Quantum

by Tom Grace

  ‘Is that all?’

  Leskov looked over his notes regarding Wolff. ‘There is one more thing. The reason for the renewed interest is not so much the body, but what was found with it. In that phone intercept, Kilkenny mentioned that Wolff’s briefcase contained a letter and six notebooks. There’s a problem with the books that Kilkenny didn’t elaborate on.’

  ‘If they were buried in the ground with Wolff,’ Zoshchenko offered, ‘they are probably in very poor condition.’

  ‘Perhaps, but our competitors still believe they are of some value.’

  ‘Then so should we. Good work, Dmitri. Follow up on the notebooks; we’ll acquire them if necessary. Oksanna, I would like you to do a little research on Johann Wolff. I believe the Red Army confiscated most of the Third Reich’s scientific records. See what you can dig out of the archives. Let’s meet on Friday to discuss this matter more fully.’

  25

  JULY 19

  Langley, Virginia

  Bart Cooper arrived at the CIA’s George Bush Center for Intelligence a little after ten o’clock having avoided the daily rush-hour traffic. Setting his own work hours was one of his perks as a consultant to the Agency, the latest in a long line of titles he’d held in an intelligence career that started when he became an OSS field operative during the Second World War. He’d risen in rank as the Agency grew, and fought on the front lines of America’s Cold War. Cooper had survived scandals, various downsizing programs, and micromanaging congressional oversight. And now, he seemed to have survived retirement in his role as adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence. At a robust seventy-seven, he served as counselor emeritus to Jackson Barnett, the current DCI, who valued Cooper for his broad perspective.

  After parking in the same spot he’d been assigned back in the sixties, Cooper cleared the main building’s security and took the elevator up to the executive level. The place was filled with its usual buzz of activity as information from around the world was gathered, sifted, analyzed, processed, digested, and eventually regurgitated for the elected officials who would decide what it meant. Some things never changed.

  ‘Morning, Bart,’ Sally Kirsch, Jackson Barnett’s executive secretary, said as Cooper stepped into the office pantry to get himself a cup of coffee.

  ‘Hi, Sally. How are things in the Far East today?’

  ‘No better than yesterday, and Africa is heating up again.’

  Cooper sighed at the thought of another military coup in some sub-Saharan country launching yet another round of intertribal genocide. ‘There are times when I yearn for the old days, when we would just send a team out and pop these guys.’

  ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’

  Cooper just smiled and left with a mug of black coffee.

  When he reached his office, he set the mug down on the desk and hung his blazer on the rack. His in-basket contained the files that Barnett wanted him to peruse. Most of them dealt with operational concepts – Cooper’s forte – while the remainder were a mixed bag of analysis that somebody, somewhere, wanted a seasoned eye to give the once-over. He wasn’t on the front lines anymore, but Cooper was thankful that Barnett valued his insights enough to let him keep his hand in the game. He was the last of the old guard, a cold warrior whose tenure ran back as far as the days of Wild Bill Donovan and Allen Dulles.

  He sat down and wiggled the mouse on his desk, awakening his computer from its electronic slumber. The black screen flickered back to life, rendering the CIA logo against a field of light blue. A small box on the bottom center of the screen waited for him to type in his password. Cooper keyed in the thirteen random characters and pressed ENTER.

  ‘Ohayo gozamasu, Cooper-san,’ the computer announced in a voice that sounded a lot like Toshiro Mifune.

  ‘Ohayo, computer-san,’ Cooper replied.

  Every day, the computer greeted Cooper in the language of one of the countries he’d worked in during his years as a field agent, never voicing the same greeting twice in a month.

  Cooper clicked on his calendar and saw that he had a meeting with the Deputy Director in Charge of Operations at 1:30. He then checked his E-mail: a few general-broadcast announcements, a response from Barnett regarding the China-Korea situation, and something generated by the central computer regarding a flagged file.

  ‘I don’t recall making a search request,’ Cooper mused as he selected the last piece of mail for viewing.

  TO: COOPER, BARTHOLOMEW

  FROM: CIA CENTER NETWORK

  KEYWORD SEARCH FOR FILE OSS-17932 HAS

  FOUND

  1 MATCH FOR KEYWORDS: WOLFF, JOHANN.

  The OSS designator in the file number identified it as something dating back to the Second World War, part of the CIA’s inheritance from the Office of Strategic Services. Cooper was the last remaining veteran of the OSS still active with the Agency. While stationed in Germany immediately following the war, Cooper was tasked with weeding out Nazis from the stream of German refugees seeking to emigrate to the United States.

  The body of the message contained only a line of blue, underscored text. Cooper selected the hypertext link, and his computer responded by loading an article that the system had culled from the day’s electronic edition of the Ann Arbor News.

  Body that of missing asst. prof.

  The remains unearthed Monday from a construction site on the Diag of the University of Michigan have been positively identified as those of Johann Wolff. Wolff was an assistant professor of physics at the university from 1946 until his disappearance on Dec. 10, 1948.

  Wolff, originally from Dresden, Germany, received a doctorate in physics at the Kaiser Wilhem Institute in Berlin and worked with renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg.

  Det. Brian Ptashnik, of the Ann Arbor Police, has confirmed that Wolff’s death is being investigated as a homicide. No further details regarding the investigation were announced.

  The discovery of Wolff’s body follows the grisly discovery of the preserved remains of medical cadavers from the 1800s on the same construction site last week. Dozens of handmade grave markers, bearing names like Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa and Elvis Presley, have sprung up on the Diag as students have transformed the campus lawn into a mock cemetery.

  Cooper printed a copy of the article, then closed the window and pulled the single sheet from the printer. After rereading the article for the third time, Cooper scanned the phone list tacked to his wall and dialed the number he was looking for.

  ‘Research, this is Connie,’ a whiskey-throated woman answered.

  ‘Morning, Connie. It’s Bart.’

  ‘Bart Cooper?’ her voice softened with surprise. ‘It’s been a while. How they treating you upstairs?’

  ‘Same as always, with the great respect due one of my numerous years of service.’

  ‘Sounds like the same old song and dance we get down here,’ Connie said with a laugh. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I need some research done on an old case.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Old, as in before your time.’

  ‘A request like that isn’t research; it’s archaeology.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, laughing. ‘But please, I need everything you can find on a Johann Wolff. He was a German physicist, worked on the Nazi A-bomb project during the war.’

  ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘They just found his body up in Michigan, fifty years after he disappeared. Looks like murder.’

  ‘A murdered German physicist. How intriguing.’

  ‘Might be. See what you can dig up. Full package: German Intelligence, Immigration. The works. You can start with file OSS-one seven nine three two. Also, see if you can get anything from our friends at Lubyanka – they got most of the Gestapo’s records out of Berlin.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. Any rush on this?’

  ‘No, it’s just to satisfy my own curiosity. You see, Wolff was one of the German scientists I vetted after the war – I wrote that OSS file I just to
ld you about. Based on what I could find at the time, I cleared him to immigrate into the U.S. Still, I have a few questions about Wolff that I’d like to resolve.’

  26

  JULY 20

  Ann Arbor, Michigan

  Kilkenny swiped his ID through the card reader that controlled the electronic lock on the door to the MARC Computer Center. The red light quickly changed to green, accompanied by an audible buzz and the release of the electrified magnets that held the door closed.

  Inside, Bill ‘Grin’ Grinelli rose from behind the cluttered workstation that was the heart of the MARC computer network and smiled. He was a few inches shorter than Nolan and wore a black T-shirt, a pair of comfortably worn jeans, and his Birkenstock sandals. His shoulder-length brown-gray hair was drawn back in a ponytail, and he sported a pointed goatee that surrounded an infectious smile. Grin was the embodiment of free-spirited mischief, and the tattoo of a mythological Pan seated on a crescent moon scattering pixie dust that adorned his left forearm only enhanced that perception.

  ‘Nolan, what’s up, man? Long time, no see. I heard about the excitement in South Bend. I guess trouble just seems to find you.’

  ‘Same old, same old, my friend.’

  Grin laughed. ‘I hear ya, man. Guys like us don’t have to look for trouble; like bees to honey it finds us well enough on its own.’

  As MARC’s MIS director, Grin kept information, the lifeblood of the consortium, flowing freely through the building’s electronic veins and arteries. The apparent ease with which he handled his job was even more amazing considering the diversity of personal computers and workstations within the consortium.

  At the heart of Grin’s electronic empire stood a pair of supercomputers that he considered his personal property, a recently acquired Moy Electronics massively parallel machine and MARC’s original Cray. The tall, thin Moy machine stood in marked contrast to the squat, cylindrical form of the Cray, prompting Grin to christen them Stan and Ollie. Affixed to the front panel of each machine was a photograph of its comic namesake.

  ‘Miss me down here?’ Nolan asked, shaking Grin’s outstretched hand.

  ‘You know it. I had to put Stan in all by my lone-some. Well, me and half a dozen techs from Moy.’

  ‘How’s he running?’

  ‘Like a champ.’

  ‘Great, because I’ve got a problem I’d like him to take a shot at. How are you at cracking encryption?’

  ‘Officially, I never touch the stuff.’

  ‘How about unofficially?’

  ‘You remember that two-hundred-and-fifty-six-bit scheme some genius thought up for the government, supposedly unbreakable?’

  ‘You’re the one who cracked it?’

  ‘I must confess. I did have my hand in that little caper. I do so love a challenge.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you talk that way. Let me show you what I’ve got.’

  Kilkenny pulled a chair around the console, seating himself next to Grin.

  ‘Log in to main campus and jump down to the library’s Preservation Lab server.’

  ‘Surf’s up,’ Grin replied as he clicked on the graphical icons that identified other computer networks connected to MARC. ‘And we’re in.’

  ‘We’re looking for a directory named Wolff Codex.’

  ‘Kodak, like the film company?’

  ‘No, codex, like Leonardo da Vinci’s illustrated notebooks. What I want to show you are high-resolution scans taken from the pages of some very old notebooks that were found with that body down on campus.’

  ‘The murdered professor?’

  ‘That’s the one. Johann Wolff taught physics at the university for a couple of years after the Second World War, right up to the day he was murdered. It’s the considered opinion of some well-respected physicists, one of whom you know—’

  ‘Kelsey?’

  Nolan nodded. ‘—that the late Professor Wolff may have been one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century.’

  ‘Last time I checked the calendar, it was the twenty-first century, big guy.’

  ‘Maybe so, but if Kelsey and Sandstrom are correct, had Wolff not been murdered, the twenty-first century, technologically speaking, might have started thirty years ago.’

  Grin let out a long, slow whistle.

  ‘Is there much left of these notebooks?’

  ‘Actually, the books are in surprisingly good shape. The experts tell me that the books were all well-made cloth hardcovers with reasonably high quality paper. The tunnel segment they were buried in protected them like a time capsule. There was very little damage to any of the notebooks.’

  ‘I don’t remember reading anything about notebooks being found with the body.’

  ‘The police are keeping that quiet because we don’t know what’s in the notebooks yet. They expect us to keep quiet as well. You’ll see why in a minute.’

  Grin navigated through the Preservation Lab’s file tree, eventually locating the folder icon named Wolff Codex. When Grin selected the icon, a window appeared requesting an access password.

  ‘Well?’ Grin said impatiently as he looked to Nolan for assistance.

  ‘I picked something I thought you could remember: MTEV two nine oh two eight.’

  Grin turned and smiled. ‘The number of feet Mount Everest is above sea level. I’m touched. You remembered my fondness for mountain climbing.’

  Grin keyed in the password and was granted access to the file. The Wolff Codex folder split into six subfolders labeled VOL1 through VOL6.

  ‘Click on volume one. I doubt there’s anything in the other folders yet.’

  As Grin selected it, VOL1 split into dozens of graphic image files. Each file bore the name of the page whose digitally recorded image it contained. VOL1 contained image files PAGE001 through PAGE016.

  ‘Pick page one,’ Nolan said.

  Grin selected the PAGE001 icon, and his monitor filled with the scanned image of the first page from Wolff’s oldest notebook.

  ‘What am I looking at here?’

  ‘This is volume one, page one of the Wolff Codex.’

  ‘What language is this written in?’ Grin asked.

  ‘None that I can understand. Zoom in on a block of text.’

  Grin selected a section of text from the upper left corner of the page. The enhanced image darkened the characters, amplifying Wolff’s bold, confident strokes.

  ‘That look like any code you’ve ever seen?’

  ‘It’s definitely not your basic letter-swap encryption, that’s for damn sure. There’s no obvious order, but you’d expect that in a serious piece of coding. Is the base language English?’

  ‘Don’t know. Wolff was a native German who spoke several European languages as well as English. He’d only been in the States for the last two years of his life.’

  ‘It might be Enigma.’

  ‘Enigma?’

  ‘Yeah, the code used by Germany during the Second World War.’

  ‘I guess it’s possible.’

  ‘They didn’t happen to find a coding machine with these notebooks, did they? It would look like a typewriter in a wooden box.’

  ‘No, but check out the file called ENDPAPER.’

  Grin selected the file. When it appeared, Grin’s eyebrows shot up.

  ‘Whoa, that is some serious, heavy-duty math, my friend.’

  ‘Well out of my league,’ Nolan admitted. ‘I found this algorithm in the front of all six notebooks. My guess is that it’s the cipher Wolff used to encrypt the notebooks.’

  ‘Hmm. Didn’t happen to see a key for this thing anywhere, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Too bad. Well, I guess I can try to feed this to Stan and Ollie and see what they come up with. Once I figure out how this algorithm works, I can apply some brute force to cracking it.’

  27

  JULY 21

  Moscow, Russia

  ‘Oksanna, have you found out anything more about Wolff?’ Orlov asked as he seated himself o
n the couch, facing Zoshchenko and Leskov.

  ‘Very little, actually, other than to confirm some elements of Wolff’s background. He was born and raised in Dresden, the fourth child of an engineer. He attended university in Berlin and, during the war, completed his doctorate under the guidance of Werner Heisenberg. I was unable to locate a copy of his thesis; it was presumably lost during the fall of Berlin. Wolff and several other physicists fled Berlin before the Red Army arrived, hiding in a rural area that was eventually occupied by the Western Allies. As a junior scientist, he was detained only briefly by the Allies and eventually emigrated to America. According to the Gestapo background checks, Wolff was a quiet, introverted young man whose instructors felt showed great promise. Evidently, Heisenberg was so impressed with his young protégé that he used whatever influence he had to protect Wolff from serving in the army. As Dmitri reported on Wednesday, Wolff lived quietly in America until he was killed.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Just an interesting note. Following the war, several of the German scientists who’d been liberated by the Red Army and became guests of the state were interviewed regarding the German atomic-weapons research. The German effort to build an atomic bomb never really started, because Heisenberg convinced Hitler that even if it were remotely possible to build such a device, research and development would drain billions of deutsche marks away from the war effort, and by the time the first bomb was completed, the war would be over.’

  ‘What does this have to do with Wolff?’ Leskov demanded to know. ‘He was just Heisenberg’s lackey at the time.’

  ‘Heisenberg’s recommendations to the Reich were based on what he considered to be irrefutable scientific facts – facts borne out by rigorous manual calculations.’ Zoshchenko’s tone was snide and superior. ‘It was all in the numbers, and those numbers were meticulously ground out by Heisenberg’s so-called lackey, Wolff.’