A Guest of Christmas Past

On the 13^th of December 2009, the predecessor of SleuthSayers, Criminal Brief, launched a Christmas puzzle unique to the web. With all seven CB members contributing, it ran for a week… and a bonus eighth day, with clues appearing every in every article. The solution to the puzzle would reveal a holiday message.

Clue or red herring?

At first, we feared the puzzle would be too easy, that flocks of readers would solve it. Then after the 8^th day when solutions didn’t flood in, we became concerned it was too difficult. What we initially concealed was that any one day could have revealed the answer, although we dropped numerous hints along the way.

In an unusual turn, one of our readers kept a diary of her efforts. She was dealing with annoying issues at the time, and picked up puzzle solving as a respite. She shared the notes after the solution was announced, and quite an epic struggle it was. A few times she thought she was on the right track, but wasn’t satisfied and the days ticked away.

And then… and then…

If you’d like to take a shot at it, visit the clues in the series of articles on Criminal Brief. Congratulations if you happen to solve it, but be sure to read the amazing journal of the solver herself, CJ Dowse.

In the meantime, I hope you had a happy Chanukah and are enjoying a safe and happy Christmas. But wait. Below find a charming tiny tale that appeared on the 8^th day.

The Skating Mistress Affair, Part III

Part I and Part II provide the background of a unique bank fraud investigation. Last time, Sandman, influenced by his interfering inamorata, could not grasp that having cheated a bank once, he was no longer in a position to negotiate tough deals to make matters right.

No one had any notion of the unreal turn the case would take.

---

Off-Court Serve

A sizable entourage gathered in North Carolina: the vice president, a local consultant, a legal assistant, two attorneys, a company officer, Chase, and a brace of company people who stayed in the background.

I hadn’t previously met the bank’s attorney, a pretty, dark-haired girl with beauty, brains, and a beguiling sense of humor. Diane and I hit it off immediately.

The vice president introduced the other attorney, a local Greensboro man who’d made good. He’d graduated Harvard summa cum laude, then returned home to practice. His Clark Kent glasses lent a vague, intellectual uncertainty that would fool most people. Women zeroed in on tall, dark, and handsome, although he’d probably suffer an academic stoop in later life. Chase used the term ‘Esquire’, which became the man’s sobriquet for the rest of the trip.

The attorneys laid out a simple plan. They intended to search Sandman’s residence and, if necessary, his workplace for the source code. Since Sandman worked nights and slept days, they hoped to catch him napping– literally.

Esquire’s clerk had filed a brief and affidavits, including a couple from me, in support of search warrants for Sandman’s residence and place of work. They drafted carefully the motion to search the workplace, Carolina Steel. They weren’t Sandman’s employer, they merely let Sandman use their computers for development in exchange for his software and services. Two of their employees, Harry Church and Charley Barley, collaborated with Sandman.

Guilford County courthouse

An out-of-state entity requesting to search a local company might give a judge pause, but banks enjoyed certain federal privileges and protections. Trailing after the attorneys, we convened at the Guilford County courthouse to obtain a judge’s signatures on the court orders and warrant.

And then we waited. And waited. The courthouse’s architecture would have given Howard Roark apoplexy, a dull cell block unrelieved by a Greco-Roman temple façade. Its uncommonly hard benches had been cunningly copied from a Spanish Inquisition design. After painful hours of aching back and backside, I’d have confessed to assassinating Warren G Harding.

Once we discovered judges had adjourned for lunch, we followed suit. Esquire stayed behind in case a magistrate returned early. We need not have worried. The clock read well after lunch hour when Esquire came dashing back.

Why Southern Deputies Have Stereotypes

Sheriff J.W. Pepper		Sheriff B.T. Justus		our Deputy I.B. Dimbulb

The next step entailed the sheriff’s office executing the search warrant. While we waited, the Sheriff’s Department assigned a deputy to us. Jaws dropped. I wasn’t sure about the others, but I gulped in dismay.

Sheriffs J.W. Pepper and Buford T. Justice– movie fans might recognize them as the fat, stogie-chomping clichés portrayed by actors George Clifton and Jackie Gleason, respectively. Our guy looked like their bigger, nastier, meaner brother, the Southern deputy the South has done its best to stamp out.

Mean little eyes peeked out from the fat pads of his cheeks. His hair was losing the follicle war fought on an oily battlefield. He chewed a fat cigar mashed out so often, its end looked exploded. This good ol’ boy had worked hard developing a beer gut, the kegger kind that gave meaning to barrel-chested.

Chase and I’d been chatting up the pretty attorney between us, idly flirting to keep in practice. The deputy looked around at the gathered crew, hitched up his gunbelt and seized upon her to impress.

“Lil lady, whuz this here all about?”

Diane explained we were waiting for a warrant.

“Whut, you’re a legal lady? Purty lil theng lack you? Listen here, I’ll check on it, pull a few strings.”

He wandered off, came back, and glowered at Chase and me still sitting on either side of her. He plumped down next to the law clerk, facing us, legs apart to accommodate the sag of his kilderkin belly. Guilford County law enforcement shirts were made out of sturdy twill, not flimsy civilian fabric that might rupture at the next Big Mac.

“We wait a bit. At least this here’s simpler than last week. Yes sir. We wuz down in n-town, middle of the night, had my nightstick out whaling away, an’ you wun’t believe how shy them dark ones gets facing real lawnforcement.”

A man with a gun, a prejudice, and a loose screw had been turned loose on the streets of Greensboro.

The rest of us sat aghast. The local paralegal looked as if he wanted to shrink out of sight. Our VP, lounging against the wall, grimaced in disgust and departed the scene of the crime.

Next to me, attorney Diane tried to reassure me, the Yankee in the group. She whispered, “Believe me, this is not what Southerners are all about. This moron is… is…”

“An abomination,” muttered Chase. “Pardon the expression, but an utter asshole.”

His eye-watering cigar breath wilted most of us. I couldn’t decide if the deputy was oblivious to our reactions or encouraged by them. Had some of us managed to conjure obsequious interest, the course of events might have changed.

He continued. “Yep, now you takes a good oak nightstick, it makes a real good impression. It’s a grand persuader and if someones gets a bit messed up, you don’ gotta file no reports lack if you draw down. Nows this one darkie…” He didn’t use the word darkie.

I worked and traveled throughout the South, but I never encountered anything like this. More than sickening, this guy frightened us.

Once upon a time, the don’t-tread-on-me temper I inherited from my mother would override the quiet reason of my dad’s DNA contribution. Chase glanced at me in alarm. He’d seen me erupt once before. He leaned over and rested a calming hand on my wrist.

“Leigh, don’t, man. Don’t let anger cloud your vision. We need this guy on our side; it’s too important.”

Chase was right. We didn’t need to antagonize the repellant lawman assigned to us. I stalked toward the restrooms.

Hands on the marble counter, I leaned forward gathering myself. The vice president stepped out of a stall. He washed his hands and said, “Piece of work, isn’t he.”

“That bastard gets his jollies clubbing kids. Makes me sick.”

“That’s why I left before I told him off. We can’t change him now.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “C’mon, we endure.”

And we did for two more hours. None of us knew how much more of the deputy we could take before one of us turned homicidal.

Chase and the VP grew increasingly agitated the warrant was taking so much time. As shadows grew long, legal delays put at risk the plan to surprise Sandman asleep. Now past mid-afternoon, the time neared for his inner vampire to stir.

Esquire appeared and waved the vice president over. Minutes later they handed the deputy the court order.

The deputy squinted at the documents.

“Whut’s this here software?”

Chase said, “Computer programs, apps. Software runs the computer.”

“Whut’s it look like?”

“It could be listings, discs, hard drives, or even tape.”

“Yuh, but which?”

“It could be any of the above: print-outs, discs, cartridges, or tape.”

“Yuh, I said which?”

Chase turned helplessly to me.

I said, “We don’t know, sir. If this order was for music, it could be on a cassette, a CD, a vinyl record, or even sheet music, see? Same idea; we don’t know if it’s on a hard drive, CD, or printed sheets. It could be any or all.”

“Listen up. If you don’ know whut you’re lookin’ fur, we jez ain’t goin’.”

Attorney Diane stepped forward. Beguilingly, she said, “This is a court order signed by a judge; you have the warrant. Leigh here can recognize the software.” She rested her hand on his forearm. “We need an experienced officer like you to execute the warrant.”

“Thet judge pulls bogus orders outta his ass all the time. It don’t spell out what it is, I don’t execute it.”

Esquire hadn’t been regaled with the deputy’s adventures like we had, but the antipathy between the two men had blossomed, instant and intense. He said, “Come, Deputy, explain that to the judge.”

“Folks say you got fancy-ass Harvard law school, but that don’t cut no ice. I don’t tote for you. I works for the Sheriff.”

“The judge hears this, you might not work for anyone.”

The deputy stared at Esquire. He unhurriedly took the cigar out of his mouth, pulled out a paper pouch of tobacco, tucked in a chaw, and reinserted the cigar. He gave the distinct impression he’d like to address Esquire with the nightstick. Finally, he said, “Let’s git.” He turned and stomped away.

The Raid

The deputy’s heavily muscled Dodge led our convoy of four cars. The paralegals and staff came along as witnesses. We pulled in front of a modest house in a suburban neighborhood.

Chase stayed back to avoid antagonizing Sandman. I was kept waiting in the last car, I was told, for the premises to be secured.

Four got out. Both lawyers and the vice president followed the deputy up the walkway. The deputy banged on the door.

A spikey-haired, sleepy-eyed Sandman came to the entry, tying the belt of his bathrobe.

“We lookin’ for a Daniel Sandman. You happen to be him?”

“Yes.”

“We got a warrant for software. You got any this here software?”

“No, no sir, I don’t.”

“None at all?”

“No sir.”

“Well, then, a good day to you.”

“But… but…” said Esquire. “We came to search.”

“No, we ain’t gonna do no search.”

“But we have a warrant, a search warrant, as directed by a judge.”

“You heard the boy: He ain’t got none of this software. His word’s good enough for me.”

The vice president spoke up. “He has the software and we have a court order.”

The deputy spoke in mean, measured words. “You heard the boy. He said he ain’t got software. Now, you wantin’ to mess with me?”

Thwarted, the lawyers trudged back to the cars. Revving the Dodge’s big engine, the deputy whipped the powerful car down the street and out of sight.

“We still have the court order for his workplace,” said the vice president.

“A lot of good that will do us now,” said Esquire. “But let’s try.”

Nervy Steel

He directed us to Carolina Steel’s headquarters. As if anticipated, we were swept straight to the top floor where two company officers and their lawyers met us. Clearly, they knew we were coming.

The company attorneys blathered and blathered, made phone calls and blathered more. They claimed they were waiting for senior counsel. Outside the conference room, security gathered.

One of the executives said, “Our boys downstairs assure us they don’t have any of this software mentioned in the court order.”

Chase muttered in my ear. “Least not anymore.”

“That’s why we brought an expert and a court order to search,” said our vice president.

“Now, now. Normally in Carolina, police or deputies conduct searches. You don’t do it differently in Old Vir-gin-I-A, do you? All y’all can’t expect us just to let you poke around, can you, especially since our boys assure everyone nothing’s to be found? Certainly you don’t mean to question our veracity or abuse our hospitality?”

A legal argument ensued, but it grew clear that without police presence, we wouldn’t be allowed beyond the boardroom.

Security personnel moved in to escort us to the parking lot. The burly males looked menacing enough, but the much scarier short female guard appeared itching to shoot one of us in the kneecap.

Thwarted yet again, we adjourned for a post-mortem. It felt like our own. What should have been a simple mission, abjectly nosedived.

---

Days later, talking to Sandman, he told me what happened behind the scenes.

“Man, the deputy gave me a scare. As soon as I closed the door, I lit the fireplace. Middle of summer and I get a blaze roaring. I’d stacked listings all over the house, one of them on an end table next to the door, not more than two, three feet from where the deputy stood.

“I gathered them up, feeding them piece by piece to the fire, burning the evidence. I also had a couple of mag tapes around. You wouldn’t believe how Mylar stinks when it burns. Gives off this black ash. The stench still reeks in my nostrils. That left a disc cartridge. I figured if worse came to worst, it might anciently sorta get dropped.

“Simultaneously, I called the computer room, and told Charley and Harry the situation. The entire time you were upstairs with the lawyers stalling you, they were downstairs erasing everything they could off of disc and tape, shredding so many listings they fried the shredder and had to roll in another.

“Every ten minutes the CIO would call in. ‘What’s left? What’s left?’ By the time our lawyers let you go, we’d hidden the key pieces and destroyed the rest.

“Harry, Charley, and me… we worried one or all of would be let go, but Carolina Steel’s attorneys nixed that, saying terminations could be used as prima facie evidence we’d done something wrong like destroying the programs specified in the warrant.

“Man, I shouldn’t gloat, but our insane clown deputy beat your Harvard summa cum laude lawyer. Lot of good he did y’all.”

Post Mortem

I accompanied the bank people back to Virginia. It wasn’t a happy trip. The vice president needed to prepare an explanation for the stockholders. The rest of us and Data Corp’s general manager met at the Arbor, a favorite restaurant for dinner, overeating, and imbibing. Comfort food and drink.

We agreed not to talk about the debacle while we ate, but we couldn’t bear the tension. We cursed the deputy, Sandman, Carolina Steel, and software in general. Finally we pushed fried chicken aside and sat back.

“Well,” said the bank’s attorney, dabbing lipstick where it had worn thin. “That was a right fiasco.”

“And other words that begin with ƒ,” Chase said.

Diane put her lipstick away. “What I don’t see is an option anymore.”

“That was it, the end of the line.”

“We’ve got to consider our exposure, to customers, to shareholders, to ourselves. We face serious liability if customers discover we don’t possess the source code.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“Damn,” said Chase, far down in his beer. “I have clients who want to buy it if we can add features and support for new hardware.”

“There is one option,” I said, but no one was listening.

“Oh Lord,” said the attorney. “I wonder if we’ve stepped on any state or federal banking regulations. We could be accused of fraud here.”

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“Even worse exposure,” she groaned, “most of our sales have been out of state.”

I said. “Folks, listen a moment. I can decrypt the code.”

Chase peered at me speculatively, the lawyer skeptically, and Data Corp’s general manager like I was crazy.

Chase said, “Danny told us over the phone it’s too complex even for him. It can’t be done.”

“When do you stop believing the guy who screwed you and start listening to the guy hired to save your butts?”

For the first time in weeks, Chase looked more relieved than morose. He gulped like a man given a Heimlich maneuver.

The general manager reached across for the last piece of chicken. “I’m pretty certain we can’t afford for Leigh to write us an entirely new program.”

Diane’s paralegal had followed both the legal and technical discussions. She had drafted the original purchase contract with Sandman.

“Leigh, what makes you think you can do this?” she asked. “Not only would you have to figure out the program in the ordinary course of events, but a brilliant and devious guy has done his best to see it can’t be done.”

“If anyone can do it, Leigh can,” Chase said with perhaps more conviction than he felt. “If you’d heard the two of them on the phone, you’d know he’s got Sandman on the run. I’ve seen his work, even more brilliant than Sandman.”

“Are we talking battle of the brains or war of the egos?” said the GM. “He may be quite the code-slinger, but experts say code-smashing can’t be done.”

I said, “The difficult part was figuring out it was encrypted. The second hardest has been deducing how. I’ve been working that out at home while I’ve been waiting.”

“You’re plugged into NSA or CIA or something?” said Diane’s paralegal.

“No, it’s merely a puzzle.” A famous quote came to mind. “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” They stared at me. The Churchill reference fell flat. I couldn’t blame them; we’d undergone a bad day.

“What’s our guarantee?” the paralegal asked. “We already took the word of one guy. It’s not up to me, but I wouldn’t throw good money after bad.”

I said, “Sandman created programs to strip and encrypt the program. I have to design programs to decrypt and restore the code.”

Diane spoke up. “So why are you saying this isn’t the most difficult thing in the world?”

“Sandman didn’t want to trigger alarms, so no fancy NSA 128-bit encryption. Instead, he scaled up cypher obfuscation to support the legend of a hard-to-comprehend way of doing things. He believed he garbled the code too much to permit serious study. He’s wrong, but it’ll take detective work.”

“Even so,” said Chase, “you won’t get the documentation back, the comments.”

“True, but I’ve been living with this program for months. Once decoded, the label names give clues; that’s why Sandman encrypted them. As for the logic, in a circular way I can learn the code by having to document it and I can document the code by having to learn it. Does that makes sense? I’ll attain a deeper knowledge than if I hadn’t had to do the extra work.”

Chase raised his glass. “I bet on Leigh.”

The attorney– she of little confidence– shook her head. “He’s cute but…”

Chase picked up the check and said to me, “Let’s get sleep and start tomorrow.”

---

Sandman had blown his chance to negotiate a deal that would have benefited everybody. The bank boxed him in legally and I was closing in on breaking his unbreakable code. He still had one more wrong move to make as we wrap up in Part IV.

The Skating Mistress Affair, Part II

Part I provided the background of a unique bank fraud investigation.

No one had any notion of the unreal turn negotiations would take.

---

Centuries from now, post-civilization archeologists will discover deep, mystifying gouges in the concrete walls of a skating rink in Greensboro, North Carolina. Those ragged furrows came about this way…

The Queen Unseen

Previously I’d uncovered an unusual fraud perpetrated upon a Virginia bank. The bankshares officials sent me to Greensboro to negotiate with the unlikely scammer.

I was willing to bet the miserly VP had booked the motel. It smelled like cheap motels everywhere, a musty mix of stale food, sex, and disinfectant. It featured two beds, a TV remote control bolted to the nightstand, and lots of cardboard stand-ups advertising the dining room, deals for my next visit, Dillard’s Rent-a-Car, and dial 6 for room service. The cardboard junk I swept into a drawer so I could open up my suitcase. Tomorrow, the maid would redecorate the room with new cardboard stand-ups.

I hung shirts on stupid hangers that featured nubbins instead of hooks. Someone had left two wire coat hangers behind. Thanks to cable television, frequent travelers no longer needed to use one as a TV antenna, but having one to keep the toilet from running helped in the middle of the night.

I sat on the bed and dialed Sandman’s number. Another cardboard stand-up informed me local calls cost 75¢. That would bring a frown to the face of Data Corp’s very tight vice president.

“Yo, this is Dan Sandman. We’re ready. Be there in fifteen minutes. Oh, I forgot– I’m bringing my girlfriend, Justine.”

Before my speaking with Sandman, Chase had filled me in about Justine, and Sandman revealed more in our conversation not long ago. Some years older than Danny, his girlfriend was married to an oblivious husband.

She certainly annoyed the hell out of Chase and not because of morals. Chase intimated she involved herself as more than a mistress. She interfered with the business he and Sandman put together. She interjected herself in the middle of discussions. Chase also thought she was a little too flirtatious.

Another hypothesis was developing.

A knock rapped on the door.

Sandman stood nearly a foot shorter than me with an average build, neither athletic nor chubby, barely a slight pudginess around the edges from Moon Pies. His sandy hair was short, but he kept brushing an invisible lock away from his eyes. He bore a pale complexion not from sun screens, but computer screens.

His girlfriend constituted another matter altogether, a dishwater blonde with blonder streaks, slender, pneumatic push-up cleavage, and skirt by Saran-wrap. In heels, she stood a couple of inches taller than Sandman. A lupine awareness hovered about her, a feral aura of a Jerry Springer guest loose on the veldt. She looked pretty in a tough, Tonya Harding way.

I found it difficult to picture her with a didactic like Sandman, a guy who listened to Shostakovich and read whenever he wasn’t writing. Well, maybe not so difficult to figure out– she insistently molded bulging parts against him.

From under her lashes she locked her gaze on me. My hypothesis was becoming a theory. They’d brought a shopping bag heavy enough that Sandman carried it in his arms rather than by its handles.

He said, “We were supposed to go out to dinner, but maybe we could order in pizza. Eat it here and talk.”

“Sure. What do you like on yours?”

We ordered a large artery-clogger with extra cholesterol, bound to be tasty. Recalling Sandman’s preference, I added two litres of Pepsi.

I got down to business. “The bank authorized me to verify the source code– no more tricks– and pay you a final fee.”

“I brought a listing.” He patted the shopping bag like a baby’s tummy. “Let me show you the program.” From the bag, he reverently pulled a binder of old-school perforated green-bar, 14×11, six inches thick. Definitely large enough.

Sandman held it in his lap for a moment longer, a young mother not wanting to put her baby in someone else’s hands. He said, “Let me show you the code now, so we don’t pizza smear it later.”

Involved with his own self-centered agenda, Chase had come off insensitive to this guy’s inner needs, missing the essential clues.

Danny opened the listing on the motel coffee table and gently smoothed a page with evident pride. Few people could appreciate his accomplishment and he desperately needed a professional and, better yet, a cognoscente to validate his work.

I scanned it. Titles, section headings, comments, labels now made sense. It stopped short of my persnickety standard of documentation, but the code was excellent, even brilliant. I told him so.

He hovered over me, pointing out snippets he was particularly proud of. Perhaps a hundred people in the world could appreciate his creation and he was not wasting this opportunity. A willing audience, I effusively praised his masterpiece.

Justine hovered by his side, watchful. Like hearing foreigners speak, she followed the buzz if not the intricacies. Throughout, she kept some part of her body touching his, not so much affectionate as proprietary. When her eyes turned on me, they gave the feeling of being x-rayed.

Tap on the door. Pizza man. Sandman carefully closed the listing and, with unconscious veneration, placed it back in the shopping bag. I noticed external drives, mag tapes, and a second, thin listing. “My encryption program,” he said.

The pizza was a social convention, a bonding device for minds and ribs. When Sandman and Justine turned to their shared enthusiasm for roller skating, she grew animated. “I love skating,” she said. “It’s where we met. My, ah, husband doesn’t skate. Do you like skating?”

“I like the Dire Straits song.”

“Have you ever tried it?” Danny asked.

“Me? Never. I’m a klutz and a menace. Klutzes that value their skin and bones don’t skate.”

Oh hush! Anyway, it has 4 feet.
© Inside Edition

“You never learned?”

“I suffered a deprived childhood. It happens when you’re raised by wolves.”

She sniggered. “Competition we like best, skate dancing. You’d have fun chasing a girl in a very short skirt, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d need to master the art of standing up.”

Sandman finished his pizza. He dabbed his mouth with a paper serviette. His eyes flicked to the shopping bag with the goodies.

He said, “About the fee, you know we want serious money.”

We. He kept using plural pronouns.

I said, “Don’t get too ambitious. The company isn’t in a mood to be trifled with.”

“You know the software is worth at least a couple hundred thousand, probably two-fifty, maybe more. They could make millions off this.”

“What I know is that they feel hijacked, Dan. You put their investors and customers at risk. They’re upset. You have their attention, but don’t overplay your hand.”

“The obfuscation was just a joke on Chase,” he said petulantly. “Why else would I sell it so cheap?”

“Their contract doesn’t have the word ‘joke’ in it. They’re not laughing. Chase was acting for the bank. Sending me here is an expediency. They figure you owe them, but they’re willing to pay a ransom if they can put this mess behind them.”

“I owe them?”

“Dan, you miscalculated. Sure, Chase might lose his job, but involving bank investors, you lost hearts and minds. You viewed it as getting a bonus $5000 to screw Chase, but you put Data Corp at risk with bank  customers. At worst, they perceive Chase as naïve, trusting a deceiver, a fraudster who lies, cheats, and steals.”

He turned paler. “Jesus, I never looked at it that way.”

“They don’t like negotiating with a gun to their head, but they’ll ransom the package if they can.”

“How much?”

“How much are you asking?”

Sandman glanced at Justine. Some silent communication transpired.

“Listen,” he said, “let’s go our own way this evening. We’ll reconvene tomorrow. We want to invite you skating. Let’s get to know each other better and then we’ll talk. OK? It’ll be fun. OK?”

It wasn’t okay, but options were limited. I nodded. “Sure.”

Sandman put his hand on the shopping bag. “We’ll, ah…” He seemed strangely uncertain. “We’ll take the program with us for now.”

I looked at them– Sandman timid, she suddenly tense. I realized each person in that room thought the same thing. I was considerably taller, broader, with more muscle mass. I could physically seize the listings and tapes from them, heave their asses out the door and leave them nothing.

For a moment they feared they’d misjudged, but the instance passed. They got me right the first time. Not an enforcer, never a bully, that’s not my style. I wouldn’t thump someone over computer code no matter how justified it might be. Doing the wrong thing wouldn’t accomplish the right thing. He’d placed himself and others in a precarious legal and ethical situation, but he nevertheless deserved compensation for his product.

Relieved, clutching their package, they backed out of the room, waving and saying, “Tomorrow, lunch time, we’ll pick you up.”

Reporting 1

I phoned the vice president at home and filled him in. He was a man of rectitude. He didn’t approve of a Sunday spent in a roller rink negotiating a shady deal with, in his view, a whoring shyster, but he understood the necessity.

“What’s your take on the situation?” he asked.

“Not positive. This girlfriend of his, she’s the wild card, the real problem. What do you know about her?”

“Almost nothing. Just that she’s, ah, a married woman of doubtful moral character. Why?”

“I think she’s running him. Behind the scenes, she calls the shots.”

“Like he’s the mistress? How do you make that out?”

“My theory, she fancies he’s Bill Gates and she’s Melinda without that pesky desire to rescue starving people on the other side of the world. Maybe it’s the skating thing, but I keep thinking Tonya Harding. Together, they’re a salad of Bud and Lou.”

“So?”

“It wasn’t strictly Sandman’s idea to scam us. She figured they could wring out more money this way. If Sandman has ceded the decision-making to her, I doubt we can reach a deal.”

“Much as it goes against my grain, this one time we’re offering him a chance to do right.”

“She thinks everyone is unscrupulous like she is. Her idea of business conduct entails screwing the other guy first. Given a path of crooked or straight, her twisted instincts choose crooked. Then after driving the bus off a cliff, she blames others. Sandman realizes they screwed up. She doesn’t.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“They assume their goals are the same, but I don’t think she cares all that much about him, just the money he represents. Sandman lashed out at Chase, but he’d prefer to settle this with minimal fuss. The woman seeks to screw as much money as possible out of the bank, and that’s still her goal. Making more money playing it straight wouldn’t occur to her.”

“If they’d been truly smart, he would have negotiated an optimum price, not a token amount. Then charged us again for continued maintenance and development, which we probably would have agreed to do.”

I said, “Instead of giving value and getting rewarded for it, petty spite and greed guides them.”

“Hmmm. Ever skated before?”

“No. The thought of me skating represents a danger to society.”

He surprised me by chuckling.

“Good luck. The person most agile remains standing at the end of the day.”

The Great Roller Skating Caper

They dropped in at noon on the dot. Her skating skirt covered most of both cheeks. She twitched her bottom against him as we walked to their car. On the ride over, she tucked a hand high inside his thigh.

The front third of the skating complex sported a store and rental shop, plus a snack bar on the left. The rest of the building encompassed a low-walled oval– the rink. Rock music and kiddie shrieks and squeals echoed off the concrete walls.

Sandman helped me pick out skates. Justine knelt to lace them on me, her breasts nearly tumbling out of her top. She momentarily rested my socked foot against her bare thigh before giving my sole a covert caress and slipping it into the boot. Truly a woman of subtlety and international distinction.

One at each of my elbows, they led me like a doomed gladiator into the arena. If given roller skates, many more Romans would have fallen on their swords.

They left me standing and backed away, leaving me on my own. Standing was the key word, because I didn’t know how to move. I shuffled my feet. Zoop. Zoop. Nothing, nothing happened.

I moved one foot, then the other, only to find I was still standing in the same place. Wait. I’d studied physics, mechanics, the science of momentum. I should be able to figure this out. Balance on one wobbly leg and cautiously push away with the side of my other skate.

Oops.

Twelve-year-olds hoisted me off the floor. They knew naught about physics, but they’d cultivated a sense of their bodies on wheels that had escaped my edification.

Clinging to the low wall, I tugged myself along by my fingernails. The waist-high barrier circled only half way around. The rest of the rink was enclosed by the building’s cinder block walls, walls I hugged with intimacy.

I clawed my way around the perimeter. I dared not venture more than two feet from the wall so I could pull myself up. My fingers left gouges in concrete blocks still embedded today. A thousand years hence, archeologists will conclude the scarred oval housed a circus of unmanicured Jurassic Park III raptors.

For some reason, girls helped me to my feet but not guys. Possibly it was a center of gravity thing, or maybe if guys stopped to help, they couldn’t get going again. Or perhaps I’d proved an embarrassment to the male population.

Meanwhile, Sandman and Justine whirled and twirled, skating away to the music. Legs outstretched, his fingertips lightly on her waist, hands clasped, they gazed blissfully toward the stars. On skates, he appeared a whole lot taller. Not taller than her, just taller than me struggling to rise from the floor.

Every time I face planted, this toddler on skates and sucking a knuckle stared eye-level at me. Why was a munchkin two Lego bricks tall judging me? I had a lot farther to fall than he.

A charming skater, the kind that prompts males to upshift mass from their abdomen to their chest, hovered over me. With gorgeous padding in all the right places, she offered advice. “Lean forward and stick your bottom out.” Easy for her to say, she was beautifully counterbalanced.

I made one and a half circuits to my hosts’ twenty-three thousand or so, when I realized I needed to visit the restroom. “Behind the food court,” the charming advice chick said.

Typical roller rink after too many tumbles. Note slight incline of floor. © Huffington Post

I worked my way to the gate and pulled myself hand-over-hand along the rail toward the snack bar. There I encountered an insurmountable problem. The floor suffered a sight incline, imperceptible to anyone but a novice on skates. To me, it sloped 160° uphill, and I didn’t have ropes and pitons to master it. I churned skates, but stayed right where I was.

Spotting the problem, two teenage girls took pity on me. Still on skates themselves, they towed me upslope to the restroom door. O sweet rescuing girls; had they been older, I might have proposed out of sheer gratitude.

The men’s room was laid out with ‘the facilities’ on one side, sinks on the other. I clomped over to the porcelain and discovered another problem. Curse the contractor, the floor’s slope continued in the loo. I found myself rolling away from the urinals. Damn. For a meticulous guy, this wouldn’t do; no one was going to mop up after me.

I angled the skates and locked my heels together, but the muscle tension discouraged kidney participation. Finally, I did the obvious and grabbed the pipe like a carousel horse and held on. That allowed me to ‘complete my business’ as my grandmother might have said. Someone more sensible would have simply entered the toilet stall.

I turned my attention to the sinks. There I encountered the opposite problem where the floor sloped toward the basins. Angling toes trying as I might, I kept rolling into them. I’d soap my hands, push off, lather, push off, rinse, push off… at least in theory. The front of my pants looked like the accident I was trying to avoid.

For once those warm air hand dryers proved useful. I aimed their nozzles at the front of my jeans and held the buttons on. A couple of locals wandered in, eyed the disheveled madman, the blow dryers, and the saturated floor, shot each other looks and backed out again.

Outside, the two girls smiled at me, waving me over. “How did you make out?”

“Trust me, you don’t want to know. I looked like a poster child for poster children.”

That brought more giggles. They steered me toward a food court plastic chair where I collapsed.

Sandman and his woman had just finished their final pirouette et pad-á-deux of the entire Swan Lake ballet. They glided out of the enclosure and up to my table. Unlike me, they barely broke a sweat.

He affectionately brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. She glanced sharply around. “Not here,” she hissed, but she covered her rebuke by surreptitiously squeezing his thigh.

Sandman pulled out a chair for her and she sank gracefully into it. I was envious of their ease on wheels, but if my awkwardness charmed teenage girls, maybe there was still hope for me.

Sandman laughed. “We’ll say one thing for you. You’ve got guts.”

We sipped coffee and Cokes for a few minutes.

“Tell me,” Sandman said, “what the numbers are.”

“Pardon?”

“The numbers… how much they’re offering. A quarter million?”

I had a horrible feeling the bank radically underestimated these two. Or overestimated, depending on how one looked at it. No number was going to satisfy them.

“They authorized much, much less. I’m talking what you can walk away with this weekend, no questions asked. Name high numbers like that, I have to call in and they debate whether or not to accept. Good chance you could get half your quarter mil, perhaps a little more if you’re willing to wait through the week, but odds drop if you try to wring out much more.”

Justine’s face clouded. Sandman flicked a glance at her but all he said was, “Let’s drive back and change. We’ll pick you up for dinner.”

---

I looked forward to famed North Carolina slaw and barbecue, but their palates weren’t adventurous. Instead, we visited a family restaurant. Sandman and I chatted technical trivia, operating system internals, stuff of interest only to computer geeks. Were the circumstances different, I might have hired him to work for me.

Justine crushed her breast against his arm while shooting me feral looks. Her leg brushed mine twice, hard to say if it signified more than accidental contact. My instinct suggested it did.

“One twenty?” said Sandman.

“Yes, can do.”

“One twenty-five?”

“Quite likely.”

“It’s worth more than that.”

“It was worth more than that, but they’re wounded, embarrassed, made fools of. Your shot across the bow at Chase injured them and damaged your credibility. You placed their bank and reputation at risk.”

Justine placed her lips against his ear and whispered something.

“So they should be willing to pay more, shouldn’t they?”

“They’re willing to pay less. Don’t get greedy, Dan. Pigs go to slaughter. I can’t impress upon you enough you’re not dealing from a position of strength. Mess around further and you’ll blow the deal. Be timely about it. I can’t advise you any more seriously.”

“You have his interests at heart?” Justine asked me, but the message was for him.

I said, “I have our interests at heart. The company has a limit how much they’re willing to deal, how much they’re willing to risk, and how much they’re willing to tolerate before cutting their losses.”

“That would leave the product up in the air.”

“No, that would leave the product dead and buried. You sold it to them; they own it.”

Wheels turned, though I couldn’t track where they headed. These two lived in a land of make-believe with no notion how the business world operated.

As I left the tip, they ambled out with their heads together. In the car, they pointed out features of Greensboro as he drove toward the motel. They stayed in the vehicle as I walked around to his window.

“Dan, what do I tell the executives in the morning?”

He waited an uncomfortable half minute before answering. “Tell them we’re in no hurry to accept.”

Did my not-to-tarry warning trigger a contrary response? Trying to keep exasperation out of my voice, I said, “What does that imply? How close or far apart are we?”

“It means… It means go home and think about it and we’ll go home and think about it. Then perhaps we’ll talk again. Perhaps not.”

“Don’t try their patience, Dan. They’re already put out.”

He shrugged, smiled, and offered his hand. I shook it. Pressed tightly against him, she reached out and shook mine too. I turned and strolled back to my room.

Report 2

Despite the late hour, back in Virginia folks waited to hear from me. The vice president asked if I thought I could resolve this impasse in the next day or so. I had to say no.

“Go home, man. We’ll be in touch. Thank for trying.”

---

Over the next two and a half weeks, I spoke with Chase every few days. He’d ask clarification of some detail; I enquired about the situation’s progress. Twice I casually reached out to Sandman. He enjoyed talking tech, but steered away from closing a deal.

The notice came unexpectedly, a call from the bankshares president himself. He instructed me to fly once again to Greensboro. No one expected we would witness an entirely different battle of wits in Part III.

The Skating Mistress Affair, Part I

Some people don’t seek trouble, but it finds them. That’s how I viewed fraud cases that came my way. Hired to hunt down computer anomalies, I didn’t enter a contract thinking criminal intent, but occasionally I stumbled upon crimes. This episode outlines my most challenging case, a battle of wits with a very smart adversary.

It started with a phone call.

In a cultured, south-of-Mason-Dixon accent, the man said, “Call me Chase; my daddy’s Mr. Franz. I’m marketing director of a software venture owned by a major Virginia bankshares concern. We own a product, a big one. We need a specialist to figure it out and support it.”

“A banking program?” Visions of Cobol or badly written C++ sprang to mind. “Sorry, I work with operating systems, not applications.”

“No, no, we’re talking systems software, not an app. The bank’s investment division floated the venture capital internally.”

“What’s the name of this product?”

“I can’t reveal that.”

“What does the software do?”

“I can’t tell you that either, not until we have your signature.”

“That’s all you can say? Why the secrecy?”

“Take a bank’s perspective of confidentiality, marketing paranoia, and a technical product we need to get a handle on, you get secrecy.”

“Who developed it? In fact, where is the developer in all this?”

“Well, that’s part of the problem. It was developed by a low-profile dude in North Carolina, really eccentric. He’s difficult to work with and we can’t seem to get his full attention. After selling us the package, he doesn’t want to be bothered with it.”

Only a few dozen independent software designers populated the top of the pyramid and we all knew each other, at least by name and reputation. I didn’t recall anyone in the Carolinas.

“You must not be paying much.”

“We bought the program dirt cheap, figuring he’d gouge us with ongoing support fees, but he’s not done that. He shows no interest in the product.”

“Your startup software group purchases an untried product from an unnamed author? How do you know the product is viable and isn’t trash?”

“Our bank’s systems run this software and no one, not even our lead systems programmer, can comprehend the program– it’s way too advanced. We sold copies to multiple Fortune 1000 companies, companies that use it and like it. But we found bugs. We desperately need enhancements and alterations as systems grow and evolve. We’ve got no one capable of maintaining it.”

“And your bank’s worried someone will wise up and expose your exposure.”

“That’s a huge concern. Spending venture capital is one thing, but discovering critical vulnerabilities implies liability. A number of jobs hang in the balance, mine included.”

“Written in C or what?”

“Assembler. 50,000 lines of machine code for the nucleus. With support utilities maybe hundred thousand lines for the old OS version and double that for the new, plus somewhat more for add-ons and extensions.”

“You’re saying a quarter million lines of code?”

“Uh, not exactly. The old and new versions cover a lot of duplication, so figure maybe one fifty to two hundred thousand unique lines.”

“That no one understands?”

“It’s costing us already. We need to put this right.”

The Plot Thickens

Locally, nothing exciting was happening with current clients. Steady income was nice, but I liked challenges.

Their tech division was named Data Corp. We exchanged non-disclosure agreements, eventually reaching an accord and a paranoia contract that required my cutting ties with other parties.

From Boston Logan, I flew a geriatric jet into Charlotte, Virginia, where I hired a car for a drive deep into the Shenandoah Valley. I passed beautiful horse farms and Mennonites in their buggies before I came to markers of American civilization – McDonald's, KFC, and WalMart.

The bank’s data center dominated a charming downtown in Harrisonburg, Virginia. I gave the receptionist my name and glanced around.

To the left of the lobby extended the glass room where the main computers lived, MICR check readers, networking and transmission units, 6000 square feet, perhaps 550 square metres, nicely laid out. It looked outwardly secure short of a terrorist attack.

From stairs at the right of the lobby descended a man about 5’5 of economical build. My salesman alert Early Warning System sounded. Scientists and engineers regard salesmen barely a step removed from slithering politicians. The two aren’t so much cats and dogs as cobras and mongooses. That mutual distaste would play a key part in the drama about to unfold.

Even so, Chase seemed a decent sort. He cultivated a brooding mien like a mantle of poetic melancholy, the kind that tenderizes feminine hearts and moistens girls’ eyes. Sporting a black, closely trimmed beard, he might have portrayed a weekend Civil War reenactor captain or river boat gambler.

He toured me around the complex, introducing me to bank presidents and vice presidents, those who plump out the top of the pyramid in financial institutions. He chatted up a half dozen girls who seemed in various stages of thrall. His magnetism short-circuited the female EWS.

“The product,” I said. “Let’s take a look.”

Chase offered me a seat in his office. He busied himself sipping coffee, winding his Swiss chronograph, twiddling a pen. I waited. Finally he said, “What we have here is a print spooling subsystem. A good one. Cool, huh!”

I understood why they wanted me. Not only did I work on operating systems, I had contributed code to two competing packages, a key operating system component in the evolution of computers.

Like a priest revealing the Dead Sea Scrolls, Chase reverently set a six-inch thick binder before me. He opened it. “This is our baby.”

My response came out less than reverential. It could be summed up as “WTF?”

No titles. No headings. No comments. No register notation. No meaningful labels. No reference points.

“I told you, Sandman, the developer, doesn’t need all that. He’s an amazing genius. He doesn’t document his work because his eidetic memory remembers everything.”

“Except for those who come after,” I said.

The lack of labels troubled me most of all. Normally programmers use real world identifiers such as Minutes, Seconds, Distance, Height, Weight, Brightness, etc. This had gobbledegook.

“Who does this?” I said.

“I told you, he’s a genius. They mean something to him, but he’s way above our level.”

“This is attempting ancient Egyptian without a Rosetta stone. This is insane,” I said.

Chase beamed. “You confirm what I’ve been saying. Sandman is genius above other geniuses; he’s beyond brilliant, absolutely off the scale. Our own people say his high-level abstract symbolism is far beyond their comprehension.”

“Even Einstein used standard identifiers, e = energy, m = mass. This has, for example, ‘rtgq233x.’”

“Sandman isn’t a merely an Einstein. Your challenge is, are you someone who can come to understand this or are you giving up?”

“Like hell.” Candidly, I wasn’t sure which part of the question I should answer.

Mystification

As a digital detective, I first confirmed the original assembly language matched the binary machine code in the executable module. I looked at a hundred different values scattered throughout the programs. They matched.

I profiled the program, I ran traces. I floated one other idea to Chase.

“Does Sandman speak Arabic or some language that omits vowels? Or Welsh? Polish? Russian? A language with unusual combinations of letters?”

“I imagine not,” said Chase. “He’s short, sandy hair, fair complexion. I doubt he’s visited out of the country. He’s barely travels outside of North Carolina. He’s so fearful of flying, he always takes a train.”

I had seen computer programs written in French and German. The mix of English and other languages looked a little unusual, but they ultimately made sense.

“Perhaps foreign abbreviations…”

“Look, stop going on about labels. Maybe they are in Klingon or Tolkien Elvish. Maybe they’re random or perhaps they’re nothing at all. With an impenetrable genius mind like Sandman’s, the labels themselves appear opaque to us and we simply don’t know.”

I didn’t accept that for a moment, but there was one other avenue to understanding the code– weeks of immersion in it. I packed the programs in my bag and headed back to Boston.

---

Over the next two weeks, I pored over 150,000 lines of assembly code. Some days I dissected routines line-by-line, noting, studying, analyzing. Other days I propped my feet up on the sofa and absorbed the gestalt.

Reading a program offers a unique peek into the author’s thought process. This mind meld can provide a strangely disquieting experience. A virtual voyeur can determine a precise mind opposed to a sloppy one, bold versus fearful, brilliant versus not so much, and lucid v losing it. This code contained all these elements and more. Although tightly written, it radiated a surreal aura and umbra, a sense of someone hiding in the shadows.

The Rosetta Stone

“The name of the song is called ’Haddocks’ Eyes.’”

“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested.

“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man.’”

“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called?’” Alice corrected herself.

“No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ’Ways And Means’, but that’s only what it’s called, you know!”

“Well, what is the song, then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ’A-sitting On A Gate’, and the tune’s my own invention.”

— Through the Looking-Glass (1871) chapter VIII, Lewis Carroll

I kept coming back to the labels. They held significance, I felt certain. I could sense a pattern as if glimpsing a phantasm from the corner of my eye. Sometimes, I almost grasped a meaning, only to lose it as I shifted to focus on it.

While analyzing the program line by line, I stumbled across the name of a known operating system routine declared in a constant. The name of the routine was $$BEOJ, which stood for ‘Broker End of Job’. Unnecessarily, the program invoked this routine directly. The author had allowed himself a moment of ego. Instead of the standard, run-of-the-mill method available to any programmer, the coder had showed off his knowledge of operating system internals and triggered this segment explicitly.

I understood the inner workings, but the label of the constant, $$XYAU, grabbed my attention. Could this, perhaps, be the name of the name? Could XYAU someway represent BEOJ?

I poked around, trying the David Edgerley Gates’ Sunday Jumble and Crypto-Quote letter swaps on other labels. Sometimes it seemed to work, more often it didn’t. I combed the program in earnest, searching for obvious constants that might zero me in.

The hunt suffered from a paucity of information, but slowly clues accumulated as I harvested two more paired constants and labels, four, and then six out of three thousand six hundred. Patterns, it was all about patterns. I glimpsed the edges of a picture. No label contained more than eight characters, and something peculiar happened to the letters in each label.

Oddly, B often meant X but it also appeared to be F at times. In rare cases, it didn’t seem to be either. I ripped another sheet off a legal pad and tried again.

I phoned and left a message for Chase. He hadn’t called in days. I sensed his dismay.

I sat up that night, the next two nights, devouring Chinese food for nourishment and Coca-Cola caffeine to feed my notorious ADD. I clocked six hours sleep out of seventy-two. My hair matted, my smelly T-shirt could startle bad-tempered water buffalo.

Everything changed. Like a submerged enemy submarine hiding in deep waters, computerdom’s trickiest puzzle broke the surface. I faced the most fascinating computer game of my career.

On the fourth day, I messaged Chase a couple of times in the morning. I made a few more notes, then toppled over and slept until mid-afternoon.

Demystification

“What?” I barked into the phone a bit too sharply. My eyes seemed glued shut.

“Hey, it’s me, Chase. I got your messages. Whatcha got?”

“How much did you pay for this program?”

“Well…” He hesitated.

“You either paid way too much or way too little. Either way, you got screwed.”

Defiance mixed with defensiveness, he mentioned a figure barely larger than a month’s salary, paid for a program that took someone a year or two of 60-90 hour weeks pouring out one’s soul.

“Why do you ask?”

“Like I said, you got screwed. Sabotaged. Someone has encrypted the labels and stripped the meaningful information out of this program.”

“Bullshit. I don’t believe it.”

“Embrace it. You think it’s a coincidence comments are missing? There’s no register notation? Not a single artifact of meaningful evidence?”

“My people asked him about that. He’s one of those super smart guys who never comments his code.”

I grimaced. For that alone, the program should never have been accepted. I no longer believed the legend.

“Look,” I said. “Labels have been encrypted. I’ve got examples of equates in which one is assigned to 5 and five is assigned to 10.”

“It’s his genius level of abstraction. And what do you mean encrypted?”

“’His genius level of abstraction nonsense’ is getting old. I mean encrypted like the cryptogram puzzles in the newspaper, A equals S and B equals M and so on. A substitution cipher they call it, like Sherlock Holmes’ Dancing Men, only a factor far, far more complex. I’m still working it out, extrapolating clue by clue; it appears the bastard’s used at least two translation tables I'm sure of plus a couple of other frills, kind of a mental oubliette.”

“I don’t believe it. Look, we better rethink this contract. This can go one of two ways. Option one, we terminate our relationship. Option two, other than these conspiracy theory labels you go on about, the positive side is you now know more about the software than anyone other than the author. Come on down here, show us what you’ve got, and we’ll move forward.”

Enter Sandman

From DC, again I boarded another deafening jet into Charlotte. Where did USAir salvage these museum pieces? Maybe they explained why Sandman refused to fly.

The girls at the banking complex greeted my return engagement warmly, speculatively. The town librarian had mentioned the region suffered a serious shortage of males.

Chase, a bit aloof, escorted me into his office.

“I phoned Sandman,” he said coolly.

“And?”

“Says your theory– your accusation– is nonsense. Says he never ever uses comments, can’t afford time for them. Says those equates you mentioned, one equates to 5 and so on, just a coding convenience when in a hurry. Told me if we want to make insinuations, his lawyer can tell us to get stuffed. We can’t afford to get on his bad side.”

I snorted. “Coding convenience? How did you approach him? Did you ask if he sabotaged the code?”

“Of course I asked him. What was I supposed to say?”

“When you asked rather than told, he knew he’d bluffed you. I know he sabotaged the code, so I don’t need to ask.”

“He denies your allegations. Look, you’re a guy I hardly know. You make unbelievable accusations about a fellow I’ve known for years who says your notion is ludicrous. You tell me; how am I supposed to believe you?”

“I’ll show you proof.”

At the end of an hour, I’d further confused Chase rather than convinced him. He still believed Sandman. My stacks of tables and colored diagrams decorated with fine-tipped arrows left him unmoved. He couldn’t entertain the slightest possibility he’d been fooled or the other guy committed malfeasance.

I said, “I want to talk to Sandman myself, geek to geek.”

“That’s unwise. If he breaks off contact, we’re done for. He might even sue our asses.”

“You’re already done for– that’s why you hired me. Anyway, I’m not going to ask him if he encrypted the program, I know he did. That gives me an advantage.”

He reluctantly agreed to my calling with the condition he silently listen in. Like me, Sandman worked nights, so Chase and I grabbed dinner at a great restaurant as we waited for Sandman to come alive in the night.

One lichee duck later, we strolled back to the data center. I sat in his office while Chase lounged outside at the secretary’s desk listening in on her phone. He promised not to interrupt no matter what– I made him swear to stay quiet.

I dialed the Greensboro number he gave me. The call connected. Dan Sandman’s voice at the other end sounded pleasantly curious.

He said, “So you’re the guy they hired to develop the app.”

“Yep, I’m the sucker. Brilliant program, by the way.” I kept my voice light, pleasant.

“Thanks. I’ve heard of you by reputation. Boston, right? So how are you making out?”

I chuckled. “Dan, you left me one tricky puzzle. I’m still working it out, but your encryption scheme is brilliant, harder than hell to break.” I shook my head admiringly, not that he could see it. “Thus far I’ve identified two different translation tables. That’s ingenious.”

No hesitation, no prevarication, he broke into laughter. “Three actually.”

Through the window, Chase blanched, then darkened. I put my finger to my lips in case he felt like an outburst.

Danny continued. “You haven’t been working on it long. I’m astounded you got that far.”

“Three translation tables explain why I still have a thousand or so labels to crack.”

He chortled. “God damn, you smart dog. I used the first character of each label as a selector, picking the cryptographic table based upon which third of the alphabet the first character fell in.”

Outside the office, a purplish Chase was working on a serious case of TMJ.

I complimented Sandman. “I’ve never come across that idea before. Man, figuring out those tables can give one fits.”

“I didn’t want anyone to break it. Can’t believe you’re two-thirds of the way there. How did you figure it out?”

“$$BEOJ.”

“What? Oh, yes. I’d debated making a special case for it, but didn’t imagine anyone would ever get that far. What did you think of my equates?”

“Annoying.”

He laughed. “I trust that’s mildly put.”

“Right you are. There’s the obvious question, of course.”

“You mean why? Why screw up my own program?”

“You weren’t seeking job security.”

“I did it because I can’t stand that salesman, Chase. He’s such a bullshitter, all monies for himself, benefit the investors and screw the inventors. Flying around the country like an exec, trying to hustle the package, spending other people’s money, hogging the biggest slice off the top– I got fed up.”

Chase’s blood vessels looked ready to burst in an apoplectic fit. When he opened his mouth, I frantically waved him to silence. I tried to remember what Chase had told me.

Into the phone, I said, “You worked with him before?”

“Yeah, he found out about my package and begged to sell it. He couldn’t bother working the phones, doing sales fundamentals. Figured he was a Steve Jobs executive, jumping on a plane just to give a demo. I sold more copies than he did and I never left Greensboro, never tried to promote it, only word of mouth. Know what Chase did? He took the salesman cut anyway. He spelled that out in the agreement he wrote. Now ask me again why I’m pissed at him.”

Outside the door, Chase turned magenta. He could barely refrain from screaming into the phone.

Sandman continued. “So anyway, Chase was burning through money when he approached that bank in Virginia. He convinced them he had a hot product and urged them to buy out his contract. Chase wouldn’t change his ways, though. He wasn’t going to pay me what it was worth and I knew I’d never see royalties. My girlfriend, she said screw him. So I got this idea and I did. It wasn’t ransom, it was revenge. Sold it for almost nothing, figured he’d do himself in.”

“How much did he pay?”

“I bet you already know that. And he was gleeful at the fire sale price, ecstatic. The greedy bastard couldn’t believe the advantage he’d seized over his so-called partner. The slime-ball acted right proud of himself.”

“Dan, it’s affected other people. Plus other companies depend on the product.”

Sandman sounded almost regretful. “Yeah, I know. That’s why I agreed to partially support it until they found a replacement for me. I didn’t figure they’d bring in you.”

“Thanks, I think.”

He giggled dryly. “It’s tough maintaining it. I made the source code such an abortion, I find it nearly impossible to debug. They send me a trace or a dump and I spend a couple of days pulling my hair out. I provide just the minimum, which hasn’t been good enough, certainly insufficient to support new equipment coming out.”

The full significance of that statement wouldn’t register until much later: By implication, he’d orphaned this program and was developing a parallel version with enhancements.

“Dan, you know I have to tell the investment bank about this.”

“Figured you had already. Did Chase convince them otherwise? I successfully put him off when he called, but I gathered you were on to me. Yeah, talk to them. Maybe we can work something out, something fair and equitable. I’d like that.”

Witness to the Ascension

If Chase wasn’t pleased, the bankers were apoplectic. The vice president called the president. The president called the chairman. The chairman called the board. The board called the holding company and they called a meeting. In the meantime, the president asked me to stand by. “Don’t leave town,” he said.

Chase departed on a trip. He begged me to stay at his house and care for his dog, one with a bad case of separation anxiety. Shenandoah Valley girls were very hospitable. Over the next few days, I accepted kind invitations to luncheons, dinners, a bluegrass festival, a Mennonite market, and a community fair.

On Monday, the chairman called the president who called the vice president who called me. “Go home for a few days while we sort out what to do.”

I departed almost regretfully.

---

A few days became two weeks. I spent the time picking at the listings, painstakingly peeling the masks off characters in this exquisite puzzle. That’s what I liked best about programming, me against the machine, taking its rules and making it do what I wished, bending the beast to my will, solving abstract puzzles others couldn’t see. Usually it was me versus the computer; now I faced a clever human adversary.

Sandman called once to ask what the bank decided. My guess was gnashing their teeth, but I confessed I didn’t know.

People found it easy to talk to me, sometimes revealing personal things that seemed surprising later. He opened up.

We ended up chatting about nothing but learning about each other. Topics included girls, cars, his fear of flying and his enthusiasm for roller skating. We discussed fueling software with good Asian food. Our liquid Ritalin was cola, Coke for me, Pepsi and Moon Pies for him. He revealed a passion for Shostakovich. In the wee hours of the morning, he confessed frustration at his girlfriend’s lack of libido. He hesitantly admitted she was married.

On Friday, the VP called from his scratchy speaker phone. “Leigh, I got Chase and the president here. We want you to hop down to Greensboro and negotiate for the source code. Just you and Sandman– you’re the only one he has rapport with, the only one he respects.”

“What are the guidelines of the negotiations?”

“Obviously try to ransom our source, pay as little as practical for it, low five digits if possible.”

“Cap it at one-twenty, maybe twenty-five,” someone in the background said, probably the bank president.

“If things turn too unreasonable,” continued the vice president, “just walk out and we’ll haul his tail into court.”

“D’accord,” I said. “Shoot me a letter defining the limits.”

The VP said, “Do you anticipate a need to involve the police? Should we hire a private detective, perhaps a non-threatening girl his age?”

Chase spoke up in derision. “He just a little squirt, a pussy, a…”

The VP must have waved him to silence. “Okay. Buy it if you can, walk out if you can’t.”

No one had any notion of the unreal turn negotiations would take.

---

Next week: Part II, Skating Follies

100 Words

Both Sharon and ABA happened to send articles about old and little used words. That set off research into other candidates that might prove useful in historical stories and even insert playfulness or elocution (there’s a word not heard anymore) in ordinary writing.

Following is a random selection. A few, such as those beginning with ‘fiddle’, I wouldn’t miss outside an English cosy.

Worry not. I don’t expect you to look up each entry. If you hover your mouse over a word, you should see its meaning.

accouchement	cordwainer	gallivant	pantywaist
affright	coxcomb	glabriety	peregrinate
appetency	cutpurse	gobsmacked	persnickety
avaunt	d’accord	gyve	picaroon
balderdash	davenport	habiliment	poppycock
baloney	delate	hoodwink	ragamuffin
bamboozled	discombobulated	hotrod	rapscallion
barnstormer	disport	hullabaloo	rigmarole
bejeebers	doohicky	humbug	shenanigans
beldam	éclaircissement	jalopy	skedaddle
bijoux	egads	jargogle	skewwhiff
bloomers	facinorous	kerfuffle	sweeting
bodkin	fainéant	kibosh	tenterhooks
brabble	farthing	knave	thingamebob
britches	feminal	knickknack	thingamyjig
bruit	fiddle-dee-dee	knucklehead	thunderation
buttonhook	fiddle-faddle	lollygag	tomfoolery
caterwauling	fiddlesticks	lurdan	trigon
catawampus	fizgig	magdalen	varlet
chesterfield	flabbergasted	malarkey	whatchamacallit
churchkey	flibberty-jibbit	malapert	whatsit
codger	flim-flam	moxie	whosemegadget
concoction	flummoxed	nimrod †	willy-nilly
confuzzled	frore	nincompoop	wishywashy
contumely	fuddy-duddy	numbskull	yclept

^† The word ‘nimrod’ has lost its original Biblical meaning, that of a sharpshooter or an outstanding hunter. It’s now used as an insult. A young acquaintance succinctly explained, “a numnutz.”

Bonus Word: Izzard

You may know the letter Z as ‘zee’ or ‘zed’, but once upon a time as early as 1726, Z was called ‘izzard’.  Samuel Johnson featured the word izzard in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. The expression “A to izzard” means “from beginning to end.”

Bonus Word: Trumpery

Trumpery is defined as (adj) showy but worthless, attractive but of little value or use; delusive or shallow; (n) practices or beliefs superficially or visually appealing but of little real value or worth.

The 2nd Greatest Con Man in America

Neither Democrat nor Republican, I’m an independent. I’m not happy if I can’t equal-opportunity offend all parties. But damn, these days some of the high-profile players egregiously push their way to the front of the ignoble queue. That old saw “Where there’ smoke…” invariably ends with, “…someone’s fanning flames.”

But I’m not here to talk about partisanship, but to address two major theories enjoying unwarranted attention. They gain traction because rumour mongers depend upon an absence of science and technical knowledge. (For the litigious sort, kindly note this is an opinion piece.)

For example, my friend Sharon forwarded an email acclaiming Chinese-designed dancing robots in Shanghai Disneyland. Although these were clearly not automatons, many, many people willingly suspended disbelief.^[1]

Blowing Smoke

Same with politics. As Alice’s Red Queen might say, we’re asked to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Psychologists have noted the biggest lies can be the easiest to accept.

As the above-mentioned smoke about massive voter fraud begins to clear (with a portion of the credit going to the incumbent’s attorneys), conspiracy oriented talk hosts have turned their attention to data manipulation. The first brings to life two decades of concerns about voting machines. The other centers around government computers reassigning millions of votes.

Hypothesis 1, Voting Machines

Grab a coffee. I can’t believe I’m defending Dominion, née Diebold, aka another half dozen company names. I’ve been highly critical of their technology and its lack of transparency. I’ve also proposed a solution, open-source code. That way anyone can peek at its internals searching for flaws.

Twelve to twenty years ago, Democrats worried problematic voting machines at best lost votes and at worst, threw elections. Part of their concern was the company’s Republican CEO, a good friend of George W Bush. According to sources, the CEO ill-advisedly told Bush he’d help win his election. Some stretched that to mean he might use his product, voting machines, to disfavor Democrats.

When Florida’s Secretary of State Glenda Hood ordered error-prone Diebold machines, Senator Bill Nelson questioned the wisdom. She told him to mind his own business… which of course he was. If memory serves, Sarasota County that year lost 20,000 votes. The county’s seemingly baffled Supervisor of Elections said 20,000 people had obviously shown up and chosen not to vote.

Diebold’s reputation was so checkered, they underwent a series of name changes: Diebold ➡︎ Premier Election Solutions ➡︎ Election Systems Services ➡︎ Sequoia Voting Services ➡︎ Dominion Voting Systems.

Over time, they have improved, but one thing is clear. Neither individual machines or networked clusters are capable of diverting anywhere in the range of numbers hinted at: a half million to a suggested two-point-seven million or even seven million votes. Some accusers hinted at machine glitches in Michigan and Georgia, while Q-Anon outright claimed hundreds of thousands of votes were deliberately deleted. Apparently audit trails aren’t widely studied on 4-Chan.

One might wonder the motive of a company board to lose this election, a corporation considered reliably Republican, historically regarded with caution and even suspicion by Democrats. Hey, don’t ask me… I raise the question, but I don’t know. (See? I told you I’d offend both sides.)

Hypothesis 2, The Giant CIA Supercomputer Conspiracy

This is a two-coffee problem, so pour another cup as you’re asked to take an ever bigger leap from the improbable to the nearly impossible.

The short version claims that the CIA (and possibly CISA) deployed a Bush era supercomputer originally used by the despot Obama to surveil and enslave Americans. Called HAMR,^[2] affectionately nicknamed The Hammer by techno-savvy, Marvel-reading politicos, it was seized by Biden’s nefarious agents to subvert the election by diverting Trump votes to Biden. A Bannon-Breitbart correctional recount proved Mr Trump won 98% of the popular vote, nearly 140-million total, the largest in history.

(How Mr Trump wrested this antique computer from Hillary’s election hands in 2016 isn’t clear.)

This vote-rigging supercomputer was engineered by a genius superprogrammer, Dennis Montgomery– both this amazing computer and the accompanying conspiracy theory. Already, I see you have questions.

I left my own amazing computer career a few years ago and haven’t consulted for the DoD even longer, but that name, Dennis Montgomery, rings no bell. I checked with colleagues, all with the same answer: Who? Actually that’s a question.

LinkedIn lists a Montgomery Dennis, which may or may not be a hit, but I suspect it is. This entry describes a guy with amazing computer, management, and top secret intelligence skills, who has the Director of the CIA, Secretary of the Air Force, and the US President on speed dial. He claims to have given intelligence briefings to the white house… yup, lower case. We shouldn’t judge him. Maybe he meant something like a white clapboard house in Terre Haute.

If that is his résumé, he’s awfully modest. Certainly he’s much better known in scam and conspiracy theory circles. Since his curriculum vitae is weak and poorly worded, I whipped up a supplement for him. Mr Montgomery may pick and choose as needed, no charge.

Dennis Montgomery (aka Montgomery Dennis?)

Superduper all around computer expert and geopolitical action figure.
($29.95 on AliExpress) Pinocchio nose sold separately.

Education

• Studied under Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert.

Career

• Operated American Report web site specializing in conspiracies of the day.™
• Investigated tunnels under a Washington daycare pizzeria. Conclusively proved pepperoni contained meat byproducts.
• Demonstrated, using advanced computer analysis of birther certificate, Ted Cruz not born in USA.
• Invented catchy names like Scorecard and The Hammer for programs that, uh, don’t actually exist.
• Scammed Bush administration into paying several million dollars for pretend programs to decode secret al-Qaeda radio messages that, uh, didn’t really exist.
• Conducted anti-terrorist scam. Fake security alerts caused the US to ground some flights and reportedly caused the Bush administration to nearly shoot down airliners. That was a rush.
• Falsified emails to implicate gubernatorial candidate and Congressman Jim Gibbons in bribery scandal that, uh, didn’t exist.
• Conned Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio into forking over more than $100,000 of taxpayer money so he could reveal a conspiracy plot against Sheriff Joe… which, uh, didn’t actually exist.
• Faked federal wiretapping evidence that, um, didn’t exist.

Hobbies

• Dabbles in presidential elections for fun and profit. Like the emperor’s clothes, evidence doesn’t exist.

In my personal opinion, I believe Mr Dennis Montgomery enjoys conning important people and, with the 2020 election, he’s hit the jackpot with the coteries of the candidates, and the attention of the two most powerful men in America.

Footnotes

1. The claim is that the performers are Chinese designed robots, a leap ahead of US, European, and Japanese robotics. As it turns out, Snopes has done the leg work, determining it’s a clip from the British television show “Strictly Come Dancing” that aired on BBC One in 2013
2. Seagate, the hard drive manufacturer, has coined the acronym HAMR, meaning heat-assisted magnetic recording.