Jack Be Quick Ch. 05

If you haven't read the earlier chapters you really ought to go back and read them now. If you don't, you'll be guessing how it started, when you ought to be guessing how it will end.

In case you missed my earlier warnings, there isn't any explicit sex in this story.

Hans

*****

The investigation went on, and meanwhile things got busy again at the lab. It takes a nerd to spot a nerd, and our nerds knew right off that down deep, Jim was one of them. They got going again, grinding out line after line of good code. My coordinator role meant that they came to me with their stuff so I could keep it harmonized with what the other nerds had turned out, which also meant that I looked at everybody's work sooner or later. I helped them over rough spots and gently advised them, always praising and finding more good things than bad things to comment on, and making sure that the new work they were assigned was something they could handle, and sometimes that it was something they'd learn from.

I was assembling a book on the workforce, and after a few days I set up their personal characteristics, strong points, weak points, and blind spots on a spreadsheet. Then every new assignment was characterized on a somewhat similar spreadsheet, and the computer would spit out a list of names showing who could do it well. Naturally, I shared all this with Jim, who was delighted to have his workforce charted out for him. He picked a few rising stars to give a little private instruction to, and I could tell that even though our project was just emerging from its infancy, he was starting to identify people who would be able to carry it all the way. No doubt about it, this thing was coming together.

Over in a corner we had our cryptographic team, two men and a woman who knew more about encrypting and decrypting than all the rest of us put together. Earlier, they had little to encrypt, so they helped out with some of the more straightforward programming. But as the core modules took shape the cryptography workload built up rapidly, and they had plenty of their own work to keep them busy. I have very little experience with their sort of work, but I had been told by George that they were three of the very best cryptographers in the country. We'd need an extra good job of encrypting, because the spies who would try to attack our system would include the best decrypters from every country in Europe, where nobody had trusted anybody since the fall of the Roman Empire.

Our three crypto specialists represented a security risk for us. All three of them were the kind of dedicated nerds who might go along thinking their deep thoughts and walk smack into a utility pole in broad daylight. One guy went to the men's room one morning and didn't come back. I found him hours later, sitting on a toilet, humming contentedly to himself while he jotted notes on a hundred feet of toilet paper. I was sort of glad that I knew very little about their specialty, and left it to Jim to figure out how to handle them. But their preoccupation bothered me, because their strange, semiconscious behavior was simply an extreme version of the way many of our workers acted. If somebody wanted to kidnap one of them, it would be easier than hauling off a kindergarten kid. I brought the problem up at one of our weekly staff meetings and asked how other projects had handled similar one dimensional geniuses. A week later, a psychologist from Quantico came to our meeting and discussed the subject at length with us, starting with the World War Two research into explosives that eventually resulted in RDX, the predecessor to C4. I judged him to be long on history and short on useful suggestions. I excused myself for an hour, and when I returned I found I hadn't missed a thing.

"Please excuse my interruption, Doctor Winstead. May I ask a question?"

That turned out to be a novel experience for the good doctor, but the break in his monologue seemed welcome to my associates, so I pushed on. "Has anyone ever tried buying an apartment house and moving all of their extreme nerds into it, so they could be looked after and safeguarded without having five hundred security guards for a dozen people?"

"I can see your logic there, but I don't believe that approach has ever been tried. A similar thing was tried with unmarried graduate students at a midwestern university, and I guess it worked out all right. It seemed at first like a coercive measure, but then the university cut the room rent in half and the dissent dissipated.

"If you put all of your nerds in one house, it's like putting all of your eggs in one basket. One assault and they could all be kidnapped. You might achieve roughly the same results if you commingle your programmers with regular graduate students. Who can tell one nerd from another? A mixed dozen of your programmers and cryptographers would be practically undetectable amid a hundred physicists and mathematicians, for example. It would be like the letter that was hidden in plain sight among other papers in The Purloined Letter, for example."

That told me all that I wanted to know, so I said, "Thank you very much, Doctor," and left the room again, leaving Jim and Glenn to figure out how to shut this guy up so they could go to lunch.

* * * * * * * * * *

One of the things that my promotion entitled me to is an office, over along the wall beside Jim's office, which of course had been George's. But the last thing I wanted was to be separated from the rest of the programmers, so I kept the workstation in the corner where George had put me on day one, with my desk, bookcase, pile of boxes, and conference table. I got a file cabinet along with the office, so I put my private papers in there. My little joke on the world was that the top drawer was marked Personal and the second drawer was Personnel. Since no Comp Sci expert can spell, that distinction would go right over their heads. I tried out my cell phone in the office and found it had good signal strength, so I had a place to make private phone calls. Then I locked the door and went back to work.

I called a general meeting for ten the next morning. "We all need to be going the same direction, and I'm hoping that we can agree on some ground rules so we won't get into any misunderstandings. I know you like to work flexible hours, and I have no wish to change that, but it's nice to have a time when everybody is here, so we can all share important ideas and everybody will hear the same words from the same people. I'd like to have a ten minute standup meeting every morning that we will all attend. How did this ten o'clock meeting time work out for everybody today? Could this be the time we get together every day, without causing a hardship for anybody?" Everybody looked at everybody else, obviously hating to be the first one to speak up. "Okay. That's what we'll have, ten minutes at ten o'clock. At the meeting I'll let you know about anything that's come up, and you'll have a chance to bring up anything that you need to get out into the open. I didn't like the conference room very much. Too crowded. Let's meet right out here, standing up, every morning, Monday through Friday at ten o'clock. Ten at ten.

"Now one thing we've got to pay attention to is security. The more we get written the more we've got to protect. So don't take any of your work home with you. If there's some little wrinkle you want to fool around with at home, tell me and we'll think it through together. I know you have laptops, and you might want to mess around with a few lines of code on them, but the critical problem is that if your laptop gets stolen or lost, a piece of your work can fall into the wrong hands. If that happens, it falls within the definition of treason. Does everybody know what treason is? Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were found guilty of treason, and they were executed. But if they found you guilty of it, even if you weren't executed, you could get a long sentence in a federal prison, and we don't want that to happen. So we have to get serious about protecting our work product and our personal freedom, and we'll be talking about that again, I'm sure.

"Any questions?" Not a hand was raised or a word spoken. "Okay, let's get back to work."

* * * * * * * * * * *

Because the nerds were gaining in proficiency as the project went along, I was enjoying the luxury of handing out more and more of the work assignments almost arbitrarily. More and more, I was freed from having to give this sort of stuff to Miles and that sort of stuff to Wendy. That made it easier to level the workload, but more importantly, it reduced our vulnerability. If all of the B7 module had been programmed by Wilbert, then all that a spy would have to do is kidnap Wilbert and milk his brain for the whole thing. But if Wilbert did only an eighth of it, they'd need to grab seven other nerds as well, which would be extremely hard to pull off. And unless they could kidnap all eight, there was no benefit for the bad guys to mess around with Wilbert.

The next time that Glenn, Jim, and I had dinner together, I briefed them on how I was handing out the assignments. The best payoff from it, at least in my mind, was that it made the nerds less attractive as kidnap targets. They were my friends, and I didn't want anything to happen to them. On the other hand, it made me a more attractive target, so we had to do something to remedy that.

"If only there were somebody we didn't like, we could put out the word that he was the only guy who knew the whole thing," mused Jim as he stirred his coffee. It was one of those magic moments when I wished I had a video camera going. Glenn almost leaped out of this chair, and I caught it at the same instant. He and I looked at each other, and I gestured for him to say it.

"All we need to do is invent some imaginary super nerd. Quick, let's think of a name."

"Bruce," I said.

"I like Clarence," said Jim.

"Maybe his last name could be Wilson," I suggested, "like the volleyball that Tom Hanks had for company on the desert island."

Now Glenn was into the name game, too. "I knew a guy in the Navy named Hubie. Hubie Wilson, how's that?"

"Can we get him an employee number and the whole works?" asked Jim.

"If it helps us keep this project at MIT, we can get him anything he wants," said Glenn.

"What if we get names painted onto our office doors. We could put Hubie's name on Jack's office. He's almost never in there, anyway."

I turned to Glenn. "Let's tell Jerry we need a concealed security camera in Hubie's office. We can take my file cabinet over to my workstation, and get another one for the office. We'll need to stuff it with misleading paperwork. Do you have any superseded plans for the architecture, and maybe some old module specifications we never used?"

And so started the misinformation campaign we referred to among ourselves as Operation Office. The desk came along quite nicely, with a letter opener and a few golf tees in the middle drawer, plus some old ball point pens, half a package of Juicy Fruit gum, and who knows what else. Jerry took care of having everything handled by somebody whose prints were not on file. The crowning touch was a picture of a woman with two teenage girls. I never did find out who they were, but to us they were the Wilson family.

The whole thing ceased to be amusing one morning when I came in early and found the fancy new entrance and exit doors taped off, and people being admitted by a campus cop through an emergency exit. Jerry was sitting at my desk, and a strip of crime scene tape was draped across the whole length of Hubie's office. "We have video of somebody rifling Hubie's office around two this morning. The only thing I can be sure of is that it wasn't Hubie. I was impressed by the care the guy took to put everything back exactly as he found it. Very professional. Our evidence specialists will be in at nine, and they'll take the place apart. There's no indication that anything else in the lab was touched, so I guess they were just after Hubie's stuff. We'd better find them real quick or they'll go the next step and grab somebody. You and Trudy better start wearing your Saint Chris medals again."

I called Trudy and she stopped over at the lab after her next class. I took her out for a walk in the fresh air and we discussed what changes we should make in our lifestyle. We both agreed with Jerry about carrying Saint Chris. Time to trot out the jackets and sweaters and vests. Trudy, ever the perfectionist, decided to go to the firing range on Wednesday afternoons, when she didn't have classes. I told her I'd join her whenever I could break away, and suggested that we also try to get there one evening a week. In the afternoons we could go through all the positions that Kirk had taught us, and in the evenings we could work on speed and accuracy in our prime position, right and left handed. She said that Monday evening might be good, with not many people going out that night as they rested up from the weekend.

She had a good point, of course. After a weekend of college-level partying, who would want to spend the next evening with something that keeps going bang?

I sensed that we were belaboring minor points, to avoid talking about what we were really thinking about. We sat down on a bench on the river bank and I put my arm around her. That did it. She started crying and clutching me and talking, all at once. "Jack, I'm scared. What if they decide that it's too hard to grab you, so they come after me? I can kick and shoot and run and scream, but if they want me bad enough I don't know if I can fight them off. I'm afraid you'd be safer without me."

"Oh no, if I didn't have you I don't think I could do anything. The project is my reason for working, but you're my reason for living. If we're vulnerable, then we've got to do something about it. Fear is good, up to a point, but let's not get paralyzed by it. What we're talking about here is the possibility of being attacked by people, and they're no smarter than we are. If we can't outnumber them, or outrun them, or outfight them, then we've gotta outsmart them. Let's talk with Jerry about this. Dealing with bad guys is his line of work, so let's see what he says."

As usual, we wound up at our favorite conference location, the Green Goose, after the lunch crowd had left. Jerry strolled in, unhurried, the very picture of a man without a care in the world. I remember wondering if the FBI gave their agents acting lessons.

Roger came over and poured three cups of fresh coffee, said a few words of welcome, and left us alone. Trudy got right to the point. "Jerry, we need help. We don't know what's going to happen next, who's doing all this stuff, how many of them there are, what they want, how far they're willing to go to get it, anything. I have a feeling we ought to be living in a bombproof bunker, have bodyguards everywhere we go, travel in bulletproof armored cars, have somebody taste our food, maybe wear suits of armor. How are we supposed to deal with all this, Jerry? I can just picture somebody kidnapping me to make Jack do something, and he gets stubborn and tries to be a hero to save me and we both wind up dead, our blood smeared from the Charles River to the Cape Cod Canal. I know I'm babbling and I'm sorry to sound like a scared little girl, but I am a scared little girl. Can't you do something?"

"What do you want me to do? How can I help you be less scared? Want me to have agents shadow you wherever you go, constantly in touch with our office, ready to send police and federal agents to your aid? Maybe you'd like me to get twenty of our best detectives and have them comb the lab for clues, so we can figure out who's trying to do terrible things to scare you. Or maybe you'd like me to assign you an identifying code and tag your phone and laptop and purse with it so that everywhere you go we can track your movements. If I do all those things, do you think you'd feel a little safer?"

"Yes, but you can't do all those things, so why bother to talk about them?"

"Yes I can, and I already have. All we need to do is insert the code chips into your laptop and your purse. There's already one in your phone. It's usually assumed that we can't do a lot of the things that the Secret Service can, but as far as I can see, you're protected right now about as well as the President. Now what do you think of that?"

"I think I ought to give you a kiss. What about Jack? Is he as safe as I am?"

"Exactly. But I don't want him to kiss me. There's no difference in your levels of protection. As we have the situation analyzed you're both at the top of the list, and we won't let up on taking care of you."

I thought about it and decided that it felt good to be as important as the President. So I took a long sip of coffee and smiled, possibly for the first time since coming to work that morning. "Jerry, as long as we've got you here alone with us, how about bringing us up to speed on the investigation into George's death. Any new developments?"

"Well, we're still looking for the truck. It's slow because we don't want to reveal to the bad guys that we even know there was a truck. One thing this has forced us to do is go outside and come in the back door, taking a hard look at everybody who might be interested in the project and building a good file on them. And that means looking at nearly every gang of spies for hire in the world.

"As we figure out what spy outfits would be best suited to what kind of work, we're building the kind of data base that you put together on your nerds, and we can look at their past jobs and match them up to our situation, just the way you hand out your work assignments. It gets kind of delicate because this is the sort of thing the CIA does so well overseas, but they're not supposed to get involved in this country. So it's back to the old boy network that's worked so well in the past. But even though it's effective, it still gets cumbersome at times. It's not like Utica, where there were specific actions we needed people to do right away. Here we're talking about picking their brains, accumulating information in wholesale lots that they're not sure they ought to share. So we've brought some of their people on board, simply by transferring them from one agency to another. The whole thing wasn't handled by wondering whether we could do this or that, but rather by assuming we'd do whatever we need and coming up with ways to make it legal. But you didn't hear that from me, of course.

"As I mentioned, we're prowling body shops to see if anybody's brought in the truck. In the next few days we ought to have it if it hasn't been crushed for scrap metal. But whether we find it or not, we're looking hard at people who could have done the driving. It was a slick job, and there aren't all that many guys who could handle it. Then we've got a team investigating George's private life, trying to see who's been building a dossier on his habits. That's not coming along so well."

"What will you do when you eventually figure out who done it?"

"Jack, don't ask me questions that you know I can't answer."

"Can't or won't?"

"Same thing."

* * * * * * * * * *

In the lab, there was an air of accomplishment. You don't often see one nerd congratulating another, with his arm around the guy's shoulders, but I saw it happen twice in one day. People would come to me looking for their next assignments, and they'd look eager. Guys who had once come to my desk, shuffling along and looking down at their toes, were now walking over with brisk steps, smiling. Gerard was a case in point. He came over and plopped down at my conference table, and smirked when he said, "That package wasn't all that hard. You said to come to you for help if I got bogged down, but I figured it out by myself. Then when I got it working I went back and reordered some of the steps to cut the processor time in half. How about something that's a real challenge this time? I'm planning to go home this weekend and I want to face my parents feeling that I'm the world's greatest programmer, let them know that I'm a success."