There was no security inside the Z building. If you were in and breathing, you were supposed to be there.
At the bottom of the stairs Kudrow turned right and cruised down a hallway, passing three green doors, each opening to disheveled offices that he avoided religiously. No placards marked the spaces. At the end of the hall there was one more door. He opened it without breaking stride and entered what was called the Puzzle Center.
It looked like a college dorm at finals.
Leo Pedanski stood with a start and spilled the remnants of his soda on a layer of papers that covered one of the room’s two desks. “Mr. Kudrow. Hi.”
Kudrow’s head twisted slowly as he surveyed the room. Dozens of empty red cans lay on the desks, on the floor next to overflowing wastebaskets, and atop equipment that had cost the taxpayers far more than they needed to pay. Stacks of paper rose to various heights almost everywhere that there was a surface to pile them. Both desks were littered with plastic wrappers. A third chair had been wedged into the room. The air smelled of sweat and junk food.
“Gentlemen,” he said in greeting. Craig Dean, taller than the boss by an inch and sporting an unkempt ponytail that had seen hardly a trim in a year, rose from a cross-legged position and stood next to Pedanski, whose hair was a mess of reddish-brown tangles. Vikram Patel, pudgy and balding at twenty seven, did not trust his legs at the moment and remained on the floor, arms hugging both knees to his chest. ‘Scared’ was a good word, Kudrow thought. “Redecorating?”
Leo Pedanski, the de-facto leader of the trio by virtue of his advanced age, ran a hand hard over his head and brought the other to meet it in a grasp behind his neck. He was to be the messenger. His caffeine-filled stomach roiled loudly. “No, but, uh…we’ve got a real problem.” A nervous half-chuckle trailed off his words.
“It’s the primary S-box,” Patel said, his voice cracking. “It was weak. I knew it was weak.”
Dean, a twenty-eight year old holder of two doctorates in theoretical mathematics and chaos theory, rotated his spindly body toward the accuser. “You damn Jethro, The primary S was mine! It was fine. It is fine!”
“Shut up,” Pedanski said with as much authority as he could summon. It wasn’t much. Their usually free flowing, sometimes sophomoric relationship had been virtually wiped out in the span of sixty hours. All because of a single phone call.
“The primary S-box?” Kudrow inquired somewhat hopefully. “Is this about MAYFLY?” He looked to Craig Dean, who stared back at him through John Lennon spectacles. It had to be about MAYFLY; that’s all it could be about. “You were doing a postmortem on MAYFLY, son, weren’t you? Did you find what might have compromised it?”
“Mr. Kudrow,” Pedanski stepped in, drawing the boss’s attention back to him. “It’s not MAYFLY. It’s KIWI.”
Kudrow’s spine straightened, his chin rising. Behind the gray tint his brown eyes flared. He heard Folger mutter Oh shit quietly behind. “What about KIWI?”
“We… It…” Pedanski paused and swallowed. “Someone knows it.”
“What do you mean ‘knows it’?” Kudrow asked, more forcefully than he normally would have in dealing with the animals. They were a special grouping, one that required his fatherly touch more than a tyrannical demand for an explanation. But his paternal streak had gone AWOL for the moment.
“We got a call,” Patel said between wet, teary sniffs. The computer engineer dragged the back of his arm across his nose and looked up to Kudrow. “Pedanski did, I mean.”
Kudrow’s eyes were snapping between the speakers. He finally locked on Pedanski and took a half step forward. He took a covert deep breath to retrieve some calm. His heart rate had nearly doubled in a minute. “From the top, Mr. Pedanski. Everything.”
Leo’s gulp for air was plain to see before he spoke. “Okay. You know the validation protocol for KIWI?”
“That was completed two years ago?” Kudrow responded. There was accusation in his rhetoric. “Yes.”
“We did the standard stuff,” Pedanski explained, though ‘standard’ only in their world. For a full year, two sets of paired Cray supercomputers, individually the most powerful pieces of computing equipment on the planet, had chewed at a piece of the digital trash produced when cleartext was subjected to KIWI. On the first day of the eleventh month the Crays found one character, a ‘C’, but didn’t know where in the sequence to place it. Thirty days later the animals completed the message for the frustrated computer wizards, placing the ‘C’ in the third space and filling in the rest. Fuck you, Chip, it read, an obvious slap at the innards of the Cray. KIWI at that time was the most secure cryptographic system ever seen. But, though the computer was the premiere destroyer of crypto systems, there was one other element that had to be considered. “Including the human element test. You know, the hidden message in those puzzle sections of magazines. Three different magazines, I thin—”
“Get to it,” Kudrow directed.
“The puzzles were KIWI ciphertext, and in there was a message to call the Puzzle Center. The same thing we’ve done with other systems. Minor ones, major ones.” Pedanski saw the boss’s nostrils flare impatiently. “So, like you said, that was all done with a couple years ago. So…” The mathematician’s voice went breathy for a second before he recovered. “…Friday I’m doing my shift in here and line two lights up. I figure it’s some guy in T getting whacked, but when I pick it up this…kid, or something on the other end says he’s solved puzzle ninety-nine. Ninety-nine was the KIWI code number.”
“We chose that because of Barbara Feldon,” Dean said as though it would matter to Kudrow. “From Get Smart. She was agent…” He wisely ended his addition to his comrade’s explanation.
“Real smooth, Craig,” Patel commented from the floor.
Pedanski took a breath and continued. “Someone busted the ciphertext, Mr. Kudrow. Of KIWI! I just about shit my pants. I didn’t know what to do. I told the other shifts set to cover the Center over the weekend to stay away and I called in Craig and Vik right away.” He seemed young and fragile as he looked around the room. “We haven’t slept since Friday, Mr. Kudrow. We’ve been going over every possible weakness in KIWI, and we can’t find anything. Not the primary S-box; that’s fine. Nothing!” He wiped a hand hard across his mouth. “KIWI was solid when the three of us thought it up, it was solid when we prototyped and validated it, it was solid when the gear to use it was being built and installed. But since three days ago…I don’t know.” His eyes glistened. “I don’t know.”
“Could someone be screwing with us, Nick?” Folger asked quietly over his boss’s shoulder. “Someone inside or outside trying to tweak us? You know, to see how we handle a possible breech?”
Kudrow considered that and looked to Dean. Pedanski had turned away and was staring at the ceiling. “Who knew what the cleartext was in the puzzle?”
“Just the three of us,” Dean answered. “That was the Agent Ninety-nine thing. We were foolin’ around one day and picked that for the identifier. We didn’t tell anyone about it. Not even you or Mr. Folger. At least I didn’t.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?” Patel demanded.
“You two, enough!” Pedanski glared at them, forcing them both into retreat. The anger stanched the tears he seemed ready to loose. “Mr. Kudrow, all the KIWI machines are going to be in and running in a few weeks.”
“Ninety-five percent are in use now, Nick,” Folger said softly. “FBI’s the last to go on line. The embassies, DoD, CIA, they’re all using it now. And we’ve got no fallback, Nick, not with MAYFLY maybe being leaky.”