by Hammond, Ray
But the woman in front of him was in no mood to care. She swung back to face him, her fine chin jutting with determination and anger.
‘You lied to me Jack, you lied, and that’s the worst thing anyone can do. Just leave me alone. I’m going to do this my way and I don’t need you, the United Nations or Sloan Press – or any of you. I’ll find a new publisher and I’ll do this my way!’
He saw tears – was it anger, pride, regret? – gathering in her wide brown eyes. She tossed her head once and then glared up at him.
‘I think it’s time for you to leave, Jack, don’t you?’
I think I am hopelessly in love. I want you so much I don’t know what to do. My pulse must be over a hundred. My stomach feels worse than it used to when I was about to go into action. My hands are wringing wet. My breath is coming in short gasps.
He takes a step forward, strange geometric hinges in time and place opening before him.
‘Haley . . .’
She doesn’t move.
He reaches out and caresses her cheek with his fingertips.
‘Haley . . .?’
She is staring up into his clear blue eyes. All she sees is honesty – and a light she doesn’t recognize, but one that seems compelling and all-embracing.
‘Haley, I don’t care about any of this. All I know is I don’t want to upset you. I never want to upset you again. I . . .’
She can’t stop her tears now, but she can’t turn away. She feels them tumbling over her lower eyelids and down her cheeks.
Suddenly he is against her, holding her head in both his hands, kissing the tears from her cheeks. He kisses her lips, her mouth, and she hungrily kisses his. She no longer has any idea of what she is doing, but her heart is singing.
*
The writ was served by hand, in the front office of the Tye Corporation Legal Services Department on F Street and 6th, Washington DC. In itself this wasn’t unusual. Writs were still sometimes served by hand, although electronic filing had long since become approved as the fast and sensible way to serve notice of a legal claim. But some contrary legal firms still liked to pettifog with old-fashioned methods, and Furtrado assumed that Masters, Morrison, Johnson & Co of Knoxville must have deliberately set out to be vexatious.
He broke the seal and sat back to read. To a seasoned lawyer a writ meant little more than childish name-calling in a schoolyard: as many as a dozen different writs were received in one part or another of the Tye group each day. Few of them ended up in Furtrado’s personal office, since usually they were appraised by one of his team and spun out to the most appropriate law firm to make an initial response.
But this writ had been delivered just as Furtrado himself was crossing the lobby. He had scooped it up from the reception desk with a smile; it never hurt to sample the daily activity.
He read it once, then read it again more carefully. It had been issued by a wholly champertous Southern law firm on behalf of the Memphis-based family of a retired fast-food franchise owner, now deceased. The man had bought a replacement liver in an auction run by LifeLines Inc., part of the Tye Life Sciences Group, for $20.5 million. The writ claimed that the liver had been guaranteed a 95.21 per cent match with the recipient’s DNA profile, but the actual match had turned out to be less than forty per cent. Despite belated immune-system treatment, the patient had died as his body rejected the organ. Attached to an aggressive covering letter sent in advance of the formal legal procedure of mutual ‘discovery’ and disclosure of evidence was a copy of LifeLines’s guarantee of the DNA match profile and an extract from a consultant pathologist’s report declaring that the organ was, in fact, no more suitable for the patient than any random organ obtained on the charity market. Such prima facie evidence was compelling. The family was claiming back the original $20.5 million and seeking $800 million in punitive, solatium and compensatory damages.
Furtrado had never seen such a claim before, but then, LifeLines had only been in operation for three months and had only recently enjoyed a spectacularly successful flotation on the EUUSA biotech market.
The counsellor knew immediately whom to call. Zachary Zorzi, as Tom’s latest rising star, was now busy building the auction models that would be used to market all products produced by the Phoebus Project. Furtrado found himself praying that this writ wouldn’t prompt the discovery of any serious technical problem that could affect that launch.
Chapter Twenty-One
‘Give us a little tour,’ Chevannes shouted above the engine noise. ‘We’ve got a first-timer.’
The pilot nodded and the UN Jet Ranger 209B rose from the JFK helicopter pad as readily as a hungry bee from a depleted bloom.
On their long flight north, Chevannes had learned that the Swedish mathematician and astrophysicist had never visited New York and, like millions of immigrants before him, the UNISA officer couldn’t resist proudly showing off his adopted city.
They had travelled from Lima first-class, in seats paid for with UN money, a new experience for Chevannes but a luxury the directors of Operation Iambus considered appropriate to their guest’s status. Unknown to that guest, two UNISA field officers dressed as businessmen had also shared their large cabin – ‘just in case,’ Deakin had said, although Chevannes couldn’t imagine what such a ‘case’ might be.
As their plane had crossed into North American airspace Chevannes had noticed that the matrix of laser-borne communications above them was growing denser. He had remarked on this to his travelling companion.
‘Yes, it’s criminal,’ agreed Larsson, misunderstanding Chevannes’s meaning. ‘Those lasers don’t have to be visible at all. They just add the visible wavelengths for show, so they can be seen from the ground. Tye Networks started that as a marketing gimmick, years ago, and all the others followed suit. It ruins terrestrial astronomy.’
‘Thomas Tye, again,’ grunted Chevannes.
Larsson smiled and leaned over to the window.
‘But it’s become the best economic indicator there is – like vapour trails above a city in the old days. When I was a boy my father used to tell me to look up at the sky to see how many jets were flying in and out of Scandinavia. That’s how we knew how buoyant the economy was. Now we just look up at the night sky, and the more laserbursts, the greater the economic activity on the planet.’
Chevannes had simply nodded and returned his attention to the light show.
In New York the other passengers in first class were held back so that the two men could leave the aircraft first, clearing immigration and Customs by a nod directed towards the waiting US diplomatic officer at the exit. They had then stepped through a side door in the jetway ramp and down an open stairway to a United Nations limousine waiting on the tarmac.
In less than five minutes their helicopter was climbing westwards above the soul-sapping undulations of Queens’s parched and polluted cemeteries. Chevannes found this rapid transition from a Peruvian mountain top distinctly disorientating and he tried to imagine how his companion must feel after so many years of isolation. But as soon as the man-made peaks of Manhattan rose in front of them, the Scandinavian intellectual was gawping, staring and smiling like any other first-time visitor.
Receiving clearance for her detour, the pilot looped south to follow the East River down to Staten Island. Here she circled the Statue of Liberty once, then climbed over the skyscrapers of the financial district and followed Broadway until it was time to turn towards the East River again, to begin their approach to the landing pad on the top of the United Nations Secretariat building.
Chevannes had already called ahead and five minutes after his arrival on UN sovereign territory Rolf Larsson was shown into the thirty-ninth-floor office of Alexander Dibelius.
‘We are extremely grateful to you for coming here, Doctor,’ said the Secretary-General as he walked around his desk with his hand extended.
Larsson looked up into that sage face with an apologetic smile. ‘I’m told some of my work from years back is causin
g trouble. I’m sorry.’
‘We’ll see what can be done,’ said Dibelius, smiling. He turned to another man in the room and Larsson was introduced to Dr Yoav Chelouche, the President of the World Bank.
Over the next hour the two men explained carefully, as they had done to Jack Hendriksen two months earlier, the implications of the Tye Corporation’s growing power and monopolies, the dangers to global economic stability and the threat to peaceful economic progress that it posed.
The astrophysicist was shaken and mortified by their revelations, beginning to understand the scale of the problem created by the private and exclusive sale of his decryption software. He explained to them that since he had recovered from his immersion in psychedelia his attention had been wholly fixed on astronomy and his search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
‘I withdrew from everything to do with this world,’ Larsson admitted. He had delegated the management of his vast financial portfolio to three different private banks and, apart from having stipulated that over fifty per cent of his wealth must be held in Tye-related stocks – for reasons he blushingly admitted were related to the competitive advantage he knew his software would bestow – he explained that he had paid little attention to economic affairs.
He had signed the UN silence resolution almost without hesitation, only delaying to confirm that he would be safely beyond the reach of any legal attack from the Tye Corporation.
‘If I have UN immunity, will I be able to resume my previous work?’ asked Larsson, as he realized what might become possible. ‘Once I had sold the concept to Thomas Tye the agreement stopped me carrying on with any similar experiments. But now . . .’
‘Prime example of a monopoly stifling innovation,’ huffed Chelouche.
The Secretary-General smiled and said he would seek advice on the subject. For the moment, Doctor Larsson had better consider his work subject to UN approval.
By the end of the session Larsson had agreed to provide full assistance to the UNISA operation to limit the growing power of the Tye Corporation.
Then he was handed back into Mike Chevannes’s care and taken to the adjoining Marriott Hotel, now owned and operated under franchise by a UN nominee corporation. There he settled into an electronically secure suite near the top of the tower – likely to be his home for some weeks, he now realized. Later that day he returned to UN headquarters and the serious debriefing began.
He was conclaved first with some prominent mathematicians retained by the UN. Alan Mathison had flown back to New York from the English fenlands and the great Professor Maurice Mendeléeff of MIT had flown down from Cambridge, Massachusetts to share in the revelations. After a day, this small investigating committee reported back to Jan Amethier and Ron Deakin. It seemed as if the Swedish prodigy had made a major breakthrough in defining sub-quantum states – and, as a result, in pure mathematics. As they made their report to him, Deakin could sense that they were suppressing a degree of irritation. Larsson would now continue to an experimental stage to test the strength of his proof They explained that nobody could predict whether such experiments would be successful and, if they were, what the impact on physics, mathematics and other branches of science might be. The academics seemed especially annoyed that Larsson should have fully understood the importance of his achievement but had chosen to throw away academic fame – and the benefits of his work to the world at large – in favour of developing and selling a software simply to crack codes.
They confirmed that Larsson’s software did indeed break all current forms of encryption, even messages encoded with super-long bit-lengths as used by the National Security Agency, the Pentagon and the US military. As an example they supplied a file of messages they had fished from the networks and successfully decrypted. Even this random trawl had produced startling results and Deakin and his boss exchanged glances as they flipped through them.
Despite their contempt for Larsson’s commercial activities, the two mathematicians’ academic enthusiasm had become more evident as they reported their findings until the two UNISA men found it hard to keep smiles from their faces. Although they understood little of the theory, they were prepared to accept the mathematicians’ analysis without question.
‘So what now?’ Amethier had asked finally.
‘So now we’ve got to get on with engineering delivery systems for quantum encryption!’ announced Professor Mendeléeff, seemingly amazed that the agency boss hadn’t grasped the obvious. ‘Nothing, nothing will be safe until that is done.’
Amethier shook his head and admitted he was lost here.
‘All the UN agencies – the World Bank, the IMF, UNISA, everything – have got to move to quantum encryption as quickly as possible,’ the mathematician explained with exasperation, as if the suggestion was totally obvious. ‘That’s absolutely safe. The technique itself was discovered years ago – back in the nineteen-eighties, by Bennett and Brassard – but everybody then assumed that our current encryption techniques were sufficiently secure; there was no need to develop the network technologies necessary to use it.’
He went on to explain that the ultimate encryption technology, one mathematically proved to be completely unbreakable, used the quantum characteristics of photons – particles of light – to encode messages. Even trying to take an unauthorized look at such messages destroyed the contents and Larsson’s new formulae for calculating the effects of observation suggested many ways of exploiting that apparent irrationality. But the problem lay with developing networks and communication systems capable of transporting such minute and unstable elements. Now things were different, of course, and work must begin at once.
‘You mean this unbreakable encryption will really be unbreakable?’ asked Deakin. ‘Unlike the last unbreakable encryption?’
They both nodded, oblivious of his sarcasm. They were keen to get back to their universities and begin raising money to start the work.
In the end, Jan Amethier called Larsson into the meeting, thanked him again for his cooperation and congratulated him formally on his achievement. Both Mathison and Mendeléeff extended invitations for him to join their faculties if he ever got bored with life on his mountain top.
*
Easy Zee Zee was finding it hard to maintain his famous equilibrium and his normal techniques for mood adjustment had failed to restore a feeling of well-being. The recent call from Furtrado had sent a panic through the LifeLines operation. At the counsellor’s insistence, every organ auction was temporarily halted – to the utter dismay of next of kin all around the world who had initiated but not completed the sale of donor assets they had just inherited.
The investigation had confirmed that the complaint from the Memphis customer’s family was justified; the liver that had been delivered had been only a 38.67 per cent match for the DNA with few common genes on the sixth chromosome and almost no common antigens.
No obvious reason could be found. The computer records of the transaction revealed that the DNA files that had been automatically compared at the time had, indeed, shown a ninety-five per cent match. Now the two records were clearly a mismatch. The problems weren’t in the computer storage systems or in the DNA comparison software. It had to have occurred in the networks.
Zee Zee was an expert on computer systems and he knew there had to be a forensic audit trail that would reveal where the foul-up had occurred, but he wasn’t the one being asked to pursue that investigation. At Furtrado’s insistence, he had e-mailed someone called Raymond Liu, the Technical Director of Tye Networks’s global infrastructure, to ask for his department’s help with the investigation. While he waited to hear from him, he went over the Phoebus sales plan again to ensure there was nothing technically flawed in what he was going to propose to Tom and the main board.
*
Al Lynch loved numbers, numerate people and machines with the potential for intelligence. When he had been a student his heroes were Blaize Pascal, John Von Neumann and Konrad Zeuss while his contemporaries had bee
n living for Bruce Springsteen and Whitney Houston. His philomathy drew him to study the work of the great steganographers of history (and their cryptanalytical counterparts) for his doctoral thesis. He had loved travelling to Britain to study the original sixteenth-century books and papers of Thomas Phelippes, the man who had deciphered the encoded messages of Mary, Queen of Scots to her cloyning supporters in a plot against her cousin, Elizabeth the First of England.
Then he traced and studied the original notes and drawings made by Charles Babbage, the nineteenth-century inventor of the world’s first mechanical computer. Babbage had cracked the ‘unbreakable’ polyalphabetic Vigené telegraphic cipher – le chiffre indéchiffrable – that had been invented by Blaise de Vigenère in the sixteenth century and that had been resurrected as the trusted form of inter-government communication once Samuel Morse’s invention had gained international acceptance.
At that time in his life, it would have been fair to say that Alan Lynch was a total nerd.
All of this returned to him as he waited to meet the young Swedish genius who was supposed to be the latest in a line of great cryptographic minds. On hearing who was arriving, Lynch had needed little prompting to pack up his two most powerful network computers, abandon his beloved Fort Mead laboratory and ship the computers and himself up to UN headquarters for the meeting.
Al Lynch was also delighted that for the first time in over three years he had been able to make such a trip without being imprisoned in a wheelchair: life was returning to normal. The week before, he had experienced his first erection since the crash. He had wept as he clung to it.