4659830481867394210786980498673261559798093
0291870980798578367251426478966596983748586
7030945896970980549381738405401290487571092
3836142543495019294766477810298378578576924
8598504821273850956070971070901613386089274 765608021834860 . . .
That was it. The stream of numbers filled three pages, and then came
Article II. Thus it went, for ten articles. As he scrolled up page
after page, he realized that the numbers continued for the rest of the
document.
She was right. Outside of occasional repetitions, there seemed to be no
real pattern. He'd seen a lot of encryptions in the old days, but this
one didn't look like anything standard.
He sat staring at the screen. Mino Industries Group. That explained the
_Mino-gumi _goon. The godfather was planning his biggest play yet,
global.
But what was it? What was in the deal? This was something he had to
see.
Eva had said she tried the Data Encryption Standard, the DES system,
and got nowhere. Which meant NSA had been foiled. How had he done it?
DES was a procedure whereby data were passed through a series of eight
S-boxes, actually mathematical operations, that when combined with a
unique user key converted it into what appeared to be alphanumeric gar-
bage. The receiver also had a copy of the key, which could be used in
combination with the same set of mathematical operations to convert it
back.
He knew that back when DES was being invented by IBM, the National
Security Agency had purposely sabotaged Big Blue's original plan to
make it uncrackable. NSA had insisted that the key, a string of zeroes
and ones, be limited to 56 bits, rather than the proposed 128 bits,
which would have made the system so complex it would have been safe
forever. The reason, of course, was that NSA didn't want an unbreakable
cipher loose on the planet; after all, their primary business was
reading other people's mail. IBM didn't know it at the time, but the
smaller key was already a pushover for NSA's Cray supercomputers, which
could try a trillion random keys per second and routinely crack any 56-
bit DES encryption in the world in half a day.
Anybody familiar with the intelligence business was well aware of that.
Which was, obviously, why somebody had turned to NSA.
But Eva said she'd tried the usual random-key procedure and got
nowhere. So what was the answer?
His head was buzzing from the raki now, but he kept turning over in his
mind the possibility that she'd been looking in the wrong place. Trying
to find the DES key when in fact this encryption used some entirely
different scheme.
He rubbed at his temples and tried to run the scenario backward.
_Project Daedalus_. The more he thought about it, the more . . .
"Zeno." He looked up from the screen. "Do you still have that copy of
Realm of the Spirit?" He'd sent the old Greek an autographed first
edition the week it came out.
"Your book, Michael? Of course I have it. I treasure it. It's in the
bedroom, in back."
"Mind getting it for me? I feel like a little light reading."
"At four in the morning? Michael, I think--"
"You know how it is when your mind gets filled up with garbage at
bedtime."
"You should be getting some sleep, like Eva. Tomorrow we have to--"
"I need to relax a little first. And I need that book. There's a chart
in the appendix guaranteed to put anybody to sleep."
"Very well." He sighed, drank off the last of his _raki_, and pulled
himself erect. "Sometimes you can be as headstrong as your father."
As quiet settled over the room, Vance continued to stare at the screen.
Why did he have a hunch he was right on this one? Could he really crack
a cypher with a 486 portable when NSA's Cray supercomputers had bombed?
Maybe. Stranger things had happened. The samurai swordsmen said you
needed to know your opponent's mind. Here, in the waning hours before
dawn in the middle of Crete, he was feeling a curious oneness with who-
ever had devised this random-looking string of numbers. He'd created
number strings just like this himself, back before the CIA had come
into his life.
"Here it is, Michael. Adriana said Eva is still asleep. I don't know
what she gave her, perhaps one of her old wives potions." He chuckled
quietly. "That's one of the reasons I love her so much. When you get
ancient like I am, it's good to be married to a nurse."
Vance took the book and, in spite of himself, weighed it in his hand.
What was it? maybe two pounds? The glistening dust jacket, unusual for
a university book back in those days, was still pristine. He smiled,
realizing it was unread.
"Thanks." He finally remembered Zeno. "This should do the trick. Now
why don't you go on to bed? I'll just stretch out here on a table when
I get sleepy."
"Michael, sometimes I think you are a madman." He shrugged, then turned
to hobble back toward the bedroom. "Just don't answer the door,
whatever you do."
"Get some sleep. I'll be doing the same."
"Then good night. May God give you rest." He was gone.
Vance barely nodded, since he was already turning to the appendix of
the book and switching on the dim overhead light. The volume brought
back a world long lost for him. Now he wanted it back, if only for a
moment.
He flipped to Appendix C. There he'd reproduced, as a dutiful scholar
should, the standard numerical correlates for the syllabary of Linear
B._
_
_Mycenaen Syllabary (after Ventris, 1953)
da qa sa je o ra
01 16 31 46 61 76
ro za qo pu pte ka
02 17 32 47 62 77
pa zo ti du ta qe
03 18 33 48 63 78
_
The numbers continued on to ninety. He checked the files and, sure
enough, she had a Lotus data management system on the hard disk. He
quickly structured a format for his matrix, then began coding in the
sounds. The setup was simple, but the next part would need some
programming. The numbers in the protocol had to be converted to sounds.
It looked easy, but what if they'd been deliberately garbled somehow?
He'd be no better off than before.
Think positive.
As he finished coding in the grid, he could hear the tentative
stirrings of early morning Iraklion outside. Trucks were starting up,
birds coming alive. He began noticing the lack of sleep, but he pushed
it aside and took another sip of _raki_. Just keep going, he told
himself. You're about to find out if great minds really do think alike.
. . .
"Darling, what in the world are you doing with my computer?" The voice
was like a whisper over his shoulder.
"How about checking to see if you've got any video games?" He turned
around, startled in spite of himself. What had woken her? She was
probably wired. "Eva, why did you take off tonight? And what was that
nonsense you were yelling at me?"
"Maybe it wasn't nonsense. Alex said you were working for him. He said
you two were partners. It's not really true, is it?" She slumped into a
chair. She was wearing a light dressing gown, her hair tousled. With a
groan she rubbed at her eyes. "I don't need this."
"You can forget about Alex. He's playing way over his head. It's always
bad judgment to underestimate the other team's strengths." He reached
for her. "You've just got to decide who you trust. You might start with
Zeno. He's offered to help me get you out of Crete."
"And go where?" She moved against him. "Michael, they found me here.
They'll find me anywhere."
"Not if we turn this scene around and take the action to them. But
that's the next move. Right now, you just have to be out of Crete while
I do a little checking. How about flying to Miami, grabbing a plane
down to Nassau, then--"
"You're going to get me on the Ulysses or die trying, aren't you."
He decided to let the crack pass. It was true, however. If she ever saw
it, he was sure she'd start to understand.
"You know," she went on, "this afternoon I was merely worried. Now I'm
actually frightened. Guess I'm not as brave as I thought. I'm sorry
about tonight, running off like that."
"Not the first time I've had a woman give me the gate." He laughed,
then reached out and stroked her hair, missing the long tresses of the
old days. "Now, you can help me out with something. Does the name
Yakuza mean anything to you?"
"What are you talking about?" She studied him, puzzled.
"I probably shouldn't tell you this, maybe it'll just upset your
morning, but that wiseguy who broke up our party last night was a
Japanese hood. From the _Mino-gumi_ syndicate. Back home they're Numero
Uno. They run Tokyo and Osaka and they've got half the Liberal
Democratic Party in their pocket. Then there's the old CIA connection,
from days gone by."
"How do you know?"
"After you took off, our friend dropped in again. Uninvited as usual.
That's when Novosty finished him off with his Uzi and I got a closer
look."
"Alex killed--! My God, that makes three."
"By actual count. He's gone a little trigger happy in his old age. That
or he's very, very scared." He rubbed at the scratch on his neck,
remembering. "What if it's the Japanese mob that's behind this? They
have the funding, that's for sure. Among other things, they run
consumer loans in Japan, legalized loan sharking. They've got more
money than God."
"This is too much. I don't know anything about . . ." She rose,
trembling. "I'll go with you to Nassau, Michael. Let's take the Ulysses
and just disappear in the middle of the Atlantic."
"It's a deal." He beamed. "But first we've got to answer some
questions. You say the Yakuza are not part of anything you know about?"
"I'm only vaguely aware they exist."
"And you don't know who runs Mino Industries?"
"Never heard of it before."
"It's a bunch of nice, clean-cut mobsters. Problem is, one of the
owner's _kobun_, street men, tried to kill us tonight. Maybe we're
finally getting a little light at the end of the tunnel." He looked her
over. Eva was always beautiful in the mornings. There was something
wanton about her this time of day. "Come here a minute."
He took her and cradled her in his arms, then brushed his lips against
her brow. "You okay?"
"I think so." She took a deep breath.
"Never knew you to quit just because things got tough." He drew her
around. "You're the cryptography expert. Why don't we try to find out
what kind of phonetics Ventris's numerical correlates for Linear B
would produce from these numbers?"
"What are you talking about?" She rubbed at her eyes.
"You know, in my travels I've discovered something. A great mind often
has a touch of poetry. Sometimes, in order to think like the other guy,
you need to be a little artistic. So, I wonder . . . about that
cipher."
"You mean--?"
"Just a crazy, early morning idea." He patted the keyboard of the
laptop. "What if the mind behind it is using a system no computer in
the world would ever have heard of?"
"There's no such thing, believe me."
"Maybe yes, maybe no." He flipped open his book to the central section,
a glossy portfolio of photos. He'd shot them himself with an old Nikon.
"Take a look at this and refresh your memory."
She looked down at the photo of a large Minoan clay jar from the
palace, a giant _pithoi_, once a container for oil or unguents or water
for the bath. Along the sides were inscribed rows of wavy lines and
symbols. It was the Minoan written language, which, along with
cuneiform and hieroglyphics, was among the oldest in the world. "You
mean Linear B."
"Language of King Minos. As you undoubtedly remember, it's actually a
syllabary, and a damned good one. Each of these little pictures is a
syllable, a consonant followed by a vowel. Come on, this was your
thing, way back when. Look, this wavy flag here reads mi, and here,
this little pitchfork with a tail reads no." He glanced up. "Anyway,
surely you recall that Linear B has almost a hundred of these syllable
signs. But Ventris assigned them numbers since they're so hard to
reproduce in typeface. For example, this series here, _mi-no-ta-ro_
reads numerically as--" he checked the appendix, "13-52-59-02. Run them
together and _minotaro_ reads 13525902. And just like the early Greeks,
the Minoans didn't insert a space between words. If somebody was using
Linear B, via Ventris' system, the thing would come out looking like an
unintelligible string of numbers."
"You don't really--"
"You say you've tried everything else. NSA's Crays drew a blank. Maybe
you were looking for some fancy new encryption system when it was
actually one so old nobody would ever think of it. Almost four thousand
years old, to be exact."
"Darling, that's very romantic. You're improving in the romance
department." She gazed at him a second, then flashed a wry smile. "But
I can't say the same for the good-sense arena. No offense, but that's
like the kind of thing kids write to us suggesting. Nobody employs
anything remotely that simple these days."
"I knew you'd think I was crazy. You're not the first." He rose. "But
humor me. Just slice those number sequences into pairs and see what
they look like phonetically. Something to take your mind off all the
madness around here."
"Well, all right." She sighed, then settled unsteadily into the rickety
chair he'd just vacated. "Make you a proposition, sweetie. Get me some
coffee, nice and strong, and I'll forget I have good sense and play
with this a little."
"You're a trooper." He turned and headed for the kitchen. "I remember
that about you. Not to mention great in bed."
"We strive for excellence in all things."
Just as he reached the doorway, the kitchen light flicked on. It was
Adriana, in blue robe and furry slippers, now reaching up to retrieve
her coffee pan.
While Eva was typing away behind him, he leaned against the doorframe
in his still-wet clothes to watch a Greek grandmother shuffle about her
private domain preparing a traditional breakfast. He suspected no male
hand had ever touched those sparkling utensils. The Old World had its
ways, yesterday and forever.
While he drowsed against the doorjamb, the aroma of fresh Greek coffee
began filling the room. _Sarakin_. That was the Japanese name for their
homegrown loan sharks, the so-called salary-men financiers. He knew
that the Yakuza's four largest _sarakin_ operations gave out more
consumer loans than all of Japan's banks combined. If you added to that
the profits in illegal amphetamines, prostitution, bars, shakedowns of
businesses, protection rackets . . . the usual list, and you were
talking multi multibillions. The major problem was washing all that
dirty money. They routinely invested in respectable but losing
propositions abroad, on the sound theory that one dollar cleaned was
worth two unlaundered.
Was that what the Soviet scam was all about? Money from the Japanese
mob being laundered through loans to the USSR? What better way to wash
it? Nobody would ever bother asking where it came from.
But there was one major problem with that neat scenario. Politically
the Yakuza were ultra-rightist hardliners. So why would they expose
their money with the Soviets, laundered or not? Particularly now, with
so much political instability there--hardliners, reformers,
nationalists. Somehow it didn't compute.
"Michael, come here a second." The voice had an edge of triumph.
"What?" He glanced around groggily.
"Just come here and take a look at this." She was staring at the
screen.
He turned and walked over, still entranced by the heady, pungent
essence of fresh Greek coffee now flooding the room. "Is it anything--?"
"Just look at it and tell me what you think." She leaned back from the
screen and shifted the Zenith toward him. The ice-blue letters cast an
eerie glow through the dull morning light. The color reflected off his
eyes, matching them.
"You did it already?"
"I started with a one-to-one replacement of numbers with letters. But
it's sequence-inverted, which means I had to . . . anyway, what do
think so far? Am I a genius or what?"
He drew a chair next to the screen and started to examine it. But at
that moment Adriana set a tray of coffee down beside the computer,
steaming and fresh, together with dark figs and two bowls of yogurt.
"_Kafe evropaiko_," she commanded, then thrust a cup into his hand.
"_Malista, efcharisto_." He absently nodded his thanks, took a sip of
the steaming brew, then returned his attention to the screen.
At first he thought he was just groggy, his vision playing tricks, but
then the string of letters began to come into focus. Incredible!
"Okay, what about this part here," he asked, pointing to the fourth
line, where the letters turned to nonsensical garbage, "and then down
here again?"
"That's what I was talking about. The interlacing switches there. It
happens every hundred numbers. They started by taking the second fifty
digits and interlacing them back into the first fifty. Then they
switched the algorithm and interlaced the third fifty digits ahead,
into the fourth fifty, but backwards. Then it repeats again."
"You figured all that out just fooling around with it?"
"Darling, I do this for a living, for godsake. After a while you have
good instincts." She tapped her fingers nervously on the wooden table,
then remembered the coffee and reached for a cup. "Nice little trick.
Standard but nice. Every so often you fold the data back into
themselves somehow. That way there are no repetitions of number
sequences--for words that are used a lot--to give you away. But once
you've played with this stuff as much as I have . . . anyway, it's
always the first thing I check for."
"Congratulations."
"Tell me the truth." She looked at him, sipping her coffee. "Can you
really still read this? It's been years."
"Memory like an elephant. Though you may have to help me along now and
then." He pointed. "Look. I think that word's modern Greek. They've
mixed it in where there's not an old word for something." He pushed
around the computer. "Want to run the whole data file through your
system? Clean it up?"
"My pleasure." She was clearing the screen. "I can't believe it just
fell apart like this. The reason our Crays didn't crack it was it's too
simple by half."
He reached for his coffee, feeling a surge of satisfaction. His hunch
had been dead on. Whoever came up with this idea for an encryption must
have been a fan of ancient Greek history, and a knowledgeable one. What
better cipher for Project Daedalus communiques than the language
Daedalus himself used? They'd taken that four-thousand-year-old tongue,
an archaic forerunner of ancient Greek, and then scrambled it using a
mathematical algorithm. Mino Industries was communicating with the
Soviets using an encoded version of Minoan Linear B.
It was absolutely poetic. It also appeared, upon first examination, to
be very naive. Yet upon reflection it turned out to be brilliant. You
convert a totally unheard-of language to numbers, throw in a few
encryption tricks, and the result is something that would drive all the
hotdog DES-oriented supercomputers crazy. All those chips would be
trying trillions of keys when there actually was no key. Yes, you had
to admit it was inspired.
Except the Daedalus crowd was about to experience a problem, a small
headache. Make that a major headache. Because their secret protocol was
about to become headlines. He figured that ought to go a long way
toward stopping any more shooting.
"Okay. It's humming." She reached for her yogurt. "This time around all
the garbage will be gone." She took a bite, then burst out laughing.
"You know, this is wonderful, working with you. Darling, I've just
decided. Let's do something together, maybe live on the Ulysses for a
while. I might even get to like it. It sounds romantic."
"I'm still looking for the romance in life."
"Well, love, you've found it. It's me." She leaned over and kissed him
on the lips. "End of quest."
"Thought I'd never hear you say that. But first you have to help me
translate this. I'm over a decade out of date. My modern Greek's a
little rusty too, and a lot of the technical terms in this look to be
transliterated--"
"No, sweetie, that's not the first thing we have to do. The first thing
is to make sure you've got a separate copy of anything you're working
with. Not in the computer. I'll spare you my horror stories about
erased files, hard disks going down, all the rest." She was rising,
energized. "Cardinal computer rule number one. Always dupe anything
you're working on, no matter how sure you are nothing can go wrong.
Believe me."
"Sounds good." He looked up. "What are you doing?"
"I need that disk I showed you tonight. We can use it for the backup.
It's in my purse, which I now realize I left in the car when I came in.
I was slightly crazy at the time." She was turning. "God, it seems like
ages."
"Look, why don't you let me--?"
"You don't know where I parked it. My secret hiding place."
"Maybe we ought to send Zeno, or Adriana--"
"Just sit tight. Only be a minute." She wrapped her coat about her and,
before he could protest, disappeared out the door, humming.
She was a marvel. Everything he'd remembered.
"Are you still awake?" Zeno was trudging into the room, still wearing
his frayed nightshirt.
"We just solved the riddle of the sphinx, old friend. Except now we
have to translate it."
"You should be sleeping, Michael. Go now, catch an hour or so. I will
start making arrangements. Get tickets for you both on the car ferry to
Athens, a pistol, maybe new passports if you want. We have work to do."
He reached and took the cup of coffee Adriana was urging on him.
"All right. As soon as she gets back."
"What?" He froze, then looked toward the back. "What do you mean? I
thought she was still asleep."
"She went out to the car, wherever it is."
"I wish she had asked me. I would have been happy--"
"You know how she is. There's no stopping her when she gets rolling."
"This is not good." He turned and called to Adriana to bring his
trousers and shoes. "We must find her."
"You're right. It was stupid. Damned stupid." He was getting up. "Let's
do it together."