The Zero Hour

“I think this is from those guys. Company was founded by some Russian émigré, an encryption specialist, used to be in the KGB’s Eighth Directorate.” The Eighth Chief Directorate of the former KGB was responsible for the security of all Soviet cipher communications. “Guy was one of their most advanced encryption people. A real big swinging dick. Got fed up with the pathetic level of Soviet technology, and then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the money dried up. Couldn’t produce his most advanced designs. So he went capitalist.”

“Huh.”

Chu explained that the Russian had developed his own encryption algorithm some years back, while still working for the KGB. The KGB, of course, hadn’t let him publish it in a mathematical journal. When he went private, the Russian kept it closely held.

This was his error.

One of the great paradoxes of the crypto world is that the more secret you keep a piece of cryptographic software, the less secure it will be. Unless you make an algorithm widely available to hackers around the world, you’ll never become aware of the hidden flaws it may contain.

In this instance, Chu explained, the algorithm depended upon the intractability of a complicated inverse polynomial operation-which the NSA had solved two years ago. The creator likely didn’t know this, nor that the NSA had a lot of partial solutions precomputed and stored in fast memory, enabling Chu to take the complicated polynomials and reduce them to a set of simpler polynomials.

In short, it hadn’t been easy to crack, but between the NSA’s high-powered research and its vast array of the latest computers, it had been crackable.

“Luckily we got a decent hunk of the signal, enough to work on,” Edwin Chu said. “Have a listen.”

George Frechette looked up, blinking owlishly at Chu. “These guys Americans?”

“Voice One sounds American. Voice Two is foreign, like Swiss or German or Dutch or something, I can’t be sure.”

“So what do you want to do with this?”

“Get it transcribed and inputted and out of our hands, buddy. Let someone else worry about it. As for me”-he glanced at his watch-“it’s Big Mac time.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

At a hardware store near the Etoile, Baumann purchased an assortment of tools, and at the Brentano’s on Avenue de l’Opéra, he picked up two identical red-vinyl-jacketed Webster’s pocket dictionaries to use for sending encoded messages. On a brief shopping trip in the 8th Arrondissement, he bought several very good suits and shirts, off the rack but well made, along with an assortment of ties, several pairs of English shoes, an expensive leather attaché case, and a few other accessories.

Then he returned to the Raphaël. Although it was not even noon, the dark, English-style oak-paneled bar was already doing a good business. At a small table, he lingered over a café express, going through a stack of American business magazines and newspapers-Forbes, Fortune, Barron’s, and others. From time to time he looked up and watched the clientele come and go.

It was not long before he noticed a man in his late thirties, an American businessman, from the look of him. Baumann overheard him having a conversation with a man at an adjoining table who appeared to be a junior associate. The first businessman, whose neatly combed dark hair was salted with gray, was complaining to the other that the hotel had failed to deliver his Wall Street Journal to his room with breakfast this morning, though he had made a specific request.

The stroke of good fortune came when the businessman was called by his last name by a waiter, who brought a telephone to his table and plugged it into a wall jack. Once he’d finished his apparently urgent telephone call, the two Americans hastened into the lobby. There the junior associate took a seat while his friend got into the elevator.

Just before the elevator door closed, Baumann slipped into the cabin. The businessman pressed the button for the seventh floor; Baumann pressed the same button again, unnecessarily, and then smiled awkwardly at his own clumsiness. The businessman, evidently in a rush, did not return the smile.

Baumann followed the American down the corridor. The man stopped at room 712, and Baumann continued on, disappearing around a turn. From that vantage point, unseen, he watched the businessman enter the room and emerge a few seconds later, wearing a tan gabardine raincoat and carrying a collapsible umbrella, and stride quickly toward the elevator.

Baumann couldn’t be sure, of course, but given the time-a few minutes before one in the afternoon-the odds were good that the two Americans were going to a lunch meeting. This was, he knew, a Parisian tradition; such lunches could go on for two hours or more.

***