“The EFF will have field day,” Susan said, pale.

“The EFF doesn’t have the first clue about what we do here,” Strathmore railed in disgust. “If they knew how many terrorist attacks we’ve stopped because we can decrypt codes, they’d change their tune.”

Susan agreed, but she also knew the realities; the EFF would never know how important TRANSLTR was. TRANSLTR had helped foil dozens of attacks, but the information was highly classified and would never be released. The rationale behind the secrecy was simple: The government could not afford the mass hysteria caused by revealing the truth; no one knew how the public would react to the news that there had been two nuclear close calls by fundamentalist groups on U.S. soil in the last year.

Nuclear attack, however, was not the only threat. Only last month TRANSLTR had thwarted one of the most ingeniously conceived terrorist attacks the NSA had ever witnessed. An anti‑government organization had devised a plan, code‑named Sherwood Forest. It targeted the New York Stock Exchange with the intention of “redistributing the wealth.” Over the course of six days, members of the group placed twenty‑seven nonexplosive flux pods in the buildings surrounding the Exchange. These devices, when detonated, create a powerful blast of magnetism. The simultaneous discharge of these carefully placed pods would create a magnetic field so powerful that all magnetic media in the Stock Exchange would be erased‑computer hard drives, massive ROM storage banks, tape backups, and even floppy disks. All records of who owned what would disintegrate permanently.

Because pinpoint timing was necessary for simultaneous detonation of the devices, the flux pods were interconnected over Internet telephone lines. During the two‑day countdown, the pods’ internal clocks exchanged endless streams of encrypted synchronization data. The NSA intercepted the data‑pulses as a network anomaly but ignored them as a seemingly harmless exchange of gibberish. But after TRANSLTR decrypted the data streams, analysts immediately recognized the sequence as a network‑synchronized countdown. The pods were located and removed a full three hours before they were scheduled to go off.

Susan knew that without TRANSLTR the NSA was helpless against advanced electronic terrorism. She eyed the Run‑Monitor. It still read over fifteen hours. Even if Tankado’s file broke right now, the NSA was sunk. Crypto would be relegated to breaking less than two codes a day. Even at the present rate of 150 a day, there was still a backlog of files awaiting decryption.

* * *

“Tankado called me last month,” Strathmore said, interrupting Susan’s thoughts.

Susan looked up. “Tankado called you?”

He nodded. “To warn me.”

“Warn you? He hates you.”

“He called to tell me he was perfecting an algorithm that wrote unbreakable codes. I didn’t believe him.”

“But why would he tell you about it?” Susan demanded. “Did he want you to buy it?”

“No. It was blackmail.”

Things suddenly began falling into place for Susan. “Of course,” she said, amazed. “He wanted you to clear his name.”

“No,” Strathmore frowned. “Tankado wanted TRANSLTR.”

“TRANSLTR?”

“Yes. He ordered me to go public and tell the world we have TRANSLTR. He said if we admitted we can read public E‑mail, he would destroy Digital Fortress.”

Susan looked doubtful.

Strathmore shrugged. “Either way, it’s too late now. He’s posted a complimentary copy of Digital Fortress at his Internet site. Everyone in the world can download it.”

Susan went white. “He what!”

“It’s a publicity stunt. Nothing to worry about. The copy he posted is encrypted. People can download it, but nobody can open it. It’s ingenious, really. The source code for Digital Fortress has been encrypted, locked shut.”

Susan looked amazed. “Of course! So everybody can have a copy, but nobody can open it.”

“Exactly. Tankado’s dangling a carrot.”

“Have you seen the algorithm?”

The commander looked puzzled. “No, I told you it’s encrypted.”

Susan looked equally puzzled. “But we’ve got TRANSLTR; why not just decrypt it?” But when Susan saw Strathmore’s face, she realized the rules had changed. “Oh my God.” She gasped, suddenly understanding. “Digital Fortress is encrypted with itself?”

Strathmore nodded. “Bingo.”

Susan was amazed. The formula for Digital Fortress had been encrypted using Digital Fortress. Tankado had posted a priceless mathematical recipe, but the text of the recipe had been scrambled. And it had used itself to do the scrambling.

“It’s Biggleman’s Safe,” Susan stammered in awe.

Strathmore nodded. Biggleman’s Safe was a hypothetical cryptography scenario in which a safe builder wrote blueprints for an unbreakable safe. He wanted to keep the blueprints a secret, so he built the safe and locked the blueprints inside. Tankado had done the same thing with Digital Fortress. He’d protected his blueprints by encrypting them with the formula outlined in his blueprints.

“And the file in TRANSLTR?” Susan asked.

“I downloaded it from Tankado’s Internet site like everyone else. The NSA is now the proud owner of the Digital Fortress algorithm; we just can’t open it.”

Susan marveled at Ensei Tankado’s ingenuity. Without revealing his algorithm, he had proven to the NSA that it was unbreakable.

Strathmore handed her a newspaper clipping. It was a translated blurb from the Nikkei Shimbun, the Japanese equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, stating that the Japanese programmer Ensei Tankado had completed a mathematical formula he claimed could write unbreakable codes. The formula was called Digital Fortress and was available for review on the Internet. The programmer would be auctioning it off to the highest bidder. The column went on to say that although there was enormous interest in Japan, the few U.S. software companies who had heard about Digital Fortress deemed the claim preposterous, akin to turning lead to gold. The formula, they said, was a hoax and not to be taken seriously.

Susan looked up. “An auction?”

Strathmore nodded. “Right now every software company in Japan has downloaded an encrypted copy of Digital Fortress and is trying to crack it open. Every second they can’t, the bidding price climbs.”

“That’s absurd,” Susan shot back. “All the new encrypted files are uncrackable unless you have TRANSLTR. Digital Fortress could be nothing more than a generic, public‑domain algorithm, and none of these companies could break it.”

“But it’s a brilliant marketing ploy,” Strathmore said. “Think about it‑all brands of bulletproof glass stop bullets, but if a company dares you to put a bullet through theirs, suddenly everybody’s trying.”

“And the Japanese actually believe Digital Fortress is different? Better than everything else on the market?”

“Tankado may have been shunned, but everybody knows he’s a genius. He’s practically a cult icon among hackers. If Tankado says the algorithm’s unbreakable, it’s unbreakable.”

But they’re all unbreakable as far as the public knows!”

“Yes . . .” Strathmore mused. “For the moment.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Strathmore sighed. “Twenty years ago no one imagined we’d be breaking twelve‑bit stream ciphers. But technology progressed. It always does. Software manufacturers assume at some point computers like TRANSLTR will exist. Technology is progressing exponentially, and eventually current public‑key algorithms will lose their security. Better algorithms will be needed to stay ahead of tomorrow’s computers.”

“And Digital Fortress is it?”

“Exactly. An algorithm that resists brute force will never become obsolete, no matter how powerful code‑breaking computers get. It could become a world standard overnight.”

Susan pulled in a long breath. “God help us,” she whispered. “Can we make a bid?”