The Egg Code Read online

  Crain continued: “Routers are specialized computers designed to conduct the flow of traffic. Certain routers handle business within autonomous networks. Other routers are configured to serve as an interface between two distinct networks.”

  “The Gloria machine,” Kay said, unsure of herself. She did not mind Crain’s pedantic tone; while she’d worked with network prototypes for many years, she’d always utilized preexisting software and thus knew very little about computers on the bare-bones level. As a cryptographer, it was her job to scramble the thoughts of others, not to devise ones of her own. “So we’ve got a computer that doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

  Here, Crain seemed genuinely puzzled. “Maybe . . . but I don’t think so.” He set his pen down on the table. “Do you remember Bob Kahn?” Kay did; she’d seen him at MIT in the mid-sixties, and in Washington a few years later when she was hired to create a cipher for the TCP/IP project. “In the early days of the ARPANET, Kahn outlined four basic principles central to network communications. The first three, I don’t remember.” He looked at Frenkle, who shrugged— search me. “The fourth rule was simple. There can be no global consolidation of power in a system of this size.” He sighed. Through the thick, tinted windows of the Pentagon, the noise of the inaugural parade sounded dull and ominous, like the boom of an underground explosion. “It seems the Gloria router may not have gotten the message.”

  “I don’t understand.” Kay rubbed her eyes, missing the clarity of a well-lit room. “Weren’t the Gloria routers manufactured according to the government’s own specifications?”

  “They were, but so what?” Crain grabbed a sheet of paper and sketched a diagram—positives and negatives and decimal expressions of relative proportions. In the dark, Kay could read none of it. “Look. The way the protocol’s designed, a host computer sends a message. The router receives information from the host describing where the message should wind up. Based on that information, the router makes a decision. It can send the message on to its destination; it can relay the message back to the host; or it can redirect the message to another router. The important thing is this: In order for the network to operate effectively, these decisions must be made on the basis of the overall system. Each router has its own role to play. These roles were determined when the network was set in place.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  Crain looked back at the screen. “It is reasonable! That’s our problem. Somehow, the Gloria router has managed to manipulate its neighbors into following a new command. And when I say ‘neighbors,’ I don’t mean some dinky mainframe sitting in a concrete barracks five miles down the road. I’m talking about sites as widespread as Chicago, Cal Tech, Ithaca . . . This is a whole new geography, Kay.”

  Frenkle turned on the overhead lights. Kay felt strange at first, as if she’d just shared something intimate with the two men. “Any ideas on how it’s getting around the protocol?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I’ve got a notion.” Crain’s voice dropped a notch. “It’s possible that by passing erroneous information on to other devices, it’s able to augment their FIBs with its own forwarding specifications. Kind of the equivalent of putting yourself on the guest list. The question is, Is this something that the Gloria router is doing on its own, or is it simply responding to instructions from an outside source?”

  “What’s the list of suspects?” Here she could finally start to assert herself. This was Kay’s world—bad men, nasty secrets.

  “Well, naturally there’s the usual nut jobs. I’m sure Frenkle’s already got his people working on that.” Reluctantly, he added, “Then there’s the Gloria Corporation itself.”

  “What would their motive be?”

  “Think about it, Kay. We’re talking about a systematic inversion of the entire structure.”

  Kay shrugged. The way these men talked. Empty portents, all vaguely apocalyptic. “You’re afraid this one tiny contraption could seize control of the whole network?” Why not just pull the plug? she wondered, feeling silly.

  “Nothing quite so drastic as that. There’s not enough room in the computer’s buffer to handle that much information. Its circuits would burn out.” Eyes flashing, he stared at Frenkle across the table. “But it could make some friends.”

  Yes, the appeal of the committed insurrectionist. The Messiah newly emerged from the desert. Kay remembered her first year in this town, back when the feds were working on the Manson case, and everyone wondered how such a despicable man could get so many others to listen and obey.

  “Okay, boys.” She clapped her hands together. “I’m hooked. Where the hell is this thing?”

  “Ah. Good point.” Crain wrote a few words on a scrap of paper and passed it to her. Frenkle studied her expression as she read the note, then put it into her purse.

  “So you can see what our problem is,” he said. “Just the mere fact that the thing exists poses a major security hazard.”

  “Have you talked to the people over at Gloria?” she asked.

  “They’d say it was a statistical aberration and to think no more of it. Besides, if someone working for the GC really is behind this, I don’t want them to know we’re on the case.”

  “I don’t know,” Crain grumbled. “I’m inclined to go in and swing our fists around. We hold the damn contract.”

  “I agree,” said Kay. “The arrangement you’ve described sounds pretty one-sided. Without our funding, Gloria would go under. Seems to me we can do whatever we want.”

  “Kay, you’re absolutely right, but my budget and Crain’s combined aren’t big enough for us to hire a new liaison and reconfigure the entire backbone from the ground up.” Frenkle looked pale. A good ninety percent of his job involved juggling cash around; the very thought of it made his heart race. “I want to keep an eye on things. The fewer people who know that the Gloria router exists, the better. You, me, Crain, and that’s it. You want to whip something up for us?”

  “You want me to shadow the Gloria Corporation?” Kay laughed. Crain and Frenkle both sat with their hands in their laps, waiting. “I’m a little old for that, aren’t I?”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Frenkle pointed at the screen. “Those numbers could lead an educated miscreant back to the source. Some of our potential enemies may have access to our code files. I don’t want a single binary open to interpretation. Use a trinomial matrix, transpose it a half-dozen times, whatever it takes, but make sure we’ve got the information locked down.”

  “Now, Mitchell, come on.” Kay touched the back of his hand. She knew the way these defense boys operated. At the first sign of trouble, they’d clog up the system with byzantine procedures and cold-war conniveries. But she also knew enough to realize that those same tactics wouldn’t fool the typical hi-tech raider. “Look, I’ve been working codes for forty years. You make a stink that big, you might as well run the software over NBC during the Super Bowl. Someone bent on decrypting the information is going to spot a granny knot like that.”

  “All right then, Kay.” Frenkle nodded judiciously. “This is why I called you down here. What do you suggest?”

  Kay gave him a nasty look. I could have had a nice lunch today. “Mitchell, what exactly is it that you’re hoping to do?” Counting on her fingers, she provided her own answers. “You want to maintain the secrecy of the router; you want to make sure that no one tampers with the equipment; and if the damned thing turns out to be an asset, you want to guarantee that no one outside of the DoD will be able to use it. Am I right?”

  Frenkle frowned. “It sounds so sinister when you say it.”

  “Ha!” Kay touched her hair, adjusting the shape of her permanent. What an old lady, she thought, scolding herself. “Rule number one of American government, Mr. Frenkle—if you want to keep something a secret, make it obvious.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and headed for the door. “Call me when you’ve got a real problem.”

  “Kay,” Frenkle pleaded, turning in his chair. “Don’t let me down
. I’ve been very nice to you over the years.”

  “Relax, Mitchell. I’ll give my daughter a call tonight.” At this, both men looked confused. Standing in the doorway, she leaned against the metal frame and said, “By the way, do you know what the new president drinks?”

  Frenkle shook his head. “No idea, Kay.”

  She backed into the outer office. “I was thinking of sending him a case of Scotch.”

  “Can’t go wrong with Scotch,” Crain agreed.

  “Takes a long time to go through that much whiskey.” Frenkle smiled. “A good eight years.”

  “Are you kidding?” Kay laughed. “George Bush is a Texan. Four years at the most.”

  Waving over her shoulder, she closed the door on the two befuddled men and thought, Thank God I won’t live to see how this turns out.

  Two Views of the War

  LONDON

  In 1944, communication was slow between London and Washington. Waiting for news, Bartholomew Hasse stayed indoors, keeping watch over his belongings. There were prowlers outside; looters, war-crazed vagrants. A safe under the fireplace was his best defense against burglary. The Hasse flat had suffered a few indirect hits—chipped plaster in the entryway, that sort of thing. Most of the damage was purely psychological. Madrigal, Bartholomew’s English wife, took it the hardest; after all, this was her country. Bartholomew didn’t let it worry him. Having already left one place behind, he’d grown used to sneaking out of town.

  “Well, Bartholomew, our only reservation is this.” The American secretary lit his cigar and picked a bit of the wrapper out of his mouth. Along with the Hasses, he sat in a candlelit room near the back of the apartment. The rest of the flat was dark. “You’ve worked well for us in the past,” he continued. “But you are a small organization, and this is a difficult time in the war. The more we close in on Hitler, the tougher he is to defeat.”

  Bartholomew looked at his wife, then back at the secretary. Secretly, he worried about his business. In Germany, he’d worked under the direction of a man named Scherbius, who’d designed an early model of the Enigma cipher machines now being used against the Allies. Since coming to England, he’d helped the Brits develop their own version, called the TYPEX. In both cases, the goal was the same—to prevent enemy eyes from decoding secret intelligence transmitted via radio. It was a worthy cause, but there wasn’t much money in it. That’s where the Americans came in.

  “The demands we’ll be placing on your facilities in the coming months are enormous,” the secretary warned. He looked over his shoulder and blew his smoke toward the dark half of the room. The sight of Madrigal standing next to the empty fireplace startled him. Trying to smile, he scooted in his seat—a vague offer of some kind—but she shook her head and turned away.

  Unsettled, he rested his cigar against the rim of a steel ashtray and handed Bartholomew a stack of blueprints. “As you know, our efforts to nullify the enemy’s Panzer corps have failed.” He watched as his host flipped through the stack. “Personally, I don’t trust these rotor machines. Our field soldiers aren’t smart enough to use the damn things.”

  Bartholomew shrugged. “Well, sir, you have my sympathy. But everything is done with computers now. I haven’t seen a code book since 1938. People are afraid of them.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t like it. I want those numbers where I can see them. Right on the body of the plane.” The secretary scooted forward in his seat. “We need a consistent cipher. No one in the States knows what they’re doing. Think you can handle it?”

  “I can, sir.” Coming to the end of the stack, Bartholomew set the blueprints aside. “As an Englishman and a German alike, I swear it.”

  Madrigal stepped to the window at the far end of the office. From here she could not smell the smoke, nor hear the final negotiations between the secretary and her husband. She knew it was dangerous to stand in such a vulnerable spot, but a growing belief in her imminent departure caused her to look upon London as a kind of dreamland in the making. The ruined opera houses, the rubble-heaped roundabouts, the ancient glass that nightly shook and sometimes shattered in the V-1s’ wake—soon she would resign these things to what she already thought of as a closed volume, an overlong prelude to the main portion of her life. This arrangement with the American would ensure an easy passage to the States for her and her husband. The extra money certainly helped, but it was the diplomatic protection they needed the most. Oh, there were many things they would have to leave behind—small treasures, pricey linens, a relative or two—but she would not regret their loss. London was a dead city, almost Gothic in its scattered destruction; after months of bombing, the Nazi firepower had turned the plainest slabs of modern British architecture into amazing displays of twelfth-century detail.

  The American rose from his seat as Bartholomew added his name to a list at the bottom of a contract. The secretary made a cursory show of inspecting the form, then dropped it into an innocuous envelope marked GROCERY LIST.

  “Ah,” he said, gathering his things. “Another contract. This war is full of ’em.”

  “Yes, yes.” Bartholomew retrieved the man’s cigar and handed it back to him. “Men are fickle. Words are not.”

  “Agreed, agreed.” They shook hands. “That’s what I love about you, Bartholomew. Your cold German logic.”

  “No, my friend.” Still smoking, he steered the secretary away from the desk. “Things are different. I am an American now.”

  Mrs. Hasse excused herself and ran down the corridor. Passing a closet, she grabbed a suitcase and hurried upstairs. The bedroom was dark. Empty drawers lay in a pile next to the window. Sorting clothes into bundles, she picked out three blouses, three skirts, three pairs of underwear. No perfume, no makeup. No books.

  PITTSBURGH

  “Mama, why I got to stay in here, it’s hot!”

  “ ’Cause I can’t be watching when you’re walking around. Now sit right there and don’t be swinging your feet!”

  Julian loved watching his mother work: the way she moved against the hull, squeezing the handle on the paint gun as she stood alongside a few hundred other women, each dressed in high black boots and gray jumpsuits with blue bandannas wrapped around their heads. Ten hours a day, they worked inside an old cannery, now converted into a hangar. They took few breaks, fought occasionally, but mainly ignored one another because the work was hard and exacting. The stencils they used were thin sheets of metal; the edges were sharp, and you had to wear gloves to keep from cutting your fingers. The children kept out of the way, playing among themselves, torturing the enormous insects that crept out of cracks in the cement foundation. Julian avoided the other kids, preferring his mother’s company. The letters fascinated him, how they jumped directly from the stencil to the body of the plane, as if a machine had put them there. His mother was the machine. Candace Mason, wife of DuMochelle, the world-famous Jap killer of Pittsburgh. She made letters appear out of thin air, and could do it over and over again.

  “Julian, hand me the J.”

  “Which one’s the J?”

  “Oh, now, you know which one’s the J. Like your name—Julian, with a J. You start way up high, and then you go all the way down and you make a little squiggle.”

  The hangar was dark, and the ceiling was so high that Julian could barely see the iron support beams, even when he lay on his back and squinted past the bluish fog of the fluorescent bulbs. The place reeked of wet laundry and women’s sweat. He could still remember the sour odor of cucumbers from those days when the cannery made pickles instead of fighter planes. Before the war, his mother used to sew at home, and he would listen to the clang of the canning machines from the steps of his tenement house two streets up and over. So much had changed since then. No men, no school. No pickles.

  “Mama, what are you making?”

  “Oh, Julian, you know what we’re making. We’re making planes to fly over Europe. Now you be quiet and toss me the M.”

  “What are you gonna name it?”


  “You name it whatever you want to, baby.”

  “I wanna call it One-Eye, after Jimmy Maxwell.”

  “Now Julian, damn it, I said the M! Ain’t you got sense to hold it right-side-up?”

  Perched atop a steel tool rack, Julian watched the letters spring from his mother’s fingertips. Her new job was mysterious, exciting. As a seamstress, she’d kept to her small tasks, sewing in the kitchen. The factory changed all that. The planes loomed over the dirty floor—vicious monoliths—and she tamed them, naming them with her paint, her letters. She was his hero, a new Adam. He’d heard all the old stories from a white preacher who stood on downtown street corners as kids and war widows passed by on their way to the factories. Black or white, didn’t matter, they all stood outdoors in the cold fall of 1944 and listened to the preacher read from the Old Testament. Adam was the first man, the namer of the beasts. With this power, he created something from nothing. I call thee—lion! Whitewolf! Devilfish! Wonderjet! Just like Adam, Candace Mason gave names to the unknown creatures. She was a powerful woman, knowing and beautiful. Julian adored her. He rarely thought about his father.

  “Mama, what are you writing now?”

  “Oh, Julian . . . I just don’t know.”

  II

  Dipshit, U.S.A.

  Old Man, Alone

  1998

  Grass on my shoes, wet grass. The steep slope, from the house to the lake. Could Mother have lived here? Nope, I would’ve had to do everything. Julian, fetch the groceries. Oh, yes, ma’am! Just sit right down, there you go...

  It’s a nice view, though. Water looks cold. You buying a new house, that’s half your investment. Girl’s trying to tell me, You need to refinance . I said, I don’t need to refinance—if you can get me zero-point-nine percent, I don’t need to refinance nothing. No sir. I got plenny of money. I take better care of my money than most people do . . .

  Leaves are coming down early this year. I can see my house from here. The lake, the moving van, the ramp sticking out of the back, big words, bold and blocky: CRANE CITY MOVERS. Looks like a popcorn bag—remember those?—with the blue and red pinstripes, and the words HOT POPCORN always written in one square serif or another. It’s a childhood thing. Summer carnivals. Of course, there were no carnivals back in 1944. I remember those days. DuMochelle Mason fights the Japs while his wife builds the bombs. That was my childhood, right there . . .