The Dan Brown Enigma (7 page)

Even with Blythe's encouragement, support and collaboration on his first three novels, Brown had felt like giving up, so it's fair to say that without Blythe, Dan Brown would probably be nowhere.

Initially I had been indignant that the NSA was reading emails. But subsequently I realised their work constituted a fascinating moral grey area.

D
AN
B
ROWN

D
igital Fortress
was the first of Dan Brown’s novels and was the only one he wrote on spec. ‘The thrill of being a published author (
187 Men To Avoid
), combined with George Wieser’s words of encouragement, my newfound fascination with NSA, and the vacation reading of Sidney Sheldon’s
The Doomsday Conspiracy
, all had begun to give me confidence that I could indeed write a novel,’ he said. ‘I quite literally woke up one morning and decided to write a thriller that delved into NSA. That’s when I started writing
Digital Fortress
.’
[54]

Like all of Brown’s books, the core of the story is built around a puzzle that the protagonist must solve in a short space of time. Brown builds the pace of the book deftly, taking the reader from Spain to Washington and back again many times. He uses flashbacks to build background information then brings the reader back into the present to push the story forward. So how does
Digital Fortress
stack up against the Curzon Group’s five principles of thriller writing?

For its entertainment value, we can go to Brown for the answer: feedback from the
Digital Fortress
website was very positive. ‘I get a lot of email from excited readers,’ Brown said. ‘It seems people have really connected with the timely “moral issues” in the novel.’ Readers have also enjoyed the inside look at the National Security Agency (NSA) that Brown exposed in the book. ‘Every now and then I get an irate letter from some technician telling me that the gadgets in
Digital Fortress
could never exist in real life (they all do), and I have to forward some article or photograph confirming my research.’
[55]

But as we have seen, Brown is an author who is able to stretch or embellish the truth when it suits him. There is, however, no shortage of independent reviews of
Digital Fortress
. ‘I found the book fast-paced and engaging,’ said one. ‘I almost literally didn’t put it down until I was done. I don’t take many forays into the world of fiction, but if you like cyber-thrillers I highly recommend you pick this book up and read it.’
[56]

Another reviewer said it was an exciting read, that the subject matter was thought-provoking and that the plot was fascinating. ‘
Digital Fortress
is an example of the techno-thriller at its very best. But what makes
Digital Fortress
stand out from the crowd are its other elements: a real love story and an examination of the struggles between right and wrong and protection of the public versus the preservation of that same public’s privacy.’
[57]

John Barnes of the
Washington Pi Journal
reviewed
Digital Fortress
in 2004 and he too was complimentary. He said Brown had succeeded in taking him from one end of the story to the other in a single sitting. ‘Twists and turns are Brown’s stock in trade and he paces their unveiling in a manner that is properly sinister,’ he wrote. ‘I won’t claim this is Pulitzer Prize literature but it is a jolly good read.’

The website
Curled Up With A Good Book
, concluded that Brown had written a ‘cutting edge techno-thriller’. The reviewer also said that the book had pace like that of a speeding plane with copious amounts of suspense and with ‘interesting characterisations and a romantic entanglement thrown in for good measure,
Digital Fortress
compels the reader to wonder whether big brother is really watching everything everywhere.’
[58]

In his interview with Claire White, of the
Internet Writing Journal
web pages
,
Brown said that many people had emailed the website saying how much they enjoyed the book because it had other elements than computers. ‘I worry sometimes that, because we talk about cryptography and the NSA that people think, “Oh, it’s a computer book,” but it’s so much more than that.’
[59]

The book was also reviewed on Amazon’s website, where the general public get their chance to say what they think about a book. These are not professional reviews but the opinions of the readers must be taken into account in assessing how entertaining
Digital Fortress
is. ‘There are enough twists and turns to keep you guessing and a lot of high, gee-whiz-level information about encryption, code breaking, and the role they play in international politics,’ says one contributor. This reviewer also tells readers to take an entire afternoon and do nothing but read the book ensuring that you have enough ‘finger food on hand for supper, because you’ll probably want to read it from cover to cover.’

However, the reviews were not all roses. Brown has his detractors and once
The Da Vinci Code
had broken, sales of
Digital Fortress
rocketed, bringing the negative comments. Yet it may be that some of the bad reviews of
Digital Fortress
are by people who have an axe to grind with Brown because they disliked
The Da Vinci Code
.

For example, one reviewer said the romance in the book was cheesy and that it made a book ‘about national-level cryptography seem oversimplified into a romance novel that was set against a life-or-death backdrop.’ The reviewer went on to say that if the reader wanted to learn about the goings on at the NSA or about computer programming or codes then
Digital Fortress
was a good book to read but ‘for plot and style, it’s just the usual Dan Brown.’
[60]

Another reviewer said, ‘I was most disappointed to discover that the betraying character – which appears in all of his books and is, I think, supposed to shock readers – becomes ridiculously easy to identify.’
[61]

Finally, a review by Magda Healey published on the
Bookbag
website in July 2004 condemned
Digital Fortress
as a book to read if the reader has nothing else to do. She said that the writing was worse ‘than
The Da Vinci Code
,’ and that his characters were unrealistic and the dialogue was wooden. She did not recommend the book at all, giving it just two stars.

So there are good reviews and bad – most are good – but is
Digital Fortress
an entertaining read? There is one easy way to tell: sales figures. In 2005 the
Times Online
published the figures for Brown’s books and even then they were astounding. ‘
The Da Vinci Code
is estimated to have sold, 2,225,118 copies in Britain, and his two backlist titles
Digital Fortress
and
Deception Point
, previously unpublished here – have shifted over 600,000 copies each.’
[62]

Based on the reviews, the comments emailed to Brown and the sales figures, we can say that
Digital Fortress
meets the Curzon Group’s first principle of entertainment value and does so in spades. From the first page to the last it is filled with tension, pace and suspense. Whether it is good writing or not is another matter.

Digital Fortress
is an interesting story. It’s set inside the US National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors communications from around the world, via the internet and email, for anything that would be a threat to US security. The core of the NSA is a multi-billion dollar computer called TRANSLTR that has three million processors enabling it to decode any encrypted messages almost instantly and the NSA to pick up potential terrorist threats.

TRANSLTR is merrily decoding thousands of messages from around the world until suddenly it comes across a code that it can’t break. The agency calls in its top cryptographer, beautiful mathematical genius Susan Fletcher, to help break the deadlock. Without her knowledge, the agency has also brought her fiancé, David Becker, into the equation. An expert in foreign languages and a professor who has assisted the NSA before, Becker is sent to Spain to retrieve the ‘kill code’ or pass key that will enable TRANSLTR to break the code.

As the story unravels, we discover that a former employee of NSA’s Crypto division, the brilliant Ensei Tankado, has written this unbreakable code called Digital Fortress because he believes that TRANSLTR is immoral and that the world should be aware that the US is listening in to everything. However, Tankado is murdered in Spain before Becker can get to him. Becker believes the code is written on a ring that Tankado gave to a tourist just before he died and Becker needs to find that ring. From this moment on Becker is in a race against the clock to get the ring back while being hunted by an assassin bent on killing him.

Meanwhile, Susan Fletcher is working hard to break the code and as she does, she uncovers layers of lies and deception. The plot twists and turns as people she thinks she can trust are the ones who can’t be trusted and her world is turned on its head. She soon discovers that Digital Fortress is more than just an unbreakable code: it has the power to bring down the US government’s entire security systems, which, once breached, will open up all of the US government secrets – including the launch codes for nuclear missiles – to hackers, terrorists and any other malignant attack!

As we have seen Brown got his ‘big idea’ for the book while he was teaching English at Phillips Exeter. ‘In the spring of ’95, two US Secret Service agents showed up on the campus of Phillips Exeter and detained one of our students claiming he was a threat to national security. … He wasn’t, of course, and not much came of it. The incident however really stuck with me.’
[63]

Brown couldn’t understand how the Secret Service had known what the student had written in his email. It bothered him, so he began to do research to find the answer. The more he looked, the more shocked he was. ‘What I found out absolutely floored me. I found out there is an intelligence agency as large as the CIA… that only about two per cent of Americans knows exists.’ That agency was the NSA. ‘The agency functions like an enormous vacuum cleaner sucking in intelligence data from around the globe and processing it for subversive material. The NSA’s supercomputers scan email and other communiqués, looking for dangerous word combinations like “kill” and “Clinton” in the same sentence. The more I learned about this ultra-secret agency and the fascinating moral issues surrounding national security and civilian privacy, the more I realised it was a great backdrop for a novel. That’s when I started writing
Digital Fortress
.’

The second of the five principles of the Curzon Group is insight, so does the book reflect the world around it and provide insight on the subject matter? Brown researches all his novels meticulously. Most of this investigative work has been done with Blythe but the fact-finding for
Digital Fortress
he did himself and the research is evident throughout the novel. For example, in the opening chapters of
Digital Fortress
, Brown tells us about how NSA’s technical people were easily able to intercept email. This, he states, was in the early days of the internet in the 1980s: ‘The internet was not the new home computer revelation that most believed. It had been created by the Department of Defence three decades earlier – an enormous network of computers designed to provide secure government communication in the event of nuclear war.’

In the same section Brown goes on to write about how email became more difficult for the NSA to crack. He claims it was made more secure by the use of public-key encryption: ‘It consisted of easy-to-use, home-computer software that scrambled personal email messages in such a way that they were totally unreadable.’ At the other end of the email process, messages would come out looking like random letters and numbers. According to Brown, the only way to unscramble the email message ‘was to enter the sender’s “pass-key” – a secret series of characters that functioned much like a PIN number at an automatic teller.’

This idea of a pass-key is crucial to the story, because this is what is supposed to unlock Tankado’s code and stop the meltdown of all the secrets in the NSA’s databanks. ‘The pass-keys were generally quite long and complex; they carried all the information necessary to instruct the encryption algorithm, exactly what mathematical operations to follow to recreate the original message.’
[64]

In the book Brown states that the new pass-keys used chaos theory and multiple symbolic alphabets to scramble the messages into complete nonsense. The NSA’s computers were able to handle the first pass-keys because they were short and relatively easy to break using trial and error. ‘If a desired pass-key had ten digits, a computer was programmed to try every possibility between 0000000000 and 9999999999. Sooner or later the computer hit the correct sequence.’

Brown goes on tell us that this method was known as ‘brute force attack’, which, while time-consuming, was guaranteed to work. However, the pass-keys got longer because the ‘world got wise to the power of brute-force code-breaking.’ The time to break the codes increased from days to weeks, then to months and to years. By the mid-1990s the pass-keys used the full 256-character ASCII alphabet of letters, numbers and symbols, and ‘the number of different possibilities was in the neighbourhood of 10120th with 120 zeros behind it.’

Brown then states that at the time the NSA’s fastest computer, the Cray/Josephson II, took more than 19 years to break a 64-bit code in a brute force attack. To break this deadlock and speed up the code-breaking, the NSA set out to build a computer that was lightning fast. ‘The last of the three million stamp-sized processors was hand-soldered in place, the final internal programme was finished, the ceramic shell was welded shut. TRANSLTR had been born.’

This new supercomputer had three million processors working in parallel to break any code that it intercepted. It would use ‘the power of parallel processing as well as some highly classified advances in cleartext assessment to guess pass-keys and break codes,’ Brown writes in
Digital Fortress
. ‘It would derive its power not only from its staggering number of processors but also from new advances in quantum computing – an emerging technology that allowed information to be stored as quantum-mechanical states rather than solely as binary data.’