William Forstchen - The Final Day

Maury, the World War II history buff, interjected, “But they had hundreds working at Bletchley Park on breaking Enigma. They already had parts of the machine snatched by the Poles out of a German embassy just as the war started, machines later captured from subs, and like you said, data to correlate from other sources. Even then, it took several years to even start to get it right, though eventually we were transcribing the orders their high command was issuing almost as fast as they were being decoded by their own people.”

“We don’t have hundreds of people, and we don’t have years,” John replied softly.

“We do have our computers up and running,” Ernie interjected.

“But how fast can we get results that we can use?”

“It depends on what you are looking for,” Linda replied with a smile.

“How so? I fear this is a needle-in-a-huge-haystack problem.”

“I recall stories from before the war of highly placed government officials, damn idiots, using their personal e-mail servers for classified data and transmitting in the open rather than on government-secured lines.”

“And?”

“During the war,” Maury interjected again, “I mean the Second World War, it was found that some bored sailor on a U-boat was playing chess via Enigma with a friend back at naval headquarters. ‘Queen pawn to queen pawn four’ type stuff.”

The two looked at him.

“Well, it was stupid, but when the pattern was realized, people at Bletchley Park were decoding it and then transferring that knowledge to important stuff, even while they were laughing about how the guy back at headquarters was a lousy player and placing bets as to who would win.”

“My point is,” Linda replied, taking over again with the conversation, “you look for someone using the system in a declassified or inappropriate way. In one case, a couple of hackers in Europe were able to get inside the system of a very high-level official before the Day and cracked into thousands—tens of thousands—of files because that high-level government type was using their personal server. Letters going to friends asking about a kid’s birthday mixed in with very deep stuff about military operations.”

“How does that help us?” John asked, feeling that he was swimming in seas beyond his understanding.

“We’ve got an idiot like that,” Linda said with a grin.

“I don’t think it is that important, Linda,” Ernie announced.

“Well, I think it is, and John should hear it.”

“Go on.”

“Within all the reams of encrypted data, something has been popping up. We’re almost certain it is from Bluemont.”

“We suspect it is from Bluemont,” Ernie said.

“All right, suspected, then. What is it?”

“Personal notes. Short ones,” Linda interjected.

“So?”

“John, this is high-level stuff, and we think we are getting into the stream.”

“What kind of personal notes?” John asked, feeling numb from exhaustion and the impact of the brandy, now desperately trying to fathom where Linda was going and why it was important.

“It reads like husband to wife. I-miss-you type things.”

“And?”

“A comment that in a few weeks the sender is scheduled for two days off and will visit.”

“That’s it?”

“It could mean anything,” Ernie snapped. “Maybe it’s to a girlfriend. Hell, maybe boyfriend to boyfriend. I don’t put much on it.”

“You would say something like that, Ernie. I don’t care who it is to or how you see their relationship. It just caught me as strange, popping up unencrypted.”

“Linda, you’re losing me here. So far, I’m leaning with Ernie.”

He hesitated, going over in his mind his promise to Bob Scales versus what was already out in the community as to what Quentin had said while dying.

“When we started this endeavor, there were questions about what that dying messenger said. Something about an EMP. Are we picking up and deciphering anything that looks like messages about an EMP?”

Ernie perked up with that. “Why, John?”

“It was a reason I decided to green-light this project.”

“Did you get something out of General Scales?” Ernie pressed, staring up at John.

“I’m dealing with what we know from Quentin,” John replied, trying to sound calm but knowing he was never the best of liars or one able to cover up facts that were troubling him.

“I see,” was all Ernie said in reply while offering to top off John’s drink, which John firmly refused but then wondered if his gesture not to drink was a clue to Ernie that he wished to remain absolutely sober during this conversation.

“No, nothing clear yet. Thought we had a code word for it yesterday, but that fell flat on its face. Remember, good encrypting can mean billions of permutations changing all the time. The machines we’ve got are way behind the ability to tackle that with the speed we wished we had. The machines out in the next room are not even doing gigs of calculations a second, when we actually need terabyte capability. So no, nothing yet.”

“Then just please keep at it.”

“You dodged my question, John,” Ernie replied.

“Maybe I did,” was all he could say in reply. “But I want to shift this back to Linda. Why are you interested in these personal messages?”

“They just strike me as odd. We have no idea exactly what Bluemont is, other than it was listed before the war as a center for FEMA in the event of a national emergency. Their updated version of the Cold War bunkers is out of some movie like Dr. Strangelove from back in the ’50s and ’60s.

“Ernie and I knew about them. Gossip when we worked at IBM, people sent off for a couple of months to set up computers and when asked about what they were doing, they’d smile and act all hush-hush. You know how it is—you were military once—and how some of those with a secret just walked around all so self-important.”

John nodded. Such types always drove him crazy. Just because they had a security clearance for some particular project, they would strut around with an oh-so-superior air, like a child taunting, “I know a secret you don’t know.”

He often wondered how any secret actually could survive at all when placed into the hands of so many people with such ego issues.

“What are you leading to?”

Ernie started to speak, but Linda overran him. “I think tracing out these short notes might bear some fruit. If nothing else, there might be something classified spilled in one of them. It’s happened before, I bet.”

“Code words during World War II.” Again it was Maury. “Manhattan, Big Boy and Little Boy, Omaha and Overlord. You put them into a letter that had to go through censors and the FBI was at your door. The double edge there. The mere fact that you used those words innocently could bring a whole lot of hurt down on you, but that it did bring down a whole world of hurt meant you had stumbled onto something. There’s the story about some innocent guy who wrote crossword puzzles and by chance had the code names for three of the five invasion beaches for D-day in a puzzle. He winds up in an FBI office getting grilled. Of course, no one reported it, but suppose it had been in a radio broadcast then, or an e-mail today, and suddenly that person is grilled and others find out. That’s a tip-off.”

“And fat chance we’d have such luck today,” Ernie replied. “Anything going up to the sat and back down to wherever from Bluemont is a closed loop. If somebody screws up, who are we to even know they screwed up? Assigning a code word to an EMP, they sure aren’t going to use flashbulb or big boom . It’ll be subtle— Starfish or Rose —and we’ll never notice it.”