“Well, then,” he said, leaning forward and folding his hands on top of his desk, glancing at each of them in turn, “what’s the latest on the Kwok-Cho situation?”
Baldwin Beech cleared his throat and began his report, absently stroking his salt-and-pepper beard as he spoke.
“Cho has requested a version of the Kwok holo-cast with the audio cleaned up. We sent it to him. We also suspect that he has gained access to many of the Central Intelligence documents Kwok was working on.”
“What makes you think that?”
“His research is taking him beyond the figures alluded to in the Kwok holo-cast—Felix Forrest, Giordano Bruno, Matteo Ricci, Ai Hao—and is beginning to include a host of others not mentioned in the holo-cast, or on the notecards Kwok left behind. Figures prominently mentioned in the Forrest documents.”
“Such as?”
“Festugiere. Marsilio Ficino. Other translators of and commentators on the Hermetica of Hermes Trismegistus,” Wang said, taking over from Beech, adjusting his AR glasses and reading from the materials appearing there. “Neoplatonist Raymond Lull, again, particularly his encyclopedic memory-art treatise, Arbor scientiae. Trithemius, abbot-necromancer of Sponheim, author of the cryptomagical Steganographia, the book of hidden writing. Cornelius Agrippa, particularly his De Occulta Philosophia. John Dee and his True and Faithful Relation, as well as his treatise on angel magic, his Liber Logaeth. A gaggle of medieval Kabbalists notable for their use of complex numerological methods intended to decipher esoteric messages hidden in the Torah, particularly the mysticocryptographic gematria and temurah approaches—”
Brescoll sat back heavily in his chair. Deep historical approaches to cryptologic problems were by no means unknown in the NSA, but to him these smelled of the CIA’s Tetragrammaton connections. He knew a good deal about this archaic crypto stuff now, having been brought up to speed with a little help from his fly-fishing friends, but he had decided to continue playing the obtuse and obstinate bureaucrat, at least for a while.
“How did you determine all that?”
“We’ve been monitoring Cho’s computer research and the materials he’s ordered or withdrawn from libraries,” Bree Lingenfelter said, shrugging back red bangs from her eyes. “We used some of the same approaches for tracking Kwok’s work. There’s a surprising amount of overlap between the research Kwok did and what Cho has recently embarked on.”
“So much overlap,” Wang interjected, “that we have to believe someone has given Cho access to those documents we’ve withheld from the current investigation.”
“Who?”
Beech, Wang, and Lingenfelter glanced at one another before Beech answered.
“We think it was Kwok’s widow, Cherise LeMoyne. She’s the likeliest suspect. We don’t know how or why she effected the transfer, or when she might have gotten copies of the documents—”
“—but she was married to Kwok,” said Lingenfelter, “and she did meet with Cho at Kwok’s memorial service.”
Jim nodded, thoughtful.
“Any other persons or groups showing a similar pattern of ‘research’?”
“Some significant correlations with a couple of Cybernesians probing Tetragrammaton,” Beech said flatly. “Their address routings disappear into informational black holes—Potemkin e-mail addresses, temporary cell numbers, borrowed IPs in the Free Zone—so we can’t pin down their exact locations.”
“Interest from the New Teachings Warriors and the Cheng tong, too,” Lingenfelter added. “No proof that the Cybernesians are collaborating with them, but the NTW and the Chengs do seem to be cooperating with each other, to some degree.”
“What about that detective in Hong Kong?”
“Marilyn Lu,” Beech said. “She’s in Kowloon, actually. CIA has placed an operative in her workplace, a lab tech working in her police district’s forensics lab. The operative, a Ms. Hon, has both medical school and Special Computing Institute background.”
“This SCI person is one of our operatives?”
“Yes, while nominally serving in that capacity for Guoanbu,” Beech said, unable to mask the pride in his voice. “She has provided excellent insider information on Guoanbu and SCI interpretations of the Kwok ’cast. Our infosphere searches show—and Ms. Hon confirms—that Lu’s done nothing along the memory-palace, Kabbalah, or hermetic lines.”
“At least somebody involved in this mess is still living in the twenty-first century,” Brescoll said, playing to the hilt the role he’d chosen. “That’s what I don’t get. What is it about these four hundred-year-old magical memory systems that got Kwok going in the first place—and now Cho? Not only them, but the Cybernesians and Muslim extremists and crime clans, too.”
The glance passed among his three wizards again, and this time Beech answered.
“They have to be interested in secrecy and security issues. At least that’s what it seems on the face of it.”
Secrecy and security issues—my ass! Brescoll thought. He had no doubt as to what everyone was looking for in this maze of activity: something that would help them create the ultimate crypto-computer, giving them access to the rest of the world’s secrets, while maintaining their own.
And what if this wasn’t just about the PRC and the USA? He thought of stealthy electronic ghosts—terrorists sliding easily past security screens, thieves walking through the walls of banks, national treasuries, transnational corporations—and he cringed inwardly.
“The cryptologic-grail quest leads to some strange places, though,” Wang was saying. “Permutations, combinations, and abbreviations of Kabbalah’s holy code systems—gematria, temurah, and notarikon—trace back at least as far as the Maaseh Merkava of Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph.”
“Who was—?” Brescoll asked, though he was pretty sure he knew.
“He taught his believers that they could come closer to the divine by intensely visualizing heavenly palaces in their minds—and that meditations on these mental palaces were so powerful they could be accompanied by altered states of consciousness, overwhelming ecstasies, and out-of-body experiences.”
“There’s a passage in the Hermetica, too,” Beech added, “that claims ‘If you embrace in thought all things at once, time, place, substance, quality, you will comprehend God.’ By creating a representation of the universe within his own ‘higher mind,’ the seeker could ascend and unite with God.”
“The great dream of the Kabbalists and Hermeticists,” Wang said, nodding. “To know, instantaneously and simultaneously, everything that could be comprehended—and thereby unite with the Supreme Being.”
“How is that relevant to contemporary cryptology?” Brescoll asked, hoping he wasn’t overplaying the annoyance in his voice.
“The idea of ‘instantaneously and simultaneously,’” Lingenfelter said, “is where quantum cryptanalysis and contemporary cryptography might be seen as fulfilling the Hermeticist’s dreams. The idea of computing everything, all at once. Maybe Cho shares that fascination now, too.”
“The magically operated animistic universe of the Renaissance magus,” Beech said, “prepared the way for the mathematically operated mechanistic universe that began with Newton. It took both to prepare the way for our Age of Code. Maybe part of what Dr. Wang called a ‘grail quest’ is about rediscovering living-fossil codes. Cryptologic systems of potentially enormous power which we’ve overlooked, but which are still very much ‘alive,’ despite being dormant for decades, or even centuries.”
“That’s pretty heady stuff,” said the deputy director, milking it, “but frankly, I think it’s a rather romantic notion that any sort of ‘living fossil’ information out of the past has ever told the future anything it didn’t already know. I can’t think of a single instance of it actually happening.”
“The Archimedes palimpsest,” said Beech.
“The what?”
“Around the year 1200, a monk who was short of writing paper scraped down the only extant copy of Archimedes’ treatise on method
and wrote a prayer book over it. Archimedes originally wrote the treatise in the third century BC. Some of its mathematical insights, like summing infinities, weren’t equalled or exceeded until Newton and Leibniz developed calculus, almost two millennia after Archimedes wrote the treatise.”
“So?”
“Think of how a mathematician in, say, the early sixteenth century—almost two centuries before Newton’s work—would have benefited from being able to read Archimedes’ treatise. In looking into these sixteenth-century crypto systems, we might be in the same position that sixteenth-century mathematician was in, with regard to Archimedes: able to make a great leap into the future, if we can only find the right document out of the past.”
“I still don’t see how all this theory has any real-word application.”
“The chaoticians suggest it’s at the boundaries of chaos that information gets its toe into the physical world,” Wang said. “Perhaps that’s the case with Kwok and these living-fossil codes.”
“What are you saying? That Kwok spontaneously combusted because he wanted to have a talk with God?”
Beech shook his head dismissively.
“Both Beckwith and Cho suggest that ‘spontaneous combustion’ isn’t the right description.”
“I’ve read their reports,” Brescoll said, heightening the frustration. “They give no real explanation for that quasi-ashen Shroud of Turin that Kwok left behind when he vanished. Can you do any better?”
That glance passed a third time among the three scientists.
“We believe we can,” said Lingenfelter. “Scanning electron microscopy indicates that Kwok’s ‘ashes’ are in fact made up mostly of organic mechanisms possessing both nanotech and biotech properties—”
“Binotech constructs?” Brescoll asked. Suddenly he found himself much more concerned, and no longer acting. There had been nothing about that from his fly-fishing friends.
“We think so. We’re having them run through sensitive-wire and nanofluidics tests, now. Currently the constructs appear to be dormant or inert. We’re trying to figure out if they can be activated, and how.”
“But if that ash is mostly binotech, then where did all of it come from?”
“In the electron micrographs,” Wang said, “the constructs bear at least some superficial resemblance to the machine-communication implants we funded for Kwok not long before he died. How those binotech prototypes changed and multiplied—if that’s what they did—we don’t know yet.”
“Ms. Hon, the operative in Lu’s lab,” Beech said, “reports that Lu requested electron micrographs of her Kwok ash samples. Hon’s latest report indicates that, after working with the ash and then obtaining electron micrographs of it, Lu sent Ben Cho a biometrically secured message cylinder. We presume that she has already, or will soon, inform him of the nature of that ‘ash.’ So we’ve arrived at a point where we must decide how much of our information we should let Cho have.”
Brescoll nodded, mulling over the implications. How much did Guoanbu know about this? There was evidence China had for some time been working on its own binotech, or something similar, in its Bletchley Parks. If they got Cho, would it tip America’s hand?
“Most likely Cho already suspects it’s not ash,” Brescoll said at last. “It shouldn’t do much harm to suggest what the ash might actually be. But keep your own progress on activating these binotech constructs—if that’s what they are—close to the vest. Cho doesn’t need to know how to activate them, assuming they can be activated.”
“We thought that, given his contacts with Lu and LeMoyne,” Beech said, “it might be wise to keep him under closer surveillance, as well. CIA has already inserted an operative into Cho’s Brazilian jiu-jitsu class.”
“Why the jiu-jitsu class?” Brescoll asked.
“We didn’t have much choice. He’s on leave from his teaching position, and doesn’t get out of the house to socialize much. He used to take the class with his wife. It’s one of his few routines which brings him into regular contact with new or unfamiliar people.”
“I see. We need to place Kwok’s widow under closer observation, too.”
“Already done,” Beech said, offering no further explanation. More CIA involvement? Brescoll wondered how busy Beech’s friends in the Company had been—and how much of their activity was being kept “dark,” even from NSA.
“We don’t want another security breach like the one that allowed her to give Cho those documents,” Brescoll continued. “And we don’t want Cho to end up the way Kwok did, either, if we can help it.”
Wang, Lingenfelter, and Beech agreed. The three said their good-byes and departed.
Brescoll sat in his office, alone. He powered up his slim desktop computer and clicked on the software that enabled it to play live cable news broadcasts. On-screen, a Chinese government spokesman condemned Nepal for serving as a haven for terrorists and as a transshipment point for illegal arms flowing into the Chinese province of Tibet. If Nepal didn’t bring these activities to a complete halt immediately, the spokesman threatened, his government would view the delay as hostile action and would, in self-defense, launch a preemptive strike against Nepal to prevent future Tibetan terrorist activities.
Brescoll scowled. Another instance of a superpower citing a supposed threat from a smaller and weaker nation as grounds for an invasion. He shook his head and changed the channel, but the news wasn’t any better there. Before a large San Francisco crowd, California secessionist leader Tom Garrity raged against the “Military Industrial Media Energy cabal” that had “hijacked the government through a Supreme Court–assisted coup d’etat.” Despite the signs Garrity’s followers carried—The MIME Will Not Silence Us!—Homeland Security had begun cracking down on the secessionists, on the grounds that they had been linked to international terrorists and a Chinese spy ring.
Possible, Jim thought, but unlikely. Garrity’s vision, of a Pacific Rim Federation or “Pacificate”—a loose-limbed political entity bestriding the world from Point Barrow to Tierra del Fuego, from Seattle to Sydney and Shanghai to Santiago—was as much anathema to the Chinese as it was to Homeland Security.
He sighed. Sometimes Garrity’s people made a certain Jeffersonian sort of sense, but neither the Tibetan secessionists in Nepal nor the California secessionists in San Francisco were making the world a more stable and predictable place. That wasn’t their goal, he supposed.
As the day’s news continued to churn and burn on the screen, he pondered his meeting with the three wizards. Chinese binotech. Snooping by Islamic extremists, Cybernesians, and crime clans. Gypsies, tramps, and thieves. Everyone looking for a way to become like God. And he would have to frame all of it in his next report to the director, in such a way that she would assume he knew everything he was supposed to know, and wouldn’t guess that he knew anything he wasn’t supposed to know.
FIVE
UNDULATIONS
SOUTH OAKLAND
Ben Cho drank another beer and took in the high-tech lowlife ambience of the Go-Go Gomorrah nudie bar. The place was a vintage strip club. Pounding robo-techno dance tracks. Cavernous darkness punctuated by pattern-lasers and pulse-strobes. Surgically augmented exotic dancers, performing the usual simulated sex-o-batics. From within his alcoholic haze, Ben wondered why he was here.
“Aggh,” groaned Ike Carlson, Ben’s guide on tonight’s debauchery tour. Flicking his ponytail and stroking his goatee, Carlson joined him at a table just big enough to hold their latest pitcher and two mugs of beer. “Sorry I took so long, but there was a waiting line in the head. Two old codgers yakking away, taking forever to shake the dew off their lilies. Man, the only thing worse than hearing a couple of old boomers complain about their failures is hearing them complain about their successes. The girls started to repeat yet?”
“No,” Ben said, “at least not as far as I can tell. The dance moves are beginning to look pretty familiar, though.”
Carlson nodded. Standing, Ben excused himself and made hi
s woozy, wobbly way to the toilet—which he found to be unoccupied, Ike’s report notwithstanding. When he returned to their table, Ike had a surprise for him.
“Hey, I set up a lap dance for you with one of the girls. I think you’ll appreciate my taste.”
“How much will it set me back?”
“Don’t worry. I got it covered. My treat. You need it.”
A moment later a young woman with dark blond hair, dressed in a modified hillbilly outfit, approached their table.
“This your friend?” she asked Ike, who nodded. She turned to Ben. “Hi, I’m Kimberly. Are you ready for your private dance?”
Ben stared at Carlson, who laughed.
“Yeah, baby,” Ike said, “he’s ready for you to make his privates dance!”
Taking Ben by the hand, she laughed off his friend’s low comment, and led him past the bar and the pool players, toward a lounge with sofas and couches loosely arranged around a wallscreen TV. The screen showed the girl who was currently dancing on the main stage. After a moment Ben realized that the on-screen image—a high-angle, single-perspective, middle-distance shot—was being fed to the TV by one of the club’s ceiling-mounted internal security cameras, mixing voyeurism and surveillance to odd effect.
“We’ve got plenty of time,” Kimberly said, noting his gaze. “I’m not due onstage for three more girls.”
As Kimberly sat down on the sofa, Ben realized that for the women doing private dances here in the back lounge, the screen was a stage clock. Kimberly patted the heavy cushion on the sofa beside her. Slowly taking the hint, Ben sat down.
Through small talk, Ben learned how many nights per week Kimberly worked this club, that she was 5'2", and twenty-three years old. The area around her eyes made him wonder whether she might be a bit older than that, but he took her at her word. Although he didn’t say so, she reminded him eerily of Reyna when they had first met. About the same height, age, and hair color. Even a similar figure: a not-inconsiderable bust on a small frame. Boyish hips and thin legs, too. He paranoid-flashed on it for an instant, then dismissed the thought that meeting her was some kind of setup—only to find that his arousal and self-consciousness both lingered.
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