Daemon

hits – all relating to World War II. Instead, he reran the search, adding
Over the Rhine
as criteria. He still got about seven hundred hits, all of them historical because the Italian campaign, ultimately, was aimed toward Germany.
    Gragg looked up from his laptop and stared at a desktop computer’s debug window scrolling the results of his program’s decryption attempts. Output appeared every millisecond or so and varied between gibberish and the words ‘Bad Data.’ He sighed, realizing that encryption could even be something like a proprietary Triple DES, where the designer re-encrypted the message multiple times. Hadn’t the Russians done something like that with their Venona project? Gragg felt quicksand rising up to swallow his efforts. Would he go to his grave never knowing the answer to this riddle?
    He knew a little more now, though. Didn’t he? Well, assuming that Matthew Sobol had designed the Monte Cassino map, he did. He halted the decryption program and brought up the immediate window. Gragg typed the stub of his decryption function:
    ?DecryptIt(
    He had to supply the only argument for the function – the key to use for the encryption. His function was hard-coded to use the encrypted string he got from the Monte Cassino map along with any key he entered here as an argument for the function. It would then cycle through a dozen common decryption algorithms – DES, Triple DES, RSA – feeding the key as the variable. Gragg thought hard. What would Sobol use as a key? Gragg typed:
?DecryptIt(‘MatthewSobol’)
    And hit ENTER. The output was twelve lines of gibberish or ‘Bad Data’ once again – one line for each algorithm attempted by the function. He tried scores of variations on Sobol’s name, and then variations on CyberStorm Entertainment, then variations of
Over the Rhine
. He started entering the names of some of the games Sobol had created – or at least ones Gragg could remember. Then the names of notable game characters, like Boerner.
    The output was all gibberish.
    Gragg just stared at the flat-panel monitor. He might as well curl up and die now because some bastard had placed this virus in his head, and he would never be free of it. If he ever got his hands on the Monte Cassino map designer, he was going to wring that fuck’s scrawny neck. Gragg pounded his head on the desk – not hard enough to hurt himself, but hard enough to inform his brain of the danger.
    Clues. He needed to examine what would be important to someone – say, Sobol – who wanted to keep a secret away from the Feds, but who also wanted Generation Y to find it. Those Feds would no doubt be using sniffers, crackers, and decompilers in order to find encrypted strings in Sobol’s work. If not now, then soon. But they couldn’t decrypt it if they didn’t find it. Where to hide data from automated forensics tools?
    Gragg had an epiphany: there was no encrypted string in the Monte Cassino map. Gragg had perceived the encrypted text, but it wasn’t really computer text; it was a graphical image– and one done in a Teutonic stone-carved font, no less. The encrypted string, ‘m0wFG3PRCoJVTs7JcgBwsOXb3U7yPxBB,’ was an arrangement of pixels that only a human eye – or a really good optical character-recognition scanner – could interpret. Programmatically scanning the contents of this map wouldn’t uncover any encrypted text – only a human being viewing the map in the context in which it was meant to be seen could see its significance. But even within the game the significance of the coded string wasn’t truly revealed until …
    Gragg smiled. Herr Oberstleutnant Boerner pointed out its significance. The combination of the picture file and Boerner’s verbal statement,
‘… use your key, and ve vill meet again …’
– these were the components of the encryption, the data and the key to unlocking it. The more he contemplated it, the more sense it made. The data and the key appeared in proximity to each other only within the context of the game, and then only if the player was dedicated and capable enough to reach the inner sanctum of that difficult map. That probably ruled out anyone over thirty years of age. Certainly it ruled out anyone in a position of responsibility.
    Excitement coursed through Gragg’s body. He had forgotten all about his exhaustion. He was hopeful again. Either that or he was headed toward madness.
    If the audio file contained the key, then where was it? Was it hidden somewhere