He drew a chair next to the screen and started to examine it. But at that moment Adriana set a tray of coffee down beside the computer, steaming and fresh, together with dark figs and two bowls of yogurt.
"Kafe evropaiko," she commanded, then thrust a cup into his hand.
"Malista, efcharisto." He absently nodded his thanks, took a sip of the steaming brew, then returned his attention to the screen.
At first he thought he was just groggy, his vision playing tricks, but then the string of letters began to come into focus. Incredible!
"Okay, what about this part here," he asked, pointing to the fourth line, where the letters turned to nonsensical garbage, "and then down here again?"
"That's what I was talking about. The interlacing switches there. It happens every hundred numbers. They started by taking the second fifty digits and interlacing them back into the first fifty. Then they switched the algorithm and interlaced the third fifty digits ahead, into the fourth fifty, but backwards. Then it repeats again."
"You figured all that out just fooling around with it?"
"Darling, I do this for a living, for godsake. After a while you have good instincts." She tapped her fingers nervously on the wooden table, then remembered the coffee and reached for a cup. "Nice little trick. Standard but nice. Every so often you fold the data back into themselves somehow. That way there are no repetitions of number sequences—for words that are used a lot—to give you away. But once you've played with this stuff as much as I have . . . anyway, it's always the first thing I check for."
"Congratulations."
"Tell me the truth." She looked at him, sipping her coffee. "Can you really still read this? It's been years."