Eric shook his head. “Minecraft is a very popular video game. Whenever you fire it up, it shows a splash screen with a phrase on it. It rotates through a bunch of different phrases, and this is one of them. You know what it says?”
They all shook their heads.
“Potato chips!” Murph cried out, and then went back to working on the phone.
“No, it doesn’t,” Gretchen said.
“Actually, it does,” Eric said, “but it uses a nontraditional spelling taken from odd pronunciations in English.” He scribbled again and showed them a new word.
Ghoti.
“You might have seen this one.”
Juan nodded, getting it now. “That spells out fish. Pronounced like the gh in tough, o in women, and ti in nation.”
“And Ghoughpteighbteau tchoghs! spells out potato chips in the same way,” Eric said, and wrote down the equivalents.
Hiccough. Though. Ptarmigan. Weigh. Debt. Bureau. Pitch. Women. Hiccoughs.
“When you said, ‘potayto/potahto,’” Murph said to Gretchen, “it made me think of that Minecraft phrase. I knew a hacker of this skill level wouldn’t leave out a signature. Reputation is everything to them. They want people to know who was responsible for an epic hack.”
“I’m still missing something,” Linda said.
Murph read the sentence again. “‘Go ahead and comb through the code looking for this time bomb if you dare, but eventually you’ll have to cough up the dough to us.’ The hacker was leaving us a clue. It’s in the different pronunciations of the same letter combinations: comb versus bomb, through versus cough and dough. He wasn’t just being cute.”
“I know you’re leading us somewhere with this,” Juan said. “What’s the punch line?”
Murph showed his screen to Eric, who nodded and said, “The hacker used an acrostic code. Normally, they’re easy to detect. You take the first letter of each sentence or the first letter of every third word, or some other variation, to spell out a message.” He scribbled on his napkin yet again.
“But this hacker was more subtle,” Murph said. “He used an acrostic that was itself encoded. The code is spelled out by the first letter of each sentence. I’ve i
terated through a bunch of different pronunciations and this is the only one that makes sense.”
Eric passed the napkin around with a new gibberish word above plain English words.
Tiaideaughow.
Nation. Plaid. Bureau. Tough. Low.
Juan sounded out the pronunciation in his head, then looked up at Murph. “Shadowfoe?”
Murph nodded. “He’s notorious in the elite hacker community. ShadowFoe came up with some of the nastiest worms and viruses to hit major companies. No one knows who he is, but he’s considered the cream of the crop.”
Gretchen seemed stunned by the information. “Oh no.”
“You know who it is, don’t you?” Juan said.
She swallowed. “Interpol received an anonymous tip last week, but we didn’t think it was credible. It gave the location where ShadowFoe is operating from and said he was planning to release a new virus that would attack banks.”
“Why wasn’t it taken seriously?”
“Because it came with a picture. A twenty-eight-year-old Albanian named Erion Kula. He’d been on our radar already because of some credit card database hacks, but we knew him by the handle Whyvern, not ShadowFoe. We figured that one of his competitors was trying to frame him by falsely identifying him.”
“Where is he?”
“The tip said he’s working from Vlorë Castle on the Albanian coast.”
“Then we go get ShadowFoe and persuade him to give us back our money,” Juan said. “I’ll call Max and tell him to prepare to set sail for Albania as soon as we get back to Palermo.”