A knock at the door this morning…and it isn’t a visit from the Easter Bunny. Agent Jones of the CIA is once again at your home. He must need you to solve another puzzling code. There’s no holiday when you are the greatest cryptologist in the land.
You greet Jones and offer him a fresh cup of coffee and some marshmallow peeps.
Jones: Sorry to bother you on Easter morning, but this can’t wait. We’ve got a new network of evil spies to deal with.
You: No problem. Give me the details.
Jones: The Government has a set of top secret plans that need guarding. The contents of these papers are so secret even I don’t know what’s in 'em. The plans are at the White House for safekeeping, and we have a full U.S. Army division assigned to protect them.
You: But you still suspect trouble?
Jones: Right. I’ve got a strange feeling in my gut that something bad is coming. Our agents have been trying to gather clues regarding the new ring of spies. Yesterday, an informant passed us a coded message she claimed was being circulated amongst the spies. She would give us no more details, but our agents do not think she knows anything else of importance.
You: Don’t worry. I’ll start on the message right now. Where can I reach you today?
Jones: I’ll be at the White House all day. I’m head of the security team protecting the annual Easter egg hunt. This year there’s a special presentation by the Girl Scouts to the First Lady. They’re giving her several pet rabbits. Should be a lot of fun. (Here Jones rolls his eyes.)
You offer Jones a few more candies from your Easter basket, and he says goodbye. As you sit down at your desk to work on the message, you too feel a sense of storm clouds gathering on the horizon…
You have stared at the code for some time now, but no lightbulb is going off in your mind. What can those blue letters mean? It must somehow be significant that the early five capitalized letters are in blue in the final sentence. But what is the significance? And why just in the final sentence?
You take a break to wolf down a few jelly bean. If things don’t start getting clearer, the ears of the chocolate bunny are probably next.
Jones arrives this Monday morning with a grim look on his face. The case has taken a tragic turn.
Late last night the CIA received a call from the informant, Cindy Wilkes. She claimed to have a copy of another cryptic note, and to know the identity of one of the spies. She demanded a $10,000 payoff for the info, and arranged for Jones to meet her on M Street early this morning. She did not live to get her reward.
When Jones arrived at the rendezvous point, he found Ms. Wilkes dead on the roadside. She had been run over by a produce truck making its early morning rounds. The driver, a distraught Mr. Stuart Harvey, claimed he had seen a shadowy figure push Ms. Wilkes in front of his speeding truck. This mysterious assailant had then disappeared down an alley.
Jones: Ms. Wilkes must have died instantly. There were no clues, but in her pocket we found another one of those notes. I have brought it directly to you.
You take the bloodstained note from Jones. If only you had solved that code yesterday!
You: I will not rest until I have cracked this code. Do you have any other news? How did events at the White House go yesterday?
Jones: Everything was quiet and normal. The kids had fun even though it rained. The First Lady enjoyed her visit with the girl scouts, and the little rabbits were very cute. Agent Brown and I watched for suspicious activity but saw none. But how could anyone get at those secret plans when there are so many soldiers guarding them? Maybe the spies are after something else altogether.
Maybe. You hand Jones some jelly beans and send him on his way. You have work to do. You spread out the newest message, determined to solve the code before something else dreadful happens.
Another observation (though I suck at cryptograms): all the capital letters (except for the “I” in “IZW” in the first message and the occasional “M”) are from the second half of the alphabet. Meaning?
Hmm…You are tired. A light rain is falling and in the distance you hear a siren wail. Can’t have anything to do with the case, you think. Your nerves are jumpy. Somewhere down the hall an amateur jazz player plays a mournful, mellow tune.
You set the messages aside a couple hours ago. The type is hard to read. It is difficult to tell an “I” from an “l”. You assume that the first letter in "lZWq, and later in “lZW” is an “ell”, not an “eye”, and you would be right. Spy proofreader must need to wear glasses. As far as you can tell, there are no capital “eyes” in either message. Damn stinkin’ spy fonts. You hope in the future that all spies refrain from using lower case letters in their codes.
But nothing seems to fit. Why are the cap letters mostly from the second half of the alphabet? Only the blue caps are from the early letters. What can that mean? You ask out loud, but there is no response.
One thing is for certain. A spy must be easily able to decode a message. We can’t expect the spy to carry around some sort of key to the codes. No, there must be some simple way…but it is obvious this is no standard cryptogram.
What about the words and the letter patterns? Is there anything to note there? Any special words or phrases I might look for in the messages? And if a “q” stands for one letter in one place, but a different letter in another place, how can one decipher the code? There HAS to be logic to this.
The music in the distance has stopped. It is now eerily quiet. You return once again to the pages. Somehow it must add up.
And what about the blue letters? Anything special at all about the sentences that contain them? More questions. Few answers.
My two eyes may be tired, but there are definitely two capital eyes in the first message.
Here’s the fourth sentence in a serif font:
gfUW maXlX mVWWdon XjinphZ fli XVmmjon IZWq oadd Yjgo aflg eYpeYlrsYl gonUhn ecffYl aTkXl.
And the sixth:
nV mbUff kWW Q mknX “hcabn fW lZW fYjom” hjhZio Xgj IZW pidoZY noVoZn fnudqmldms.
But even the most careful spies will make trancription errors from time to time, and I’m going to have to consider that those might be meant for ells. Even if they are, the non-blue capitals are restricted not to the second half of the alphabet, but to the last 15 letters. What to do with that? I have a feeling this may be another one of those pull-the-fat-out-of-the-fire-late-Saturday-night assignments. Hope we don’t lose a lot of agents.
Yes, you are certain (though you don’t know exactly why), that neither of the two messages are supposed to have any capital “eyes”. A transcription error…grrr…but at least if the spies made that kind of mistake in their code, they may also prove fallible in carrying out their nefarious schemes. At least you hope so.
Meanwhile, you receive a call from Jones who tells you that everything is quiet. Perhaps too quiet…
It won’t take until Saturday night after all, but it isn’t going to be done before breakfast tomorrow, either. All I know at this point is that we had better have that army division keep an eye on the bunnies.
Maybe some of the other agents can help with the deciphering. I’ll just point out a few articles in case anybody is available tonight.
Here are a few of the ways “the” appears: lZW; fTQ; kYV
As Jones and Company wait patiently for a solution, some others are having their special breakfast right now. Crunch. Crunch crunch. Crunch crunch crunch!
So I guess we’re too late to intercept the doctored carrots. Can we at least catch the delivery people before they get away? I’m still not quite through the whole message, but I expect to have it done before the bunnies become a problem. JUST DON’T LET THEM OUT!
For the other agents on the case, I’ll just mention that the capital letters decode the same way as the lower case ones, and the length of the words is part of the key. I still don’t know what the blue is about.
Evi spy network has genetically engineered several carrots. These roots will be given to our contact in the White House Veterinarian’s Office. Our man will feed carrots to the new rabbits. Once these rabbits consume our carrots they will grow into gargantuan mutant killer hares. Our horrible bunnies will be unstoppable. We shall see a true “night of the lepus” moment for the United States government. While their armies fend off the grotesque and malevolent Peter Cottontails, we will be able to sneak inside and steal those top secret plans.
Deliver a bag of special carrots to the White House on Tuesday. An aide to their animal doctor secretly works for us. She can make sure that the presidential bunnies eat their carrots. Two days after that meal, the creatures will suddenly expand into deadly carnivorous monsters! Have all our men prepared to raid Sixteen Hundred Pennsylvania Avenue while the army is busy battling enormous crazed homicidal critters. Thursday is the day we attack.
You, Brown and Jones share a victory drink…even though it is a Tuesday night.
Jones: The rabbits have been shipped off to a remote island government facility. There they will be allowed to rampage in peace among the tropical flora.
You: I take it that Harvey has also been imprisoned, as well as the mole in the White House veterinarian’s office.
Brown: Yes, those two will be put away for a long time. We should have suspected the “Slice & Splice” Produce Company right away. In fact, the whole operation was a front for a genetic engineering lab run by evil spy scientists. Of course Harvey lied when he said someone had pushed that woman in front of his truck. But his carrot-deliverin’ days are over now.
You: The key to the code was word length, and sentence length. Every letter was bumped up the total of the number of letters in the word plus the number of words in the sentence. When the upper case letters bumped up past “Z”, they became lower case letters. The few instances where the bumping went past “z” again, the letters became blue caps. So in the second code, “WHILE” bumped up 26 and became “while”. Coded, but yet not coded.
Jones: Well I guess that wraps up this caper. Unfortunately, we never found the identity of the head spy, nor caught most of the operatives, so I expect we may soon hear again from our spies.
You: And we’ll be ready. Whatever those top secret plans are, we’ll protect them. But today is for celebration. Have a Cadbury.
Damn, Biotop. Another masterpiece. It’s been months since my scheduling allows me to get in on any of these. No worries, though. I’ll just have to get some sort of wireless internet laptop contraption that all of the kids seem to be using these days.