Simple Genius

“Our work here has potentially enormous commercial application. We are in a sort of race against time. Others in the world would love to beat us. Hence, we have guards. Everywhere.” He waved his hand distractedly. “Everywhere.”

“Has the CIA been here yet?”

“Well, spies hardly ever walk up and say, ‘Hello, we’re the CIA, tell me all you know or we’ll kill you.’” Champ pulled from his jacket pocket what looked like a thin glass tube.

“Did you just come from your lab?” Sean asked.

Champ looked suspicious. “Why?”

“That little thing you’re holding. It looks like a big eyedropper although I’m sure you have some technical name for it.”

“This little thing could well be the greatest invention ever, leaving Bell’s telephone or Edison’s light bulb a distant second.”

Sean looked startled. “What the hell is it?”

“It might well be the fastest nonclassical computer in the history of the universe if we can only get the damn thing to work up to its enormous potential. This isn’t a working model, of course, only a conceptual prototype. Now getting back to what’s happened here. There have been lots of people through Babbage Town recently. That included the local police in the person of a doddering old duffer in a Stetson hat named Merkle Hayes who says, ‘Good Lord’ a lot, and several stalwart members of the aforementioned FBI.” He put the tube down and looked up at Sean. “You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think there’s some massive conspiracy going on. Not involving the CIA. They’d be too obvious a choice, wouldn’t they? No, I believe it has to do with the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned the country about before he left office.”

Sean tried to hide his skepticism. “And how would that tie into Monk Turing’s body being found at Camp Peary?”

“Because right next to Camp Peary is the Naval Weapons Station. And Camp Peary used to belong to the Navy.”

“Does what you’re working on have military applications?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say.”

“But you’re not working for the government?”

“Does this look like a government facility to you,” he said sharply.

“Maybe.” Sean glanced over at the martial arts uniform on the door. “Karate? Kung fu?”

“Tae Kwon Do. My father made me start taking it when I entered high school.”

“So he was into martial arts?”

“No, he made me take it so I could defend myself at school. It may shock you to learn that I was something of a nerd, Mr. King. And if it’s one thing teenage boys hate, particularly teenage boys whose neck size is larger than their IQ, it’s a nerd.” Champ glanced at his watch and then picked up some papers on his desk.

Noting this Sean said quickly, “I’ll need to go over the details of the case. If you don’t want to regurgitate them again, I can always speak with Len Rivest.”

At that moment a short, stocky, gray-haired woman came in carrying a coffee tray. She handed out the cups, sugar and spoons.

Champ said, “Doris, would you ask Len Rivest to join us?”

After she left Sean turned back to Champ. “So while we’re waiting, without revealing anything confidential, what exactly is Babbage Town? The driver didn’t really know how to explain it.”

Champ didn’t look inclined to answer.

“Just background, Champ, that’s all.”

“Have you ever heard of Charles Babbage?”

“No.”

“He was instrumental in developing the blueprint for the modern computer; no small feat when you consider the man was born in 1791. He also invented the speedometer. As a lover of statistics he drew up a set of mortality tables, a standard tool in the insurance industry today. And whenever you send a letter you use the single postal rate that Babbage conceived. But in my mind the most amazing thing that Charles Babbage did was break the Vigenère poly-alphabetic cipher, which had withstood all decryption attempts for nearly three centuries.”

“Vigenère polyalphabetic cipher?”

Champ nodded. “Blaise de Vigenère was a French diplomat who fashioned the cipher in the sixteenth century. It was known as a polyalphabetic because it used multiple alphabets instead of simply one. However, it lay unused for nearly two hundred years because people thought it was too complex, to hell with it being impregnable to frequency analysis. Do you know about frequency analysis?”

“Sounds familiar,” Sean said slowly.

“It was the holy grail of the early code-breaking community. Muslims invented it in the ninth century. Now frequency analysis means what it says. You analyze how often certain letters appear in writing. In English the letter e is the most common by far, followed by the letter t and then a. That’s immensely helpful in decoding ciphers, or at least it was. Today decryption is based on the length of secret number keys and the power and speed of computers to factor those keys. All the linguistic romance has been ripped right out of it.