the same length. Working on corporate email systems had taught him that once people had a writing style, they stuck to it. Not these. Some were just a few characters or words. Others went on for several paragraphs. Brian decided it was more likely that they weren’t from or to a single user, that the “Hostile Foreign Entity” the challenge referred to was an actual intelligence agency, not just a handful of terrorists.
A guess, but he had to start somewhere.
He tried again, dividing the messages by hours of the day. Maybe they were routed through specific Internet nodes at specific times. Again, he couldn’t see any pattern. The drop points—the router addresses through which the messages had entered the Internet—had come from all over Central Asia and the Middle East.
Of course, skilled users could try to hide the real locations where they were connecting. But those methods left clues, such as transmission lags lasting a fraction of a second, that the NSA should have found. Brian saw no hints of those. He didn’t understand. The obviousness of the drops cut against his first guess, that he was looking at an intelligence agency. If an agency was using this system to connect officers with frontline operatives, he would have expected security that extended past encryption, including falsified entry points.
Then again, maybe he just wasn’t good enough to spot them. He put aside the messages and spent a couple of hours reading manuals on the agency’s technical tricks for tracing message traffic. Nothing jumped out. By the time the sun rose he was exhausted. Though he was increasingly sure the message system wasn’t particularly sophisticated. It looked like a commercial-grade instant messenger with encryption layered on top. But would a serious intelligence agency rely on an outside vendor for its messaging system?
Brian pulled papers from the agency’s library about the potential holes created when encryption was added to preexisting message services. Software engineers called fixes like these bolt-ons. They were notoriously vulnerable to outside attack.
After some searching, he found a paper—Secondary Encryption: Strengths and Vulnerabilities—that addressed the issue. He downloaded it, promising on pain of his life, or at least the next five years, not to remove it from the agency in any form. It turned out to be thirty-three pages long, each paragraph more gruesomely difficult than the next: “Assuming finite algorithmic variability, we find that random errors will rise at the square of…” After two hours and three more Red Bulls, he had read twelve pages and understood maybe half.
He simply didn’t have the training in core computational theory he needed to follow the logic here. He never would. The guys who wrote these papers were off the charts, and they’d spent their lives learning to think like computers and to make computers think like them.
Brian was just a mechanic.
He was also exhausted. He could have used a pick-me-up. Too bad he’d left his stash of Addys way back in the nineties.
He put his head on the desk and closed his eyes.
* * *
He wasn’t sure how long he was out, but he woke up to a monsoon. He jumped out of his chair to find McNeil dumping a bottle of Poland Spring on his head.
“Dude.”
“Lucky it’s not Gatorade.”
“Lucky I didn’t deck you.”
McNeil cackled. The guy was six feet tall, one hundred forty pounds, with a widow’s peak that guaranteed him a spot as an extra in the next Addams Family movie. “How’s it going?”
Brian shook his head, feeling the water drip down his back.
“I hear this one is even more impossible than usual. Half the guys have quit already. I’d offer you advice but I’m not allowed and it wouldn’t help anyway.” McNeil scooped up the paper that Brian had printed out. “This is some high-level shit. If I were you, I’d focus on beating the password protection, 1Gojihad1. ’Cause you’ve got about as much chance of figuring this out by midnight as learning Japanese.”
“You’re taking a little too much pleasure in this.”
“We also serve who remotely shut down our masters’ lost Crackberries. I’ll be glad to have you back on Monday.” McNeil ostentatiously checked his watch. “Anyway, you have another eight hours and fifty-four minutes, so make me proud, son.”
“Thanks. Don’t you need to get back to your coffin and wait for dark?”
“Sick burn, Bri.” McNeil saluted and left.
Brian gave him a minute before going to the bathroom to mop himself up. Staring at himself in the mirror he wondered what had happened to his life. He loved