{Takes place a day or two before Bridge incident.}
Jordan was at his desk. The Puzzle Club had sent him a new cipher to break...he had been getting lots of practice over the past two or three months. He had always liked cryptograms, and in college had picked up puzzle magazines with ciphers just for fun. Now, those ciphers were something he could read almost like a newspaper column.
But this cipher was harder, coming from a club for real enthusiasts. He could use one of two techniques—brute force or cryptanalysis. The brute force technique attempts to decrypt the message using all possible keys. But there were too damn many factorials, even with the decryption algorithms in his computer. The brute force technique tries all possible keys and looks at the resulting decryption and checks whether it looks like English. That approach could take years...tens of years for Jordan's small laptop.
He would use cryptanalysis, using the algorithms, multilingual letter statistics and letter positions tables in his system (and in his memory) to make an effort. Most of the Puzzle Club stuff was in English, but he was prepared to move on to machine languages.
In such wise did Jordan while away his evening. Lacking a girlfriend or any kind of meaningful social life, study was the logical option.