“My name is John Decker. I’m with the FBI. Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re safe with us, Mr. Braun.”
“Safe?” He started to laugh. It was a tight hollow sound, without substance. “I’m not safe. No one is safe. You. Her. Me. We’re all going to die.” He looked down at the floor for a moment, and then added, “How did you find me?”
“That isn’t important,” said Lulu. “What is important is that you tell us everything you know about your former boss, Matthew Zimmerman. How he died and who killed him.”
At the mention of Zimmerman’s name, Braun began to whimper again. Tears welled up in his eyes. “I… I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do,” Decker said. “It’s okay. Don’t worry. We’re here to protect you.”
“Then why am I tied to this chair?”
“Because you wouldn’t listen to me. First, you tried to kill us. Then, you tried running away.”
“I was just trying to protect myself. I didn’t know who you were. I still don’t. If you’re with the police or FBI or whatever, where’s your badge?”
Decker reached into his pocket to remove his ID when he remembered that he no longer had it. He had planted his wallet on the assassin in Georgetown. In fact, he had nothing on him, no evidence whatsoever to prove that he was whom he claimed to be. Decker smiled. “I guess you’re just going to have to trust us,” he said. “As I told you before, I’m Special Agent Decker, and this here is Xin Liu.”
“Lulu,” she said, cutting in. “How about some tea, Rutger? If I can get your stove going, I think we could all use a cup.” She smiled at him and he visibly softened.
“What do you want from me?”
“The truth,” Decker said. “What happened to Zimmerman?”
“He’s dead.”
“Yes, we know that.”
“He died in a car accident. On 100 between Winhall and Londonderry.”
At this, Lulu turned form the stove and approached him. She stared down at his face. Braun’s blue eyes looked impossibly huge behind his thick glasses. Sweat danced on his brow and bald head despite the near-freezing temperature.
“We both know that isn’t true, don’t we, Rutger?”
Braun issued a sigh. His head dropped to his chest. It was as if all the air had been sucked out of him. He looked spent.
“Who killed him?” asked Lulu.
“I… I can’t say.”
“You can’t, or you won’t?”
“I…” Braun began to cry once again. “I don’t know anything. Please.”
“It’s okay, Rutger,” said Decker. “We believe you.”
Lulu looked at Decker incredulously.
“You do?” Braun replied. He seemed suddenly buoyed.
“Yes, we do,” Decker said. He walked over to Braun and began to tug at his bonds. “And as a show of good faith, Rutger, so that you truly know we believe you, I’m going to untie you. All I ask is that you don’t try and run out of here, like before. Can you promise me that?”
Braun nodded.
“Good.” Decker untied his hands.
Braun rubbed his wrists where he had been bound. He smiled up at Lulu. “Want me to make you some tea?”
It was as if Braun had morphed into an entirely different person. Gone now were the tears and the fear in his eyes. He got up and began to stuff the stove with paper and kindling.
Decker stepped in to assist him. “So, Rutger, let’s talk about something else, shall we?”
“Okay,” Braun replied.
“What do you know about Riptide?”
“I don’t do that anymore.”
“I know,” Decker said. “For good reason, I’m sure.”
“For good reason,” said Braun. He looked up and smiled, and in that moment it became abundantly clear that there was something terribly wrong with Rutger Braun, as if his mind had suddenly and irrevocably snapped.
How hard did I hit him? thought Decker. Then, he said, “Yes, for good reason. But what did you do? Before, I mean. You and Matt. What exactly is Riptide?”
“It’s a black ops division of Allied Data Systems. The NSA was intrigued with the work Matt and I were doing on profiling, and they recruited us. But, once Matt found out what they were really up to, we quit the project.”
“Why?” Decker asked. “What were they really up to?”
Braun slipped a final piece of wood into the stove. He picked up a box of matches from a nearby shelf. “Global Net traffic will quadruple over the next few years. By 2015, we’ll reach 966 Exabytes per year, and—”
“What’s an Exabyte?”
“A Kilobyte of data is 103, or one thousand bytes,” said Lulu. “A Gigabyte is 109 bytes. An Exabyte is 1018.”
“Right,” said Braun, suddenly impressed. “You’re a coder!“
Lulu nodded.
“Cool.”
“That’s a big number,” said Decker. “Hard to get your head around.”
“Think of it this way,” said Lulu. “According to Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, the total of human knowledge created from the dawn of Man to the year 2003 equaled five Exabytes. Five!”
“And in a couple of years,” said Decker, “we’ll reach almost a thousand Exabytes per year?”
“Exactly,” said Braun. “In 2011, around two billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Net. By 2015, it will be closer to three billion. Almost half of the world’s current population.”
“The Bluffdale Data Center,” said Lulu. “That’s why NSA’s building such a large storage facility. Is that where you worked?”
Braun struck a match, leaned over and reached his hand into the stove, lighting the paper and kindling within. “No,” he replied. “Data is one thing. You need a place to store it. Especially if you’re not just sucking in the public Web, all the digital pocket lint we’re now monitoring, but deepnet too — password-protected stuff from both U.S. and foreign government communications, peer-to-peer file-sharing, reports, databases. More importantly, you need to be able to interpret it. How do you manage twenty Terabytes of intercepts per minute? That’s the rub, since most of what we capture is encrypted. And then from that, how do you predict who’s likely to mount a terrorist attack? Matt and I were working on that part of it, using the system to do scenario planning. Not in Utah, though. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” He pulled a kettle down from a shelf and began to fill it with the hand pump at the sink.
“Building 5300,” said Lulu.
Braun spun about. “You know it?”
“I know of it,” she answered. “I’ve never been inside, of course. Few people have, other than the three hundred odd computer scientists and engineers who work there.”
“What’s Building 5300?” asked Decker.
Braun and Lulu exchanged a knowing glance. “Not many people with your hair color there,” Braun said. “But you’re NSA, aren’t you?”
“I do some freelance for the Fort on occasion.”
“What’s Building 5300?” Decker repeated.
“You’re a cryptanalyst,” Lulu replied. “You know how hard it is to break the Advanced Encryption Standard baked into most commercial email programs and Web browsers.”
Decker laughed. “Hard is an understatement. More like impossible. 128 is a bitch. Let alone the 192 or 256 bit algorithm. According to my friend Ivanov, a brute force attack — using a computer to try one possible combination after another to unlock the encryption — would take longer than… well, the age of the universe.”
“Which is about 13.73 x 109 years. He’s right, your friend,” said Braun. “For ordinary supercomputers. But the Cotter Multiprogram Research Facility, or Building 5300, doesn’t house an ordinary supercomputer.”