciphertext, 8 percent in the English language. D—4 percent in the ciphertext, 4 percent in the English language. E—14 percent in the ciphertext, 13 percent in the English language. I—8 percent in the ciphertext, 7 percent in the English language. See the pattern? The percentages are almost the same.”

  It was hard to argue with Wellington on encryption, so Nikki just gave him an “Mmm-hmm” and took another shot of mocha. She felt stupid for not seeing it herself.

  “Which means that we’re not dealing with a substitution cipher in this chapter. We’re most likely dealing with a transposition cipher.” Wellington turned to Nikki, his eyes expectant.

  “Amazing,” Nikki said, though her inflection said, “Boring.” She didn’t bother asking what a transposition cipher was. She knew that would be point number two in Professor Wellington’s lecture.

  “A transposition cipher is when the letters actually represent themselves but the order of the letters has been scrambled. Our job is to detect the pattern and unscramble them.” There was a pause in the seminar as Wellington took his last bite of pound cake, chased it with a gulp of Pellegrino, and then set the empty Starbucks bag he had used for a plate on the floor of the vehicle.

  “Most people use a matrix to encrypt a transposition cipher.” Wellington pulled his small spiral notebook and pencil out of his backpack. He opened the notebook to a blank page. “Let’s say we want to write a message that says, ‘Meet me at Starbucks for coffee.’ I’ll use a matrix that is five letters wide and six letters long to encode it.”

  Nikki watched as Wellington arranged the letters.

  “Notice that I added some letters at the end as filler.” Wellington looked at Nikki, who nodded. “Now, instead of writing the letters in the code from left to right across the rows, we can write them from top to bottom along the columns,” he continued. “This will scramble them so that our message would read M-E-A-K-C-E-E-A-R-S-O-X and so on.”

  “I see,” Nikki said, hoping the comment might speed things along.

  “That’s just one form of transposition cipher, so I thought I would start there.”

  Wellington flipped the pages in his notebook, showing Nikki a lot of different matrixes. “None of those worked,” he said. “So I tried some mathematical formulas to see if I could detect a pattern.”

  He turned the page again. “Voilà! It was right under my nose the entire time.”

  Nikki noticed the new pattern Wellington used on the page. “This is called the rail-fence cipher,” Wellington explained. “It’s so basic that I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it earlier. You just write the entire message on two different lines, alternating between them, and then you write the encoded message by copying the entire first line and then following it with the entire second line.”

  Wellington turned toward Nikki. “Did you read chapter 2 in Finney’s book?”

  “I skimmed it.”

  “Good. Then you know it’s about the paralyzed man that some friends brought to Jesus for healing in a house so crowded that they had to drop the man in through the ceiling. Jesus pronounced forgiveness of the man’s sins, but the Pharisees were thinking that He had committed blasphemy. So to prove He had power to forgive sins, Jesus healed the man as well.”

  “Which, of course, would lead any reasonable person to suspect a rail-fence cipher,” Nikki said sarcastically.

  “Exactly,” Wellington said, proving once again that cipher experts didn’t do sarcasm. “Finney’s point was that too often we just operate on the physical plane, whether it’s our health or finances or whatever. But Jesus first dealt with the man’s spiritual condition and maybe wouldn’t have healed him at all
if the Pharisees hadn’t been so critical. So Finney is saying we need to be cognizant of both dimensions—the spiritual and the physical—and the rail-fence cipher is a perfect picture of that because it only makes sense if you integrate the two planes together.”

  “Did you solve the code?” Nikki asked. She avoided church so she wouldn’t get preached at. She didn’t need the Right Reverend Wellington Farnsworth making up for lost time in the minivan.

  “Sorry. I just get into this stuff. It’s a verse from the apostle Paul after he had prayed without success for God to remove a thorn in his flesh.” He slid the paper over toward Nikki. “As you read, alternate from the top line to the bottom, and you’ll see what I mean.”

  Nikki read the message, and like magic, it all made sense. She raised an eyebrow at Wellington. “Not bad,” she said.

  Next, Nikki reached into the secret compartment of her black leather Fendi Spy bag. “Here are the letters from Finney’s latest Westlaw searches,” she said. She rattled them off to Wellington, who wrote them down using the rail-fence cipher.

  He studied it for a minute before announcing the solution. “‘Need to know the location of Paradise Island. Is William Lassiter from governor’s office involved with show?’”

  “That’s it?” Nikki asked. It seemed like they were working awfully hard for some pretty meager messages.

  “At least it didn’t say to skip chapter 2,” Wellington noted.

  40

  Finney woke just before sunrise to the familiar sound of Kareem Hasaan’s prayers. Groggy, the judge managed to sit on the edge of the bed, coughing as the monotone chants floated through the patio door.

  “Allahu akbar,” Finney heard Kareem say. “Subhana rabbiya al azeem.”

  Finney stumbled into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. He threw on a pair of baggy swim trunks, a T-shirt with cutoff sleeves featuring a Virginia Beach logo, and his frazzled John Deere ball cap. He put on some deodorant and padded out to the kitchen to start the coffee.

  “Allahu akbar,” he heard Kareem say again. Finney knew that this roughly meant, “Allah is the greatest.” “Subhana rabbiya A’ala . . .”

  Finney listened absentmindedly as he threw away last night’s coffee grounds and picked up the mess in his kitchen. The card game had been a doozy, going until nearly 1:00 a.m. For an old man like Finney, it might as well have been all night.

  He stepped onto the patio and watched Kareem while the coffee slowly brewed. Every morning, the same routine. The same prayers—praising Allah, seeking forgiveness, reciting the Koran. The same prayer positions—standing upright, bowing down, kneeling, and then prostrating himself.

  Finney thought the monotony of it must surely make the prayer time lose its zeal. But when Finney had raised the issue at dinner last night—a drawn-out affair as all the contestants stuffed themselves in preparation for the time of fasting—Kareem said that just the opposite occurred. The very discipline of the salah five times a day kept him in close relationship with Allah. When he finished his prayer, his heart would be filled with remembrance of Allah. A proper prayer time, Kareem said, would help him strive successfully against all kinds of evils and temptations and remain steadfast in times of trial and adversity.

  Finney poured a cup of coffee, then placed it on the counter and coughed until he bent over. The last few days, his lungs had been hurting more when he coughed. More phlegm came up in the process, he wheezed a fair amount afterward, and he had no appetite. He found it harder to catch his breath after even moderate amounts of exercise. Absent a miracle, Finney thought, I probably won’t make it to the end of the year.

  This is my last summer.

  The thought steeled him. How many men had a chance to reach an entire generation during the last year of their lives? Maybe his whole life had been preparing him for this.

  He took his coffee to the patio and watched Kareem finish his prayers as the sun peeked over the ocean. Finney himself prayed—silently, with his eyes wide open. He thanked God for the promise that one day he would be perfectly healed. He asked for strength to finish strong. He prayed for wisdom and courage in the next few days. The plan he was contemplating would require more than he had to give.

  And he prayed for Kareem. So much passion, but he was missing God’s grace. Lord, please show him the way.

  By 7:30 local time, the sun dominated the eastern sky while a few wispy clouds inched their way from south to north. The prevailing winds this morning were virtually nonexistent, providing a good excuse to skip the sailing but also sending a bad omen for tomorrow night. It was the first day that the winds hadn’t been in at least a ten- to fifteen-knot range since they had arrived on the island.

  Finney walked down to the small shed on the beach that housed the snorkel gear, past a meditating Swami. Five or ten minutes later, Dr. Kline showed up. She and Finney talked about taking a day off from sailing in order to do some snorkeling. They mentioned the schools of fish they had been seeing while sailing and the coral reefs they wanted to investigate. Since God had cooperated with their ruse, Finney also mentioned the lack of wind.

  Finney took off his mike and laid it carefully on a lounge chair. He pulled off his T-shirt, feeling exposed in his baggy swim trunks. His bony and pale chest, sporting more gray hair than black, was not going to earn him any points in the beefcake department. He put his snorkel on quickly and did a quick Joe-muscle-beach flex, which brought a hoot from his friend Horace hiding behind the camera.

  But Finney quickly lost Horace’s attention, as Horace turned his camera to Dr. Kline, who didn’t mind stripping down to her small turquoise two-piece swimsuit in front of a camera recording her for all of America. She had a toned body and washboard abs, with an even tan that obviously predated her time on the island. To Horace’s credit, he avoided hooting, but he never took the camera off Dr. Kline as she adjusted her ponytail so it wouldn’t interfere with the elastic band of the snorkel.

  “Over here, Horace,” Finney called, waving at the camera, but he might as well have been talking to an island iguana. Horace knew what America expected on its reality shows, and it wasn’t a fifty-nine-year-old judge whose chicken legs sprouted out of the bottom of his baggy swim trunks.

  “Yeah, over there,” Dr. Kline said as she waded out in the knee-deep surf and put on a pair of flippers. Finney followed her in, losing his balance once or twice as he struggled to fit his size ten feet into the flippers. He soon got everything situated and joined Victoria just past the small breaks in the surf. The two began exploring the underwater world of Paradise Island.

  The clear water made it seem as if you could reach out and touch schools of small fish swimming several feet below the surface. The colors amazed Finney as he swam with Dr. Kline, pointing and gawking, stopping occasionally so that he could surface and cough.

  “Two-thirds of the earth’s living organisms are beneath the surface of the ocean,” Victoria said when they both came up for a break. They were treading water directly over a colorful coral reef and sponge field. “Let’s head back toward the Swami.”

  “Okay,” Finney said. They pulled their masks back down and started snorkeling again, meandering in the general direction of the Swami and his yoga exercises. Finney and Kline surfaced again and yelled for the Swami to join them. It didn’t take much coaxing, and a few minutes later the Swami had his own snorkel on and swam toward his fellow contestants a hundred feet from shore.

  On cue, Kareem walked down to the beach, wearing nothing but his swim shorts.

  “You coming in?” the Swami yelled.

  “No.”

  “Why not? There’s some great stuff out here!” Finney shouted.

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  But the three snorkelers were not to be denied. After some serious cajoling and a confession by Kareem that he didn’t swim, he grudgingly agreed to join them if they stayed closer to shore. He took off his microphone and headed for the snorkel masks. A few minutes later, the four contestants were
standing in chest-deep water, talking in a small circle. When the small waves crested, Kareem held his arms out to the side as if he couldn’t get them wet, while Victoria pointed and lectured about the cool things they were seeing under the surface.

  “We don’t have long,” Finney said, keeping his voice low. “So, Victoria, why don’t you bring us up to speed?”

  For the next few minutes, Victoria Kline talked about her visits with Bryce McCormack and what she had discovered. She also confirmed, under questioning from Finney, that Ando had declined to join them this morning.

  “Is he working with them?” the Swami asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Victoria replied. “But he has this strange way of looking at life. It’s pretty much a let-it-be approach. Plus, it’s hard to really understand what he’s thinking when you can only communicate through that pinprick cipher.”

  Finney stole a glance toward the camera crews on the beach. Horace and the others weren’t even filming, huddled in their own little cluster. “The way I see it,” Finney said, “we’ve got three choices. One: keep playing the game but try to get some more information in the next few days before they select the finalists. Two: leak some information about these threats to the media and let Murphy and McCormack know we’ve done that. That way, they won’t dare try anything. Or three: bring in the authorities right away.”

  “How can we do number two or three?” Victoria asked. “They’ve got us cooped up on this island. I can’t even get in touch with my agent. If McCormack won’t let me talk to someone outside the island, I seriously doubt if anybody else can.”

  “I think I can figure out a way,” Finney said. Another glance toward shore told him that a few of the cameramen were getting suspicious. “Tell you what,” Finney said. “Everybody put on your snorkels and swim around a little . . . except you, Kareem. You just walk around. Let’s huddle up in a few minutes.”