Frankie Aguirre and Art Jefferson - 03 - Simple Simon

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  “Get to it,” Kudrow directed.

  “The puzzles were KIWI ciphertext, and in there was a message to call the Puzzle Center. The same thing we’ve done with other systems. Minor ones, major ones.” Pedanski saw the boss’s nostrils flare impatiently. “So, like you said, that was all done with a couple years ago. So…” The mathematician’s voice went breathy for a second before he recovered. “…Friday I’m doing my shift in here and line two lights up. I figure it’s some guy in T getting whacked, but when I pick it up this…kid, or something on the other end says he’s solved puzzle ninety-nine. Ninety-nine was the KIWI code number.”

  “We chose that because of Barbara Feldon,” Dean said as though it would matter to Kudrow. “From Get Smart. She was agent…” He wisely ended his addition to his comrade’s explanation.

  “Real smooth, Craig,” Patel commented from the floor.

  Pedanski took a breath and continued. “Someone busted the ciphertext, Mr. Kudrow. Of KIWI! I just about shit my pants. I didn’t know what to do. I told the other shifts set to cover the Center over the weekend to stay away and I called in Craig and Vik right away.” He seemed young and fragile as he looked around the room. “We haven’t slept since Friday, Mr. Kudrow. We’ve been going over every possible weakness in KIWI, and we can’t find anything. Not the primary S-box; that’s fine. Nothing!” He wiped a hand hard across his mouth. “KIWI was solid when the three of us thought it up, it was solid when we prototyped and validated it, it was solid when the gear to use it was being built and installed. But since three days ago…I don’t know.” His eyes glistened. “I don’t know.”

  “Could someone be screwing with us, Nick?” Folger asked quietly over his boss’s shoulder. “Someone inside or outside trying to tweak us? You know, to see how we handle a possible breech?”

  Kudrow considered that and looked to Dean. Pedanski had turned away and was staring at the ceiling. “Who knew what the cleartext was in the puzzle?”

  “Just the three of us,” Dean answered. “That was the Agent Ninety-nine thing. We were foolin’ around one day and picked that for the identifier. We didn’t tell anyone about it. Not even you or Mr. Folger. At least I didn’t.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?” Patel demanded.

  “You two, enough!” Pedanski glared at them, forcing them both into retreat. The anger stanched the tears he seemed ready to loose. “Mr. Kudrow, all the KIWI machines are going to be in and running in a few weeks.”

  “Ninety-five percent are in use now, Nick,” Folger said softly. “FBI’s the last to go on line. The embassies, DoD, CIA, they’re all using it now. And we’ve got no fallback, Nick, not with MAYFLY maybe being leaky.”

  Kudrow said nothing for a moment after his assistant finished speaking. Neither did any of the animals. Instead he mentally tallied just how bad the situation could be if they were not being screwed with, which he doubted anyway. He wasn’t assuaged by the result. Disaster was what he thought.

  “You have the call on tape?” Kudrow asked.

  “Of course,” Pedanski answered. “Sir, shouldn’t we—”

  “And the trace gear was working?”

  Pedanski nodded to the boss. “The call came from Chicago.”

  There were two options, Kudrow quickly decided. Pull the plug on KIWI, tell its users that it was not the unbreakable monster he’d promised it to be, and flush what he’d worked so hard for down the can. Because if KIWI was no good, as Brad had said, there was nothing to switch to. Nothing feasible that could accommodate all the users who’d gone to KIWI. Ten billion dollars, Kudrow thought. Wasted. Congress would not be happy. He would be the whipping boy, of course, sitting at a table covered by a field of green in some congressional hearing room off limits to cameras. He’d be privately destroyed by the men and women whose lives he knew were tangles of deceit and dishonor. And once his butt was bared…

  G. Nicholas Kudrow had not made many friends in his long government career, but he had forced many alliances. He had not always followed the book, obeyed every law, or thought much of consequences other than how they could be avoided. He had used people, gathered information on them, held it over their head, threatened, promised favors, persuaded, demanded.

  But he had done all this in pursuit of getting the job done. He had made the nation’s communications secure, and in doing so had secured his place in the future. He would have a long, quietly illustrious career, and he would someday be remembered in the texts that memorialized such things as the ‘Father of KIWI’. KIWI might still be in use then. That was what he had believed. Until now.

  Yes, dumping KIWI was option one, and Kudrow knew without hesitation it was unacceptable.

  Option two was the better course…for the country. Yes, for everyone. “I want a copy of the tape and the trace info on my desk in ten minutes.”

  Pedanski nodded, chewing his lower lip and digging fiercely at the carpet with the toes of his Reeboks. “But, Mr. Kudrow…”

  “What?” Kudrow looked at each of the animals individually, and gave his assistant a glance for surety’s sake. “If someone is playing with us, gentlemen, testing us, they will not expect that we just dump the system you three designed. And if there is a weakness in your system, we have to find out what that is, and how whoever cracked it did so. In either instance the proper course is to investigate. I will see to that.” He looked over his shoulder to Folger. “Shut this room down. Assign anyone who is scheduled to work in here to other duties. Put them on the MAYFLY dissection. I don’t care. If that phone rings again I don’t want anyone other than a KIWI team member answering…just in case. Understood?”

  “Yesss,” Folger replied breathily.

  “You three work out a schedule to cover this place,” Kudrow instructed. He thought Patel ready to complain, but instead saw the small, dark head fall between the worn knees of his jeans. “Understood?”

  After three tentative nods Kudrow turned and left. He stopped in the hall just outside the door and slid his hands into his pockets. Brad Folger followed him out and studied the government blue carpet at his feet. The boss hadn’t been able to swing a more pleasing gray sisal.

  “KIWI’s all we have, Nick,” Folger said once again, as though speaking of the air they breathed.

  “All the more reason not to throw it away because of one phone call.” Kudrow looked down the hallway, briefly at each door, then to the stairs that led up from the basement. It was the only way out. “We’ll fix this.”

  “How?”

  Kudrow began to walk toward the stairs, passing the three green doors as he did. “It won’t be a problem,” he answered with his back to his assistant, then disappeared up the staircase.

  * * *

  “So nothing?” Art Jefferson asked, looking up from the report.

  “Preliminarily, no,” Special Agent Denise Green answered. “That’s just a quickie, remember.”

  “I know,” Art acknowledged. “Bob said the CIA is anxious.”

  Green nodded and took the report back from the A-SAC. She saw him close his eyes as his glasses came off. “You knew Chappell, didn’t you?”

  “Briefly,” Art answered. Surely not long or well enough to know some of the things the report had just told him. To each is own, Art usually thought, but in this case it looked like Vince Chappell’s sexual tastes only made Keiko Kimura’s job easier. ‘Subject’s acquaintances report a propensity for B & D (bondage and domination) in sexual situations.’ “Very briefly.”

  “Anything else?” Green asked.

  Art glanced at his desk clock, and stood in a hurry. “Nope. Gotta run. Make sure I have the full report by Friday.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Please, no ‘sirs’,” Art said as be hurried by the youngish agent. “I’m old enough as it is.”

  The Chicago Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is located on the 11th, 12th, and 13th floors of the Federal Building on South Dearborn Street. Several blocks due west the Sears Tower
rises toward the sky in stark black steps, and on late summer afternoons when the sun is deep in the northern hemisphere the Tower casts a shadow that leaves the west-facing Bureau offices in a cooling shade.

  The office Art rushed out of as winter was melting into a chilly spring had spears of bright afternoon light filling its space, but the room he arrived at one floor down from 13 a minute later knew no such measure of the day. Tucked between a conference room and file storage, and most importantly just feet from the coffee and soda machines, Communications was a windowless cube longer than wide, and on its door was a keypad entry system. Art fumbled mentally for the right number, mistakenly tried the one L.A. used for its Com room, and knocked hard on the door after giving up. “A-SAC here.”

  “Just a minute.” A shrill, rolling squeal came from behind the door before it opened. When it did, a pleasant but serious face looked up at Art through the opening. “Agent Jefferson,” Special Agent Nelson Van Horn said in greeting. He leaned forward in a non-motorized wheelchair, straight brown hair swept to the left, eyes dark but susceptible to a blue tint in the right light. “Memory trouble?”

  Art saw the agent’s face light up in jest. “All right, Nels. I could say that thing needs some oil on the hubs, but I’m too po-lite to do so.”

  Van Horn wheeled back and let the A-SAC in, then closed the door. It locked and alarmed itself automatically. “Here to see the new toy?”

  “That I am.” Art walked deep into the Com room, past fax machines, teletypes, computers, phones, and stopped just short of a three-foot square polished metal cube that had been brought into the space through a now-patched hole in the west wall. He saw wires snaking from it, one each to the fax machines and phones, the computers, and one to a workstation that lacked a chair. Van Horn wheeled himself up to that one and reached over to pat the stainless steel cube.

  “Our baby.”

  “It’s a big damn thing,” Art commented. He stepped close and touched it. His fingers tingled at the coldness of its metal surface.

  “That’s just the shell,” Van Horn said. He rolled one wheel back so he faced the A-SAC. “That’s so someone can’t walk in here and take it with them. The thing weighs twelve hundred pounds, but…” He leaned conspiratorially close. “…my sources say the actual works of it are no bigger than a shoe box. And don’t worry about someone cutting into it; it’s pressurized with some inert gas so that if the pressure drops some sort of thing destroys the innards. Real James Bond stuff, eh?”

  Art nodded, though he didn’t understand. What mattered was that their communications were supposed to be rock solid secure now. The rest of the field office still had unsecure phones and faxes, but all sensitive communications took place in here. “So this is the KIWI thing. As long as it works…”

  Van Horn smiled and shook his head. He did understand the basics of code gear—though he had no illusions about ever knowing the secrets inside the silver cube—a knowledge gained during four years at MIT and several more at Harvard. At first he’d studied computer and number theory, and then, being a shrewd young fellow, decided that the brotherhood of lawyers had far too few who would be qualified to handle the cases of the burgeoning electronic frontier. Piracy, electronic fraud, and the like. But somewhere along the way to a JD he had decided that some practical experience in the law might help, and the FBI had seemed all too eager to add to his resume.

  But a strange thing happened then. Two things, actually. One, he found that he liked, truly enjoyed doing what a Bureau man did. Two, while enjoying what he did he caught a slug in a Philly shootout with some well armed bank robbers. Scratch two bad guys and the use of his body below the waist.

  So his legs didn’t work? So what? The Bureau had agreed, and though he didn’t chase bad guys in the street anymore, he sometimes chased them in the digital realm, and was the Chicago office’s Com clerk, the agent responsible for the security and well being of the crypto gear.

  And KIWI had just made his life a whole lot less stressful. “It will work,” Van Horn assured the A-SAC. He pointed to a three inch space behind the cube. “See that. Six phone lines come in. You know what comes over those? Garbage. Electronic noise. It goes through KIWI—again, from my sources, with some sort of time keyed three step decryption routine—and into readable info or conversation in here. Phone, fax, or computer. Even the old teletype.” He wondered when the Bureau would finally get rid of that, considering that a fax was essentially the same thing. “And,” he added, grabbing a blank sheet of paper from a tray next to a laser printer, “let’s say that for some reason the phone lines are down, like when the loop flooded, and we need to get a coded message out.” Van Horn held up the blank paper. “We enter our message through this station and call for a loop back. The KIWI gear encrypts the message and prints it out. On this paper you’d see nonsense, but all the operator of another KIWI machine would have to do is enter what he sees on the paper into their station and call for a loop back decryption and…bingo! Out it comes making complete sense. Slow, for sure, and it won’t work for the phones, but if we have to we could courier the message. It’s a great backup when Ma Bell screws up.”

  Blah blah blah blah blah. Art knew Van Horn might as well have been speaking in some tongue derived from Sanskrit. “So the communications are going to be secure?”

  Van Horn allowed a chuckle and nodded. “Yes, they are.” He reached over and patted KIWI again. “Trust us.”

  “Okay,” Art said with resignation. He would have to succumb to the technology sooner or later. “Show me what she’s got.”

  * * *

  Several hundred miles away a phone was being answered by a man with red hair. The call was brief and to the point. A favor was needed, and the red-haired man still owed much to the person who was requesting the favor. When he completed this task the debt would be nearly repaid. He hung up the phone and began to pack, confident he could make short work of things.

  * * *

  Not far from where the call to the red-haired man was placed, a car drove past a blue mailbox in northern Maryland and slowed. The driver, an Asian man in a gray suit, braked the silver Lexus and noted a mark on the rounded top of the box. He parked his car and withdrew a prepared postcard from his coat. It was addressed to his mother in Kyoto, and he stepped from the vehicle to drop it in the box. As he did he wiped off the mark.

  He got back in the car and drove away at a normal speed. An hour later he had dinner with a friend in Washington, and after they were finished that friend, another Asian man, drove to a bar in College Park, near the University of Maryland, and ordered an Asahi before going to the restroom. The stalls with doors were empty. He entered the third one and closed the door.

  Someone outside the stall might have heard the squeak of screws turning or the click of the metal tissue holder coming apart. Or possibly the crackle of paper unfolding. But there was no one to listen.

  A minute later the Asian man flushed the toilet, washed his hands, and dried them under an air drier.

  Back in the bar he took his beer by the neck and drew long on it, but left it half full and walked out the door. He had to get back to the office quickly. This information could not wait.

  Three

  Children of the Eighth Day

  Jean Lynch freshened the tea in Anne’s cup and set the pot back on the coffee table. She sat next to her husband, their legs touching, and took his hand in hers.

  “I hope you can understand why we’d like Simon to come five days a week,” Anne said after her lengthy plea/explanation. She tasted the Earl Gray and placed her cup back on the saucer on the end table to her left. An empty rocker was next to it, and a sofa across the low coffee table from her. The Lynches stared at her from it.

  Martin Lynch ran slow circles over the back of his wife’s hand with his thumb as he put his thoughts into words. He was talking to an educated lady and did not want to sound like the high-school dropout he was. “Dr. Jefferson, we appreciate your interest in Simon. He seems to like
going to the center.”

  “He does,” Simon’s mother added enthusiastically. “He even remembers bits and pieces of his day when he gets home.”

  Martin Lynch waited for his wife to finish. “But I don’t want it to become his world.” He gestured to the room and pointed upstairs. “This is his world. This room, his bedroom.” He put a hand to his chest. “We are his world.”