The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 8

Even with a recent security clearance, it took weeks for me to get my badge. I had to take a polygraph—apparently even current employees were now getting them quarterly, ever since Edward Snowden had disclosed several thousand classified documents to journalists back in 2013. I also had to update and verify my security paperwork, take a drug test, and list in detail any relationships I had with foreign nationals.

While I waited, I visited Paul, sometimes several times a day. He gained strength quickly, much faster than the doctors seemed to expect. Finally, the hospital staff disconnected his IV and pronounced him fit for discharge. My mom and I came to pick him up. Before we could take him, a nurse repeated Dr. Chu’s earlier instructions about his prescribed sulfadimethoxime.

“Don’t skip any doses,” she said. “If you miss one, take it as soon as you realize. It’s dormant now, and you’ll start feeling fine, but it can come back. If it does, it’ll be resistant to the medication, and it will hit you a lot worse.

“Stay in bed for a week, even if you start to feel better. Drink plenty of fluids. Your body needs a lot of energy to fight this off, so take it easy.” To Mom, she said, “If his fever goes above 103 degrees, or you notice any other symptoms—any rashes, lesions, discoloration, difficulty breathing, pain in other places in his body—then he needs to see a doctor right away.”

We agreed to follow these instructions to the letter, and she brought a wheelchair to cart him out to the lobby. Once there, Paul stood, and though he was still pale and coughed a lot, he seemed his normal self. He walked out to the car, and we all drove back home.

The next week was hard. Paul gained strength and looked healthier every day, but he was morose and irritable. I knew it was a kind of survivor’s guilt, a struggle against the apparent wrongness of his continued existence when everyone else involved in the incident was dead. It implied something supernatural, that he had been preserved for some higher purpose. It put a pressure on his life, as if he were living it for all of the people who had died. Maisie most of all, whom he had failed to save.

At least, I thought that’s what he was thinking. He didn’t say much, and he resisted any attempts on my part to broach the subject. I even suggested once that he ought to consider seeing a therapist, but he dismissed the idea. “I’m sad,” he said. “It’ll pass eventually, but for right now, that’s how it is. I’m allowed to be sad, aren’t I?” I admitted that he was and let it drop.

As he recovered, Paul started to move around a lot more. He tired of sitting still and watching daytime television. He was lucid enough to play chess, which he always won, and Scrabble, which I did.

One evening, he took me aside and showed me an online article from Folha de S. Paulo, a Brazilian newspaper. I skimmed the Portuguese, taking in the meaning without processing every detail. It reported a dramatic increase in the number of fungal lung infection cases in the Pará and Amazonas states, including a large number of deaths. “Don’t you see what this means?” Paul said.

“What?”

“If there’s an epidemic, some new fungus that’s getting around, then Maisie wasn’t my fault.”

I gave him a hard look. “She was never your fault.”

“I’m the one that took her through the jungle. I gave her mushrooms. I’m supposed to know about these things.”

I wanted to argue with him, but it seemed better to let it go. “You’re right,” I said. “She could have picked up that infection even if she’d never met you.”

“She was a great person,” Paul said. “Nothing was ever going to come of it, between us, not living on opposite sides of the country. But she didn’t deserve to die.”

I couldn’t disagree with that. “I’m sure she didn’t,” I said. “I’m sorry she couldn’t have lived as well. But I’m glad you’re alive.”

Finally, I was given my badge—with surprisingly little pomp for what was to me a momentous occurrence—and told to report on Monday morning to my new job.

FANX was a pretty big place, but it was nothing compared to Fort Meade. The NSA Headquarters was the size of a city, complete with bank, post office, hair salon, movie theater, and medical center. It was home to thousands of people and a daily place of work for thousands more. The fact that so many other people were doing the same thing dulled none of my excitement, however, when I pulled off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and joined the stream of cars onto Savage Road, my very own badge around my neck.

From a distance, the obsidian glass of the giant headquarters building caught the eye, but the true scope of the place wasn’t immediately obvious. The road brought me between two guard towers, beyond which a pair of ten-foot fences topped with razor wire marked the edge of the property. Between the fences, guard dogs patrolled, and the soldiers at the gate wore fatigues and carried the biggest guns I’d ever seen.

I stopped at the checkpoint, holding up my badge, which had my picture and name printed on it. I had spent most of the weekend sneaking looks at it, trying it on, and admiring myself in the mirror. The soldier at the gate scrutinized it and compared it to my face. I donned my most serious secret agent expression and nodded at him smartly when he handed it back. He ignored me, already looking toward the next car.

The misunderstanding at the FANX gate a few weeks earlier had been cleared up without too much difficulty. Apparently I wasn’t the first idiot visitor to try to back up in the exit lane, though I was the first to actually shred my tires on the security spikes. Once the car was thoroughly searched, the soldiers had pushed it out of the way—requiring eight of them to actually lift the back of the car off of the spikes—and I had called the same bemused tow truck driver to retrieve yet another car of mine from the NSA facility.

My employee badge allowed me to bypass the K-9 search, and I rolled right into one of several enormous parking garages. I was still driving my mom’s car, now with a new set of tires. I had promised to repay her for the tires the moment I got my first paycheck, and to buy a car of my own soon after that.

I walked toward the building, breathing the fresh air and admiring my surroundings. The high fences, the concrete stanchions designed to stop a tank, the towers bristling with antennas and manned with armed soldiers—all of it combined to make me feel like I was special, someone worthy of being trusted with the secrets of the United States government. I was entering the sanctum sanctorum, a place very few people—comparatively—were permitted to go.

If I hadn’t already been inclined to approve of everything I saw, I might have been disappointed by the working facilities in Melody Muniz’s room. I had envisioned a state-of-the-art mission center, huge wall displays with the political status of the world, intense and busy agents working at high-tech stations. Kind of like Houston’s Mission Control, but futuristic and top secret. Instead, her group worked in a basement office with burnt orange cubicles that looked fifty years old. It could have been an office in any aging tech company in the country, probably one whose stock was plummeting. A low hum permeated the space, like the background engine noise in an airplane.

The cubicles were arranged in quads, four seats each, and there were three quads in the room, plus a tiny kitchen area and an office for Melody. That made twelve team members, including Melody, with me as the thirteenth. Not that I was superstitious or anything.

Melody took me on the tour, introducing me to each of the members of the team. They were mostly young, and friendly enough, but I forgot their names almost as soon as I met them. Names had never been my strength.

I did notice that seven of the twelve were women, a higher percentage than I had expected, and what I would later find out was well above the NSA average. I mentioned it to Melody, who shrugged and said, “Women don’t posture. There’s no room on this team for personal ambition or for trying to appear to be something you’re not. If I get even a hint of that, I’m not interested. Your average male intelligence agent, well…”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

“This will be your quad,” Melody said. The other three chairs were taken by an older white man with a fringe of white hair at the back of his head, an Asian woman with a slender face and large glasses, and Shaunessy Brennan.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Shaunessy said.

Melody ignored her. “And this will be your seat.” The fourth spot had a sagging swivel chair with a broken arm, and no computer.

“You mean you vouched for him? After he pulled that stunt?” Shaunessy said.

“We were told to hack into the account,” I said, for what seemed like the twentieth time. “I was following instructions.”

“He’s part of the team, for better or worse,” Melody said, and that seemed to end the discussion. To me, she added, “We’ll get you a machine and a better chair. Office furniture requisitions take forever around here. You’ll need your own account as well.”

“Don’t worry, he can just hack into somebody else’s,” Shaunessy said. “Though I don’t know why he needs a computer at all. Just give him a pencil and a stack of paper.”

“Why don’t you come with me for now, and we’ll get you set up as best we can,” Melody said.

I followed her back to her office. It was crowded with knickknacks, mostly geekware of some kind or another. I saw a binary clock, a chess set with a half-finished game, and a plush Cthulhu. Her bulletin board had a photo of a little girl—I was guessing a granddaughter—dressed as Chewbacca, and a hand-lettered sign that read TANSTAAFL.

Melody sat in her swivel chair with the same elegance she might have if it were a throne. “Welcome to the team,” she said formally.

I took the chair opposite her desk. “Thank you. Just what team is this?”

“The team of misfits,” she said. It seemed to be a joke, but she didn’t smile. “I’d like to say we do the jobs nobody else can do. But often we just do the jobs nobody else wants to do.”

I didn’t answer. My eyes roamed the office and settled on the chess set. White was a knight up, but its pawn structure had been demolished. I liked Black’s chances better.

“The vast majority of all traffic these days is encoded with public key encryption,” Melody said. “Which, I’m sorry to say, is unbreakable.”

I waited. The whirring noise in the background was the only sound. “As far as most people think,” I prompted her.

“I’m afraid not,” she said. “RSA encryption really is unbreakable, if it’s done right. We have more compute power than anyone else in the world, and we can’t touch it.”

“But this is the NSA,” I said.

She sighed. “Then I guess your disillusionment starts here. You’re a mathematician. Do I really have to give you a primer on big numbers?”

“But… the NSA,” I said.

“2048-bit encryption. The kind your phone can manage in a few milliseconds.

How many possible keys is that?”

“2²⁰⁴⁸,” I said immediately.

“Which means that to find your key in a brute force attack, I need to make 2²⁰⁴⁸ guesses. Or half of that, on average.”

“But you don’t brute force it,” I said. “Come on, you’ve got the Sieve of Atkin, at the very least, to narrow the guesswork, and you’ve probably got a lot better tricks than that.”

“We do,” she said, the hint of a smile playing around her lips. “But bear with me. Say I have a computer that costs one dollar and can make a billion guesses a second. We’re not even in the ballpark there, but let’s just imagine such a computer exists. How many computers would I need to guess your key in, say, a million years?”

“Brute force?” I did the math. “A billion is 2³⁰, give or take. A year is maybe 2²⁵, so a million years is 2⁴⁵… altogether, call it 2¹⁹⁷³,” I said.

“And how much do you think we can knock off with prime sieving?”

“That allows you to skip all the non-prime numbers,” I said. “The rule of thumb is an average separation of 2.3 primes per digit, so with numbers of that size, I’m going to guess you have a prime every, what, one or two thousand?”

“Which brings it down to what?”

“2¹⁹⁶⁹,” I said. “Ish.”

“And do you think we have 2¹⁹⁶⁹ computers?”

My faith in the NSA was waning, and I was starting to feel a little foolish. “No.”

“Or 2¹⁹⁶⁹ dollars to buy them?”

I sighed. “I get the picture. I just thought that there would be, you know, another way. That somebody would have invented something by now to crack it.”

Melody smiled beatifically. “Now don’t despair. I said properly encrypted messages were unbreakable, but, fortunately for us, very few messages are properly encrypted. Even now, less than ten percent of HTTP traffic goes through SSL, and of those that do, the vast majority use the primes hardcoded in their key exchange software. Software packages that do the encryption can have bugs, which we can exploit if we find them or know about them. Also, although the message might be sent encrypted, it has to be decrypted on the other side, and that computer system itself might be vulnerable to attack.”

“So… that’s what this team does?”

“No. The NSA already has thousands of hackers, algorithm experts, and mathematicians who work on those problems. We have experts on every operating system and software package out there, teams that invent ways to identify non-randomness, teams that look for ways to knock an order of magnitude or two off of the time it takes to crunch through a trillion keys.”

“But not us.”

“No. Nothing so banal. We work on messages that aren’t public key encrypted. That’s a very small percentage of the overall traffic. Usually, that means they use some old tried and true method, and can be cracked by a Raspberry Pi with one hand tied behind its back. Occasionally, though, we get messages that aren’t encrypted with any recognized variation of obsolete technique, and we can’t read them. I’ll be honest with you: most of those are never cracked. But we’re the team that gets to try.”

I couldn’t help grinning. “Sounds like just my kind of team.”

“It’s not glamorous, and it’s not all that valued. I have to constantly fight to keep funding. A lot of the messages we wrestle against probably aren’t even meaningful at all—just scrambled signals that were encoded wrong or garbled by atmosphere or bad equipment. But every once in a while, we crack something that nobody else could.”

“And that’s not valued?” I asked.

She blew out a long breath and rubbed the back of her neck. “You have to understand, the vast majority of the messages the NSA intercepts have no intelligence value whatsoever. We go for quantity, not quality, and then try to pick the needles out of the haystack. That means that even when we triumph and crack an indecipherable message, it’s just as likely to be somebody’s grocery list as it is to be something important.”

She was trying to lower my expectations, but it wasn’t working. I had dreamed about doing this for so long that nothing she could say would lessen my excitement. I was going to pit my mind against the enemies of the United States, and I was going to win. The shabby facilities, Shaunessy’s disapproval, none of it mattered. I worked for the NSA.

“So, welcome to the team,” Melody said. “Sorry about the seat. We’ll get that replaced, and get you a machine and an account as soon as possible.”

“What’s the noise?” I asked.

She looked confused. “What noise?”

“That constant humming sound. It’s like we’re in a wind tunnel.”

“Ah.” She nodded in comprehension. “I’m so used to it, I don’t hear it anymore. Come with me, and I’ll show you.”

We walked back through the cubicles to the back of the room, to a large wooden door with a keypad. Melody passed her badge over the keypad, which beeped and turned its indicator light from red to orange. She pressed a series of numbers. The light turned green, and a heavy clunk indicated an electromagnetic locking system unlatching. She opened the door, and the whirring sound grew much louder.

We walked through into a cavernous room. I couldn’t have been more surprised if the door had led directly to the White House. The ceiling was probably twenty feet high, and we were near the top of it. A flight of stairs led down to the floor. For as far as I could see, there were rows and rows of rack-mounted servers, probably thousands of them. Despite all the heat the machines must generate, the air was frigid.

“The server room,” she said. “And this isn’t the end. We have a hundred thousand square feet of it. Not nearly enough to crack a single properly encoded message with a 128-bit RSA key, mind you. But give us enough information, and we can launch quite an attack on a lot of things.”

There were a few people among the racks, but the room was mostly empty. One person was riding a bicycle down one of the aisles, which seemed like a good idea, given the amount of distance there was to cover. I noticed that the doorway we had come through was significantly thicker than it needed to be and had grooves on both sides. I asked Melody about it.

“There’s a steel cage in the wall above the doorway,” she said. “In the case of an attack on the building, it and others like it would crash down, blocking the entrances and making it extremely difficult for anyone outside this room to get in.”

“And anyone inside to get out,” I said.

“Well, yes. But in the unlikely event that this building is successfully breached by an enemy force, you’re probably safer locked in here than anywhere else.”

I also commented on what looked like a ridiculously large yellow locker marked Emergency. “What are they storing in there, automatic weapons?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” Melody said. “But that’s NSA bureaucracy at its best. It probably took a committee three months to decide on what to put in that locker, and I’ll bet if you actually had an emergency, you’d find it contained every possible thing you could think of, except for the one thing you need.”

We retreated to the office, and Melody closed the door, which latched with an audible clunk. “I have to catch a plane to Germany this afternoon,” she said. “I’ll make sure I get the ball rolling on getting you a machine and an account, but you’ll have to get the team to show you the ropes.”

That took the smile off my face. “Wait. You’re leaving? For how long?”

“Just a week. You’ll be fine. It’ll take a while for you to learn the organization, the security procedures. You’ll have some more mandatory classes to take. The week will go quickly. Just do me a favor.”

“What?”

“No more trouble with security. I don’t think I could rescue you a third time.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

She held my gaze. “I hope your best is good enough. I want you to be here when I get back.”