‘I think I found what you’re looking for,’ the jeweler announced as he climbed up from the lower level.
He laid an old brown file folder on the glass display case, next to the tray of rings Nolan had browsed. He opened the file to a yellowed page of handwritten notes.
‘The customer was Johann Wolff, a referral of your grandfather’s. In December of 1948, Mr Wolff purchased a fourteen-karat yellow gold engagement ring. The ring was an original design. The style of the ring was a heavy band, high polish. The ring was inscribed as follows…’
The jeweler flipped through the next few pages until he reached a sheet of graph paper that contained a long string of numbers.
‘Not terribly romantic, as far as inscriptions go, is it?’ the jeweler opined.
‘No, but it’s exactly what I’m looking for,’ Nolan replied. ‘Can I get a copy of this?’
‘Sure.’
‘Another thing. After I leave, put that file in your safe.’
‘Why?’
‘The people who shot up the street in front of your store on Wednesday are also looking for this. If anyone else comes in here asking about this ring, tell them you gave the file to me.’
As he walked out of the store, Nolan pulled out his phone and pressed the speed dial for Grin.
‘Yo, this is Grin.’
‘Hey, Grin, it’s Nolan. Do you have any of the image files from Wolff’s notebooks handy?’
‘I got a couple of Zip disks in my backpack.’
‘Great, bring them with you. I’m downtown right now. Meet me out at my place in half an hour. I’ll fill you in on the rest when you get there.’
48
Dexter, Michigan
Grin arrived right after Nolan and parked his yellow VW bus next to the red Viper. With any luck, he planned to have the thirty-five-year-old vehicle restored to her original glory by the end of summer.
‘I’m here,’ Grin said as he stepped out of the van in cutoff jeans, a tie-dyed tank top, and a pair of yellow- and-black-checkered high-top canvas sneakers. ‘What’s up?’
‘I found Wolff’s key,’ Nolan said. ‘Let’s head upstairs and crack Lobo.’
Nolan led the way up to his loft. Grin set his backpack on the kitchen table and began pulling out disks and printouts.
‘Let me fill you in on what I got so far,’ Grin said. ‘For starters, do you know anything about quantum computing?’
‘Just what little I’ve read in the journals.’
‘Well, you know how in a digital computer, like the one sitting on your desk over there, information is stored in a series of ones and zeros – bits?’
‘Yeah. I remember that much from my high-school intro to computer class,’ Nolan replied.
‘I’ll bet you do. In a quantum computer, the quantum bits, or qubits, exist in multiple states simultaneously. I won’t get into all the wave/particle duality and superposition stuff, but bottom line, a qubit can represent a whole lot more information than the plain old digital bits you and I are used to playing around with.’
‘I read about a couple of research projects where they assembled a rudimentary quantum computer.’
‘One team of people from IBM, MIT, Berkeley, and Oxford put together a hydrogen-chlorine processor and used it to sort an unordered list. We can do the same thing using conventional programming algorithms, but a quantum computer can sort a list of one million names about five hundred times faster. On more complex problems, the quantum advantage grows larger exponentially.’
‘Don’t tell me Wolff built a quantum computer to encrypt his notebooks.’
‘No, they didn’t have the technology required to tackle that kind of problem back then. Heck, the big-brain folks working on quantum computing today are just scratching the surface. Like conventional computers, though, quantum computing comes in two distinct parts.’
‘Hardware and software,’ Nolan offered.
‘Give that man a cigar. About six years ago a guy at AT amp;T labs named Shor wrote a quantum algorithm for factoring integers. On paper, this piece of code looks like it’ll smoke anything written for digital machines. Shor scared the hell out of all those folks who write data-encryption software because an algorithm like his could eat those codes using big-bit prime-number keys for lunch.’
‘Lucky for them nobody has a machine to run it on.’
‘Not yet they don’t, but in about twenty years quantum-programming techniques are going to turn the computer world upside down. You think that Y two K stuff was bad? Internet security will evaporate the second machines capable of running quantum programming go on-line.’ Grin paused to catch his breath. ‘Getting back to Wolff, this cipher of his reminded me of some of the research papers I’ve seen on quantum computing, so I pulled a few of them off the Net to see if my hunch was right.’
‘What’s your conclusion?’
‘Johann Wolff developed a new form of mathematics and, as a by-product, wrote his quantum encryption algorithm. And if you think elliptical curve schemes were hard to crack, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Do you want to know the really wild thing about this?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Algorithms, whether they’re quantum or conventional, are essentially a list of instructions that tell you how to do something. You and I are spoiled. We’re used to writing up our programs, plugging them into a computer, and letting the machine do all the grunt work.’
‘That’s why people made computers.’
‘That’s right, but Wolff didn’t have a computer back when he did this. There were only a handful of crude digital machines in the entire world in 1948, and quantum computing is something the long-term research types didn’t start looking at seriously until the early nineties. From today’s point of view, Wolff’s algorithm is an astonishing piece of programming. The fact that he wrote it over fifty years ago is almost unbelievable. The thing that really blows my mind is that not only did he write this little mathematical symphony, he played the thing in his head and used it to encrypt his notebooks. Wolff’s cipher is a truly incredible piece of work,’ Grin said respectfully. ‘I tried graphing portions of Lobo, and it’s working with something on the order of eleven dimensions. The mind this guy must have had – the focus! We’re talking Einstein and the Rain Man all rolled into one.’
‘I get the picture. But can we decode his notebooks?’
‘Yeah, but you and I have some serious work ahead of us. You see, we got his key and his quantum algorithm, but no quantum computer to run it on. We’re going to have to reconstruct this algorithm using conventional programming techniques.’
‘Well, let’s get at it. Cracking Wolff’s code is our ticket to getting Kelsey and Elli back unharmed.’
‘Say no more. I’m staying right here until we get plain text coming out of this thing. I’ll need caffeine and some coding music. Whaddya got?’
‘How about Diet Coke and the Ramones?’
‘It’s a start.’
Grin cracked his knuckles and began spreading out a schematic flowchart of the programs they would have to write. Nolan handed him an ice-cold can as a pounding bass and a grungy three-chord guitar riff roared out of the recessed wall speakers, flooding the loft with hard-driving sound.
49
