Collision

by William S. Cohen

“Ballet?… Oh, yes. The system for when he had to act like he knew how to use a computer. Oh, yes!” She smiled. “Like a pas de deux. Very funny.”

  “I’ll need you to give me a formal statement, giving all the details, such as how Paul got the passwords. I assume it was someone from SpaceMine.”

  “Yes, it was Mr. Hamilton.”

  “Wonderful! Then Hamilton himself literally gave Paul the key to tampering?”

  “Yes. I see the need to give you a deposition as soon as possible. When and where?”

  Falcone took a sip of coffee and then put the laptop in its case. Suddenly, he looked up and said, “I just had an idea, Ursula. Let’s go to FBI headquarters.”

  He told her about his session with Sarsfield’s timelines and how the double download made him realize what had probably happened.

  “Exactly how. The pas de deux,” she said, smiling. “I can see why going to the FBI is a good idea. I agree.” She leaned back and said softly, “I feel relieved. Very relieved. It’s like I am two persons. One who works there”—she tilted her head toward the Sullivan & Ford Building—“and one who … who has a life … who tries to have a life.”

  Falcone took out his cell phone and called Taylor to say, “I’ve got it. I’ll be dropping it off shortly. Then I’ll be going with my provider to where I was earlier. Can’t say more.”

  He next called Patterson’s private number. “J.B., I need a return visit with Agent Sarsfield. Right away.”

  “I would think you had enough of him for the day,” Patterson said dryly.

  “No. This is hot, J.B. I have someone who wants to make a statement. A big statement. I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay, Sherlock. Sarsfield will meet you at the gate.”

  56

  Falcone and Ursula jumped into a cab and took it to his apartment. Falcone handed the laptop to the doorman and asked him to deliver it to the penthouse, where there would be someone to take it. Then the pair sprinted two blocks to the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

  Sarsfield was standing in front of the entrance to the courtyard. He checked Ursula’s identification and swiftly ushered them through the security path to the elevator. On the seventh floor, they bypassed Patterson’s office and entered the conference room. Falcone nodded to Agrawal and Poindexter, who were in the same seats. At the far end of the table, Falcone was surprised to see Director Patterson. Seated at his left was a woman in her fifties wearing a dark-blue blazer and holding an iPad. Sarsfield took the chair to Patterson’s right.

  “This is our general counsel, Marjorie Humphreys,” Patterson said, nodding toward her. “She’ll handle any legal issues that may come up.”

  Falcone, standing behind the chair he had recently occupied, said, “This is my client, Ursula Breitsprecher”—he spelled out her name and then went on. “She is the executive assistant to Paul Sprague, to whom I gave the laptop we had been discussing. She wishes to describe what happened on October fourth.”

  Humphreys ducked and came up from her briefcase with a Bible, which was passed down the table to Ursula, who, under the general counsel’s direction, swore to tell the truth.

  As Ursula began describing the speakerphone system that she and Sprague had worked out, the door opened and a man slipped into the room. He took a chair next to Humphreys, who introduced him as Assistant Attorney General James Cosgrove.

  After Humphreys gave Cosgrove a whispered summary of the deposition thus far, she signaled for Ursula to continue, step by step, describing the downloading and disabling on October 4. When she mentioned the phone call, she identified the other person on the line as Robert Wentworth Hamilton.

  “What is the basis for your identification?” Humphreys asked.

  “No other client of Mr. Sprague uses a telephone encryption system. It distorts the voices of both parties. I know his voice through that distortion. It makes him sound like one of those children on South Park.”

  Humphreys smiled. Falcone was the only person in the room who laughed.

  Finally, at Humphreys’s request, Ursula handed the thumb drive to Poindexter, who accepted it with a gloved hand and placed it in a transparent evidence bag.

  “Don’t we get to read it?” Falcone asked the end of the table.

  “It’s evidence,” Sarsfield said. “It must be processed and analyzed.”

  “What about a video of this deposition?”

  After a long silence, Patterson had a whispered conversation with Humphreys and Cosgrove and finally said, “You will receive a copy for your client. Thank you both for coming here today.”

  Sarsfield led Falcone and Ursula back through the security gauntlet and left them with a wave on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  “There’s a restaurant, D’Acqua, just a block from here,” Falcone said. “It’s an Italian and seafood place, but you can get tea there, too, I know.”

  “Come on, Sean, give me a break! Already it’s been a full day. I’m going right home and…”

  “Please, Ursula. This is something that I need to know. You liked Hal Davidson. He had never done anyone any harm. But he was shot to death.”

  “Yes, a fine man. But, Sean, he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “I don’t think so, Ursula,” Falcone said, pointing to the Starbucks on Seventh Street, half a block away. “I think he was murdered because somebody wanted him killed. Please, five minutes.”

  “All right. You have my attention. I want to know why you think that.”

  They entered from the side door. Ursula sat at a table along the far wall while Falcone ordered his coffee and her chai tea latte.

  When he returned carrying the cups, she looked up and said, “I … I am grateful that you had me go to the FBI. Next, Paul will be hearing from Sarsfield. And I will be without a job.”

  “He’d be a fool to fire you. And … there’s your friend.”

  “Ralph. He spends half of his time back in South Carolina. But, you’re right. Having a member of Congress as a boy … as a friend, will help,” she said, smiling and pausing. “Maybe he could get me a job on the Hill.… Well, okay, what is it you want to know?”

  “Hal Davidson made several recent trips to South Africa on a pro bono case of some kind. I have a hunch that whatever he was doing is somehow connected with his murder.”

  “Murder?” Ursula asked. “I can’t believe that.”

  “I know it seems incredible, but I’m convinced that Hal was the target, and there had to be a motive.”

  “All I know is that he had been helping South African miners for a couple of years when we took on Hamilton as a client,” Ursula said. “Helping those miners was like a crusade, a cause, for Hal. There was one day when the police and miners fought. Hal was there. The miners had clubs and machetes. The police had guns and killed a lot of the miners. Hal told me how horrible it was. He knew I was … dating … a congressman. Hal asked me to talk to Ralph and have Congress investigate the terrible conditions the miners worked under. But Ralph ran into a brick wall. He couldn’t find any cosponsor for a congressional hearing. The word was out that big money—big donors—didn’t want anything to do with the African miners.”

  “What did Hal have to say?”

  “He wasn’t surprised. He said that something funny was going on. ‘Something funny.’ That’s what he said.”

  “Do you have any idea what he meant?”

  “The strike should have ended. I think he thought that the strike leader acted like he didn’t really want the strike to end. He was working with people in South Africa, trying to figure out what was happening.”

  “Was this when Hamilton became a client?”

  “I really can’t say definitely. I think so. Anyway, Paul said Hal had to drop the miners. And, Hal told me, Paul gave no reason. But Hal was suspicious.”

  “How? What was he suspicious about?”

  “He knew who Hamilton was, of course. Then he heard something on a TV show—I don’t remember its name—so
mething about a monopoly of something. He was angry, very angry. There was a big scene. I heard Hamilton’s name.”

  Falcone thought for a moment. “Was it Street Speak, the show about Wall Street?” he asked.

  “Perhaps. That sounds familiar. Paul watches it. He has a large portfolio.… Wait. He had me get a transcript of a show. Now I remember. Yes. It was Street Speak.”

  “And did the transcript have Ben Taylor talking about SpaceMine?”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “I watched, too,” Falcone said. “Taylor was talking about how most of the world’s platinum and palladium comes from Russia and South Africa and that SpaceMine would drastically change the market for them. It’s beginning to fall into place.”

  Ursula looked puzzled and said, “What is?”

  “The whole damn thing. How was it when Hal was killed? Was he was still working for the miners?”

  Ursula put down her nearly empty cup. “Yes. Hal even threatened to resign and talk publicly about being fired because of the miners if Paul forced him to drop them. He was a stubborn man.”

  As she and Falcone neared the door, he said, “Do you think Hamilton was behind this?”

  “Paul never said so. He just said that Hamilton was our most important client. Anything he wanted, we had to do,” Ursula said. “Like firing you.”

  “You, forget, Ursula. He never fired me. I had already quit.”

  57

  After flagging down a taxi for Ursula, Falcone strode across the Navy Memorial toward the door of his apartment building. But the ring of his cell phone stopped him: “This is Ben. I’m at my house. Needed to drive here. Will explain when you get here, which I hope is right away.” Falcone blessed his luck for getting a taxi in minutes and headed for Taylor’s Capitol Hill home.

  Ben had left the front door unlocked. Falcone walked in and found Taylor at the kitchen table, hunched over Falcone’s laptop. Next to it was an open dictionary and a notepad. In Taylor’s left hand were a black ballpoint pen and a notebook. To the right of the laptop was a bottle of beer and a half-eaten sandwich on a paper towel.

  “Sean, I’m so glad to see you,” Taylor said, rising and hugging Sean, who was surprised by Taylor’s rare emotional display. “This really shook me up. It was like Cole reached out and touched me.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, sitting down again. “Real glad you’re here. Darlene’s out somewhere with Sam. Reading this, I didn’t want to be alone. Grab a beer and make yourself a cheese sandwich,” he said.

  Falcone went to the refrigerator, took out a beer, and opened it while looking at the laptop screen over Taylor’s shoulder. “Why did you come here?” Falcone asked.

  “I came here for a dictionary,” Taylor replied. “I needed this one”—he pointed to a Webster’s dictionary with its fading red cover case half attached and bearing coffee-cup ring stains. “It’s the one I need for decryption.”

  “Decryption? I don’t get it,” Falcone said.

  “It’s from Cole. Encrypted. I’m not surprised. It’s Cole protecting himself.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Just fine. Just fine,” Taylor answered, tapping out two words. God and dare appeared on the screen.

  “What the hell?”

  “It means ‘Goddard,’” Taylor said. “‘Goddard’ doesn’t make this edition of Webster’s. But ‘Hamilton’ does. Both those words show up several times in the message. When I find a frequently used word, I jot it down with its coded form in the notebook.” Looking closely at the computer screen, Falcone saw what he assumed was Cole Perenchio’s encrypted message, line by line, with Taylor’s decryptions between the lines.

  “I can’t believe you cracked it this quick,” Falcone said. “You’re a goddamn genius.”

  “That may be true. But in fact I knew the code system the minute I saw it,” Taylor said. “It’s an encryption system—called a dictionary code. Cole developed it for the three of us while we were in college. For it to work, all three of us had to have exactly the same dictionary. Each word in a message contains the page number, column number, and the sequential number of the word on that page and in that column. So theoretically this would be ‘Hamilton.’” He scrawled “604233” on the notepad.

  “But to make it a little harder, we put in a simple superencryption.” He pointed to “9H7566” on the screen. “We added ‘three’—Musketeers, get it? oh, how clever!—to each digit. So ‘six’ becomes ‘nine’ and ‘four’ becomes ‘seven.’ And ‘zero’ becomes H—Hal; ‘one’ becomes B—Ben; and ‘two’ becomes C—Cole. That’s how those numbers and the letter”—he pointed to the screen again—“become ‘Hamilton.’”

  “Whose idea was it for the Three Musketeers to communicate in code?”

  “Cole started it because he thought that someone had named us as members of the Black Panthers. He was always a touch paranoid.”

  “Were you guys Black Panthers?”

  “Hell, no! We were too busy keeping our scholarships and getting four-point-oh GPAs. But Cole at the time was sort of the leader and we went along. The code came in handy when we were rating girls and we wanted to keep the ratings confidential.”

  “How long will it take Sarsfield and his chums to crack it?”

  “They’ll probably hand off the problem to the NSA. Any cryptographer there would quickly see it’s a dictionary code. But what dictionary? What edition? That’ll slow them down for a while. There isn’t any punctuation. And spacing is arbitrary, so at first it looks like the message is in code words four or five characters long. Also, Cole drops words like ‘an,’ ‘the,’ ‘of,’ the idea being that the cryptographer doesn’t get a chance to have any easy way into the encryption through those little words. And then there are the anomalies, like this one.”

  In the notebook list of frequently used words, Taylor drew a line under “Kuri Basayev” and said, “Boy, what a name to decrypt! Cole produced Basayev’s name by encrypting ‘Cure,’ then ‘I,’ ‘B.A.,’ ‘say,’ and ‘ev’—that’s the abbreviation for ‘electron-volt.’ See? ‘Cure-I-BA-say-ev.’ Took me a while to nail all those words as one name.”

  “Kuri Basayev?” Falcone exclaimed. “How the hell does he get in here?”

  “It looks like he’s Hamilton’s silent partner. You’ll see. What’s the deal about him?”

  “Basayev is a crime boss. And one of the richest, most powerful men in Russia,” Falcone said. “We know from Senator Lawrence’s research that the rocket to Asteroid USA was launched from that Russian site.”

  “Khrunichev State Research and Production Center,” Taylor said. “And from what I know about that place, the Russians had to do some work there to accommodate the rocket they used to launch the SpaceMine spacecraft.”

  “Okay,” Falcone said. He felt his old prosecutor instincts kicking in. He leaned toward the screen. “Just give me what you’ve got on that son of a bitch.”

  “Slow down, Sean. Slow down. Let me finish. Then we can see the whole message from Cole.”

  “How far along are you?”

  Taylor stood, stretched his arms, and said, “Well more than halfway through. I’ve worked out a couple of algorithms. Applying them speeded things up. And there’s a sharp learning curve.”

  “Can I start reading?”

  “I’d prefer finishing it, giving it a read-through, and then printing it out. You want to start reading? Why not go into the living room and start reading that exciting new book, It’s Your Universe?”

  58

  Three hours later, Taylor walked into the living room and found Falcone writing on a yellow pad. It’s Your Universe lay open next to him on the couch. Taylor handed him a cup of coffee and a stapled document entitled “Cole’s Message.” Taylor had another copy. Without exchanging a word, they sat side by side and began reading.

  The following is a faithful decryption of an untitled memorandum written by Cole Perenchio, my friend and a true friend of Ea
rth. As is the typical practice in decryption, I have added only punctuation and minor words, such as “the,” “a,” and “of,” which do not appear in the encryption. —Dr. Benjamin F. Taylor

  First of all, I want to say that I believe in God. I am saying this right out in case someone comes along and accuses me of theism and says that my belief in God, not scientific reality, is driving me. I can’t tell you how many times I have been in a group of scientists (or engineers) and found that I was not only the only black man but also the only theist. All of this you might call a prelude to what I am about to set down. I found myself in a place and time, a where and when, that held the fate of the world. I suddenly realized that I could save the world. And, because I believe in God, I believe that God put me in that place and time.

  The place was NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The time was a little while after an explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia. That was an asteroid only about 50 feet in diameter. It never touched Earth. But the atmospheric explosion injured more than 1,200 people and broke almost all the windows in the city.

  Fatefully, the explosion was extensively photographed, particularly by windshield cameras that Russian drivers favor. We were given an unprecedented opportunity to collect and analyze data about an asteroid that menaced the Earth. We could further our knowledge of the laws of orbital mechanics, possibly making it possible to develop a way to predict the time and probable place of an impact of future asteroids.

  The day after the explosion, I went to my superiors at Goddard and said I wanted to drop the work I was doing on Moon-Earth gravitational variations and set up a task force that would study the Chelyabinsk event to see how it affects our estimates of asteroid impact probabilities. I have always considered NASA’s attitude toward asteroids was to treat them as space objects rather than possible hazards.

  Preliminary data from Chelyabinsk indicated that the traditional estimates of risk of impact may be ten times greater than we had thought. In my memo, marked urgent, I quoted Dr. Qing-Zhu Yin of the University of California at Davis, who said, “If humanity does not want to go the way of the dinosaurs, we need to study an event like this in detail.” He estimated that the energy of the Russian explosion was equal to the blast from about 500 kilotons of TNT. As a matter of comparisons, each of the nuclear bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the explosive energy of about 16 kilotons of TNT.