“So what?” Laing asked.
“So, if he got deep enough, Krueger could have generated a means of upsetting those patterns.”
“Upsetting patterns?” Frank asked.
Madda gave him an exasperated look. “He figured out how to kill people real good. That simple enough for you?”
“But he can do that now. Sarah's virus proves that. So what did Turing spike?” Laing asked.
Madda shrugged.
“In your time at Echelon, did that happen often?” Ryan asked. “Turing hoarding a data pull?”
“Only this once.”
“So, to distill all this down—we're fucked. We don't know shit,” Frank said.
“Well, I do have a theory,” Madda said, the old smile rising.
“Okay, spill,” Frank said.
“Kryptos.”
Laing cocked his head. Frank went red with frustration.
“We're going to Langley,” Madda continued.
“That's the one place we know Krueger's not!” Frank steamed.
“Wrong,” Madda replied.
The skim jet headed east, swooping low over open ground, then rising with the burbs to gain max altitude over the cities.
“How long you been at the CIA? And you never noticed it?” Madda had repositioned himself as far from Frank as possible.
Frank turned to Laing. “Your genius better start making sense. I'm way beyond a mood for twenty questions.”
“Madda,” Laing urged.
“Kryptos, man!” Madda exclaimed. “The sculpture! Designed by James Sanborn in the twentieth? It sits plunk in the middle of Langley.”
“Oh, shit,” Laing blurted. “The cryptology sculpture. Turing had a holo of it in his office. He was obsessed with cracking the code within it.”
“You're talking about the stone and metal thing with all the letters?” Frank asked.
“Yes,” Madda replied with scorn. He called up an image of the sculpture on the vid screen.
“So what?” Frank shot back. “So Turing liked the sculpture? The fuck difference does that make?”
“He didn't just like it. I found something while you were getting to me. Did a deep run on Turing's activity during the Krueger affair.”
“And?” Laing asked.
“And, through a series of shells that would house all the clams in the sea, Turing made a generous contribution to the United States government. Specifically, to the restoration of Kryptos.”
“No shit,” Frank said.
“No shit,” Madda replied.
40
Darkness had become the constant. For hours, days maybe, Krueger had kept Sarah in the rad-blocked cabin. The black had eaten through her, isolation as damaging as the spike itself.
Finally, the eternity had ended. Blinding white glare pierced the darkness. The stimulus had been too much. She remembered Taylor's hands on her, street sounds, exotic smells. Then she was shoved down a ladder and into insulated silence.
Descending, her vision cleared to the point where she could see stone columns disappearing into black water. Taylor pulled her along, down a softly lit hall to a door. He opened it and she clued to the rad-blocking film on its interior.
Panic shot through her—drawing her back to reality.
“No!” she raged, desperate to stay in the light. She threw her arms out, bridging the door. But Taylor was too strong. He pushed and she fell.
Before her head hit the floor, the door slammed shut. The darkness was total. For a time she had the pain of her head wound to keep her company. Then it faded and there was nothing.
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
The atrium bustled with activity. Vaulting walls arched to a translucent ceiling from which diffused light filtered down. All construction within the CIA was done with rad-blocking biocrete. The material rippled and flowed, luminescing tracks on the floor and walls that led employees to their assigned locations. A side effect of the navigation system was that few felt comfortable loitering. The blipping dot that indicated a standing employee was easily noticed.
As a result, employees raced through the atrium without taking notice of the statue that occupied center stage. Its aged tarnish stood in stark contrast to the slick biocrete and hypermod space.
Ryan regarded the serpentine curved copper screen emerging scroll-like from a trunk of petrified wood. Rising well over his head, the plate held four sections of encrypted text punched into the tarnished metal.
“It used to be outside,” Madda said.
Ryan, Madda, and Frank stood under the statue, the only people lingering in the cavernous atrium. Around them, employees whipped by, few making eye contact. Security eyed them with suspicion. It had taken all the chits Frank had saved up to get Laing and Madda into the building.
Madda reached forward, touching the punched metal. “It's amazing.”
“Turing loved it,” Ryan said. Wisps of comfortable memory filled him. So many times, Ryan had sat within Turing's flow-constructed office, this statue rotating in the corner. Turing had never mentioned it, but every so often, Ryan would notice his eyes floating to it, lingering on it.
“Okay—so let's get to it,” Frank said, breaking the spell. “We break the code here and the statue'll spit out whatever Turing spiked from Krueger, right?”
“Uhh, no.” Madda shot Frank a look that brought the larger man's blood to a boil. Laing stepped between them.
Madda continued unfazed, “Kryptos was erected in 1990. That's a tad before even Turing.”
“So he hid some sort of cache in the sculpture while restoring it.”
“And slipped it into the CIA's security bubble? Seems unlikely. They'd have scanned this six ways to Sunday before letting it back in the building.”
“Then what the fuck are we doing here?”
“If I knew, I'd have told you.”
Madda began a slow tour of the sculpture. “The sculptor used a combination of systems to encrypt this thing,” he said, pointing to the metal scroll. “Basically, it's a Vigenère cipher—a substitution system using multiple alphabets. It's a real bitch—”
Frank cut in, “I don't give a shit, Madda. We got some time pressure here. What does the thing say?”
Madda pulled himself back to reality as Ryan continued to circle the sculpture.
“Okay,” Dave said. “First three sections were hacked a long time ago. First one reads:
Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.”
Madda fumbled over the last word. “It's a misspelling within the cipher,” he explained.
“And you know all this by heart?”
“Sure. Kryptos is a huge deal. Though I am paraphrasing a bit.” He turned back to Kryptos. “Anyway—second section was debated for a while, but the sculptor himself finally settled it to:
It was totally invisible hows that possible? They used the earths magnetic field x the information was gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown location x does langley know about this? They should its buried out there somewhere x who knows the exact location? Only ww this was his last message x thirty eight degrees fifty seven minutes six point five seconds north seventy seven degrees eight minutes forty four seconds west x layer two.”
“The fuck does that mean?” Frank's annoyance was in no way diminishing Madda's excitement.
“Search me,” Madda replied.
“Who's ‘ww'?”
“Think it's William Webster. He was the CIA director when Kryptos went up. The location's a bust. Nothing there.”
Frank paced, trying to focus. “This is a jerk-off,” he mumbled.
Laing listened to them bicker. Madda's staccato rambling fell away as he focused on the letters punched into the metal plate. His drones began to tingle. They were pattern matchers. They had linked to the patterns within him—his genetic code. They spoke to him as he spoke to himself. Augmented internal dialogue. And now as he gazed at the cipher, they tingled with pattern recog
nition but couldn't seem to pull resolution.
“This thing's complicated,” Laing said, lost in it.
“Tell me about it. It's badass, to have stumped everyone for so long. Last section that's been deciphered is a rip on some dude's journal, where he talked about breaking into the tomb of Tutankhamen. That's King Tut,” Madda said, looking at Frank. “Kinda cool. Reads,
Slowly desperately slowly the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed with trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner and then...”
Madda's words faded as Laing pushed into the cipher. The drones buzzed within him. Then the expansion began. His mind's eye widened to take in the breadth of the world—the same fractal perception he had experienced in New York. Data swamped him. Then he focused down, locked into crypto-flow, and it began to rez clean.
Ryan spoke the words as they popped from the cipher. It took him a moment to realize that he was speaking in time with Madda.
“Widening the hole a little I inserted the candle and peered in the hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist...”
Madda broke off, looking at Ryan with a mixture of shock and awe. “You cracked it? That fast?”
“It's not me. Well, I guess it is. I just see the pattern.”
“Holy crap, that's cool. You get the last bit?”
“It's harder,” Laing replied.
“Well, yeah,” Madda scoffed. “Everything else was deciphered long ago. Those first three passages are themselves a key to unlocking the fourth. Shit—you coulda just pulled them off the flow.”
“Right,” Frank shot in. “I'm sure his priority is impressing you.”
“Will you two kill it for a sec?” Ryan broke in.
They did, both turning on him, waiting.
Something in the cipher picked at Ryan. He was missing something crucial. “Is this it? Is there more to the sculpture?”
“Ummm, yeah. There used to be a pool of water curving under the copper plate. Didn't survive the renovations.”
Ryan looked back to the statue. He pushed back in. With the drones, he sifted into the cipher, ingesting it. His mind spun. He saw not just the sculpture, but all the information on it that floated through the flow. He saw the sculpture as it had been, with the pool beneath. Suddenly a pattern click. The pool! Something about it was drawing him. Finally, Ryan realized that it was the waves themselves. The water had been pumped into the pool in such a manner as to create a standing wave.
For most, decrypting the cipher would have been a rational process. For Ryan, it was a combination of logic and gut instinct. The drones used the standing wave's characteristics, plugging them into the Kryptos cipher. Through the cold focus, he sensed a phase shift. He needed power to rez out the transformation. To get it, the drones co-opted the CIA's system. It wasn't a hack. It was an expansion of self. In New York, Ryan had used the flow to augment his perception of the physical world. This was another step down that road. Ryan became the confluence of physical self, the drones, and the CIA system—the outside processors augmenting his own mind's capabilities.
The shift swamped him. Under the wash, the Ryan Laing standing in the atrium of the CIA shrank to a mere part of a much bigger whole. His being was no longer housed within that physical core, but spread through the CIA's data-net. He reeled under the transformation, struggling to maintain a sense of self. He needed focus—something to lock onto. The cipher! It had pushed him here, and he could use it to get back.
He used the cryptogram as a focus point. Under the brute force of his expanded perception, the cipher began to resolve. The crypto-flow came to a rest, finding perfect order. But as the cipher resolved, Ryan felt his augmented mind bottling down, processing power dwindling. He fought to retain it, but couldn't. The system crumbled around him.
Then, another jarring perception shift. Reality jammed down on Ryan, squeezing his augmented perception out. He rezzed back to Frank shaking him violently.
“Laing!” Frank shouted.
Ryan locked back into physical reality, ingesting the scene shift that had occurred while he'd been out. What had been a cool-flowing work-place was now blasting panic. Sirens wailed. People ran.
“What's happening?” Ryan asked, still blurred out from his experience.
“Breach of the CIA mainframe. Full hack. The system shut down in response.”
Laing looked at Frank, finally pulling back into himself. “I think that was me.”
“What?”
“I needed more processing power to crack the code. It just happened.”
“Just happened? Cracking the CIA's mainframe doesn't ‘just happen.' You pulled the whole system offline.” Frank looked down on Ryan with fear in his eyes.
“I...” Ryan couldn't understand what he'd done, let alone explain it. “I'm changing. It started in New York. This is new to me.”
“You're fucking changing? Into what—a goddamned butterfly? You crashed the CIA,” Frank said with slow deliberation, as if trying to believe it himself. “No one should have that kind of power.”
Ryan held Frank's gaze but couldn't respond. He had nothing to say.
Before he could digest the full ramifications of his new ability, Madda pushed past Frank. “You got it, didn't you?” Dave blurted. “You cracked the cipher. Not even a fucking hacker and you got it. No fucking justice.”
Ryan nodded. “The answer's not here. There's more to Kryptos than this.”
“Come on,” Frank said, grabbing Laing's arm. “Let's finish this before you decimate anything else.”
Madda struggled through the rush of people to keep up with the two. They skirted the main exit, sliding down a side hall that fed into the building's infrastructure. Cleaner bots hustled on servos through the low-ceilinged passageway.
“What's this?” Ryan asked.
“Side exit. No one knows this building like me,” Frank shot back.
They burst through the exit, hitting the spongy sod surrounding the structure. The door slid back into the wall, disappearing with a pneumatic hiss.
Laing didn't slow. He extended his senses, integrating sat imagery, and even the CIA's own surveillance. He pushed into a soft thatch of trees at the building's far end.
“This used to be the main entrance to the New Headquarters Building,” Laing said. It was now derelict, long abandoned. “Come on, this way.” He pushed into the oaks.
“Stop!” Frank shouted with cold authority.
Laing did, Madda crashing into his back.
Frank caught up with Ryan. “This is the fucking CIA, dumbass. You don't just run into the fucking woods. There's shit in there you don't want to know about.”
“There's also another piece of the sculpture.”
“What are you talking about?” Madda stammered.
“The sculptor placed slabs around the buildings. Most are decoys—large granite slabs with copper sandwiched in them, all junked up with Morse code. But there's one other. It's subtle—nothing flashy. It's the solve!”
Laing pushed on. Frank grabbed his arm. “That's death on a stick. No-access zone. I need to kill the security to get us in there.”
“And how long will that take?”
“After you just hacked in? It might take some time.”
“Forget it. Sarah doesn't have time for that.” Ryan pushed forward. After a step or two, he realized Madda was following.
“I'm coming,” Dave said. “You're about to solve the unsolvable. I am coming.”
Ryan looked over to Frank, who grabbed Madda and reeled him back. “You gotta find some perspective, man,” Frank said.
Ryan stepped forward, pushing on alone. Immediately, the slow-tick hover of stimuli bombarded him. He tried to block the hunt-kill surveillance system that ran through the CIA's grounds, but it operated on an isolated system that would take Laing too long to crack.
Laing pushed forward, bre
aking the radiation corridor. Bots rose from the soft earth and began to swarm. Ant small, they worked on a system of rules modeled after schooling fish.
Ryan tried to fool their acquisition protocols by ghosting images of himself into the woods. But the bots got better at seeing through the digital ruse. They went after Ryan's decoys but, each time, they learned a little more, abandoning the attack more quickly. He didn't have much time.
Laing reached the slab outlined in the cipher. He pulled moss and dirt from it, revealing the aged imprint of a compass chiseled into the smooth granite. The bots centered on him, pushing to target.
Laing scratched away the remainder of the grit. Amid his launch of countermeasures, he tried to hold the Kryptos cipher in his mind. He cycled through the solutions, coming back to Howard Carter's journal entry on finding the tomb of King Tut. Ryan ran it again, trying to concentrate with the bot swarm closing in.
Slowly desperately slowly the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed...
The swarm reached him, pushing through his remaining decoys. They bore into him, a sensation rising from dull itch to hot pain. The bots piranhaed his leg. A thousand bee stings—and then worse. They injected something that slowed him down. The drones fought the effects, but he couldn't last long. He swiped at the bots, clearing them, knowing they'd be back.
Ryan tried again to focus, pushing back into the solutions.
With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner...
If each clue built on others, maybe the solve lay in mimicking Carter himself. It was worth a shot. Aligning himself with the compass, he searched the slab's upper left-hand corner. Nothing. It was as smooth as the rest of the slab. Panic rose. The swarm pushed in, chewing his legs, injecting venom.
Desperate, Ryan slammed a palm into the corner of the slab. It cracked.
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