Gideon's Corpse

by Douglas Preston

  “Alida told me Blaine was denied a Nobel Prize because of his past. Perhaps that embittered him.”

  “Perhaps. And perhaps we’ll find the answer on this laptop.” Fordyce plugged in the computer and pressed the POWER button.

  From the driver’s seat, Gideon looked over as the hard disk trundled, various start-up messages flashed by, then the login screen appeared.

  Gideon muttered, “Like I said. Password-protected.”

  “O ye of little faith,” Fordyce retorted.

  “Can you crack it?”

  “That remains to be seen. Look at the splash screen, it’s running the NewBSD variant of UNIX—an odd choice for a novelist.”

  “Don’t forget, he’s ex-MI6. Who the hell knows what software they run?”

  “True. But I doubt this is Blaine’s working machine.” He pointed at the laptop’s screen. “Check out that version number: NewBSD 2.1.1. This OS is at least six years old.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It might be good—the security won’t be as strong. Didn’t you see any other computers in his office?”

  “I didn’t hang around casing the joint. I just grabbed the first one I saw.”

  Fordyce nodded. Then he pulled his BlackBerry from his pocket and began pressing buttons.

  “Who are you calling?” Gideon asked.

  “I’m accessing the mainframe at FBI Crypt. I’m going to need a few tools to do this job properly.”

  Gideon waited while Fordyce typed a laborious series of commands. Then, with a grunt of satisfaction, the agent attached a flash memory stick to the BlackBerry’s USB port. “I can boot into half a dozen operating systems with this gizmo,” he said, tapping the memory stick. “Thank God this laptop’s got USB.”

  “What next?” Gideon asked.

  “I’m going to run a dictionary attack on Blaine’s login password.”

  “Right.”

  “If it isn’t too long or obscure, and if the total exhaust time on the OS password monitor is within reason, maybe we’ll catch a break.”

  Gideon glanced over dubiously. “Blaine’s no dummy.”

  “True. But that doesn’t mean he’s technically savvy.” Fordyce snugged the flash drive into one of the laptop’s USB ports and rebooted the machine. “This little honey can try two hundred and fifty thousand passwords a second. Let’s see just how paranoid Simon Blaine really is.”

  For the next ninety minutes, Gideon drove the Jeep at precisely seventy-nine miles per hour, passing Elk City, then Clinton, then Weatherford. The sun would soon be setting, and a starry sky would fill the night dome of the prairie. As they neared Oklahoma City, without progress, Gideon began to feel increasingly restless. Fordyce, too, was growing impatient, peering at the screen and muttering under his breath. Finally, with a curse, he yanked the flash drive from the laptop’s slot and powered down the machine. “Okay,” he growled. “Score one for Blaine.”

  “So we’re screwed?” Gideon asked.

  “Not yet we’re not.” When the laptop rebooted and the login prompt appeared, Fordyce rattled off a quick blast of keystrokes:

  LOGIN: root

  PASSWORD: ****

  Immediately a storm of text scrolled up the screen.

  “Bingo!” Fordyce said.

  Gideon looked at him. “Did you get into his account?”

  “No.”

  “Then what good is it?”

  “I got into the system account. Just type root for both the login name and password and, presto, you’re super-user. You’d be amazed at how many people either don’t know enough or are too lazy to change the default system account passwords on these older UNIX systems.”

  “Can you get into his account or his files from there?”

  Fordyce shook his head. “No, I can’t. But maybe I don’t need to.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because as super-user, I can access the standard UNIX password file.” He plugged the flash drive back in, typed a long string of commands, then sat back in his seat, beaming. He pointed at the screen. “Check it out.”

  Gideon looked over.

  BlaineS:Heqw3EZU5k4Nd:413:adgfirkg

  m~:/home/subdir/BlaineS:/bin/bash

  “That’s his account name and password, the latter scrambled with DES.”

  “Data encryption standard? I thought that couldn’t be cracked.”

  Fordyce smiled.

  Gideon frowned. “Uh-oh. Let me guess. The government built a back door into the encryption standard.”

  “You didn’t hear it from me.”

  For about ten minutes, Gideon drove while Fordyce typed, sometimes pausing to peer at the screen, now and then muttering under his breath. Finally, with a withering curse, he punched the back of the seat.

  “No joy?” Gideon asked.

  Fordyce shook his head. “I can’t break the DES algorithm. Blaine’s a lot more sophisticated than I thought. He or someone used a hardened DES variant. I’m totally stuck. I can’t think of anything else to do.”

  The Jeep fell into silence.

  “We can’t just give up,” Gideon said.

  “You got any ideas?”

  “We can try guessing the password.”

  Fordyce rolled his eyes. “My dictionary attack just tried over a billion passwords in twelve common languages, including words, combinations of words, names, and place-names, not to mention a compilation of the million most commonly used passwords. It’s the best brute-force attack program in existence. And you think you can do better by guessing?” He shook his head.

  “At least we know what not to guess at. Your dictionary attack is just a dumb program. We know a lot more about Simon Blaine than it does. Look, it’s worth a shot. We’ve already got his account name, right?” Gideon thought for a moment. “Maybe he used the name of one of the characters in his books. Get on your BlackBerry, find his website, and grab the names of any characters you find.”

  Fordyce grunted approval and got to work.

  A few minutes later, Fordyce had compiled a list of a dozen names. “Dirkson Auger,” he said, looking at the first on the list. “Blaine really gets paid for making up names like that?”

  “Try it.”

  Fordyce lifted the lid of the laptop. “I’ll try Dirkson first.”

  Error.

  “Auger.”

  Error.

  “Try them together,” Gideon suggested.

  Error.

  “Try the names again in turn, only backward this time.”

  Error.

  “Son of a bitch,” Fordyce muttered.

  “Do the same with the rest.”

  Before Gideon had driven another fifteen miles, Fordyce threw up his hands. “It’s hopeless,” he said. “I’ve tried them all. Even if it was one of these names, if Blaine had any sense he’d have thrown in a few extra characters to add some noise, or changed letters to numbers, or something. There are just too many variants.”

  “The thing about passwords,” Gideon said after a minute or two, “is that, unless you’re using a password manager, you have to remember the damn thing.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe it isn’t a character in a book. Maybe it’s the name of a real person. He wouldn’t be likely to forget that. And the most obvious person would be Alida.”

  “Obvious, all right. Way too obvious.” Fordyce typed in the name anyway, tried a bunch of variations. “Nope.”

  “Okay, so do what you suggested a minute ago. Change some of the letters to numbers or symbols.”

  “I’ll change the l to a 1.” Fordyce tried this password. “Nada.”

  “Try something else. Change the i to a dollar sign.”

  More typing. “Strike three,” said Fordyce.

  Gideon licked his lips. “I remember reading that most decent passwords are composed of two parts, a root and an appendage. Right? So add something on the end.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Xyz, maybe. Or 00.”
<
br />   Still more typing. “This is getting old, fast,” Fordyce told him.

  “Wait a minute—I just thought of something. Blaine has a pet name for Alida. Miracle Daughter. He sometimes calls her MD. Try that after her name.”

  Fordyce typed. “No go. Not in front, in back, or in the middle.”

  Gideon sighed. Maybe Fordyce was right. “Just keep trying all the variables.” He concentrated on the road ahead while Fordyce typed quietly beside him, trying one variant after another.

  Suddenly the FBI agent gave a whoop of triumph. Gideon glanced over and saw a fresh welter of text scrolling up the screen.

  “You got in?” he asked in disbelief.

  “Damn right!”

  “What was the password?”

  “A1$daMdee. Kind of sentimental, don’t you think?” And Fordyce settled in to browse the computer’s files as the skyline of Oklahoma City came into view.

  62

  TWELVE HOURS LATER they were crossing Tennessee. Fordyce slouched in the passenger seat, nose buried in the laptop. For twelve hours, he had been poring over it, browsing its many thousands of files, with no hits; nothing but book drafts, endless chapter revisions, correspondence, outlines, movie treatments, notes, and the like. The computer seemed completely and totally devoted to writing—and nothing else.

  Gideon glanced over. “Any luck?” he asked for about the thirtieth time.

  Fordyce shook his head.

  “What about emails?”

  “Nothing of interest. No exchanges with Chalker, Novak, or anyone else up at Los Alamos.” It seemed more and more likely, Fordyce reflected, that there had been another computer in Blaine’s office that Gideon had failed to grab. But he didn’t say anything.

  In the background, Gideon was listening to NPR, which—as usual—was spewing a mixture of news and speculation about the impending nuke attack on Washington. The investigation had managed to keep the presumed N-Day—today—a secret, but the massive movements of troops, the evacuations of Washington, and all the other preparations in major cities around the country were garnering frantic media attention. The country was in a state of intense and escalating anxiety. People knew that things were coming to a head.

  Anxiety and outrage ruled the airwaves. A parade of self-appointed experts, pundits, talking heads, and politicians offered their conflicting views, one after the other, excoriating the stalled investigation and offering their own insights. Everyone had a theory. The terrorists had abandoned their plan. The terrorists had shifted their attack to another major American city. The terrorists were lying low, biding their time. The terrorists were all dead from radiation poisoning. The liberals were to blame. The conservatives were to blame. The terrorists were communists, right-wingers, left-wingers, fundamentalists, anarchists, bankers, you name it.

  It went on and on. Fordyce couldn’t help but listen with a kind of repulsed fascination, wanting to ask Gideon to turn it off yet unable to.

  He glanced out at the road ahead of them. They were approaching the outer suburbs of Knoxville. He stretched again, looked back down at the laptop. It was incredible how many files a writer could generate. He was about three-quarters through them, and there was nothing to do but keep going.

  As he opened the next file—something called “OPERATION CORPSE”—he was jolted by the sudden whoop of a siren and flashing lights in his rearview mirror. He glanced over at the speedometer and saw they were still going seventy-nine—in a zone where the speed limit had just dropped to sixty.

  “Oh shit,” he muttered.

  “No driver’s license,” said Gideon. “I’m dead.”

  Fordyce laid aside the computer. The cop whooped his siren again. Gideon put on his blinker, slowed, eased over into the breakdown lane, and came to a stop.

  “Play it by ear,” said Fordyce, his mind working fast. “Tell him you had your wallet stolen, that your name is Simon Blaine.”

  The cop got out of his car, hitching up his pants. He was a state trooper, big and square, with a shaved head, knobby ears, mirrored shades, and a frown on his thick lips. He came up, tapped on the window. Gideon rolled it down.

  The trooper leaned in. “License and registration?”

  “Hello, Officer,” Gideon said politely. He reached over into the glove compartment and rummaged around, pulling out the registration. He handed it to the cop. “Officer, my wallet was stolen at a rest stop back there in Arkansas. As soon as I get back to New Mexico I’ll be getting a replacement license.”

  A silence while the trooper glanced over the registration. “Are you Simon Blaine?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Fordyce hoped to hell the guy wasn’t a fiction reader.

  “You say you have no license?”

  “I have a license, Officer, but it was stolen.” He had to engineer this one fast. He pitched his voice in a confidential tone. “My dad was a state trooper just like you, shot in the line of duty—”

  “Please step out of the car, sir,” said the trooper, impassive.

  Gideon moved to comply, fumbling with the doorknob while he continued talking. “Routine traffic stop, two guys, turned out they’d just robbed a bank…” He continued fumbling. “Damn door…”

  “Out. Now.” The man brought his hand to rest on the butt of his sidearm, as a precaution.

  Fordyce could see that this was already going the wrong way. He took out his shield and leaned over Gideon, showing it to the trooper. “Officer?” he said. “Special Agent Fordyce, FBI.”

  The trooper, startled, took the shield and examined it through the mirrored shades. He handed it back to Fordyce, making a show of being unimpressed. Then he turned to Gideon once again. “I asked you to step out of the car.”

  Fordyce was irritated. He opened his door and got out.

  “You remain in the car, sir,” said the trooper.

  “Excuse me,” said Fordyce, sharply. He walked around the front of the car and approached the trooper, staring at his shield. “Officer Mackie, is it? As I said, I’m a special agent from the DC field office.” He did not offer his hand. “My associate here is an FBI technical liaison. We’re traveling undercover. We’re both assigned to NEST, working on the terrorist case. I’ve given you my name and shown you my badge number, and you’re welcome to check out my affiliation. But I am sorry to say you are not going to see any ID from this gentleman and you’ll just have to accept that. Do you understand?”

  He paused. Mackie said nothing.

  “I said, do you understand me, Officer Mackie?”

  The trooper remained unmoved. “I will check out your affiliation, thank you. May I have your identification back, sir?”

  This wasn’t acceptable: the last thing Fordyce wanted was for Millard to learn he was two-thirds of the way across the country in Simon Blaine’s Jeep. But… If the man needed the identification back, it meant he hadn’t noted his name. Fordyce took another step toward the trooper and lowered his voice. “No more of this bullshit. We need to get to Washington, and we’re in a big-time hurry. That’s why we were speeding. Because we’re traveling undercover, we can’t slap a siren on the vehicle or travel with an escort. Call in my ID, check it out—no problem. You do that. But in case you haven’t been listening to the news, there’s a crisis going on, and my associate and I sure as hell can’t wait around while you check us out.” He paused, scanning the man’s face to see if he was penetrating that stolid exterior.

  The state trooper remained more or less impassive. A tough one. Well, so be it. He raised his voice to a shout.

  “And I might just add, Officer, that if your activities blow our cover, you’ll find yourself at the bottom of the Mariana Shit Trench. We’re on a critical mission and you’ve already wasted too much of our time.”

  And now, finally, Fordyce saw the man’s truculent, brick-like face flush with fear and anger. “I’m just doing my job, sir, you’ve no business talking to me like that.”

  Fordyce eased off abruptly, exhaled, laid a hand on the man
’s shoulder. “I know. I’m sorry. We’re all just doing our jobs—in a tough situation. I’m sorry for speaking to you sharply, Troop. We’re under a lot of stress here, as you might imagine. But we really do need to keep going. By all means, call in my name and badge number, check it out—but please don’t hold us up.”

  The man straightened. “Yes, sir. I understand. I think we’re done here. I’m going to radio your plate number ahead and let everyone know you’ll be coming through on official law enforcement business, so you can exceed the speed limit at least as far as the state line.”

  Fordyce gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Appreciate it, Troop. Very much.” He slipped back into the passenger seat and Gideon took off. After a moment, Fordyce said, “Father a state trooper shot in the line of duty? Fucking lame. Lucky I was around to pull your fat out of the fire.”

  “You had the badge, I didn’t,” Gideon said. Then he added, grudgingly: “Still, you did good.”

  “Damn right.” Fordyce frowned. “Lot of good it’s going to do us. We’re, what, seven hours out of DC and we still don’t have a clue what Blaine’s up to. This laptop is as clean as the driven snow.”

  “There’s got to be something in there. You can’t plan a huge conspiracy like this and not have it leak into your work in some way.”

  “What if we’re wrong? What if he’s innocent, after all?”

  Gideon fell silent. Then he shook his head. “For personal reasons, a huge part of me wishes he was. But he’s behind this. He has to be. Nothing else makes sense.”

  With a weary sense of futility, Fordyce went back to OPERATION CORPSE. He knew what he’d find, the same thing he’d found in all the other endless files: the straightforward work of a dedicated and prolific writer.

  OPERATION CORPSE was a ten-page outline for a novel, apparently one Blaine had never written—at least, not by that title. Fordyce rubbed his eyes, began skimming the synopsis, then stopped. As he stared at the screen, he felt his heart just about do a flip. He blinked once, twice. Then he went back to the beginning and began again, more slowly this time.

  When he reached the end, he looked over at Gideon. “Oh my God,” he said in a low voice. “You aren’t going to believe this.”