The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 2

When I drove my battered Nissan through the NSA gate the next morning, I felt hopeful but nervous. I knew I had a lot to overcome. My school record wasn’t exactly stellar, and although I hadn’t been convicted of any felonies, or anything else that would directly interfere with a security clearance, there were some things in my history that were hard to explain.

The screening and interview process took place at the Friendship Annex, a surprisingly jolly name for a complex that housed thousands of employees ranging from cyber espionage experts to signals intelligence analysts in the world’s largest intelligence agency. The Friendship Annex, or FANX, was a twenty minute drive away from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. It had been named after the nearby Friendship International Airport, which had since been given a more dignified title. I thought they should have renamed the NSA complex, too. The Crypto Annex, perhaps, or the Annex of Cyber Warfare.

Two armed MPs scrutinized my driver’s license and application letter. They took so long checking their list that I started to get nervous, but eventually they waved me on. At the next checkpoint, I was asked to step out of my car while a K-9 agent and his German shepherd checked it for explosives. Nobody smiled. It was a serious place, for a serious purpose. It was a place I wanted to belong.

My upbringing gave me an appreciation for the importance of good operational security. Even 256-bit encryption didn’t keep your message safe if the enemy had access to your private key. A password wasn’t secure if you told it to someone who said they worked for the data center. In a world more and more governed by computers, people were often the weakest link.

I pulled up to FANX III at 7:00 a.m., two hours early. They let me in, which was fortunate, because it was one of the coldest days of the year, and my Nissan’s heater didn’t work anymore. The security guard watched as I untangled two scarves, gloves, a hat, and a coat, and put them on the conveyor belt to be X-rayed. My wallet and keys followed them, and I stepped through the metal detector without a hitch. Finally, they gave me a bright red-and-white striped badge with “Visitor—One Day Only” stamped on the front in two-inch high letters.

I sat in a molded plastic chair next to a vending machine. I was hungry, having skipped breakfast to make sure I had time to find where I was supposed to go, but the vending machine ate my dollar bill without relinquishing my chosen candy bar. The metal spiral turned, but the bar clung tenaciously to its position, refusing to fall. The next customer would probably get two for his money, but I was out of cash. I thought about shaking the machine, but I thought that might not give the right impression to my potential employers.

I slouched in the chair, watching a flat-screen television mounted on the wall that was set on endless loop. It showed a two-minute video extolling the virtues of the NSA. It was called Information Is Power, and it featured clips of high-tension battle scenes and a deep male voiceover saying things like “Intelligence saves lives on the battlefield,” and “We protect our nation’s borders through global cryptologic dominance.” The first time, I thought it was awesome. By the fifth time, I had it memorized. By the tenth, I had fallen asleep.

I woke up at 9:05 with a stale taste in my mouth and sense of panic, which only intensified when I realized my name was being called. The lobby, which had been empty, was now full of candidates. I thanked the receptionist who was calling my name and rushed down the hallway she indicated. My interview letter said I would be interviewed in room thirty-two by a Ms. Shaunessy Brennan. I pictured a red-haired Irish woman, her fiery locks tied back and a merry twinkle in her eye. When I peeked into the room, however, a young black woman sat there with her arms crossed, wearing a scowl. “Um, hello?” I said.

“Neil Johns?”

I halted. “Yes.”

“You’re late.”

“Oh. My paper said a Ms. Brennan.”

“That’s me.”

“Right. Sorry, I just thought…”

“You didn’t think there were any black women in Ireland?” Her voice was steel, and I now realized there was a bit of an Irish flavor to her vowels.

“Apologies,” I said.

She stood to shake my hand. She was young and fit, dressed in black slacks and a loose green blouse, with long hair twisted into tight braids and pulled back in a silver clasp. Her handshake was businesslike and cold.

I sat down and tried a smile. “Shaunessy, that’s a lovely name.”

Her look impaled me to the chair.

After that, it only got worse. She asked me nothing about the WWII-era ciphers I’d invented in my spare time, nor did she quiz me on famous cryptologists of history, which I would have knocked out of the park. There’s a certain kind of person I can impress with charm and a winning smile, but Shaunessy Brennan was not one of them. Her baleful gaze didn’t falter, no matter how many witticisms I attempted, and soon I stopped trying. I sensed that my dream of following in my father’s footsteps was about to die.

Her accent was beautiful, light and musical, and soon I found myself listening to the sound of her voice instead of what she was saying.

“Mr. Johns?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. I was thinking.”

“You do realize,” she said, “that you applied to the Computer Science division of Signals Intelligence? We do large-scale computing. Practically everyone in this division has advanced degrees in Computer Science. You don’t seem to have any formal computing education at all.”

“I’m pretty good at math.”

“With three failed attempts at a degree to show for it.”

I shrugged. “Signals Intelligence seemed like my best shot. I don’t know anything about network security, and I haven’t really studied any foreign languages.”

She frowned. “Your resume says you know Portuguese.”

“Well, yeah. I kind of grew up in Brazil, so Portuguese is easy. I know a little Spanish, too. And I can get by in Tupi-Guarani.”

“But you don’t know any foreign languages,” she said, deadpan.

“I wasn’t counting those because I learned them as a kid. I haven’t learned any recently, as an adult.” She raised an eyebrow. “Which, granted, hasn’t been very long,” I pushed on, rambling now. “I mean, I don’t know any of the really important languages, like Arabic or Russian or Chinese. I’m guessing you don’t get much signals traffic in Tupi-Guarani.”

Her face was impassive. “Let’s talk about your school record.”

I would have rather not, but it didn’t seem helpful to say so.

“It says here that over the course of three years, you managed to be expelled from MIT, Princeton, and Carnegie Mellon.” She looked at me over the top of my resume. “An impressive feat, I suppose, but not in a good way.”

“I was young then,” I said. “It was a long time ago.”

She squinted at me. “How old are you now?”

“Twenty-one.”

She riffled through the papers in front of her. “You started at MIT when you were sixteen,” she said. “You were expelled a year later. Admitted to Princeton at seventeen, and expelled a year after that. Carnegie Mellon at eighteen, and that time you lasted only two months.”

Her eyebrows asked the question.

“That last one wasn’t my fault,” I said. “I thought the university president was embezzling funds. I did a probability analysis, based on the donation profile of similar schools, the number of attending students and the published scholarship numbers, and the report of available capital I happened to see on his secretary’s desk. But nobody was going to believe me without evidence. I had to break into his office to prove it.”

“I take it you were mistaken.”

I shrugged. “Sort of. The embezzler was actually the provost.”

She regarded me with an unreadable expression. “Do you have a problem with authority?”

I felt the blood rushing to my face. I was getting tired of her raised eyebrows and barely veiled disdain. How much did a degree and a neat resume really prepare someone for a job? The Alan Turings and Claude Shannons of the world had been eccentric, inventive, forceful people. Rule breakers. The people at Bletchley Park and Room 40 didn’t stop to check boxes; they got the job done no matter what the cost. This NSA seemed more interested in writing procedures and creating flashy videos than in saving the world. “I might not be a cookie-cutter candidate,” I said. “But I’m more than qualified. I belong in the NSA.”

She drummed her fingernails on the desk for a moment, thinking. Then she pushed her papers into a stack and rapped them on the tabletop to square the edge. It was a dismissal. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re obviously a pretty smart guy. But we don’t hire candidates without at least a bachelor’s degree.”

“I know that’s your policy. I was hoping that you’d make an exception.”

She sighed. I guessed that interviewing candidates wasn’t her usual job, and she was anxious to get back to whatever it was. “And why is that?” she said.

I squared my shoulders. “Because I care. Because I know that every war, every battle, every skirmish over trade rights and clear waterways is won and lost by intelligence. When I attack a problem, I don’t quit until I solve it. Nobody in this building will work as hard at this as I will.”

“It takes more than just ambition. You need to finish your education.”

“I’m a quick study. Anything I don’t know, I’ll learn on the job.”

“You’re too young.”

“If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, “how old are you?” It was a cheeky question, and I thought it might get me thrown out of the room, but it actually evoked the first hint of a smile. “I’m twenty-four,” she said. “Unlike you, however, I actually graduated, with a degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. I’ve been working here for three years.”

“And they have you interviewing unlikely candidates?”

Her expression soured. “It’s a temporary thing. It’s something my manager usually does, but she was unavailable.” She handed a sheet of paper across the table. It was maybe thirty rows of unreadable letters and numbers in five-character groups. Under each row was a blank line. I assumed it was an encrypted text, and the blank lines were to write the plaintext message.

“Now you’re talking,” I said.

She pressed her mouth into a line. “Look. This is the practical portion of the interview. You can try it if you want.” Her tone of voice communicated that I shouldn’t bother.

“But you’ve already made your decision, is that it?”

“I don’t make hiring decisions. I’m a software engineer, not a manager. I just report on my impressions of your technical qualifications. I’m pretty sure the only reason you got an interview at all is because my manager saw something interesting about your resume—don’t ask me what. If she wants to offer you a position, or call you back for another interview, she will.”

“Okay.”

She indicated a computer on the table to my right. “There’s a file in the home directory with the same encrypted message. When you’ve got it solved, copy it down onto the sheet of paper.” Her slim shoulders gave a slight shrug. “They still like their hardcopy around here.”

She stood, gathering her folder and handbag. “I’ll leave you to it. Good luck, Mr. Johns.”

“Do most people solve it?”

She met my gaze. “Most competent ones, yes.”

She left me alone in the room. I pressed the power button on the computer. Nothing happened. It was just as well. I felt more comfortable with a pen and paper in hand than typing numbers into a spreadsheet anyway.

I crossed to a printer on the far side of the room and ripped a sheaf of paper out of the tray. Then I started to work.

The first thing I did was to make a few deductions. First of all, they expected new college graduates to solve this thing. That meant it wasn’t encrypted with modern methods. Public key encryption could be cracked, but it required banks of high-powered computers working in tandem for hours or days or, depending on the length of the key, weeks. So this would rely on somewhat simpler methods.

I figured the most likely was a Vigenère cipher or something in the same family. It was the dominant style of cipher used during the World Wars, and although it would take some serious effort to crack, I was confident I could do it. In a Vigenère cipher, the message was encrypted by adding a repeating key phrase to it. So if the message was:

and the key was Shaunessy Brennan, then the message would be encrypted by treating each letter as a number and adding them together. ‘M’ would be added to ‘S’, ‘Y’ would be added to ‘H’, etc. If any sum went higher than Z, it would just wrap around again to A.

If you knew the key phrase, then deciphering the message was as simple as subtracting it out of the cipher text. If you didn’t know the key phrase, then figuring it out could be remarkably difficult. Fortunately, avenues of attack had been worked out for such ciphers over the years, and I knew them. Unfortunately, it eventually became clear to me that the problem in the exercise was not a Vigenère cipher.

By “eventually,” I mean that two hours had gone by, and Ms. Brennan had peeked in on me three times, in between her other interviews, to see if I was done yet. I don’t think it was concern for my well-being that had her checking in as much as a desire for me to vacate the interview room. There was a lobby full of other candidates. She must have given up on me after that, because she didn’t check again.

I was getting pretty worried. I had expected the practical part of the interview to be where I would impress them. I had a working knowledge of cryptological history, and as I told Ms. Brennan, I was pretty good at math. But I was starting to think I had underestimated the competition. The NSA was, after all, the biggest employer of mathematicians in the world, in a country that had dominated world politics for decades. These were the best of the best. Ms. Brennan had obviously expected me to solve it quickly, and the increasingly patronizing expression on her face when she peeked in let me know that I had already failed the test.

But I don’t give up. Maybe it was a genetic deficiency, or maybe my big brother had knocked me in the head once too often growing up, but I had a complete inability to let a problem go once I’d sunk my teeth in it, no matter what the consequences. So even though I’d been there for hours, my stomach was growling, and I had to pee, I kept on working.

I tried frequency analysis and the Kasiski examination and the Friedman test. I tried digraph mapping and the shotgun hill climbing method. Finally, out of options, I tried the time-honored approach of every stymied exam taker in the history of exams. I guessed.

An unknown cipher could be cracked much more easily if you knew some portion of the plaintext. It dramatically reduced the number of possibilities to be analyzed, and if you could determine which portion of the cipher text matched the portion you knew, then in most cases, you could crack the rest of the message as well. I didn’t know a portion of the plaintext, but I still had the deep tones of the male voice actor from the NSA video running through my head.

I decided to take a gamble. It wasn’t much of a risk, really, since I didn’t have any other ideas, and time was ticking away. They might let me spend all afternoon here, but I didn’t think Ms. Brennan and the NSA were going to let me spend the night working on it. It was now or never.

I wrote “GLOBAL CRYPTOLOGIC DOMINANCE” on a new sheet of paper and got to work. Twenty minutes later, I had it cracked. It was a Playfair cipher, named for the British lord who promoted its use by the British in World War I. The plaintext message wasn’t an exact transcript of the video, but it was the same sort of high-minded advertising jargon lauding the mission and vision of the NSA. I was annoyed it hadn’t occurred to me sooner.

When I emerged from my cave, the lights were turned low and the hallway was empty. I peeked into rooms until I found Shaunessy Brennan hunched wearily over a terminal, typing. “Long day?” I said.

She looked at me in surprise. “Are you still here?”

I held up the paper. “Solved it,” I said.

“The last of the candidates went home hours ago.”

My heart sank. “I guess I’m a little rusty. I did get the answer, though.”

She sighed. “Fine.” She held out a hand for the paper, which I passed over. She glanced at it briefly, then set it on the desk. “I’ll add it to your file. Did you certify completion on the web page?”

“Web page?”

“The portal, I mean. When you logged in and accessed the decryption tools, the last step was to certify that you’d successfully completed the test. Some people forget that step.”

“I didn’t use the computer.”

She stared at me, eyes hard. “The computer in the interview room. For the practical exam.”

“I never turned it on. I hit the power button and nothing happened, so I just ignored it.”

“So how did you decrypt the message?”

I shrugged. “Pen and paper.” I felt a glimmer of hope. If she had been expecting me to use the computer, then maybe she wouldn’t hold my slowness against me. Not that I type any faster than I write, but there might have been tools, Matlab or Mathematica for instance, or at least a calculator, that would have sped the process a little.

Without changing expression, she stood and walked past me. I followed her back to the interview room. She stopped short when she saw the table, strewn with pages and pages of calculations from my failed attempts. She crossed to the computer and hit the power button, as I had done. Nothing happened. She followed the power cord from the back into a snarl of cables behind the table, and found the plug dangling loose beside an outlet. The outlet was covered with a wide strip of masking tape and a sign that said, “Outlet loose. Maintenance notified. Do not use.”

She straightened and looked at me, her expression still suspicious. Feeling foolish that I hadn’t thought to check the plug, I shrugged. “Sorry. I like pen and paper. I thought it would be allowed.”

“The computer has a web portal that introduces you to several decryption tools,” she said. “It assumes a knowledge of Java or C, but it requires no knowledge of cryptography techniques. Most competent programmers can put it together in half an hour and find the answer.”

I was feeling really stupid now. “I didn’t know. I thought the computer just had the file with the cipher text. And maybe a calculator or something.”

She picked up one of my pages of calculations, examined it, and set it down again. She shook her head. “You really decrypted a Playfair cipher… by hand?”

Now she was laughing at me. It was probably a story she would put in her repertoire, to tell future candidates about the idiot who spent all day solving it on paper instead of checking the plug. “It was a misunderstanding,” I said. “And I would have had it done faster if I hadn’t started with a Vigenère.”

“I’ve never seen anyone solve a Playfair by hand. Or a Vigenère, for that matter. Either you’re the smartest mathematician we’ve seen in a decade, or you’re trying to scam your way into this agency.” Her tone of voice made it clear which she thought was the more likely.

I didn’t say anything. I assumed that she could verify whether or not I had logged into the computer.

“Does that mean I don’t get the job?”

“As I already told you, that’s not my decision to make. However, if my boss decides to make you an offer, that still doesn’t guarantee you a job. All offers are conditional on passing the security check, which is no small hurdle. It requires a full lifestyle polygraph, psych exam, background investigation, the works. It can take at least six months for the paperwork to go through, and usually more like nine.”

“It’s a pain, too,” I said. “I went through it several years ago, when my dad got me an internship with Lockheed Martin.”

The look she gave me was almost pleading. “Are you telling me that you already have a CSI security clearance?”

“Well, it’s lapsed,” I said. “But they can usually get those turned around in a week or so.”

“And you didn’t think that was worth mentioning on your resume?”

I shrugged, feeling stupid again. “I figured it wouldn’t matter unless I got the job.”

Her gaze tried to dissect me. She seemed to think I was pulling a fast one over on her, but she couldn’t quite prove it. “I’ll pass on that information, along with my impressions of this interview. I warn you, they will have your claims—all of your claims—thoroughly investigated. It will probably take at least a week before you hear back, one way or another.”

“Fair enough,” I said. I could feel the grin splitting my face, but I couldn’t hold it back. I could tell that, although she didn’t agree, she thought her superiors would make me an offer. I was going to work for the NSA.