Thomas Hoover - Project Daedalus

"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."

Thursday 6:28 A.M.

The morning air was sharp and she wished she'd grabbed one of Adriana's black knit shawls before going out. Could she pass for one of those stooped Greek peasant women? she wondered. Not likely. She shivered and pulled her thin coat around her.

The rain was over now, leaving the air moist and fragrant, but the early morning gloom had an ominous undertone. They'd found the key to open the first box, but the message inside still had to be translated. What was it? What could possibly be in the protocol that would make somebody want to kill her?

She stared down the vacant street leading away from the square, a mosaic of predawn shadows, and tried to think.

Alex Novosty was the classic middleman, that much was a given. But then she'd known that for years. Yes, she'd known about Alex Novosty all her life-his work for the KGB, his laundering of Techmashimport funds. She knew about it because they were second cousins. Fortunately their family tie was distant enough not to have made its way into NSA's security file, but around the Russian expatriate dinner tables of Brighton Beach and Oyster Bay, Alex was very well known indeed. He was the Romanov descendant who'd sold out to the Soviets, an unforgivable lapse of breeding.