Deep Black

21

Nothing in the world was more depressing than a pure mathematician at middle age. Young, they were full of vim, vigor, and fresh answers to Fermat’s Last Theorem. When they hit thirty, however, they inevitably began tumbling downhill. In Rubens’ opinion, it wasn’t that they lost mental acuity. Instead they started to question things outside of math, and that threw them off. Questioning the sequence of prime numbers was one thing; questioning whether to change a haircut or have an affair was something else entirely. By the time they hit forty, the questions had done serious damage to the certainty required for top-level math.

And then, most devastatingly, they would ask the Impossible Question. This might be phrased many ways, but its most terse expression found its way to coffee cups throughout the complex: If I’m so smart, why ain’t I rich?

In a few cases, the result of asking the question was relatively benign — a bath in the stock market. Too often, however, Rubens had watched it lead to ashrams and mass marriages in baseball stadiums.

Or stadia, as a mathematician would insist they be called.

John Bibleria—“Johnny Bib” to his co-workers — was fifty-one, and a prime candidate for the stock market/stadia stage. He had joined the NSA out of Princeton. His area in the government was cryptoanalysis, but his true interests involved string theory, and during the early years of his career he had published several papers with impressive titles and even more impressive arrays of Greek letters in the text. He had also been responsible for realizing the Chinese were using a fractal code in the early 1990s.

The days of one individual “cracking a code” were long gone by the time Johnny joined the agency. “Codes”—lists of word-for-word substitutions — had been obsolete for a hundred years or more, and even the more complicated ciphers of the early Cold War seemed quaint. Modern encryption was done by translating plaintext into data streams through mathematical algorithms or formulas governed by keys. Teams of cryptoanalysts, cryptologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and programmers with overlapping abilities and responsibilities worked with cutting-edge computers to “solve” a cryptosystem.

But even with all that, Johnny Bib came as close as anyone to being a one-man show. To Rubens, his genius had little to do with his math, at least not in the way most people thought about math. What Bib at the height of his powers did as well as anyone in the world was intuit the significance of sequences. You didn’t need to know the precise words being used in a sentence if you knew that the sentence told a missile to launch. Simply knowing that allowed you to answer many questions. Did you want to know how many missiles there were? Count the sentences. Where they were? Look for the sentences. How they were aimed? Study the events before the sentence was uttered. Bib not only spotted the sentences; he also could come up with questions no one else had thought of that they would answer.

But Bib’s heyday had passed. Officially an Expert Cryptologic Mathematician, Johnny Bib was now an excellent team leader and an invaluable member of Rubens’ inner circle. But he was no longer a star’s star. Rubens, a connoisseur of genius, hated to see diminution. He looked at Johnny Bib and felt pain for the true heights the man’s mind might have reached.

Rubens had hopes, however — a few mathematicians were able to enter remission following the question stage. Whether this had to do with advancing senility or not, Rubens hadn’t yet decided.

Johnny Bib, standing over Rubens’ desk, pointed to the status sheet he’d just put down. The color of the sheet matched Johnny’s jacket.

“Now if you want my analysis,” started Bib.

“Actually, I don’t,” said Rubens. “We have plenty of analysts.”

“It’s the pattern that’s interesting,” said Johnny Bib. “Ten units, fuel purchases, obscure encryption, connection to Anderkov. Bingo.”

“Bingo,” said Rubens sarcastically.

“Russian coup,” said Johnny Bib.

“Bingo,” said Rubens.

“You can see it?”

“Not really.”

Johnny Bib blinked his owl eyes, then pushed back his longish hair, which had a habit of falling over his forehead and covering his right eye.

The E-mails that Bib’s group had selected from the vast array of intercepts harvested in the NSA’s Russia Military Project were, individually and collectively, benign — they were reports of fuel reserves in ten different Russian Army units. The fact that all of the units were east of the Urals did pique Rubens’ interest, as did the fact that they used network addresses formerly reserved for diplomatic channels. Most interesting, however — and this was Johnny Bib’s actual point — the messages used a very sophisticated but cumbersome asymmetrical or double-key encryption. Why go to so much trouble with information that was of relatively little strategic value?

“You really don’t see it?” asked Johnny Bib.

“Assume I’m playing devil’s advocate,” said Rubens.

“Ah,” said Johnny Bib, nodding knowingly.

“The CIA draft estimate doesn’t say who is organizing the coup,” said Rubens. He had obtained a copy of the draft from one of his usual sources even as Collins was leaving the Puzzle Palace; she had undoubtedly said it wasn’t prepared as a personal challenge to him.

Johnny Bib wrinkled his nose, fighting back a sneeze. He seemed to loathe the CIA people so badly he had an actual allergy to them.

“Are they holding back?” Rubens asked.

“They’re not smart enough to hold anything back.”

“Smart and devious do not go hand in glove, John. Who’s the leader of the coup? Vladimir Perovskaya, the defense minister?”

Johnny Bib stifled another sneeze by burying his nose in the crock of his arm. Rubens wondered if the agency ought to add etiquette and manners classes to its basic training regime.

“If you gave me access to the Wave Three findings,” said Johnny Bib finally, “perhaps we could pinpoint the players then.”

It was a variation of a common refrain — the intelligence expert asking for more intelligence. Wave Three, the program to take information off hard drives via aircraft, had not targeted government officials yet and, in fact, was currently on hold because of the shootdown in Siberia. But Johnny Bib wasn’t authorized to know that, which meant that the program represented a kind of Holy Grail to him — if only he had that information, he could solve the problem.

“You’re looking at me as if I don’t know about the program,” said Johnny Bib. “I was the one who invented the process for discerning significant magnetic wave patterns in real time. You’ve forgotten.”

“What wave patterns?” said Rubens. “And you’re exaggerating your role.”

The mathematician began shaking his head violently.

“Relax, Johnny. Relax.” Rubens realized he had gone a little too far. “Nothing in the data contributes to this.”

Johnny continued to shake his head. Rubens sighed.

“You are an important contributor to our operation,” Rubens told him. “Need I say more?”

Though still pouting, the mathematician stopped shaking his head.

“Do we have anything at all about our aircraft?” Rubens asked. “The PVO intercepts — that’s what we need.”

“It was a renegade unit. It’s one of the ones that sent the E-mails.”

“Now that’s interesting. What else do we know about it?”

Johnny pushed his hair back, then stuffed his arms into his pockets. A good sign — it meant he was thinking about something he hadn’t considered before.

“We have no other data at all,” said Johnny. “No intercepts from the unit.” Something had suddenly clicked in his complicated mind. “Yes. Well, yes. Yes. A subunit — if we go far enough back in the library, if we look at its creation — perhaps the person who created it: Perovskaya?”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” said Rubens. He slid back in his seat. He still wasn’t sure about the coup prediction, but they were definitely making progress. A light began blinking on his phone console. “I have to answer that.”

Johnny Bib scowled but then nodded. “I’ll update you when we have something.”

“Two hours,” said Rubens. “Every two hours.”

Johnny nodded, then closed the door behind him — a good sign.

“Karr’s team is being tracked by a MiG similar to the one that took Wave Three down,” said Telach when he picked up the line to the Art Room.

“I’ll be right there.”