“The cranes were sabotaged with drones. DHS gave us a map of other flights. He flew one over the block you live on, in Brooklyn, and also near your office here.”
“Jesus.”
Peter said, “You should know, Detective. An hour ago, little longer, we were on our way to a meeting and it looked like somebody was following us. I made him and he turned down another street.”
Sellitto pulled out a notebook, a battered one like detectives in TV shows always use. “Description.”
Talese and Peter gave it to the detective.
“Is there any reason somebody would want you dead? Whistleblowing? Any old prosecutions that may’ve come back?”
“No...”
But he was looking out the window, reflecting: Was what he’d thought of earlier possible? That someone wanted him dead because of his vote for the tax bill?
“I have no idea. I mean, yes, I put a lot of bad guys away. It was years ago. But a few of them were sociopaths. I can track down their names and see if anybody’s been released lately.”
Sellitto looked his way for a moment, then tucked the pad away and pulled out his phone.
Talese said, “I’m scheduled to go on TV in an hour. Can we stop at the studio?”
“No.”
“But it’s CNN,” Talese said.
Still texting, the detective said, “The answer’s still no. And do me a favor and sit back.”
“Sit back?”
“Yeah, away from the window. You’re putting me in the line of fire too.”
“Talese’s at the federal building.”
Lon Sellitto’s voice was coming through the speaker into the parlor.
Rhyme asked, “The theory? Who wants him dead and why?”
“He says he doesn’t know. But he was like sixty-eight percent he doesn’t know.”
Rhyme asked, “Can you up the dial?”
“I can try. He’s a politician. Either they’re evasive or they lie. Give me a mob enforcer any day. They sing like chickadees.”
“You stopped at the tech department, right?”
“It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever done for you, Linc.”
“But you did it?”
“Yeah.”
“More on that later.”
As soon as they disconnected, his phone hummed again.
“Rhyme here.”
“Detective, I’m Ben Emery. Emery Digital Solutions? Two of your officers dropped off a computer for us to crack. I wanted to give you an update.”
Ah, good. Rhyme still hoped emails on Gilligan’s laptop could reveal who’d hired Hale, for what purpose and where future attacks might be. Maybe even an alternative safe house now that his primary one had self-destructed.
“Do you have anything?”
“Afraid it’s moving slowly.”
Wasn’t this the day and age of supercomputers? Couldn’t teenagers hack into a laptop while texting and playing video games simultaneously?
Emery continued, “We’re brute forcing, but he used an SHA-256 hash.”
“Which is?” Rhyme’s voice betrayed his impatience.
“Secure Hash Algorithm 256.”
A sigh. “And ‘hash’ is?”
“Software that turns one string of data into another one. To passcode protect something, you create a password, right? Then you feed it into a hash generator and it becomes a string of data. Let’s say the password’s your name: Lincoln Rhyme. Loved that book about you by the way...”
“Mr. Emery,” Rhyme muttered.
“All right. Well. I just sent you the hash of your name. It’s on your phone.”
A text arrived.
49b14a858f2c023331d308310de984acad097cd510ed2e5cb0185fab284be511
“All right. The passcode’s your name. Somebody needs to crack it. It’s easy to find the hash — there’s no reason to hide it, since hashes only go one way. You can’t turn it back
“Exactly!” He sounded pleased Rhyme got it. “That’s what we’re doing now. Inputting words and characters, hoping to find a hash that matches. Not typing them in, of course. It’s all done automatically. We’re running about a trillion hashes a second.”
“Excellent. So, you’ll crack it soon? A few hours, you were saying?”
A pause. “Well, Detective Rhyme, that was just an illustration. Why I’m calling... If we don’t have it now, that means he’s probably using a mix of uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters like question marks and percentage signs.”
Rhyme frowned. “You’re saying it might take a day or more?”
This pause was longer. “Uhm. If he’s got a fifteen-character password, which isn’t unusual, about two hundred million years.”
“Is that... Are you joking?”
“Uhm, well, no, sir,” said the man who, it was clear to Rhyme, probably never joked about computer matters.
“You have to have a faster computer there.”
“Doesn’t matter. Even with Fugaku, in Japan” — he said this almost reverently — “you might shave off a few hundred thousand years is all. But maybe we’ll be lucky and he used something short.”
Ah, the damn L-word again.
Rhyme added another unnecessary: “Let me know the minute you find something.”
“I’ll do that, sir. Oh, just one question?”
“Yes?”
