Simple Simon (5 page)

Big Dogs

G. Nicholas Kudrow paced slowly along the bookcase wall of his office, a few sheets of paper held high in one hand, the other rubbing slow circles on his prominent chin as he considered what he read. At the end of the bookcase the forty-eight year old civil servant turned and retraced his steps toward his mahogany desk, still reading, his tinted glasses angled down at the object of his interest. Almost to the next turn-around he paused, square face rising a bit in contemplation, then lowering as the thought-walk continued.

At the end he stopped and ran a hand over his graying brown hair, whose natural wave added an illusory inch to his six-one frame, and looked away from the papers for the last time. His eyes angled right, at the flexible microphone snaking upward near the computer monitor on his desk. “VOICE,” he said loudly, in a distinct tone he knew would be recognized, then, in a more normal voice, “Intercom.” His normal voice commanded attention. An electronic beep told him to continue. “Sharon?”

“Yes, Mr. Kudrow,” a disembodied voice replied through the speaker in the microphone’s base.

“Contact Colonel Murdoch in S and inform him that I have studied his request and that it is denied.” Kudrow stood motionless, staring toward his desk.

“Understood, Mr. Kudrow.”

“Intercom off.” Two beeps signaled that his voice command had been heeded. Kudrow walked around his desk and sat, tossing the poorly conceived request into a large red basket. There was no need to shred what went in there.

Done with serious contemplation for the moment, Kudrow sipped lemonade from the half full glass on his desk and flipped through a minor stack of papers. All bore the TOP SECRET designation across their top, which was why his secretary had placed them with the routine material he needed to peruse before this first day of the work week was finished. If he had his druthers he’d have Sharon sign off on them, but the government had silly rules that only added to the workload of its truly valuable people, of whom he was certainly one, Kudrow believed without a doubt. So he moved quickly through the collection of briefs from DoD, State, and other less important entities, and was only mildly perturbed when his intercom interrupted him mid-stack.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Kudrow, Mr. Folger says he’s coming down.” There was a distinct hesitation in Sharon’s voice.

Kudrow stared silently at the speaker for a second. “He’s
coming
down? Did you inform him that I am occupied?”

“He didn’t give me the chance, Mr. Kudrow.” She never called him sir. Military officers were ‘sirs’. Kudrow was proudly a career civilian. “He just called, said he’s coming down, and hung up. I tried to get him back on the phone but his secretary said he just hurried out.”

“Very well,” Kudrow said tersely and heard his secretary click off. Interruptions—the bane of those with purpose. G. Nicholas Kudrow was a man with purpose. And with position. Deputy Director for COMSEC-Z of the National Security Agency. A position that was never publicly acknowledged as existing by those ‘in the know’, in the same way that his domain, Department Z of the NSA’s Communications Security directorate, was but a phantom operation within the world’s largest intelligence gathering organization.

But for apparitions, Kudrow and Z left an undisputable mark on the basic functions of the nation’s government. He and his people were responsible for the cryptographic systems that protected the sensitive information that flowed between pieces of the United States Government and its assorted agencies, departments, and bureaus. When people committed secrets to paper, or to some other storage media, and sent it across the street or across an ocean, when imaging satellites snapped their pictures and relayed the shots to a ground station, when secure phones rang at any U.S. installation, the signals passed at each end of its transmission through something that G. Nicholas Kudrow was responsible for. In between those stations the secret was nonsensical gobbledygook.

It was Kudrow’s job, his purpose, to see that that remained the status quo. To that end he was directly responsible for a budget of one hundred million dollars in discretionary funding a year, fifteen times that much in annual project money, two dozen cryptographers who dreamed up the ‘ultimate security’, and a hundred technicians to build the physical structures—or cryptographic machines—that gave that ultimate security to select users. He had chosen the design of the building that housed Department Z, even the color of its windowless exterior—dark brown—and nearly everything else about Z had his stamp of approval on it. It was his domain, and he balanced his rule of it somewhere between father and tyrant dependent on the situation at hand.

The tyrant in him snapped eyes to the door when it opened without a knock. Brad Folger, Assistant Deputy Director for COMSEC-Z, entered just ahead of Kudrow’s secretary.

“Mr. Kudrow,” Sharon said in frustrated apology. “I tried to grab him—”

“Good morning, Nick,” Folger said, ignoring Sharon. He was in shirtsleeves, cuffs buttoned down smartly, but his red and blue tie was askew, fat and thin ends both showing. The lid above his right eye tremored noticeably. “Can we talk?”

This was no petty disturbance, Kudrow could tell by his assistant’s appearance. “All right, Sharon.” She stepped out with a poisoned glance at Folger and closed the thick door. Kudrow watched as Folger, forty but looking twenty-five, stepped close to his desk. “You should get that eye looked at.”

Folger consciously tried to stem the tremor, the attempt futile. The lid shook like a flap of loose skin, covering half the eye in a perpetual jitter. “I got a call a few minutes ago. From Pedanski.”

“And?”

Folger slid both hands into the pockets of his pleated gray trousers. “He wants me to bring you downstairs. He and Dean and Patel want to talk to us.” Kudrow’s chin rose a bit. “Nick, he sounded scared.”

Kudrow’s brow collapsed slowly into a series of fleshy furrows. He stood, his imposing frame against the jarring colors of the Lichtenstein that hung behind his desk. It had cost a hundred thousand dollars. “Scared?”

“I’ve never heard him like this,” Folger said. “The guy usually doesn’t take anything seriously.”

But what would frighten Pedanski, or any of his animals, as Kudrow referred to the three all stars of his team of cryptographers? He did not know. But he did know that anything involving the trio in concert required attention. They were special, after all, not only for who they were, but for what they had created. “Let’s go.”

The Z building was but one of three dozen buildings on the grounds of the National Security Agency, which was ringed concentrically by three fences, the outer two chain link and topped with razor wire and the inner one electrified. Marines with smart-looking German Shepherds walked the perimeter in an endless patrol, and from control points atop the U-shaped Headquarters-Operations building other Marines scanned the grounds zealously for any attempt at intrusion, rifles slung for quick access. The security was meant to be oppressive, and seemed more so considering that the entire NSA complex sat
within
the boundaries of the United States Army’s Fort George Meade, located halfway between Baltimore and the nation’s capital.

The Z building, a hundred yards inside the triple fence and fifty yards from the nearest structure, was surrounded by its own combination of chain link, razor wire, and high voltage. Two Marines guarded the single portal through the barrier at all times. They had orders to shoot any who attempted unauthorized entry into the windowless brown building known colloquially as the Chocolate Box.

They had done so twice in ten years. Neither incident had made the news.

On the first floor of the Z building, G. Nicholas Kudrow left his office at a brisk walk with Brad Folger on his heels. He headed for the stairs to the basement and walked freely down one level.

There was no security inside the Z building. If you were in and breathing, you were supposed to be there.

At the bottom of the stairs Kudrow turned right and cruised down a hallway, passing three green doors, each opening to disheveled offices that he avoided religiously. No placards marked the spaces. At the end of the hall there was one more door. He opened it without breaking stride and entered what was called the Puzzle Center.

It looked like a college dorm at finals.

Leo Pedanski stood with a start and spilled the remnants of his soda on a layer of papers that covered one of the room’s two desks. “Mr. Kudrow. Hi.”

Kudrow’s head twisted slowly as he surveyed the room. Dozens of empty red cans lay on the desks, on the floor next to overflowing wastebaskets, and atop equipment that had cost the taxpayers far more than they needed to pay. Stacks of paper rose to various heights almost everywhere that there was a surface to pile them. Both desks were littered with plastic wrappers. A third chair had been wedged into the room. The air smelled of sweat and junk food.

“Gentlemen,” he said in greeting. Craig Dean, taller than the boss by an inch and sporting an unkempt ponytail that had seen hardly a trim in a year, rose from a cross-legged position and stood next to Pedanski, whose hair was a mess of reddish-brown tangles. Vikram Patel, pudgy and balding at twenty seven, did not trust his legs at the moment and remained on the floor, arms hugging both knees to his chest. ‘Scared’ was a good word, Kudrow thought. “Redecorating?”

Leo Pedanski, the de-facto leader of the trio by virtue of his advanced age, ran a hand hard over his head and brought the other to meet it in a grasp behind his neck. He was to be the messenger. His caffeine-filled stomach roiled loudly. “No, but, uh…we’ve got a real problem.” A nervous half-chuckle trailed off his words.

“It’s the primary S-box,” Patel said, his voice cracking. “It was weak. I knew it was weak.”

Dean, a twenty-eight year old holder of two doctorates in theoretical mathematics and chaos theory, rotated his spindly body toward the accuser. “You damn Jethro, The primary S was mine! It was fine. It
is
fine!”

“Shut up,” Pedanski said with as much authority as he could summon. It wasn’t much. Their usually free flowing, sometimes sophomoric relationship had been virtually wiped out in the span of sixty hours. All because of a single phone call.

“The primary S-box?” Kudrow inquired somewhat hopefully. “Is this about MAYFLY?” He looked to Craig Dean, who stared back at him through John Lennon spectacles. It had to be about MAYFLY; that’s all it
could
be about. “You were doing a postmortem on MAYFLY, son, weren’t you? Did you find what might have compromised it?”

“Mr. Kudrow,” Pedanski stepped in, drawing the boss’s attention back to him. “It’s not MAYFLY. It’s KIWI.”

Kudrow’s spine straightened, his chin rising. Behind the gray tint his brown eyes flared. He heard Folger mutter
Oh shit
quietly behind. “What about KIWI?”

“We… It…” Pedanski paused and swallowed. “Someone knows it.”

“What do you mean ‘knows it’?” Kudrow asked, more forcefully than he normally would have in dealing with the animals. They were a special grouping, one that required his fatherly touch more than a tyrannical demand for an explanation. But his paternal streak had gone AWOL for the moment.

“We got a call,” Patel said between wet, teary sniffs. The computer engineer dragged the back of his arm across his nose and looked up to Kudrow. “Pedanski did, I mean.”

Kudrow’s eyes were snapping between the speakers. He finally locked on Pedanski and took a half step forward. He took a covert deep breath to retrieve some calm. His heart rate had nearly doubled in a minute. “From the top, Mr. Pedanski. Everything.”

Leo’s gulp for air was plain to see before he spoke. “Okay. You know the validation protocol for KIWI?”

“That was completed two years ago?” Kudrow responded. There was accusation in his rhetoric. “Yes.”

“We did the standard stuff,” Pedanski explained, though ‘standard’ only in their world. For a full year, two sets of paired Cray supercomputers, individually the most powerful pieces of computing equipment on the planet, had chewed at a piece of the digital trash produced when cleartext was subjected to KIWI. On the first day of the eleventh month the Crays found one character, a ‘C’, but didn’t know where in the sequence to place it. Thirty days later the animals completed the message for the frustrated computer wizards, placing the ‘C’ in the third space and filling in the rest.
Fuck you, Chip
, it read, an obvious slap at the innards of the Cray. KIWI at that time was the most secure cryptographic system ever seen. But, though the computer was the premiere destroyer of crypto systems, there was one other element that had to be considered. “Including the human element test. You know, the hidden message in those puzzle sections of magazines. Three different magazines, I thin—”

“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.”