Mad Bill Cipher Novels & Stories

Making Ruby chuckle. "But honestly, that Madison is senseless."

There were people including women and there were about thirty people in all. He had a hard cutter in his hand with great difficulty. He often used this cutter to separate the pages of books and sometimes to cut newspapers and pictures, so he put it in the back pocket of his pants at the same time. He had moved when there was a sudden stampede in the bus. This fowler-like cutter was in his hand at that time. He was now cutting the ropes of his hands with great skill. The style was such that no one from the front could even realize what he was doing at the moment. If he got tired, he would stop his hand because he was afraid that the cutter would slip due to sweat in his hands.

He held it up for a moment, examining it in the light before casually flicking it onto the concrete floor, where it landed with a tiny, insignificant tink. "One," Zandrei counted softly, his eyes glinting with a mad, ecstatic light. "Now, let's try again. Who sent you?" He asked, his voice brimming with a childlike excitement, like a madman who had just discovered a wonderfully fun new game and was eager for another turn. The man in the chair could only manage a strangled, guttural sound, a wet sobbing noise that vibrated through his shattered mouth. His head thrashed from side to side, his eyes wide with a horror so pure it was almost beautiful to Zandrei.

I was creating a tiny, hidden portal. I wrote a quick piece of code—a reverse shell—and installed it deep within Higgins's browser cache. This shell would only activate if it received a very specific, coded email. I then sent one last, encrypted message using the external proxy link to Mia's burner account: the activation code. > Evelyn (Coded): New contact method: Higgins's private email. Subject Line: The Queen needs a new cipher for her chess problem. Body: [4-digit code]. Send every ten days exactly. Do not miss a beat. If the code works, the reply will be confirmation.

"Vaporized. Whoever this is, they just erased three billion credits from existence in thirty seconds. They don't want the money. They want to burn the bank." Altair stood up. He walked to the window. Three billion. A dent, but survivable. But the method... that was the threat. "Who?" Altair asked. "The signature is encrypted with a chaotic algorithm," Nova said. "But I found a tag buried in the metadata." She tapped the tablet. A symbol appeared. A hollow circle with a slash through it. The mathematical symbol for the Empty Set. "CIPHER," Nova whispered. "The urban legend?" Altair scoffed. "CIPHER is a ghost story hackers tell newbies. A collective of digital anarchists."

"You said the encryption was a very old, very paranoid system." Dominik nods, reaching into a velvet pouch on his desk and retrieving my heavy gold signet ring. He holds it carefully between his ink-stained fingers. "It’s a variation of a Vigenère cipher," Dominik explains, his voice keeping low so as not to disturb the surrounding chaos. "It’s a grounded, analogue method of cryptographic substitution. No digital footprint, no hackable servers. It’s entirely uncrackable unless you possess the specific keyword used to shift the alphabet. I ran thousands of permutations based on Russian military codes, historical Syndicate dates, and your father's known aliases. None of them worked."

Avi drew a table on our white board and wrote the input from the plain text. H | E | Y | I | W | A | S D | O | I | N | G | J | U S | T | F | I | N | E | B E | F | O | R | E | I | M E | T | Y | O | U | X | X Cipher text: HDSEEEOTFTYIFOYINIROWGNEUAJEIXSUBMX "There. So to decrypt the ciphertext, you just need to make a table like the one I drew earlier. Then if you don't have enough input to fill up the table, simply put an 'X'."

“Tim, what the fuck? How did that fucking bitch release the video under your damn watch?” Tim sounded absolutely distraught. “Man, I’m so sorry, but the blackmailer has cover from a very powerful encryption program. She had protection stronger than the one Tina had. And this particular encryption can only be pulled off by a high tech digital company with very advanced computer programs. The blackmailer just has had access to a very high-tech computer program. For me to crack the code, I’d have to get the same level of tech too. I’m sorry, man.”

She groaned. Cyphers were very frustrating for her because most of the time if you didn’t have a key to solve it, it was next to impossible. She groaned and opened the application on her computer for the encrypted message board. Next she opened a cypher software program. She quickly typed in the message from the message board and then sagged back down in her seat. “So what now?” Kane asked. “We wait. Want some coffee?” She asked, looking over at him. “Sure.”

Then, I turned to the real challenge. "Leo," I said, my expression shifting. I didn't treat him like a child. I treated him like an operative. "You are a seeker of truths. You see the patterns that even your Uncle Julian misses. You have seen the Bad Man's glowing glass tablet, haven't you?" Leo leaned back, his small arms crossed. "He uses 256-bit encryption, Nanny. It’s a standard corporate shell with a rolling bypass. It's... tricky." "The mountain does not care for shells, Leo," I countered, pulling a small, battered flash drive from my apron pocket, the kind of tech that looked like junk but held a ghost-protocol I’d written for the Bureau.