Probe

by Douglas E Roff

  Even until this very day.

  Chapter 29

  He first spotted her in the lobby of the upscale hotel where they were both staying; he was tangled up in a gaggle of old friends, and conferees and couldn’t break free fast enough to wander over and introduce himself. He hoped he would see her again; hopefully she would be around for a few more days.

  He was in Washington, DC for a Conference, and he hoped she might be there to attend too. Not likely though. He was part of an official delegation sent by the British government to meet as many dull and boring mathematicians from around the world as he could in a week and learn more from them about the application of new breakthroughs in advanced mathematics to modern cryptography. The field was as dry as the Sahara Desert in the summer and just about as barren of female colleagues. Conferences were just about his only social outlet these days; he normally spent all his time with his father, one of the pillars of the field, and one of the few men left who had studied under one of Alan Turing’s original protégé’s.

  He loved his father immensely, but a date with a living, breathing woman with a pulse would be nice every now and then. The woman who caught his attention was very attractive, and stylishly dressed and in the company of a tall but much older black man. The two might be related, but who knows these days. Age seemed to have disappeared as a factor in modern romance and the man was, for his age, quite handsome himself. He would keep an eye out for the young woman later and hoped that the pair were just friends or colleagues.

  He spent very little time in his room, changing and showering after the long flight from Heathrow to Dulles, and the time change, jet lag, had thrown him off a bit. Though well-known in the field, he was still a stranger to international travel, or for that matter, much travel outside the vicinity of Lansdowne Park, his home, workplace and virtual Universe.

  His ancestral home was located just outside of London, scaled down in size to a mere fraction of the lands and estates that once formed the landed part of the family fortune. Around two hundred years ago, give or take following one conflict or another, his very distant great, great, great, great grandfather had been rewarded for some service or another by relieving the former owner of the estate of both his head and lands. To the first master in his family, it was good fortune.

  In the intervening generations, the family had managed their wealth well, squandered little, and kept pace with modernity. They transitioned out of land-based wealth, which became quite an expensive bother and into more diversified, and liquid holdings in industry, foreign ventures, and banking. The young toffs of the family became educated and were given a fixed amount of starting wealth at age twenty-five and that was all. Increased wealth had to be earned and only those who earned it inherited. If the stipend remained stagnant, it would provide a comfortable living for life, if not subsequently squandered or mismanaged. If it was lost, there was no more to be handed out. If personal wealth increased, there might be more capital from family to invest where success was clear, demonstrable and objective.

  Conservative bankers in London and Zurich held the purse strings through a series of interlocking family trusts, so penury was never truly going to be a factor. But the rules of the family were quite strict and enforced with as little emotion as family lawyers, and Swiss bankers could bring to bear.

  Preservation of capital and the continuance of the family fortunes ad infinitum were the goals. The family wasn’t altogether unhappy with the how they had fared, and the modern-day branches of the family were no exception.

  There had been four principal family branches of which three were still thriving. A fourth had gone under sometime in the 1920’s due to vice, and simple bad luck. Much of that wing of the family had decided to move its wealth to the United States just as the stock market was about to crash in the late 1920’s. Which it did, on poor Sir Henry. His attempt at a high dive off the top of a mid-town Manhattan office building made the news. Soon after, that distinct bloodline disappeared into the dustbin of history.

  The young man’s specific branch of the family wasn’t involved in commerce in any way nor had it been for over a hundred years, instead opting for conservative cash management, and living within whatever means was provided on attaining the family age of inheritance. They were the academic branch of the family and, while not considered disgraces to the other landed, and titled family branches, they were nonetheless considered the relative paupers in the family and not often invited to the family picnics. Those two remaining segments with their extended families lived in London proper, as befitted a Detwiler.

  This worked well for the young man and his father, who had little interest in money, less interest in ostentatiousness, and zero interest in the arrogance of the moneyed classes. Interesting that these upper-class scions considered themselves superior, at least intellectually, as they relied less on merit to succeed than a letter of introduction from a Zurich bank.

  To the academic branch of the family, the British government, and its super-secret spy agencies only called on the young man and his father for help; the British government had no need for the other Detwiler’s and their social climbing offspring. To MI-6, there was little use for another wealthy socialite in their world. But a top rate mathematician familiar with cryptology spawned genuine interest.

  The young man’s father had even been featured in Scientific American and had been awarded the modern equivalent of a medieval benefice by the British government, at least had the modern family had a cleric within its ranks. Instead the father and son, both staunchly Liberal, and thoroughly modern, were the crème of British intellect. No fools, they knew that mathematics alone at some small British institution of higher learning could be a dead-end occupation leading to an excess of drinking to relieve the tedium of a dead-end life.

  But father Detwiler had chosen the mathematics of cryptology in the late sixties as his academic discipline, and his son had chosen to follow in his footsteps two decades later.

  The father was considered a gem, a national treasure, and the dean in his field. His son was said to be less gifted, and thus less acclaimed. This wasn’t, however, true; the lack of acclaim was by design. Her Majesty’s government was quite content to have the young man’s reputation to be that of the family dullard.

  This was wholly the result of the younger man having been recruited during college to work for some super-secret directorate of some super-secret part of some super-secret organization within one of the security apparatuses of Great Britain. To that end, he worked at Lansdowne Park with his father, never published a single academic paper, and often strolled the grounds of his home thinking and talking to himself. He had park benches strategically place all over the two hundred-acre grounds, with beautiful walkways, and gardens dotting the landscape, even a koi pool very near the residence attached to the massive greenhouse.

  The gardeners and maintenance workers were all employees of the British government and did a magnificent job of maintaining the grounds, and protecting the young man, and his father from annoying insects and dangerous spies.

  The young man didn’t remain home because he wasn’t allowed to travel, but rather because he was prohibited from discussing his work. His life wasn’t lonely in any way; in fact, it was quite fulfilling. But at age thirty-two, he knew it was incomplete. He had dated a fair bit during the British equivalent of high school, and college, and was generally considered reasonably good looking by his female classmates. But many of his female contemporaries seemed to gravitate toward men headed for law, business, or medicine.

  Being Mrs. Mathematician just didn’t have that cache of excitement they craved. But picking a field, and a specialty dominated almost exclusively by men in the UK just seemed cruel once he began to think about it. He wanted to serve the nation but this, this was just unfair.

  When he saw the invitation, his father received to the Conference in DC, and noted the number of American female mathematicians scheduled to be in attendance, he
decided that a visit to the Colonies was definitely in order.

  Then he saw her and suddenly his decision seemed genius. He asked around about the woman he had spotted and wasn’t sure whether the news was good or bad.

  “Her? In the blue dress? Yeah that Tawney Thierry. The big dude talking to her is her father, Marcus Thierry. She’s a grad student in Mathematics at LSU; her Dad is an FBI agent, and a mathematician. A UCLA alumnus, I think. Not sure what he does at the FBI exactly but she’s writing her thesis on the mathematics of quantum encryption.”

  “She single?”

  “I believe the answer is yes but watch out. Daddy is very protective, and she’s not the friendly Washington bar scene type anyway. Strictly New Orleans gumbo with an attitude to boot. Good luck my British friend, but I’m pretty sure you’ll be the only one trying to land her.”

  “Then I best get started right away.”

  Chapter 30

  The young man had been in his room looking at the schedule of upcoming lectures, and events and hoped he might bump into Tawney Thierry at one of them. He had received a text from an old acquaintance now teaching at Yale, and decided he’d come downstairs to meet him for a beer in the bar. It was still a few hours away from the Conference registration, and official social mixer, so he thought he’d kill some time catching up on all the nerd gossip from his still well-connected academic American friend.

  They really couldn’t talk shop, his work being mostly for MI-6 and his friends work being mostly for the NSA, so they got right down to the dirt of who was sleeping with who, who was cheating on who (and with whom) and which ladies were currently single, and randy as a minx. The good news for the young man was that America was a rich ground of erotic opportunity, especially for mathematicians. The bad news, of course, was that he lived on the outskirts of London.

  He had to pass through the lobby on the way to the bar, a not so accurate replica of a British Pub. The “pub fare” was mostly just American bar food, and bore no resemblance to actual English pub fare, unless you counted the pubs catering to American tourists that no Brit would dare frequent unless by accident or, possibly, tourist coercion. But “when in Rome” he thought and pretended it would be fun to have a non-existent English brewed Coors or Budweiser.

  His attention was immediately cast to the woman seated at the grouping of small tasteful couches, and overstuffed chairs immediately adjacent to the big picture window looking outward to the busy Washington street traffic. She was almost hidden behind the vacant baby grand piano, entertainment for a different crowd at a later hour.

  “Is this seat taken? Or for that matter, are any of these seats taken?”

  She found the tall thin fellow dressed in the khakis, and polo shirt with the very adorable upper crust English accent to be quite handsome. She looked at him warily and smiled.

  She said, “What is it about a British accent that makes every American think you Brits are so smart? How do you guys get away with that?”

  “May I join you? I’d love to make up some totally disingenuous explanation that’s both witty and charming.”

  She smiled again.

  “Please. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic. But I must warn you that I’m a terrible skeptic, and not easily impressed.”

  “A challenge. Well I shall do what I can to impress you as best I can.”

  “You’re up. Go for it.”

  “No, no. Let’s not jump into anything too rashly, at least since we’ve only just met. We English are dreadfully formal and all that, you know.”

  “I see. Stalling. I get it. But go on, who’re you anyway? Lord somebody or other I presume. That’s another bizarre fascination Americans have with you Brits.”

  “Which is?”

  “Royalty and all things royal. Especially snooty, stuffy royalty who seem to look down on the average Joe. Or the average Sir Reginald Smythe-Smith of Dunston Ayres.” She affected an upper-class British accent. Not half bad, he thought.

  “Well, one problem at a time. And talk about stalling. Well, first off my name happens to be Sir Reginald Pithwaller, GQS, Order of the Realm.”

  “Really?”

  “Nope. Not even close. It’s Richard. Just plain Richard. Dr. Richard Detwiler. Ph.D., not MD in case you’re the snooty kind yourself and that matters to you. But my little ruse does tend to support your latter point.”

  “Can’t believe I…”

  “Yes, you did. You fell into your very own … observation.”

  “You Brits are very sneaky or, so I’ve been told. Spy craft and all that, tut tut.”

  “We are that, for sure. But now it’s time for you to fess up. What’s your name and why’re you here at this Conference?”

  “That’s actually two questions but that’s OK. I don’t mind. I’m a grad school mathematician, and I can count.”

  Richard laughed at the lightness of her chat and her ease with him. She continued.

  “Well, I’m here with my Dad, also a mathematician, because the Conference has some topics that may be useful in my dissertation. I’m just finishing up my Ph.D. at LSU and my thesis involves the applied mathematics of quantum encryption. Hoping to get some ideas for a problem to solve. For my dissertation, of course.”

  “Of course. Is that all?” Richard smiled. “Sounds complicated.”

  “I guess, but Daddy’s been talking about cryptology all my life, so I followed him into the field. Then I decided to specialize. He loves math, I love math, and well there you have it. Here I am.”

  “And your Dad?”

  “He’s in law enforcement. Cryptology is more of an avocation for him most of the time but is still part of his vocation from time to time.”

  “Is there a lot of math crime here in the States? I would never have guessed. You Yanks seem so much grittier than that. Lots of fist fights, shoot-outs and the like.”

  Tawney smiled and tried to look serious. “Not math exactly. But white-collar crime is his thing. Mostly works in his office at a computer in the New Orleans Field Office of the FBI.”

  “Sounds very serious.”

  “It is, and here he is.” She stood up, and turned to face her father, leaning into him and giving him a peck on the cheek. “Daddy, I’d like you to meet Dr. Richard Detwiler of London, England. He was about to explain why the Brits always sound so smart when they talk, at least to us Americans.”

  Marcus Thierry was warm, and friendly man but had still not outgrown his fatherly protective nature regarding his eldest little girl. She was twenty-six but sometimes all he saw was his seven-year-old little girl, missing a front tooth, and still beating up the boys in the neighborhood. The adult version of his little one had turned into a beautiful, and sophisticated grown up version who needed no protection at all from her father. At least not right now, and certainly not from Dr. Richard Detwiler.

  “I seem to recall a father, and son team of mathematicians working for MI-6 in London named Detwiler. Any relation?”

  “Yes, my father is Dr. Alvin Detwiler. And, yes, we do work together. Do you know him?”

  “Only by reputation. But they say the son is quite a chip off the old block. His reputation precedes him.”

  “Yes, his thirty-two-year-old, unmarried and somewhat socially reclusive son is quite well-known in British social circles. Or is it that he’s almost completely unknown? It’s one of the two, anyway.”

  “Not what I hear,” said Marcus, “But then what do I know? I hope we can have a chat some time, maybe join us for dinner? Tonight, that is, if you’re free?”

  “That would be lovely. Perhaps…”

  Tawney cut in, “Perhaps we can all have dinner together another time. Richard had just graciously asked me out for dinner tonight, and I thought we could’ve a cozy chat about … algorithms.”

  “Yes, yes that’s right. We were discussing the latest … algorithms … just before you arrived. I hear someone is planning to make a movie. Fascinating
subject, very promising indeed. Brad Pitt or George Clooney to star.”

  “Were you now? Algorithms. All right, I know when I’m not wanted. But just remember, Richard.”

  “Yes?”

  “I carry a gun.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind and have her home by eight. Earlier if we just order water for dinner and drink fast. No ice.”

  Marcus laughed. “That’s OK. Her curfew is nine. Don’t be late.”

  “Goodbye, Daddy.”

  ***

  “We have a date?”

  “Yes. We have a date. Unless you have other plans? A more pressing engagement?”

  “Nothing that I couldn’t heartlessly cancel at the last minute. I can be cruel that way.”

  “I can see that now. Don’t know how I missed it before.”

  Tawney smiled to herself inwardly. She had never, ever asked a man out on a date before. Her own behavior was shocking. Almost. Well, not really at all. Besides, he seemed nice, and he was a math geek to boot. Daddy liked him right away, she could tell.

  “You were going to ask me out, right? I mean eventually. I don’t think your interest was entirely professional. C’mon, don’t be shy. Tell me the truth. You Brits and your famous ‘reserve’. We’re in America now, so it’s OK to ask a cute girl out. Even if you did just meet me.”

  “Did you just pick me up?”

  “Don’t act so shocked, Dr. Detwiler. I just saved us a lot of time and you a lot of unnecessary anxiety. I like you Richard Detwiler. And I know you’re gonna like me. I can tell.”

  “Real-ly.”

  “Yes, real-ly,” she mocked.

  ***

  Dinner was nice and the two chatted on and on as if they had known each other all their lives. Richard thought Tawney was smart, sophisticated, and gorgeous. She was fun and funny. Serious and thoughtful. And a math geek. And into cryptology.

  My goodness, he thought, this is actual scientific proof. There is a God in Heaven.