“And the third obstacle?”
“Encryption. I only have half of the encryption key required to access the data. You have to understand, the information I worked with came through people who don’t exist. These people could, and frequently did, make liabilities—real or imagined—disappear. I’m talking with the touch of a button or the nod of the head, and you’re gone. And these people that don’t exist, they don’t trust anybody. If you saw some of the technology that I’ve seen just in the last year, it would blow you away. Anyhow, what I’m getting at is that the encryption key to access the data is 208 characters long. I’ve memorized the first half—104 of them. The second half was supplied by my handler . . . Major Larrabee. Here’s where our glitch may reveal itself. Major Larrabee used the same 104 character code for the last two presentations I’ve done. He dictated it to me and I entered it after my own. With that said, he could have changed his code. If that happened, there’s no way we can get the information contained on the drive. But there’s another problem.”
“And that is . . .?”
“You only get two chances to enter the code correctly. If you fail, all of the data goes bye-bye, and therein lies our problem.”
“Explain.”
“Well, the reality of the situation is that you’re asking me to remember the exact sequence of characters—104 of them consisting of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters—that I’ve only heard twice before.”
“Can you do it?”
Oakley looked around the room at the assembly. Every eye was watching, and every breath was held awaiting his response. “I don’t know . . . maybe.”
“Ouch!” Oakley yelped as the artificial, USB drive containing tooth was released from the dental cement that held it in place. With the smoothness born of countless repetitions in the surgical ward, Doc Collins swiveled on the chair and plunked the tooth into the waiting cup of alcohol.
“OK, that should do it,” Oakley mouthed as he rubbed the side of his cheek. “Give it about five minutes to dissolve the chemical, and then we’ll pull it out and let it dry for about thirty minutes.”
“Why can’t we hit it with some compressed air to speed up the process?” Walter asked.
“I don’t know. That might work, but I’m just telling you the way they’ve always done it before.”
“Well then,” my uncle replied, “what say we just keep it that way. Besides, if were gonna be working all night, I’d like to get a little bit of food in my belly.”
Walter picked up the radio. “Bernie, I can hear a lot of commotion up there . . . how soon until supper is ready?”
In a few seconds the reply came back, but not through the radio. Bernice’s scratchy voice echoed down the stairway. “If you’re too lazy to walk up a dozen steps and ask me about supper instead of just exercising your thumb and calling on the radio, then I don’t believe I got any food for you. For the rest of you, supper’s ready.”
Walter grinned and gestured toward the stairs. “You heard the lady . . . go eat.”
We ate quickly—more rice, mixed vegetables that had been home canned by Bernice, and a cup of thick, fish chowder with a tomato base. It was hot and tasty, but I could see several grumbling faces as it was portioned out. Most of those faces reversed course when Amy stood and made an announcement.
“As you know, we’re trying to hold on to who we are—to what we are—in the midst of this crisis. Tomorrow night if everything goes well, we’re going to show a movie. Everybody who’s not assigned some type of duty that takes them elsewhere is welcome to attend. For those who miss the movie, it will be shown again the following afternoon.”
A round of cheers echoed in the room.
“Oh, but it gets better,” Amy beamed. She reached into a large shoulder bag that dangled under her arm. “Through a monumental effort of coordination, scavenging, and electronic wizardry— courtesy of Bucky, C.J., and your ever humble and slightly fantastic Jane of all trades . . . me—we now have a few partially charged cell phones.”
Another cry of elation sounded in the living room as Amy called out the owner’s name for each of the charged devices.
“We’ll try to finish the rest of them this evening. Remember though, you’ll still need to conserve your battery.”
Amy sat down to another round of applause, and then Walter took the floor. “As you’ve probably heard, there’s a chance that we might be able to obtain some much needed information about the nature of what’s happening to our world. Andy, Lieutenant Oakley, Captain Estes, Doc Collins, and Sam Ironfeather are going to be sequestered in the basement overnight, so we’re going to make temporary sleeping arrangements to keep that area clear. The information that we might gain access to is time sensitive, and the security on the data drive we’ve obtained prevents us from saving or copying it. Even now the clock is ticking.”
I finished my fish chowder and sat quietly in the corner. My internal clock was telling me that it would be dark soon, and I closed my eyes and made a halfhearted attempt to sort through the jumble of thoughts that ricocheted back and forth in my head. I wasn’t having much success, and for a brief moment I considered trying to catch a little nap right there in the corner. That thought was interrupted by a tiny bundle of curly red hair that wormed her way against my chest.
“Hey tiger . . . did you get enough to eat?”
Faith nodded and pushed her cheek against mine. Her arms wrapped around my neck and squeezed, and I returned the favor immediately. Through the explosion of curls that half blocked my vision I caught a glimpse of Michelle on the other side of the room. She had been talking to Sergeant Keene and one of the other soldiers—Perkins I think—but now her attention was directed straight towards me. The smile on her face was coming from more than just her lips, and after nodding several times towards the soldiers, she turned and stepped my way.
“Mind if I join?” Michelle whispered loudly as she scooted down next to us.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said as I spun Faith around to face Michelle, “you have to be pretty brave to be a member of our tiger club.”
Faith reached out her arms toward Michelle. “Mommy is brave,” she said.
My eyes widened and locked onto Michelle’s face as I silently mouthed the word, “mommy?” For a moment, the thought that the two of them had set this up as a joke crossed my mind, but the look on Michelle’s face was both real and priceless. I returned her gesture from Devils Lake and mimicked snapping a picture.
“Well thank you, Faith. I happen to think that you’re just as brave as me,” Michelle managed to stumble out.
The little girl squirmed in Michelle’s arms until she was facing me again. “When can I play with the puppy?”
“Hopefully in the next couple of days. Max isn’t really a puppy anymore, and we have to let him get used to you, but right now he needs some time away from all these people.”
“Doesn’t he like people?” she asked innocently.
“Sometimes, but he likes to make sure that the people he’s with will be his friends, so it takes a while for Max to get to know you.”
“I can be his friend.” The cherubic smile that accompanied her statement beamed up at me.
“Well I’ll bet he’d like to be your friend too. We’ll see what we can do about it in the next few days, OK?”
Faith nodded, and then chased her nod with a wide mouthed yawn.
“Someone is getting sleepy,” Michelle said.
“Is Leah still OK with taking her until we can figure out something else?” I asked.
“She said she’ll keep her for as long as we need.”
“Are you going to join me?”
“Where?” Michelle answered.
“I need to get Max away from the crowd. He’s been good so far, but I can tell that he’s getting real antsy.”
“The cabin?”
I nodded. “Yeah, maybe for a few days. We can drive back and forth if we need to, but if I don’t get him away, som
ething bad might happen.”
“OK, that actually sounds nice. I’ve got a couple of things that I need to do before we go, though.”
“Me too, and I also want to see if they can get into that drive before we leave.”
Michelle looked at her watch. “Say about 8:00 PM?”
“We can shoot for that,” I grumbled as I pushed my still aching body into a standing position.
She nodded and stood up with Faith still wrapped in her arms. “I’ll find you.”
I stepped into the kitchen where Walter, Uncle Andy, and Doc were standing. It took less than a minute to tell them about my plan to take Max to the cabin, and then Shawn walked over to us with Emily in tow.
“Emily has an idea that might help us out,” Shawn started right in, “and I can’t think of any reason it wouldn’t work. But hey,” he continued, “I’m just a country boy with bricks in my head, so I told her to run it by you.”
We all swiveled to look at her, and Emily’s elfin face took on a serious expression as she explained. “I was just talking to Shawn, and he was telling me more about what Walter said—I’m talking about the data not being able to be copied because of some high tech security program or something.”
“That’s supposedly correct,” Uncle Andy replied.
“Well if high tech won’t do it, what about low tech?” she asked.
“What are you referring to?” Walter replied.
“It’s simple, I would think,” Emily answered. “If you can’t save or copy the information without it imploding because of some ultra security protocol, why don’t you just clone the laptop display onto the movie screen like you did when we watched the transmission that Samantha got from the satellite. Then all you have to do is take pictures of the screen. Not with a little utility on the laptop, I’m talking about actual digital pictures of the big screen. You won’t get the resolution of the actual files, and it might not work for everything, but it would certainly be a way to get around your security problem and have a lot of the data still available after the rest of it times out.”
“Do you know anybody that has a camera?” I tried to keep a straight face.
“Young lady,” Uncle Andy said, “I think you’ve just been drafted.”
Emily smiled and spun around. “I’ll go get my stuff,” she said as she walked away.
Bernice clanged a pot in the kitchen sink, and that noise attracted my attention to Oakley. He was sitting on a tall stool at the kitchen island where the serving line had been, and he was staring down at a small tablet in front of him. His right hand was slowly twirling a pencil, and as I watched he dropped the eraser end to the tablet and scrubbed. After blowing away particles of rubberized graphite, he flipped the point towards the paper and scribbled a short series of characters, and then he sat back and stared at the tablet again. An almost imperceptible shake of his head accompanied the stare.
“Do you think he can remember the right code?” I asked no one in particular.
“Some people have a mind for numbers. He’s sure that his part of the code key is accurate,” my uncle answered, “and he said he’s ninety-nine percent sure that he has Major Larrabee’s correct, but the one percent that’s holding him up is the arrangement of a small section right in the middle of the string.”
“I guess we’ll find out soon enough. I mean, look at it this way,” Walter said, “if it falls through, we’re no further behind than we were yesterday.”
“Yesterday sucked,” Uncle Andy said as he looked down at his bandaged leg.
Chapter 99
“OK, we’re eighty-seven minutes post removal of my tooth,” Oakley began as he studied the microscopic drive held in his fingertips. “That gives us a little over ten hours . . . minimum . . . if we can even access this little guy. The problem is that I’m pretty sure the midline sequence of Major Larrabee’s code follows one of the potential strings that I’ve written down. Unfortunately, I can’t decide between them, and we only get two shots of this.”
“How many did you to narrow it down to?” Emily asked as she finished setting up her tripod.
There was a space of silence, and then the lieutenant gave the answer that I already knew.
“Seven,” he said.
“Well, if this doesn’t work out, I imagine we can all play a few hands of gin rummy,” Sam answered.
We had taken several precautions to eliminate potential Murphy’s Law scenarios. Samantha’s laptop was fully charged, and both the laptop and projector were plugged into a battery backup system, which was in turn fully charged and being powered by one of the inverter generator outlets.
“One final thing,” Oakley said, “I have no way of knowing how much data is on this drive until we get in. If we have the right code, we may find that it’s a single document two pages long. On the other end of the spectrum—again, assuming we can even get in—we might find gigabytes of technical data, extrapolative assumptions, and a lot of other potential file types—videos, spreadsheets . . . whatever. What I’m trying to say is to not get your hopes up. However, if we can get in, and if it’s loaded with data, please let me do my job. I process things differently than most people, and when I’m digging through trying to organize the whole ball of wax in my own way, I won’t be very receptive to questions, OK?”
“We’ll keep the interruptions to a minimum,” Doc responded.
“Just make sure that you give Emily a chance to take pictures before you switch pages,” Sam said.
“I will.” Oakley glanced at the miniature drive one final time and then inserted it into the port on Samantha’s laptop. A few seconds later the computer gave an audible beep and both the laptop’s display and the projector screen turned dull yellow. I watched as a single flashing cursor appeared on the field of yellow. Oakley’s fingers began to precisely tap the keyboard, and with every peck the cursor jumped to a seemingly random part of the screen.
“That’s my code. Now let’s try my top choice for Major Larrabee’s.” He gazed at the tablet to his right, and then began to methodically punch in a long series of characters. When he finished, his index finger hovered above the enter key. “Here goes . . .”
With one tap, the screen fuzzed out for a long heartbeat, and then fuzzed back in to the wall of yellow with the flashing cursor.
“That wasn’t it,” Oakley mumbled as he studied the tablet again. “We’ve got one more shot at this. Anybody feel lucky?”
“Which one feels right . . . of the ones that are remaining, I mean,” Uncle Andy offered.
“I’ve listed them in what I felt was my priority to try. I really thought that the first one was it.”
“Look at the next two . . . numbers two and three on your list. Get rid of the other ones. Of those two, which one do you keep going back to?”
Lieutenant Oakley looked up at my uncle and shrugged. “I don’t know. The third one was originally my number one choice, but the more I thought about it, the more I tried to remember . . . well, I ended up switching it with the one that didn’t work.”
“Number three was originally your number one choice?” Walter asked.
Oakley nodded.
“Use that one.” The reply came bluntly and quickly from my uncle.
I followed Oakley as he swiveled his neck looking for a consensus. Sam shrugged his shoulders, and Doc Collins raised his eyebrows noncommittally. The rest of the small gathering nodded.
“Alright then, let’s see what’s behind door number three,” Oakley mumbled as he turned to the keyboard. Once again the field of yellow showed nothing more than a randomly appearing cursor as the lieutenant entered the long series of the code. When his half was done, he began entering the equally complex chain that occupied group three on the tablet. In a repeat of the last attempt, his finger paused above the enter key. “Anybody want to make a wish?”
Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending Page 73