The Dan Brown Enigma

by Graham A Thomas

  In the same section Brown goes on to write about how email became more difficult for the NSA to crack. He claims it was made more secure by the use of public-key encryption: ‘It consisted of easy-to-use, home-computer software that scrambled personal email messages in such a way that they were totally unreadable.’ At the other end of the email process, messages would come out looking like random letters and numbers. According to Brown, the only way to unscramble the email message ‘was to enter the sender’s “pass-key” – a secret series of characters that functioned much like a PIN number at an automatic teller.’

  This idea of a pass-key is crucial to the story, because this is what is supposed to unlock Tankado’s code and stop the meltdown of all the secrets in the NSA’s databanks. ‘The pass-keys were generally quite long and complex; they carried all the information necessary to instruct the encryption algorithm, exactly what mathematical operations to follow to recreate the original message.’[64]

  In the book Brown states that the new pass-keys used chaos theory and multiple symbolic alphabets to scramble the messages into complete nonsense. The NSA’s computers were able to handle the first pass-keys because they were short and relatively easy to break using trial and error. ‘If a desired pass-key had ten digits, a computer was programmed to try every possibility between 0000000000 and 9999999999. Sooner or later the computer hit the correct sequence.’

  Brown goes on tell us that this method was known as ‘brute force attack’, which, while time-consuming, was guaranteed to work. However, the pass-keys got longer because the ‘world got wise to the power of brute-force code-breaking.’ The time to break the codes increased from days to weeks, then to months and to years. By the mid-1990s the pass-keys used the full 256-character ASCII alphabet of letters, numbers and symbols, and ‘the number of different possibilities was in the neighbourhood of 10120th with 120 zeros behind it.’

  Brown then states that at the time the NSA’s fastest computer, the Cray/Josephson II, took more than 19 years to break a 64-bit code in a brute force attack. To break this deadlock and speed up the code-breaking, the NSA set out to build a computer that was lightning fast. ‘The last of the three million stamp-sized processors was hand-soldered in place, the final internal programme was finished, the ceramic shell was welded shut. TRANSLTR had been born.’

  This new supercomputer had three million processors working in parallel to break any code that it intercepted. It would use ‘the power of parallel processing as well as some highly classified advances in cleartext assessment to guess pass-keys and break codes,’ Brown writes in Digital Fortress. ‘It would derive its power not only from its staggering number of processors but also from new advances in quantum computing – an emerging technology that allowed information to be stored as quantum-mechanical states rather than solely as binary data.’

  Research is the key to Brown’s craft. ‘I did read a lot of books about cryptography and the NSA’s advanced technology. The hardest part was sifting through the techno babble and simmering it down to something fairly non-technical that anyone could understand and that would not bog down the plot.’[65]

  But he had to be sure that his research was as accurate as it could be, so he read as much as he could about cryptography. ‘I posted some questions to a cryptographic newsgroup,’ he said in an interview with Claire White on the Internet Writing Journal. ‘I ended up talking to some people whom I later found out were former NSA people. I was also fortunate to meet face to face with a Trusted Agent with the US Commission on Secrecy. Although these people never shared anything classified they helped me sort through a lot of recently declassified data through the Freedom of Information Act.’

  Brown also turned to a wide variety of sources and spent a lot of time on Usenet groups on the internet. These are forums where like-minded people can discuss or post questions to people interested in specific topics. ‘Brown has said that he relied on Usenet groups to ask questions pertinent to his research, and in some cases these initial queries developed into close friendships later on,’ says Lisa Rogak in her biography of Brown.[66]

  Brown’s research revealed some startling information. ‘There are a number of intelligence sources who have written extensive white papers on the NSA,’ he said. The writer discovered that the US government’s eavesdropping on their citizens and on countries around the world was far more insidious that he’d thought. ‘They certainly buried the hooks they need to monitor traffic. They also have satellites that can listen to cellular phone calls and all sorts of other electronic eavesdropping devices.’

  ‘A particularly influential book, at the time, was James Bamford’s The Puzzle Palace,’ Brown said. ‘Although dated, it is still one of the seminal books on the covert world of America’s premier intelligence agency, describing how the NSA pulls in intelligence data from around the globe, processing it for subversive material.’[67]

  Brown was indignant at this massive invasion of privacy. However, he believes that even with this technology listening to everyone, the NSA isn’t really interested in the ordinary person. ‘Agencies like the NSA are far more interested in terrorists than in the average citizen and most of us have nothing to worry about. Of course, the pros and cons of living in an Orwellian “Big Brother is watching” kind of society can be debated forever.’

  One of the former NSA cryptographers also faxed him a transcript of a Senate Judiciary Hearing, ‘where the then director of the FBI, Louis Freech, testified that in one year alone – I believe the year was 1994 – the NSA’s ability to infiltrate civilian communication had thwarted the downing of two US commercial airliners and a chemical weapons attack on US soil.’[68]

  In the review posted on Curled up With a Good Book, Brown’s research was singled out for praise. ‘Dan Brown’s laudable detailed research makes this book so realistic it’s scary. Moreover, it will provoke readers to think and wonder if this loss of privacy and violation of human rights is justified by the number of horrific terrorist plots foiled and lives spared daily. It’s an interesting dilemma.’[69]

  It is this research that gives Digital Fortress its authority and certainly provides the reader with insight into cryptography and the NSA. Brown tells us that President Truman founded the NSA on the morning of 4 November 1952 but the Congressional Record did not record this event in any way. The role of this new super secret agency was to wage information war by stealing the secrets of people and governments hostile to the US. ‘Today the agency has a $12 billion annual budget, about 25,000 employees, and an 86-acre heavily armed compound in Fort Meade, Maryland. It is home to the world’s most potent computers as well as some of the most brilliant cryptographers, mathematicians, technicians, and analysts,’ says Brown in Digital Fortress.

  Even though Brown spent considerable time researching the book there are many who believe that some of the information is inaccurate. ‘As a computer programmer myself, I found some of the research a bit weak,’ said one critic. ‘For example in this book, a computer program could have bugs in it if the programmer typed in a comma instead of a full stop. In the real world this program wouldn’t compile, let alone run!’[70]

  So what about the characters, the people who populate Digital Fortress?

  Some reviewers have labelled his characters unbelievable and unreal. Some – such as Healey – have been unable to suspend disbelief at the improbability of finding anyone who speaks the way the characters do in Digital Fortress. ‘The dialogue is in a class of its own: people simply don’t speak like that,’ was Healey’s opinion.

  She is referring to a section in the book where Brown describes David Becker, Susan Fletcher’s fiancé, who happens to be one of the youngest professors ever at an American university and is paid such a pittance that he resorts to freelance translation work to ‘re-string his old Dunlop with gut’. She tells us the biggest problem ‘with writing about characters with an IQ of 170 employed in highly responsible, management positions is that all credibility is lost if the writer makes the
m behave and speak like temp office juniors.’[71]

  Brown tells us that they are composites of people he knows. ‘They are also a bit larger than life (something for which a few people have criticised me), but this is an escapist, fun novel, and I personally enjoy reading about characters that have exceptional talents like code-breaking or multiple language skills,’ he said. ‘We run into boring people all day long, so why not read about some interesting ones?’[72]

  This makes sense. If a writer wrote about tedious people no one would read the book. Digital Fortress is anything but boring. The characters are sometimes a little wooden, and the ending, where it takes some of the greatest minds to figure out a very simple clue does take some believing. But that’s not the point: we have to remember that this was his first attempt at writing a thriller. Many, many writers never get their work published but he did, before the world went mad for The Da Vinci Code.

  While the characterisation in some cases might not be as up to the mark as Le Carré, there is still a lot of warmth and depth to them that Healey must have skimmed over. For example, Brown gives Susan a moment of reflection before he introduces another character. She is worried about her fiancé in Spain. ‘Despite her efforts to forget her morning conversation with David, the words played over and over in her head. She knew she’d been hard on him. She prayed he was okay in Spain.’ These moments of reflection advance the plot and provide greater anxiety later in the novel, increasing the tension for the reader when she learns that someone has been sent to kill David.

  Brown puts his heroes into a situation where they are on the run, or on an adventure in completely unfamiliar settings. ‘The hero of Digital Fortress, David Becker, finds himself on the run through a landscape of ancient Moorish towers, Sevillian barrios, and the Cathedral of Seville,’ Brown said. ‘Much of the early work is to place these locations in a workable sequence such that the characters can move from one to the next in a logical manner.’[73]

  ‘In trying to craft a suspenseful framework, I decided to throw Becker into a world he did not understand,’ Brown explained in his witness statement. ‘I also took him away from the heroine, his fiancée, Susan Fletcher. A lot of the suspense of this novel derives from wondering if these two will be reunited. In general, my plots drive my need for specifics (such as the precise vehicle a character will use to move from point A to B) rather than vice versa.’

  In Spain, David Becker speaks some simple Spanish, but Brown takes his characterisation that one step further: ‘Becker affected his Spanish with a thick German accent. “Hola, hablas aleman?”’

  One of the crucial points about Digital Fortress is that it relies on Susan Fletcher’s feelings to push the story forward. When Susan discovers her fellow cryptographer Greg Hale – a man with a dodgy past, bad cologne and a penchant for snooping through other people’s computers – is Tankado’s partner, she is stunned. The book continues: ‘Susan could not accept what she was seeing. True, Greg Hale was obnoxious and arrogant – but he wasn’t a traitor. He knew what Digital Fortress would do to the NSA; there was no way he was involved in a plot to release it!’

  In the book there are several sublevels beneath the main floor of the building that houses the supercomputer. These levels are for the generators needed to keep TRANSLTR cool and, given its size, the generators that cool it with Freon gas would also have to be pretty big, as the novel states: ‘The heat generated by three million processors would rise to treacherous levels – perhaps even igniting the silicone chips and resulting in a fiery meltdown.’ This information is Brown giving us a taste of what’s to come and what the characters face.

  The book is littered with red herrings and turning points. It’s the characters who push the story forward, such as when Susan is in the bathroom and overhears a muffled conversation through the air vents from two people standing on the catwalks below. She recognises one of the voices, commenting that: ‘One voice was shrill and angry. It sounded like Phil Chartrukian.’

  This particular character is a systems security officer. After Susan overhears this conversation, the power goes out and moments later the sirens begin to blare, announcing that TRANSLTR is overheating. Here Brown borrows a little from the movie Alien, when Ripley is moving through the atmosphere processor searching for the little girl Newt when the entire installation is about to blow a whole in the ground the size of Nebraska. Sirens blare incessantly and compressed superheated steam shoots out of red-hot pipes.

  In Digital Fortress Brown raises the tension and suspense by several notches. We find out that Chartrukian has been thrown over the catwalk onto the generators below, causing enough damage for the generators to stop working: ‘Phil Chartrukian was sprawled across the sharp iron fins of the main generator. His body was darkened and burned. His fall had shorted out Cyrpto’s main power supply.’

  Then all hell breaks loose when the warning horns start blaring. This is a crucial turning point because now the reader is faced with characters who are trapped inside with a giant computer that not only has a virus that threatens all the NSA data banks but that same computer is about to blow. To make matters worse, she discovers her fiancé is in grave danger when she reads the suicide note left by Greg Hale, who supposedly shot himself: ‘And above all, I am truly sorry about David Becker. Forgive me, I was blinded by ambition.’

  But it isn’t only Susan Fletcher whose world is turned upside down. Brown uses his supporting characters to push the plot forward as well. In Spain, David runs across several smaller characters, from a fat German tourist with a prostitute to the assassin Hulaholt, who is trying to kill him. In between, he runs into punks, an old French Canadian and a girl with spiked punk hair who has Tankado’s ring.

  Brown believes the setting is critical to the story. A parking lot, he tells us, is probably not the best place to set a love story. ‘Set the scene in a location that has an interest factor so that the setting itself is interesting,’ he says. In his case, Brown has set his first thriller inside a super-secret American agency with a giant supercomputer where everything goes badly wrong. ‘Reveal your setting in such a way that the setting is interesting,’ Brown said. ‘If you wrote a story in a private school and didn’t reveal any inside information about what life’s like to work or study at a private school, then you’ve got a boring setting.’[74]

  The other thing to remember is that Digital Fortress was not turned out in a fortnight. It was a labour of love and sometimes of hate, as Brown tells us. ‘The toughest part was believing in the story even when things were going badly.’ Indeed, he had to force himself to spend five to eight hours each day writing, even when he felt he had lost direction and that the book wouldn’t work.

  To write Digital Fortress, Brown followed a simple approach. The first, as we have seen, is to get the ‘big idea’, which has to be something that will hold his interest for a long time because his novels are so research-intensive. ‘Therefore, I choose a subject which is not black and white, but rather contains a grey area,’ Brown said in his witness statement. ‘The ideal topic has no clear right and wrong, no definite good and evil, and makes for great debate. I have some favourite subjects, which I wove into the Digital Fortress story once I had my “big idea” in place.’

  Those favourite subjects include secret organisations, puzzles, codes and treasure hunts. ‘My books are all “treasure hunts” of sorts. In each of my books, the treasure is an object,’ Brown explained. ‘I think people enjoy this sort of quest, especially trying to stay a step ahead of the hero by deciphering the clues along the way.’[75]

  All of his books deal with secrecy – covert agencies, conspiracies, ‘classified technologies, and secret history’. David Becker signs his messages to Susan ‘without wax’ – a code that Susan has real problems breaking, much to the delight of David. Brown reveals this code at the end of the book when he includes a little bit of history:

  During the Renaissance, Spanish sculptors who made mistakes while carving expensive marble often patched t
heir flaws with cera – “wax”. A statue that has no flaws and required no patching was hailed as a “sculpture sin cera” or a “sculpture without wax”. The phrase eventually came to mean anything honest or true. The English word “sincere” evolved from the Spanish sin cera – “without wax”. David’s secret code was no great mystery – he was simply signing his letters “Sincerely”. Somehow he suspected Susan would not be amused.

  After writing the novel Brown wanted to share some of the research he’d discovered, so he posted it on the Digital Fortress website. ‘While I was researching the book there was so much information about the National Security Agency, about global terrorism, about intelligence gathering that couldn’t be worked into the novel,’ he said. He wanted people to see that what he was writing about was, in fact, true, saying, ‘People would email me to say that there was no way that there’s an agency that can do this. I would simply respond, “Go to the website and have a look – it’s real.”’ (At the time of writing, however, the website didn’t contain anything to do with the NSA and was an advertisement site for everything from digital voice recorders to night-vision goggles. The only mention of Dan Brown was where the reader could pick up a copy of the book – cheap.)

  If we apply the five principles for thriller-writing to Digital Fortress, then by and large the book meets four of the five principles. First it is entertaining, as we’ve seen from the reviews. It provides an insight to the NSA and reflects the world around it through the settings in Spain, Washington, the use of email, gadgets and so on. At its heart it is an adventure. Brown cuts back and forth between the NSA where everything is going wrong, and with Spain where Becker is racing against time to find the ring. It is a stylish, edge-of-your-seat thriller. The one thing it doesn’t have is humour but this is made up for by lashings of suspense, pace and tension.