No Way to Die (8 page)

Joaquin “Doc” Kiahtel, a tall, handsome, very muscular Native American man, stopped and wiped the rain from his eyes. He stared at me menacingly. “I’m a full-blooded Chiricahua Apache,” he said softly. “I grew up on the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico. Beautiful country—
dry
country. It used to rain six or seven times a year. We actually celebrated the rain in those days. It was special. Now look at me.” He straightened his arms and watched the water drip off his Gore-Tex jacket. “I look like a friggin’ duck. What the hell am I doing here in a place where it rains every stinkin’ day, except maybe six or seven days a year when it’s sunny?”

I smiled. “Savor the sun, my friend. Savor the sun—just like the rest of us.”

He stared at me. “Yeah, right,” he said before turning and stalking off into his office.

I smiled. He’d get over it. Doc is a private investigator on our staff as well as our director of security. He’s six four and weighs two-thirty or so—basically all muscle. He’s an imposing sight. Doc and I became friends while we were both still in the army stationed at Fort Lewis. He’s pretty hush-hush about what he actually did in the army, but I know he was in the Rangers—at least. I say “at least” because I suspect Doc was probably involved in a lot more than just the Rangers—perhaps even something as secretive as Delta Force. He spent most of 2005 through 2007 behind enemy lines somewhere in Afghanistan. Doc’s an expert with his hands and with almost any sort of weapon. I left the army in December 2007 and opened Logan PI three months later. When Doc got out six months after that, I hired him immediately.

“Doc, have you seen Kenny yet?” I called out to him.

“I’m here,”came a voice from the office across from Doc’s. A moment later, Kenny Hale stepped into the hallway.

“I’ve got something you might be interested in,” I said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yep. We’ll go over it at the briefing.”

Kenny is technically a private investigator, but he’s also our head of technology. The fact is, he’s a tech genius—one of those boy wonders who has the ability not only to understand but also to master—and even pioneer—new technology ideas. From concept to code to application, Kenny’s the best. It seems like half of a PI’s work nowadays involves data mining of one sort or another—accessing this or that database. Fortunately for us, Kenny’s got mad skills in this area—what he calls a “big propeller.” Almost without fail, he’s able to quickly get in, get what we need, and get out without anyone ever knowing he was there. This comes in very handy.

Kenny’s as short as Doc is tall—he’s five eight and one-fifty, soaking wet. He has thick, dark hair and bushy dark eyebrows. He doesn’t have the greatest people skills in the world, but he’s good looking in a nerdy kind of way.

At nine o’clock, I walked across the hall to the conference room. Everyone was assembled—even Richard Taylor. I bought the company from Richard four years ago after he built it from the ground up over a twenty-year period. It took me a couple of years to pay Richard off, but during this time, I found that Richard’s years of PI expertise, along with the thirty years of Seattle Police Department expertise before that, could be had for the asking if I simply provided him an office and allowed him to participate in the briefings. This deal was a no-brainer in the bargain department.

Richard's in his early seventies. He’s tall and thin with white hair and brilliant blue eyes. He’s a wonderful steadying influence on us—always in a good mood, always smiling. When we started out, I didn’t expect that our relationship would develop the way it has—he’s turned into a very valuable mentor and, even more important, a good friend. He’s always willing to listen and provide advice when I hit a tough spot. As the saying goes: he's probably forgotten more than I’ll ever know about this business.

“Good morning, everyone,” I said. “I’d like to start by—”

“Danny,” Toni interrupted, “before you get started, may I say something first?”

I looked at her, confused. She had an odd look in her eyes. I shrugged my shoulders. “Sure,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“Thanks. We’re all detectives here, and I have a little detecting I’d like to do.”

“Go ahead,” I said again.

“Okay,” she said, a sly smile starting to appear on her dark-red lips. She stood up and looked around. Her eyes settled on Kenny. “I’d like to point out that Mr. Kenny Hale here is wearing an interesting black turtleneck.”

I looked at Kenny and saw that this was true. I hadn’t noticed before. Hearing his name called, Kenny’s eyes glanced upward from the notepad he’d been focusing on. He immediately started to look nervous.

“We’ve not seen young Mr. Hale wearing a turtleneck before. I checked—it’s not his birthday, so that means his mom probably didn’t buy it for him. And, since it’s March now, if he got it for Christmas, we’d probably already have seen it. Furthermore, since it’s almost fifty degrees outside, it’s obviously too warm for a turtleneck, even if you customarily wore them—which Mr. Hale does not. From this behavioral anomaly,” Toni continued, “I propose that we can deduce one of two things.”

She paused, allowing the tension to build.

“The first possibility,” she said, “is that Kenny has suddenly developed a Steve Jobsian–type style jones. As you all may know, Steve Jobs wore a black turtleneck almost every day. So it’s entirely possible that, to honor Mr. Jobs’s passing, Kenny has decided to adopt a black-turtleneck look as a sort of homage.” She paused. We all paid attention, interested to know where she was going with this.

“But we all know that there’s a problem with this theory, don’t we?” She nodded as she said it, answering her own question. “First off, we know that Kenny is an irreverent type who’s not in the habit of paying tribute to anyone—except maybe himself. Also, it’s a well-known fact that although Kenny can almost tolerate the Apple brand itself—and I emphasize the 'almost', Kenny didn’t even like Steve Jobs. Or Bill Gates, or Larry Ellison, or any of the other big techies, for that matter. He doesn’t consider any of them his intellectual equal. He would never knowingly pay tribute to any of them. These facts combined, I conclude that this rules out potential number one.”

Kenny started to squirm in his chair.

“That leaves us with possibility number two. After I ruled out the first scenario, I asked myself, ‘Why would a guy who’s never worn a turtleneck suddenly start to wear one on a relatively warm day like today?’ Then, just like that, it hit me.” She looked at Kenny. Her smile turned into a wicked grin. “You’ve got something to hide, don’t you?”

Doc and Richard started chuckling. Kenny started to blush—he literally turned as pink as a lobster right in front of us. “You’re full of crap,” he said dismissively. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t I?” Toni asked. “Well, that’s easy to prove.” She looked at the rest of us. “I propose to the group that our colleague Mr. Hale got himself hooked up last night with one of his young little chickies, and,” here her voice raised, “lo and behold—said young chickie turned out to be none other than a vacuum-sucking remora who left a souvenir on Mr. Hale’s neck in the form of a big, red love-kiss, which he now attempts to conceal with the black turtleneck!”

“It’s a lie!” Kenny said. Doc burst out laughing.

"Love kiss?" Richard said.

"A love kiss," Toni answered. "A big red hickey." She turned to Kenny. “If it’s a lie, prove it. Roll down your turtleneck and show us.”

Kenny looked around, flustered. After a moment, he said, “I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to dignify your—”

“Enough!” I said, interrupting him. I turned to Toni. “Very amusing, counselor.”

“Thank you. The state rests.” She sat back down, the mischievous grin still on her face. She turned to Kenny and pointed at him. “Got ya, you little twerp. Now we’re even.”

I let them have their fun for a couple more minutes. Kenny ended up giving in and pulling down his turtleneck. For the record, Toni was right. Fortunately, our group is tight-knit, and this sort of horseplay leaves no hard feelings. Truth is, Toni is probably the closest thing Kenny has to a big sister. They just like to go after each other from time to time.

“Well, now that that little discovery is behind us,” I said, “maybe we should talk about a new case.”

When I was sure I had everyone’s attention, I continued. “Yesterday, my dad called and asked us to talk to a woman named Katherine Rasmussen.”

“The widow of Thomas Rasmussen?” Richard asked.

“Yes.”

“Thomas Rasmussen was like a tech god,” Kenny said. “They named shit after him. I think his company is in Redmond and it's called ACS or something like that.”

“That’s right—Applied Cryptographic Solutions.” I went over our interview with Katherine and our subsequent talk with Inez Johnson. I mentioned that Katherine had said that ACS had a new product.

“I’ve heard rumors of something called the Starfire Protocol,” Kenny said. “It’s hush-hush stuff—more speculation than anything. No one even knows if it really exists. I can say that even the rumor of it definitely has people’s attention, though.”

“Katherine couldn’t explain it except to say it had to do with cryptology,” I said. “Do you know anything about it?”

“A little, just based on what I’ve heard through my network. Without getting too technical, almost all modern cryptology relies on a concept known as asymmetrical key technology. In it, there are two keys required to code and decode a message: a so-called public key—a password, if you will—which is not kept secret, and a private key, which is. Essentially, you use the public key to encrypt a message that only the correct private key can then decode. The two keys are different, but they’re mathematically linked. Now, if you could somehow study just the public key and use it to figure out the private key, then the whole world opens up to you because everybody uses this technology—commercial, industrial, military, banking—you name it. Even our business networks use it. You could break almost all modern cryptography schemes. Nothing would be secure.”

He paused, and then continued. “The good news is that since the link between the two keys is based on ridiculously esoteric math functions using integer factorization and discrete logarithms, the private key is, for all intents and purposes, unsolvable. The numbers are so big and so complex that they are unbreakable—so far, anyways. Until now, there’s been no known mathematical way to discern the private key using just the public key—no formula, nothing like that. So what people try to do instead to figure out the private key is use what’s known as the brute-force method—that is, they simply use a powerful computer to try every possible combination of numbers until one works. For example, if the key were two digits long, there would be one hundred possible answers. The possible combinations would be somewhere between zero-zero and ninety-nine. The computer would start at the beginning and try every one of these combinations until it came up with the right combination, all in a couple of nanoseconds—that’s the essence of a brute-force attack. What the cryptologists do to thwart this attack is pretty simple. They use a great, big, long key with lots of digits. The universe of solutions increases exponentially. And I mean they get
really
big—huge, in fact. So much so that the fastest computers in the world today would still take at least
a couple thousand years
to run through all the combinations—maybe a lot longer. This makes the data being protected what they call
computationally
secure. And it means a brute-force attack will take so long to figure out the answer that the data would no longer be relevant when it finally unlocks the code. What difference does it make if someone can bust into your checking account if it will take them two thousand years to do it? With me so far?”

Surprisingly, Kenny’d made it fairly easy to understand. We were all with him.

“So that leads to Starfire. I don’t know much—only what I’ve picked up from my secret sources. But as I understand it, Thomas Rasmussen apparently came up with another way to figure out the private key. He developed an algorithm called Starfire. From what I’ve heard, Starfire may have the ability to factor those large numbers very quickly. There’s been speculation for years that such an algorithm could eventually be discovered, but it hasn’t happened yet—until now, if Starfire is legit. The rumor is that using the Starfire Protocol, ACS can supposedly factor out the private key in hours instead of thousands of years.”

It was silent for a moment. Then Richard said, “And then, this would unlock—”

“It would unlock pretty much anything to do with computers as we know them today,” Kenny said. “Since asymmetrical key cryptology is so prevalent, if you can crack it in a short time, nothing is secure. Like I said, banking, military, government, the entire Internet structure—everything becomes insecure.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “That could be profound. Everything would have to shift to another coding technology almost immediately.”

“That’s true,” Kenny said. “If another such technology exists. That's why I thought that it makes sense that the Starfire Protocol is step one in a one-two combination punch.”

“Explain,” I said.

“Commercially,” he said, “the Starfire Protocol by itself would have some value, but probably not anything huge, at least if whoever used it was honest about it. It’s essentially meant to destroy security—not create it. As soon as people who were using asymmetrical key technology heard that Starfire was real and capable of rendering their encryption technology insecure, they’d want to stop using it and use something else, instead. This would eliminate the need for Starfire. But that leads to the other half of the puzzle. There are companies out there—I think ACS may be one of them—that are developing next-generation cryptography methods. You can bet that if Rasmussen knew how to make asymmetrical key technology obsolete, he had his company preparing a new system—one that would be immune to a Starfire Protocol attack. If such a new method were widely accepted, the financial implications would be staggering. They’d be sitting on a gold mine—maybe worth billions.”