tensely awaited the next hourly update.
THIRD CONFRONTATION
Space division, that part of the defense intelligence Agency which deals with foreign powers' space capabilities, is located on the second-to-bottom floor of the Pentagon, three stories directly below the famous Pentagon Situation Room.
And although its title may sound exotic and exciting, as David Fairfax knew, such a perception couldn't have been further from the truth.
In short, you got sent to Space Division as punishment, because nothing ever happened in Space Division.
It was nearly 10.00 a.m. on the East Coast as Fairfax — oblivious to any commotion going on in the outside world — tapped away on his computer keyboard, trying to decipher a collection of phone taps that the DIA had picked up over the past few months. Whoever had been using the phones in question had fitted them with sophisticated encoders, masking their content. It was up to Fairfax to crack that code.
It's funny how times change, he thought.
David Theodore Fairfax was a cryptanalyst, a code breaker. Of medium height, lean, with floppy brown hair and thin wire-frame glasses, he didn't look like a genius. In fact, in his Mooks T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, he looked more like a gawky university student than a government analyst.
It was, however, his brilliant undergraduate thesis on theoretical nonlinear computing that had brought him to the attention of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense's chief intelligence-gathering organization. The DIA worked in close consultation with the NSA, America's chief signals gatherer and code breaker. But that didn't prevent it from running its own team of code crackers — who often spied on the USA — of which Dave Fairfax was a part.
Fairfax had taken to cryptanalysis immediately. He loved the challenge of it, the battle between two minds: one which hopes to conceal, the other which hopes to reveal. He lived by the maxim: No code is unbreakable.
It didn't take him long to get noticed.
In the early 1990's, U.S. authorities were confounded by a man named Phil Zimmerman and his unbreakable encryption software, 'PGP.' In 1991, Zimmerman had posted PGP on the Internet, to the great consternation of the U.S. government — principally because the government couldn't crack it.
PGP employed a cryptographic system known as the 'public key system,' which involved the multiplication of very large prime numbers to obtain the code's all-important 'key.' In this case 'very large prime numbers' meant numbers with over 130 digits. It was unbreakable.
It was claimed that it would take all the supercomputers in the world twelve times the age of the universe to check all the possible values for a single message.
The government was annoyed. It became known that certain terrorist groups and foreign governments had started using PGP to encrypt their messages. In 1993, a grand jury investigation into Zimmerman was initiated on the basis that by uploading PGP onto the Internet, he had exported a weapon out of the United States, since encryption software came under the government's definition of a 'munition.'
And then strangely, in 1996, after hounding Zimmerman for three years, the U.S. Attorney General's office dropped the case.
Just like that.
They claimed that the horse had bolted and the case wasno longer worth pursuing, so they closed the file.
What the Attorney General never mentioned was the call she had received from the Director of the DIA on the morning she dropped the case, saying that PGP had been cracked.
And as anyone in cryptography knows, once you crack your enemy's code, you don't let them know you've cracked it.
And the man who cracked PGP: an unknown twenty-five-year-old DIA mathematician by the name of David Fairfax.
It turned out that Fairfax's theoretical nonlinear computer was no longer theoretical. A prototype version of it was built for the express purpose of breaking PGP, and as it turned out, the computer, with its unimaginable calculative abilities, could factor extremely large numbers with considerable ease.
No code is unbreakable.
History, however, is tough on cryptanalysts — for the simple fact that they cannot talk about their greatest victories.
And so it was with Dave Fairfax. He might have cracked PGP, but he could never talk about it, and in the great maze of government work, he had simply been given a small pay raise and then moved on to the next job.
And so here he was in Space Division, analyzing a series of unauthorized phone transmissions coming into and out of some remote Air Force base in Utah.
In a similarly isolated room across the hall from him, however, was where all the good stuff was happening today. A joint taskforce of DIA and NSA cryptanalysts were tracking the encrypted signals coming out of the Chinese space shuttle that had launched from Xichang a few days earlier.
Now that was interesting, Fairfax thought. Better than decrypting some phone calls from a stupid Air Force base in the desert.
The recorded phone calls appeared on Fairfax's computer screen as a waterfall of cascading numbers — the mathematical representation of a series of telephone conversations that had taken place in Utah over the last couple of months.
A huge pair of headphones covered Fairfax's ears, emitting a steady stream of garbled static.
His eyes were fixed on the screen.
One thing was clear: whoever had made these calls had encrypted them well. Fairfax had been at this for the last two days.
He tried a few older algorithms.
Nothing.
He tried a few newer ones.
Nothing.
He could do this all month if he had to. He tried a program he had developed to crack Vodafone's newest encryption system –
'…Kan bevestig dot in-enting plaasvind…'
For a brief second, a strange guttural language materialized in his ears.
Fairfax's eyes glowed to life.
Gotcha…
He tried the program on some of the other telephone conversations.
And in a miraculous instant, formless static suddenly became clear voices speaking in a foreign tongue, interspersed with the odd sentence of English.
'…Toetse op laaste paging word op die vier-entwientigste verwag. Wat van die onttrekkings eenheid?…'
'…Reccondo span is alreeds weggestuur…'
'…Voorbereidings onderweg. Vroeg oggend. Beste tyd vir onttrekking…'
'…Everything is in place. Confirm that it's the third…'
'…Ontrekking kan 'n probleem wees. Gestel ons ge bruik die Hoeb land hier naby. Verstaan hy is 'n lid van Die Organisasie…'
'…Sal die instruksies oordra…'
'…Mission is a go…'
'…Die Reccondos is gereed. Verwagte aankoms by be plande bestemming binne nege dae…'
Fairfax's eyes gleamed as he gazed at the screen. No code is unbreakable. He reached for his phone.
