by Hammond, Ray
The obstinately perambulatory computer scientist had sent instructions ahead and, within two days of his arrival, a temporary computer lab had been established in a basement room one level down from the Security Council’s private meeting chamber. The room was in the deepest level of the UN complex, a space carved out of the Manhattan bedrock in the early 1950s when it was believed that there was a good chance that this bunker would have to house many of the world’s leaders during a global exchange of nuclear weapons – and for a very long time afterwards.
The meeting had been memorable. Within minutes Lynch and Larsson were exchanging views about cryptographic achievements of the past and Larsson realized that he had found something rare: a listener capable of understanding his work.
Lynch was careful to make it clear that he did not yet understand how the irrationality of quantum mechanics and string theory could be adapted to apply to rules as strictly logical as those of binary representation. But Larsson was pleased to hand over the software he had brought from his Peruvian mountain top. Loading this, Lynch followed Larsson’s instructions on how to run it against the petabytes of data Jack Hendriksen had copied from Thomas Tye’s personal data warehouse.
Three hours later Larsson wore a broad smile, while Lynch knew his own jaw was in danger of acquiring a permanent sag. Every file and document that had been sent to Tye or that he had created in the last dozen or so years was now accessible as plain hologram, video, sound, image, document, spreadsheet, text or binary code.
Lynch then called Deakin down and they trawled at random through the vast sea of data. After half an hour Deakin had to give up, his head spinning.
‘This really brings it home,’ Deakin observed as he scrolled through pages of highly confidential Tye Corporation business plans. ‘We’ve all relied so much on this encryption system that if someone discovers the key, you’re completely vulnerable.’
Larsson had had the grace to look away.
Deakin drafted in two psychologists to examine Tye’s personal recordings in order to construct a detailed psychological profile of the tycoon. He then ordered all patent-related communications to be distributed to the team’s patent lawyers. He also faxed Chelouche to request Joe Tinkler’s presence in New York to lead the team of business analysts already starting to work backwards over the countless project plans, deals, acquisitions and business plans that had been revealed.
After half a day of this, Martha Rose, the international legal expert, opened a video discussion with Deakin. She could hardly contain herself as she described her evidence.
‘He’s guilty as hell,’ she told Deakin with absolute certainty. ‘There are copies of three original documents intercepted by Tye CTA – his Competitive Threat Analysis Department. And there are copies of the patents Tye subsequently filed. We think there must be thousands more. We’ve just got to find a way of legitimizing this evidence.’
Deakin congratulated her as he turned to examine the files on his recently reactivated display screen.
Then their discoveries became a flood. One of the human rights lawyers had found a file on Lily Albertyn, Erasmus Research and on the birth of a boy called Reon.
Next Professor Berzin of the World Health Organization dropped by with a wry smile on her face. ‘He’s refiled for the patent on body chemistry. It looks like they realized they had the wrong genes, but now they’ve identified the right ones.’
For a few moments Deakin knew what it felt like to be Thomas Tye: omnipotent.
*
The President of the Australian Republic was responsible for the idea spreading to the southern hemisphere. Even though it would already be afternoon in all Australian time zones before the rains were predicted to begin falling on Ethiopia, Robert O. Baldwin decreed his country should start the global celebrations.
‘We’ll be the first to kick off the greatest street party this planet has ever seen,’ he told his people formally. ‘So let’s give generously to the people of Ethiopia.’
The President of Bolivia was next, announcing that the Festival of San Roque, which this year also fell on Sunday, 30 August, would be co-dedicated to the Ethiopian Appeal. Within two days, most countries on the continent of South America had followed suit.
On EUSSA the Tye Corporation’s stock rose another fifteen points.
*
The parcel, delivered by one of the island’s couriers, was waiting for Raymond Liu when he eventually returned to his apartment in the SpacePort Development.
He slipped off his shoes, flopped into an easy chair and ran his fingers under the seal of the gift-wrapping. He removed a small leather-bound book, clearly an antique. There was a handwritten card.
Raymond,
I am truly sorry that aspects of our work have alarmed you. Please be assured that none of our experiments conducted within the digital environment growing around this planet will cause problems with your day-to-day network operations.
I thought you might enjoy the enclosure. Although many critics have dismissed Descartes as misguided (because of his religious and spiritual confusions) he nevertheless provided the original inspiration for my work.
With very best wishes,
Theresa
Liu turned the book over. It was René Descartes’s Discours de la Méthode Pour Bien Conduire sa Raison, a Chercher la Vérité dans les Sciences and this English translation of the 1637 work – which rendered its Anglicized title as The World, Rules and Discourse on Method – had been printed and bound by Bartholomew in London in 1847. He saw a small place-ribbon and opened the book. He read the section Theresa had indicated:
Then, carefully examining what I was, and seeing that I could pretend that I had no body, that no outer world existed, and no place where I was; but that despite this I could not pretend that I did not exist; that, on the contrary, from the very fact that I was able to doubt the reality of the other things, it was very clearly and certainly followed that I existed; whereas, if I had stopped thinking only, even though all I had ever conceived had been true, I had no reason to believe that I might have existed – from this I knew that I was a being whose whole essence or nature is confined to thinking and which has no need of a place, nor depends on any material thing, in order to exist. So that this I, that is to say the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body, is even easier to know than the body, and furthermore would not stop being what it is, even if the body did not exist.
Raymond Liu finished the passage and then reread it. He closed the book and sat for a moment staring out at the setting sun, considering Theresa’s apologia. Then he turned to his screens, located a retail book resource and hunted for something suitable to send her in return.
*
The temptation was overwhelming; the information that lay before Joe Tinkler was the stuff of a trader’s fantasy. The fund manager had only been back in New York for two days, but he was already drooling. Al Lynch had installed network filters – he called them ‘sniffers’ – at key locations on the world’s networks to intercept, collect and reassemble all packets of Tye-related data that passed by. The scrambled messages were then submitted for processing by Rolf Larsson’s software.
On his arrival from Geneva, Joe had been able to expand Lynch’s search vocabulary considerably by providing an up-to-date list of all the corporation’s subsidiary identities, the names of the top 500 Tye Corporation and subsidiary-company executives and the group’s wider interests and investments. The result of their collaboration was a continuous flow of decrypted highly sensitive information to Joe’s temporary desk in the UN. He felt as if he was inside Thomas Tye’s head.
‘Take this new Tye Life Sciences operation, LifeLines Inc.,’ Joe said to Yoav Chelouche, waving a printout of a decrypted e-mail in the banker’s direction. ‘We hold nearly sixty-eight million dollars’ worth of this stock, but now there’s at least one lawsuit pending for mismatched organs. The stock’s going to collapse if more follow and someone goes public. Now’s the t
ime to sell.’
They were meeting in the banker’s office on the thirty-ninth floor of the Secretariat building. Joe had now discovered that his boss was in constant rotation between three addresses: his office in Geneva (his preferred location), this jurisdictional eyot in the middle of Manhattan and the World Bank’s global headquarters building in Washington DC.
Chelouche waved his enthusiastic young protégé back into his seat. He understood how excited Joe must be by his new discoveries. In the past ten minutes he had been shown business plans for two new Tye Corporation start-ups, eight strategic transcontinental acquisition recommendations and four sets of accounts that were nearing final-draft stage. If he allowed Joe to make trades from his large fund on the basis of such inside information, it would become infallible: then he realized that they would be no more infallible than Tye’s investment decisions had been for the last seven and a half years.
‘You want to trade on all this inside information, Joe – you think that’s OK?’ Chelouche flipped at the pile of printouts Joe had placed on his desk. This meeting seemed more formal than their Geneva discussions: Chelouche behind his desk, Joe seated in front.
‘Why not? That’s exactly what Tye himself has been doing for years, sir,’ reasoned Joe. ‘And we know they haven’t yet realized we can read their messages. We’re keeping tabs on all the communications from their CTA – their Competitive Threat Analysis division. They obviously felt confident enough not to use Larsson’s techniques to improve their own encryption. Very cocky.’
Chelouche nodded. He quite liked the idea of Joe’s fund building up the cash necessary for a takeover from profits made in such a fitting way.
‘And look at this,’ urged Joe, leaning out of his seat again. ‘This is a contract between Tye Agriceuticals and the government in Addis Ababa. TA has obtained the genetic rights to all the arabica coffee grown in the hills of south-west Ethiopia. I’ve done some research – that’s where coffee originally came from and those plants contain every basic genetic variation for coffee in the world. As a result, only Tye Agriceuticals will be able to come up with new coffee strains based on the master gene pool. Their agreement is due to be announced once those rains are supposed to fall, and coffee has now become the world’s most valuable commodity since it overtook oil. If we short the other coffee stocks now, we can . . .’
Chelouche held his hand up once more. ‘I know, I know. There will be many other such opportunities . . .’
Joe sank back, still anxious that the banker should understand the magnitude of this one in particular.
Chelouche considered, scratching the stubble on his jowls. ‘OK, I agree, Joe,’ he nodded after a long period of silence. ‘Let’s use the ganef’s own tricks against him, for the time being. But only on Tye Corporation and its subsidiary stocks. Give me your word, Joe; use this inside information on nothing else. And remember, we want to keep things nice and steady. This situation won’t hold for long.’
‘I understand, sir,’ said Joe, already imagining what he could achieve.
*
Rolf Larsson retraced the tortuous route to the roof of the UN building, but tonight he was stopped at the last flight of steps by a security guard. The soldier hadn’t seemed particularly impressed by the visitor’s newly issued UNISA security ident or by his powerful image-stabilized binoculars; he simply pointed to the ‘Restricted Access’ sign. Larsson had then dangled his roll-up sheepishly between his fingers and the guard had finally relented, allowing him entry to one of the few areas of the UN building where smoking was permitted.
Larsson sat down on a small bench a few hundred yards from the helicopter landing pad and stared up at the sky. This was really why he had come up here at the dead of night. He was missing his night sky, even though he had presumed that Manhattan’s urban glare would make observation difficult. But in fact it hadn’t: tonight was very different and he was pleased he had broken off from his analysis of Tye Aerospace documents – Thomas Tye’s ambitions were making his head reel.
He had seen the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, hundreds of times before. Those sheets of red and green light were a familiar spectacle in the summer skies of Scandinavia. There was even an oil painting of a circular borealis in the cathedral near his old apartment in Stockholm. That had been painted in 1431 when the unusual event had been seen as a celestial warning. Now, modern scientists explained that the lights were caused by discharges of solar particle energy as it met the magnetosphere – the Earth’s protective magnetic shield.
But the Northern Lights were so called because they were northern, and they were seen almost exclusively at latitudes where the sun’s harsh output of damaging radiation was deflected over the North Pole. Tonight, the skies above Manhattan were Christmas-coloured: the giant alternating sheets of crimson and green wrapping around the lower latitudes of the night side of the planet.
Larsson lifted his binoculars. In the glow he could make out small knots of observers on other high-rise buildings in the city.
*
Towards the end of the fourth day after they had broken the codes the excitement within the Operation Iambus team was beginning to lessen slightly. Deakin took the elevator down to the third basement level of the Secretariat building to visit Al Lynch in his cryptorium. He found the computer scientist engrossed at his terminal. He didn’t look up until his old friend touched his shoulder.
‘I think I’m beginning to get it, Ron,’ grinned Lynch as he turned round in his swivel chair. ‘I think I understand what Larsson has observed – how computing two alternative states for each object can weed out high primes and then produce a definitive string of integers. It sounds dotty but it isn’t – it’s just an incredibly high-speed process.’
Deakin held up his hand in protest as Lynch sank into a chair: ‘Al, you know I can’t follow this stuff. Just so long as it’s working.’
‘Oh, it’s working all right,’ beamed the scientist. ‘We’re getting a terabyte an hour of decrypted material off the networks. I just spoke to one of the translators from the Chinese section; she says the People’s Republic is getting very worked up about a Tye Corporation land deal in Russia, close to their northern border.’
Deakin nodded. He had already seen the translated decode. ‘Al, I want you to do something for me.’ He handed Lynch a printout of the Wall Street Journal article reporting Congressman Robarts’s accusations.
Lynch skimmed it and looked up questioningly.
‘Can you get into the US defence networks, Al – the White House, the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, you know? Oh, and NASA?’ He saw his friend’s stare. ‘We need to know what’s behind this. Larsson’s been looking at Tye’s Phoebus Project and he’s making some very strange noises. We need to find out what the Americans really know about Tye’s plans, and what they intend to do about them. Can you also check the State Department – they’ve summoned Tye for a meeting.’
Alan Lynch shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Ron. I’ve signed up to the Charter – we all have.’
It was one thing for the UN Security Agency to spy on commercial enterprises: that was easily justifiable in the interests of the greater global population. It was another to consider spying on a member state, especially the most powerful of all, even if that country’s governmental lower house did periodically display its collective envy of the UN’s global role by withholding US dues. Such hacking would be a direct contravention of the United Nations Charter and a crime under international law that, on detection, carried a mandatory prison sentence.
‘I know, Al, I know,’ agreed Deakin. ‘This would have to be strictly between us. I’m not even telling Jan, let alone the SecGen – they’d have to refuse permission. But I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t think it was really important.’
Lynch considered. He had served twenty-four years with Ron Deakin. First at the National Security Agency in Fort Mead when Ron had been the youngest instructor ever in the US Navy SEALs and a liaison officer be
tween his special forces and the NSA, then for the last three years in UNISA after they had sworn new loyalties. In the end, many such decisions were based on trust and long-established relationships, rather than man-made laws or abstract notions of right or wrong.
‘They’ll have every level of security on their networks, Ron – detectors, false doors, booby traps – even before we get to isolated networks, firewalls, data-dykes and flame-moats,’ he objected. ‘They’re the biggest and brightest target for hackers the world over and the more you get hacked, the better you get at detecting it and preventing it.’
‘But you do have an advantage, Al,’ prompted Deakin. ‘Quite an advantage – in fact, two advantages.’
Lynch smirked and shrugged his shoulders. He had helped to design most of the networks in use by the main security agencies of the USA and he had Larsson’s software. ‘Give me a day or two,’ he said.
*
‘I’m sleepy,’ said Jed.
Calypso and Tommy exchanged a smile: they had been near to dozing off themselves, but that wasn’t what the Furry meant.
‘I’ll do it,’ said Calypso, stifling a yawn and closing her magazine. She pushed herself up from the cushion of her shaded sunlounger and looked around.
‘There’s one by the changing room,’ suggested Tommy, looking up from his book. He shielded his eyes and pointed to a low white building almost completely concealed by shrubs.
Calypso nodded and bent to pick up the Furry. Since Tye Consumer Electronics’s breakthrough in battery technology, portable electronic devices such as Jed needed only a twenty-minute battery recharge once a month and the caterpillar’s announcement of impending sleep was his euphemistic request for an energy top-up.
They’re the only ones amongst us who still have monthly cycles, she thought absently as she carried the caterpillar towards the low building. The introduction of hormonally active foods for women had allowed most females in the developed world to dispense with the inconvenience of menses until they wished to become pregnant. Ovulation was mimicked, because of its impact on female (and male) sexuality, but otherwise menstruation was a female inconvenience that had been almost forgotten.