Quantum (13 page)
Authors: Tom Grace
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Kilkenny swiped his ID through the card reader that controlled the electronic lock on the door to the MARC Computer Center. The red light quickly changed to green, accompanied by an audible buzz and the release of the electrified magnets that held the door closed.
Inside, Bill ‘Grin’ Grinelli rose from behind the cluttered workstation that was the heart of the MARC computer network and smiled. He was a few inches shorter than Nolan and wore a black T-shirt, a pair of comfortably worn jeans, and his Birkenstock sandals. His shoulder-length brown-gray hair was drawn back in a ponytail, and he sported a pointed goatee that surrounded an infectious smile. Grin was the embodiment of free-spirited mischief, and the tattoo of a mythological Pan seated on a crescent moon scattering pixie dust that adorned his left forearm only enhanced that perception.
‘Nolan, what’s up, man? Long time, no see. I heard about the excitement in South Bend. I guess trouble just seems to find you.’
‘Same old, same old, my friend.’
Grin laughed. ‘I hear ya, man. Guys like us don’t have to look for trouble; like bees to honey it finds us well enough on its own.’
As MARC’s MIS director, Grin kept information, the lifeblood of the consortium, flowing freely through the building’s electronic veins and arteries. The apparent ease with which he handled his job was even more amazing considering the diversity of personal computers and workstations within the consortium.
At the heart of Grin’s electronic empire stood a pair of supercomputers that he considered his personal property, a recently acquired Moy Electronics massively parallel machine and MARC’s original Cray. The tall, thin Moy machine stood in marked contrast to the squat, cylindrical form of the Cray, prompting Grin to christen them Stan and Ollie. Affixed to the front panel of each machine was a photograph of its comic namesake.
‘Miss me down here?’ Nolan asked, shaking Grin’s outstretched hand.
‘You know it. I had to put Stan in all by my lone-some. Well, me and half a dozen techs from Moy.’
‘How’s he running?’
‘Like a champ.’
‘Great, because I’ve got a problem I’d like him to take a shot at. How are you at cracking encryption?’
‘Officially, I never touch the stuff.’
‘How about unofficially?’
‘You remember that two-hundred-and-fifty-six-bit scheme some genius thought up for the government, supposedly unbreakable?’
‘You’re the one who cracked it?’
‘I must confess. I did have my hand in that little caper. I do so love a challenge.’
‘I’m glad to hear you talk that way. Let me show you what I’ve got.’
Kilkenny pulled a chair around the console, seating himself next to Grin.
‘Log in to main campus and jump down to the library’s Preservation Lab server.’
‘Surf’s up,’ Grin replied as he clicked on the graphical icons that identified other computer networks connected to MARC. ‘And we’re in.’
‘We’re looking for a directory named Wolff Codex.’
‘
Kodak
, like the film company?’
‘No,
codex
, like Leonardo da Vinci’s illustrated notebooks. What I want to show you are high-resolution scans taken from the pages of some very old notebooks that were found with that body down on campus.’
‘The murdered professor?’
‘That’s the one. Johann Wolff taught physics at the university for a couple of years after the Second World War, right up to the day he was murdered. It’s the considered opinion of some well-respected physicists, one of whom you know—’
‘Kelsey?’
Nolan nodded. ‘—that the late Professor Wolff may have been one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century.’
‘Last time I checked the calendar, it was the twenty-first century, big guy.’
‘Maybe so, but if Kelsey and Sandstrom are correct, had Wolff not been murdered, the twenty-first century, technologically speaking, might have started thirty years ago.’
Grin let out a long, slow whistle.
‘Is there much left of these notebooks?’
‘Actually, the books are in surprisingly good shape. The experts tell me that the books were all well-made cloth hardcovers with reasonably high quality paper. The tunnel segment they were buried in protected them like a time capsule. There was very little damage to any of the notebooks.’
‘I don’t remember reading anything about notebooks being found with the body.’
‘The police are keeping that quiet because we don’t know what’s in the notebooks yet. They expect us to keep quiet as well. You’ll see why in a minute.’
Grin navigated through the Preservation Lab’s file tree, eventually locating the folder icon named Wolff Codex. When Grin selected the icon, a window appeared requesting an access password.
‘Well?’ Grin said impatiently as he looked to Nolan for assistance.
‘I picked something I thought you could remember: MTEV two nine oh two eight.’
Grin turned and smiled. ‘The number of feet Mount Everest is above sea level. I’m touched. You remembered my fondness for mountain climbing.’
Grin keyed in the password and was granted access to the file. The Wolff Codex folder split into six subfolders labeled VOL1 through VOL6.
‘Click on volume one. I doubt there’s anything in the other folders yet.’
As Grin selected it, VOL1 split into dozens of graphic image files. Each file bore the name of the page whose digitally recorded image it contained. VOL1 contained image files PAGE001 through PAGE016.
‘Pick page one,’ Nolan said.
Grin selected the PAGE001 icon, and his monitor filled with the scanned image of the first page from Wolff’s oldest notebook.
‘What am I looking at here?’
‘This is volume one, page one of the Wolff Codex.’
‘What language is this written in?’ Grin asked.
‘None that I can understand. Zoom in on a block of text.’
Grin selected a section of text from the upper left corner of the page. The enhanced image darkened the characters, amplifying Wolff’s bold, confident strokes.
‘That look like any code you’ve ever seen?’
‘It’s definitely not your basic letter-swap encryption, that’s for damn sure. There’s no obvious order, but you’d expect that in a serious piece of coding. Is the base language English?’
‘Don’t know. Wolff was a native German who spoke several European languages as well as English. He’d only been in the States for the last two years of his life.’
‘It might be Enigma.’
‘Enigma?’
‘Yeah, the code used by Germany during the Second World War.’
‘I guess it’s possible.’
‘They didn’t happen to find a coding machine with these notebooks, did they? It would look like a typewriter in a wooden box.’
‘No, but check out the file called ENDPAPER.’
Grin selected the file. When it appeared, Grin’s eyebrows shot up.
‘Whoa, that is some serious, heavy-duty math, my friend.’
‘Well out of my league,’ Nolan admitted. ‘I found this algorithm in the front of all six notebooks. My guess is that it’s the cipher Wolff used to encrypt the notebooks.’
‘Hmm. Didn’t happen to see a key for this thing anywhere, did you?’
‘No.’
‘Too bad. Well, I guess I can try to feed this to Stan and Ollie and see what they come up with. Once I figure out how this algorithm works, I can apply some brute force to cracking it.’
Moscow, Russia
‘Oksanna, have you found out anything more about Wolff?’ Orlov asked as he seated himself on the couch, facing Zoshchenko and Leskov.
‘Very little, actually, other than to confirm some elements of Wolff’s background. He was born and raised in Dresden, the fourth child of an engineer. He attended university in Berlin and, during the war, completed his doctorate under the guidance of Werner Heisenberg. I was unable to locate a copy of his thesis; it was presumably lost during the fall of Berlin. Wolff and several other physicists fled Berlin before the Red Army arrived, hiding in a rural area that was eventually occupied by the Western Allies. As a junior scientist, he was detained only briefly by the Allies and eventually emigrated to America. According to the Gestapo background checks, Wolff was a quiet, introverted young man whose instructors felt showed great promise. Evidently, Heisenberg was so impressed with his young protégé that he used whatever influence he had to protect Wolff from serving in the army. As Dmitri reported on Wednesday, Wolff lived quietly in America until he was killed.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Just an interesting note. Following the war, several of the German scientists who’d been liberated by the Red Army and became guests of the state were interviewed regarding the German atomic-weapons research. The German effort to build an atomic bomb never really started, because Heisenberg convinced Hitler that even if it were remotely possible to build such a device, research and development would drain billions of deutsche marks away from the war effort, and by the time the first bomb was completed, the war would be over.’
‘What does this have to do with Wolff?’ Leskov demanded to know. ‘He was just Heisenberg’s lackey at the time.’
‘Heisenberg’s recommendations to the Reich were based on what he considered to be irrefutable scientific facts – facts borne out by rigorous manual calculations.’ Zoshchenko’s tone was snide and superior. ‘It was all in the numbers, and those numbers were meticulously ground out by Heisenberg’s so-called lackey, Wolff.’
‘
Spasíba
, Oksanna,’ Orlov chided, politely ending her lecture before she riled Leskov even more.
Zoshchenko bristled but said nothing further. Orlov knew that she and Leskov barely tolerated each other, and did so only because Orlov demanded it. She despised Leskov as a hulking Neanderthal – an unfortunate necessity of Victor Orlov’s business. Conversely, Leskov viewed her as an arrogant, self-centered intellectual bitch who could easily be replaced by any of the high-priced whores servicing Moscow executives.
‘Dmitri, what do you have to report?’ Orlov asked, looking to get the meeting back on track.
‘The notebooks found with Johann Wolff have been taken to a laboratory on the campus of the University of Michigan for analysis and preservation. Our electronics team has infiltrated the university’s computer network and located information, what they call image files, linked to these notebooks. The files are secured, but they believe they can hack their way in. They have also monitored someone outside the laboratory accessing some of these files, someone named Grin from MARC. We are working to identify this individual.’
‘Have you discovered what is in Wolff’s notebooks?’
‘No, and neither have they.’
‘What do you mean?’ Zoshchenko was confused. ‘If they are interested in these books, then it must be Wolff’s research.’
‘I have no doubt that that is exactly what it is, but apparently the notebooks are somehow encrypted. Wolff didn’t want people to know what he was working on.’
‘That’s very interesting.’ Orlov rubbed his chin as he considered Leskov’s report. ‘Oksanna, based on Wolff’s letters, do you think his work might be of value to our competitors?’
‘Absolutely. Wolff’s thinking is highly unconventional, and his insights into quantum reality could provide the keys to understanding how Sandstrom’s device works.’
‘Then we must acquire these notebooks, even if only to deprive our competitors of them. Dmitri, make the necessary arrangements.’
‘
Da
, Victor Ivanovich.’
Langley, Virginia
When Bart Cooper entered his office, he found a thick manila envelope resting on his desk. He sat down, undid the clasp tie, and extracted the contents; it was the information he’d requested from Connie. The first few pages laid out a chronology of Johann Wolff’s abbreviated life, starting with his birth in Dresden and ending with the discovery of his remains a few days ago.
After the chronology, Cooper found a synopsis of the information about Wolff dredged from a classified report regarding the wartime activities of German scientists issued in September of 1948.
10/1947: Workmen clearing rubble in West Berlin uncover a cache of files in the basement of a collapsed building. The building was used by the Reichsforschungsrat – the Reich Science Council.
The files identified research projects on which prisoners from German concentration camps were used as slave labor and test subjects – projects that included Wernher von Braun’s V-2 ballistic missile program at Peenemünde. Johann Wolff’s name was listed among those responsible for conducting a horrific series of experiments on prisoners.
Investigators were able to confirm, through witnesses and secondary documentation, most of the war crimes alleged in the files.
Since several of the more prominent German scientists named in the recovered files were working on classified U.S. military projects, no action was taken to prosecute them for war crimes.
9/1948: The recovered files and investigative reports were reviewed by the congressional oversight committee and classified.
‘And three months after the files were suppressed, Johann Wolff was murdered in Ann Arbor, Michigan,’ Cooper said with a sigh.
Cooper recalled hearing rumors about the recovered files, but only the most senior intelligence officers were assigned to work with them. He also remembered the anxiety he felt over the possibility that a war criminal might have entered the United States because of something he missed on the background check.
Review of the still-classified report reveals that investigators were unable to confirm the allegation that physicist Johann Wolff participated in any scientific experimentation on prisoners. Further, other sources deemed reliable contradict the allegations.
The evidence found appears to support information provided by Johann Wolff during his interviews with the OSS. Wolff spent the entirety of the war in Berlin, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, where he was a junior member of the Uranverein – the Uranium Club. The Uranverein was responsible for the German nuclear-research program for both civilian and military applications. This group’s work was primarily theoretical, and there is no evidence that Wolff, or any other member of the Uranverein, was involved in human experimentation of any kind.
Further investigation into the discrepancy regarding Wolff reveals that the Reichsforschungsrat files were intentionally altered by a Nazi scientist named Gerhard Strauss. Strauss essentially traded professional identities with Wolff to cover up his wartime activities. Strauss was killed during the Red Army attack on Berlin.
‘My God, he
was
innocent,’ Cooper said, his doubts vanishing as he read on.
As the war in Europe came to an end, Soviet and U.S. forces aggressively sought to acquire German scientists and technology. A few members of the Uranverein were captured by the Soviets, along with a significant amount of research documentation.
Interrogation of the German scientists revealed the truth about their failure to build an atomic bomb. None of the scientists wanted to construct an atomic bomb for the Fürhrer, but they also truly believed that the job was impossible. When the Uranverein presented their nuclear-research proposal to the Reich, they said that building an atomic bomb was at best impractical and, at worst, impossible. Their conclusion was based on hard numbers that had been painstakingly calculated by hand. These scientists stated that their data had been checked and double-checked by the best mathematician on their staff – Johann Wolff.
Following the successful detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, NKVD transcripts indicate that the German scientists were dumbfounded as to the reason for their failure. Using the files captured by the Red Army, the scientists reconstructed the mathematics on which they based their claim that an atomic bomb was theoretically unfeasible.
After careful review of several years’ worth of original calculations, it was the opinion of the German scientists and their Russian counterparts that a number of subtle errors had been introduced into the equations – errors that doomed the German research effort to failure.
Cooper reread the last section and came to an inescapable conclusion. ‘They were sabotaged.’
The review uncovered a deliberate pattern of miscalculation on the part of Johann Wolff. After correcting for Wolff’s subtle errors, the Germans realized how close they had come to determining that the atomic bomb was feasible. They also realized that in order for Wolff to have undermined their research efforts so perfectly, he must have known the truth. It was the opinion of the German and Russian scientists that Johann Wolff single-handedly prevented the Germans from building an atomic bomb.
Cooper slumped back in his chair, his face now ashen. He felt a tightness in his chest and, for a moment, wondered if he was having a heart attack. He vividly remembered the day he learned that Wolff, a man he’d cleared to immigrate into the United States, might have been a war criminal. Germany was swarming with rumors then – secret projects, hidden Nazi gold – and it was often hard to separate truth from lies. Rivers of disinformation flowed out of Western and Soviet intelligence services as the Cold War began to set in.
He remembered hearing rumors about a secret cache of files, about records of who did what, and further rumors about how those files were suppressed for reasons of the highest national security. Cooper saw the death camps firsthand and could not fathom how a nation could find any security in harboring men capable of inflicting such horror.
Then there were those who would not tolerate such an injustice, men and women bent on seeking retribution – the Nokmim. Cooper sympathized with them, exchanged information, and occasionally turned a blind eye when the Nokmim became a court of last resort for war criminals who found refuge under the Cold War umbrella of political necessity. Some of the more radical members of the Nokmim were less interested in due process and reasonable doubt than in vengeance.
‘I am responsible for the death of an innocent man,’ Cooper admitted, acknowledging something he’d feared since his first contact with the Nokmim regarding Wolff. ‘Not just an innocent man, but a hero who prevented Hitler from building an atomic bomb.’
The information he’d had back then was incomplete, but both he and the Nokmim knew that Wolff’s name was in the files. At the time, that seemed enough, but now the enormity of that error in judgment bore down upon him.
Clipped to the last page of the report, Cooper found a note from Connie.
FYI. It appears you aren’t the only one interested in Johann Wolff. According to the Russians, two search requests were made for information regarding Wolff. That’s the reason they responded to my inquiry so quickly; they’d just finished the same search for someone else.
‘What the hell?’ Cooper’s mind raced as he reread the note. He then checked his watch. ‘Well, I guess it won’t hurt to ask.’
He pulled a tattered address book from the top drawer of his desk and flipped through the pages until he found the entry he was looking for. There was a gray smudge beneath Fydorov’s name where the initials
KGB
had been written. In keeping with the new order in Russia, the former Committee for State Security had been rechris-tened the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (Federal Security Service), and the initials FSB were now scrawled above the smudge.
Cooper picked up the phone and keyed in the long string of numbers.
‘Fydorov,’ a voice growled into Cooper’s ear.
‘
Dóbry viécher
, Igor Sergeevich,’ Cooper replied in lightly accented Russian. ‘You’re working late. It’s Bart Cooper.’
There was a pause on the line. ‘Bartholomew Georgievich? It’s been quite a long time. Are you in Moscow?’
‘No, Iggy, I’m calling from the States. How are things with the FSB?’
Fydorov sighed. ‘There is a saying in your country that fits perfectly: The more things change, the more they stay the same.’
‘Ain’t it the truth. I’ve got a little business I’d like to discuss with you, if you’ve got a minute.’
‘As always, I’ll help you any way I can. Go ahead.’
‘A few days ago the body of a German physicist was found here in the States. He’d been murdered back in ’forty-eight, and the body had remained hidden until now. This physicist worked on the German bomb project, and I was the intel officer who cleared him to immigrate into the U.S. When his body surfaced, I asked our research department to put together a full package on him, more for my own curiosity than anything else.’
‘Did you learn anything interesting?’
‘A little, but what stuck out was how quickly we got the information. Your archives turned our request around in a day.’
‘A day? What are you bribing them with? I’ve had requests go weeks before receiving a report.’
‘The quick turnaround surprised us, too. The reason your people responded so promptly was that they’d just completed an identical search for someone else, so the information had already been culled.’
‘That’s quite a coincidence.’
‘My old instincts tell me it’s more than a coincidence. What I want to know is who was asking for information? As far as I know, the story was strictly local and didn’t get picked up by the wire services.’
‘And our archives are not exactly as accessible for research as your Library of Congress. What is the name of your dead German physicist?’
‘Johann Wolff,’ Cooper replied.
‘I’ll see what I can come up with.’
‘I’d appreciate it, Iggy.’