Collision (32 page)

“What did Hal have to say?”

“He wasn't surprised. He said that something funny was going on. ‘Something funny.' That's what he said.”

“Do you have any idea what he meant?”

“The strike should have ended. I think he thought that the strike leader acted like he didn't really want the strike to end. He was working with people in South Africa, trying to figure out what was happening.”

“Was this when Hamilton became a client?”

“I really can't say definitely. I think so. Anyway, Paul said Hal had to drop the miners. And, Hal told me, Paul gave no reason. But Hal was suspicious.”

“How? What was he suspicious about?”

“He knew who Hamilton was, of course. Then he heard something on a TV show—I don't remember its name—something about a monopoly of something. He was angry, very angry. There was a big scene. I heard Hamilton's name.”

Falcone thought for a moment. “Was it
Street Speak
, the show about Wall Street?” he asked.

“Perhaps. That sounds familiar. Paul watches it. He has a large portfolio.… Wait. He had me get a transcript of a show. Now I remember. Yes. It was
Street Speak
.”

“And did the transcript have Ben Taylor talking about SpaceMine?”

“Yes. That's right.”

“I watched, too,” Falcone said. “Taylor was talking about how most of the world's platinum and palladium comes from Russia and South Africa and that SpaceMine would drastically change the market for them. It's beginning to fall into place.”

Ursula looked puzzled and said, “What is?”

“The whole damn thing. How was it when Hal was killed? Was he was still working for the miners?”

Ursula put down her nearly empty cup. “Yes. Hal even threatened to resign and talk publicly about being fired because of the miners if Paul forced him to drop them. He was a stubborn man.”

As she and Falcone neared the door, he said, “Do you think Hamilton was behind this?”

“Paul never said so. He just said that Hamilton was our most important client. Anything he wanted, we had to do,” Ursula said. “Like firing you.”

“You, forget, Ursula. He never fired me. I had already quit.”

 

57

After flagging down a
taxi for Ursula, Falcone strode across the Navy Memorial toward the door of his apartment building. But the ring of his cell phone stopped him: “This is Ben. I'm at my house. Needed to drive here. Will explain when you get here, which I hope is right away.” Falcone blessed his luck for getting a taxi in minutes and headed for Taylor's Capitol Hill home.

Ben had left the front door unlocked. Falcone walked in and found Taylor at the kitchen table, hunched over Falcone's laptop. Next to it was an open dictionary and a notepad. In Taylor's left hand were a black ballpoint pen and a notebook. To the right of the laptop was a bottle of beer and a half-eaten sandwich on a paper towel.

“Sean, I'm so glad to see you,” Taylor said, rising and hugging Sean, who was surprised by Taylor's rare emotional display. “This really shook me up. It was like Cole reached out and touched me.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I'm fine,” he said, sitting down again. “Real glad you're here. Darlene's out somewhere with Sam. Reading this, I didn't want to be alone. Grab a beer and make yourself a cheese sandwich,” he said.

Falcone went to the refrigerator, took out a beer, and opened it while looking at the laptop screen over Taylor's shoulder. “Why did you come here?” Falcone asked.

“I came here for a dictionary,” Taylor replied. “I needed this one”—he pointed to a Webster's dictionary with its fading red cover case half attached and bearing coffee-cup ring stains
.
“It's the one I need for decryption.”

“Decryption? I don't get it,” Falcone said.

“It's from Cole. Encrypted. I'm not surprised. It's Cole protecting himself.”

“How's it going?”

“Just fine. Just fine,” Taylor answered, tapping out two words.
God
and
dare
appeared on the screen.

“What the hell?”

“It means ‘Goddard,'” Taylor said. “‘Goddard' doesn't make this edition of Webster's. But ‘Hamilton' does. Both those words show up several times in the message. When I find a frequently used word, I jot it down with its coded form in the notebook.” Looking closely at the computer screen, Falcone saw what he assumed was Cole Perenchio's encrypted message, line by line, with Taylor's decryptions between the lines.

“I can't believe you cracked it this quick,” Falcone said. “You're a goddamn genius.”

“That may be true. But in fact I knew the code system the minute I saw it,” Taylor said. “It's an encryption system—called a dictionary code. Cole developed it for the three of us while we were in college. For it to work, all three of us had to have exactly the same dictionary. Each word in a message contains the page number, column number, and the sequential number of the word on that page and in that column. So theoretically this would be ‘Hamilton.'” He scrawled “604233” on the notepad.

“But to make it a little harder, we put in a simple superencryption.” He pointed to “9H7566” on the screen. “We added ‘three'—Musketeers, get it? oh, how clever!—to each digit. So ‘six' becomes ‘nine' and ‘four' becomes ‘seven.' And ‘zero' becomes H—Hal; ‘one' becomes B—Ben; and ‘two' becomes C—Cole. That's how those numbers and the letter”—he pointed to the screen again—“become ‘Hamilton.'”

“Whose idea was it for the Three Musketeers to communicate in code?”

“Cole started it because he thought that someone had named us as members of the Black Panthers. He was always a touch paranoid.”

“
Were
you guys Black Panthers?”

“Hell, no! We were too busy keeping our scholarships and getting four-point-oh GPAs. But Cole at the time was sort of the leader and we went along. The code came in handy when we were rating girls and we wanted to keep the ratings confidential.”

“How long will it take Sarsfield and his chums to crack it?”

“They'll probably hand off the problem to the NSA. Any cryptographer there would quickly see it's a dictionary code. But what dictionary? What edition? That'll slow them down for a while. There isn't any punctuation. And spacing is arbitrary, so at first it looks like the message is in code words four or five characters long. Also, Cole drops words like ‘an,' ‘the,' ‘of,' the idea being that the cryptographer doesn't get a chance to have any easy way into the encryption through those little words. And then there are the anomalies, like this one.”

In the notebook list of frequently used words, Taylor drew a line under “Kuri Basayev” and said, “Boy, what a name to decrypt! Cole produced Basayev's name by encrypting ‘Cure,' then ‘I,' ‘B.A.,' ‘say,' and ‘ev'—that's the abbreviation for ‘electron-volt.' See? ‘Cure-I-BA-say-ev.' Took me a while to nail all those words as one name.”

“Kuri Basayev?” Falcone exclaimed. “How the hell does he get in here?”

“It looks like he's Hamilton's silent partner. You'll see. What's the deal about him?”

“Basayev is a crime boss. And one of the richest, most powerful men in Russia,” Falcone said. “We know from Senator Lawrence's research that the rocket to Asteroid USA was launched from that Russian site.”

“Khrunichev State Research and Production Center,” Taylor said. “And from what I know about that place, the Russians had to do some work there to accommodate the rocket they used to launch the SpaceMine spacecraft.”

“Okay,” Falcone said. He felt his old prosecutor instincts kicking in. He leaned toward the screen. “Just give me what you've got on that son of a bitch.”

“Slow down, Sean. Slow down. Let me finish. Then we can see the whole message from Cole.”

“How far along are you?”

Taylor stood, stretched his arms, and said, “Well more than halfway through. I've worked out a couple of algorithms. Applying them speeded things up. And there's a sharp learning curve.”

“Can I start reading?”

“I'd prefer finishing it, giving it a read-through, and then printing it out. You want to start reading? Why not go into the living room and start reading that exciting new book,
It's Your Universe
?”

 

58

Three hours later, Taylor
walked into the living room and found Falcone writing on a yellow pad.
It's Your Universe
lay open next to him on the couch. Taylor handed him a cup of coffee and a stapled document entitled “Cole's Message.” Taylor had another copy. Without exchanging a word, they sat side by side and began reading.

The following is a faithful decryption of an untitled memorandum written by Cole Perenchio, my friend and a true friend of Earth. As is the typical practice in decryption, I have added only punctuation and minor words, such as “the,” “a,” and “of,” which do not appear in the encryption. —Dr. Benjamin F. Taylor

First of all, I want to say that I believe in God. I am saying this right out in case someone comes along and accuses me of theism and says that my belief in God, not scientific reality, is driving me. I can't tell you how many times I have been in a group of scientists (or engineers) and found that I was not only the only black man but also the only theist. All of this you might call a prelude to what I am about to set down. I found myself in a place and time, a where and when, that held the fate of the world. I suddenly realized that I could save the world. And, because I believe in God, I believe that God put me in that place and time.

The place was NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The time was a little while after an explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia. That was an asteroid only about 50 feet in diameter. It never touched Earth. But the atmospheric explosion injured more than 1,200 people and broke almost all the windows in the city.

Fatefully, the explosion was extensively photographed, particularly by windshield cameras that Russian drivers favor. We were given an unprecedented opportunity to collect and analyze data about an asteroid that menaced the Earth. We could further our knowledge of the laws of orbital mechanics, possibly making it possible to develop a way to predict the time and probable place of an impact of future asteroids.

The day after the explosion, I went to my superiors at Goddard and said I wanted to drop the work I was doing on Moon-Earth gravitational variations and set up a task force that would study the Chelyabinsk event to see how it affects our estimates of asteroid impact probabilities. I have always considered NASA's attitude toward asteroids was to treat them as space objects rather than possible hazards.

Preliminary data from Chelyabinsk indicated that the traditional estimates of risk of impact may be ten times greater than we had thought. In my memo, marked urgent, I quoted Dr. Qing-Zhu Yin of the University of California at Davis, who said, “If humanity does not want to go the way of the dinosaurs, we need to study an event like this in detail.” He estimated that the energy of the Russian explosion was equal to the blast from about 500 kilotons of TNT. As a matter of comparisons, each of the nuclear bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the explosive energy of about 16 kilotons of TNT.

My memo was ignored—just as all my memos have been ignored in the past. I had already been exiled to Goddard's Laser Ranging Facility, where I shot laser beams at the Moon and at satellites in order to get accurate measurements of Moon-Earth gravitational effects. I'm sure that our measurements are imprecise and need to be continually sharpened so we can make accurate predictions of asteroid orbits.

Shortly after the Chelyabinsk event—and the rebuff of my memo—I left NASA and contacted a headhunter firm, gave my qualifications, and said I believed I would be a good recruit for SpaceMine. I was known as an authority on gravitational fields and their effects on the orbits of objects in space. I soon was approached, hired, and on a plane to SpaceMine's headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

My plan was to infiltrate SpaceMine and do what I could to stop any attempt to endanger Earth. I would perform criminal acts, if necessary. In fact, as soon as I got all the data that I could, I walked out of the building and went into hiding, to write this and pass it on to Hal. I realize that I am taking a risky course. And I realize that I might even be killed because of what I have learned. So, if that happens, I ask the person who reads this to act on it, by presenting it to President Oxley.

When Falcone got this far, he stopped reading. A moment later, so did Taylor. Falcone described what had happened at FBI headquarters. After going over the analysis of the car and computer timelines, he said, “It's pretty clear that Hal had the laptop—with this coded message—in his possession when he was killed. When Cole called you, he would have known about Hal's murder. The killers followed him to Capitol Hill and shot him there.”

“Why didn't they kill me when they had the chance?”

“You were saved by the laptop's GPS signal, which showed that the laptop was in the possession of someone on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“So it was
you
who might have been killed,” Taylor said.

“All the GPS told them was that the laptop was somewhere in a building at 701. They knew it would be crazy to try knocking on random apartment doors in a building that had to have tight security. So, I guess, they decided to kill Cole because he knew what was in the laptop.”

“Poor, poor Cole,” Taylor said. They both resumed reading Cole's message.

 

59

At SpaceMine headquarters, I worked night and day analyzing all the data that came from the Chelyabinsk explosion, adding it to the data I had developed while working at Goddard. My conclusion was that we simply do not know enough about Near-Earth Objects, especially asteroids, to carry out SpaceMine's plans to extract ore from asteroids. I also believe that there is a hidden side to SpaceMine involving a Russian silent partner named Kuri Basayev. He seemed to me to be a gangster. Initially, I wasn't able to determine his role.