Simple Simon by Ryne Douglas Pearson Read Free Book Online

uh…we’ve got a real problem.” A nervous half-chuckle trailed off his words.
    “It’s the primary S-box,” Patel said, his voice cracking. “It was weak. I knew it was weak.”
    Dean, a twenty-eight year old holder of two doctorates in theoretical mathematics and chaos theory, rotated his spindly body toward the accuser. “You damn Jethro, The primary S was mine! It was fine. It is fine!”
    “Shut up,” Pedanski said with as much authority as he could summon. It wasn’t much. Their usually free flowing, sometimes sophomoric relationship had been virtually wiped out in the span of sixty hours. All because of a single phone call.
    “The primary S-box?” Kudrow inquired somewhat hopefully. “Is this about MAYFLY?” He looked to Craig Dean, who stared back at him through John Lennon spectacles. It had to be about MAYFLY; that’s all it could be about. “You were doing a postmortem on MAYFLY, son, weren’t you? Did you find what might have compromised it?”
    “Mr. Kudrow,” Pedanski stepped in, drawing the boss’s attention back to him. “It’s not MAYFLY. It’s KIWI.”
    Kudrow’s spine straightened, his chin rising. Behind the gray tint his brown eyes flared. He heard Folger mutter Oh shit quietly behind. “What about KIWI?”
    “We… It…” Pedanski paused and swallowed. “Someone knows it.”
    “What do you mean ‘knows it’?” Kudrow asked, more forcefully than he normally would have in dealing with the animals. They were a special grouping, one that required his fatherly touch more than a tyrannical demand for an explanation. But his paternal streak had gone AWOL for the moment.
    “We got a call,” Patel said between wet, teary sniffs. The computer engineer dragged the back of his arm across his nose and looked up to Kudrow. “Pedanski did, I mean.”
    Kudrow’s eyes were snapping between the speakers. He finally locked on Pedanski and took a half step forward. He took a covert deep breath to retrieve some calm. His heart rate had nearly doubled in a minute. “From the top, Mr. Pedanski. Everything.”
    Leo’s gulp for air was plain to see before he spoke. “Okay. You know the validation protocol for KIWI?”
    “That was completed two years ago?” Kudrow responded. There was accusation in his rhetoric. “Yes.”
    “We did the standard stuff,” Pedanski explained, though ‘standard’ only in their world. For a full year, two sets of paired Cray supercomputers, individually the most powerful pieces of computing equipment on the planet, had chewed at a piece of the digital trash produced when cleartext was subjected to KIWI. On the first day of the eleventh month the Crays found one character, a ‘C’, but didn’t know where in the sequence to place it. Thirty days later the animals completed the message for the frustrated computer wizards, placing the ‘C’ in the third space and filling in the rest. Fuck you, Chip , it read, an obvious slap at the innards of the Cray. KIWI at that time was the most secure cryptographic system ever seen. But, though the computer was the premiere destroyer of crypto systems, there was one other element that had to be considered. “Including the human element test. You know, the hidden message in those puzzle sections of magazines. Three different magazines, I thin—”
    “Get to it,” Kudrow directed.
    “The puzzles were KIWI ciphertext, and in there was a message to call the Puzzle Center. The same thing we’ve done with other systems. Minor ones, major ones.” Pedanski saw the boss’s nostrils flare impatiently. “So, like you said, that was all done with a couple years ago. So…” The mathematician’s voice went breathy for a second before he recovered. “…Friday I’m doing my shift in here and line two lights up. I figure it’s some guy in T getting whacked, but when I pick it up this…kid, or something on the other end says he’s solved puzzle ninety-nine. Ninety-nine was the KIWI code number.”
    “We chose that