White: A Novel (11 page)

Alred seemed fine with this, which surprised the president.

“Why would the Defense Department have a criminal suspect? Doesn’t the FBI want him for prosecution?” Venable asked.

“Not at this time, sir,” Alred said, looking at Beechum for guidance. This was a new president. A Democrat. How would he react to fundamental changes in judicial process that had been ushered in by a Republican predecessor?

“The FBI has to abide by the rule of law,” Beechum said. She walked to the window and looked out into the snow. Windows seemed to draw her. “That means Miranda warnings, booking procedures, court hearings, public disclosure. It means civil rights scrutiny.”

“Civil rights . . .” Venable trailed off. He seemed to get her meaning. “Yes, well this is war, right? I guess I don’t need to know the details.”

His lack of a desk seemed to confuse the others in the room, who didn’t know exactly where to stand.

Havelock stepped toward the podium.

“If I may, sir,” he said, “we have a matter that we need to address before we go much further. This country maintains what is known as the ‘continuity of government plan.’ You probably haven’t been briefed yet, but . . .”—he waited for the president to interrupt. “FEMA administers a set of crisis response protocols. They provide for a smooth transition of power should something happen . . . frankly, if something should happen to you, sir.”

“This involves that secure location they always talk about on the news?” said Venable.

“Yes, sir. We need to consider moving the vice president out of NACAP—excuse me, sir . . . that stands for national capital region—along with a number of congressional leaders, cabinet secretaries, and members of the judiciary. They will have full communication with the White House, of course, but will be protected in the event of further attacks.”

“Right,” was all the president said. He looked questioningly at Beechum, then asked, “When?”

“As soon as possible.” He turned toward the vice president, as if her experience in these matters might enforce his authority.

“My place is here,” she said. “I need to stay.”

“Why?” Venable asked. He was president, after all; she little more than an insurance policy.

“David, I’m going to speak frankly.” She looked confident, almost condescending. “You’ve presided over two of the worst domestic tragedies this country has ever suffered, and yet, despite the best advice of your staff, you haven’t slept in nearly two days.”

No one backed her, but she felt strong in her conviction.

“I’m the leader of the most powerful country in the world,” Venable responded. “The commander in chief. You think I can just walk upstairs, kiss the wife good night, and call it a day?”

His incredulous smile made the room even more tense. This was a new administration, a White House fracturing between two very strong personalities.

“Yes,” she said. There was no doubt in her voice. “That’s exactly what you need to do. How long will you stay up? Three nights? Four?” She turned to the others, but they had no intention of sticking their noses in this. “You may be president, David, but you’re still just a man. Don’t forget that.”

Venable’s smile fell flat. He should have gone with his gut and refused Beechum as his running mate.

“Call the vice president a helicopter,” he ordered. “She’ll be going to that secure location as soon as possible. It seems the continuity of government protocols demand it.”

V

Tuesday, 15 February

02:33 GMT

Albemarle Building, New York, New York

VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE
seventeenth floor of Borders Atlantic’s corporate headquarters had been set aside for security operations. From satellite transmissions to computer interfacing and product development, Borders Atlantic depended on high technology for its very existence, and it seemed that everyone, from competing corporations to foreign governments, had tried to probe its secrets. The seventeenth floor represented its innermost ramparts.

“So it’s the algorithms?” Sirad asked. She stood beside Ravi, who she had gotten to know quite well in the past twelve hours. “That’s our vulnerability?”

“That’s just what Dieter thinks, but he doesn’t really understand the problem,” Ravi answered. Despite access to some of the most powerful and sophisticated computer mainframes in the world, the diminutive New Delhi native had opted to test his theories on an old-fashioned blackboard.

“Here’s the real issue.” He began with two boxes and a circle in what to Sirad looked like a simple isosceles triangle. “Code-making is simple in theory. Borders Atlantic wants to pass information from one cell phone to another.”

He pointed to one of the boxes, demonstrating his point.

“That information is relayed in microwaves, which travel line of sight. Because of the curvature of the earth and physical obstructions, we need to raise our repeaters up high on towers, or in the case of our Quantis system, launch them into low earth orbit.”

Ravi drew lines and arrows, connecting the cell phone boxes with the circular satellite, filling in the slanted walls of his communications pyramid. Sirad considered all of this rudimentary, of course, but saw no point in disturbing his thought process.

“The problem for cryptographers is twofold. First, the microwave is easy to intercept anywhere in the transmission/reception conduit; microwaves cannot be shielded from intrusion like hard lines. Second, you need keys to encrypt the transmission and decrypt the reception. Those keys are based on algorithms, which rely on random numbers. It’s all mathematics. If you can figure out the code-maker’s math, you can figure out and break his code.”

“Simple enough,” Sirad said, folding her arms. Ravi knew she oversaw the entire Quantis project. Why was he offering her a tourist-level orientation?

“Yes, of course.”

He wiped his chalk from the board, moved to the upper left-hand corner, and began to write. Letters. Numbers. Greek symbols. The chalk tapped and scratched against the slate surface with such speed and force, Sirad stepped back to avoid the flying shards.

“Without giving up too many system eccentricities,” he said, “let’s begin with our random number generator—the true soul of Quantis, its key base. Conventional computer-model generators produce ‘pseudo’ numbers based on statistical randomness. Cryptographers can’t rely on these because they too easily yield replication, so they try to find true physical sources that cannot be predicted, such as device latencies, utilization statistics—keystroke intervals, say, on a thousand different PC keyboards.”

Ravi spoke one language while writing another on the board. Where he made mistakes, he swiped his hand across the equation and wrote through the smudges.

“This noise is then distilled by what is called a ‘hash function’ to make it all interdependent in a cryptographically strong way. The point, remember, is to generate unpredictability—to make your code confusing to external observation. You don’t want the intruder to guess your root.

“Until recently, that meant at least one hundred twenty-eight bits of true entropy. To achieve this, number generators have relied on very large pools of information, cycling data through a hash function to protect the pools’ contents. When you need more bits, you simply stir new chunks of the device latencies or utilization statistics into the pool, using a random key to maintain interdepen-dence, of course.”

Sirad nodded her head.
Of course,
she thought.

“All right. Now . . .”—Ravi’s chalk really began to tap—“random number generation is typically the most overlooked and weakest part of the system. Our mathematicians have achieved a breakthrough in random number generation. We don’t rely on these old systems because we have found a wholly different way to generate randomness. It is a major breakthrough—the kind that certainly would have won us a Nobel in math or physics if we could ever divulge it in open-source literature. Of course we can’t.”

“That’s the famous Nguyen cornerstone I hear about?” Sirad asked. She had heard talk of this but never asked for details. All she knew was that Borders Atlantic had hired a twenty-two-year-old mathematician named Hung Il Nguyen away from the National Security Agency. He was the first-generation American son of Vietnamese immigrants. A prodigy. He apparently had done something extraordinary.

“No,” Ravi said. He finished three last swipes of his chalk and stood back from his blackboard. “
This
is the Nguyen cornerstone.”

The man pointed to the equation and beamed with childlike awe.

“What’s it mean?” Sirad asked. She had taken her share of theoretical math classes in college but understood little of Ravi’s quixotic hieroglyphics.

“It means money; more than thirty billion dollars in revenue this year alone,” he said, crossing his arms. “It means security, power, beauty, a fundamental change in the way we look at the physical universe. And to most people, of course, it means nothing but a bunch of white symbols on a dirty blackboard.”

“Humor me,” Sirad said. “I’m afraid we don’t have time for metaphor.”

“Yes.” Practicality returned to Ravi’s eyes. “There are two primary kinds of code-making—secret, or
symmetrical,
and public key, or
asymmetrical,
encryption. Symmetrical codes use the same key to encrypt and decrypt, whereas asymmetrical use two different keys. Quantis relies on a combination of the two. We stay symmetrical from transmission to the satellite, then go asymmetrical from the satellite to the receiver. You understand that part, right?”

Sirad nodded her head. Borders Atlantic owned all satellites in their system, allowing them to depend on well-established stream cipher techniques. The company’s system was very fast and, coupled with Borders Atlantic’s new random number generation process, extremely secure.

“Well, the Nguyen cornerstone involves the second stage of the data stream, from the satellite to the receiver. Our problems always boiled down to message authentication codes for individual subscribers: key agreement protocols. If we integrated keys in each of the Quantis phones, for example, an attacker might reverse engineer our technology and clone it. Couldn’t have that, could we?”

Sirad shook her head, then checked her watch.

“We need to get moving, Ravi,” she said.

“Public-key cryptosystems—the second stage of the Quantis data stream—have always faced vulnerability to what are known as ‘hard problems.’ There are several, but the one Nguyen went after involved problem solving and validation in polynomial time . . .”

“Polynomial time?” Sirad asked.

“That’s where the execution time of a computation does not exceed the polynomial function of the problem size itself.”

Ravi pointed to his equation.

“Here,” he said. “Simply put, any problem solvable in polynomial time, we’ll call
P.
Any solution that can be checked in polynomial time we’ll call
NP.
By definition, every problem in
P
must be
in NP,
but prior to Nguyen’s groundbreaking work, we could not show that
P equals NP.
”

“That’s simply put?” Sirad asked. He had lost her, despite the movements of his hand through the length of his chalky equation.

“The Nguyen cornerstone forms the basis for Quantis,” Ravi said. “The
P
=
NP
conundrum was one of the most important problems in mathematics. Now we have solved it.”

“That helps us?” Sirad asked.

“Oh, yes.” Ravi smiled. “This is not the cornerstone of some academic equation. This is the basis of a whole new world.”

HRT MOUNT-OUTS
MOVED
with the efficiency of a finely tuned engine. While the duty section—either gold or blue, depending on rotation—saw to personal equipment and rapid-action supplies, the training section scrambled to load team gear. Everything from beans to bullets went into the back of stake-bed trucks for immediate delivery to C-17 transport aircraft at Andrews Air Force Base, forty-seven miles to the north. HRT took pride in being completely self-sufficient, so supplies necessary to maintain fifty operators and twenty-five support staff had to move with them. Box trucks and stake-beds quickly piled up with MREs, medical equipment, communications gear, shelter, ammunition, weapons, helicopter rigging, and personal bags.

By simple process of luck, Jeremy’s Xray Snipers today fell within the duty section. He and the six other members of his team quickly stuffed their backpacks with two days’ worth of rations, night vision and surveillance optics, ammo, cold weather gear, an encrypted radio, and two extra batteries.

“Sixty-five pounds of lightweight gear,” the guys always joked. Jeremy had read that the Spartans had carried the same battle load at Thermopylae. Whether swords and shields or assault rifles and thermal imaging scopes, warriors had always toted the same load.

“Let’s move!” Jeremy called out as the rest of Xray hustled out toward their cars. As team leader, he functioned as something more than special agent and something less than supervisor. HRT had its own rules, and this paramilitary responsibility existed nowhere else in the FBI.

“You got a warning order for us yet?” Lottspeich asked, following his friend and former partner out of the garage and into the now blinding snow. They had endured selection, NOTS, and the Marine Corps Scout/Sniper School together. Jeremy considered Fritz one of his closest friends.

“On the record or off?” Jeremy asked. He wore camouflage Gore-Tex pants and a parka over polypro long johns, but the driving wind and snow bit through just the same.

“The real shit,” Lottspeich said. He sidestepped the communications van as it drove up from the tech shed in what had been the team’s original sniper tower.

“We’ve arrested one of the shooters. The military is interrogating him, but the CIA has HUMINT from a source down at Gitmo who says this is part of some bigger plot. They think this is just the first stage of an attempt to bring down the government.”

“Holy shit . . .” Lottspeich lost the rest of his sentence in the howling wind.