They talked for a while about the darkroom Pappas was building in the basement, about the adult-education course he was taking in black-and-white photography. Sarah ran the details of the Valerie Santoro murder by him, mentioning the database search and the still-unclear involvement of a banker named Warren Elkind.
“I seriously doubt,” she said, “that the head of the Manhattan Bank killed Valerie.”
“Why? Rich people don’t murder?”
“Come on. There’s something more to this.”
“There always is, kid. Always is. When someone decides to become an FBI informant, he or she’s taking a chance.”
“Sure, but…”
“You know the pay’s the same whether you develop an asset or not.”
“My job is to protect the source-”
“Sarah, if you really want to protect a source, you’ll never use her information, and what good is that? Look, always go with your gut instinct. You’re suspicious about your informant’s murder, don’t leave it to the locals. See if the answering-machine tape turns up anything. Whether it’s the Mob or your banker, you’ll know soon enough. Speaking of the Mob, you still seeing that Italian guy?”
Sarah gave him a blank stare and said in mock indignation: “Is that supposed to be funny? Do all Italians belong to the Mafia?”
“Yeah, and all Greeks have souvlaki stands,” Pappas replied. “What’s his name again-Angelo?”
“Andrew,” Sarah said, “and he’s history.”
“He was a nice-looking guy.”
“Not my type.”
“Not potential father material?”
“Alex, he’d pretend Jared wasn’t even there. He couldn’t deal with the fact that I had a son.”
“You probably won’t believe me when I tell you you’ll find the right kind of guy-for you as well as for Jared. You’re the one who’s got to fall in love with him. Jared-Jared’ll come around.”
“You’re right. I don’t believe you.”
Pappas nodded. “It’ll happen. Plus, whoever you get serious about is going to have to pass Jared’s scrutiny, and he’s an excellent judge of character. Gotta be-he likes me, doesn’t he? So don’t worry so much. It’ll happen.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Within hours after Edwin Chu and George Frechette, the NSA cryptanalysts, received the encrypted fragment of telephone conversation captured by a Rhyolite spy satellite above Switzerland, Edwin Chu broke the code.
Actually, the NSA’s Cray supercomputers, using all available analytical skills, including several cryptanalytic techniques unknown outside the agency, broke it. But Edwin Chu had hovered over the computer and had done what he could to help-sort of a binary backseat driver.
The National Security Agency is always interested in new encryption schemes, so the work Chu did with the Cray late that night and into the early morning wasn’t purely to satisfy his own curiosity.
But that was a large part of it.
It wasn’t easy. In fact, had Chu been more senior and had more clout, cracking the code would have taken less than an hour, rather than eight hours. He’d wanted to use the latest generation of Cray supercomputers, but had to settle instead for an older Cray.
“I was sort of hoping this would be RC-4,” he explained to Frechette, referring to a commercially available encryption package. The only cryptographic software that NSA permitted to be exported out of the United States used algorithms of a certain length, specifically 40-bit. The best-known of these software packages were RC-2 and RC-4, tunable ciphers that were reasonably secure-except from the NSA, which has special-purpose chips designed to crack them in just a few minutes.
“Piece of cake,” he modestly announced to George Frechette, handing him a set of headphones. “There’s supposed to be this new crypto firm in Zurich that’s been making new secure voice-encryption phones and told the Agency to go fuck off.”
“Good for them,” Frechette murmured. Unknown encryption schemes paid their mortgages.
“I think this is from those guys. Company was founded by some Russian émigré, an encryption specialist, used to be in the KGB’s Eighth Directorate.” The Eighth Chief Directorate of the former KGB was responsible for the security of all Soviet cipher communications. “Guy was one of their most advanced encryption people. A real big swinging dick. Got fed up with the pathetic level of Soviet technology, and then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the money dried up. Couldn’t produce his most advanced designs. So he went capitalist.”
“Huh.”
Chu explained that the Russian had developed his own encryption algorithm some years back, while still working for the KGB. The KGB, of course, hadn’t let him publish it in a mathematical journal. When he went private, the Russian kept it closely held.
This was his error.
One of the great paradoxes of the crypto world is that the more secret you keep a piece of cryptographic software, the less secure it will be. Unless you make an algorithm widely available to hackers around the world, you’ll never become aware of the hidden flaws it may contain.
In this instance, Chu explained, the algorithm depended upon the intractability of a complicated inverse polynomial operation-which the NSA had solved two years ago. The creator likely didn’t know this, nor that the NSA had a lot of partial solutions precomputed and stored in fast memory, enabling Chu to take the complicated polynomials and reduce them to a set of simpler polynomials.
In short, it hadn’t been easy to crack, but between the NSA’s high-powered research and its vast array of the latest computers, it had been crackable.
“Luckily we got a decent hunk of the signal, enough to work on,” Edwin Chu said. “Have a listen.”
George Frechette looked up, blinking owlishly at Chu. “These guys Americans?”
“Voice One sounds American. Voice Two is foreign, like Swiss or German or Dutch or something, I can’t be sure.”
“So what do you want to do with this?”
“Get it transcribed and inputted and out of our hands, buddy. Let someone else worry about it. As for me”-he glanced at his watch-“it’s Big Mac time.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
At a hardware store near the Etoile, Baumann purchased an assortment of tools, and at the Brentano’s on Avenue de l’Opéra, he picked up two identical red-vinyl-jacketed Webster’s pocket dictionaries to use for sending encoded messages. On a brief shopping trip in the 8th Arrondissement, he bought several very good suits and shirts, off the rack but well made, along with an assortment of ties, several pairs of English shoes, an expensive leather attaché case, and a few other accessories.
Then he returned to the Raphaël. Although it was not even noon, the dark, English-style oak-paneled bar was already doing a good business. At a small table, he lingered over a café express, going through a stack of American business magazines and newspapers-Forbes, Fortune, Barron’s, and others. From time to time he looked up and watched the clientele come and go.
It was not long before he noticed a man in his late thirties, an American businessman, from the look of him. Baumann overheard him having a conversation with a man at an adjoining table who appeared to be a junior associate. The first businessman, whose neatly combed dark hair was salted with gray, was complaining to the other that the hotel had failed to deliver his Wall Street Journal to his room with breakfast this morning, though he had made a specific request.
The stroke of good fortune came when the businessman was called by his last name by a waiter, who brought a telephone to his table and plugged it into a wall jack. Once he’d finished his apparently urgent telephone call, the two Americans hastened into the lobby. There the junior associate took a seat while his friend got into the elevator.