Simple Genius

AUTHOR’S NOTE

WARNING: DO NOT READ THIS BEFORE YOU READ THE NOVEL.

Dear Readers,

Babbage Town is completely fictitious but was inspired in part by Bletchley Park outside London where German military codes were broken by the Allies during the Second Word War. I have fudged certain geographic details and other facts where Babbage Town is set, created places out of thin air, totally fabricated a history for that area of Virginia, complete with abandoned mansions, and generally run amuck in a literary sense. However, readers knowledgeable about Virginia history will recognize in the story the influences of some of the “real” Tidewater estates along the James River (as opposed to the York River) of historical significance, such as West-over, Carter’s Grove, and Shirley Plantation. Fortunately, this triumvirate of Virginia estates has not fallen into ruin.

That said, “making it up” and distorting the facts are legitimate tools of the novelist, so please disincline from writing to me to point out various factual and historical gaffes. I am not only aware of them, I tend to revel in them.

Now, the material concerning quantum computers is all true, or at least as true as a layperson such as yours truly can understand these baffling concepts and then communicate them to the reader in a narrative form that will not put one to sleep. There really are colleges, companies and countries in a race to get there first. And if someone does the world will change forever. To what degree and whether for the positive or negative depends, I guess, on who wins that race. One book that I found helpful in writing about quantum physics was A Shortcut Through Time, by George Johnson.

Since secret codes and the history of certain real-life cryptanalysts are tangentially explored in the book, I took inspiration from that field to create some of the character names. Here’s the list:

1 Champ Pollion was derived from Jean-Francois Champollion, a brilliant French linguist, who was instrumental in the decipherment of the cartouches of Ptolemaios and Cleopatra. His work also enabled scholars to read the history of the pharaohs as set down by their scribes.

2 Michael Ventris was the name of the man who discovered that the so-called Linear B tablets unearthed on the island of Crete were written in Greek.

3. Alicia Chadwick’s surname came from John Chadwick whose extensive knowledge of archaic Greek was instrumental as he and Ventris went on to decipher the Linear B tablets. As an interesting side note their findings were made public around the same time that Mt. Everest was first conquered, prompting their discovery to be labeled the “Everest of Greek Archaeology.”

3 Ian Whitfield’s surname came from Whitfield Diffie, who came up with a groundbreaking new type of cipher that used an asymmetric key, instead of a symmetric key. Symmetric merely means that the way one unscrambles the cipher is the same way one scrambles it.

4 Merkle Hayes’s first name came from Ralph Merkle, who worked with Diffie and Stanford professor Martin Hellman on their world-changing work in conceptualizing public cryptography in a way that finally solved the key distribution problem.

5 Len Rivest’s last name came from Ron Rivest, who teamed with Adi Shamir and Leonard Adelman to create RSA, the system of asymmetric public key cryptography that is dominant in the world today.

6 Monk Turing’s last name came from, of course, Alan Turing, whose actual history is set forth in the book. Charles Babbage and Blaise de Vigenere were real people as well, whose discoveries are also chronicled in the novel.

7 The inspiration for Valerie Messaline’s surname (with a slightly different spelling) didn’t come from the world of cryptanalysts. However, students of history may spot the significance. One clue: Unlike RSA,

which is brilliantly asymmetrical, Valerie’s name and character are beautifully symmetrical.

So as they say, what’s in a name? Well, with Simple Genius, a lot!

The history of Camp Peary revealed in the novel is based on the research I was able to do and is factually accurate as well. However, the descriptions of what goes on there in the book are entirely products of my imagination. This was necessary since it’s doubtful any novelist will ever be allowed there to do research. In that vein, anyone who works at Camp Peary who reads the novel, please keep in mind that I just made up what happens at the place; the characters and the dialogue, and nothing in the story is a reflection on you or the work you do for your country. A rogue agent is just that. Known as the “secret place” by some locals, it’s worth a trip down just to drive by Camp Peary. No, you can’t tour the place; the CIA won’t even acknowledge it exists.

The idea for Simple Genius came to me, or at least part of it did, after reading about the Beale Cipher. The Beale Cipher is one of those oxymoronic phenomena-a famous secret. It concerns an enormously complicated code, three pages worth of numbers, and an alleged treasure worth tens of millions of dollars that was supposedly hidden by Mr. Thomas Jefferson Beale in the early 1800s. One page of the cipher has been-at least allegedly-successfully deciphered long ago by a friend of a friend of Mr. Beale’s. The page was decrypted using the American Declaration of Independence as a source of letters corresponding with the numbers on the cipher. For example, the third number in the cipher is 24, which means, you’d look up the 24th word in the Declaration. That word is “another,” so you’d take the first letter of that word, or “a,” and plug it into the ciphertext in order to form words.

The decrypted page tells the general vicinity of the treasure-somewhere in Bedford County, Virginia-as well as the type and amount of the treasure-gold, silver and some jewels-and that it’s buried in stone-lined caves stored in iron pots. Based on today’s precious metals prices the treasure would be worth well over $20 million. It’s impossible to calculate the value of the jewels, really. However, the deciphered message says they were worth $13,000 in 1821, so presumably they’re worth a lot more today.

Easy, you might say. One page broken, two pages to go, put me down for the private jet. Well, here’s the catch. Apparently everyone who is anyone in the cryptanalyst field has tried to decipher the other two pages, using cutting-edge technology and supercomputers, and they’ve all failed. Indeed, it’s estimated that one out of ten of the best cryptanalysts in the world have tried to crack the Beale Cipher and not a single one of them has succeeded. The difficulty is that if the ciphertext is tied to a particular document-e.g., the Declaration of Independence-you need to know which document is the right one. And even in 1820 there were a lot of possibilities. The more obvious ones, like the U.S. Constitution and the Magna Carta, have already been tried.

However, at least one Web site has claimed to have solved the cipher and includes photos of the alleged vault found on the site. The folks running the Web site also claim that the treasure vault was empty when they got to it. Hmm. Maybe, maybe not.

The Beale Cipher has achieved such mythic status that another Web site offers specialized Beale Cipher software that can be used to decrypt the code and discover the location of the treasure. It makes you wonder why they don’t use the software to decrypt the code and find the treasure. Yet, it could be they’re selling a lot of that software and are perfectly content with those profits.

There is even a Beale Cypher and Treasure Association founded in the 1960s to stimulate interest in the mystery, not that enough people aren’t stimulated already. It’s said that there’s hardly a farmer or landowner in Bedford Country, Virginia, that hasn’t had part of their land dug up by eager treasure hunters, often without their consent.

Below I’ve reproduced the three pages of the cipher for you, including the plain text of the decrypted one. The first page of numbers supposedly reveals the exact location of the treasure. The third page lists the parties who are legitimately entitled to the treasure. I would imagine that virtually all interested treasure hunters would not even bother to look at page three!

To find out more information about the mysterious Mr. Beale and how and why he did what he allegedly did, read The Beale Treasure: New History of a Mystery, by Peter Viemeister, or check out the Wikipedia free encyclopedia entry. Another tome you aspiring cryptanalysts might want to check out is The Code Book, by Simon Singh.

Is it all a complete hoax as many believe? It certainly could be. If so, someone went to extraordinary lengths to carry it off. Just so you know, I’ve tried a few times to break the code but I’m far from an expert. It will take a better cryptanalyst than your humble novelist to pull it off, if it is genuine. Piece of advice for those of you thirsting