The Case of the Woolbridge Cipher A Spike Adams Mystery If, as a poet once said, life means asking "Who do you haunt?" then I would have to confess I don't haunt anyone in particular. I haunt four walls in old L.A. and a cubit of space-time on the Net. As my door says, I'm "SPIKE ADAMS, INTERNET DETECTIVE." Call me an optimist, but most days go down slow and easy, and my wages find their way indirectly to the bill collector. I manage to scrape by till the end of the week, and even save enough to buy a drink at Rosie's. But last Tuesday, for a change, I was on the verge of calling it quits. My business had dried up to a few regular loonies willing to pay for background checks and other forms of legal snooping. When I walked into the building where I work, I was ready to throw in the towel, sell the farm, cash my chips, and hit the road, Jack. The elevator was broken again, so I chugged my gams up five flights of stairs to my sorry excuse for a workplace. All the while, I was cussing my fate and blaming my plight on every whiny loser that had ever darkened my doorstep. The cold wind howled in the halls and slammed through the building as if it weren't there. When I got up to my office, I noticed a shadow behind the frosted glass window on the door. I held my breath, clenched my fist, and turned the handle. Ready to clobber an intruder, I spied instead a neat little old lady sitting primly on my ragtag visitor's chair. She was decked in full winter regalia -- hat, sweater, coat, and yellow rubber boots. In fact, she looked pretty cozy sitting there knitting and humming. With white tufts of hair poked behind her ears, skin like a lizard, and yet the sweetest face you could ever imagine, I figured she couldn't be any younger than ninety. "May I help you, ma'am?" She fixed me with a pair of baby blues that would have made a federal judge squirm. "Are you the detective?" "Yes, ma'am." "You don't mind if I let myself in?" I was wondering how she got there. Then I remembered I had scheduled electricians to lay down some cable. They had a set of keys, and she must have entered as they were leaving. "How can I help you, ma'am?" "Mister Adams," she said, "I would like to hire your services. I want to know if my sister sent me this letter." She handed me a sheet a paper filled with zeroes and ones, and a few "U"s. I turned it this way and that: An email address at the top said "to: ewoolb@hepmail.com" The subject was "no subject," and the return address was "rstrick@lockleer.com." The body of the message looked like this. 1111 1 1011 1001 U 00 1 U 1 101 01 11 1 U 011 000 0101 0 000 101 111 U 111 1 1 010 U 0 000 U 1 00 0111 1 0011 0011 1011 1 U 1101 101 1 011 100001 111 U 00 000 01 1 0100 U 111 10 1110 1 U 00 1 U 001 1011 10 011 0100 111 "I think you'd better tell me your story, ma'am." I sat down at my desk. "My name is Ernestine B. Woolbridge. I'm a widow. I have one sister named Gladys who retired to a care facility in Tampa, Florida. I haven't seen her in sixty years." "Why so long?" "She married my husband." "Huh?" "Oh, of course, I was divorced from him by then, but you know how bad blood takes long to clear between siblings. My sister is four years younger, and I've always felt that she was more popular, smarter, and better-looking than me. When she married Fred, I simply refused to have anything to do with them. He later made a fortune on the stock market, subsequently died, and left all his money to Gladys. Anyway, a year ago I received a call from a nurse from Lockleer Geriatrics Center in Tampa. The nurse wanted to know if I was Gladys's only living relative. I explained that Gladys and I were estranged. I asked the nurse to send me monthly progress reports on the health of my sister. In exchange, I would send money. We arranged that I would send a check to a post office box at the end of each quarter. The name on the check was Rosanne Strick, the name of the nurse. Miss Strick explained how to use email at the local library to read the progress reports." "And she sent them?" "Yes. Unfailingly." Ernestine B. Woolbridge pursed her lips, and added, "Only this month, I received two messages instead of one. I tried calling Miss Strick, but she said she only sent one. That's why I'm here to see you. I think something is wrong." "You haven't been to see your sister?" "I'm not sure that would help. Gladys has a nervous disorder and can hardly move. She doesn't speak at all." I promised Ernestine Woolbridge that I would look into the matter. She paid a retainer, left her phone number, and slowly headed toward the stairs. Outside the wind was howling like a team of unchained hounds. I turned to deciphering the messages Mrs. Woolbridge had left. The first was the set of zeroes and ones. The second was a plain email sent from the same address, but apparently composed by nurse Rosanne Strick. Strick gave a competent progress report, spiced up with a little Greek and millisomethings of medication, but it was the other message that puzzled me. If Rosanne Strick hadn't sent it, there was a good chance the infirm old lady had. But what was it written in? Was it corrupted? Was there a transmission error? I logged onto the Net and scrolled page after page on character sets, Unicode, Baudet, ASCII, EBCDIC (the IBM PC code), but to no avail. The characters in the Woolbridge message seemed to follow no pattern -- neither the 16-bit code set of Unicode, nor the seven-character sequence of ASCII, nor even the five set of Baudet. The stuff didn't even look as if it was intended to be computed. Then it occurred to me that Gladys Woolbridge was old enough to remember the advent of ship-to-ship transmission using Morse. I set about converting the ones into dots, the zeroes into dashes, and U's into slashes. The following sequence emerged: .... . .-.. .--. / -- . / . .-. -. .. . / -.. --- -.-. - --- .-. ... / ... . . -.- / - --- / . -- -... . --.. --.. .-.. . / ..-. .-. . -.. .----. ... / -- --- -. . -.-- / ... .- ...- . / -- . / --. .-.. .- -.. -.-- ... Methodically, I began deciphering the Morse code. "...." was H; "." was E; ".-.." was L; and ".--." was P. At last, the complete message read: help me ernie - doctors seek to embezzle fred's money - save me - gladys Gladys Woolbridge had tapped a message in Morse on her keyboard. Then she had set about disguising the periods as ones and the dashes as zeroes. Finally, to break up her words, she inserted U's at the place of slashes. She probably figured that if a copy of her email was intercepted by her captors, they wouldn't understand its meaning. I rushed to the telephone to call the District Attorney in Florida. She said she would contact Ernestine Woolbridge and arrange to have her come to Florida to testify, if necessary. Today, I received a money order for five-thousand dollars from Ernestine Woolbridge. It turns out her sister had used the nurse's station computer to send the ciphered message. The doctors at Lockleer are being investigated, and the nurse, a pawn in their game, has been fired. Of course, I mailed the money quickly to the electricians. How come you can never find a bill collector when you need one? January 20, 1999