Simple Simon

Chapter Two 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.”

“Could someone be screwing with us, Nick?” Folger asked quietly over his boss’s shoulder. “Someone inside or outside trying to tweak us? You know, to see how we handle a possible breech?”

Kudrow considered that and looked to Dean. Pedanski had turned away and was staring at the ceiling. “Who knew what the cleartext was in the puzzle?”

“Just the three of us,” Dean answered. “That was the Agent Ninety-nine thing. We were foolin’ around one day and picked that for the identifier. We didn’t tell anyone about it. Not even you or Mr. Folger. At least I didn’t.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Patel demanded.

“You two, enough!” Pedanski glared at them, forcing them both into retreat. The anger stanched the tears he seemed ready to loose. “Mr. Kudrow, all the KIWI machines are going to be in and running in a few weeks.”

“Ninety-five percent are in use now, Nick,” Folger said softly. “FBI’s the last to go on line. The embassies, DoD, CIA, they’re all using it now. And we’ve got no fallback, Nick, not with MAYFLY maybe being leaky.”

Kudrow said nothing for a moment after his assistant finished speaking. Neither did any of the animals. Instead he mentally tallied just how bad the situation could be if they were not being screwed with, which he doubted anyway. He wasn’t assuaged by the result. Disaster was what he thought.

“You have the call on tape?” Kudrow asked.

“Of course,” Pedanski answered. “Sir, shouldn’t we—”

“And the trace gear was working?”

Pedanski nodded to the boss. “The call came from Chicago.”

There were two options, Kudrow quickly decided. Pull the plug on KIWI, tell its users that it was not the unbreakable monster he’d promised it to be, and flush what he’d worked so hard for down the can. Because if KIWI was no good, as Brad had said, there was nothing to switch to. Nothing feasible that could accommodate all the users who’d gone to KIWI. Ten billion dollars, Kudrow thought. Wasted. Congress would not be happy. He would be the whipping boy, of course, sitting at a table covered by a field of green in some congressional hearing room off limits to cameras. He’d be privately destroyed by the men and women whose lives he knew were tangles of deceit and dishonor. And once his butt was bared…

G. Nicholas Kudrow had not made many friends in his long government career, but he had forced many alliances. He had not always followed the book, obeyed every law, or thought much of consequences other than how they could be avoided. He had used people, gathered information on them, held it over their head, threatened, promised favors, persuaded, demanded.

But he had done all this in pursuit of getting the job done. He had made the nation’s communications secure, and in doing so had secured his place in the future. He would have a long, quietly illustrious career, and he would someday be remembered in the texts that memorialized such things as the ‘Father of KIWI’. KIWI might still be in use then. That was what he had believed. Until now.

Yes, dumping KIWI was option one, and Kudrow knew without hesitation it was unacceptable.

Option two was the better course…for the country. Yes, for everyone. “I want a copy of the tape and the trace info on my desk in ten minutes.”

Pedanski nodded, chewing his lower lip and digging fiercely at the carpet with the toes of his Reeboks. “But, Mr. Kudrow…”

“What?” Kudrow looked at each of the animals individually, and gave his assistant a glance for surety’s sake. “If someone is playing with us, gentlemen, testing us, they will not expect that we just dump the system you three designed. And if there is a weakness in your system, we have to find out what that is, and how whoever cracked it did so. In either instance the proper course is to investigate. I will see to that.” He looked over his shoulder to Folger. “Shut this room down. Assign anyone who is scheduled to work in here to other duties. Put them on the MAYFLY dissection. I don’t care. If that phone rings again I don’t want anyone other than a KIWI team member answering…just in case. Understood?”

“Yesss,” Folger replied breathily.

“You three work out a schedule to cover this place,” Kudrow instructed. He thought Patel ready to complain, but instead saw the small, dark head fall between the worn knees of his jeans. “Understood?”

After three tentative nods Kudrow turned and left. He stopped in the hall just outside the door and slid his hands into his pockets. Brad Folger followed him out and studied the government blue carpet at his feet. The boss hadn’t been able to swing a more pleasing gray sisal.

“KIWI’s all we have, Nick,” Folger said once again, as though speaking of the air they breathed.

“All the more reason not to throw it away because of one phone call.” Kudrow looked down the hallway, briefly at each door, then to the stairs that led up from the basement. It was the only way out. “We’ll fix this.”

“How?”

Kudrow began to walk toward the stairs, passing the three green doors as he did. “It won’t be a problem,” he answered with his back to his assistant, then disappeared up the staircase.

“So nothing?” Art Jefferson asked, looking up from the report.

“Preliminarily, no,” Special Agent Denise Green answered. “That’s just a quickie, remember.”

“I know,” Art acknowledged. “Bob said the CIA is anxious.”

Green nodded and took the report back from the A-SAC. She saw him close his eyes as his glasses came off. “You knew Chappell, didn’t you?”

“Briefly,” Art answered. Surely not long or well enough to know some of the things the report had just told him. To each is own, Art usually thought, but in this case it looked like Vince Chappell’s sexual tastes only made Keiko Kimura’s job easier. ‘Subject’s acquaintances report a propensity for B & D (bondage and domination) in sexual situations.’ “Very briefly.”

“Anything else?” Green asked.

Art glanced at his desk clock, and stood in a hurry. “Nope. Gotta run. Make sure I have the full report by Friday.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Please, no ‘sirs’,” Art said as be hurried by the youngish agent. “I’m old enough as it is.”

The Chicago Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is located on the 11th, 12th, and 13th floors of the Federal Building on South Dearborn Street. Several blocks due west the Sears Tower rises toward the sky in stark black steps, and on late summer afternoons when the sun is deep in the northern hemisphere the Tower casts a shadow that leaves the west-facing Bureau offices in a cooling shade.

The office Art rushed out of as winter was melting into a chilly spring had spears of bright afternoon light filling its space, but the room he arrived at one floor down from 13 a minute later knew no such measure of the day. Tucked between a conference room and file storage, and most importantly just feet from the coffee and soda machines, Communications was a windowless cube longer than wide, and on its door was a keypad entry system. Art fumbled mentally for the right number, mistakenly tried the one L.A. used for its Com room, and knocked hard on the door after giving up. “A-SAC here.”

“Just a minute.” A shrill, rolling squeal came from behind the door before it opened. When it did, a pleasant but serious face looked up at Art through the opening. “Agent Jefferson,” Special Agent Nelson Van Horn said in greeting. He leaned forward in a non-motorized wheelchair, straight brown hair swept to the left, eyes dark but susceptible to a blue tint in the right light. “Memory trouble?”

Art saw the agent’s face light up in jest. “All right, Nels. I could say that thing needs some oil on the hubs, but I’m too po-lite to do so.”

Van Horn wheeled back and let the A-SAC in, then closed the door. It locked and alarmed itself automatically. “Here to see the new toy?”

“That I am.” Art walked deep into the Com room, past fax machines, teletypes, computers, phones, and stopped just short of a three-foot square polished metal cube that had been brought into the space through a now-patched hole in the west wall. He saw wires snaking from it, one each to the fax machines and phones, the computers, and one to a workstation that lacked a chair. Van Horn wheeled himself up to that one and reached over to pat the stainless steel cube.

“Our baby.”

“It’s a big damn thing,” Art commented. He stepped close and touched it. His fingers tingled at the coldness of its metal surface.

“That’s just the shell,” Van Horn said. He rolled one wheel back so he faced the A-SAC. “That’s so someone can’t walk in here and take it with them. The thing weighs twelve hundred pounds, but…” He leaned conspiratorially close. “…my sources say the actual works of it are no bigger than a shoe box. And don’t worry about someone cutting into it; it’s pressurized with some inert gas so that if the pressure drops some sort of thing destroys the innards. Real James Bond stuff, eh?”

Art nodded, though he didn’t understand. What mattered was that their communications were supposed to be rock solid secure now. The rest of the field office still had unsecure phones and faxes, but all sensitive communications took place in here. “So this is the KIWI thing. As long as it works…”

Van Horn smiled and shook his head. He did understand the basics of code gear — though he had no illusions about ever knowing the secrets inside the silver cube — a knowledge gained during four years at MIT and several more at Harvard. At first he’d studied computer and number theory, and then, being a shrewd young fellow, decided that the brotherhood of lawyers had far too few who would be qualified to handle the cases of the burgeoning electronic frontier. Piracy, electronic fraud, and the like. But somewhere along the way to a JD he had decided that some practical experience in the law might help, and the FBI had seemed all too eager to add to his resume.

But a strange thing happened then. Two things, actually. One, he found that he liked, truly enjoyed doing what a Bureau man did. Two, while enjoying what he did he caught a slug in a Philly shootout with some well armed bank robbers. Scratch two bad guys and the use of his body below the waist.

So his legs didn’t work? So what? The Bureau had agreed, and though he didn’t chase bad guys in the street anymore, he sometimes chased them in the digital realm, and was the Chicago office’s Com clerk, the agent responsible for the security and well being of the crypto gear.

And KIWI had just made his life a whole lot less stressful. “It will work,” Van Horn assured the A-SAC. He pointed to a three inch space behind the cube. “See that. Six phone lines come in. You know what comes over those? Garbage. Electronic noise. It goes through KIWI — again, from my sources, with some sort of time keyed three step decryption routine — and into readable info or conversation in here. Phone, fax, or computer. Even the old teletype.” He wondered when the Bureau would finally get rid of that, considering that a fax was essentially the same thing. “And,” he added, grabbing a blank sheet of paper from a tray next to a laser printer, “let’s say that for some reason the phone lines are down, like when the loop flooded, and we need to get a coded message out.” Van Horn held up the blank paper. “We enter our message through this station and call for a loop back. The KIWI gear encrypts the message and prints it out. On this paper you’d see nonsense, but all the operator of another KIWI machine would have to do is enter what he sees on the paper into their station and call for a loop back decryption and…bingo! Out it comes making complete sense. Slow, for sure, and it won’t work for the phones, but if we have to we could courier the message. It’s a great backup when Ma Bell screws up.”

Blah blah blah blah blah. Art knew Van Horn might as well have been speaking in some tongue derived from Sanskrit. “So the communications are going to be secure?”

Van Horn allowed a chuckle and nodded. “Yes, they are.” He reached over and patted KIWI again. “Trust us.”

“Okay,” Art said with resignation. He would have to succumb to the technology sooner or later. “Show me what she’s got.”

Several hundred miles away a phone was being answered by a man with red hair. The call was brief and to the point. A favor was needed, and the red-haired man still owed much to the person who was requesting the favor. When he completed this task the debt would be nearly repaid. He hung up the phone and began to pack, confident he could make short work of things.

Not far from where the call to the red-haired man was placed, a car drove past a blue mailbox in northern Maryland and slowed. The driver, an Asian man in a gray suit, braked the silver Lexus and noted a mark on the rounded top of the box. He parked his car and withdrew a prepared postcard from his coat. It was addressed to his mother in Kyoto, and he stepped from the vehicle to drop it in the box. As he did he wiped off the mark.

He got back in the car and drove away at a normal speed. An hour later he had dinner with a friend in Washington, and after they were finished that friend, another Asian man, drove to a bar in College Park, near the University of Maryland, and ordered an Asahi before going to the restroom. The stalls with doors were empty. He entered the third one and closed the door.

Someone outside the stall might have heard the squeak of screws turning or the click of the metal tissue holder coming apart. Or possibly the crackle of paper unfolding. But there was no one to listen.

A minute later the Asian man flushed the toilet, washed his hands, and dried them under an air drier.

Back in the bar he took his beer by the neck and drew long on it, but left it half full and walked out the door. He had to get back to the office quickly. This information could not wait.