“Who could?” He shrugged. “A lot of us have seen trouble coming. When I had money and expected more, I planned to endow McAdam College into an island of culture, where a few dedicated men and women might do what they could to shelter some spark of our civilization the way the church did through the Dark Ages.” “A noble dream.” Wistfully, Pepperlake nodded. “I wish you’d made the money.”
He put his bottle back in the filing cabinet, and we followed him down the stairwell. A thin cold rain was still falling when we came out of the building. Rob Roy’s pickup was on the lot behind it. He let me load my bike, and we drove Lydia back to the TV station where she had left her car.
When she got out, I asked to see her again.
“Why not?” She smiled and gave me her telephone number. “We’ve had an interesting evening.”
“A good kid,” he said as we watched her drive away. “I’ve known her since grade school. She’s had a hard life. Rough times as a nightclub hostess. An affair with Stuart McAdam that went very sour. But now I think she’s getting herself back together.”
He dropped me and the bike off at my room.
“Come by the plant tomorrow,” he invited me. “Let’s talk about the cryptophone.”
I located CyberSoft in what had been Moorhawk’s Coal Combustion Corporation, a long low green metal building off the Lexington highway. The parking lot was empty when I got there next morning, but half a dozen bicycles were racked out in front. A short fat man with thick glasses and a lot of hair came to the door. I introduced myself and asked to see Mr. McAdam.
“Rob Roy?” He nodded and shook my hand. “We’re free and easy here. I’m Mike Densky. Rob said you’d be here. Come on in.”
The big room inside was almost as empty as the parking lot, though I saw a few people busy at computers. Rob Roy came to beckon me genially to a chair in front of his desk and poured coffee for us before he asked how I got on with Beth.
“I don’t.”
“I know.” He grinned as if amused. “She’s another McAdam, but you’ll find her okay when you get to know her.”
“If I could—”
His grin spurred me to ask about the cryptophone. He reached across his desk for a wallet-sized device cased in slick brown plastic. A thin metal antenna and a thin-stemmed microphone snapped out when he clicked a switch and coiled back into place when he clicked again.
“Wireless,” he said. “Linked to the infonet system through digital relays and the global satellites. They’re trying to break my encryption algorithms. Trying reverse engineering on my hardware. Trying to break us. Threatening to throw me into prison.” He shrugged and gave it to me. “Hold it to your ear. The pressure switch turns it on.”
It hummed faintly for a moment and went silent.
“Yes?” Elizabeth Me Adam’s voice startled me. “Mode?”
I knew nothing to say.
“Open mode.” Her cool voice grew crisper. “Who are you calling?”
“Nobody,” I said.
“Voice unknown.” I realized that I was really speaking to nobody. “Identify destination if you wish to continue in open mode. If you wish to use secure mode, give your name or ID number and repeat the alphabet as initial voice sample.”
I handed the instrument back to Rob Roy.
“It’s really private?”
“Too private to suit the government.” Amusement flashed in his eyes. “It’s based on a new wrinkle in physics we’re keeping to ourselves. It fits a very real need for total security. Hackers are breaking the best systems in use, though nobody likes to admit it.”
“It can beat the hackers?”
“And rile the FBI and the National Security Agency. It’s an educated telephone. In the open mode, it gives you an ordinary infonet link. In the secure mode, it recognizes voices and encrypts signals into secure digital strings that can travel safely on any public channel. It can save the last two hours of talk, still protected. Messages can be decrypted only by another cryptophone, and only after it has matched instructions with the voice track of an authorized receiver.”
“You won’t give it up?” I said. “And the justice department calls you disloyal?”
“Maybe I am.” He nodded cheerfully. “But the cryptophone is our own creation. Potentially a very valuable property. Revealing the algorithms would destroy it.” His jaw set. “I won’t give them up.”
“So they’re trying to close you down?”
“They’ve done that.” His face tightened. “When we had a market—only a very small beginning—most of it was overseas. They’ve shut that off. Customs has been ordered to seize our exports and arrest anyone trying to take a cryptophone out of the country. We’ve had to stop shipments and shut production down.”
He pushed his coffee aside and sat gazing at nothing, stubborn defiance on his face.
“What next?” I asked.
“Moorhawk left for Washington this morning, under subpoena to testify before Senator Finn’s National Defense Committee. They want to know which criminal groups or foreign powers could have received cryptophones. There’s not much we can say. If we’d interrogated or recorded the buyers, we’d have had no sales.” He scowled at the empty desks, lips set hard. “They’re determined to put me out of business. To get my secrets if they can.”
“Don’t they have a point?” I thought of Botman. “Couldn’t terrorists use your cryptophone?”
“Perhaps.” He nodded soberly. “That alarms the feds, maybe with good reason, though in the end they’ll have to admit that technological advances have left them in the dust. Information science has grown beyond control. As for your unlucky brother, I think he should have been more concerned with why the FBI and the CIA are so desperate to seize my technology for themselves.”
“Is your defiance worth the cost?” I had to ask. “To you?”
He paused to consider that. I was struck by the clean grace of his bones and his likeness to his sister—and to Stuart. A family mask that changed immensely with the wearer.
“Moorhawk sees it as a matter of principle.” His eyes came back to me, as keen as Beth’s but more blue than violet. “He wants to defend the right of privacy, the right of the individual against the crowd. So does Pepperlake—at least as far as he can with his struggling weekly. For me, it’s more personal. CyberSoft’s my life. I grew up with computers. I saw the need for stronger security while I was still a college sophomore. Dropped out to work in it. Worked nights and weekends till Moorhawk came up with the venture capital to finish it.”
His voice dropped.
“It’s ours now. I won’t give it up. Not to the infonet managers. Not to the Department of Justice. Not to anybody, though offers have run in the hundreds of millions. Creighton, our pal in the FBI, is accusing me of every crime in his book. The courts have given us an ultimatum. We don’t intend to blink.”
“What if they don’t blink?”
“If they don’t—” He gave me another piercing look. “Barstow, are you really one of us now?”
“I am,” I said. “Cross my heart. Though I’d like to know more about who we are.”
“Your brother set us on the road,” he said, “with Terror in America. Pepperlake talks about what he calls the temper of the time. He remembers World War II and the way the country was united then. A man in uniform could hitch half across the country, counting on good citizens to get him back to base on time. He wouldn’t get far now.
“Your brother was asking how we lost the unity that made us a nation.” He gave me a twisted grin. “But I guess you know the book.”
“Alden saw the problems,” I said. “I don’t think he knew the answers.”
“Does anybody?” He shrugged soberly. “Our little group has never found a cure for the sort of thing that killed your brother.” He paused again to study my face, and finally shook his head. “I don’t know who tipped Hunn and Creighton off, but you may be standing where he was.”
“I’ve considered the risks,” I
told him. “They do concern me. But I’m wondering about you and your congress. You seem to have the local courthouse gang against you as well as the federal government. Can’t they smash you?”
“Maybe they can.” His lean shoulders squared. “Maybe they can’t. We have an ace to play.”
I didn’t ask what it was, but he let me stay another hour, talking about his life.
“We McAdams were sometimes a very happy family.” Recollection warmed his face. “Our father is an easy-going guy who loves history. Taught it till he retired. He likes good stories and good bourbon. He has his double shot every evening, collects antiques, works now and then on a history of slavery he’ll never finish.
“But our mother—” His smile disappeared. “She was a shrillvoiced Christian fundamentalist who hated him for frittering away the last of the family fortune. Always calling him a good-for-nothing sot and nagging him to give his soul to Jesus. I think she was bad for Stuart.” He made a wry face. “The youngest sibling. Beth calls him a rebel soul. In trouble with his parents or his teachers or the law all his life. He got expelled from VMI, got a dishonorable discharge from the Army, did his year in prison in spite of all the old man and Beth could do to save him. Free again now, on a pardon Gottler must have paid for, he’s back in command of the Rifles.
“He could be an angel when he tried, but he used to play dirty tricks on me when I made him jealous. He brought Lydia home from a hard life in Louisville with a promise to marry her then beat her half to death before she left him. Yet I’ve put up with him. Most people like him. He’s clever. He can show a sort of charm.
“And you know Beth.”
“Only slightly.”
Amusement crinkled his eyes.
“The best of us, Clay. Don’t give her up before you get to know her. She kept the house after our mother died. Still lives at home and looks after our father. Stuart has always been her poor little baby brother. He’s never been nicer to her than to anybody else, but she always forgives him for anything. Tries to bail him out when he needs her.
“She is okay,” he told me again. “You ought to know her better.”
With no easy answer for that, I thanked him for the interview and got up to leave. He nodded at the cryptophone.
“Yours,” he said. “If you want it.”
Surprised, I thanked him again.
“Careful,” he warned me. “The National Security Agency has experts working to break my algorithms. It has a little security kink of my own that ought to keep them scratching their heads for a long time to come, but they can detect the encrypted signal. You could be in hot water for mere possession of the instrument, even if you never try to use it.”
I dropped the little instrument into my shirt pocket.
“I gave your brother one,” He shook his head as I rose to go. “I hope that’s not what did him in.”
He walked with me to the door. Turning back when he smiled and offered his hand, I glanced at the glass-walled cubicles around the long room, most of them empty.
“For all you have done, you seem to have a small staff.”
“Once it was larger. We depend more on AIs now.”
“Artificial intelligences?”
“If you call them intelligent.”
“If not?”
“They’re systems of algorithms that use their own sort of logic. They can store a lot of data and process it faster than a human brain can, but they lack intuition. Call them the foot soldiers of the computer revolution.”
“So they didn’t invent the cryptophone?”
“They helped.” His shrug seemed enigmatic. “I have to give them credit.”
“You aren’t afraid they’ll get out of control?”
“They’ll never have my brother’s ambition.” He laughed, perhaps a little ruefully, and grew more sober. “They won’t take the world over, but there’s no predicting what could be done by those with know-how to create and use them.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but his face had become so grim that I decided not to ask.
CHAPTER NINE
THE CRYPTOPHOHE’S CHIME startled me next morning.
“Mr. Barstow?” Beth McAdam’s actual voice, cool and official. “Can you come to my office this morning?”
I caught my breath and said I could.
“Be here at ten. Something urgent.”
Walking in five minutes early, tense with a mix of hope and trouble, I found her already at her desk. She looked warmly fresh and desirable in the same tan sweater, but she gave me no smile. Nodding for me to sit, she closed the office door and sat scanning me with stern disapproval. I waited uneasily till she spoke.
“Mr. Barstow, you’re ignoring my advice.” Her manner brought back long-past scoldings from my stepfather. “I warned you to stop your meddling here. To get out of town.”
“So?” I gave way to resentment. “Why should I care?” “Remember your brother.”
That hurt.
“I’m sorry.” She had seen me flinch. Her tone softened, though
only for a moment. “I’m not your enemy, but you will have serious enemies when they learn your business here.”
“A risk I have to take.”
“If you feel that way—” She gave me a searching frown and abruptly went on, “Perhaps we can help each other.”
“How?”
My breath came faster, with the fleeting hope for some sort of friendship.
“I can keep quiet about who you are and your business here.” But not, I remembered, with Rob Roy. Her narrowed eyes were sharp as blades. “You can answer questions for me. How about it?”
I heard nothing warmer in her voice.
“Okay,” I muttered, wondering what answers she wanted.
“So we’ve agreed.”
She was absently fingering a paperweight on her desk, a racing Thoroughbred in bright black glass mounted on an oval silver base.
“I’ll keep quiet, but others may not.” She pushed the horse away and fixed those intense ultra-blue eyes on me. “I must warn you again, Barstow. My advice still stands. I can’t protect you from others who won’t want you here.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Understood.”
Still intently watching me, she touched the horse again.
“Last night you attended a meeting of this so-called Citizens Congress? I believe you became a member? Right?”
How did she know? Had Rob Roy told her? Baffled, I had to admit that I’d been at the meeting.
“Who was there?”
“I recognized Mr. Pepperlake and his attorney. The others were strangers.”
“I want the truth.” Her face set harder. “I think you know my brother Rob.”
“Slightly. I met him at Rotary.”
“You know him better than that.” My stepfather couldn’t have been more severe, yet I felt, or wanted to feel, a generous human warmth beneath her stem official shell. “You saw him at the meeting. Yesterday morning you visited him at CyberSoft. He gave you a cryptophone. Right?”
I had to nod.
“Mr. Barstow—” She paused to frown forbiddingly. “I want your full cooperation, because I’m concerned for my brothers. You heard Stuart making his political announcement at the rally?”
She waited for another uneasy nod.
“He’s not a bad man.” She was sharply defensive. “Sometimes impulsive, often reckless, trouble-prone since he was a baby, but never really evil.” Her baby brother, Pepperlake had said. Forever in need of her protection, now far beyond her control. What could she expect me to do about him?
“Not that he’s stupid.” Tight-lipped, she shook her head. “Maybe too smart. He wants too much, reaches too far. He’s surrounded now by all the trigger-happy thugs in his militia, talking open rebellion. They’re asking for trouble.”
“They could get it,” I said. “The rally made a splash on the infonet. Washington must be listening.”
“I’ve begged Stuart to back off.” Nervou
sly, she picked up the little glass horse and set it down again. “So has his father. He won’t listen. I think I know why. He expects help from Rob.”
She must have caught my startled look.
“Rob’s never been close to me. Secure in himself and always independent.” Her gaze grew keener. “Did he mention a weapon?” “He spoke of an ace he could play.”
“He does have something.” I saw her disappointment. “Something he hinted at once, back before trouble seemed so close. Only an idea then—he called it a bit of serendipity he’d hit on in his search for information security. It may have come to nothing. Stuart thinks it didn’t.
“My brothers—”
She stopped for a moment, looking up with a wistful half-smile at her own portraits of them and her father on the wall behind me. “Rob’s a genius. Or so our mother used to say. That always made Stuart furious. They’ve never got on, and I don’t like what might happen now.”
She looked back at me, a somber shadow in her eyes.
“The Silicon Shell. That was a name he had for the weapon he’d imagined if it was to be a weapon. Designed for defense, he said, not for aggression. He’d picked the name to hide the actual idea. He doesn’t talk about it now. He’s too stubborn to listen, even when I’ve begged him to make some reasonable deal with the government on his cryptophone.”
“So you expect some kind of showdown?”
“It could be something—” She stopped, with a wry twist of her lips. “I love Stuart, but he frightens me. Back from prison now, he’s harder than ever. Bitter against the government and not afraid to talk of treason. He’s got a lot of fools around him. They could start a crazy little war and get a lot of people killed.
“And there’s another player. Kit Moorhawk—I think you’ve met.”
I nodded, wondering how much she knew about the Citizens Congress.
“Rob’s business partner back when he had money and his attorney now. A political opponent of Stuart and Burleigh. Each man with his own agenda. The government is crowding them all into a mix that can turn deadly. Maybe deadlier, if that weapon does exist and Stuart gets control.”
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