Exponential

by JM Addison

  Chapter 26

  Mara returned to the lobby area and sat in one of the low, soft lounge chairs. She thought about getting some of the delicious smelling coffee, but her stomach was strongly hinting that it would be a bad idea. Fresh gourmet coffee and high anxiety made for a bad combination. From her position, she had a clear view in all directions. Behind her was a large section of glass that offered a view out into the adjacent square. She thought she could blend in with the scenery to a large degree, however, she still had a nasty looking bruise on her face from her encounter with the bathroom door at the morgue.

  She could easily see straight down the narrowing hallway in front of her. To her left was an expansive lobby that led out to an adjacent building across the wide student crossing. She was still carrying around her entire life’s worth of belongings since she really had no place to stay. At least until she could someday safely get back to her apartment – if she ended up surviving at all. She had her purse, a whole bunch of notes, a light bag with a few of her clothes and such and her jacket which she still wore to ward of the anxious chill.

  She sat collecting her thoughts and her notes while she waited for her “guests” to arrive. She could feel the butterflies of mild anticipation while she waited. She did not trust them, but she had no choice. Somehow, this had to end and the only way was to do something about it herself.

  She knew to expect the woman she talked to on the phone. She tried to picture her in her mind. She sounded young on the phone, but you never knew. It was funny how different people actually looked from the imagined demeanor you often created in your mind after only hearing someone, but never actually meeting them. She said she wanted to bring someone else along, her boss? Mara didn’t like the idea, but she was in no position to protest.

  Waiting like this was quite a struggle. It was difficult to be at ease with her mind racing over the events of the last days. She still had not had a period of time to properly grieve the loss of her mother. How odd it was, she thought to herself, how the passage of time seemed to crawl when you were forced to do nothing but wait. It reminded her with a shudder of the frantic moments she spent locked in an utterly dark box with no chance for escape. She had the notion that she would likely be permanently claustrophobic after that ordeal.

  There were a considerable number of people around her, but none seemed to notice her as she sat as any other student would with a few notes in front of her. Some paused to chat as they stood enjoying a cup of coffee. Others scurried this way and that, no doubt immersed in thought of the next class they had to get to or some important project that needed their urgent attention. It reminded her a lot of her own days in college. It also reminded her of her mother’s conviction to provide good education for both of her children in spite of their relatively limited family resources. Here she was agonizing over the loss of her mother again. She had to overcome this if she was going to be able to continue. Where were they?

  From the student crossing she saw a possible candidate approaching. What tipped her off was the fact that the girl (who looked nothing at all like what she had imagined) was apparently with a man who was older that her. Could be a student and teacher walking along discussing course material, but that was rare. Mara pretended to be studying her notes as they made their way into the lobby and paused for a moment to get their bearings. When they spotted the coffee kiosk, they approached. Both were carrying bags, the middle aged man with slightly graying hair had a leather satchel you often associated with small computer carrying bags. The girl had what simply looked like an oversized purse.

  They walked up to the counter an apparently began discussing the selection of coffee. She could only hear bits of their conversation, but they placed orders and waited for their gourmet delight as the machine ground out some fresh concoction, no doubt with cocoa or cinnamon or some other exotic flavor. After receiving their cups they pondered the landscape a bit. They noticed her sitting there and Mara continued to pretend to be deep in study. They shuffled around a bit, drinking from the little holes in the lids of their cups and eventually sat nearby.

  Mara tried to survey all of the other people who came and went looking for any signs of surveillance. It was a little comforting to be meeting with a woman who was not all that much different from her. She seemed only a little older. Perhaps a little bigger, but then most people were a little bigger than Mara. She looked a little… dumpy? Like someone who didn’t care all that much about just how they looked. Not fat, but out of shape for someone so young. Her hair needed a stylist to give it some attention and she could wear some makeup. Then it suddenly dawned on Mara that she herself probably looked worse. Her hair was trimmed and bleached as a disguise, but not very well cared for and out of necessity, she wore no makeup either.

  She decided that these two looked safe enough. The man was a little harder to read. He was average looking in almost every way, medium height, brown hair that was softly graying, glasses that shaded his eyes enough that she couldn’t make out a color without staring.

  She gathered her nerve and looked up from her notes at them. “Annette?”

  “Yes!” replied the woman as she stood up.

  “Please, don’t bother getting up. It might seem ridiculously paranoid, but if you’ve been through what I’ve been through the past few days, you would be wary too.”

  No doubt they both understood after noticing the bruises on her face.

  The man cleared his throat and began, “I’m Mike Ludwik and, as you know, this is Annette. We received your message and are pretty concerned. Our first concern is that this seems unlikely to be a legitimate insinuation that you’ve made. I don’t mean to make it ssound that we don’t trust you or anything, but we don’t even know you and then to make this request to meet… here.”

  Mara began to get a little scared. All along she was looking at things from her perspective and never gave thought to what they must think. Putting herself in their place, it’s really surprising that they would even bother to show up at all.

  She tried to ally their concerns, “I can completely understand what you mean. But I think after I’m through you will appreciate the sacrifice you’ve made to come here to meet me.”

  “Well, the only reason we are here is simply to follow up on our own problems. You mention theft of secure, encrypted data and we believe that we’ve been victims, but don’t know how.”

  “Let me tell you my story and I think I can explain how and perhaps even who…”

  Mike Ludwik suddenly zeroed on Mara with laser focus in anticipation of the promised answers. Mara began to relate her experience, beginning with her real name and then the disappearance of her brother from where they both worked – Viiradium.

  Annette interrupted, “We use products from Viiradium for our network traffic and security control.” Both Mike and Mara looked at her and she stopped to let Mara continue.

  Mara described the attacks and attempted kidnapping, the harrowing escape from her mother’s and the sadness of her death. She became slightly agitated as she related the fact that she was hunted by both the cops and whoever was trying to kill her. She paused a moment to glance around to be sure no one was watching them or was surreptitiously eavesdropping on their conversation.

  She continued with the eventual help she had gotten from the police only to be betrayed by the one cop she trusted and then her nightmare with Enrique at the morgue, only she didn’t know his name was really Enrique.

  “Now, I’m sure you are probably wondering, why are people trying to kill me and why have I contacted you!” She went back to describe the discovered message from Chris about the ‘Tomb’ and it’s discovery, then the unearthing of the drawing at Chris’ that showed details of some of the victims – including Sequitus – as well as the odd diagram. How she investigated the meaning of this and eventually ended up with the old math professor who knew exactly what it was, that it wasn’t an archaeological discovery, but a mathematical discovery and described in detail ho
w such a discovery could have a dramatic impact on the world of information exchange.

  Then in desperation, she sent e-mail messages to several companies hoping she would turn up something since she could not go to the authorities without endangering herself. If she ended up in jail (or dead), the people responsible would then be allowed to continue with their dirty little tricks.

  Finally, she spent some time describing the mathematical process using the illustration of the magic boxes that Professor Tattinger taught her, although she was sure her version lacked the exciting color of his.

  When she finished the whole story, they sat back and looked at each other. Were they wondering whether to believe this outrageous story? Would they take her seriously? Could they believe she was spinning an elaborate fabrication? Like a spider, only a web of lies? People have died over this thing, so obviously something ‘real’ was going on here. There was apparent theft of data occurring right at Sequitus, so there indeed could be truth to this story.

  Mara continued, “Right now, the only problem I have is proving that this is happening and that finding out exactly who is responsible. And to me, that’s a big problem because I don’t know where to start!”

  Mike and Annette decided to take her seriously. Mike asked, “What about simply using stronger encryption to make it even more difficult and eventually impossible to decode the data?”

  “You don’t understand,” replied Annette. “The number of bits used in the encryption key determines the difficulty of cracking the code. Right now, 128 bits is considered theoretically impossible to decode. Without the key, there’s no way currently to determine the original message. What she’s talking about is not the key but the method used as the key exchange. Because the other party who you are sending the message to has to be able to decrypt the information, there has to be some way to exchange what the key is.

  “To do that, this mathematical method of using related key pairs was devised. What Mara is saying is that someone has discovered a mathematical way to exploit the relationship between the keys. In other words, since one of the keys is distributed freely, anyone has easy access to it. But, until now, it has been mathematically impossible to perform a prime number factorization operation against the public key to determine the private one. But apparently someone has discovered a way to do this. With the knowledge of the private key, someone could examine the key exchange part of the transaction. This is the key that both ends of the electronic conversation agree to use to encrypt and decrypt the information. Since another party was able to determine what the key to be used actually was, that same someone could record the electronic transaction as it occurred, determine the encryption key selected during the key exchange using the ‘Tomb’ and decrypt the entire electronic conversation between the two computers.”

  “But how would someone be able to record such a conversation? Aren’t the data connections between companies considered private?” Mara asked.

  “Yes, they are considered private from a legal standpoint, but messages from one company to another go through many telecom circuits and probably several phone companies or telecom providers on their way through the internet to the destination. It is not too hard to monitor traffic, especially if you knew the electronic addresses of both parties and that’s pretty much public information. And if a company like Viiradium is involved in this key compromise effort, it would be easy for them to build network traffic routing products with a secret, built-in ‘agent’ to collect and then redirect any traffic you collected to any destination in the world. In fact we do it all the time to monitor our data flow from a diagnostic standpoint.” Annette replied.

  “So you think Viiradium is involved to the point of making equipment and selling it with this illegal capability?”

  “The collection and forwarding of data traffic is not really illegal. First, the equipment already has this capability and its purpose is really just a ‘feature’ to enable the network administrators to better control data flow in a complex network. To exploit this built in ‘feature’ would only take a little bit of computer code implanted into the equipment. It wouldn’t be a surprise if there was some sort of a special diagnostic password known only to the manufacturer so that they could activate this code and turn something completely legitimate into something dangerously illegal.”

  After a moment reflection, Mara piped in, “That means proving their involvement is going to be next to impossible if it depends on discovering something that is already supposed to be there.”

  Mike added, “We’re not so sure it’s Viiradium that’s the culprit here. We’ve been doing some investigating on our own and we think we might be able to help. Have you ever heard of an outfit called ‘I-Data’?”

  Mara looked puzzled. “No, not that I can think of, Why?”

  Mike looked disappointed. “I was hoping that in all of your research, you might have uncovered a trail that lead in their direction. We believe that a company or some adversarial organization could purchase private data about a competitor, or ‘opponent’ without their consent or knowledge. We just had no idea how they were getting the data.

  “Our small company was formed after the discovery of a significant scientific breakthrough called the ‘Pico Timer’. We have some initial patents pending for the discovery, but there are other companies racing to produce products that take advantage of this new technology and that competition is fierce and even cutthroat. There are big government contracts at stake that are worth, potentially, billions of dollars. Not to mention application of the new technology in all sorts of consumer electronics.

  “We feel that our competition has made use of or hired these people to electronically ‘spy’ on us to keep the upper advantage. From what you have told us, this seems more likely than ever.”

  Annette chimed in, “If what Mara is saying is true, corporate spying is the least of our worries. This same technique of private data exchange has become almost universal. Manufacturers of electronic equipment have embedded this encryption technology it in lots of things to make it completely transparent and convenient to the user to send private data. If the mathematical details of the discovery of the ‘Tomb’ were made public, it would end private data exchange all over the world until someone could discover an alternate method. Some methods already exist, but the technique of using relative prime factors is the clear favorite because until now, it was the easiest to use and most difficult to break. Governments would not be safe from their enemies, the police could understand messages between criminal organizations and worse yet, criminals could understand the private police data traffic. The world would be a mess for a while.”

  Mike replied, “Well there is nothing much we can do about that. For now, we have our own problems and Mara here is in a sinking boat. We need to bail her out of this and I think we can do it by solving our own problems.”

  “What are you thinking?” Annette asked.

  “We have contacts at the National Security Agency because of our work with the Pico Timer and application of the technology in the surveillance field. If they knew about this, there is no way they would be kept quiet by some corporate entity, I don’t care who the company is. At least I don’t think they would anyway. We just need to gather a bit of evidence and present it to the guys at the NSA. When they hear Mara’s story and compare that with the evidence we prepare, they’ll scramble to put an end to this including Mara’s troubles.”

  How do you plan on gathering this so called ‘evidence’?” Annette asked.

  Mike smiled and simply said, “Why not use our own stuff?”

  “You mean the Pico Timer?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean!”

  Mara interrupted, “I’m not following along with you…”

  “Where are you staying, Mara?” Mike asked. Mara was reluctant to say anything as the fear alarm went off in her head. Could she really trust the two of them? She had been burned before and nearly died for it. No, not again.

 
; “I’m afraid I can’t say. I don’t mean to be rude, but being careful has somehow kept me alive.”

  “Would you be willing to come back to Sequitus Tech with us? I know it’s asking a lot after what you have been through, but this time it’s one victim to another. I think you would be safer with us than staying… here,” he said as he looked around the premise drawing the conclusion that she was living homeless blending in with the campus students.

  Mara momentarily flushed with embarrassment and reconsidered the offer. If she did go with them she could avoid the risk of driving the car out to their company. A car that stuck out like a sore thumb and would no doubt be on every cop’s APB. It boiled down to a simple matter of whether she felt comfortable enough to go with them. Her intuition told her that she had to trust them. What else could she do? Weren’t they victims that she solicited? After a long pause, she finally simply said, “OK.”