Chapter 7

Susan’s mind was racing‑Ensei Tankado wrote a program that creates unbreakable codes! She could barely grasp the thought.

“Digital Fortress,” Strathmore said. “That’s what he’s calling it. It’s the ultimate counterintelligence weapon. If this program hits the market, every third grader with a modem will be able to send codes the NSA can’t break. Our intelligence will be shot.”

But Susan’s thoughts were far removed from the political implications of Digital Fortress. She was still struggling to comprehend its existence. She’d spent her life breaking codes, firmly denying the existence of the ultimate code. Every code is breakable‑the Bergofsky Principle! She felt like an atheist coming face to face with God.

“If this code gets out,” she whispered, “cryptography will become a dead science.”

Strathmore nodded. “That’s the least of our problems.”

“Can we pay Tankado off? I know he hates us, but can’t we offer him a few million dollars? Convince him not to distribute?”

Strathmore laughed. “A few million? Do you know what this thing is worth? Every government in the world will bid top dollar. Can you imagine telling the President that we’re still cable‑snooping the Iraqis but we can’t read the intercepts anymore? This isn’t just about the NSA, it’s about the entire intelligence community. This facility provides support for everyone‑the FBI, CIA, DEA; they’d all be flying blind. The drug cartels’ shipments would become untraceable, major corporations could transfer money with no paper trail and leave the IRS out in the cold, terrorists could chat in total secrecy‑it would be chaos.”

“The EFF will have field day,” Susan said, pale.

“The EFF doesn’t have the first clue about what we do here,” Strathmore railed in disgust. “If they knew how many terrorist attacks we’ve stopped because we can decrypt codes, they’d change their tune.”

Susan agreed, but she also knew the realities; the EFF would never know how important TRANSLTR was. TRANSLTR had helped foil dozens of attacks, but the information was highly classified and would never be released. The rationale behind the secrecy was simple: The government could not afford the mass hysteria caused by revealing the truth; no one knew how the public would react to the news that there had been two nuclear close calls by fundamentalist groups on U.S. soil in the last year.

Nuclear attack, however, was not the only threat. Only last month TRANSLTR had thwarted one of the most ingeniously conceived terrorist attacks the NSA had ever witnessed. An anti‑government organization had devised a plan, code‑named Sherwood Forest. It targeted the New York Stock Exchange with the intention of “redistributing the wealth.” Over the course of six days, members of the group placed twenty‑seven nonexplosive flux pods in the buildings surrounding the Exchange. These devices, when detonated, create a powerful blast of magnetism. The simultaneous discharge of these carefully placed pods would create a magnetic field so powerful that all magnetic media in the Stock Exchange would be erased‑computer hard drives, massive ROM storage banks, tape backups, and even floppy disks. All records of who owned what would disintegrate permanently.

Because pinpoint timing was necessary for simultaneous detonation of the devices, the flux pods were interconnected over Internet telephone lines. During the two‑day countdown, the pods’ internal clocks exchanged endless streams of encrypted synchronization data. The NSA intercepted the data‑pulses as a network anomaly but ignored them as a seemingly harmless exchange of gibberish. But after TRANSLTR decrypted the data streams, analysts immediately recognized the sequence as a network‑synchronized countdown. The pods were located and removed a full three hours before they were scheduled to go off.

Susan knew that without TRANSLTR the NSA was helpless against advanced electronic terrorism. She eyed the Run‑Monitor. It still read over fifteen hours. Even if Tankado’s file broke right now, the NSA was sunk. Crypto would be relegated to breaking less than two codes a day. Even at the present rate of 150 a day, there was still a backlog of files awaiting decryption.

* * *

“Tankado called me last month,” Strathmore said, interrupting Susan’s thoughts.

Susan looked up. “Tankado called you?”

He nodded. “To warn me.”

“Warn you? He hates you.”

“He called to tell me he was perfecting an algorithm that wrote unbreakable codes. I didn’t believe him.”

“But why would he tell you about it?” Susan demanded. “Did he want you to buy it?”

“No. It was blackmail.”

Things suddenly began falling into place for Susan. “Of course,” she said, amazed. “He wanted you to clear his name.”

“No,” Strathmore frowned. “Tankado wanted TRANSLTR.”