False Witness (2 page)

“That the birds of worry fly above your head, this you cannot change,” the young man continued with mock solemnity. “But that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent.”

Kumari did not smile. He was known for being jovial and outgoing, having a type of mad-professor personality, which, he had to admit, was a reputation he did little to dispel. But this was not a time for smiles.

“Be careful, my son,” Kumari said.


Rajat took the cue, nodded solemnly, and instantly became the earnest young businessman. He looked professional in his dark blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. Professional—and almost American. Still, he was so inexperienced to be handling such a sensitive transaction.

Kumari wanted to give Rajat a lecture, one of Kumari's patented professorial pep talks, more about life than about academics. But Kumari sensed that the young man had already surpassed his teacher in so many matters of life and faith. The time for lectures had passed.

“God be with you,” Rajat said.

“And with you.”

The young man climbed out of the van, grabbed his briefcase, and strode confidently toward the MGM Grand. He did not look back to see the lines of worry etched into his mentor's face, the birds beginning to nest in the professor's hair.

“Protect him,” Kumari prayed. He pulled away from the front of the casino, cutting off other drivers and ignoring their horns.

Twelve minutes later, Kumari entered his apartment, breathless from his climb up the outdoor steps. He disabled the alarm system, locked the dead bolt, and pulled the chain lock into place.

The living room and dining area, one long, L-shaped open space, was littered with twenty-four interconnected desktop computers and enough wiring to make the rooms look like a den of snakes. There were no pictures on the walls and no couch or recliner or television set. Just twenty-four desktop units, a small card table set up in the dining area, two folding chairs, and a beanbag.

In the single bedroom were two air mattresses.

Kumari had chosen this unit twenty days ago because it met all three criteria on his list: high-speed Internet access, a monthly lease, and anonymity. He paid cash in advance and signed the application using a phony name.

He hustled across the room, accidentally kicking one of the computers. He checked the lock on the sliding-glass door that led to a small patio, then pulled the blinds on the glass door and placed his laptop on the card table so he could hook it up to his improvised network.

Each computer had been maxed out with memory upgrades, according to Rajat, and then linked in such a way that the total network capacity exceeded 256GB of RAM. The network was protected by three separate firewalls.

Kumari's screen flickered to life, and he entered his password. He connected immediately to the Internet and opened the program that gave him remote access to Rajat's computer screen. Kumari typed the words
I'm on
so that they showed up on a document opened on Rajat's desktop. Then Kumari opened a second window on his computer that pulled up the video and audio feed from Rajat's computer. When the MGM Grand conference room came into focus with the same grainy resolution that Kumari had witnessed during the trial runs, he began to relax a little.

Rajat, the more electronically savvy of the two, had wired his laptop with a hidden video camera on the back, inside a port that looked like an Internet connection. He squeezed a corresponding microphone into what appeared to be an expansion port on the side. His computer now fed Kumari a live, blow-by-blow broadcast of the meeting.

Though the resolution was not the best, Kumari could make out three business executives within range of the wide-angle lens. They sat across from Rajat, separated from him by a large, polished-wood conference table. The man in the middle had dressed casually; the others wore suits. All three appeared younger than Kumari had anticipated.

The Chinese American man on the right looked more like a thug than a businessman. He had a low brow and thick neck, with veins bulging from a too-tight collar on his shirt, as if he couldn't afford a custom fit. On the right side of his face, a scar started at his sideburn and ended at his jaw. His right ear was smaller than the left, as if he had lost part of it in a knife fight and a plastic surgeon had just sewn up what was left. A tattooed cobra was coiled on the left side of his neck, poised to strike at any moment.

Kumari pegged him as security.

The man on the left, pale-skinned and tall, seemed infinitely more sophisticated. Eastern European perhaps, with ice blue eyes and short, Nordic-blond hair. He slouched in his seat, a cool, disinterested look on his face.

In the middle, the position of influence, sat a young man approximately Rajat's age, probably the CEO, dressed in a black linen shirt, with long dark hair, a trim goatee, and dark, brooding eyes that seemed to pierce Kumari's screen.

Kumari had missed the introductions and casual conversation, if any had taken place. Rajat was sketching out the logistics of the transaction, a complicated matter since Rajat had insisted on having the fifty million dollars in the bank before the algorithm was transferred. The men opposite Rajat were employed by a deal-brokerage agency that represented the three largest Internet security companies in the world. Understandably, they wanted to test the algorithm before any money changed hands.

“You will forgive my skepticism,” the middle man said, his expression difficult to read, “but the implications of your claims are enormous. Not to mention the fact that our top consultants believe rapid factorization into prime numbers is a mathematical impossibility.”

“Did you bring the numbers?” Rajat asked calmly. His voice came across louder than the others, based on his proximity to the mike. Kumari could discern no wavering in it, no hint of the frayed nerves that surely had to be racking his young partner.

“Of course.”

“Then we can talk theory or we can talk application,” Rajat said. “I mean, why bother finding out the true facts if we can just sit around and speculate based on the opinions of your experts?”

“We can do without the sarcasm,” the Nordic man said.

The CEO betrayed no emotion as he consulted a folder. He dictated a long number that Rajat typed into the open document on his screen. Next, Rajat read back the digits to the CEO, all 197 of them, double-checking them slowly. It took nearly two minutes just to verify the number.

Kumari smiled. Child's play. Using his algorithm, he should have the answer in less than five minutes. His laptop could process this one by itself. He copied and pasted the number into his formula.

As Kumari's computer crunched the algorithm and Rajat plunked away on his own keyboard, plugging in phony numbers and functions, the conference room grew remarkably quiet, tension filling the air, as if the executives didn't dare jinx this moment by making a sound. From miles away, Kumari could almost tell what they were thinking:
If this works—if this
really
works—it would destroy the foundation of Internet encryption.
The RSA protocol, used extensively to secure transactions on the web, would be a sieve. It was, as Rajat had exclaimed when Kumari first told him about the breakthrough, “The key to every lock!”

Kumari had started working on his formula nearly twenty years ago as the result of a challenge from a fellow professor. Kumari called it a serious academic pursuit, a scholar's desire to break new ground. Others called it an obsession. Whatever the label, he dedicated his best and most productive years to accomplishing something unprecedented: discovering an order in the sequence of prime numbers. Most theorists believed that the numbers sprang up like weeds among the natural numbers, obeying no law other than the law of chance. It was impossible to predict where the next prime number would sprout, they said.

But where others saw chaos, Kumari saw the faintest outline of order. Over time, the outline became more discernible, the order more predictable, his convictions more resolute. He ultimately developed a complex mathematical algorithm, stunning in its reliability, which could quickly and accurately generate the prime factors of any number, no matter how large.

Delighted, Kumari wanted to publish the formula in a respected, international mathematics journal. But his protégé immediately saw the tragic consequences of such an approach. The Internet would be thrown into chaos until encryption technology evolved in a different direction. When it did, the algorithm would be useless in a matter of months.

Instead, Rajat talked Kumari into selling the formula to a conglomeration of the top global encryption companies. “It could help them see the Achilles' heel in their encryption techniques,” he argued. “They could take steps to make Internet transactions more secure, to provide better protection for privacy.” Then the clincher: “We could use the proceeds to help the Indian church provide Christian schools for the Dalits. An education in English for thousands of children. A way out of caste-based shackles.”

It seemed like a good idea at the time. There were already hundreds of such schools in existence, but they needed thousands more. Otherwise, the children would be relegated to the plight of their parents—degrading work on the fringes of society. Going through life with their heads down, cleaning the bathrooms of the upper castes. This money could be a good start.

Kumari jolted back to the present when the answer popped up on his screen after only three minutes of computation. He typed in the results for Rajat.

Not surprisingly, Rajat decided to add a little drama. He had not been pleased to learn that the brokerage company was owned by the Chinese. The least he could do was have a little fun with them. “If I remember correctly,” he said, his voice gaining confidence, “a recent attempt to find the prime factors of a 193-digit number took more than three months, with eighty different computers working simultaneously. Altogether, about thirty years of computer time was utilized. Is that what you gentlemen recall?”

The three men all looked at Rajat stone-faced; they did not like being mocked. “And this number,” Rajat continued, “roughly the same length, has just been factored in the amount of time it might have taken you to go to the bathroom.”

“And the answer?” the CEO said. His voice had an aggressive, no-nonsense edge to it.

Rajat read the prime numbers while the CEO checked his folder. He shot a glance to his Nordic friend, received a barely perceptible nod, and flipped the page to another enormous number. “This time,” the CEO said, “we'll use a number the size our clients would typically use in their protocol. According to the deputy director of the National Security Agency, it should take all the personal computers in the world on average about twelve times the age of the universe to solve it by a traditional sieve method. We'll see if your formula can do it in a few minutes.”

For ten minutes, they read and checked the digits of the new number. When everybody was satisfied, Kumari plugged it into his formula. This time, Kumari put his entire little network on the task.

Twelve minutes later, Rajat read the answer to the astonished men—two prime factors, each over two hundred digits long.

The business executives no longer tried to act unimpressed. The CEO called an impromptu meeting, stepping behind the chairs, where the men formed a little huddle, holding their folders in front of their mouths so Rajat couldn't read their lips. When they slid back into their seats, the Nordic man eyed Rajat the way a spectator might eye an illusionist at a magic show—scrutinizing, confident there was some sleight of hand that eluded the normal eye.

“We'd like to try one more thing,” the CEO said, “just to prove our own firm's security hasn't been breached by someone on the inside providing the answers in advance. We're going to call a consultant for another test number, different from the ones we brought to this meeting. It could take a few minutes to get this one last beta.”

Twenty minutes later, after Rajat had factored the third number even more quickly than the second, Kumari noticed a final change in demeanor on the other side of the table. Even through the grainy resolution, he could tell Rajat was now dealing with converts—men who had seen something that the foremost experts in the world had assured them was impossible.

“Who else has access to this formula?” the man on the right asked.

“Why is that relevant?” Rajat responded.

“Our price is based on exclusivity. If we're the only ones with this formula, it's worth fifty million dollars. If others have it, the value diminishes substantially.”

“Only one man has seen this formula,” Rajat replied. That part was true, Kumari knew. But the person wasn't Rajat.

The men across from Rajat nodded at each other, and Kumari breathed a sigh of relief. It looked like they might actually have a deal. “Praise God,” he murmured. Rajat had been right.
No worries.