by John Altman
The Company had first extended feelers last year, inviting him to an informational meeting in DC. He must have caught their eye after writing and, unusually, publishing an undergraduate thesis on kamun sosŏl, the vernacular Korean lineage novels. He had gone on to earn a PhD in East Asian Studies from Columbia, which had undoubtedly compounded their interest. Losing his father at the World Trade Center had surely put him over the top. They had figured, rightly, that Benjamin Bach would do anything to help prevent the Twin Towers, Part Two.
So far, he had passed everything they threw at him. Polygraphs, background checks, questions about drug use and relationships with foreign nationals. Psych profiles: men and women making frank eye contact while asking probing questions. What problem would you fix if you had unlimited resources? What would you most like to be remembered for? What are you proudest of? Least proud of? Are you self-reliant, self-confident, and adaptable? Are you open to critical feedback? He had answered honestly—after checking to make sure that the steel door still held.
Standing outside the Columbus Circle restaurant, he released a long, shuddering breath. He was okay.
Heartbeat slowing. Door lowering again. Airtight, negative pressure.
He opened his eyes. The women behind the window were just women. Two Upper West Side housewives squeezing in slices of avocado toast between Pilates classes. They posed no threat to him.
He coughed. Then again, a percussive series raking his torso.
He spat a plug of phlegm the color and consistency of tar onto the sidewalk.
He focused. Do-mode.
He walked on.
* * *
He made sure, on 9/11 anniversaries, to keep busy, to avoid dredging something up.
In March 2010, he found himself back in the States, after almost seven years overseas, to attend an emergency cybersecurity conference at the Pentagon. Seven years of fleabag hotels in Yanji Province and Vladivostok made the extended stay Marriott in Arlington feel like the Plaza.
Each morning, he would take his free continental breakfast in the Marriott’s lobby. Then he would be picked up at 8 a.m. sharp by Command Chief Master Sergeant Woodrow “Woody” Whitlock, US Air Force. According to the grapevine, Whitlock was on track to become chief master sergeant, maybe even someday director for operations of J3, the Joint Chiefs’ Command System Division. Despite a résumé bristling with commendations and command tours, the man proved strikingly down-to-earth: soft-spoken, polite, and unmistakably intelligent. Whitlock played loud classic rock on the radio of his Toyota Highlander. A photograph of a four-year-old daughter in a frilly pink tutu dangled from the rearview mirror.
Each morning, they would park in a reserved spot near the river entrance of the Pentagon’s sixty-seven-acre lot, so close to Ronald Reagan International that the Toyota’s windows rattled when planes took off. They would swipe their badges over a sensor at a guard podium. Whitlock’s red-striped laminate included a small number 3 beside the square-jawed photo, indicating that he was of sufficient value to merit evacuation to Site R, the alternate command center in Pennsylvania, in case of crisis. Bach himself, with no number beside his laminated face, was evidently expendable.
But Bach determinedly did not think of crises as he followed Woody Whitlock past E-ring offices populated by senior military leadership. Even in this distinguished company, Whitlock inspired grins and handshakes on every side. When Bach’s gaze brushed a plaque commemorating forty-two Navy personnel lost inside the Pentagon on September 11, the steel door in his mind remained flush, hermetically sealed.
Each morning, they walked the polished halls alongside people in business attire, dress blues, full flight suits. An elevator carried them down to the subbasement labyrinth of offices, cubicles, and conference rooms that constituted the National Military Command Center. Seated around a twenty-five-foot boat-shaped table, they joined representatives from the DIA, CIA, FBI, NSA, NSF, NIST, DARPA, IARPA, DHS, NASA, and J3.
Some of the faces were familiar to Bach; he had hosted them at Seoul Station. Publicly, US efforts to curtail Pyongyang’s ballistic-missile program focused on saber rattling and missile interception schemes such as THAAD. But behind the scenes, high-tech sabotage got the real work done. Because preemptive policies were officially verboten, such work unfolded in a zone purposely kept gray.
Operation Nimble Fire took a page from the Israelis’ playbook. Unit 8200 of the IDF had pioneered modern cyberwarfare, in 2005 creating Stuxnet, the worm that made Iran’s fast-spinning centrifuges tear themselves apart. And in 2007, during Operation Orchard, the IDF had deactivated Syrian air defenses by feeding them a false sky picture. Applied to North Korea, cyberwarfare had already yielded several successes after sanctions and threats failed. DPRK ballistic tests had been derailed via malware, laser, and signal blocking; missiles had blown up on their launchpads and gone careening into the sea.
Now a snafu in Wyoming had driven home just how vulnerable US missile systems remained to the kind of attack Bach directed regularly against America’s enemies. Fifty nuclear-armed Minutemen in underground silos had vanished, without warning, from the monitors of their launch crew. As operators scrambled to make sense of the disappearance, the Pentagon had gone into emergency mode. They knew that hackers continually bombarded the firewalls of US nuclear networks. If attackers had found an electronic back door, this was what it might look like. Until the situation was resolved, the fifty missiles could not be launched by CENTCOM, and—worse—the crew had no way to interrupt a launch triggered by an enemy.
After an hour, a faulty circuit card in an underground computer had been discovered and replaced. But spooked investigators had kept probing the system. Cheyenne was the gold standard of Global Strike Command. Something like this might conceivably happen at Minot, even Malmstrom. But not Cheyenne.
They had found, to their great dismay, that flight guidance systems were accessible via the internet. Digging deeper, they discovered that critical firewalls had been breached. Much of the software and hardware used in vital networks had come from off-the-shelf commercial sources. A top-to-bottom reevaluation had been ordered.
The first week of Pentagon meetings dealt with that reevaluation, and new measures that would be implemented as a result. The second week, top brass widened the scope to encompass larger cybersecurity issues, including policy.
A woman from NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, fired the opening shot across the bow. “I have a question for the architects of Nimble Fire.” She pinned Bach with small, hostile eyes, a smirk on her overlipsticked mouth. “By indulging a policy of preemptive maneuvers, do we not invite retaliation in kind? Have we fully considered the political and strategic consequences of our actions?”
Before answering, Bach checked to make sure the steel door remained tightly sealed. You couldn’t just tell the woman from NIST that in the real world, people who clung to the moral high ground ended up with blood-soaked children and melted badges and dead fathers. You couldn’t scream in her face, throw her onto the floor, rape her, kill her, show her what the world was really about. No, you had to tiptoe around the issue. Here at the Pentagon, surrounded by ribbon-studded brass and bureaucrats in two-thousand-dollar suits and professional Boy Scouts like Woodrow “Woody” Whitlock, you had to finesse the truth.
He cleared his throat. Softly but firmly, he answered. “Nonkinetic technologies implemented by my team in Seoul target electronic radar signals and embed Trojan horses with a higher success rate than any existing missile interception system. When coupled with HUMINT to ensure strategic target selection, we’re looking at the single most promising strategy to counter ballistic—”
“The question on the table, sir”—the paunchy director of US-CERT, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team of Homeland Security—“is not whether we can use left-of-launch against the bad guys. It’s whether, by doing so, we lose any grounds on which to p
rotest their using it against us.”
Bach nodded somberly. The Sony hack was still four years in the future. But he already had plenty of firsthand experience with Bureau 121. “And the question that naturally follows: does not engaging in preemptive strikes do anything to guarantee our security?”
He could see already how this would end. They would bicker. Nothing would be resolved. But everyone would get what they needed. Bach would continue electronically sabotaging North Korean missile systems. The woman from NIST and the man from CERT could honestly claim that they had protested a preemptive doctrine. The White House, turning away without looking too closely, would maintain plausible deniability.
On the meeting’s second-to-last day, a very young man from the NSA and a very young woman from IARPA gave an update on a program called Luna Moth. So named, the young man reminded them—a very eager young man with shoulder-length hair, a bad mustache, and flecks of spittle that flew from chapped lips when he got excited—because it would bring light to the darkness, on gossamer wings. In fact, it would provide the answer to all the problems under discussion today—at least, until America’s enemies caught up.
Weary skepticism traveled around the table. It seemed they all had heard the wunderkind’s promises before. Bach vaguely remembered hearing some tell of it himself, from the Codpieces in Seoul. Quantum computing would revolutionize cryptography and cybersecurity. It would represent nothing less than a (yawn) total paradigm shift. He who achieved quantum computing would achieve complete cybersecurity dominance. Lofty promises notwithstanding, Bach had yet to hear of any actual advances being made.
But the young man spoke with the conviction of the true believer: “Last week, Luna realized Critical Achievement One.” He paused expectantly. The response was evidently less than he’d hoped for. He traded an uncertain glance with the young woman before continuing. “The first solid-state quantum processor. A two-qubit superconducting chip. Maintained for almost nine-tenths of a second. Early days yet, early days. But this is the Turing machine all over again. And this time, we get to witness it. We get to be a part of it.”
The chubby little CERT director was shaking his head and scowling. But Bach wanted to hear more. Bureau 121 was proving far more resourceful than the Codpieces had expected. He was a people person—knew how to gauge when an asset was approachable, when it needed time and when it needed a push. He relied on others to handle the technological heavy lifting, but complete cybersecurity dominance was language he could understand. “Refresh us,” he said, “about what’s under the hood here.”
The young man looked at him gratefully. “We take an entangled system of subatomic particles—that is, a group of subatomic particles whose qualities cannot be described separately but must be described as a whole. We can create such a system in a variety of ways: a fiber coupler, atomic cascades, the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect …”
His friend from IARPA nodded. She was pretty, slender, and comfortably in command of her audience. “How we get there doesn’t matter. What matters is that the system is entangled. If we’ve got two electrons with opposing spins, whenever one spins up, the other will always spin down.”
“Remember that subatomic particles exist in multiple states corresponding to different possible outcomes.” The young man had warmed to his subject now, and the flecks of spit were flying under the gimbal lighting. “Schrödinger famously illustrated this idea with his theoretical cat. He meant it to be absurd—a criticism of the Copenhagen Interpretation. But it remains a good way to visualize what we call quantum superposition. The cat, both alive and dead at the same time, represents an atom or a photon, existing in multiple states that correspond to multiple potential outcomes—until you observe it. When you open the box, the particle—and the cat—falls into a single outcome, a single state.”
“Back to our entangled electrons,” the young woman said, smiling pleasantly at the scowling director of CERT. “Until they’re observed, they exist in superposition. But once you look at one particle and see that it’s spinning one way, you know that the other is now spinning the other way. This holds true even with measurements made light-years apart. Measure one electron, and its entangled partner immediately assumes the opposite spin. This, by the way, is why Einstein thought quantum mechanical theory must be incomplete. Entanglement violates general relativity’s speed limit on the universe. ‘Spukhafte Fernwirkung,’ he called it—‘spooky action at a distance.’”
“But in 1964, John Stewart Bell proved that the principle of locality—the idea that something can be affected only by something else close enough to travel at the speed of light to reach it—is mathematically inconsistent with quantum theory. His proof is called Bell’s Inequality. And it’s experimentally testable. In fact, it’s been validated many times. We don’t understand this property of the quantum universe, but we do observe it.”
“Then … we can send information faster than light?” Bach asked.
The smile turned to him. “Unfortunately not. But entangled particles do appear to communicate with each other faster than light.”
“Now,” the young man said, “apply this to computers. A digital computer uses binary digits, called ‘bits,’ that are always in a state of either zero or one. Just like the first computers, the punch cards, which had either a presence or an absence of holes in predefined positions.”
“Of course, you can build some big numbers using just zero and one.” The young woman’s eyes looked animated, alert. “Take a matrix with columns in ascending powers of two. In the rows, plug in zeros and ones. With six bits, you get sixty-four possible combinations. With eight bits—that’s one byte—you get two to the eighth power possible combinations. That’s two hundred and fifty-six. Encryption schemes today use two hundred and fifty-six bits. The number of possible different combinations is bigger than one with seventy-seven zeros after it. That’s about the same as the number of ordinary particles in the known universe. And to solve a two-hundred-fifty-six-bit encryption with brute force would take a digital computer longer than the age of the universe since the big bang. Public-key encryptions assume that factoring large numbers is computationally intractable.”
“But Luna Moth could shred a two-hundred-fifty-six-bit encryption in a few minutes.” The young man’s enthusiasm was proving contagious. Bach felt the old juices beginning to flow. “Because a quantum computer doesn’t use bits, which are either zero or one. It uses qubits, which are in superpositions. Not just zero and one, but also all places in between.
“Imagine trying to find the key for a lock,” the woman said. “Using a digital computer is like testing each tumbler to find its position. With a quantum computer, you run an equation that sees what position the first tumbler is in, then uses entanglement to move other tumblers into the necessary position to turn the key.”
The director of CERT was underwhelmed. “But it’s a pipe dream.”
Eyes turned in his direction.
“There’s no way to keep the particles isolated for any significant time. And any interaction disrupts the entanglement.”
“Moscow and Beijing don’t think it’s a pipe dream,” the young man said pointedly.
“Until 1934,” his associate added, “splitting atoms was entirely theoretical. Give the best minds in the world unlimited resources to attack a problem, and who knows what they might accomplish? And we’ve got the very best: Yale, MIT, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Raytheon, Georgia Tech …”
“All the king’s men,” said the director.
But Bach was intrigued.
Complete cybersecurity dominance.
* * *
A hand on his shoulder: Dalia Artzi.
For an instant, he felt something maternal in her: a mother gently waking a child. Then it was gone, and she was back, harsh as ever and blunt as a blackjack.
He followed her down the corridor, knuckling one eye. Inside the conference room, Mc
Connell and DeArmond faced the monitor expectantly. Sonny Romano inspected his cuticles. Shyam Radha was typing—always typing. “Followed a hunch.” His voice was soft, his eyes bloodshot.
On-screen, the doorway of an airport ladies’ room. The feed played. Passengers zipped. Red crosshairs appeared. The image froze again.
“Been scanning every feed around her last known location and coming up blank. So I started to expand the perimeter. But then I thought, no. She’s not made of smoke. She didn’t vanish. Somehow, she’s fooled the software. The truth is, you can trick billion-dollar object-tracking with a fifty-cent dollop of putty that changes the shape of the face. So I went back over the footage. But this time, I scanned gaits. Software breaks down the body into parts—knee, foot, shoulder, and so on—then builds a composite signature. And …”
The feed rolled forward again. Crosshairs followed from the ladies’ room a woman of indeterminate ethnicity, wearing heavy-rimmed eyeglasses and no coat, with a scarf covering her hair.
Pause again, and zoom. White pancake makeup, thick lenses, a canvas gym bag. Sam enlarged the bag and compared it with the image from the Hertz desk.
“God knows how many disguises she’s got in that thing.” He upended a can of Red Bull, found it empty, and shook it to double-check. “So.” Fast-forward. “She took a shuttle. Left Newark at eleven fifty-five. Reached Port Authority at quarter past twelve. I took the liberty of hacking into PABT CCTV, et voilà!”
Tired-looking people shuffled off a bus in shadow. The woman in the scarf was among them. Head lowered, she moved through a door.
Another angle. She stepped onto an escalator. Another feed picked her up stepping off.
Even past midnight, Port Authority bus terminal was packed. People bunched up by doors leading to the street. People swirled, elbowing, circling. In the confusion, the crosshairs flickered … and vanished.
