I could see some fancy test equipment sitting on lab benches. “A network analyzer?” We had an older one in the microwave lab at Georgia Tech. “You do radio work here?”
Suddenly, he looked at me as if for the first time. “How did an IT assistant get familiar with network analyzers?”
I got the new inkjet cartridge popped in. “I’m studying electrical engineering at Georgia Tech.” I punctuated my statement by closing the top of the printer with a decisive click.
“What’s an electrical engineer from Georgia Tech doing replacing inkjet cartridges?”
“I’m a student intern. I guess HR figured we can do that.”
He shook his head ruefully and held out a hand. “Roger Thorn. I got out with my EE from Tech a dozen years ago.”
That name. It was familiar for some reason. “Pete Burdell,” I introduced myself again.
“No relation to George P. Burdell?” Roger asked with a smile?
“Something of a distant cousin,” I acknowledged.
“Good times,” Roger said. “Hard times, too. Is Muldoon still teaching Linear Circuit Analysis?”
“He is, as a matter of fact.” I grinned, understanding perfectly Roger’s segue from “hard times” to Muldoon. “I had Muldoon last fall.”
“I got an 88 on his midterm and a 75 on his final.” Roger said it matter-of-factly – not boasting, but rather glad for a chance to share his accomplishment with someone who’d appreciate it. “With the curve, I aced the class, but man, I think it was the hardest class I took there.”
Finally, I remembered where I’d heard the name “Roger Thorn” before.
“I got a perfect score on Muldoon’s midterm,” I explained seeing the surprise and disbelief creep into Roger’s eyes. “Muldoon was convinced I cheated because he didn’t think I was nearly as smart as the legendary Roger Thorn, holder of the previous high score.”
“Wow,” he seemed taken aback. “Did you? Cheat?”
“Not in the way Muldoon was thinking.” I explained how I discovered the geometric tricks Muldoon employed to make the exam easier to grade. Using Muldoon’s own tricks against him made my work much faster and more accurate than even an apparently more brilliant student like Roger.
“Of course,” Roger nodded in appreciation. “I should have figured that out myself.”
“I finished the exam in a half hour, and I spent another fifteen minutes double checking my work. Then I got up five minutes early and turned it in to him.
“’Don’t give up,’ Muldoon told me. ‘You have five more minutes. Keep working and you may be able to get a few more points.’
“I thanked him, told him I was done, and then I walked out of the room.”
Roger chuckled in appreciation. “I wish I’d been there to see the look on old Muldoon’s face. Damn, but he was one of the best teachers I ever had. He sure could be a mean old SOB, though.”
“I hear you.” I gestured around the lab. “So, how did you get from Georgia Tech to riding herd on this prize collection of idle test equipment and boxes?”
“That’s a long story,” Thorn replied, looking at his watch. “Tell you what. Let’s grab some dinner at the West End Grill after work. My treat. Least I can do for a fellow rambling wreck.”
“Thanks.” I accepted his generous offer.
* * *
It was a bit awkward when Mr. Thorn tried ordering a beer for me, and I had to admit I wasn’t 21. I chose the chicken quesadilla on his recommendation.
“Call me Roger,” he insisted after the waiter took our order.
“OK, Roger.” I complied. “What brought you to TAGS?”
“TAGS bought my company,” he explained. “I was working on ultra-wideband mesh networks.”
“Ultra-wideband?” I mean, obviously it had something to do with really big bandwidth signals, but there had to be more to it than that.
“Ewe Double-Ewe Bee,” he replied.
Took me a moment to realize it was an acronym: UWB.
“Time Domain Corporation, right here in Huntsville, was one of the leaders in the industry,” Roger explained. “The name tells you a lot about how it works. UWB uses short time duration impulses to convey data, determine location, or take a radar image. It’s a completely different way of doing wireless. That’s why they killed UWB, the big well-funded startups like Time Domain, and my own little company.”
“TAGS did it?”
“Well, the FCC, for starters. The original experimental and demonstration work assumed operation around 2 gigahertz with about a gigahertz bandwidth. All the legacy companies making money off that spectrum raised a stink about it, even though the power levels were the same as the FCC allows for unintentional radiators. The FCC used that as an excuse to bump up the frequency to the 3-10 gigahertz range, making it that much harder to implement a practical system.
“My company was leveraging the technology developed by Time Domain and others. We pioneered an ad hoc wireless network. Imagine a phone that could work just like the Internet – making a link to whatever other nodes are available and passing a data packet on, from neighbor to neighbor, until the data reaches the destination. With a UWB link, it would look like noise, unless you had the right protocol to decode it. The physical layer itself would be secure, and there’d be no central switchboard where you could try to tap the messages. Secure, private, surveillance-free communications, at least between peers in a local area. We had it working, too: we built a dozen prototypes and got our first production batch of a thousand chips in to build the first units.
“Then, TAGS bought us out at a great valuation. They paid 10% down with a payment plan for the rest and a 10% royalty on gross sales. Only, within six months, they’d bankrupted the company, so the payments stopped. I only got a dime for every dollar I expected. And the sweet royalty? Ten percent of net sales on sales of zero… You don’t need a Georgia Tech degree to figure out that math.”
Roger told me the story of how it all played out, just in time for the waiter to bring our orders.
“You’re sure what happened was deliberate?” I asked, and then took a bite of the delicious chicken quesadilla.
“You can’t ever be sure about something like that,” Roger acknowledged, “but it’s happened before. Ever hear of Edwin Howard Armstrong?”
He must have seen the look of confusion on my face.
“He invented frequency modulation – FM radio.”
“That I’ve heard of.”
“You see,” Roger was clearly eager to share the story, “he invented the regenerative radio receiver, but a charlatan named Lee de Forest won it from him in a patent battle. Then, Armstrong came up with the super-heterodyne architecture that’s still used in most radios today and an improved super-regeneration concept. He made a mint off his ideas, and became the largest single shareholder in RCA – the Radio Corporation of America.”
I remembered Amit had told me a bit about that. “RCA – they were formed as a compromise when the Navy tried to take over wireless after the First World War. One government-sanctioned company to control commercial wireless in the United States. Kinda like how the government merged all the Internet companies to form Omnitia.”
“Exactly,” Roger seemed pleased I already knew that part of the story. “AM radio has lots of problems with static: noise and interference. Frequency modulation was considered as an alternative, but a radio genius named John Carson ‘proved’ that FM was no better than AM. Most everyone lost interest, but not Armstrong.
“He figured out that if you used a wide bandwidth, you could make an FM signal much better, with much less noise and static than an AM signal. Awfully similar to the idea behind UWB, actually. Armstrong demonstrated it to his friend, David Sarnoff, the president of RCA. Sarnoff put Armstrong’s FM through test after test, and it kept beating the socks off AM performance.
“Soon it became obvious that Sarnoff was just trying to string Armstrong along. FM was clearly superior, but AM radio was a cash cow f
or RCA in the 1930s. Sarnoff was taking all the money he made off AM radio and spending it to develop television. If RCA embraced FM, they’d be destroying their own successful market.
“FM proved its worth in World War II, and not long thereafter Armstrong had a host of customers setting up FM radio stations and selling FM radio receivers. It was clear that RCA’s monopoly over radio was about to come to an end, and television was still in its early days, operating at a loss.”
Roger took a deep breath. “RCA got the FCC to yank the spectrum out from under Armstrong and his customers. On the basis of an analysis by FCC engineer Kenneth A. Norton on secret military propagation data, they took away the 40 megahertz band spectrum, and bumped FM up to near 100 megahertz. They gave the prime spectrum between to television, and the FCC administrator who oversaw the decision ended up a few months later with a remunerative executive position in radio. With the stroke of a pen, all the investments Armstrong’s customers had made in radio gear became obsolete. To add insult to injury, the new FM rules demanded stations use low transmit powers, so the coverage areas couldn’t compete with RCA’s legacy AM stations.”
Kenneth A. Norton? I took a moment for me to recall the conversation a few weeks ago. That had to be the same engineer who claimed there was a sign error in the Zenneck Wave Theory. Norton had shut down attempts to revive Tesla’s dream of worldwide wireless power. Now it appeared he’d helped do the same for Armstrong’s FM radio technology.
Roger took another deep breath. “Armstrong fought in court. RCA stole his FM technology to use as the audio channel in television, but claimed it was different, somehow, and not covered by Armstrong’s patents. And those patents were set to expire in the early 1950s. His fortune gone, one evening Armstrong opened a window, and jumped to his death.”
Wow… Jumped? Or was pushed? That sure sounded like the kind of “suicide” that was the Civic Circle’s hallmark. What a tragic loss… I took it in silently.
“Sorry to be such a downer,” Roger smiled, taking a last bite of his dinner. “So, are you keeping busy and enjoying your summer?”
“It depends.” I brandished the cell phone that now held my life in bondage. “Sometimes the job keeps me hopping, other times it’s a challenge to find enough to do.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Roger asked.
“I’ve been dating a couple of the other interns,” I acknowledged. “But I’m really in love with a girl… back in my hometown.”
“Oh,” he said, waving down the waiter to get our check. “If you already have a girlfriend, why are you dating some of the interns here?”
“My girlfriend hasn’t made any sort of particular commitment to me,” I explained. “And I figured if I dated some other girls I’d get better at it – more likely to land the one I really want.”
That answer appeared to satisfy him.
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.” Roger smiled, as if that were funny somehow. “Let me drop you back at the office.”
I thanked him for dinner. “That was a heck of a story you told me… yours and Armstrong’s.” I really wanted to learn more. “Can I help you move the boxes in your lab into some kind of order?”
“Sure,” he replied genially. “Stop by any time. Don’t be sharing my story around, though. I’m not supposed to be talking about my deal with TAGS.”
“Of course.”
I stopped by the next afternoon and helped Roger get his lab better arranged. He even broke out a couple of his mesh-networking prototypes and gave me a tutorial on how it all worked.
One aspect of his invention deeply impressed me. Communications security requires encryption. The state-of-the-art approach uses mathematical algorithms to encrypt a message. The algorithm generates two mathematical keys – a public key that the algorithm uses to encrypt a message, and a private key that reverses the encryption, allowing the message to be decoded and read. In theory, it is extremely difficult to decrypt the message without the private key. In practice? The algorithms are complex, and the NSA has some of the best mathematicians and computer scientists in the world. From all the indications Amit was getting, the NSA was selectively decrypting large fractions of encrypted message traffic online.
The most important messages we share, however, are with our close friends and associates – people we spend time with. Roger’s prototypes included a security process he called a “handshake.” When you connected two of his devices together, they would generate and share a massive table of random numbers derived from electrical noise he insisted was better than any digital random number generator. Since the two devices shared a common random number table, they could use it to encrypt and decrypt secure messages between the devices that couldn’t be cracked by eavesdroppers without violating the physical security of the devices themselves. You couldn’t very well stream video or vast amounts of data using the technique, but Roger’s prototypes could store enough random data for many hours of voice conversations and a virtual eternity of text messaging. Then, when the random bit bucket runs dry, you mate your phone up to your friend’s and refill it with a new matched collection of random numbers.
“Why isn’t this ‘Handshake Device’ standard on all cell phones?”
Roger smiled at my naïveté. “Because it’s absolutely secure, and absolute security is not in favor these days, except for military and government communications.”
The helpline phone rang, and I was off to help someone who’d locked themselves out of their account. Deep in thought, I almost got myself lost again on my way out of the modular building complex.
There was definitely something going on here.
“Once is happenstance, and twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action,” Dad liked to say. Roger’s UWB wireless and the Zenneck Surface Wave wireless power guy. I needed to get his name, but that was two. There was the lady rocket scientist who figured out space elevator cables only had to stretch high enough to launch an electromagnetically-propelled rocket to escape velocity, instead of all the way to geosynchronous orbit. That made three. Oh, and Professor Glyer was busy working on his killbot army.
The pattern was becoming obvious.
TAGS wasn’t just a typical government contractor. It was an unofficial arm of the Civic Circle. TAGS collaborated with the Civic Circle’s Technology Containment Team to hire or acquire ambitious inventors and entrepreneurs pursuing technologies they viewed as a threat. They also served as an incubator for technologies TAGS wanted to develop for their own purposes, like Glyer’s killbots. I wondered if Larry and Travis appreciated what their company was doing. Were they actively involved? Neither had much of a technical background. They could easily be doing “favors” for their Civic Circle patrons without fully comprehending the reasons, implications, or consequences.
There were only so many productive things I could do to fill the downtime between helpline calls. I’d have loved to spend the time reviewing some of the material we’d saved from the Tolliver Library, but I didn’t feel comfortable using work time or a work computer to do it. Too risky. I’d finished the Borges book, but there were only so many books available from the bookstore that were relevant to what I needed to learn. I’d reverse engineered Mr. Humphrey’s VirtualDan.exe scripts and used them as a model for VirtualPete.exe on a different server. So far, all VirtualPete.exe did was send me text messages when Mr. Humphreys arrived or left the office.
When I got bored with coding, I reread the company’s manuals. I was on my second read-through of the Tolliver Corporation Safety Manual when I spotted it: my ticket to join the Reactance on Jekyll Island, if I played my cards right. It seemed fitting that my way out of the boring bureaucratic morass I seemed to be stuck in might come from mastery of the bureaucratic rules. I double-checked the building layout. Yes, all was as I had remembered. To pull it off, though, I was going to need some assistance from Uncle Larry.
Chapter 6: Independence Day
July 4 fell on a Tuesday, so I
decided to take off work early on Friday and make a long weekend of it back home in Tennessee. It was a good four-hour drive – five including the time zone change. The summer sun was getting low in the sky by the time I unlocked the gate and drove up the narrow incline to Robber Dell.
No one was in the trailer, so I headed on over to Uncle Rob’s barn. “Hey Pete!” Amit beamed as he opened the door to the apartment wing of the barn. “Good to see you!”
“Likewise,” I acknowledged, following him in. “I really missed talking with you. I was getting worried about all the cryptic ‘can’t talk this channel is monitored’ messages.”
Rob was shaking his head. “He’s been telling us all about it.” Rob turned to Amit. “Give Pete the summary version.”
“When the Civic Circle put all us interns up in the same apartment complex, I should have known something was hinky,” Amit began. “First, they assigned everyone a roommate. A few days into the internship, I get taken in to security, and they tell me my roomie, this Ivy Leaguer named Aaron, they’re suspicious of him, and they think he’s leaking secrets and has contacts hostile to the Civic Circle. ‘Cool,’ I’m thinking, ‘I’ll pull a George P. Burdell and recruit the guy – start a Civic Youth cell right under their noses.’ Then, a couple of days later, I notice a change in Aaron. He’s all standoffish and suspicious. Huge difference in behavior, not that he was all that normal in the first place. That’s when I figured it out. Everyone gets told their roomie is questionable and to monitor them.”
“Wow,” I was imagining having to live under that kind of surveillance from a roommate. “That’s creepy.”
“Yeah,” Amit acknowledged. “So, the next day I report to the security office that they were right about Aaron. I tell them Aaron is clearly trying to spy on me, and it’s all obvious, and he must be a plant trying to infiltrate the Civic Circle… discredit the other guy first, you see. At least I made it clear Aaron can’t be trusted not to give himself away.”
“Standard technique,” Rob explained. “Get everyone to spy on everyone else. You know, before the Berlin Wall fell, something like ten percent of East Germany was on the payroll of the Stasi – their secret police – spying on and writing reports on neighbors, even family. But Amit, you need to tell him the best part.”
The Brave and the Bold Page 11
