Showing posts sorted by date for query "David Edgerley Gates". Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query "David Edgerley Gates". Sort by relevance Show all posts

22 March 2024

Getting Ideas From Characters


Elmore Leonard has been the subject of many fine posts here at SleuthSayers. Just search through the blog for posts by David Edgerley Gates, Dixon Hill, Fran Rizer, Brian Thornton and many others who quoted Elmore or touched on his work.

Found this on YouTube – Elmore Leonard: The Story Writing Process and want everyone who hadn't seen it to see it. I found it fascinating how he'd get the beginning of an idea about a character and develop a story, bring in other characters, seeing who was good and who was bad and that became the plot. He explains how he would take a individual and see what happens to him, what he can get into and what he'll do about it.

Something's gotta happen in the opening scene, he explains. And he went on from there.

He'd follow the main character, adding subplots as the character went along until it was time to shut it down. He said it was the best way to end some of his books, ending it abruptly because the story's over.

The examples he mentions are from of his novels, two of my favorite Elmore Leonard books.

The former secret service agent turned photographer is LaBRAVA


The high diver is from TISHOMINGO BLUES.

Two Elmore Leonard quotes come to mind:


“Characters are much more important to me in my book than plot.


When I write a book I'm the only person I have to please.”


Link to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub_09NgFjrA&t=14s


That's all for now,

www.oneildenoux.com

03 December 2023

The Spy Who Shunned Me


I was glancing at a not-so-recent Stacker.com ‘Best 100 Spy Movies of All Time’, thinking it was right up the dark alley of our spymaster, David Edgerley Gates. If you did something extremely stupid, he could make you disappear.

male spy in trenchcoat carrying smoking gun

And then I noticed something stupid.

Where was Ipcress File? And Day of the Jackal? Manchurian Candidate? Riddle of the Sands? Casablanca? And where the hell was 39 Steps? And why the Hail Freedonia was Duck Soup in the list? Hey, I love the Marx Brothers but it bears as much resemblance to a spy movie as Margaret Dumont does to John le Carré.

I had to stop because so many possibilities flooded my mind. The article should be retitled ‘100 Pretty Good kinda-Spy Movies of Small Time, Give or Take.’ I bet David could name many more.

So here is the core of Stacker’s list followed by a few unranked suggestions of my own.

100Body of Lies2008Ridley Scott 50Clear and Present Danger1994Phillip Noyce
99Salt2010Phillip Noyce 49Rogue One: A Star Wars Story2016Gareth Edwards
98Moonraker1979Lewis Gilbert 48Breach2007Billy Ray
97Never Say Never Again1983Irvin Kershner 47Spy2015Paul Feig
96Shadow Dancer2012James Marsh 46Eye in the Sky2015Gavin Hood
95Octopussy1983John Glen 45Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol2011Brad Bird
94The Man from U.N.C.L.E.2015Guy Ritchie 44The Bourne Identity2002Doug Liman
93The Informant!2009Steven Soderbergh 43Red Cliff2008John Woo
92The Eagle Has Landed1976John Sturges 42Emperor and the Assassin1998Kaige Chen
91Atomic Blonde2017David Leitch 41Flame & Citron2008Ole Christian Madsen
90Until the End of the World1991Wim Wenders 40Inherent Vice2014Paul Thomas Anderson
89You Only Live Twice1967Lewis Gilbert 39No Way Out1987Roger Donaldson
88Cloak & Dagger1984Richard Franklin 38Black Book2006Paul Verhoeven
87The Fourth Protocol1987John Mackenzie 37The Age of Shadows2016Kim Jee-woon
86RED2010Robert Schwentke 36Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation2015Christopher McQuarrie
85Mission: Impossible1996Brian De Palma 35The Bourne Supremacy2004Paul Greengrass
84Snowden2016Oliver Stone 34Europa Europa1990Agnieszka Holland
83Allied2016Robert Zemeckis 33Lady Vengeance2005Park Chan-wook
82The Matador2005Richard Shepard 32Dr No1962Terence Young
81Michael Collins1996Neil Jordan 31Inglourious Basterds2009Quentin Tarantino
80Eye of the Needle1981Richard Marquand 30The Imitation Game2014Morten Tyldum
79Horror Express1972Eugenio Martín 29The Man Who Knew Too Much1956Alfred Hitchcock
78Patriot Games1992Phillip Noyce 28The Quiet American2002Phillip Noyce
77OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies2006Michel Hazanavicius 27A Beautiful Mind2001Ron Howard
76The Front Line2011Jang Hoon 26Infernal Affairs2002Andrew Lau, Alan Mak
75Thunderball1965Terence Young 25Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy2011Tomas Alfredson
74The Hunt for Red October1990John McTiernan 24Ghost in the Shell1995Mamoru Oshii
73Spy Game2001Tony Scott 23The Constant Gardener2005Fernando Meirelles
72Mission: Impossible III2006J.J. 22Bridge of Spies2015Steven Spielberg
71Despicable Me 22013Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud 21Skyfall2012Sam Mendes
70True Lies1994James Cameron 20From Russia with Love1963Terence Young
69Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid1982Carl Reiner 19Casino Royale2006Martin Campbell
68The Falcon and the Snowman1985John Schlesinger 18Enter the Dragon1973Robert Clouse
67The East2013Zal Batmanglij 17The English Patient1996Anthony Minghella
66Official Secrets2019Gavin Hood 16Mission: Impossible: Fallout2018Christopher McQuarrie
65Lust, Caution2007Ang Lee 15The Conversation1974Francis Ford Coppola
64Sneakers1992Phil Alden Robinson 14House of Flying Daggers2004Yimou Zhang
63Fair Game2010Doug Liman 13Stalag 171953Billy Wilder
62Confessions of a Dangerous Mind2002George Clooney 12Goldfinger1964Guy Hamilton
61Charlie Wilson's War2007Mike Nichols 11The Bourne Ultimatum2007Paul Greengrass
60Kingsman: The Secret Service2014Matthew Vaughn 10Letters from Iwo Jima2006Clint Eastwood
59Three Days of the Condor1975Sydney Pollack 9Zero Dark Thirty2012Kathryn Bigelow
58GoldenEye1995Martin Campbell 8Le Petit Soldat1963Jean-Luc Godard
57Walk on Water2004Eytan Fox 7Barry Lyndon1975Stanley Kubrick
56Marcel Proust's Time Regained1999Raoul Ruiz 6The Departed2006Martin Scorsese
55Where Eagles Dare1968Brian G. 5Duck Soup1933Leo McCarey
54Top Secret!1984Jim Abrahams, Zucker Bros. 4The Lives of Others2006Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
53A Most Wanted Man2014Anton Corbijn 3Notorious1946Alfred Hitchcock
52The Spy Gone North2018Yoon Jong-bin 2Pan's Labyrinth2006Guillermo del Toro
51X-Men: First Class2011Matthew Vaughn 1North by Northwest1959Alfred Hitchcock
The 39 Steps1935Alfred Hitchcock Topaz1969Alfred Hitchcock
Day of the Jackal1973Fred Zinnemann Riddle of the Sands1979ony Maylam
The Ipcress File1965Sidney J Furie Casablanca1842Michael Curtiz
The Manchurian Candidate1962John Frankenheimer Dark of the Sun1968Jack Cardiff

male spy in trenchcoat carrying smoking gun

For worst movie, I seem to recall Our Man Flint (1966), directed by Daniel Mann, was embarrassingly awful.

What is your take? Enquiring spies want to know.




Check out Prohibition Peepers, a Michael Bracken anthology.

23 December 2022

Mysteries at the Heart of the Season


Speak comfort to me, Jacob Marley— Southern Comfort!

December vexes me. Like Charlie Brown in the old TV special, I am always trying to wring some vestige of meaning from a season that is needlessly overwrought and overburdened with cheap sentiment.

Without intending to do so, some years ago I became an obsessive student of Christmas. I spent five years of my life and 500,000 words trying to write the ultimate Yuletide novel. Was I successful? Eh. Let’s just say that in the process I learned a lot about the holiday. I learned that when the season turns dark and cold, we at least have great writing (not mine) to sustain us.

Some pieces I love: The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford is solid, narrative nonfiction about the writing and publication of A Christmas Carol by that canny self-published author, Charles Dickens. I like A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote. The old recording of A Child’s Christmas in Wales, read by Dylan Thomas himself, is a perfect way to embrace the close and holy darkness. If there is a church nearby that is mounting a production of Handel’s Messiah, I will always go to hear the Hallelujah Chorus one more time. But if you are short on time, you can do no worse than “The Gift of the Magi,” by O Henry. For that matter, as long as you’re going short, my fellow Sleuthsayer David Edgerley Gates wrote a post on Christmas Eve, 2014, that chokes me up every time I read it. Each year, late in December, I navigate to this very website and that particular post to re-read his critical graf:

“Taken at face value, unto us a child is born—no room at the inn, the shepherds tending their flocks by night, the journey of the Magi—it still works its magic. You don’t have to believe it’s the hand of God, necessarily. Probably doesn’t do any harm, either. The hopes and fears of all the years. We bring a lot of baggage to any story. Maybe we bring more to this one than most. It's an investment. We all believe in a child’s native innocence. The loss is our grief. If, for sake or argument, we don’t know the story’s end, but only how it begins, then the birth of Christ is the stirring of hope. We embrace the myth because it’s our own, each of us born, each of us begun. Destiny waits to be chosen.”

He’s marvelous, isn’t he?

Of course, if you’re me, maybe you end up scrolling to this web page maintained by the National Institutes of Health. There you will find numerous peer-reviewed academic papers that attempt to solve the mystery at the heart of Christmas: What ails Tiny Tim?

Tiny Tim is the third-most important child of December. The first, of course, is the child you know and love. Your children and grandchildren, say. The second is the child who gives Christmas its name. Then comes Tim, in his threadbare jacket, limping along on his crutch.

For 179 years this poor child has appeared in stage and screen productions of the Dickens novella and the entire world knows his pain. From Day 1, astute readers should have anticipated that eventually actual doctors would begin to wonder just what was wrong with the tyke. That is the essence of those NIH papers: Modern masters of the differential diagnosis are having a blast trying to figure out just what illness nearly killed poor Tim.

Here are the facts: The boy suffers from an unnamed ailment that renders him lame, forcing him to wear a brace and a crutch. In the fictive glimpse provided by the Ghost of Christmas-Yet-to-Come, Tim dies. After Scrooge’s redemption, however, we are told that Tiny Tim “did not die.” In other words, Tim’s affliction could in fact by cured by a judicious expenditure of Ebenezer’s silver.

Did Tim have rickets? Or was it tuberculosis, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, or renal tubular acidosis (RTA)? All of these diseases can be ameliorated, apparently, with the right kind of medical attention. Every year, when the now-practically-annual article about Tim’s illness appears in my newsfeed, I read the story eagerly, wondering if someone has definitively cracked the case. No such luck. Indeed, it’s beginning to look a lot like we will never know the truth, and that Dickens took this one to his grave, along with the solution to Drood.

One of the best articles I’ve found on this medical mystery concludes with the observation that Charles Dickens, reformer that he was, truly understood that the horrors of poverty are fundamentally socioeconomic. Who knows? Maybe Tim was never completely cured, but if his family had just a little more coin, they alone could have ensured that Tim lived a comfortable and long life. (The writer Louis Bayard wrote an entire novel entitled Mr. Timothy on the premise that Tim survived into adulthood.)

And maybe that is just as well. Because we have plenty of other Christmas mysteries to solve. In recent years I have begun seeing articles in which doctors attempt to puzzle out the mystery that appears in Stave V of A Christmas Carol. After his encounter with the third spirit, Scrooge awakes in his bed, clinging to his bedpost, “laughing and crying in the same breath.” Later, Dickens tells us:

“Really, for a man who had been out of practice for many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!”

Several actors over the years have tried to bring this laugh-cry to life. Patrick Stewart has probably done it best. Here. Watch:

Here’s what some medical detectives are wondering: does that laugh/cry indicate a troubling respiratory condition?

And that, dear friends, is when I realize that I’ve spent entirely too much time researching and fretting about Christmas and too little time enjoying it.

I wish you the best in this season—and beyond.




Besides the links I’ve shared in this post, you might enjoy this post from an illustrators’ blog about best illustrated versions the Dickens classic.

05 June 2022

Happiness is a Warm Gun


Obsessives make me cringe– drugs, religion, politics, hero worship. The literal meaning of idée fixe suggests the rational brain has locked up and passion has seized control.

In gun control arguments (the late, great ‘debate’ was strangled in its sleep), I haven’t seen admissions about feelings and the emotional relationship of gun ownership. Denial of feelings represents a fundamental dishonesty.

May 1968 American Rifleman

A rare exception is the Beatles’ song, ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ on their White Album found in an ammoerotic movement called ‘The Gunman’. Inspiration came from a May 1968 NRA American Rifleman article called, what else, ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’.

Happiness is a warm gun.
Bang, bang, shoot, shoot
When I hold you in my arms
And when I feel my finger on your trigger
I know nobody can do me no harm
Because
Happiness is a warm gun.
Bang, bang, shoot, shoot

I bring this up because from a young age, I felt comfort, I felt empowerment when I holstered cap pistols and later, a Peacemaker Colt B.B. replica. I didn’t grow up with the television exposure David Edgerley Gates wrote about, but I absorbed it in school. I’d tramp through forest and farm and field unafraid.

Industry lobbyists and politicians promote that illusion, that a gun keepa you safe, it protecta you. They like to forget that when you rode into Tombstone or Abilene, you checked your guns. The Earp brothers understood that, but a century and a half later, we fail to internalize the simple concept that we’re not safer.

1839 Colt Paterson
1839 Colt Paterson

American engineering in the latter 1800s was brilliant and Colt Arms was no less so. The 1839 Colt Paterson had one of the cleverest safeties; the trigger remained invisibly tucked inside until the hammer was cocked. The 1847 Colt Walker that followed set the blueprint for the Navy Colt and Army Colt, and the six-guns that won the West.

They were also peculiarly seductive. The heft seemed natural. The grip fit either hand without effort, better than today’s pseudo-ergonomic designs of, say the Colt Python. I surmise its grip’s rear convex curve may help it not snag on clothing if you’re rushing to shoot your wife’s lover, but the concave tang of an 1800s Colt grip feels more secure in the hand. Like I said, seductive.

1847 Colt Walker
1847 Colt Walker

Some people take that literally. I'm pretty certain a squirmy little security guard at a client found great excitement and, er, pleasure in his acquisition of a dodgy Saturday Night Special. And we've written about a Florida woman who also took great pleasure in a motel parking lot with a loaded, yes, loaded automatic. If people fetishize bridges and bicycles, the leap to a Beretta might be smaller than we admit. Nothing like proximity to death to get the blood pumping.

1851 Colt Navy
1851 Colt Navy

Then there's the religiously obsessed, the true believers who massage warm oil into their current love and find it impossible to converse without bringing up the latest gadget to convert their AR into a fully automatic rifle. In chat rooms, they discuss which ammunition they should use to liquefy brains or flay muscle from bone, because hollow-points and explosive tips are so last season. There was a type of shotgun round that spread in flight, a whirligig of sharp metal and tiny wires that was touted to inflict incredible damage to the human body. But let us not forget the holy grail of gunnery, finding a way to encapsulate a drop of mercury in a lead slug for theorized maximum expansion.

1860 Colt Army
1860 Colt Army

Many of these wishful warriors look forward to eliminating 'libtards' from the landscape, without being certain quite why. Hate radio, of course, and the venerable NRA American Rifleman regularly feature articles about 'the war on guns' or some such fear.

Most listeners and readers don't realize thirty years ago, the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution was treated very differently. While it was never uncontroversial, a couple of events changed the terrain.

Weapon manufacturers took over the NRA hobbyist club, turning it into a political lobbyist powerhouse. And Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas reinterpreted the 2nd Amendment to mean open season.

1980 Colt Python
1980 Colt Python

With a math and science background, I’m more likely to regale readers with the horrifying bullet points of American gun ownership, • how we kill nearly a thousand of our fellow countrymen a month, • how we average more than a multiple/mass shooting every day of the year (we’re way ahead this year, 233 mass shootings in 150 days), • that the US population is 330-million but every American man, woman, and child owns a total of 400-million guns– twice as many as the armies on the planet combined.

But gun control advocates overlook the heartfelt feelings of gun ownership, the deep-seated relationship between a man (or woman) and his/her gun. Statistics aren’t meaningful for them because he– or she– is different. The averages don’t apply to them.

Yet the spilling of visceral feelings are a frighteningly small step from spilling one’s viscera.

The TL;DR summary means we need to find a way to deal with the deep emotions of gun ownership.

And when I feel my finger on your trigger
I know nobody can do me no harm
Because
Happiness is a warm gun.
Bang, bang, shoot, shoot

18 July 2021

Spycraft, Old School


Zoo Station

Usually SleuthSayers learn spycraft from the invisible-ink pen of David Edgerley Gates. A month ago, Janice Law slipped past the yet-to-be-built Berlin Wall to recall David Downing. I depend heavily on my SleuthSayers colleagues for reading material, and I ordered up Zoo Station.

The tale has a much older ‘golden age’ feel of the 1960s and I had to double-check the copyright of the first in the series, 2007. The initial half of the book is slow paced but it builds tension out of proportion to pages turned. I wondered how the author accomplished that, and I’m not the only one. One critic’s comment on the back cover says, “Downing has shown that he can produce that creepy sense of paranoia along with the best of them.”

Furthermore, the book contains a feature I’ve rarely encountered outside a school textbook, a ‘Reading Group Guide’. Question 9 reads: “Given the relative lack of overt violence, how does Downing create the novel’s sense of menace?”

Yeah. How did he do that?

I have a few notions, but other readers will surely come up with better insights. Mostly I credit the immersive nature of the story where the author puts us in the scene with the perfect serving of detail.

The story’s set as the 1930s draw to a close. Perceptive people smell war on the horizon, but live in hope it doesn’t come. Kristallnacht has left its mark. Kindertransport is under way. Jews aren’t permitted to work, travel, or dine in restaurants. While the word ‘ghetto’ hasn’t yet arisen, Jewry are evermore isolated in restricted parts of cities.

The author has allowed history to do much of the heavy lifting. Much of life seems normal, ordinary, but it won’t remain so. We know the horrors that are coming; we want to warn the innocent, tell them to flee for their lives.

Whereas trains and train stations appear in backdrops and settings, mentions of government buildings feel eerily ominous. Downing mentions 15-foot high doors, evoking the architecture envisioned by Albert Speer.

No worthy espionage story would be complete without Soviet spies. One Russian spymaster isn’t so bad, but woe be he who crosses the path of Stalinist spymistress Irina Borskaya. She eats her young.

The novel’s protagonist, British journalist John Russell, advances through a character arc from somnambulance to getting his rear into gear, helping to get the word out while saving a life or two. His actress girlfriend suggests a hint of Cabaret, but with far more gravitas than Sally Bowles.

A minor note jarred me. Russell is virtually broke when we first meet him. He lives simply, but he drinks goldwasser. It seems a pretension more in line with 007 than our impecunious reporter. I excused the gold-flecked drink on the grounds it was a product of Gdańsk (Danzig), but the affectation seemed peculiar.

Along the line, our hero obtains a ten-year-old motorcar, a Hanomag. I thought myself reasonably familiar with cars of bygone eras, and those of the late 1920s are the peak of design– the Mercedes SSK, the Cord, the Packard, the Dusenberg, the Bugatti, and the gorgeous Auburn.

1928 Hanomag
1928 Hanomag © Bonhams Auction

I hadn’t heard of Hanomag. I had to stop to look it up. It turned out to be one of the homeliest automobiles ever made. Easiest way to tell the front from the back is to look for the single, motorcycle-style headlight, on the left in this photo. Oh well, our hero’s Hanomag ran most of the time and many folks had no cars at all.

As Janice suggests, Zoo Station reads as old style spycraft with luggage storage and postal drops, suitcases with false bottoms, and shadowy men who make others disappear. Downing’s novels aren’t nearly as gloomy as those of, say, John Le Carré.

When you’re bored with the current digital library on your Kindle or Kobo, stop in a musty used book store and pick up a dog-eared copy of Zoo Station. Go old school.

03 January 2021

The Skating Mistress Affair, Part IIII


bank vault

Parts I-III provide the background of a unique bank fraud investigation.

In Part II, negotiations soured and in Part III, legal action failed miserably. The bank thought they were done for, but I wasn’t.


The Commentator

To continue developing and enhancing the software, I needed to understand it at least as well as the author. Nothing would do that like immersion in it, and nothing would aid in immersion like having to document the programs line by line, block by block, section by section.

Tedious. Refill the Ritalin, oil the exercise bike, and absorb.

Data Corp set up a pair of desks for me, not with their programming group but in a large room staffed with accountants, bookkeepers, and clerks. That made me the only guy amid thirty-some women.

pink office chair
 
pink Princess phone
Princess phone
 
boobs coffee cup
a slightly less risqué model
 
latex fingertip protectors
latex fingertips

Flirtatious and fun, the data center girls delighted in playing pranks on me. Some tricks were small, such as when they glued a dozen water-cooler cups together and hid the rest. Others were more ornate. They ordered a pink and gold chair for my desk, and installed a Playmate screen saver. My black office phone found itself replaced with a princess phone also in pink. A welcome gift box on my desk contained a coffee cup shaped like breasts.

My office mates flattered and flirted. Once, I asked a supervisor why the girls believed they could get away with such outrageous behavior. “You look easy to tease,” Shelly said. They read me like a Power Point slide.

They were also kind, sharing lunch with me. I never knew who installed a bud vase on my desk and kept its rose and water fresh.

One afternoon, the VP stopped by to pick up a couple of data cartridges. I opened my desk drawer… and immediately slammed it shut. I’d caught a glimpse of something lavender and lacy. Every eye was riveted upon me, watching what I’d do next.

“Er, maybe this drawer,” I muttered, only to spot another item, pink and frilly. The women had filled my drawers with, well, drawers, lingerie at least. I could feel the back of my neck burning.

“Er, I have to dash down to the computer room,” I said. “I’ll drop them off at your desk.”

“But…”

He peered after me suspiciously, knowing something was up. As I took off, he glanced around at the women who were all staring at him.

One morning I arrived to find a fat pink envelope on my desk decorated with hearts and cupids. Inside was tucked another plump envelope with a calligraphic message on it: “Shelly, Julie, DiDi, and Roxy invite you for the weekend. Necessities enclosed.” Heads craned my way as I slipped my thumbnail through the seal.

Out fell a dozen of the tiniest condoms. They’d filled the envelope with the thin latex fingertips clerks slip on when flipping through sheaves of checks and currency. Their cleverness cracked me up. When I stopped laughing, I took out a ruler and carefully measured one of the latex rings. Nodding judiciously, I placed one in my wallet. The lasses laughed, hooted, and jeered and cheered.

We Leave Our Light Off For You

At night, I pretty much lived at the data center, starting on the computers as soon as one was freed up from the work day. To snatch a few hours’ sleep, I holed up in a small motel near the bank’s Data Corp office.

During my extended stays, hotels generally grew used to me, A low-key and seldom demanding demeanor made the maids happy and sometimes pampering. Managers were pleased to X-out a room from their unrented list for a month or six, sometimes more. Across many states and a few countries, hotel life worked efficiently for me.

But deep in the Shenandoah Valley…

This local motel operator wasn’t used to a nomad like me, out all night, sleeping during the day. He glowered at my arrival each morning, frowned as I departed in the evening. Chambermaids reported reams of secret code documents in my room. Learning I skulked down to the bank building each night convinced him I was up to no good. He grew suspicious nefarious activities were afoot.

He telephoned the bank. They routed him to the Data Corp center and wound up with an operator who told him, “Oh, that’s the guy involved in the computer fraud.”

He’d heard enough.

Next morning, exhausted from a long and grueling bout of decoding and debugging, I arrived to find the motel manager in the lobby, arms folded, glaring at me. My haphazardly packed suitcases stood by the door.

Stiff-lipped and obviously fearful of a disheveled guy my size, he said, “Pay your bill and leave. I’ve called the police.” Activity in the motel stopped as a gallery of employees gathered at the balcony rails to witness their innkeeper deal with his dastardly guest. I disappointed them by producing my American Express.

With no internet at the inn, he refused to lend me a phone book to look up alternative hotels. The manager got his final satisfaction by ordering his bellboy to toss my bags outside.

Theirs was an independently owned franchise of something like Motel 7. An hour later, cheek buried in a Howard Johnson’s pillow, I sleepily fantasized complaining to Motel 7’s corporate office… and drifted off to sleep. Just another hazard of the road.

Reanimation

Here I delve into technical details of Sandman’s cryptography and computing. Feel free to skip ahead to The Flash Gorden Super Decoder Ring.

The first hurdle required overcoming a lack of tools, even a lack of tools to build tools. I needed to develop solutions on the bank’s computers, and they weren’t geared for deep-level development. The answer was to invent parsers in assembly language, the language of the machine itself, not meant for the type of character analysis and manipulation I needed. That filled the early days and then came the heavy lifting.

David Edgerley Gates previously brought to our attention substitution cyphers called cryptogramsfound in Sunday newspaper puzzles. Each encrypted letter translates or maps to a plain text letter. For example,

CryptoQuote Encryption Table
↪︎ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789 ↪︎
JXOHY28RGUPB1WA736SLZQF5MD40CN9VTKIE

In the ‘Adventure of the Dancing Men’, Sherlock Holmes took on a secret society’s messages that differed from cryptograms only in the ‘letters’ represented as pictographs. The Dancing Men glyphs corresponded one-to-one with letters of the alphabet.

Sherlock Holmes Dancing Men translation table

Sandman didn’t resort to half measures. I realized he’d built multiple tables that made decoding a multiple more complex. I had to figure out the mirror image of what he’d devised. The American Civil War saw the use of hair-yanking two-dimensional cyphers. Sandman hadn’t made decryption impossible, merely difficult.

Toward that end, I built a translator to fill holes in the reconstituted tables, gaps where uncertainty failed to reveal which letter represented what. The translator checked for errors, refined and reran the process repeatedly until the blanks filled in.

The process was a variation of stepwise refinement: shampoo, rinse, repeat. I’d decrypted so much, I no longer doubted the plan’s viability. The more I decoded, the smaller shrank the unknowns list.

As Sir Conan Doyle pointed out, the frequency of letters we use in writing varies considerably, useful to know when solving puzzles and Wheel of Fortune. In many examples, ETAOIN occur most frequently in ordinary writing and KXQJZ appear least often. In my code tables, I’d cracked the ‘E’s, the ‘S’s, the ‘T’s and most of the other letters. Here and there I might not know the occasional Q or J, but that decreasingly mattered. Over time, I could plug holes as the solution became clear. I was going to whip this thing.

Ironically, if Sandman had simply treated labels as serial numbers, e.g, No52000, No52010, No52020, etc, he would have robbed them entirely of meaning, making decoding moot. He probably avoided that path, thinking it went too far and might set off alarms within Data Corp’s programming staff.

In the days before I’d realized the labels were encrypted, I wrote a program to extract a sampling from 25,000 lines of code, sort them, hoping they’d point a way to patterns. The harvest yielded 3600 unique names, not one of them a recognizable word or abbreviation. That clue alone suggested something bogus. Programmers might omit vowels, might use peculiar abbreviations, or sometimes use slang drawn from popular fiction like grok and borg, foo and plugh. In 3600 labels, I found not one meaningful word. Patterns, yes, but nothing recognizable surfaced.

I built frequency counters, applets to show how often characters appeared. I had to be wary of vowels since labels were limited in length and the first thing people jettison when abbreviating are vowels. The tables from the frequency counters not only revealed which letters were the most crucial, but also helped zero in on likely character replacements.

The first pass turned out better than expected. A thousand labels suddenly appeared readable. A few unknowns became obvious, but in one table I inadvertently mixed M with N. Correct and rerun. Rinse and repeat. Letter by letter, the coded alphabets unmasked.

Discovering how Sandman selected which table to use helped narrow the focus. The first character of a label served as a table selector. If that letter fell within the first third of our thirty-six alphanumeric characters, he used table 1, or within the second third, table 2, and so on. That mapping didn’t immediately jump out from the encryption, but it could be deduced as labels revealed themselves.

Sandman’s Encryption Table
  ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789
selector

↪︎ JXOHY28RGUPB1WA736SLZQF5MD40CN9VTKIE
↪︎ 5FXABTS2V71K9Y6G048HUOLEIPQJNZCDMWR3
V52KGBXSLOM7TIWH6P18Q03NYDJZCEUFR94A

7-of-9 and Other Figures

An important issue I had to deal with was context. If you’ve ever glanced at raw HTML, you saw that formatting tags were mixed in with common text. You might see something like:

<html><head><title>Student Body</title></head><body>

This page discusses who shall head the student body.

</body></html>

Imagine searching and replacing the keywords ‘head’ and ‘body’ without affecting the HTML tags in a hundred-thousand lines and upwards of a million words without making a mistake. The solution is to comprehend meaning, to grasp when head is part of a formatting tag and when it isn’t.

Much like a human reader, the translation program needed to comprehend context. It parsed the text, distinguished actual programming statements, formatting commands, comments, and assorted runes in what technical people call a non-trivial exercise.

The smart enough parser had to recognize if “7,9” referred to two registers, two memory locations, a mix of the two, coordinates, formatting, a decimal number, part of a comment, or an actress in a television show.

To minimize errors as I restored the code, I borrowed a programmer to help check expansions. Late into the night, our flat conversations sounded like alien air traffic controllers:

“… Hex two-five-five, nought, bang paren dog-easy minus splat…”

“… Xor var fox fox, double word, two-seven baker niner able, no deltas.”

A splat meant an asterisk, bang an exclamation point, a delta implied a difference, and much of the rest was hexadecimal. You’re following this, right?

Deltas had to be identified and dealt with. A final pass matched the assembled output of the original and my newly created decrypted version.


The Flash Gordon Super Decoder Ring

It took a shade over two months, but finally I could inform the vice president he had viable source code, better documented than the original. Since most people couldn’t tell assembler code from alphabet soup, he awarded me congratulations with a vague smile. After all, he had to trust what I said it was.

More satisfying was a phone call I made, one to Sandman.

He said, “I don’t believe it. Impossible. You could not have done it. I couldn’t have done it.”

“It’s true. Got a fax number? I’ll send you a couple of pages plus a cross-reference list of labels.”

“Wow, that’s stupendous. Awesome. I didn’t think it could be done. I respect you, you know. This has been extremely satisfying in a way, a battle of brains. Thrust and parry. Check and mate. You’re as good as they say.”

“You could be a contender, Dan. Do the right thing, join the universe on the side of the angels.”

I thought it was end game, but it wasn’t over yet. When no one was looking, perhaps influenced by his corrupt skating Queen, Sandman slipped another rook onto the board.

Computer Associates

I continued development, expanding the product’s capabilities. Some time earlier I had invented Fx, a technique to carve out an independent partition tailor made for such a product to run in. I refined it for Data Corp, which pleased the customers.

On the sales side, matters were not going well. Sandman was right about one aspect. The business model Chase maintained in his head did not match the reality of the market. Australian Boyd Munro had managed to support a high-flying international sales organization– literally high flying– Boyd and the top officers flew their own private planes. Their salesmen personally visited companies to sell a product that leased for a thousand dollars and upwards a month.

Chase owned a Cessna, but with a product that sold for a fraction of Munro’s in an increasingly competitive and changing market, flying half way across the country to make a sales pitch wasn’t feasible. Although we’d solved the technical and legal catastrophes, the board eyed the bottom line, and S&M– sales and marketing– loomed in their gunsights.

During my break in Boston, the vice president phoned. Another situation. Couldn’t he time dramas to occur when I was in Virginia?

“Leigh, what is your opinion of Computer Associates?”

“My opinion? They have staying power, can’t argue that. They change with the times. The company has a chequered reputation, though, considered shady. Rumors persist about a clash with Tower Systems out in California and that the D-fast and T-fast products were cloned. Supposedly the president’s brother is the corporate attorney, so one story says they bully smaller companies in court, grind them down with legal fees, Software Darwinism, the beast with the biggest claws.”

“Computer Associates expresses an interest in buying the rights to our product. They want to send a software specialist to look over the programs. Can you fly here to show it to him?”

“You want to show a competitor our source code? In light of what I just explained, if only a small part is true, does this make sense?”

“Did I mention they are talking a five with a lot of zeros after it?”

“Five hundred thousand dollars? You are joking.”

“I do not joke.”

“Have them sign a non-disclosure agreement, maybe an MOU. Protect yourself.” I could tell from his reaction he wasn’t listening to anything but a five followed by five zeroes.

Bankers, hard-nosed but so naïve.

CA’s software guru turned out to be a Jersey guy with an enviable excess of kinetic energy. The bank’s coffee klatch girls studied Matt, sizing him up.

“He looks like the Leverage TV actor, you know, Christian Kane without the smile, don’cha think?”

“I picture that bad boy flying down the road on a motorcycle, long hair flattened back by the wind.”

“You hear how he talked to the receptionist? He gives me the creeps. You ever see Andrew Dice Clay?”

“Girlie, we got a male who fogs a mirror. What more do we need in a testosterone drought?”

Matt communicated mostly in monosyllabic grunts and nods, then dove head-first into the programs. The vice president hung about, all but wringing his hands before deciding his presence wasn’t contributing. Chase on the other hand, sat down prepared to answer questions. When Matt opened his notebook and began to make copious notes, I shot a questioning look at Chase. He merely shrugged and motioned me outside the room.

“The VP said anything goes. They want to sell it and don’t want us to throw up barriers.”

“What about the non-disclosure? Your bank had me sign one.”

“You are a consultant. This is an established company.”

“I don’t believe it. You wouldn’t give me a hint about the program until I signed sixteen documents. This guy waltzes in, they open the vault?”

“Pretty much. Look, they know your feelings; they just don’t see it your way.”

The VP returned and offered lunch, a largess almost unheard of. Barbecue, Southern buffet, Chinese… Matt waved them all away. “Cold pizza will do.”

Folks in the Shenandoah Valley like to get to know people they do business with. Matt did his best to keep a distance. Chase was clearly uncomfortable with this, but the vice president took it to mean Matt was all business and above frivolity while the rest of us worried about job security. The fact Matt saved the vice president forty bucks for lunch didn’t hurt either.

The afternoon turned into more of the same. Matt pored over the programs, taking extensive notes, filling page after page. From time to time he stepped out of the room to make private phone calls. About 5:30, we shut down for the evening, unusual for us. We invited Matt out to dinner. Chase suggested bluegrass, but Matt declined both.

We met again at nine the next day. Mid-morning Matt turned his attention to my Fx routine and his interest picked up, so much so that he was copying actual bits of code. How did this advance negotiations, I wondered. I closed the binder cover and excused myself, taking it with me.

I stopped in the VP’s office, and reported I didn’t like the way this was going. I’d developed this routine on my own, already had it purloined once, and I didn’t want it stolen again. Because I benefited from royalties, I allowed the bank to use it but they didn’t own it– I did. My holding out for a signed agreement did not make the vice president happy.

Lunch saw subs delivered. By mid-afternoon Matt said he was ready for a meeting. Even I wasn’t prepared for the audacity of his announcement.

“You know a guy named Daniel Sandman? We bought rights and title to the package from him. After minor changes, we shall bring it to market. We’re willing to pay you $10,000 for whatever rights you think you have and you turn your source code over to us.”

The blatant gall stunned us. Finally, Chase said, “The offer of a half million plus was just bullshit?”

The vice president, never one to forget proprieties, frowned at Chase but said to Matt. “You viewed our source under false pretenses?”

Matt shrugged. “You were under no obligation to show me a fucking thing. I suggest you consider this proposal quickly and unemotionally. I have no idea how long my bosses will keep the offer open. With or without you, we’ll bring the product to market within months.”

“What offer?” said Chase. “This is blackmail.”

“It’s actually extortion,” said the vice president. “It won’t fly here. We own the product. We have taken steps more than once to defend it. I cannot imagine what Sandman led you to believe, but the product is not yours. Now I’d appreciate it if you return the notes.”

“Forget about it. The notes are mine, freely allowed by you. You know Charlie Wong, the guy I work for? And his brother, their lawyer? Believe me, before this is over, we’ll own it, Fx and all, and you’ll be wishing you had the $10,000 to cover your first week of legal fees.”

“Fx is not for sale,” I said flatly.

“You think you can stop us?”

The vice president leaned in. “Our customer base monthly revenue is worth more than you’re offering. I suggest you leave, before Southern hospitality comes to an end.”

Matt tapped his fingers a moment and said, “You’ll regret it. Call me a fucking cab.”


The after-conference turned dismal. We had been humbled, deceived, threatened, misled and misused. Only our refusal to be bullied gave us the least comfort.

Matt’s feint and his company’s bluff corroded the bank’s confidence. Computer Associates’ audacity must surely have some credence, mustn’t it? The vice president sent out a tendril of query, tried a civilized probe into Computer Associates, which was met with stony implacability. Gradually, the cold acidic silence ate through the bank’s certainty and sense of justice. They decided to invest no more in the product.

I was retained for the time being because Data Corp still had customers who depended on the software and they would not abandon them. As manufacturers introduced new devices and operating system changes, our package continued to adjust and adapt.

Loose Ends

Chase departed, moving on to sell elsewhere. He reported an industry insider rumor that Computer Associates concluded Sandman either screwed them or they found him too volatile to work with. Either way, they killed off their project. But sadly, they’d also killed ours.

CA’s retreat came too late for us. With sales and marketing shut down, the die had been cast. Within a year or two, requests for updates to the software slowed and then tapered off altogether. The bank ceased billing the last few customers, letting them continue to use the product if they chose or migrate to a competitor’s offering.

Sand Castles

Sandman induced mixed feelings. He possessed a brilliant, if sadly injudicious mind. Like a Greek drama or a Russian novel, the characters and the outcome were doomed from the start. I thought of Sandman less a bad guy and more a pathetic protagonist hemmed in by a distorted perception of the world.

As a result, he acted vengefully and criminally. He’d defrauded a bank and its most important business clients. Goaded by his lover, he blew every chance, every opportunity to get it right. When the blunders of a cigar-chompin’ deputy gave him a get-out-of-jail card, he attempted one more dishonest end-run, reselling a product he no longer owned. It shouldn’t have turned out a tragedy, but characters seldom get to decide the plot.

I confess I relished the contest. Like a novel’s protagonist, I had to see it through until its end. A friend noted I would have fought the battle even if I hadn’t been paid.

As a freelancer, jokes surrounded me about riding into town, smiting a problem, and riding out again as winsome daughters clasped their hands to heaving bosoms and cried out, “Who was that masked man?” Even the industry slang of a hired ‘code-slinger’ evoked the image of a geekish gunfighter. We each enjoy our illusions, but the challenge felt exciting.

Although a resoundingly happy ending didn’t materialize, the case looms in my past with a sense of satisfaction, of skirmishes won and a job completed. One could argue otherwise, but I like to think it a shadow victory for the good guys who prevented the bad guys from winning.

As much as I enjoyed the battle of wits, the world would have been a happier place if Sandman had executed an ethical U-turn into the righteous lane. But if the ungodly, as The Saint was wont to say, always did the right thing, we’d have no story.

06 December 2020

The Skating Mistress Affair, Part I


bank vault

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 isThe 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 isA-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