“Here’s the real issue.” He began with two boxes and a circle in what to Sirad looked like a simple isosceles triangle. “Code-making is simple in theory. Borders Atlantic wants to pass information from one cell phone to another.”
He pointed to one of the boxes, demonstrating his point.
“That information is relayed in microwaves, which travel line of sight. Because of the curvature of the earth and physical obstructions, we need to raise our repeaters up high on towers, or in the case of our Quantis system, launch them into low earth orbit.”
Ravi drew lines and arrows, connecting the cell phone boxes with the circular satellite, filling in the slanted walls of his communications pyramid. Sirad considered all of this rudimentary, of course, but saw no point in disturbing his thought process.
“The problem for cryptographers is twofold. First, the microwave is easy to intercept anywhere in the transmission/reception conduit; microwaves cannot be shielded from intrusion like hard lines. Second, you need keys to encrypt the transmission and decrypt the reception. Those keys are based on algorithms, which rely on random numbers. It’s all mathematics. If you can figure out the code-maker’s math, you can figure out and break his code.”
“Simple enough,” Sirad said, folding her arms. Ravi knew she oversaw the entire Quantis project. Why was he offering her a tourist-level orientation?
“Yes, of course.”
He wiped his chalk from the board, moved to the upper left-hand corner, and began to write. Letters. Numbers. Greek symbols. The chalk tapped and scratched against the slate surface with such speed and force, Sirad stepped back to avoid the flying shards.
“Without giving up too many system eccentricities,” he said, “let’s begin with our random number generator—the true soul of Quantis, its key base. Conventional computer-model generators produce ‘pseudo’ numbers based on statistical randomness. Cryptographers can’t rely on these because they too easily yield replication, so they try to find true physical sources that cannot be predicted, such as device latencies, utilization statistics—keystroke intervals, say, on a thousand different PC keyboards.”
Ravi spoke one language while writing another on the board. Where he made mistakes, he swiped his hand across the equation and wrote through the smudges.
“This noise is then distilled by what is called a ‘hash function’ to make it all interdependent in a cryptographically strong way. The point, remember, is to generate unpredictability—to make your code confusing to external observation. You don’t want the intruder to guess your root.
“Until recently, that meant at least one hundred twenty-eight bits of true entropy. To achieve this, number generators have relied on very large pools of information, cycling data through a hash function to protect the pools’ contents. When you need more bits, you simply stir new chunks of the device latencies or utilization statistics into the pool, using a random key to maintain interdepen-dence, of course.”
Sirad nodded her head. Of course, she thought.
“All right. Now . . .”—Ravi’s chalk really began to tap—“random number generation is typically the most overlooked and weakest part of the system. Our mathematicians have achieved a breakthrough in random number generation. We don’t rely on these old systems because we have found a wholly different way to generate randomness. It is a major breakthrough—the kind that certainly would have won us a Nobel in math or physics if we could ever divulge it in open-source literature. Of course we can’t.”
“That’s the famous Nguyen cornerstone I hear about?” Sirad asked. She had heard talk of this but never asked for details. All she knew was that Borders Atlantic had hired a twenty-two-year-old mathematician named Hung Il Nguyen away from the National Security Agency. He was the first-generation American son of Vietnamese immigrants. A prodigy. He apparently had done something extraordinary.
“No,” Ravi said. He finished three last swipes of his chalk and stood back from his blackboard. “This is the Nguyen cornerstone.”
The man pointed to the equation and beamed with childlike awe.
“What’s it mean?” Sirad asked. She had taken her share of theoretical math classes in college but understood little of Ravi’s quixotic hieroglyphics.
“It means money; more than thirty billion dollars in revenue this year alone,” he said, crossing his arms. “It means security, power, beauty, a fundamental change in the way we look at the physical universe. And to most people, of course, it means nothing but a bunch of white symbols on a dirty blackboard.”
“Humor me,” Sirad said. “I’m afraid we don’t have time for metaphor.”
“Yes.” Practicality returned to Ravi’s eyes. “There are two primary kinds of code-making—secret, or symmetrical, and public key, or asymmetrical, encryption. Symmetrical codes use the same key to encrypt and decrypt, whereas asymmetrical use two different keys. Quantis relies on a combination of the two. We stay symmetrical from transmission to the satellite, then go asymmetrical from the satellite to the receiver. You understand that part, right?”
Sirad nodded her head. Borders Atlantic owned all satellites in their system, allowing them to depend on well-established stream cipher techniques. The company’s system was very fast and, coupled with Borders Atlantic’s new random number generation process, extremely secure.
“Well, the Nguyen cornerstone involves the second stage of the data stream, from the satellite to the receiver. Our problems always boiled down to message authentication codes for individual subscribers: key agreement protocols. If we integrated keys in each of the Quantis phones, for example, an attacker might reverse engineer our technology and clone it. Couldn’t have that, could we?”
Sirad shook her head, then checked her watch.
“We need to get moving, Ravi,” she said.
“Public-key cryptosystems—the second stage of the Quantis data stream—have always faced vulnerability to what are known as ‘hard problems.’ There are several, but the one Nguyen went after involved problem solving and validation in polynomial time . . .”
“Polynomial time?” Sirad asked.
“That’s where the execution time of a computation does not exceed the polynomial function of the problem size itself.”
Ravi pointed to his equation.
“Here,” he said. “Simply put, any problem solvable in polynomial time, we’ll call P. Any solution that can be checked in polynomial time we’ll call NP. By definition, every problem in P must be in NP, but prior to Nguyen’s groundbreaking work, we could not show that P equals NP.”
“That’s simply put?” Sirad asked. He had lost her, despite the movements of his hand through the length of his chalky equation.
“The Nguyen cornerstone forms the basis for Quantis,” Ravi said. “The P = NP conundrum was one of the most important problems in mathematics. Now we have solved it.”
“That helps us?” Sirad asked.
“Oh, yes.” Ravi smiled. “This is not the cornerstone of some academic equation. This is the basis of a whole new world.”
HRT MOUNT-OUTSMOVED with the efficiency of a finely tuned engine. While the duty section—either gold or blue, depending on rotation—saw to personal equipment and rapid-action supplies, the training section scrambled to load team gear. Everything from beans to bullets went into the back of stake-bed trucks for immediate delivery to C-17 transport aircraft at Andrews Air Force Base, forty-seven miles to the north. HRT took pride in being completely self-sufficient, so supplies necessary to maintain fifty operators and twenty-five support staff had to move with them. Box trucks and stake-beds quickly piled up with MREs, medical equipment, communications gear, shelter, ammunition, weapons, helicopter rigging, and personal bags.
By simple process of luck, Jeremy’s Xray Snipers today fell within the duty section. He and the six other members of his team quickly stuffed their backpacks with two days’ worth of rations, night vision and surveillance optics, ammo, cold weather gear, an encrypted radio, and two extra batteries.
“Sixty-five pounds of lightweight gear,” the guys always joked. Jeremy had read that the Spartans had carried the same battle load at Thermopylae. Whether swords and shields or assault rifles and thermal imaging scopes, warriors had always toted the same load.
“Let’s move!” Jeremy called out as the rest of Xray hustled out toward their cars. As team leader, he functioned as something more than special agent and something less than supervisor. HRT had its own rules, and this paramilitary responsibility existed nowhere else in the FBI.
“You got a warning order for us yet?” Lottspeich asked, following his friend and former partner out of the garage and into the now blinding snow. They had endured selection, NOTS, and the Marine Corps Scout/Sniper School together. Jeremy considered Fritz one of his closest friends.
“On the record or off?” Jeremy asked. He wore camouflage Gore-Tex pants and a parka over polypro long johns, but the driving wind and snow bit through just the same.
“The real shit,” Lottspeich said. He sidestepped the communications van as it drove up from the tech shed in what had been the team’s original sniper tower.
“We’ve arrested one of the shooters. The military is interrogating him, but the CIA has HUMINT from a source down at Gitmo who says this is part of some bigger plot. They think this is just the first stage of an attempt to bring down the government.”
“Holy shit . . .” Lottspeich lost the rest of his sentence in the howling wind.
“The team is prestaging in a hangar up at Andrews, but I don’t know what the hell good that is going to do,” Jeremy said. The cold wind helped clear his overburdened mind. “There’s no way we’re lifting off in this weather.”
“Stand by to stand by—that’s our motto, right?” Lottspeich yelled. He couldn’t think of much else to say at the moment. Terrorism was their business, but fifty men in a snowstorm seemed a pitiful response to what Jeremy was describing.
“You driving or me?” Jeremy asked. Their assigned parking spaces were side by side.
“You drive,” Lottspeich said. “All you do is complain about my . . .”
“Waller!” a voice called out behind them. Jeremy turned to supervisor Billy Luther, who had run across the parking lot in his shirtsleeves.
“Hey, didn’t your mother tell you . . . ,” Lottspeich started, but Billy cut him off.
“We just got word that WFO’s SOG has a possible cell under surveillance in an Anacostia warehouse,” he yelled over the storm.
Jeremy could feel this ratcheting up very quickly. If the Washington field office’s Special Operations Group had run this Ansar group to ground, HRT might get to play in this after all.
“They think these assholes are cooking ANFO,” Billy said. “Our objective is to close down the perimeter so no one gets in or out. Get your men on the road; we’ll relay more information as we get it.”
Billy turned and started back inside.
“Make sure you maintain a safe standoff,” he called over his shoulder. “That shit can make a big hole!”
“ANFO,” Lottspeich said. He opened the rear doors of Jeremy’s Suburban and threw his pack inside. “That don’t sound right. Anyone capable of splashing three airliners isn’t likely to be messing with fertilizer and fuel oil, are they?”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Jeremy said, tossing in his gear after Fritz’s. “From what I heard in the team leaders’ meeting, this thing goes a helluva long ways beyond some guy cooking bubba bombs in Anacostia.”
He climbed into his truck and started the engine. For reasons that made no particular sense, all he could think of was that butter-fly in the jungle.
Graphium milon, GI Jane had said just before everything went to hell. Odd that something so beautiful could send shivers down his spine.
JORDAN MITCHELL SELDOM traveled for meetings, but this was one of those exceptions. Twelve years earlier, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a soft-spoken midlevel-management type had walked up at a conference and asked to have a word with him. The man had offered no business card, came with no introduction, and managed to insert himself in Mitchell’s day precisely at a time when his defenses were down. Ten minutes later they were talking in Mitchell’s suite. Within a week they were partners.
Mr. Hoch was all he had ever called the man, but that seemed appropriate for a wraith who came and went with no contact numbers or corporate affiliation. He spoke with spare economy, a trait Mitchell had always sought in his own employees. Most interesting of all, Mr. Hoch talked about a new program, developed within the CIA, to cover young intelligence operatives inside American business. The program was run out of the Directorate of Operations—the dirty-hands-and-broken-bones side of the house—and it was so secretive Hoch introduced the concept with a question Mitchell would never forget.
“I love my country enough to die for it, Mr. Mitchell,” he said. “Do you love yours enough to keep a secret?”
It had sounded like the perfect pitch. Mitchell felt compelled to hear the man out, to listen to what this otherwise completely forgettable person had to say. It felt like duty.
Hoch started by telling Mitchell that he represented a government agency and that his employer collected intelligence on other governments, agencies, businesses, and people. The intrigue alone would have compelled Mitchell to give this man a chance, but what really captivated him was the part where he talked about money.
“We have come to understand that the war on terrorism is all about money,” he said in explaining the link between intelligence and business. “National security is no longer a question of keeping the seething communist hordes out of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. It’s an issue of protecting the strongest, most far-reaching financial empire in the history of the world.
“If we want to maintain the freedoms that allow people like you to accomplish their dreams, we have to adopt an entirely new attitude about national security. Our success as a world superpower is going to come down to leaders who understand the validity of the dollar.”
Nothing this man or any other could have said would have seized Mitchell’s attention any more fervently. All his life, he had believed that bombs and tanks were little more than a Stone Age excuse to avoid more complicated issues. If the United States ever wanted to protect itself from foreign threats, it had to accept the new reality: pecunia vincit omnia—money conquers all.
Deficit spending, not military action or the threat of mutually assured destruction, had won the Cold War. Ronald Reagan crippled the Soviet Union by taunting it into bankruptcy. The war on terror would be won the same way.
Mitchell had gone so far as to include a chapter in his new book about the potentially calamitous dangers of foreign acquisition of U.S. corporations. When Daimler-Benz bought Chrysler, he wrote, they didn’t simply purchase a bunch of assembly lines, sheet metal, and hood ornaments; they bought a huge chunk of America. They gained access to labor contracts, research and development secrets, personnel folders, and virtually every black-walled program Chrysler ever worked on.
Corporate raiding by companies like Ford, Viacom, and GE threatened to change the global power balance more than all the bombs in Iran, Iraq, and North Korea combined. This new shadow war was being waged with a whole new kind of soldier—one armed with pinstripes and a BlackBerry. Guns and bombs were simply window dressing for the morons at cable news.
“Hello, Mr. Hoch,” Mitchell said. He had agreed to meet his enigmatic partner at a tiny SoHo café called Twelve Seats. There was just one large room with an espresso bar. Two women sat talking in the back. A man on Rollerblades fought his way out the door, wrestling a venti latte and two feisty pugs.
“Nice to see you, Jordan.”
It was just the two of them. Trask sat outside in the Mercedes. Hoch always came alone.
“You, too. How have you been?”
Neither man had any interest in small talk, but a mutual respect had grown between them.
“I feel well. Coffee?”
They ordered and sat at the window.
“So, we have business?” Mitchell asked. He could see Trask in the car, wrestling with two cell phones, trying to juggle and cancel meetings to accommodate this last-minute tryst.
“We do.” Hoch looked casually around the room to ease any concern about overhears. “Jafar al Tayar.”
“I don’t speak Arabic. I think you know that.”
Hoch watched Mitchell’s face, trying to decide whether or not the phrase had surprised him.
“It means Jafar the pilot, or the high flier—one who controls things from a position of power or influential standing. We have developed a source in Guantánamo Bay who talks about an operation called Jafar al Tayar. A terrorist operation, it seems, but more troublesome than that.”
“What would be more troublesome than a terrorist operation?” Mitchell asked. “Particularly in light of recent events?”
“Jafar al Tayar was developed by the United States government,” Hoch said. The Borders Atlantic CEO held his eye with no change in expression.
“Go on.”
“In the mid-1980s, the Pentagon was getting itself involved in all kinds of crazy schemes called ‘asynchronous warfare.’ I’m sure you remember the stories—everything from ESP and telepathy to subliminal suggestion and mass hypnosis. Well, one of the more rational projects involved the possibility that communists or terrorists might infiltrate our government from within.”
“From within? What do you mean?”
“By getting themselves elected. The CIA and FBI had always been looking at spies, of course, but no one had ever considered the possibility that a foreign power might simply front a candidate in a general election.”
Mitchell nodded. America was a free and open society. Despite lingering vestiges of prejudice, men and women from all different ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds had achieved high office.
“Interesting,” Mitchell said. Hoch had garnered his full attention.
White: A Novel Page 9
