But that wasn’t what Jean-Christophe Arras thought, or even considered, until she shoved him away when he pushed her down on the couch in her apartment. She was strong; she had been trained in hand-to-hand combat at the Farm. When he tried to come at her again, she hurt him. He limped away from her apartment. And then things began to come apart.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” said the operations chief at the embassy. When people say that, they usually mean the opposite. He told her to put the recruitment on hold. The French FBI, known as the DST, put surveillance on her, and it wasn’t hard, really, for the French to assemble a dossier.
The ambassador was summoned by the interior minister, who complained bitterly about a covert American attempt to recruit a French scientist and demanded the departure of the undeclared CIA officer working at the IEA. The ambassador screamed at the station chief; the station chief told Denise Ford to pack her bags. She was gone twenty-four hours later.
“I knew this wouldn’t work,” said the station chief as he drove her to the airport. He congratulated himself later for managing to keep the story out of the French newspapers.
When Denise Ford came home from Paris, her father met her at the airport. That was meant kindly, but it deepened her sense of failure. He had served in the government, too. He knew what she did for a living, and he understood what not to ask. He took her for dinner to a restaurant on K Street that had dim lighting and black-leather banquettes with a maître d’hotel who sang Puccini and Verdi arias in a liquid baritone voice. She didn’t mean to, but she started to cry.
Before returning to work and the reassembly of her career, she traveled to New Haven to see a faculty mentor. It wasn’t to visit the history professor who had pitched her to apply to the agency, but to see his wife, Marie-Laure Trichet, a lecturer in French literature. Ford had always wondered if it was this woman who had really spotted her as a potential intelligence officer, rather than her notoriously well-connected husband.
Ford brought a gift for her French teacher. It was a first edition of Aden, Arabie, a memoir published in 1931 by the philosopher Paul Nizan, chronicling his youthful dreams and despair in what is now Yemen. She had found it in an antiquarian bookstore in the 5th arrondissement, beyond the Luxembourg Gardens. She treasured the opening line of the book, which she had quoted in one of her undergraduate essays. “J’avais vingt ans. Je ne laisserai personne dire que c’est le plus bel âge de la vie.” I was twenty. I will let no one say it’s the best time of life. Ford was fourteen years older, but she felt Nizan’s premature exhaustion.
“You look very sad,” said Madame Trichet, after she had received the visitor in her study and accepted the book. “What has gone wrong?”
Ford explained what she could, starting with the rupture of her marriage before Paris. She had dated George Ford at Yale, where he was regarded by most of her friends and family as an ideal match. He was part of the upward path that she was meant to ascend in her personal life and at work. But the threads had come undone so quickly, they obviously hadn’t been stitched very well from the beginning. The silences got longer. Ford always felt that she was making little mistakes, putting the shirts and socks in the wrong drawers. She was relieved when she discovered that he was cheating on her.
“I never thought he suited you really,” said Madame Trichet. “He was not supple. His head was flat. But what about your work? We have had such high hopes.”
“You know, then?” asked Ford.
“Of course, I do. I was the one who recommended you. Ewing thought women were wasted on the agency, and vice versa. I said you were different.”
“I had some bad luck in Paris,” said Ford. “It wasn’t my fault, but things happened. It will be hard for me to go overseas again, probably. I can’t really go into the details.”
“Of course, you can’t,” said Madame Trichet. She looked at the handsome, gifted woman sitting across the table, her shoulders bowed slightly. “May I give you some advice?”
“Please. That’s why I came, I think.”
“Never settle for the lesser ambition. The job, the title, the conventional loyalties and rewards. Stay focused on the larger ambition, which is making a difference in the world.”
“Should I keep working for the government?”
“Probably. But only if you think you are doing good things. That’s what you must promise your teacher. That you will have the big ambition, and forget the rest. It’s too easy in this world to say yes to mediocre people and ideas. Remember what Voltaire wrote. I taught it to you in this study: ‘L’homme est libre au moment qu’il veut l’être.’ ”
“Man is free at the instant he wants to be,” said Denise Ford, translating her professor’s words. How far she was from freedom.
Denise Ford roused herself from her chair in the living room in Old Town, and from her reverie. She had another opportunity to be useful in an intelligence operation. But really, she had never stopped trying; it had just been hard to get her colleagues to give her the chance.
When she was ready for bed, she turned on the bedside light and opened the memoir of Simone de Beauvoir. It was easier to read, now. Every word was incendiary. “I was choking with fury. Not only had I been condemned to exile, but I was not even allowed the freedom to fight against my barren lot; my actions, my gestures, my words, were all rigidly controlled.”
She fell asleep with the book open, but when she awoke the next morning, she felt oddly refreshed.
12.
COLLEGE PARK, MARYLAND
Roger Kronholz worked in an unadorned, white-concrete office in Prince Georges County, Maryland, just inside the Beltway. It had the deliberately uninteresting name “Office Park 2.” The sign in the lobby said the occupant was the National Oceanographic Institute. The chief tenant was in fact the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, better known by its acronym, IARPA. Its presence was suggested by the armed guard just inside the door who barred entry to anyone who didn’t have a security clearance.
Because Kronholz was involved directly in quantum computing projects, Kate Sturm had ordered the Office of Security to immediately begin monitoring his phones and computer for “anomalous behavior.” Security stationed a plainclothes officer in the parking lot to observe Kronholz’s comings and goings. The watcher’s suit and tie were incongruous. This was a new-age intelligence facility, with two parking spaces allotted for fuel-efficient vehicles and two more for “mothers-to-be.” The security officer removed his jacket and tie.
Upstairs, in an office that had a grand view of the parking lot and little else, Kronholz was unaware of his new status as a subject of a counter-espionage investigation. He reviewed a portfolio of research projects with names that were comprehensible only to engineers and computer scientists. His job was to direct government funding toward quantum computing projects that could revolutionize computing. “If it exists,” Kronholz always added, with a wink.
To convey its official skepticism about quantum computing, IARPA had added a new logo to its quantum PowerPoint presentations: “The Gap Is Even Larger Than We Thought.” This mantra had been repeated so many times that many computer scientists had begun to suspect that the search for the breakthrough computer might, indeed, be folly. But were the skeptics cleared for the real information? If you doubted the technology could work, did that simply demonstrate that you were looking in the wrong place?
Kronholz looked annoyingly like a computer scientist: He was male, bearded, bespectacled, and spoke bewilderingly fast. He read graphic novels, drank craft beers, and played nth-level computer games on his Xbox. Fifteen years ago at MIT, he had been a prankster, one of the undergrads who calculated how to paint a big red nipple on top of the MIT dome. But he wasn’t actually an engineer, and he was suspect among his new IARPA colleagues who knew that he was on temporary assignment from the CIA’s directorate of Science and Technology and feared that he was snooping on them.
Like many technologists, Kronholz had become something o
f a loner. In his nearly ten years with the CIA, he had punched tickets in various program management jobs. He was the sort of person who kept his office door closed and sat alone reading a book in the cafeteria. His brother, who worked in the CIA general counsel’s office, had advised him not to transfer to IARPA. This was the kind of interagency collaboration that intelligence managers loved, but staff officers usually resisted.
Kronholz made the transfer anyway. He told his brother he needed a change, and he assured his new manager that he would enjoy overseeing the sorting process through which some projects were openly funded and others were taken into the dark. His first IARPA performance review had been generally favorable but included several negative comments. Kronholz’s attention wandered. When he was bored with his own work, he asked questions about other people’s projects.
Kronholz’s world at IARPA was labs and grants. His research projects had unpronounceable names and missions that were difficult to explain. “Quantum Computer Science (QCS),” project number BAA-10-02, was providing funding to Georgia Tech, the University of Southern California, and Raytheon for basic research on the algorithms and error-correction techniques that would allow programming of a quantum computer, if it could ever be built.
“Coherent Superconducting Qubits (CSQ),” project number W911NF-08-R-0011, was funding a half-dozen companies’ research into the materials and fabrication techniques to create the physical architecture of a quantum computer, if it could ever be built. “Multi-Qubit Coherent Operations (MQCO),” project number BAA-09-06, was funding research at the University of Maryland, Duke University, and the University of California at Santa Barbara to combine many hundreds of qubits into a quantum computer, if it could ever be built.
The slogan at IARPA was “fail fast.” The government didn’t mind spending money on blind alleys and dead ends, so long as it discovered a few promising paths through the maze. On his first day as an IARPA program manager, Kronholz had been given a piece of paper with this formula: Expected Utility = Probability × Consequence. That meant that even if the chance of building a real quantum computer was low, the benefit of succeeding was so large that the research made sense.
On a crisp fall Friday, as the Maryland Terrapins prepared to host Ohio State, Kronholz received an urgent message from the Physics Department. Research into a multi-qubit architecture known as an “ion trap” had finally succeeded in “entangling,” or combining, many dozens of quantum bits in the magical “superposition” state that was both zero and one. In other words, their pathway might conceivably, just possibly work.
Success was a mixed blessing. Quantum computer research chugged along happily at IARPA so long as it was theoretical. But once something seemed as if it might actually succeed—might help capture the holy grail of information dominance—then changes had to be made quickly. The program had to disappear off the open-source grid and go “black,” in the jargon of the intelligence world.
When Kronholz read the message, he thought at first that it was a mistake. He read it twice more and felt a prickling on his skin. He wanted to see the quantum effect happen, live in the lab, before pulling the IARPA alarm.
Kronholz grabbed his jacket and scrambled down to the parking lot and his new toy, a sky-blue Jaguar convertible. He kept it secret from his bike-riding and Prius-driving colleagues at Office Park 2. The car had a 320-horsepower engine and a carbon footprint as large as New Jersey. Kronholz parked far from the building to avoid stares from expectant mothers and Chevy Volt drivers. But the Security officer at the perimeter noticed the fancy new car and made a note to have his colleagues investigate how it had been purchased.
Kronholz drove west to the University of Maryland campus, where the “ion-trap” researchers had reached their seeming breakthrough the previous night. He dumped his car in the parking garage and clambered up a back stairway toward the office of Dr. Gwen Warren, who ran the ion-trap lab. Outside her study was a knot of post-docs who were working on the project: One was Dutch from the University of Rotterdam, another was from Humboldt University in Berlin, and two more, a Chinese husband and wife team, had studied at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Kronholz glowered as he pushed through this international gaggle of post-docs. Gwen Warren greeted him jubilantly with her arms held aloft above her head. She had short black hair and a runner’s body and wore big, black-framed glasses pushed up on her forehead, like sunglasses. Her eyes were alight.
“I think we did it, Roger. We actually did it.”
The students outside her office, who could hear through the thin wall, burst into applause.
“Who are these people?” Kronholz rolled his eyes. “You’ve got to get them out of here for a little while so we can talk. We need some privacy.”
“Don’t rain on their parade, Roger. They’re so excited.”
“Sorry, but it’s not their parade. Uncle Sugar paid for it.”
Warren stepped out into the hallway and spoke with the grad students. Most of them had been up all night, and they had the crazy energy that goes with having achieved something most people had told them was impossible. Warren told them to go down to the cafeteria and celebrate with coffee and donuts. She returned to Kronholz and gave him a fist bump.
“Did you really get it to work?” he asked.
“Oh, yeah. This is the real deal. Isn’t that what you say? A big ‘f-ing’ deal! We had enough qubits entangled to factor a pretty big number.”
“How big?”
“Three digits.”
“That’s definitely an improvement over two digits.”
It had been a “big deal” not long ago when they had held the qubits together long enough to factor the number 15, identifying the two prime numbers, 3 and 5; and then, another “breakthrough” when someone factored 21. A three-digit number was certainly an advance.
“And the qubits didn’t de-cohere?” pressed Kronholz.
“Nope. You want the details? We tried something a little different with the targeting lasers that manipulate the ions to get less noise. And we added more backup, so every time de-coherence degraded the quantum state, we could use extra qubits to fill in. We call it ‘Quantum Error Connection.’ And it’s stable. Really.”
“Good for you,” said Kronholz. “Less noise means more computing.”
“Noise” produced de-coherence, which was the enemy of every quantum computing lab. Normally, researchers could push the fragile qubits into the superpositioned state that was both one and zero and entangle them for a few milliseconds. In that moment, they were both on and off and their power to compute was immense. But then flutter—heat, light, magnetic field fluctuations, even the jitters caused by the lasers themselves—would disrupt the array and the coherence would collapse. If Warren had solved that problem, she might be on the way to something real.
“Look, Roger, this isn’t ‘it,’ but maybe it’s what ‘it’ would look like. The qubits were stable and entangled for long enough to do some real computing. Eventually they de-cohered, sure. But I think this is going to work.”
Kronholz nodded, taking mental notes of what she said.
“This is so good, it’s bad,” he answered after a moment.
“What do you mean, Roger?”
“You still have your SCI clearance, right?”
“I just had it renewed. I sent the notification to the Office of Safe and Secure Operations in your building.”
Kronholz lowered his voice.
“We’re going to have to take this into another space, if what you say is true. It has to go black.”
“What about my lab? What about my post-docs and grad students?”
“We’ll keep them on until the contract runs out. But they can’t do the serious stuff anymore. We have to cover your tracks. We’ll work up some ‘glitches’ that prove last night’s breakthrough was a false start. The foreigners will have to go home; the rest can apply for security clearances and keep working on this, if they pass. How’s that?”
; Warren shook her head.
“That’s terrible,” she said. “They’ll be crushed.”
“Penalty for success. Sorry. You knew the rules when you started.”
Warren’s eyes were flashing. She had done what she had always dreamed of, and she was being penalized.
“This is why scientists hate the government. It’s bullshit!”
“Write your congressman. But you’ve got to show me it works, before I pull the plug. Maybe you’ll get lucky and it will fail!”
Warren scowled at Kronholz. She grabbed her purse and her security badge and bustled toward the door.
“Come down to the lab, Roger. Seeing is believing.”
The corridor outside Warren’s lab was crowded with the post-docs, doctoral students, and even a few undergraduates. Kronholz shook his head: No, he didn’t want everybody crowding around when he made his assessment.
“Sorry, everyone,” said Warren glumly. “We’re going to have a private session with our visitor. I need a helper, please. Andrew, you come into the lab with me. Everyone else, sorry. We’ll be out in a bit.”
Andrew Klein stepped forward, thin as a knitting needle, a sprout of black hair topped by a kippah perched on the back of his head. He was the only member of the group who, like his boss, had a security clearance. He had been a cryptographer at the National Security Agency before joining Warren’s lab in quest of a doctorate.
Warren punched a code into a lock and the metal door of her lab clicked open. She entered the control room and, with Klein, began turning on the various parts of her ion-trap system. Kronholz studied their den of invention; he made some notes in a pad he had brought along.
The lab had a homemade, science-project look. Spaghetti strands of wires emerged from processors and monitors in the control room. The door to an interior room was guarded by a red sign that warned: “Danger! Visible and/or Invisible Laser Radiation. Avoid eye or skin exposure.”
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