Page 78 of Murder on the Boardwalk

Brent chuckled. “You don’t need to do that. But at least I know you’re determined to see this through.”

“I’m determined to keep these three locked up for the rest of their lives. They deserve nothing less. Even if I need to show up at every parole board hearing, I don’t want these guys seeing the light of day.”

22

With her back against the wall and the clock ticking, Brogan enlisted Birk’s help to crack the VPN their mysterious sender used to make contact.

“I’ve sent two emails since this afternoon. Our anonymous emailer ignored both. I don’t have time to wait around. I need his IP address. Is it possible?”

“If given time, a highly skilled hacker can breach anything,” Birk assured her. “They eitherfind a known vulnerability to crack the encryption or steal the key. Sometimes it takes weeks, months, or years to do that. Need I remind you that you want this done in a matter of hours?”

“Which method is faster?”

“Breaking the encryption is time-consuming. It’s easier to steal the key.” He huffed out a sigh. “Fine. I’ll see what my security experts can do in a limited amount of time. But don’t get your hopes up. High-tech cheating andtechnical trickery take time, too.”

While Birk conferred with his security team, Brogan sat by her laptop, waiting for a reply, hoping for a miracle.

Lucien brought her a glass of lemonade. “From our own orchard. Any progress?”

“Birk’s talking to people,” she explained, sipping the cold drink. “This is good stuff. Thanks.”

“I used Maeve’s recipe.”

“I taste her influence. She always had a secret ingredient she refused to reveal.”

“Don’t tell anybody, but I added lemon extract to this batch.”

Brogan’s eyes bugged out. “You didn’t use our lemons?”

“I squeezed them fresh myself. But when I was looking for the juicer, I spotted Maeve’s recipe underneath it. She’d written a side note on the recipe card. ‘Not all lemons should be used to make lemonade. Some are more sour than others.’ She suggested adding a high-quality lemon extract to the formula.”

“So she always added flavoring to hers? Wow. All those years, she had me fooled. Do you realize I’ve been drinking her lemonade since I was eight or nine and never knew that?”

“You realize that getting this guy’s IP address doesn’t ID him, per se.”

“Sure. But I’ll know the location of his virtualprivatenetwork. With any luck, it’ll track back to a house, not a commercial address. Look, I know it’s a shot in the dark. But the IP address also verifies that he’s nearby or has a connection to the town.”

“You want to make sure he’s not a crackpot making up a story to get attention.”

“Exactly. Lots of people listen to Jade’s podcast. You should see some of the emails she gets. Some are downright scary.”

Lucien heard Birk end his phone call. “Want lemonade?”

“After that conversation, I think I’ll require something stronger. Here’s the deal. Four people are working on the algorithm and ciphertext, looking for a weakness in the VPN. It’s based on the same method the CIA uses to catch spies these days. I can dabble in the tech stuff, but the pro hackers go after the point-to-point tunneling protocol, one step at a time. It takes patience. Once you finally nail the key, the layered attackdecrypts many different kinds of Internet traffic.”

Brogan’s eyes crossed. “You’re speaking Greek to me.”

“Same here,” Lucien added.

“Let’s just say it was a behind-the-scenes kind of thing for years. It took a while, but research scientists convinced the government that certain systems were vulnerable. They admitted to it officially in 2015. It’sreferred to as Logjam—asecurity vulnerability that allows hackersto go after the man in the middle—to decipher 512-bit systems to export and modify data. It was soon expanded to include the more commonly used 1024-bit.”

When Birk saw the panicked look on their faces, he added, “Relax. It’s common knowledge now. We’re not talking about state secrets here. It’s all about using the right algorithms, number theories, primitive roots, and prime numbers, looking for that key. You put the parts together in stages, sending over a number or code that convinces a server to accept it. That’s the tricky part, settling on what to use. But you keep trying various numbers until you hit upon one the server recognizes. Bingo. Ultimately, scientists figured out Logjam could disrupt eighty percent of the traffic.”

“That sounds like a lot, but it might as well be Greek,” Brogan professed. “Wouldn’t you need calculus know-how or a brilliant geek to hack into a server?”

“All it takes is math. But mathematicians will always have a special place in the CIA. Recruiting the smartest and brightest people to crack code will always be a government priority.”

“Does any of this help me get this guy’s IP address?”

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