After leaving Matt’s, Ellen and I drove east to the financial district, parked up, and walked to the corner of Battery and Sacramento. Five minutes later – at 7:31 – Scott Brendan materialized out of the crowd, wearing a neat suit, thick spectacles, and nervous grimace.
I knew he’d be tense. Scott was a good guy. But he was also straight-laced, and this underhand stuff wasn’t his bag.
‘Saul, good to see you.’ He gave a quick nervous smile as he shook my hand. He turned to Ellen. ‘And you must be… Ellen.’
Ellen nodded.
‘We really appreciate this, Scott,’ I said. ‘I know it’s a big deal.’
He waved a dismissive hand. ‘Don’t sweat it. Although the next time I’m in your neck of the woods and need to borrow a supercomputer, I expect you to return the favor.’
I smiled at the attempt at humor. At the attempt to convey that – despite what his body-language might be saying – he was happy to do the favor.
‘I’ll mail-order one the moment I’m home so I’m not caught off guard.’
Scott smiled. ‘Right, here’s the situation. The office is closed today, but there’s still security at the door. We head in, I present my ID, and sign the two of you in under false names. We really should have no problems, so just keep a low profile, and follow my lead. Then we’ll head up to the Data Analytics Center.’
Ellen and I nodded, and Scott led the way into an impressive forty-story building that might’ve been a bank or law-firm. Minutes later, we were in the elevator on the way up.
The elevator opened on an expensive-looking hallway, and Scott headed for a reinforced metal door – like the ones you might get in a three-letter agency headquarters; then he inputted a fifteen digit code, swiped a card, and the door swung open and we stepped in.
Along the left- and right-hand walls, there were a number of more conventional desktop computers. And on the far side, behind a Plexiglas wall, was a huge machine – the Cray supercomputer – in a separate room. To gain access, there was a second reinforced door.
This wasn’t like the hacking spaces I’d encountered the past few days. These were cutting-edge machines, worth sums that’d make your eyes water.
Scott wiped the considerable sweat on his face with a handkerchief after which, he moved across the room, and opened the second reinforced door.
‘It’s in a separate room, because it generates lots of heat, and this room has its own tailor-made air-conditioning system. Only four Crays in the US not in government hands.’
He was talking to take the edge off. He headed for the Cray, and turned it on. Suddenly there was a soft whirring in the air.
Scott returned. ‘Okay, let’s see this USB.’
I handed the USB over. Scott approached the last computer on the right-hand side – the one nearest to the door to the Cray – and switched it on. It booted fast, and Scott plugged in the USB.
‘Right,’ he said, after a few clicks of the mouse. ‘We can work with this. As you said: it’s encrypted and it’s pretty much unbreakable for most ordinary people. But since the Cray can run sustained multi-petaflops a second – that is, some thousand trillion calculations per second – it can brute-force it in maybe two hours.’
‘In other words,’ said Ellen, ‘an encryption requires a key – a sequence of numbers – to unlock it. But since this encryption is weaker, the number of conceivable keys that might unlock it is smaller, meaning the Cray can try every single permutation in that time.’
Scott looked at her a moment, then nodded. He wasn’t the first to be impressed by her knowledge – Matt had given her a similar look. At any rate, she certainly blew me out of the water on the tech front.
‘Right, let’s do this,’ said Scott. He stood, ejected the USB, entered the adjoining room, and plugged the USB into the Cray.
As he did so, Ellen shot me a quick look. And this time, it spelt uncertainty: she was unsure about Scott. But though his nervous demeanor hardly inspired confidence, I knew we could trust him. I raised a hand as if to say, ‘ride it out.’
A moment later, Scott re-entered. Again, he looked at Ellen hard; then he said:
‘So, you’re Lawrence Kelden’s sister?’
Ellen nodded.
Scott hummed. ‘I’ve read lots about him, and have to say, I’ve got an awful lot of respect for his work. The NSA’s full of smart guys, but Lawrence was a genius among geniuses. The speed with which he acted during Buckshot Yankee was – inspiring.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’
Ellen smiled. I was pleased. Wanted them to get along.
Scott opened his mouth to speak, looked like he’d decided against it, then said: ‘If you don’t mind talking about your brother, I’ve got a question. I once spoke to a guy who worked alongside him during Buckshot Yankee who had a theory that Lawrence actually set up a second computer with the unique software and hardware capable of communicating with the virus on the US air-gapped computers. The guy wasn’t certain about it, though he was also one of those libertarian-leaning sorts, and so seemed delighted by the prospect.
‘But I suppose my question is – is it true?’
Ellen chuckled a sincere chuckle.
‘Well, seeing that nobody can chuck his ass in jail now, no harm in telling. Yeah, it’s true. In fact, he told me that he always took it with him wherever he moved, because he felt it was too risky to leave it in anyone else’s hands. But he never used it himself: it was more of a symbolic middle-finger to the establishment.’
Scott whistled. ‘Remarkable.’ He thought a moment. ‘But if this technology – this de-anonymization of TOR and bypassing of Public Key – is real, it’d surpass anything he’d done before. But while it’d be a remarkable achievement, it’d also have some very serious implications for liberties if, say, the NSA got hold of it. Yes, there’d be some good – the jig would be up for terrorist and criminals – but at the same time, it’d give the NSA unprecedented powers, and their track record is hardly great.
‘And if the PLA were to get hold of it – don’t get me started. Many dissidents use TOR. Heads would roll.’
‘Well, right now, only a small team have it,’ I replied. ‘And heads are already rolling. So clearly this is an explosive tool.’
We were silent a spell. Presently Ellen said:
‘Scott, are any of these computers connected to the internet?’
‘Only that one.’ Scott pointed to the last computer on the left-hand side, directly opposite to the one he’d used. ‘The rest are disconnected for security purposes.’
‘Would I be able to use it – to check for news?’
‘Sure.’
Ellen went and booted the computer. She opened a browser, and looked over at us.
‘I’m gonna visit that pro-Tibet blog – see if there’s any news. That okay?’
‘I’m sure that’s fine,’ I replied, and Scott nodded. I walked over as Ellen was typing in the URL: I was interested to see, too.
The page loaded with the same words across the top – The Free Tibet Guy – this time overlaid on an image of thick Californian Oak trees. And there was indeed a new article, entitled: ‘Friends of Dalai Lama murdered at Caesar’s Palace.’
Ellen began reading aloud. ‘Three friends of the Free Tibet cause, who aided the Dalai Lama by purging his virus-riddled computers in 2008, were found dead yesterday afternoon in Caesar’s Palace Hotel, Las Vegas… They appear to be the latest victims in a string of killings conducted with a sniper rifle on the West Coast, for which the police believe a lone serial-killer is responsible… The trio had been involved in a number of political causes, and as such, there is little to suggest that their deaths had anything to do with their pro-Tibet work in particular. On the contrary, the police believe they attracted the attention of a serial killer purely because they were in the public eye…’
Ellen trailed off with a sigh.
‘There’s playing it close to the bone,’ I said. ‘But at the end of the day, nobody’s gonna be able to say this has anything to do with Tibet or China. If I had to guess, the people they’re forcing to carry this out are being told it’ll never come back to them. But at some point, the nationalists will dump the rifles that’ve been using for all these killings, and the DNA on them will point to all the folk they’ve been blackmailing.’
Ellen nodded. ‘And then it’ll be an open-and-shut case.’