The Russian Code
by Michael de Mare
Copyright (C)2010 Michael de Mare
ISBN: 978-1461002659
Draft revision of Mon Jan 16 05:23:52 2012
please do not distribute
Preface
Civilian cryptography has, since RSA was published in 1977, been a political movement as much as an academic discipline. It is only recently, with the rise of the Internet, that it has been seen as an indispensible technical tool rather than a method to evade law enforcement. This novel captures debates that occured during that transition.
Unlike a scholarly work, there is no mechanism for an author to cite his sources in a work of fiction. This does not pose a problem for me because much of my research involved confidential sources who would not want their names to appear in this book. I would, however, like to mention a book that I used as a source for Soviet-era jokes: Hammer and Tickle: The Story of Communism, a Political System Almost Laughed Out of Existence by Ben Lewis. There are many compilations of Soviet-era jokes mostly comprised of the same anekdoty, as the Russians call them, but this is the one that I used. I have also seen some of the jokes in the pages of popular magazines such as The Weekly Standard.
I would like to acknowledge my teacher and fellow students at Gotham Writers Workshop where I workshopped the first few chapters under the guidance of teacher Evan Rehill. The book would have gone horribly awry without the feedback that I received in these workshops. My father provided feedback on each chapter as I wrote it, which kept the first draft on course as I penned it in the summer of 2010. Feedback is vital, for without it the writer might be tempted to assume that the readers are making the interpretations and inferences that he intended. This is not always the case.
Although she did not contribute to this work, I would like to mention that my Ph.D. adviser, Rebecca Wright, helped me to learn to write clearly and read my drafts carefully. I do not think that this novel would have been possible without the habits that I developed in graduate school.
A great source of information about the key-escrow proposal mentioned in the story is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. While I did not use them as a source as the details of key escrow are forever etched in my brain from the "crypto wars" of the 1990s, they played an important role in the national debate in 1993. I expect them to play a similar role in the debate in the twenty-teens as new proposals to ban cryptography, such as the recent one from the Obama administration, emerge. The Internet is so dependent on strong cryptography for what little security it has, banning or severely restricting cryptography now would mean the end of the Internet. I recommend Whit Diffie and Susan Landau's book Privacy on the Line as a resource on the political debate about cryptography.
Part 1: The Student
Chapter 1: The Farm
If Professor Jones knew what I was about to do after I left his office, he would have been surprised. He had no idea of my extracurricular activities when he selected me to do cryptography research with him. The double life just went with my job. I walked to the posh dorms on the other side of campus from where I stayed.
I went into Chris's dorm room and saw the Clarkson Integrator on his table. The headline read "FRATERNITY RAIDED; MARIJUANA PLANTS SEIZED." I gestured at the paper, "Aren't those the guys you smoked with after your connection was busted?"
"Yeah, and when they find out who narced on them they're gonna burn his house down, even if it's one of the brothers." He paused. "Especially if it's one of the brothers."
I kept my face composed as my chest tightened and said, "I have the money." I slipped him a twenty and a ten. I glanced out the window. I saw a New York State Trooper car parked next to a dirty six-foot snowbank half a block away in case things went bad. My gaze returned to the room. Chris had cheap digital postage scales on his desk. Next to the scales were thirty-two sandwich bags.
"I divided the shipment up," he said. "Here's your baggie. Let's smoke a bowl."
The drug deal was real, but this was only practice for the dangerous work I was slated to do in Russia.
***
At the age of 21, I was a spy. On the CIA's website, they claim that they don't do domestic law enforcement, but that is a lie. I had busted a lot of people while doing undercover narcotics work in the CIA Officer in Training (OIT) program in college. A couple of hackers and some other miscellaneous miscreants as well. My official cover was Drug Enforcement Agency and I was serious about it. I was finished with college though, having gotten my degree in math and computer science. I had also learned Russian, but that wasn't on my transcript. Neither were the lessons on the dark arts of spying. Training can only take you so far, though, so it would be a couple of years before I would be seasoned enough to live abroad.
***
"See you later, Molly," I said, waving good-bye to my Mormon cousin.
"Thanks for helping me move out of Antioch," she said. Antioch College's slogan was "Boot Camp for the Revolution." I hadn't seen so many hippies in one place since the seventies. I wondered if Antioch was where all the outside agitators on other campuses in Ohio came from. Antioch seemed to be stuck in 1968, although it was more than twenty years later. I felt sorry for them, a college of mediocre left-wing revolutionaries. If they really wanted to make a difference, they should have tried emulating MIT whose activists invented the Free Software Foundation and civilian cryptography. Those were political movements that would affect people's lives.
Molly had introduced me to some other students. One of them had invited me into his room to talk while Molly loaded her stuff into my Bronco II.
"So what's your name?" her friend had asked.
"Jim."
"What sort of music are you into?"
"I listened to DOORS tapes most of the way here." I said.
"Cool. That should further the Revolution."
"Yeah. That's what they sing about. The Revolution," I said.
"I have a plan to cause the government to collapse by destroying the financial system."
"Cool, let's hear it."
"Sure, you want some blow while we talk about it? I'll sell you a gram."
"No thanks, I have a long drive." I said.
The Ohio State Police didn't pick him up for the cocaine until we were on the interstate back to upstate New York. Thanks to my recording, he was charged with intent to sell.
##
Molly got in her mother's car loaded with her stuff and they drove off. She was going to move out to Utah where her brother was at Brigham Young on an Air Force ROTC scholarship. I was about to graduate from Clarkson University but hadn't stayed for senior week and graduation. The Agency wanted me out of town the minute I finished my last exam.
***
My CIA scholarship had paid for my education, but my parents didn't know that it was CIA, just that it involved the national security. They also didn't know about the earpiece I wore. It was like a small hearing aid that fit within my ear, except that it transmitted what I heard to the Agency and relayed the Agency's instructions back to me.
Forget what you have seen in the movies about spies. Hollywood spies would be arrested before they even got out of the airport. The key to being a good spy is to have no one suspect that you are anything but an ordinary person with no connection to the intelligence business. Most of the work of being a spy is simply fitting in with the people you are spying on. You do what they do, act like they act, and listen to what they say. You lie a lot. Learning to lie with verisimilitude is a big part of the training. Mendacity takes a lot of practice for the sort of honest kid that the Agency likes to recruit, but opportunities present themselves the minute you take the job.
***
It was May of 1991 and I returned to the family farm, a place that I loathed yet was loath to leave. I signed up for a couple of summer classes at a state university about forty-five minutes away. One was a class on drug dependency, a topic that I had become interested in, and the other was a class on astronomy, because I enjoyed looking at the Adirondack sky at night. I wondered if I would have time to look at the stars in Russia.
I couldn't go back to Clarkson University or its town Potsdam, New York anymore except for short visits, because too many drug dealers and marijuana cultivators were after me. It would be reckless to do undercover narcotics work in my home town, but I had accepted that as my mission for the summer. Maybe I wanted to be banished, I don't know. What I do know is that I wanted to be the best spy that I could be.
The dirt road that our farm was on went up a hill into state forest, coming out the other end on a barely paved road in the mountains. There was a house at the other end of the road and about half a mile before it there was the entrance to a field where a small wooden dome structure had stood when I was a teenager, before local kids had burned it down while drinking beer and taking drugs on a Saturday night. The drive from the road went to a field, with forest on the left. The site of the dome was a clearing in that forest.
On the next road over, coming from the top of the hill, was the local swimming hole. It was a pond that people went swimming in with their families on the hottest days of summer and that kids had boozy parties by on warm summer nights. It had a large, green lawn in front of it and a dock that kids dived into the pond from. On the lawn was a charred circle of stones where one could build a fire for a cookout. I was on my way up to the pond to see if anyone was hanging out when I saw a tent and a motorcycle where the dome had been. Curious, I pulled into the drive with my Bronco II to see who it was.
A wiry young man who appeared to be 18 emerged from the woods. "Hey!" I called. "Are you camping here?"
"We're staying here for the summer," he said. I was about to ask who "we" were when a girl who looked 16 emerged from the tent. The young man was five foot six inches tall with hair a darker brown than mine and eyes a brighter shade of blue than mine. The girl was five foot two inches tall with brown eyes and brown hair.
"Jim Washburn, pleased to meet you," I said.
"Scott Starkwick," he said. "I remember you from school."
"Don't you have a house to live in?" I asked.
"I haven't been getting along with my mother, and my girlfriend here, she hasn't been getting along with her family, either. So we are staying up here."
Scott was old enough to take care of himself, but I wanted to check the girl against the missing persons list. "What's her name?" I asked.
"Cindy," he said.
"Does she have a last name?"
"No." I decided that she was safe for the time being, but I would keep working to find out her identity. We couldn't just bag her and make her tell us without blowing my cover, and as long as she wasn't in imminent danger, she wasn't a high priority.
"Where'd you meet her?"
"That's a long story," Scott said. "I'll tell you some other time."
"Is there anything that I can help you with? I live at the bottom of this road."
"We could really use some water," he said. "I can't carry much on the motorcycle."
He gave me some empty one-gallon water bottles, and I put them in the back of my Bronco to fill for him. It wasn't a big deal to get them water and maybe they would open up some. It would also be a way into the drug underground that I was to infiltrate over the summer. Before I left to get them water, I quizzed him a little and he confirmed their ages.
I filled the bottles with our tap water, which came out of a spring on a nearby mountain. When I brought the full bottles back, the motorcycle was gone, so I just left them by the fire.
When I got home it was time to leave for my drug dependency class in Utica. Coming from an elite engineering school, I thought that the state college offering the class was something of a joke, but it gave me something to do for the summer. The Gulf War was over and the Soviet Union had been consigned to the dustbin of history, as President Reagan had promised, so there wasn't such a need for computer programmers to develop weapons systems. There was still a need for spies to go to Russia, and I was anticipating my trip. It wouldn't be for a couple of years, though, so in the fall I would take classes at Cornell to spy on a famous computer scientist there by the name of Dale Kent.
##
The chemical dependency class was held in a huge lecture hall in a giant academic building. The seats were more than half full, representing two hundred students. My shaggy hair and unshaven face, an artifact of my undercover work, contrasted sharply with the well-groomed appearance of other students, who mostly appeared to be older. The druggie element, I supposed, would get credit for life experience. The class was numbered as a sociology class, but it was full of cops and nurses.
The professor said each letter in the course number individually. "Welcome to SOC 350. I am Captain Anderson and I am responsible for substance abuse counseling at Griffiss Air Force Base." Griffiss was a Strategic Air Command base fifteen minutes from the college. I had been there once during a high school career event when an Air Force captain had taken me to learn about engineering. I knew that they had nuclear weapons there.
I thought that it was cool to have an Air Force officer for the professor. I had been in Air Force ROTC for a year in college. ROTC had provided cover for some OIT training missions including a trip to Ottawa. I had gotten A's in my aerospace studies courses, cut my hair short with clippers, and regretted turning in my uniform at the end of the year. I particularly regretted returning the parka, which kept me warm in the minus twenty Fahrenheit weather that we had in the winter in Potsdam, NY.
After class I went to the terminal room, where scores of computer terminals were hooked up to an unseen mainframe. I had gotten an account on the mainframe during spring break to work on a cryptography paper with my professor at Clarkson. I was still working with Professor Jones on cryptography research. He had worked as a research assistant a grant from the shadowy National Security Agency in graduate school at Yale. It was said that these grants were intended to give the NSA the authority to prevent the publication of papers by the scientists receiving them.
I sat down at one of the computer terminals and logged in. It said that I had new email. The email turned out to be from Professor Jones encouraging me to go to graduate school. I wrote to him and told him that I would be taking graduate classes at Cornell in the fall. I was certain that he would approve. I didn't mention that I had no intention of seeking a degree there. My goal was to secure a place for myself in history, and graduate school wasn't the way to do it.
After sending my email, I read some posts on Usenet to kill time as I didn't want to go home to the boring farm. I had an idea to solve a research problem that Professor Jones had posed and I sent him an email about it.
After an hour, I decided that it was time to leave. I had people to meet, secrets to steal. Also, it was a little chilly in the refrigerated terminal room in my shorts and tee shirt.
When I got home, I went down to the barn, where the hired hand Jay was milking the cows. Jay was a year younger than me. "Hi," I said.
"Hey. What's happening?"
"Not much. I just got back from my class on drugs, which made me wonder where I could get some."
"A lot of people around here are growing them," he said, laughing.
"Maybe you know someone who could sell me some?"
"It's too early. The buds won't grow until fall."
"Maybe you could get me some shredded leaves."
"I know a guy that grows them, I'll see what I can do."
I couldn't really bust him for selling me shredded leaves, as that isn't the narcotic part of the plant, but maybe I would get a lead on where it was coming from. Also, I could smoke the leaves and give people the impression that I was getting high without really using drugs. They smelled the same when burning. If I managed Jay right, I would get information and introductions from him.
"How much is that going to cost me?" I asked.
"Twenty dollars."
That seemed like a lot of money for some shredded leaves, but I bit my tongue. It was a start to getting into the local drug underground. I was sure that Jay could come up with buds if he wanted to, but I thought that it was to his credit that he didn't want to deal.
I went up to the house, taking off my shoes when I went in the door. "How was class?" my grandmother asked.
"It was fine. The professor is an Air Force officer."
"I don't understand why you didn't stick with Air Force ROTC," she said.
"I flunked the physical." She really was disappointed, as my deceased grandfather had been a flight instructor in the Army Air Corps in World War II. I would have liked to have been a pilot, but I wanted to be a spy more.
Chapter 2: Drunk Driver
Every morning I would bring water up to Scott's campsite. I would also hang out with them on the warm summer nights while Scott smoked pot and I drank beer, gazing at the stars in the Adirondack sky. His runaway girlfriend usually would stay at the periphery, as if I was a danger that only Scott could handle.
I wasn't going to bust Scott for the pot. I didn't believe in busting people just for smoking pot, only for dealing or growing it. New York was a decrim state anyway, meaning that anything less than seven-eighths of an ounce was just a one hundred dollar ticket, like speeding. I wasn't a traffic cop. Seven-eighths of an ounce is a lot of marijuana.
We were hanging out by the dirt road, Scott half stoned and me with a couple of beers put away staring off into the distance so intently that Scott got nervous. Scott was just saying, "Are you alright, man?" when a man came running down the road. When he saw us he started screaming, "Help! Help! We had a near-fatal accident." He was drunk, of course. I didn't have to get close enough to smell the alcohol on his breath to know it, either. He was slurring his words and seemed more agitated than was necessary.
"Calm down," I said. "What exactly happened?" I was sure that the Agency was already on the phone with the state troopers. It would take a while for the troopers to get this far out into the boondocks, though. I unconsciously put my finger in my ear to make sure that my earpiece was there and getting all of this.
"My Jeep tipped over! It was a near fatal accident! My son was riding with me." The man stepped into the moonlight. I could see that he was disheveled and unshaven with shaggy hair. I made him to be in his early thirties, certainly old enough to know better than to go cruising while drunk.
"Is your son alright?" If someone was injured in that accident then there was nothing to do but wait for the troopers and ambulance to arrive.
"Yes. It was a near-fatal accident." How he considered it "near fatal" when no one was injured was beyond me.
"How old is he?" I asked. I wondered if the son was drunk, too.
"Ten. I need someone to get it right side up." I figured that I could do that. It certainly would give me a reason to check out the accident.
This guy had been cruising down the dirt roads, drunk as a skunk, with a ten-year-old kid in the car. He was going to get busted, of course, but it was important that Scott not know that I was involved with the busting. "Let's drive up there and see what I can do." I had a chain in the back of the Bronco, part of the equipment that one carries when he lives on a farm. Soon it would be time to put up hay, and I would be working with hay wagons, pulling them to the barn, stacking the hay in the hot, dusty haymow. You never know when a chain might come in handy when working with farm equipment.
He and Scott got in my car and we drove up the dirt road, down some pavement, and down another dirt road. There was a Jeep Wrangler on a bend on its side. "That's my Jeep. We've got to hurry before the state troopers get here." A ten-year-old kid was by the Jeep.
"The troopers are coming?" I asked, "Who called them?"
"The lights went on at that house," he said pointing to the house at the top of the road. On this side of the house there was nothing but forest for several miles until it came out on the state highway at the bottom. I was relieved that there was someone other than me to blame for the troopers coming.
"Okay, I'll see what I can do," I said. I got out and opened the tailgate, taking out a chain that my grandfather had given me before he died. I hooked one end of the chain to my rear axle and the other end to the rollbar on his Jeep. The rollbar seemed sturdy and had an impressive function, so I thought that it would stand the strain of my Bronco pulling it right-side up.
"Hurry, hurry, before the cops get here," he said. I wished that he would shut up. It seemed to me that I was doing much more than he had any right to expect and that he should stop yelling at me.
I got in my Bronco and put the transmission in low range, which I called tractor mode. I accomplished this by pushing a button on a console above the rear view mirror. There was clicking and clanking as the hubs locked and the transmission shifted. Then the 4X4 light and the Low Range light came on steadily and I was good to go. I put in the clutch and shifted to first gear. I let out the clutch and started crawling forward. "Hurry before the cops come," he was still urging me.
After crawling forward for a few yards, the chain was taut and I gave just a little gas. The Jeep started turning over. I continued forward slowly until the Jeep fell, thump, onto its wheels. I put in the clutch and shifted to reverse. I backed up to let the tension off the chain, got out and disconnected the chain from his Jeep before he could try to drive off with his Jeep still attached to my Bronco.
"Thanks!" he said. "We're going now."
I eyed the big dent on the hood and said, "Don't you think that you should check the fluid levels first, it was just on its side." I imagined all the oil leaking out of the engine not to mention the transmission fluid, brake fluid, etc. It seemed to me that the Jeep shouldn't be started until the levels of all of these fluids were checked to avoid ruining the engine or having a sudden loss of steering or brakes while driving.
"No, the troopers will be here any minute. Get in, boy." His son climbed in the passengers side and he climbed into the drivers seat. They headed off down the hill, the weight of my disapproval following them. I had to admit, though, that I was impressed with how little damage there was to the Jeep. I decided that my next car would be a Jeep Wrangler.
"I can't believe that they are continuing down that dirt road," I said to Scott. "I hope that they don't turn it over again."
"We'll pick them up at the bottom," a female voice in my earpiece said.
Scott got into my Bronco and so did I. We drove the short distance back to Scott's campsite where his girlfriend was waiting in the tent. "Is that guy alright?" she called.
"Yeah, we pulled them onto their wheels and they took off," Scott said. "Still drunk off his ass."
"Do you know where he lives?" I asked.
"Yeah, he lives down on 80. I don't know what he was doing up in these hills."
"Probably joyriding," I said.
"Yeah, maybe. Either that or he was hanging out at the bowling alley and decided that there are less cops on the back roads," Scott said.
I popped the top on a beer and said, "Well that was some excitement. He hangs out at the bowling alley, eh?"
"I see him there every so often. Not all the time. He doesn't bowl, he just drinks in the bar."
"The bowling lanes are shut down for the summer, anyway," I observed. "All people can do there is drink in the bar, maybe play some darts or pool."
"Say," Scott said. "Do you think that we could use your shower? It's been a few days and we both could use one."
"Not tonight," I said. "My grandmother is asleep. But you can come tomorrow morning and use it."
"Thanks, I appreciate that."
I sipped on my warm beer. The six pack had been cold when I bought it at the Country Store earlier in the evening, but that had been hours ago. I sat on the front bumper and wondered what Scott and Cindy did for money, and where they showered when they didn't shower at our place. Scott's farm was nearby, but he was on the outs with his family. I shrugged my shoulders and finished my beer.
Chapter 3: The Girlfriend
I had a girlfriend, of sorts. I had met her in high school where she was two years behind me despite being the same age. The math teacher had told me a story of a girl who wanted to be kept back to be with her friends. I was sure that she was talking about Cheryl. I had tried to tutor her in math, but became frustrated when all she wanted to do was play footsie.
We didn't see each other much anymore, in spite of living in the same hamlet. She had gone to a two-year school ten miles from Clarkson, and I had visited her a number of times during my junior year when I was with Air Force ROTC. But then my mission changed to drug enforcement and I didn't want to involve her with the desperadoes that I was investigating. Still, she had tracked me down in the nearest town to our village during spring break and kissed me at the bar in a seedy bikers club.
I had walked into the bar only to see her sitting up at the bar next to a burly stranger in his late thirties or early forties. I sat down next to her and the stranger said, "Why don't you kiss your girlfriend?" So I did. We must have made out for ten minutes before she withdrew. That seemed like enough evidence to me that we still had a relationship.
I was afraid to call her, though. I was afraid of her parents and afraid of what she might have heard about me being involved with drugs. Her sister was a year behind her and a girl from her sister's class was a freshman at Clarkson while I was a senior. I knew that Cheryl had heard stories.
I was driving up a dirt road in the state woods when I saw a pickup truck pulled along the side of the road, across from the entrance to a spot in the woods where kids were known to have parties. That was what I was looking for, as there was often some drug dealing going on at these parties as well as underage drinking and illicit pot smoking.
I pulled in front of the pickup truck and parked my Bronco. I got out to see who it was. "Hey Jim, we're having a party," Cheryl's sister Kara called. The man who had sat next to Cheryl at the bar appeared from the cab of the pickup with a case of beer cans, then brought them back to bed of the pickup truck.
"Who's there?" I asked.
"Kailyn," Cheryl said. Kailyn was the name of her friend at Clarkson.
Cheryl seemed to think that I wouldn't recognize the sound of her voice, but of course I did. Young men always know what their girlfriends sound like.
I opened up the doors and back of my Bronco, getting a cold beer from my cooler. I said, "Would you like to hear some music?"
"We've got some music! Let's sing the Cheryl song," Cheryl said.
"The longest man," her sister harmonized repeating the line.
"I ever saw," her sister repeated the second line.
"I don't remember the rest," she said. I betted that she was blushing on the back of that truck.
"So I guess you guys have had some beer, then," I said.
"Yeah, we're just hanging out drinking beer," Cheryl said.
"Do you like the DOORS?" I asked. I had taped all the DOORS albums at the college radio station. I had become a disc jockey there on Saturday nights while investigating a hacker who was also a DJ with the station. The record library contained thousands of vinyl albums, alphabetized by the name of the band in stacks like a book library. Deep in the record library, where it wouldn't interfere with the DJ booths, was a stereo made up of a turntable, a tape deck, a small amp, and two speakers. I had taped many albums that I was interested in at that station.
The DOORS and the Grateful Dead were still popular in the druggie communities and I had developed a taste for their music while trying to fit in. The DOORS movie by Oliver Stone had come out the previous summer.
I put in a mix tape of songs that I had made from DOORS records during my misspent time in the record library. I pushed play and it started off with the lesser-known DOORS song The Spy. I liked that song because of its repetitious lyric, "I'm a spy." I turned up the volume and soon it was serenading the young women in the back of the pickup truck.
"Why do you listen to such weird music?" Cheryl wanted to know.
"Weird? You think that this is weird? You obviously haven't heard much DOORS. They have some really weird stuff," I said.
"Just play the hits," she said.
"It's a tape. I can't jump around between songs so easily," I protested.
"We've really got to get you some better music," she said.
It was strange, because in high school we had listened to the same pop eighties music. Maybe she leaned a little more towards the bubblegum vocals of Fleetwood Mac and Madonna, while I leaned towards the storytelling lyrics of Bruce Springsteen, but we weren't so far apart. We listened to the same radio stations, went to the same school dances, played the same tapes on the school bus where we had developed our relationship.
I hadn't told her about my job with CIA. That wasn't evidence of a withdrawal from our relationship, though. I hadn't told anyone about it. Not even my grandmother. But my secret made me different, gave me a new set of experiences and a new point of view that Cheryl didn't share. Her travel and tourism major seemed to fit with my job, but it didn't really. A spy looks at things differently.
The next song was Five to One, a song about sixties radicals throwing a revolution. I didn't approve of sixties radicals or revolutionaries, but as someone who was going to go to Russia to work with dissidents, the lyrics appealed to me. In fact, I had found out everything I could about sixties radicalism because I wanted to know how underground movements worked. They all seemed to be based on conspiracy theories. The tightly controlled press of the Soviet Union also encouraged conspiracy theories. There was a synergy there.
"What is this crap that you are playing?" Cheryl demanded to know.
"It's a song about revolution," I said.
"Revolution? Since when were you into revolution. I mean here, you told me about Russia."
Years ago, I had been sitting next to her on a school bus discussing the possibility of war with the Soviet Union. It was a real threat those days. She had said, "I don't want to kill the Russian people."
I had replied, "The Russian people have a duty to overthrow their government."
A girl across the aisle interjected, "They're all a bunch of commies, Jim."
"That's what he was saying," Cheryl had retorted.
Soon Light My Fire came on. "Yeah, this is a cool song," Cheryl allowed.
I was sitting on the tailgate of my Bronco, sipping my beer as the catchy tune filled the summer night. Then it got past the first vocal part of the song into the instrumental that divides the song in two.
"Not this weird stuff! Just play the hits." Cheryl said.
"It's the same song," I said.
She didn't reply. The song continued to play. After a long stretch of music, the second vocal part started, with references to smoking marijuana and exhorting a girl to consummate a relationship lest it become a funeral pyre. Cheryl was singing along. As the song started to fade out, Cheryl said, "Play it again."
I went to the drivers seat of the Bronco and hit the cue review button, squealing it back to the beginning of the song. The song started playing again. "Play it again and again and again until you get the idea," Cheryl said.
I said, "What is the idea?"
"I've got some pot," she said.
I got scared. Not scared for myself but scared for her. I had my earpiece in and the Agency was picking all of this up. "I better go home now," I said.
"You don't know who I am!" she yelled.
I knew who she was and I didn't want to record her doing anything with drugs. I closed up my Bronco, turned down the volume on the stereo, and made an eight-point turn on the narrow dirt road, heading home.
"Who was the girl?" the woman in my earpiece asked. "Was that your girlfriend?"
"She didn't really have pot," I said. "She just heard that I was into pot so she said that. She wanted to get me alone."
When I got home, it was a long time before I got to sleep. I lay in bed thinking about the evening and worrying about Cheryl getting involved with drugs. If she did, was it my fault? Was I a bad role model? A bad boyfriend? I didn't know.
Chapter 4: High as a Kite
Soon it was time to put up hay. We didn't have enough land to cut our own hay, we used what we had for pasture, so we were buying hay from my Uncle Fletcher who lived on Travis Road up in the hills. I drove my Bronco up there to see if there were any hay wagons that needed to be picked up.
"Hey!" I called, waving at Uncle Fletcher on the tractor.
The tractor Uncle Fletcher was on was pulling a baler and a wagon full of hay. He got off and pulled the pin that held the wagon on the back of the tractor, then backed the rig up to an empty wagon. I ran behind and, with a careless skill, mated the hitch and dropped in the pin. I hadn't unlocked the hitch, so he didn't need to back up. Uncle Fletcher yelled, "Bring that wagon to your farm."
"Okay!" I yelled, nodding that I understood. With that, he drove back into the field.
I backed my Bronco up to the wagon hitch, got out and pulled the wagon until it matched up, dropping my pin in it. I backed my Bronco up until I heard the hitch lock, then I started pulling the wagon slowly off the field and onto Travis Road. The wagon wobbled a bit but followed me alright as long as I didn't go too fast. As I approached the hill, I dropped my transmission back into first gear to provide some engine braking as the hay wagon pushed me down the hill. The farm pickup had lost its transmission pulling an empty wagon up this hill a few years before.
When I reached the bottom of Travis, I was on a state highway, Highway 168. I pulled as far to the side of the road as I could and made my way home in second gear. The wagon couldn't go at highway speeds. When a car would get stuck behind me, I would pull to the shoulder and let him by. It took a while, but fortunately it was only a few miles.
I pulled the wagon up to the hay elevator. My Uncle Gordon was at work. I wanted to wait for him to come home to help unload it, but I knew that wouldn't fly. Jay came out of the barn and asked, "Are we unloading this now?"
I nodded.
"I'll go up in the haymow, then," he said.
"Thanks," I replied. I hated working in the hot, dusty haymow. Not just because it was a hundred twenty degrees under the tin roof and itched from the hay, but also because I was allergic to all the dust and would go into prolonged sneezing fits. The work in the haymow was also duller and more repetitive. While unloading the wagon involved some thought about how to pull bales out of the jumbled pile, in the barn one dragged the bales across the barn floor and threw them into a pile. One should stack them, but that required two people in the barn: one to get the bales and one to stack them. My uncle and I would have to go up there and stack them later that afternoon or the next morning.
I plugged in the hay elevator and climbed up the side of the wagon. The hardest part was getting the wagon open. I threw 50-pound bales of hay off the top of the wagon, then climbed down and put them on the elevator. I climbed back in the wagon and repeated this until the opening on the wagon by the hay elevator was clear enough for me to start sending bales up from the door of the wagon.
I always worried when I put up hay that it was too wet. If the hay is baled too wet, then it will ferment in the haymow and, potentially, burst into flames from the heat of the fermentation. I knew that I should just trust Uncle Fletcher to have waited long enough for them to dry, but worrying is my way.
When the wagon was unloaded, my grandmother came running from the house. "I need you to mow the lawn at the church," she was yelling. She was always yelling about something.
I was hot and sweaty and covered with hay. I didn't want to mow the lawn at the church. "Can't someone else?"
"No. Jay, you take Jim and the lawn mower there in the pickup truck. The lawnmower won't fit in the back of Jim's Bronco."
"Okay," I sighed. "Let me hose off first."
I went into the milk house and washed some of the hay off my bare chest and torso. Then I drank some of the water out of the hose. The water was good for drinking; the milk inspector took a sample every time he visited. It was drawn from our cistern which was fed by our spring. Sometimes in the spring, dirt would wash into the spring house bringing bacteria into our water supply. When that happened, I would carry a bottle of Clorox up the steep embankment in the woods to the spring house and dump it in. Then the whole house would smell like bleach for a week.
I pulled my shirt back on and helped Jay load the lawn mower on the back of the pickup truck. He drove me half a mile to the church in the village that was really a wide spot on the road, across the street from the other church and we unloaded the lawn mower. The church's yard was overgrown and I could see that this was going to take a while.
I got the lawn mower started on my fifth try, and started pushing it around the church. Farm chores were a big enough pain in the ass, having to mow the church lawn really annoyed me. As I pushed the mower around, I constructed a narrative of my time on the farm in my head, always ending with, "I left and never came back."
Around and around the church I went. I hadn't gone to services every Sunday since I left my parents at the end of ninth grade. My grandmother did, though. She would leave the barn early on Sunday morning to go to church and I would go down and wash up the equipment in the milk house. I gave them a good, thorough cleaning with lots of soap and lots of sanitizer and dipped them in water tinted with acid at the end so that they wouldn't be slippery. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed the steam and the hot water and the time to be left alone and think.
It took three hours to mow the church's lawn. When I was done, the sun was getting low in the sky. I wondered how Jay would know when to come pick me up, but I didn't need to as after about ten minutes the pickup truck pulled into the church parking lot. I had been about to go to the County Store next door to call and say that I was done.
Jay and I loaded the lawn mower onto the back of the pickup truck and then we got in the cab. Instead of starting the truck, Jay pulled a marijuana pipe and a baggie out of his pocket and said, "Let's smoke a bowl."
I didn't want to get high, but I couldn't tell Jay that without blowing my cover. Jay packed some weed into the bowl and lit it with a lighter, took a deep drag off of it and passed it to me. Not being able to fake it with Jay watching, I took a toke as well and passed it back to Jay. I got high, and it felt as if my brain were doing somersaults in my head.
Jay put the pipe away and said, "Okay, let's go back."
I wasn't going to bust Jay for the pot unless he tried to sell it to me. I wasn't sure about how he would drive while stoned, but it was only half a mile.
He drove back rather slowly and when we got back I went up to the house, planning on going straight to the attic where I slept to conceal my condition. When I got my shoes off, my grandmother said, "I'm cooking a steak for you."
"Uh, thank you," I said.
"That's alright, you've earned it."
"Uh, thanks."
I sat down at the kitchen table while my grandmother cooked a steak from an old Jersey cow for me. It wasn't until years later when I discovered that beef cows taste different from dairy cows that I learned to enjoy beef. For me at the farm, steak was just one of the least reprehensible foods that I was offered.
The steak worked out well for me, as the marijuana had given me an appetite. I wolfed it down and headed upstairs, only to encounter my Aunt Bobby Sue who said, "I know what you're doing and I don't like it."
Did she know that I was a spy? A narc? I tried to work it out in my somersaulting brain. Oh, of course, she knows that I am stoned. I had heard that she had some experience with that sort of thing when she was a kid. There was nothing to say so I just nodded and stepped by her. Aunt Bobby Sue was almost exactly ten years older than me and had come of age in the tumultuous seventies. My grandmother often was at odds with Aunt Bobby Sue's husband, Uncle Gordon, who preferred to work outside of the farm and was active in the National Guard. One area of contention was his collection of guns which he kept in a closet in their bedroom. I was a pretty good shot with them, and that annoyed my grandmother as well.
When I got up to the cavernous, unfinished attic, I put a Grateful Dead record on my stereo and sat down on the floor, leaning against the wall listening to it through my big, padded headphones. I had never learned to like the little headphones that came with the Walkman, preferring the professional sort that was used by musicians. After listening to both sides of the record, I climbed in bed and went to sleep.
##
I didn't wake up until my grandmother called me at eight the next morning. She always got me up when she got in from milking the cows, as she considered sleeping a dangerous vice. I was groggy from the marijuana, and sipped the instant coffee she fixed for me with milk, no sugar.
"I need you to go get some diesel fuel before Jay gets here today," she said.
"Let me drink my---"
"Here is some money to buy it with."
I didn't like getting diesel fuel as it got my car all stinky. "Okay, I'll do that right after I bring water---"
"No, do it first. Jay needs it to clean the barn."
Chapter 5: Fourth of July
As the summer wore on, our spring started to dry up. This wasn't unusual in the summer, but it meant that we had to take two minute showers like sailors do on naval vessels. This didn't bother me, I liked being frugal with things: money, gas, water. I just had to make sure that I didn't smell when I went to my chemical dependency and astronomy classes. Not that it would have shocked people if I did smell, my hair was a shaggy mess and I didn't shave every day, but hygiene still meant something to me. One day I walked into the house and stood in front of my grandmother in my homemade tie dye tee shirt and jeans.
"Do I look like a hippie?" I asked.
"You're letting it all hang out. That's what hippies do."
"That's the look I'm aiming for." I went outside before she could ask me why.
It was the Fourth of July and they were having a party at the Country Store. Or rather in the field next to the Country Store. I drove the half mile to the store, which was next door to the church, and parked in their spacious parking lot. I saw people on the field and I waved to them. They waved back and called me to join them.
Before I could go up into the field, Cheryl's dad pulled into the parking lot. I got nervous when he looked straight at me, but then he grabbed the mike on his CB and said, "Girls, there's someone you want to see here." My heart pounded, boom boom. Cheryl was coming. I saw much too little of Cheryl for my tastes. Maybe for Cheryl's tastes too, although you wouldn't know it from the way she acted when I was around.
I had a CB too, with a big antenna attached to the wheel in the back and a working PA speaker under the hood, both of which I had wired myself. I had spent a lot of time trying to figure out what channel they used, even going so far as to buy a scanner, but their conversations were infrequent and they changed channels all the time confounding my efforts. I supposed that I flunked at signal intelligence. That was okay by me, because CIA doesn't do signal intelligence, we leave that to our friends at the National Security Agency. I had never heard of NSA until I started to do cryptography with Professor Jones at Clarkson; from him I had learned that they controlled all government cryptography and had made efforts at controlling civilian cryptography as well. To me, real intelligence was spies.
I had just gotten a hamburger and a beer when Cheryl's black Ford Escort with a Garfield plushie hanging on to a rear window pulled into the driveway with Cheryl and Kara in it. Things were going well for me today, my grandmother said that I looked like a hippie and my girlfriend was at the same party that I was attending. Not to mention free beer and food. The smell of burning charcoal and cooking meat from the grill gave me the appetite that I frequently lost when confronted with food on the farm.
Cheryl and Kara came up to the barbecue and took a seat where they could observe me and we could hear each other. After they got their hamburgers and Cheryl got a beer, Kara was too young for beer, they sat down and proceeded to ignore me.
"We went to a chip 'n dales yesterday," she said. "A lot of cute guys."
"Where was that?" a man asked her.
"Over in Utica. A lot of naked men."
I wondered if that was bullshit. As far as I knew, full nudity in strip clubs was illegal in New York State. And I couldn't imagine her parents allowing her to go on such an outing, though she was twenty-one. I also felt a twinge of jealousy.
The barbecue was hosted by Brad and Scarlet, the owners and operators of the Country Store. They had moved up there from Long Island not too long after they were married to try to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Brad came by and said, "How are you doing? Everything okay?"
"Everything is great, thanks. Nice barbecue. Maybe tonight I will have some eucalyptus," I said. Eucalyptus was Brad's code word for pot. I didn't know what he said when he had to talk about cough drops, but I was sure that he thought of something.
He nudged me. "Yeah, that's what I like. Eucalyptus. I've got to get back to the grill."
Scarlet sat down across from me with a beer. The radio was playing Pour Some Sugar on Me by Def Leppard. When the line came, "Do you take sugar?" she said it directly at me. It seemed like a come on in the song. Then she started chatting. "You know that if you want to have sex with someone, a married woman is the best. You don't have to worry if she gets pregnant, she will just blame her husband for it."
Scarlet was talking in a low voice, but Cheryl got quiet. I glanced at her and if looks could kill, I would have had a homicide case on my hands. Scarlet apparently noticed the attention she was getting from my girlfriend, because she got up explaining that she had to help with the food.
Soon everyone was fed and Brad announced, "It's getting dark. Let's start the fireworks."
"Where'd you get the fireworks from?" I asked.
"A trucker brought them to me from Virginia. These are some righteous rockets."
He went farther out in the field to where he had a pipe stuck in the ground. He put rockets in it and lit their fuses with a cigarette. Soon the sky was full of patriotic explosions. To top it off Boston's rendition of the National Anthem came on the radio.
"Those are some pretty cool fireworks," I said to Cheryl and Kara.
"Yeah. You have to go to the South to buy fireworks like that," Cheryl said.
"Maybe we should stand for the National Anthem," I suggested.
"No, everybody is sitting, we'd look stupid."
"Yeah, I guess so. I wonder if there are any hamburgers left."
"I never saw someone eat so many hamburgers in my life. You need it, though. You are too skinny," she said. "For a guy, that is."
"I eat and eat and eat, but I can't put on weight," I said. "Maybe it is because I burn so many calories throwing hay around and stuff."
"I don't believe that you eat that much. I remember back in high school you spent the money that your Grandma gave you for lunch on cigarettes and a candy bar."
"Those were good times," I smiled.
"Yeah, I guess that they were. You should have eaten in the cafeteria with us, though. The food wasn't that bad."
"If you say so."
"I have to get moving soon. I'm going to a club tonight."
"Really? Where?"
"It's in New Hartford," she said
"Maybe I can come."
"No, it's a girl's night. Come on, Kara. It's time to go."
"Good night, Jim," Kara said.
I wondered if Cheryl would remember me when I went to Russia. That was what bothered me most about going abroad. I was afraid that Cheryl would forget me and marry another boy. What I needed to do was make a move on her, then she would be mine forever. But I wasn't in a position to court a woman, I was still a student, living on my OIT scholarship. When I finished being a student, my money from the Agency would be kept in a secret account for me. Operational money would be provided and I would work jobs that provided deep enough cover to fool the Russians.
With these thoughts and feelings going through me, I said good night to Cheryl and Kara. They went down to the parking lot and left in Cheryl's little black Escort. Other people were leaving, as well. Brad came and sat down next to me. "So do you want to have some eucalyptus some time?"
"Sure, that would be great," I said.
"Maybe you could come by tomorrow. I mean, you always do to buy your stuff, but maybe you could come and we could hang out," he said.
It was a warm evening and the stars were out. I liked looking at the stars and had learned all sorts of interesting things about them in astronomy. Stuff they didn't teach me in the three semesters of calculus-based physics that I had taken at Clarkson. I didn't take the astronomy class seriously, because it wasn't calc-based, but I did find it interesting. I figured both classes for easy A's and didn't even study for them.
I got up and stretched, reaching for the stars.
Chapter 6: Cultivation
The next day I went to the Country Store. Brad was running the cash register and Scarlet was sitting at a table by the deli counter. "Hey Jim," Brad called.
"Hey, how is it going?"
"Pretty good. What do you need today?" he asked.
"I came to hang out."
"Oh yeah, let's go to the backyard. Could you watch the store, honey?"
"Sure," Scarlet said.
We went out the backdoor into a garden. Brad motioned for me to take a seat on some lawn furniture and sat down himself. "So how are things?" he asked.
"Pretty good. I'm taking some classes at the state college. They're pretty easy."
"What are you taking?"
"Chemical dependency and astronomy." I said.
"Chemical dependency?" he asked. "What's that about?"
"Drug addiction," I said. "I have been doing a lot of extracurricular study."
"Yeah, I bet. I've got a couple of plants growing back here," he said.
"Cool. Maybe we could smoke some," I said.
"It's still pretty early. I don't know if they have any buds yet. Let me check on that."
He went a little deeper in the garden to check on his crop. I tried to get a look at the marijuana plant, but I couldn't really see it from my seat. I knew that the store would probably close after he was busted, and was sad for it. Aside from having to go to the nearest town, eight miles away, for beer and stuff, I would also lose a good place to talk to people.
Brad came back with a joint. "There isn't time to dry it so I guess that we will just smoke it," he said.
"Okay," I said. "I guess that it's pretty fresh."
He lit the joint and took a deep toke. Holding his breath, he passed it to me, and I took a toke as well. I passed it back to him. Within a few seconds, it hit me and my brain tried to jump out of my skull. "This is some strong shit," I said.
"Pretty neat. I guess that I will have a high time this winter."
"I guess that it saves you a lot of money on beer," I commented.
"Yeah. I get my buzzes for free. Sometimes I go down to the bowling alley and have a few drinks, though."
I felt kind of bad that he was going to be busted. He just wanted to be left alone with his weed. That was why he left Long Island. But a hard part of me knew how this would progress. First he would just grow a little for himself. Then he would grow a little more for himself and his friends. And then he would get tight for cash and would be selling it under the counter at his store. Best to nip it in the bud, so to speak, assuming that he wasn't already selling it.
"It's pretty dry this summer," I said. "I don't think that it has rained more than three times in the past month."
"Yeah. We get our water out of the creek, but it's drying up," he said.
"The creek behind our house is dry in places," I said. "That is where we get the water for the cows. The hay isn't doing so well, either."
"Everyone says that their crops need some more rain."
"My great-grandfather used to say, `Not enough rain will scare you to death, but too much rain will put you out of business.' I guess that we should consider ourselves lucky. Besides, there have been plenty of nice days for haying," I said. "But we are running out of water to flush toilets and take showers."
"Yeah. I don't know where the afternoon thunderboomers are. Usually the weather is changing every five minutes."
I closed my eyes and could see myself out in the pasture working on fences when I was a teenager. I would look up at the sky and see an impossibly large thunderhead moving across it, so I would pick up my pail of fencing material and head to the barn, rolling under fences, trying not to get zapped by the powerful New Zealand fence charger. I opened my eyes again. "Yeah, a thunderstorm would also cool things off," I said. "Some girls that I went to high school with were skinny dipping in the pond last night."
"I bet you liked that," he said, smiling.
"Yeah, but I couldn't see much in the dark. They wanted me to go in with them, but that pond is kinda gross. I've seen condoms floating in it."
"That is kind of gross."
"You know what would be cool? Some music. Maybe a little Grateful Dead to go with the buzz," I said.
"I would go get my box, but I really don't feel like getting up right now," Brad said. "I like just sitting in the shade with the nature all around me."
"You know what I really want to do, Brad?" I asked.
"What do you really want to do?"
"I want to run away. Leave the farm and this town and this whole goddamn valley behind me."
"Where would you go?"
"I don't know. Maybe San Jose. They have a lot of programming work there. Or Russia. Maybe I should go to Russia."
"Far out. What would you do in Russia?"
"I don't know. What do people do in Russia?" I replied, stretching my fingers.
"I guess that they do the same things people do here, except in Russian," Brad said. "And without toilet paper or meat."
"I've heard about their shortages," I said. "Maybe it will get better now that the communists are gone."
"I'm not sure that they are. Anything could happen over there," he said. "And they have forty thousand nuclear bombs ready to drop on us."
"That's heavy," I said. "Listen, thanks for the weed but I think that I better be going."
"Any time," he said. "You're fun to hang out with."
I walked around the store to the parking lot. I got in my Bronco, fumbled with the key and got it started. I drove slowly back toward the farm. Instead of stopping, though, I drove right by it. I didn't want to encounter my family while I was high. I went up the dirt road, past Scott and Cindy, up the paved road a little way and then down another dirt road to the pond.
I turned the key backwards in the ignition so that I could run the stereo with the car off and put in a tape of Supertramp's greatest hits. I put my seat back and closed my eyes. The incisive lyrics echoed in my squirming brain. I could see how someone could become dependent on pot. This wasn't so unpleasant.
As Supertramp took the long way home, I heard a motorcycle pull up next to me and opened my eyes. It was Scott. He waved. I waved back. When he killed the engine, I said, "What's up?"
"Not much. What are you doing up here? Swimming?"
"Just enjoying a buzz," I said.
"Yeah, I see your eyes. Don't want to spoil your fun."
"That's alright. I was coming down anyway," I said. "You know what is nice up here? We spend so much time outside. Before I moved up here, I used to stay indoors all day."
"That's what it's like on Long Island," he said. "Kids stay inside all the time."
"You're from Long Island?" I asked.
"My father lives there. I've been there a few times," Scott said.
"My parents live in New Jersey," I said.
"Say," Scott said. "Maybe you could help me study for my GED."
"You didn't finish high school?" I asked.
"No. I---I just didn't have the patience. So now I am trying to get my GED. It will help with getting jobs and stuff."
"Sure," I said. "You wouldn't happen to have any snacks, would you? I am kind of hungry."
Scott shook his head. "Sorry, man, I don't. Why don't you go to the Country Store."
"I was just there, but I didn't think of it. It's alright. I'll live."
"Yeah, you'll be okay."
"I'm thirsty, though. Maybe I better go home and get a drink of water."
"Okay, I am just on my way somewhere myself," Scott said. "Have a good one."
"You too."
Scott started his motorcycle up and headed up the road. I wondered where he was going. Maybe he was going to buy some food or use the phone at the bowling alley. I should have asked him.
I started my Bronco and put the seat up. I backed out into the road and headed up the hill to the paved road so that I could follow the other dirt road down the hill. There was nothing but state forest between the two roads. Once there had been another road that cut across, back when the railroad went through the village and the state woods were homesteads. All that was left of it, though, were deep ruts with old foundations by them every half mile or so. Sometimes there were hints of the former owners in the form of tulips or blackberry bushes by the foundations. But mostly it was just wilderness, land that man had conquered and then abandoned.
When I got back to the farm, I got a drink out of the hose in the milk house. Then I went up to the house and through it up to the attic before anyone could see me. I put a DOORS record on my stereo and listened through my headphones. It was always a good day when you bust a marijuana farm.
Chapter 7: Frat Boys
One afternoon, after I got home from the state college, I cruised up to the pond to see if anybody was hanging out. There were about half a dozen college-aged men there with a bonfire and a keg of beer so I stopped. I didn't recognize them, but they were more entertaining than sitting on the swing in front of our house watching the grass die.
"Hi, I'm Jim. I live at the bottom of the next road," I said.
"Hi Jim. We're from Fort Plain. We just came up here to party. Have a beer." He handed me a plastic cup and I filled it half full from the keg, pumping the tap a couple of times.
It seemed strange for kids from town to be coming all the way out here, ten miles away, to have a party. How did they even know about the pond, I wondered. I took a drink of the beer. It was good. The kids were looking at me, though. They seemed to have a question.
I sat down on a piece of a log, put there for that purpose, and looked into the fire. "My name is Chad," one of the kids said. He was big with a barrel chest and seemed to be the leader of the group.
"Nice to meet you Chad," I said.
"I have forty marijuana plants on a farm by Fort Plain," he said.
This was a surprising revelation, if it was true. My instincts told me that it wasn't. People don't just start talking about their marijuana plantations to total strangers that they meet in the woods.
"You don't say?" I replied. "Maybe you have some with you that we could smoke."
He shook his head. "No, not today."
They were all looking at me, so I took a big gulp of my beer and refilled it. I looked into my beer as I talked to them.
"Maybe what we need is a little music," I suggested. "Something to lighten up the mood a little."
One of the men went to their car and got a boom box out of the trunk. They fiddled with the dial, eventually tuning in a classic rock station out of Utica. "How's that?" Chad asked.
"Cool. That's the radio station that I like to listen to," I said.
Scott came walking down the road. "Hey, what's going on here?" he asked.
"Who are you?" Chad demanded.
"I'm Scott. I'm camping out at the top of the next road," he said.
"Don't worry," I said. "Scott's cool."
"Well, come up here and have a beer," Chad said. "We were just getting to know your buddy."
Scott and I drank beer and chatted with the strangers. They still seemed hostile, but it wasn't clear to me why. I wanted to get at the truth of their involvement with drugs, but didn't think that asking any direct questions would be a good idea. Scott didn't seem to sense the bad vibes coming off of the group. I only filled my cups half full. I wanted to keep my head about me.
"Scott, do you want to go for a drive?" I asked.
"Yeah, sure. Where are we going?"
"Just to see what else is happening around here. These guys will still be here when we get back." Kegs of beer tend to suggest a long party.
Scott got in the passenger's seat of my Bronco and I got in the driver's seat. I drove out to where Kara and Cheryl had the party at the beginning of the summer. There was no one around.
"Nothing going on here," I said.
"No, I guess not."
"Anywhere else you want to check out, or should we go back to the party?" I asked.
"Let's go back," Scott said. "It's a good party."
"I'm not sure about those guys," I said. "Maybe we should just go home."
"They know that I'm cool," Scott said. "And they've got free beer."
"I think that they are up to no good, maybe setting us up for something."
"Nah, you're just paranoid."
I put my misgivings aside and drove back to the party, parking in front of the lawn by the pond alongside the road with my windows open. I didn't have air conditioning in my car or in our house, just at the state college. We got out and found them still drinking beer. Our trip didn't seem to have improved their mood any.
"Where did you guys go?" Chad demanded.
"We just went for a drive," I replied.
"You called the troopers on us, didn't you?"
"Don't be crazy. There aren't any troopers for ten miles around here," I said.
"Then why do you have a police radio in your car?"
"What the fuck are you talking about? That's a CB. Everyone's got one." I was heading to my car.
"Narc! Narc!" they started yelling.
"Scott! Get in the car!" I yelled, getting in the drivers seat and starting it up.
"I want to make sure these guys know that I'm cool," he said. He was talking with two of them.
"Don't bother. Just get in," I yelled.
Finally Scott came running to the passenger's seat and jumped in, as men rocked my Bronco trying to tip it over. Before I could get it in gear, Chad's fist flew through the window and caught me in the eye. I drove off.
"They're going to burn down your house," Scott said.
"Like hell they are," I said, driving faster than was safe down the dirt road to my house. "You better stay with us tonight."
When we pulled in the driveway, I ran up to my aunt and uncle's room and grabbed a Mini-14 assault rifle and a clip of .223 ammunition out of the closet. As I ran downstairs, an agitated Scott was explaining to my family what had happened, but I went right on by. I went out on the lawn and lay down in the prone position with the rifle. No one was going to approach the house without my permission.
They drove down the road with their windows open and when they saw me on the lawn with the rifle, they yelled, "Oooooooooo!" and gunned the engine. I stayed out there for another hour in case they came back, but they didn't. I guessed that they didn't want me to perforate their hides.
When I went back in the house, I cursed myself for not having gotten their license plate number up at the pond. That was a serious oversight and would make it a lot harder to solve this case.
"Are they gone?" Scott asked.
"Yeah, they're gone. I hope that we've seen the last of them."
"Let me look at your eye," my grandmother said. "You've got quite a shiner."
After she examined it, I looked in the mirror. I sure did have a black eye. Those guys were going to get assaulting a federal agent when I found out who they were. I suspected that they were from the fraternity at Clarkson that had been raided by the state troopers. They had two marijuana plants in the basement and had spent the last semester trying to find out who turned them in. It was me, of course, but I couldn't imagine how they figured that out. I had heard about their plants from Chris because he smoked with them after I had busted all of his other connections. We hadn't rolled up Chris yet and I had his address in Potsdam where he was taking summer classes to make up for some of his F's.
Scott spent the night in one of our spare bedrooms. I wondered what Cindy was doing without Scott, but Scott didn't mention her so I figured that she was okay. Scott had told me that she "kept his pipes clean," but the statutory rape laws in New York back then allowed eighteen year olds and sixteen year olds to mate, although the age of consent was seventeen.
In spite of all the excitement, or perhaps because of it, I slept well that night. The next morning we let Scott use our shower, "Make it quick, we are low on water," I told him. When he was done I drove him back to his campsite. I didn't see Cindy around, but she might have been in the tent. Sleeping on the ground must get old, I thought.
When I got back, my grandmother and aunt were gone. A state trooper pulled into our driveway and I hoped that I looked presentable in my Grateful Dead tee shirt and jeans. He was just there to get a look at my black eye, I knew, but he would probably ask some questions.
He got out and said, "I heard that there was an incident up at the swimming hole yesterday."
"Yeah," I said. "Some kids punched me in the eye."
"Do you know who they are?" he asked.
"No," I said.
"Anything else you want to tell me about it?"
"I think that there were drugs involved," I said.
With that, he got back in his car and left. He could now be called as a witness to testify about my black eye if these guys were foolish enough to plead "Not guilty." I didn't worry about it, though, no one pleads innocent after hearing the recordings the Agency makes of them through my earpiece.
Chapter 8: Interview with the Drug Dealer
Potsdam, the town the Clarkson University was in, was 200 miles away. It takes over four hours to get there going west to Utica and north through the Adirondack Mountain Range. The next day, I got up bright and early to drive there. My mission was to look up a drug dealer named Chris and see if he had any information on the men who had assaulted me two days earlier. My eye was still black and I was still angry.
I drove without stopping. Once, when cresting a hill, I was scared out of my wits to see a big B-52 bomber coming straight at me. It flew so low that I thought that we would collide. It passed over me making a din of jet noise. When I got into Potsdam, I headed straight to Chris's apartment building. I went in and knocked at his door. There was a long wait and I wondered if he was home, then he answered it.
"Hey, Jim!" he said. "Come in. I was just hanging out."
I went into his one-bedroom apartment. He invited me to take a seat in the living room, which I did. He didn't seem to be high, which meant that I had gotten there early enough in the day. "So what have you been up to?" I asked.
"Not much. Taking some summer classes. Thermo is a real bitch."
"Maybe if you had gone to the lectures rather than trying to watch them on Clarkson TV you would be able to do something else this summer," I observed.
"Well, I'm going to the lectures now. Damn, they assign a lot of homework in that class."
I snorted. They assign a lot of homework in all the classes at Clarkson. The reason that Chris didn't understand this was because he didn't do it. Homework wasn't a big component of the grade, usually just ten percent, but it was important practice for exams and an important way to get feedback on whether you were doing the problems right.
"Can I get you something?" Chris asked.
"No, I'm cool. I'm taking summer classes too, at SUNY IT."
"I thought that you graduated," he said.
"Yeah, I did. But I still have a scholarship. I am going to Cornell in the fall."
"I was like you, smart, before I started tripping," he said.
Obviously that was true, or he wouldn't have gotten into Clarkson. He loved to talk about how messed up his head was from the LSD, but he kept taking it. There was something wrong with him that caused him to engage in such self-destructive behavior. He didn't have empathy for people. When he saw an ambulance he said, "Here comes the meat truck to pick up the meat." If you tried to commiserate about something, he would just say, "It sucks to be you." He was aggressive about dealing, trying to get people hooked on drugs that he could supply. I thought that he was a sociopath. I never saw him with a woman.
"You are still smart," I said. "You just spend too much of your time stoned."
"When I blink, everything melts," he said. "It's all the acid that I took."
He had been saying that to me since we met and I still doubted it. It had caused me to get a program for the X-workstations called Xmelt, which caused all of your X-windows to melt into a puddle at the bottom of the screen. A freshman found the program so amusing that he melted the Dean's X-windows while he was giving a lecture. He was expelled. I knew that Chris would be expelled for drugs as soon as the university heard from the cops. I didn't care, it wasn't like Chris was interested in getting an education.
"It's pretty dry this summer," I said.
"Yeah, it's dry alright. I can't find any weed anywhere. That's why we can't get high." I frowned. He probably thought it was because I wanted to get high but that wasn't it. Chris always had drugs. It had amazed me how fast he found new connections when I busted his old ones. That was what he used his brains for. He claimed not to have drugs when he didn't trust someone. I wondered what happened to the trust that I had so carefully cultivated over the previous year.
"I haven't had problems getting connected at home," I said. "I meant that the crops are all drying up."
"You know what I think about crops," Chris said. "The only ones I care about get watered every day."
"Why aren't you living in student housing this summer?"
"The university is too nosy. I decided to try living off-campus," he said.
"So this is your home next fall, too?"
"Yeah. I have a one-year lease."
He still hadn't commented on my black eye. If he didn't bring it up, eventually I would have to. By not saying anything he was saying a lot.
"Do you still use that expired drivers license I gave you?" I asked.
"Yeah, it's great. No one looks at the picture too hard and I always get served," he said.
I had been taught not to talk about where you come from, but I was learning the hard way not to let information slip though other channels. I supposed that it was better to take the lumps here in the States where the police were on my side than in Russia where I would be breaking their laws. Attention to detail was the key to survival.
"I had a run in with some guys back home," I said.
"What sort of run in was that?" he asked.
"They punched me in the eye. See the shiner?"
"Well, I punched somebody in the eye yesterday for taking my drugs and not paying for them."
This must have been something that he thought up while stoned. I had, in fact, paid for drugs that I had gotten from him. I had made two undercover buys which were going to land him in the federal penitentiary. He would have liked to have sold me a lot more, though. I could see his dilemma. He couldn't accuse me of being a narc, because he didn't want me to report him, but his friends got busted and they thought it was me.
"So, what, you just went to someone's house and punched him in the eye?" I asked.
"I found him hanging out and punched him out. People should pay for their drugs," Chris said. He swung his fist in the air and his face flushed red.
"Uh, okay," I said.
"Yeah! You can go tell the state troopers that. I have fifty pounds of weed in this chest here. Tell them that too!" he was on his feet and shouting, now. "Tell them that I am growing pot in my closet." He swung his fist in the air again.
It seemed like another assault was imminent so I made my way to the door.
Chris was following, still yelling as I let myself out. I went quickly to my car and drove off. I stopped at the Science Center on the hill campus to use the men's room and splash some water on my face. It seemed like a waste to drive all the way up there just for that visit, but I didn't really want to talk to Professor Jones right after the encounter.
I drove back home without stopping, arriving nine hours after I had left for Potsdam. I had missed a chemical dependency class, but I figured that this had been field study. I knew a lot more about chemical dependency than was taught in any college class. I also knew a lot more about the consequences of it than they could fit into a "Just Say No" commercial.
When I went in the house, my grandmother asked, "Where have you been all day?"
"I went up to Clarkson," I said.
"To talk with your professor?"
"No. I had to meet with someone. It's all cool. I came straight back when I was done."
"You know, sometimes people get themselves into something that they don't know how to get out of," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"I can't help you get out of whatever you're into if you don't tell me about it. I don't know if I can help you if you do tell me about it," she said.
"Tell you about what?"
"You know what I am talking about."
I decided that I was going to have to make more efforts to conceal my intelligence activities from my family. I wouldn't have told them what happened at the pond, but Scott did. I didn't think that was very helpful. If they knew that I was a secret agent, they would blow my cover all over the valley. Civilians are indiscreet that way.
"No, I don't think that I do know what you are talking about," I said.
Chapter 9: The Runaway
It was a Sunday morning near the end of summer and my grandmother was cooking bacon sandwiches. The smell of bacon filled the house. I liked bacon sandwiches, although I was not altogether sure that they were good for me. She used the thick cut slabs of bacon from the slaughterhouse where we brought our pigs when I was in high school. She toasted the bread and buttered it before putting the bacon in between. It was amazing that I only weighed 120 pounds eating that.
"Bacon: nature's perfect food," I said.
"Yes, it is good to have something that we can get you to eat," she said. I hated potatoes, preferring rice that my mother served me as a kid. I ate most types of meat, but wasn't enthusiastic about the cull cow cuts that we got from the slaughterhouse after bringing them heifers that failed to get pregnant.
My hands were all pruney from washing up the equipment in the milk house. I yawned. "I think that I am about full now," I said.
"You ought to be, you ate four bacon sandwiches," she said. I stretched and got out from the bench between the kitchen table and the wall. I thought about what needed to be done.
"I guess that I better water the runaways," I said. "I'll go fill the jugs down at the milk house." Bringing Scott and Cindy water every few days had become just another farm chore for me, something that I did without even thinking about it.
"Okay, you go do that," she said. "I think that it is kind of you to help Scott this way." I smiled. It really wasn't a big deal to bring them water and it gave me a reason to get away from the farm.
I grabbed some water bottles from the back kitchen and took them down to the barn. They filled more quickly in the milk house using the hose than in the house. I loaded them in my car and drove them up to Scott and Cindy. Five gallons of water, that should hold them for a few days.
"Hey Scott, here is some water." I unloaded the water bottles from the back of my Bronco. He grabbed a couple of bottles and took them back by the tent.
"Thanks. I was wondering if you could help us out."
"Sure, what do you need?" I asked. I was always happy to help out. Besides, I didn't have plans for the day.
"We need to take Cindy home. School starts in a few weeks." It was about time. I had been worried about that girl living in the woods like she did. I was especially worried the night that the frat boys attacked and Scott spent the night with us. She needed to be home, with her parents. I would have returned her a long time ago if I had been able to determine her identity. Voice analysis doesn't work for kids as their voices are still in flux.
"That's a great idea! Let's go," I said. "Where is she?"
"Come on, Cindy," he called. "We're taking you home."
Cindy emerged from the tent. "I don't want to go home." She crossed her arms and stamped her foot.
"Don't you want to sleep in a soft bed and be with your mother?" Scott asked. "Anyway, school is going to start soon and you have to go to school." This must have been an ongoing conversation with them.
"You don't understand about my mother. She's not nice to me." I put the palm of my hand over my eyes and rubbed them, making little stars in my eyelids.
"Come on, get in the car," he said. For a minute I thought that she would refuse. She didn't seem to be interested in going home and she must have some spunk to her that she left in the first place.
She reluctantly got in the back of my Bronco. I got in the driver's seat and Scott rode shotgun. "You'll have to give me directions," I said as I backed out of their campsite.
Scott said, "Turn right at the top of the road." Scott knew where she came from. I turned the radio down so that I could hear Scott's directions. Guns 'N Roses was singing Paradise City.
"You don't understand about my mother. She isn't nice to me," Cindy was saying. Unless she had a specific accusation, she was just being a rebellious teenager. I understood about having conflicts with your parents, or your grandmother. It wasn't so unusual. Running away wasn't the answer, though. I had tried running away when I was seventeen, but I had run out of money after a few hours and gone home.
I continued following Scott's directions and soon we were in a town about half an hour from the farm. "Okay, why don't you help Jim find your house," Scott said. I wondered if she would cooperate.
"You don't understand about my---turn here, left, no right."
I swerved trying to follow her directions. I drove slowly down a residential street. "Okay, it's this house here," she said. "I really don't want to go home."
We all piled out of the car and I knocked on the door of the house. "Hi, are you Cindy's Mom?" I asked the woman who opened the door.
"Cindy!" she cried. She grabbed Cindy in a bear hug. "You're home!" She was crying.
"Yeah, I guess that she is," Scott said.
"You boys brought my baby home to me," she said, stating the obvious. "Why don't you come in?"
I didn't want to go in, but it was the polite thing to do. "What's your name?" she asked me.
"Jim Washburn," I said.
"Where do you live?"
"On a farm about half an hour from here." I was trained not to be too specific about where I lived and I had a recent practical lesson in why.
"A farm boy! And you?" she addressed Scott.
"I live on a farm, too," he said. "Not far from Jim."
"So you're both farm boys. You don't smell like farm boys."
I winced. She meant well though. "I just drove," I said. I didn't want the hero treatment.
"Well, thank you. Thank you both," she said. Then she turned to Scott. "What's your name?"
"Scott Starkwick," he replied.
I said, "I think that we better go now."
She walked Scott and I to the door and watched as we climbed in the Bronco. As we drove back towards Scott's campsite, I said, "I'm not going to smoke any more weed. Cornell is going to require all of my brains."
"You never did smoke much to begin with," Scott said.
"It was enough to screw me up," I said. "I don't want any bong resin clogging my synapses this semester."
"I wouldn't worry about it," Scott said.
The first big raindrops hit my windshield and I turned on the wipers. "Oh, good, just what we need, some rain," I said.
The raindrops turned into steady deluge so I turned the wipers on high and also turned on the rear wipers. "Take me to the bowling alley," Scott said. "I need to use the payphone."
I took him to the bowling alley and he ran to the payphone at the edge of the parking lot. With the rain falling on him, he put in a quarter and made a phone call. I waited in the car. When he got back in, he was soaking wet. "Okay, I called my new girlfriend," he said.
"You have a new girlfriend already?" I asked. "What about Cindy?"
"Yeah. I have a date for Friday. Cindy was kind of immature."
"So why did you live with her all summer?"
"She kept my pipes clean."
"I'm going to come back here this afternoon and have a beer," I said. I wanted to celebrate taking the runaway home. "Do you want to join me?"
"Sure, that would be great. You know where to find me."
##
Around five o'clock, I picked Scott up and we went to the bowling alley. The owner of the bowling alley, Ray, got me a beer and Scott a soda. A woman was sitting at the other end of the bar. She looked straight at me and said, "Chris was picked up walking down the street. He had pot in his pocket."
I was surprised that the FBI considered that bust big enough to come out and take a look at me. Sure he was wanted on a lot of charges, enough to keep him behind bars for the better part of a decade, but he was still just a small-time dope dealer. Normally information like that would be passed through the earpiece. It was a big deal for an FBI agent to come all the way out to the sticks. I nodded my head slightly and turned to Scott. "Any word from Cindy?"
"No, I haven't heard anything. Her mother was sure happy to see her."
"I wish that she was happy to see her mother," I said. I wondered if she would run away again. She was compliant about going back to her family as much as she protested. I was sure that her mother wrote our names down in case she ran away again.
I looked around the bar area and spotted the man whose Jeep had turned over in the beginning of the summer. I waved, he didn't wave back.
I approached him and said, "Hey, how is it going?"
He spit out the letters. "Just fine, N.Y.P.D."
"Jim's cool," Scott said. "He helped you with your Jeep. Don't you remember? It was him."
"Oh yeah, I remember," he growled.
Looking confused, Scott went back to the bar. I followed. Usually, they protect my cover better in that sort of investigation. I hoped that the drunk driver didn't get talking with Scott.
Chapter 10: Splitsville
Uncle Gordon was the only one who knew that I was with CIA. He had a Secret clearance with the National Guard and the Agency had called him in the beginning for help recruiting me. He was riding in my Bronco with me while I went to get a wagon load of hay. I decided to try to get more information about his past.
"So you said that you smoked pot in college," I said. His National Guard forms swear that he did not.
"I'm not going to say anything about what drugs I might have used," he said. "I don't know what intelligence agency might have bugged your car."
He knew exactly which intelligence agency might have bugged my car, but that was alright. Someone toking on a joint ten years earlier in college isn't actionable intelligence. "Whatever," I said.
"Listen, your aunt and I aren't getting along these days."
"That's hardly a newsflash," I said.
"So I think that I might be moving out," he said.
"Moving out? When?" I replied, surprised.
"This week."
"That's too bad," I said.
"It's for the best. I haven't really enjoyed the farm in years and your grandmother, well your grandmother hates me so---"
"Do you need help?" I asked.
"Help with what?"
"Moving out."
"No, I don't have that much stuff. I just need to use the pickup truck for a couple of trips." His wheels were a motorcycle.
"Where are you moving to?"
"Johnstown. I found an apartment there."
We arrived at Uncle Fletcher's. Uncle Gordon got out and pulled the pin to let the empty wagon we were pulling loose. Then I backed up to a full wagon and he hooked it up, dropping the pin in. It took all of two minutes.
As we drove back, I said, "Do you want to go down to the bowling alley tonight and get a couple of beers?"
"No, that's okay. I have some beer in the refrigerator."
"You mean that awful stuff Grandma gets you for three dollars a case? Come on, you should come."
"No, it would just make things worse." There was a long pause, then, "Do you know anything about the Country Store closing?" he asked.
"Why, what have you heard?"
"I heard that Brad and Scarlet broke up and Brad moved out with Scarlet pregnant with his baby." That story was almost worse than the reality that he had to go to a federal prison camp for six months.
"So that's what they are saying, huh. I didn't know that Scarlet is pregnant."
"That's what makes it so shocking. Why do you think they broke up?"
"I don't know, but I think that they will get back together soon, maybe in six months," I said.
"Oh, so you do know something about it."
"I didn't say that," I said. "I'm just a romantic."
##
Later, after we had put up the wagon load of hay, Uncle Gordon joined me up in the cavernous attic with a couple of beers. The attic had four gables, one of which was filled with old furniture. My stereo was on a old door put on its side over the stairwell and my bed was in the main area. I was playing a Moody Blues record that I had gotten for fifty cents at a used record store in Herkimer.
"That sounds like what people listen to when they are stoned," Uncle Gordon said.
"Let me put something better on," I said. "How about some Steve Miller Band?"
"I like Steve Miller Band. When I was in college, my roommate used to put Jungle Love on when it was time to party."
I queued up the second side of Book of Dreams which starts with Jungle Love and we sipped our beer.
"It's too bad about your marriage," I said.
"It's been coming for years," he said. "I guess that is just the way it works. Your grandmother certainly hasn't been helpful."
It works both ways. Maybe he should have made more of an effort to get along with Grandma. He was always running her down behind her back. I shrugged, there was no point in going over ancient history.
"I got my grades for summer school," I said.
"Oh really? What did you get?"
"I got an A in chemical dependency and a B+ in astronomy."
"Not bad, what's your average?"
"At that school? 3.67. An A-. I expect that Cornell will be a lot harder."
"Yeah, I guess that it will be. Do you know what you are taking?"
"Advanced Algorithms, which is a Ph.D. class taught by Dale Kent. I haven't decided on what the other class will be, but it will have to be numbered 400 or above because I am a grad student."
"That sounds like your sort of thing. Good luck with that."
Uncle Gordon just had an associates degree, but he considered himself college educated. Going to Cornell for grad school was a big deal to him.
After we finished our beers, Uncle Gordon left. I supposed that after the divorce, he would just be Gordon. There were a lot of changes with the end of summer. This week I would have to go to Cornell and register. I was going to clock how long it took to get there so that I could plan when to leave for class.
##
The next day, Uncle Gordon backed the pickup truck up to the front door to load it with his stuff. "You're ruining the lawn," my grandmother yelled. "Don't drive the truck on the lawn."
"I need it here to get my stuff," he yelled back.
"Just be careful," she said. I guess that she didn't want to fight now, she had already won. "Be sure to take all of your guns."
"Don't worry, I will," he said, carrying an armload of firepower.
Soon all of his possessions were loaded in the back of the pickup truck. They didn't seem to be so much. I was sure that I had more possessions than that and I was only twenty-one.
He drove off. He would be back to get his motorcycle, but after that I wouldn't see much of him. It was good that he stayed until the hay was almost all put up. Grandma probably planned it that way.
I drove down to the Country Store. It was locked up, so I knocked on the door. I waited a long time, then knocked again. Scarlet answered. "Hi Jim, what can I do for you? We're closed now."
"Closed for now or closed, that's it, no more store?" I asked.
"We're closed for good," she said.
"That's too bad. I liked hanging out here."
"Well, Brad and I are living apart for the time being and I can't run the store by myself. Also, I have a baby on the way."
"It's okay, I understand," I said.
I peered in past her to see the store area being converted to more living space. They had been living upstairs, but now she was using the whole house. "I guess that you are living off of your stock, huh?"
"Yeah. And I got a job. It's not much but it pays the bills," she said.
"Have you heard anything about Scott Starkwick?" I asked. I had stopped by his campsite earlier only to find his tent and motorcycle gone. He hadn't said goodbye. I didn't know where he was at.
"I hear his family sent him to live with his father on Long Island. He was getting into too much trouble here."
I suppressed a laugh. Getting into too much trouble in this sleepy little village? I had been sent here when I was fourteen because I was getting into too much trouble in New Jersey. I knew that the frat boys had put a scare in him.
"Okay, thanks," I said. "I'll see you around."
"Okay, see you around," Scarlet said.
When I got back to the farm, there was another load of hay ready to be put up. Uncle Fletcher had brought it down and picked up the empty hay wagon. I went in the barn and found Jay to help me put it up.
"So your uncle is moving out," Jay said. "I guess that he won't be helping us stack this hay."
"No, I guess he won't."
"That's okay, we can do it. You just bring the bales to me and I'll stack 'em. No big deal."
"I guess that is the plan. Thanks. Do you know his plan for the haymow? Where the good hay goes and where the bedding hay goes and stuff?" I asked.
"Don't worry, I'll figger it out. First, let's get this wagon unloaded. I'll go up in the mow."
We unloaded the wagon. When we were done, I was hot and dusty, covered with hay chaff. I had little scratches on my chest and arms from the hay, but they didn't hurt. I went into the milk house to hose myself off and get a drink of water. I flexed my haying muscles. A lot of bodybuilders would have liked to have muscles like this. I had started at the local high school in tenth grade after a summer of putting up hay. At first people wanted to pick on me because of my size, but they had bumped up against me and found me solid. I didn't get in a single fight the three years that I was there. Nobody wanted to get clobbered by me.
Chapter 11: Cornell
It took me two and a half hours to get to Cornell. I resigned myself to spending five hours a day driving for the entire semester. When I got out of the parking garage, I found a gourmet coffee store. I had never had gourmet coffee. We drank instant on the farm and at Clarkson I had brewed myself Maxwell House in an old Mr. Coffee.
I went in and smelled the flavored coffee immediately. I stood on line and when it was my turn, I ordered a cheese danish and asked them what type of coffee I smelled.
"Hazelnut," the girl said. "You'll like the hazelnut."
I ordered a large hazelnut coffee. I sat at one of the tables and took a bite out of my danish. It was good. Much better than the stale danishes a friend of my grandfather's had brought us on the farm when my grandfather was dying. Bags and bags of day-old baked goods. Some we fed to the cows. The pastries we ate. But this cheese danish was better than any of that. I bit into the cheesy part and it melted on my tongue.
I tasted the hazelnut coffee. Heaven. I wondered where hazelnut coffee had been my whole life. It was even better than coffee mixed with Nestle Quick and vanilla ice cream. I was learning to like being an Ivy League student.
I headed toward the university, crossing a bridge over a hundred-foot deep gorge that distraught students liked to jump from. Once on campus I examined a map posted by the path. I found where Day Hall was and headed there. I needed to pick up a registration form and a schedule.
At Day Hall I introduced myself to the girl at the registrar's office.
"I'm Jim Washburn. I am a special student."
"What's your social?" she asked
I told her and she gave me a form to register for classes. "How do I know what is being offered?" I asked.
She pointed me to a big book, and I started looking up classes. I already knew that I needed Advanced Algorithms, so I looked up its call numbers and put them down. It was a six hundred level course, four credits, meeting for a full hour each day on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I needed another course and went through the computer science section of the book to see what was offered. It had to be four hundred or above. I finally settled on CS421 Numerical Analysis. Numerical Analysis was an hour and half a day on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was another four credit course. I put Numerical Analysis's call numbers down on the form. I signed it and waited on line to give it back to the girl.
When my turn came, I said, "Here is my registration form."
She took it and typed the call numbers into the computer. A dot-matrix printer rattled off a continuous-feed page. She pulled the tractor feeds off the edges and said, "Here is your schedule. You will need to get your textbooks at the bookstore. We will bill your scholarship."
"Thanks," I said, and left the desk.
When I left Day Hall, I examined another campus map to see where the bookstore was. I followed a path through campus until I came to a door set in the side of a hill. I expected to see hobbits, but instead the sign said, "Cornell Book Store."
I went in and grabbed some school supplies, two spiral notebooks and a loose leaf binder that all said Cornell. Then I stood on a line marked Textbooks. After forty-five minutes, I got to the front of the line and offered the young man there my schedule.
He went into the stacks of textbooks and emerged with a thin white paperback book titled "Data Structures and Network Algorithms" by Robert Tarjan and a big, heavy blue textbook titled "Introduction to Applied Mathematics" by Gilbert Strang. He handed me the books and my schedule and I went to the cash register.
I waited on line at the cash register. When it was my turn, I put my notebooks and textbooks on the counter. The girl rang them up and it came out to $160. I paid with crisp twenty-dollar bills and she put my stuff in a bag with my receipt.
When I left the bookstore, I walked across campus and crossed the bridge to Ithaca to find my car. I had already determined that the parking garage was where I was going to park for class every day. Parking was restricted on campus.
After putting my books in my Bronco, I headed back across the bridge to find Upson Hall, where my classes were. I wanted to know how to get to each of my classes from the parking garage before I headed home. Classes would start on Monday, August 26, 1991. I was excited and planned to spend the weekend looking through my textbooks.
In Upson Hall, I found a vending machine that offered almond M&Ms. I had never seen almond M&Ms before, only the plain and the peanut. They were expensive, seventy-five cents, but I felt compelled to try them. I put a dollar bill in the bill feeder, pushed the buttons and out came my almond M&Ms as well as a quarter.
I eagerly tore open the bag and tried one. They were really good. I didn't understand why they didn't have them in the little supermarket in Fort Plain. I ate them as I crossed the bridge back into Ithaca. I went back to the coffee shop and bought a bag of ground hazelnut coffee to bring back to the farm.
I was done at Cornell for the day and I would be heading back to the farm now. It seemed stupid to commute five hours a day, but I knew that I would get a lot of resistance from my grandmother if I tried to rent a room in Ithaca. I was young, then, and didn't mind driving so much, so I just went with the flow.
##
Back at the farm, my hazelnut coffee got a cool reception. "Flavored coffee, huh?" my grandmother said. "What is wrong with the instant coffee that we drink?"
"This is better, much better. You've got to try it," I insisted.
"Okay, I guess that we will try it. Get the percolator out from the cabinet."
I got out a big percolator that we used on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Grandma measured the coffee and the water and told me to plug it in. I plugged it in and waited while it made its various noises and the house filled with the aroma of hazelnut coffee.
When it was done, I filled two mugs, one for me and one for Grandma. She mixed some sugar in hers and poured raw milk that had been brought up from the milk house that morning in each of our cups. I took a sip. It was even better brewed with our spring water and creamed with the rich milk from our Jersey cows. Grandma took a sip and made a face.
"I don't like it," Grandma said.
"Really? I think it's great. Maybe you just aren't giving it enough of a chance, drink more."
She drank a little more. "This isn't how coffee is supposed to taste," she said. "I'll stick with my instant, thank you."
I knew right then that I would never be having hazelnut coffee for breakfast in my grandmother's house. I sighed. I didn't know what the word philistine meant, but if I had it would have crossed my mind if not my lips. There was a lot of stuff that I liked that my grandmother didn't. It just hadn't occurred to me before. I had always been focused on the idea, planted by my grandmother, that I was a fussy eater who didn't like what everybody else ate.
I took my books up to the attic to look at them. First I looked through Tarjan. It was dense and technical. I read the first chapter, but I wasn't clear on what a network flow problem was. As I leafed through it, I found lots of diagrams and algorithms. The algorithms were named after people that I had never heard of. I felt unsure as to whether I was ready for a Ph.D.-level class at an Ivy League university.
Next I looked through Strang. Strang was a math book, which seemed appropriate for a numerical analysis class. Its pages were filled with characterizations of systems of differential equations, spring problems, fluid dynamics, all sorts of stuff that I never imagined that a computer could solve since I had been a student of math and computer science. I tried to imagine how a straight computer science major could take this course, and decided that one couldn't. Luckily I had studied math as well as computer science.
Tired from looking at my textbooks, I climbed on my bed, lying on top of the covers. I closed my eyes but did not sleep. If Grandma had found me lying in bed in the afternoon she would have had a fit. That was unacceptable laziness to her, although she slept in front of the television after milking the cows in the morning. I thought about Cornell and my classes. They had been clear that as a special student, I couldn't apply these classes towards a degree at Cornell. It didn't matter to me, I wasn't interested in an advanced degree and even if I had been, my chances of being accepted to any Ph.D. program, no less Cornell's, seemed remote, regardless of what Professor Jones said.
Chapter 12: Dale Kent
Advanced Algorithms was held in a lecture hall with fifty students in the basement of Upson. I took a seat clutching my notebook and a cup of hazelnut coffee. Soon Professor Kent and a TA came in. Professor Kent was so pale that he looked like he was just getting off an extended deployment on a submarine. The TA was a pretty woman in her mid-twenties with brown hair. Professor Kent started talking.
"We are fortunate enough to have my lecture notes from previous semesters. These were notes taken by students appointed to be scribes and then edited by me. The TA is handing them out."
The TA handed me half a ream of paper, printed double sided. I looked through it. It was divided into lectures rather than chapters and seemed more straightforward than Tarjan. It was held together with a big black binder clip. I put it in my loose leaf binder.
Professor Kent began lecturing and I was blown away. Never had I been in a class where so much information was presented so quickly. He jumped right in with network flow problems and I couldn't begin to take notes. Instead I watched the lecture trying to understand what he was saying. He moved quickly into complex algorithms. No time would be wasted on introductions or repetition in this class.
The lecture lasted exactly one hour, then Professor Kent and the TA disappeared through a door at the front of the room. The rest of us got up, got our stuff together, and left through the door in the back. I got the feeling that my mission to spy on Dale Kent was not going to go well, but at least I would get an education.
I brought my copy of Professor Kent's lecture notes home like a trophy. It looked like it was going to be a textbook, and I got an advance copy of it. That was at least one valuable piece of intelligence. The TA was a problem. As long as there was a TA for the class, I wouldn't be able to go see the professor. The TA is always the first point of contact, particularly when the professor is a famous scientist.
I studied the lecture notes. There were problems and exercises, but I didn't look at those. Then I attempted the homework. It asked me to prove several theorems and I came up with what I considered some pretty clever proofs. I had done a lot of proofs in the advanced math classes at Clarkson, so I didn't have any trouble with them.
The five hours of driving a day was already proving to be a problem. That was five hours a day not spent on resting or schoolwork. A full time graduate course load at Cornell was nine credit hours and I was taking eight credit hours. Most of the grad students at Cornell had assistantships that kept them at the university, so I was at a disadvantage.
##
The next day I had Numerical Analysis. Numerical Analysis was held in a classroom on the second floor.
"I'm Professor Thompson and I just finished a postdoc with the National Weather Service modeling climate systems. Climate systems are examples of unstable systems which, as we will learn, cannot be accurately modeled with computers due to their sensitivity."
I wrote it all down in my spiral notebook marked "CS421." He passed out a twenty-five page typed guide to numerical methods. I flipped through it. It showed the types of errors that computers make, round-off errors, how to calculate their magnitude, and how to mitigate them. I guessed that was about all the computer science content in the course and that the rest would be math. I found math to be hard but worthwhile. I had never regretted learning a bit of math, as much as I may have struggled with it.
He gave an introductory lecture showing how naive approaches to computing things result in erroneous results due to computer round-off errors. He then showed revised algorithms for calculating the same things and how that resulted in more accurate results. He taught us to compute the magnitude of the cumulative round-off error for our algorithms. I scratched it all into my spiral notebook. He mentioned that the class was going to focus on how to solve systems of differential equations with a computer. I groaned, because differential equations was one of my weakest subjects.
When I got out of class, I found the computer lab that he had mentioned we could use MATLAB in. I emailed Professor Jones and told him that I was going to stop by on Memorial Day to discuss our research in cryptography. Then I started playing with MATLAB. I was impressed, it could not only solve complex problems, it could generate 3-dimensional graphs of the results. It was pretty nifty. I had heard that a MATLAB license cost a thousand dollars and decided that I wouldn't be getting one.
They had issued us computers at Clarkson that we got to keep when we graduated. Mine was a 16-bit 80286 with 512KB RAM, two floppies and, this was something I added myself, a 20MB hard disk. I had Minix installed on the hard disk as I found it more interesting than DOS. Minix is a small, Unix-like operating system designed by Dr. Andrew Tannenbaum to teach computer science students operating systems. I had hacked the kernel, adding all sorts of small improvements until it reached the point that I couldn't apply the patches that Dr. Tannenbaum distributed anymore.
Even if my 80286 system was capable of running MATLAB, which I doubted as all the computers in the lab were brand-new 32-bit 80386 computers, I wouldn't have been able to afford the license. In fact, I didn't expect to find any occasion to use my computer for schoolwork all semester. I planned to do any computer work in the lab.
##
On Memorial Day I drove up to Clarkson, bringing my Cornell notebooks with me. I wanted to show Professor Jones what I was studying. It took me four hours to drive up there and I parked by the Science Center. I found the Science Center empty, with my footsteps ringing through the concrete halls. In college, we had said that in ten years the Science Center would break in half and slide down the hill. The architect had intended the building for Arizona and the freeze-thaw cycle had taken its toll on the concrete structure.
I showed Professor Jones Professor Kent's notes. He leafed through them. "This looks like it will come out as a textbook very soon. Even the problems are done, and that is usually the last part of a book to be written," he said. "You are fortunate to get an advance copy of this book."
I brought up Numerical Analysis. "I don't really like NA," Professor Jones said. "And it surprises me that you are taking it. It really doesn't relate to cryptography."
The previous year, Professor Jones had heard a paper about an interesting problem at Crypto and asked me to help him research it. I had come up with an algorithm to solve the problem and we had written a research paper together and submitted it to Crypto '91. It had been rejected and Clarkson released it as a tech report.
Out of my solution to the problem, Professor Jones had found a more interesting problem and asked me to come up with a way to solve it using number theory. That is what I had been working on all summer. But other problems were not far from my mind. I discussed some of them with Professor Jones as well. This was another important part of my education.
When I got back to the farm, I had a lot to read about and a lot to think about. I liked to be challenged and Professor Jones always challenged me, as did the classes at Cornell.
The house smelled like roast beef and I didn't have to guess what was for dinner. I liked roast beef, but my grandmother overcooked it. It was all there was to eat though, so I choked down enough of it to fill the void in my stomach. On the farm, meat was always well done.
"It is hard driving five hours a day and taking eight hours of classes," I commented.
"Most of those people are working full time and taking classes full time," Aunt Bobby Sue said.
I knew that wasn't true, but kept my mouth shut. She had no idea what full time was for graduate students, or what graduate classes at Cornell were like, or how financial aid worked for graduate school in a research university. I didn't see the point in arguing. She had gone to a two-year school and didn't graduate from that. Grandma was a Cornell alumni as was my mother. Grandma had studied math and my mother had studied history. They had tried to get me into Cornell when I graduated from high school. My father had studied math at Yale and my other grandmother had an MFA from Yale, but they didn't push me to follow in their footsteps. I wondered if it would have been different if they had. Anyway, I was finally at Cornell.
Chapter 13: Too Clever
I got my first homework back from Advanced Algorithms, and I didn't like my grade. I took it home to study it, and found that I lost points for a proof that I thought was clever and valid. I decided to challenge the TA on it and maybe get a peek at how things work in the Computer Science Department. First, I had to go to Numerical Analysis.
I asked a lot of questions in Numerical Analysis because I needed to understand what was going on. Like my questions in most classes, my questions in Numerical Analysis were deep enough to merit a ten minute answer involving material that wasn't on the syllabus. I just liked to be clear on things, but I imagined that my questions annoyed and aggravated my classmates.
I was sitting in Numerical Analysis on a Tuesday, the day after I got my Advanced Algorithms homework back. I had a question, but I decided to save it for the end of class, so as not to be disruptive. I wrote it down in my notebook in the middle of the notes.
After class, I went up to Professor Thompson and asked him my question.
"That is a very good question," he said. "There isn't time right now for me to answer it, but you can come to my office hours."
I knew when his office hours were from my syllabus. "Uh, okay, thanks," I said.
"We have a numerical analysis seminar every week," he said. "Why don't you come. There is one this afternoon."
"Okay, where and when?" I asked.
He told me and it was in an hour. I decided to hang out and wait for it. I went to the vending machine and got myself Almond M&Ms. I still hadn't been able to find them anywhere near home. I wondered if they were test marketing them at Cornell.
While eating the M&Ms, I headed to the computer lab. I played with MATLAB, drawing three-dimensional models of number theory problems used in cryptography on the monitor. The result was a crazy block of spikes of varying heights. I couldn't find any pattern that might be exploited to solve them. I logged onto the computer science department computer at Clarkson and read my mail. Professor Jones had found the solution to our problem in one of the emails that I had sent to him. We were going to write a paper.
I wrote back to Professor Jones with an attack that might be used against our solution. It seemed likely that we would have to provide a proof that that attack wouldn't succeed. I checked his Sun SPARCstation and found that he was playing spider. He usually did that while thinking, so I logged off and left him alone.
Then it was time for the seminar. I went to the room that was specified in Upson Hall. There was a sign up for it, but instead of seminar, it said colloquium. Colloquium and seminar meant the same thing to me, so I went in.
There were coffee and cookies set out in the back of the room. I got some coffee and a couple of cookies and sat down. Soon a professor came to the front of the room and said, "Our speaker today is Professor Mitchell with MIT. He is going to talk to us about---" I didn't understand a word of what he said after that.
A tall man took the podium with a big stack of transparencies. He proceeded to give a lecture which might as well have been in Chinese for all I understood it. It was supposed to be an hour, but it went over to an hour and a half. I later learned that this wasn't unusual for academic talks. When the lecture was over, I left the room with my head spinning. I wondered why Professor Thompson thought it was a good idea for me to attend this.
I went up to the computer science department and checked out where the Advanced Algorithms TA's office was on the fourth floor. It was mixed in with faculty offices and I was impressed. I had heard that in most universities, graduate students worked in labs in the basements of buildings. Cornell must have had a lot of extra office space in the computer science department. She wasn't there and her office hours would be the next day before class.
I was done for the day, so I walked across the bridge to the parking garage where I had stowed my Bronco II. I stopped at the gourmet coffee store to get a cup of hazelnut coffee for the road. As I drove out of Ithaca, I noticed that my Bronco was running funny. It would need maintenance. That would cause a reshuffling of cars at the farm because the '79 Dodge Ram pickup was not road worthy for such long distance travel. I hoped that I would get to drive my aunt's yellow Mustang, even though it was a cheap model with a four-cylinder engine and an automatic transmission.
It took me more than two and a half hours to get home. When I arrived, I told my grandmother that my car needed maintenance. I knew that the CIA would cover it as part of my scholarship, as that was operational money. "Okay, I'll make an appointment and you can drive your aunt's Mustang while it is in the shop. We'll make do with my station wagon and the pickup truck."
I was relieved because I did not want to drive the station wagon even though it did have a big five-liter, eight-cylinder engine. It drove like a boat and wasn't very cool.
My thoughts were interrupted by my grandmother, "Is that why you're home late today?"
"No. I attended a numerical analysis colloquium," I said. "My professor invited me so I went to check it out."
"When I was at Cornell, I was invited to the math department teas," my grandmother said. I wondered if it was because she was a prodigy at math or because she was a beautiful woman or if maybe it was because she was just a kid. She started at Cornell when she was 16. She said that wasn't unusual during the war. My grandmother had retained much of her looks into my teenage years, in spite of not doing anything to maintain herself. Her hair remained bright red without dying and milking the cows every morning kept her in shape.
"I never got why you didn't use your math degree," I said.
"I taught school for a while after the war, but I didn't like it. There is nothing worse than a room full of seventh graders," she explained.
It seemed like a waste to me. A waste of education, a waste of talent, and a waste of money for her to get an Ivy League math degree and then milk cows on a dairy farm. My father had gone to NYU after he got his math degree from Yale and was in the Ph.D. program there before he quit and started programming computers full time for the defense industry. That also seemed like a waste. Five years of graduate school for which he only received a masters degree. I didn't understand it.
My grandmother and I took my car to the Ford dealership in Herkimer. I drove it there, and she brought me back in her station wagon. They promised to find the problem and change the oil as well.
##
The next day I left for class early in my aunt's Mustang so that I could catch the TA at her office hours. I was nervous about challenging my grade. Quite frankly, I was afraid of Dale Kent and, by extension, his TA. He was a famous computer scientist who taught Ph.D.-level classes at Cornell. I was a special student who wasn't even admitted into a degree program. I rallied myself with the thought that Cornell doesn't admit just anyone as a special student.
I sat in the gourmet coffee shop eating a croissant and drinking a hazelnut coffee while studying my homework, trying to figure out what to say. I didn't understand the lectures so well in that class, they were more advanced than the classes that I had taken in college. Also, the professor related every algorithm to the network flow problem which I was still a little unclear about. Since classes had started, I had learned that there was a 400-level class that was usually taken as a prerequisite for Advanced Algorithms.
I steeled my resolve and threw away the wax paper that the croissant was served in. Still drinking my coffee I went to Upson Hall and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. I went through the corridors until I saw the TA's door. It was open. I walked to the entrance and saw her staring into a Sun SPARCstation. I rapped on the door.
"Oh, yes. Can I help you?" she asked with a faint south European accent.
"Yes, I have a question about my homework for Advanced Algorithms," I said.
"Oh, okay. Let's see it."
I pulled my homework out of my notebook and pointed to the proof that she had marked wrong. "This is a valid proof, let me explain it to you," I said. Then I went over the proof.
"The purpose of the homework is not to show us how clever you are," she replied. She made no motion to change the grade or mark the assignment. Defeated, I backed out of her office, putting my homework away and heading downstairs to the lecture hall to wait for class.
I didn't understand her remark at all. Of course the homework was to show how clever we are. Why else would it ask us to write proofs for hard theorems, or construct algorithms for difficult problems. My motivation to do the homework drained out of me and I knew, from experience, that I wouldn't be turning in any more homeworks in this class, even though they were ten percent of the grade.
Chapter 14: Car Trouble
With my car in the shop, I drove my aunt's 1988 Mustang LX. It was hard for me to get used to the automatic transmission, my clutch foot kept on looking for the clutch when I wanted to stop or change gears. It was also an inferior sort of Mustang with a four-cylinder engine, smaller than the 6-cylinder engine in my Bronco II. I didn't think that a car should be called a Mustang with less than eight cylinders.
I have never liked automatic transmissions. They give you less control, less gas mileage, less reliability, and are more expensive to fix. I suppose that they are nice for people who can't figure out how to drive a stick shift, but they weren't for me. Beggars can't be choosers though, so I drove the Mustang to Cornell.
I left the 'stang in the parking garage and got some hazelnut coffee and an apple turnover. I had come to enjoy visiting the gourmet coffee shop before class. They might have had something like that near Clarkson, but I had rarely left campus. At Clarkson, I ate in the cafeteria, and I was always too low on funds for such extravagance. My cash when I was an undergrad came from a part time job helping people with computers in the terminal room. Fifty dollars a week didn't take me very far. I should have asked for a stipend from my Officer in Training scholarship, but working for the computer center gave me access to students, administrators, and computer accounts that proved crucial during the hacking investigation.
After my breakfast, I went to Advanced Algorithms, entering through the door in the back of the lecture hall. I had been trying to follow along with the lectures in Dale Kent's book based on previous iterations of the class, but it was hard. While in every class Professor Kent talked about network flow problems, there was no mention of network flow problems in his book. I usually managed to find the algorithms he talked about, but it was a hit or miss thing with me.
I know that I should have gone to the TA's office hours for help, but I was afraid of her. She had defeated me on my question about the homework, and I just wanted to avoid her as much as possible. I sat in the lecture hall waiting for class to start. Other students came in and took their seats. I was sitting in the center of the third row, where I could get a clear view of the lecture without making myself too obvious.
Soon Professor Kent and the TA came in through the door in the front of the lecture hall. One thing that I had learned about famous scientists at Ivy League schools is that they have buffers of graduate assistants around them to protect them from random students. The lecture started and I tried to keep up.
After the hour-long lecture, I closed my eyes for a minute to try to absorb all the information that I had just heard. Professor Kent was not one to waste words. I wondered if this class would have made more sense to me if I had taken its prerequisite, CS482 Introduction to Algorithms. I had taken an undergraduate algorithms class at Clarkson, but CS482 was a graduate-level class. There is a big difference.
After class, I went to the computer lab to work with Professor Jones on our research. We didn't have time to make the Crypto '92 deadline in February for our paper, so we were aiming for the Eurocrypt '93 deadline next October. That gave us plenty of time to deal with all of the issues that we were encountering and to write a high-quality paper.
I went back to the parking garage and got the Mustang to drive home. I followed the shortest way home, which took me through a lot of small towns. There was little advantage to following the interstate because its speed limit was still 55, the same as the state highway. In one of those little towns, I stopped for a red light by a convenience store. When the light turned green, I pushed on the gas and the Mustang went "Vroom" but didn't move. I shifted to neutral and then back to drive. Same thing. I tried the lower gears, no luck.
After some experimentation, I found that reverse worked, and I backed into the convenience store parking lot and called my grandmother on the payphone outside.
"Hello," she said.
"The Mustang is broken. I put it in drive and it doesn't move."
"Where are you?" she asked.
I told her.
"I'll call a tow truck," she said. "You stay with the car."
"Sure thing." Like I had a choice.
I wondered what I would do if my car broke down in Russia. I probably wouldn't be able to get an auto mechanic so easily. A lot of people didn't even have cars in Russia, and the cars that they did have were crap. They were so underpowered that they could not even take the inclines common on American roads without a running start. For instance, a Russian car would never be able to climb the hill to Herkimer County Community College a few minutes away from the Ford Dealership. Or go up our dirt road. The reverse gear on some Russian cars was lower than first, allowing them to take some hills in reverse that they couldn't take going forward.
I waited around the convenience store. I bought some snacks and soda and made the clerk happy, but I was mostly just loitering. A man pulled up in a car. "Do you need a ride?" he asked. I wondered who he was and where he came from. Maybe he had a scanner and heard the tow truck dispatch, I didn't know. It seemed creepy.
"No, thank you. I have to wait for the tow truck," I said.
"Suit yourself," he said and drove off. I took his license plate number.
After an hour and a half, the tow truck arrived. It was a flat bed and we loaded the Mustang up on it's back. Then I got in the passenger's seat and we drove off to the Ford dealership in Herkimer. It seemed like bad luck to have two vehicles broken down at the same time, and I said so.
"It happens," the tow truck driver said. "That is the way it is with cars."
It took us more than an hour to get there. Once there, I checked on the status of my Bronco II. They said that it would be ready in an hour, so I called my grandmother on a payphone.
"There is no need to pick me up, my Bronco will be ready in an hour."
"Do you have a check?" she asked.
"Uh no, I don't. I guess that you will have to come pay for it."
"Okay, I'll be there soon. Just be patient."
I went into the show room. I sat in a cherry-red Mustang GT with a stick shift and an 8-cylinder engine, not to mention a cool air scoop on the hood. This was a real Mustang. I sat in the driver's seat. Very cool. Then I found a full-size Bronco. My Bronco II was only about the size of a Jeep Cherokee, maybe a little shorter. The full-size Bronco was some serious truck. I sat up in the drivers seat, looking down at the other vehicles in the showroom.
After a while I got tired of looking at the new cars, and I went into the waiting room by the shop. I pulled out my Numerical Analysis notes and went to work on the homework. I wasn't bothering to do the Advanced Algorithms homework anymore since the TA had demoralized me.
I was finishing up the first problem when my grandmother arrived. She went up to the payments desk.
"I'm here to pay for the Bronco II," she said.
"Okay, that'll be $1,100," the cashier replied.
She pulled out her checkbook and wrote a check for $1,100. I wondered if the check was any good. She took the receipt to get reimbursed by my scholarship. She addressed me, "Your Bronco is paid for, boy." I hated it when she called me `boy'. "When they are done, just come home."
I thought that it would have been a good idea for her to wait at the dealership for my Bronco to be ready, just in case there was some sort of trouble and I wasn't able to take it home that day. That didn't seem to occur to her, though. She probably wasn't going straight home, anyway. She liked to get groceries in Herkimer.
I nodded my agreement and she left. I started working on the second problem. With any luck, I would get the CS421 homework halfway done here. I was just finishing up the third problem when the cashier called me. "Your Bronco is all ready, the mechanic is backing it out now."
The big door to the shop started opening and they backed my Bronco out of one of the workstations perpendicular to it and drove it out the door. I went outside and the mechanic was getting out. I took the keys from the mechanic and climbed in, adjusting the seat for my short legs. Mechanics always messed up the seat.
I gunned the engine a couple of times to make sure that it seemed to be running right, and then headed out of the parking lot. It was purring. Whatever it was that they did to it had worked. It ought to have for how much they charged. I stopped at a gas station in Mohawk and filled the tank, paying with a twenty dollar bill. Then I headed back home.
Chapter 15: Dumped
Thanksgiving break came way too soon. The realization that it was near the end of the semester sent me into a panic. My mission to spy on Professor Kent, as far as I was concerned, was a failure. I hadn't even managed to meet him. I studied Professor Kent's notes carefully, hoping to pick up what I didn't understand in class.
Professor Jones was still suggesting that I go to graduate school, although he didn't think that Cornell would be the best choice as there were no cryptographers there. I signed up to take the GRE general test and the GRE computer science subject test just before finals. I didn't prepare for them, I had been taught that you can't prepare for these tests beyond the years of education that you already had. That had worked out for me pretty well in high school, where I was a National Merit Scholar Letter of Commendation winner on the PSAT, and scored well enough on the SAT that my score was a top score even at Clarkson, where high SAT scores are common.
Thanksgiving was a big meal. My grandmother got good and grouchy while cooking turkey and ham, and my mother and sister, Uncle Fletcher and Aunt Sheela with my cousins, as well as my great aunt and her son all showed up for Thanksgiving dinner. I didn't like turkey or most of the high calorie foods that my family prepared for Thanksgiving. For some reason, they couldn't prepare just a plain vegetable, no it had to be mixed with cream and turned into an entree in its own right. I just ate ham and broccoli. The broccoli was covered with melted butter and sauteed almond slivers.
My mother spent Thanksgiving weekend at the farm. She was an attorney in New Jersey, and had divorced my father when I was sixteen. She liked to come up and visit me, maybe more often than was necessary. My sister had gone to Clarkson in a program for high school seniors when I was a senior at Clarkson, then went to Cornell where she had recently dropped out in the middle of the semester. Needless to say, I didn't approve of that maneuver.
After dinner we had pies for dessert: pumpkin pie, cherry cheese pie, apple pie. Grandma got out the big percolator and made coffee to go with the pie. I ate a few pieces of pie and drank a few cups of coffee. Jay was taking care of chores.
##
The next day the crowd was gone, leaving just my mother and my sister as guests. I went down to the barn to talk to Jay and found him standing in front of the barn door. I was about to say something to him when the shock hit my jaw and my teeth hit each other hard. Jay had punched me on the chin. I just looked at him, unable to imagine the reason for that.
He said, "That's for what you did to her." I decided that it must involve Cheryl and she must be in town. I turned around and left the barn, getting in my Bronco and driving to the bowling alley.
I went into the bowling alley and took a seat at a table by the jukebox. There weren't a lot of people there, but the people who were there were sitting at the bar or playing pool. I put a quarter in the jukebox and selected three songs. The jukebox selected the first 45 rpm record from its library, plopped it down on the internal turntable, and started playing it. I thought that jukeboxes were pretty neat.
I went to the bar and got a beer which I brought back to my seat. I was hoping that Cheryl would turn up to let me know what the deal was. I was drinking my beer when a long-haired drug burnout named Mitch with blond hair and a full beard came in. Mitch had been helpful to me when I was a teenager, giving me rides when he saw me walking along the road and pulling my tractor out when it got stuck in the mud.
Mitch smiled at me and said, "Hey Jim." Then he went up to the bar. He was dressed in dirty blue jeans and flannel. He lived on a farm right in the village. The state wanted to knock down their house to straighten Route 80 and they were fighting it. What they wanted was a new house.
I drank beer and listened to music, keeping my eye on the parking lot for Cheryl's car. It was pretty boring and I wasn't in the mood to eavesdrop on the conversation at the bar. I nursed my beer, as I didn't want to pay the $1.25 that it would cost to get another bottle. Eventually, though, I finished it, drinking down the warm dregs from the bottle, and I got up and bought a second bottle of beer.
Just as I was sitting down with it, Cheryl came in and walked right past me, taking a seat at the bar. I got up and took a seat next to her. She had straightened her hair. All her life she had had curly hair, but now it was straight. She was a knockout with straight hair, though.
"Her drink is on me," I told Ray.
She got a fancy mixed drink with fruit juice in it which cost me $4 and said, "Thank you."
"No problem," I said. "What are you doing these days?"
"I'm going to college," she said.
"I thought that you already went to college."
"That was for a two-year degree. Now I am getting a four-year degree."
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"Buffalo, ex," she replied.
So that was it. I was her ex-boyfriend. Maybe that was why she had changed her hairstyle. What a way to be dumped, as an afterthought in the answer to a question. I took a big drink from my beer. Then I went to the jukebox, which by now was quiet, and put a quarter in. I selected one song, Separate Ways by Journey, and walked out of the bar.
When I got in my car, I sat and thought for a long while before starting it up. Then I went to town to buy some beer at a convenience store. There was only a little snow on the ground, so I figured that I could get to the pond on its seasonal road in four-wheel drive. I didn't take the dirt road by the farm up there, as that was seasonal too, instead I got on Travis road from Route 80.
Once at the pond, I put American Pie by Don McClean in my tape deck and drank beer while listening to it. American Pie is eight and a half minutes long and it was one of the songs that I used to play on the Clarkson radio station when I needed a break.
I was not one to wallow in self pity, but I made an exception on this occasion. I had been with Cheryl since forever. We had met when we were fourteen and the attraction had been immediate. That was eight years, and now I needed to find a new girlfriend. I was 22, "no time left to start again," indeed. I wondered why she had dumped me. I wondered why I hadn't even known that she had gone off to college again. I guessed that Cornell must have kept me too busy.
American Pie was over so I rewound it and played it again. I looked at the pond and there was steam coming off of it. The air was a little nippy, I thought, turning on the engine to get the heat going again. I didn't want to sit with the engine idling too long, though, because aside from wasting gas I was afraid that the exhaust would blow into the air intake on the hood and give me carbon monoxide poisoning. After the car was nice and warm, I shut it off again.
No one would be coming by this time of year to bother me. I sat in my Bronco, listening to the music and drinking beer for a couple of hours, or about four beers. Then I got tired of it and started up the car, turning it around and heading back home, going down our seasonal dirt road in four by four and first gear so as not to encounter any cops.
##
When I got home, it was apparent to everybody that I was moody. I wasn't known for having, or at least for displaying, moods, so my mother and my grandmother wanted to know what was wrong.
"What's the matter?" Grandma asked.
"Nothing," I said. "Everything's fine."
"Don't give me that," my grandmother said. "Something is bothering you."
"Nothing is bothering me and I wish that you guys would just leave me alone," I said.
"We can't help you if you won't tell us what is bothering you," my grandmother said.
"Listen, everything is fine, okay? I'm going to go upstairs now to study," I said. I went up to the attic before anyone could object.
Once up there, I put the Darkness on the Edge of Town album by Bruce Springsteen on and listened to it through headphones. Soon the beer started wearing off and I started to get a headache from it. I knew that a glass of water would help with that, but I didn't want to go down to the kitchen where my mother and grandmother were discussing my mood.
Chapter 16: Exams
The GREs were offered on a Saturday morning. I got up early to be at Cornell at nine o'clock when the exam started. Once the exam was underway, no one could enter or leave the gym where it was being given. I found the gym okay and sat down with my handful of sharp number 2 pencils. A proctor handed out scantron sheets, scrap paper, and exam booklets.
They gave instructions not to open the booklets until time was called, and to answer each section completely and then wait for them to tell us to go to the next section. If we were taking a subject test, we were to stay in our seats after the exam and we would get a subject test book, a new scantron sheet, and fresh scrap paper. They had us fill out our name, social security number, book number, and registration number on the scantron sheet, filling in the bubbles for each letter and number.
They had us fill in the codes for the schools that we wanted our GRE scores sent to. I put down Clarkson and Cornell. I wasn't applying to any graduate schools and I could always have my scores sent to another school for a small fee.
Then they checked the time, barred the doors, and told us to start. I filled in the little bubbles for each question. At the end of each section, I had to sit and wait, with nothing to entertain me, until the next section. It was boring and painful and reminded me of the SAT that I took in high school.
A couple of hours later, we were finished with the GRE general test and it was time to take the GRE subject test. I had a headache. The proctor brought me a book for the computer science subject test and a new scantron sheet which I again had to fill out the bubbles on for my name, social security number, book number, and registration number as well as the subject code for the exam that I was taking.
I found the computer science subject test easy. I was surprised at how simple the concepts they tested were. I tore through it, finishing early and then had to sit quietly for half an hour while I waited for the proctor to call time. After they collected our booklets and scantron sheets, I was happy to leave the gym and go to the computer lab to check my email and fool around for a bit.
I had no way of knowing how well I did on the GRE. I thought that I messed up the math section because of my headache, but I couldn't be sure. They had given us the option to cancel our score, but that would have been ridiculous. They would send me a score card soon, I would look at that.
In the computer lab, I checked my email and had some correspondence about the paper that we were going to write for Eurocrypt. There were still some outstanding issues that needed to be addressed before we wrote the paper. Professor Jones and I would both think about these issues and email each other anything that we came up with.
I went to the gourmet coffee shop and got a hazelnut coffee and a cheese danish. I sat up at one of the tables eating them and thinking about the GREs. I hoped that I did as well on the GREs as I did on the SATs. I wasn't sure what constituted a good score, but I was hopeful that I would get one. The next week was final exams and I wanted to do well on them, as well.
When I got back to the farm, my grandmother was waiting for me so that she could start cooking bacon sandwiches, even though it was well into the afternoon.
"How did the GREs go?" she asked.
"They went okay, I guess," I said. "I had a headache during the quantitative part, though."
"I'm sorry to hear that. Do you think that you did alright anyway?"
"Yeah, I don't see why not."
"Here, have a bacon sandwich," she said, handing me one on a little plastic saucer.
"Thanks," I said. I bit into it. It was good, with bacon grease and butter soaking into the toast. The thick slices of bacon were a little chewy. She must have put four of them in there.
"So, what is your schedule this week?" she asked.
"I have my Advanced Algorithms final on Monday and my Numerical Analysis final on Tuesday."
"Are you ready for them?"
"Not really. I will study though."
"Yes, you better study. Remember, these are graduate classes, not undergraduate and they are at Cornell. I know that you didn't need to study hard in college but now you do."
"Yes, Grandma," I said. "Numerical Analysis isn't strictly a graduate class, it can be taken by both grad students and undergrads."
"How do you think that you are doing in it?"
"I would be doing better if I had studied differential equations when I was an undergrad," I said.
"How did you do on the midterm?"
"I got a 75."
"You better study."
I went upstairs to study for my exams.
##
On Monday, I went to Cornell to take my Advanced Algorithms final. We sat in the lecture hall where the class was taught, with seats between us and we were given blue books and exam sheets. When I looked at the exam sheet, I saw that all the problems were proofs. Some of the proofs required devising algorithms. This was my type of exam.
I proved each theorem with care, mindful of the TA's admonition that the purpose of the problems was not to show how clever I was. I couldn't have written the proofs without being clever, though. I supposed that if I had completely understood the lectures and done the homeworks, I wouldn't have had to rely so much on cleverness.
The time was almost up when I turned in my blue book. I picked up a copy of the Cornell Sun to read while drinking some coffee. The headline was that a student had jumped from the bridge into the gorge. I knew from my numerous relatives that had gone to Cornell that that happened most semesters. What was unusual was that he lived, albeit barely.
As I sat at the cafe, sipping my coffee, I read the gruesome details about his broken back and internal injuries. Then it mentioned that he was accused of stealing computers from the university and was about to be indicted. That was different from the usual jumper who jumped because he didn't like his grades.
The next day I took the Numerical Analysis exam. The exam was full of problems that we had to solve involving systems of differential equations. I hated differential equations, but I went through the motions that we had learned in class to form them for the algorithms to solve and then run the algorithms. There was no real textbook for the class, Strang was only tangentially related to the material that was taught in the lectures. Again, I turned in my blue book as time was running out for the exam.
I knew that this was my last time at Cornell. I went to the computer lab and wrote to Professor Jones that I wouldn't have much Internet access for an indeterminate length of time, but that we could use the telephone and, if necessary, the fax machine. I didn't know what I was going to do the next semester, but it wouldn't involve Cornell.
I took a long walk around campus wearing a Navy peacoat. The wind blew over my ears, turning them into blocks of ice. I looked at the old buildings covered with ivy, and the new buildings, and the hills. Finally, I walked back to Ithaca and got a cup of coffee to thaw out my ears and nose. I got in my car and left Cornell for the last time.
When I got home, my grandmother asked me, "How did you do?"
"I did okay, I guess."
"Did you know the answers?"
"I knew how to solve the problems, but I'm not sure that I executed them all correctly."
"When will we find out your grades?"
"Next week they will send a grade report. Just in time to ruin Christmas."
"Okay, I'll look for it in the mail."
"Look for my GRE scores, as well," I said.
With the semester over, I had a lot of free time on my hands. Jay was still milking the cows at night, I had refused to since I got back from Clarkson. I reread the old Mark Twain books from my great-grandfather's library and listened to music. I didn't watch TV because I didn't like it, and we only got one snowy channel anyway.
The rest of the week went by slowly. Soon my mother would be coming up for Christmas. She had said that she was going to help me get a job. The economy was in recession, so jobs for fresh outs, as people in industry called recent college grads, were hard to find. There certainly weren't any jobs for me up by the farm. I couldn't stay anyway, as more dissatisfied customers from my undercover work knew where I lived.
When the mail came on Monday, both my report card and my GRE score card were in it. Grandma handed me my report card and I opened it, scanning the grades. I got a C in Numerical Analysis. Oh well, I thought, differential equations weren't really my thing. I got a C+ in Advanced Algorithms. That could have been a B+ if I had turned in my homeworks. I felt a twinge of regret.
"How did you do?" Grandma asked.
"I passed," I said.
"That doesn't sound good, let me see."
I handed her my report card and opened the GRE score report. I got a 1350 for the verbal plus quantitative on the GRE. That didn't seem so great to me although it was comparable to my SAT score. I looked at the computer science subject test. I had scored in the 95th percentile. I was disappointed. The standardized tests I had taken when I was a child had gotten me used to always being in the 99th percentile. But I supposed that the set of people taking the computer science GRE was an elite group to start with. I still couldn't help but think that I could have done better.
Chapter 17: New Underwear
Christmas morning didn't start until the cows were milked. Then we all took seats in the living room to open presents. The presents under the tree were arranged by person, so it was a matter of sitting in your particular spot.
First came the stockings with an orange in the bottom. When I was a kid, someone had explained to me that the oranges were traditional to ward off scurvy in the dead of winter when there weren't many fruits or vegetables available. You can imagine my excitement at receiving a piece of fruit for Christmas.
Then it was time to start opening presents. I opened my first present. It was a package of Fruit of the Loom underpants. "Great! That is exactly what I need," I said. "New underwear." Now that I thought about it, the only time I got new underwear all year was Christmas.
The next present was a bag of white athletic socks. "Great!" I said. "My old socks were getting kinda raggedy." They were too, as the last time I had gotten socks was the previous Christmas.
Then I opened a box that looked like it came from a department store. It was a red union suit from Herb Phillipson. "That should keep me warm," I said. "My old one is still good though." Union suits would, in fact, be perfect for the cold Russian winters. I wondered if people wore them in Russia or just in the American backwoods. I would have to ask the Agency.
My mother urged me to open a present that she had gotten for me, so I did. It was two dress shirts. "You will need them when you get a job," she said.
"Yeah, I guess I will," I replied.
She pointed me to another box. I opened it. It was dress pants. "You'll need to get them shortened," she said.
"Okay. I don't know where to do that around here."
"Don't worry, we'll find a place."
I opened another gift which turned out to be a bag of Fruit of the Loom undershirts. "Oh great!" I said. "These will keep me warm under my union suit."
When we finished opening presents, I took my loot upstairs while Grandma prepared Christmas dinner. Christmas dinner was to be ham with all the same stuff I didn't want that they cooked for Thanksgiving. I figured that my best bet was to avoid people, as Grandma and Aunt Bobby Sue were grouchy.
I sat upstairs playing with my computer from Clarkson while people started turning up for Christmas dinner. It would be a full house, I knew, and everybody would be talking at once and getting in each other's way. The big dining room table wouldn't be big enough to seat everybody, so we would all be smushed in together on benches. I would just as soon have skipped Christmas.
I wondered if I could skip Christmas dinner. Would they even notice if I didn't come down for it? My speculation ended when my mother started calling me by name. Reluctantly I came down to a house full of aunts, uncles, cousins, great-aunts, and, of course, the usual people.
"Sit up at the bench," my Aunt Bobby Sue said. "Scoot over so that there is room for your cousins." I found myself in the middle of the bench with kids climbing in on either side of me. I wouldn't be getting out for a while.
"Okay, is everyone up to the table? Who is going to ask the blessing?" Grandma asked.
Someone did and then the food started going around. I took some ham and some broccoli and tried to eat it, but every time I tried to eat something, I got passed another plate or bowl of food. The food got backed up next to me and I had to find places on the table to set hot dishes.
After a while the passing died down some, and I was able to eat, but stuff still got passed frequently enough to be a pain in the ass. I asked for more ham and it was passed to me. After I took a sufficient quantity, I found a place to set the plate of ham down.
I knew that we would be eating a lot of ham for a while. Fried ham sandwiches instead of bacon sandwiches for breakfast. Ham sandwiches for lunch. We would eat ham until the giant ham that my grandmother cooked was all gone. That might not take so long if some of the people stuck around for a few days.
My mother addressed me, "Jim, I got you a job interview with Peter Romano." Peter Romano was the CEO of Romano Automation, where my father was vice president of advanced software. Mom was their legal counsel.
"Great, when is that?"
"In a couple of weeks. I'll give you the details after dinner. You'll have to stay with your father."
"That's fine. Just give me directions so that I can get there."
"You can wear the nice clothes that I got you for the interview."
"Yeah, thanks Mom. I appreciate it."
I had finished eating, but I couldn't get up. I was smushed in by my cousins and people weren't getting up from the table anyway.
"Does anyone want pie?" Grandma asked.
I raised my hand.
"Does anyone want coffee?"
I raised my hand again. She counted the number of people that wanted coffee and went into the kitchen. Soon I could hear the percolator and smell the freshly brewed coffee. None of that instant stuff on Christmas.
I sat Zen-like on the bench, trying to ignore all the people around me while my grandmother and aunt passed out the coffee. Then my aunt asked me what sort of pie I wanted.
"I'll have some apple and some cherry-cheese," I said. A few minutes later I had a plate with warm apple and cherry cheese pie on it. I ate the apple first, then the cherry-cheese, washing them both down with the fresh coffee.
People were starting to get up from the table, but I was still stuck at my spot on the bench. I nudged my cousin, and finally I was able to get up. I started heading upstairs and my mother said, "Where are you going? Wouldn't you like to talk to us?"
"We were just talking at dinner," I said. "What more is there to talk about?"
"I've hardly seen you all semester," she said. "Why don't you come down and talk to me."
"You were just here for Thanksgiving," I said.
"Come down and talk to me anyway," she said.
I went down to talk to her, or more accurately to listen to her. The place was a total zoo with all the people there, although some were making motions to leave.
"It is time to go home and do chores," Uncle Fletcher said. "We have a heifer freshening soon so we have to check on her." Between Uncle Fletcher, Aunt Sheela, and their three kids, that would take some of the pressure off of the overcrowding.
I could have gone for a beer to help me cope with all the people, but my grandmother was a prohibitionist. Her mother had been president of a chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, so I couldn't drink in front of Grandma. My mother was having a glass of wine, though. She couldn't cope with Grandma without one.
Soon enough people had left that it was quiet again. I got myself another cup of coffee and some more pie and listened to my mother talk about things in New Jersey that I had no idea about or interest in. People whose names meant nothing to me. People whose names I did recognize, but from a distant memory. I stretched my arms and yawned.
"Am I boring you?" my mother asked.
"Actually, yes," I said.
"Well, what do you want to talk about?" she asked.
"I don't." I said.
"You don't what?"
"I don't want to talk."
"We are going to have to teach you to be more social. Do you want to be a wallflower like your father?"
I didn't see anything wrong with being like my father. He was the smartest person I knew and a good computer programmer. My mother always complained that he wasn't ambitious enough, never wanting to work in management, preferring to program computers, but that made sense to me. Management was a lot of stress. Programming computers was fun. If you could have a job having fun, isn't that what you should do?
Chapter 18: Peter Romano
I drove down to New Jersey in the afternoon. Once I went east to Albany and I got far enough south, I had to go west a long way. It seemed to me like there should be a more direct way to Sparta, New Jersey, where my father lived. Maybe one that only involved going south. I promised myself that I would get some maps and figure it out.
I parked my car in front of his little house and went to the door. I knocked a few times and he answered it. "Hi James!" he said.
"Hi Dad," I said.
"Come in, I haven't seen you in a long time."
"Yeah, it's been a while."
"What are your plans?"
"I have the interview with Peter tomorrow and then I will head back home."
"Okay, let's get some dinner."
We walked down the hill toward the lake and into the plaza. We went to a restaurant named Arthurs where I ordered a plain hamburger and fries.
"Remember when you used to bring me to work when I was a kid and I learned to program computers?" I asked.
"Yes. Peter was impressed with you then. He is looking forward to seeing you."
"Do they still have the old PDP 11/34?"
"Yes, they have it, but it hasn't been turned on in years now. It's obsolete."
"That was a nice machine. My Minix computer is like it, with the 64K text plus 64K data segments and everything."
"Have you applied to other jobs?" my father asked.
"I sent my resume to Santa Cruz Operation but I haven't heard back."
"Who?" Dad asked.
"SCO."
"Oh, the Seawolf submarine uses SCO Unix. You will be working with it."
The waiter brought me a giant hamburger on a big roll with a plate of french fries. I picked up the hamburger and took a bite. "This is a really good hamburger," I said.
"I'm glad that you like it," my father said.
I finished chewing and said, "What are we doing with the Seawolf submarine?"
"We are doing testability analysis and automated diagnostics. You'll see."
"I guess that I will," I said.
In my conversations with the Agency, it had emerged that it was helpful for the military to have a spy in a defense contractor like Romano. Not just to keep an eye on Romano, but also because small defense contractors work with large defense contractors and it would mean keeping an eye on them, too. It wouldn't be a criminal investigation, though, because if you put someone in jail every time a defense contractor screwed up, there wouldn't be room for the drug dealers. If I got the job, I would take a new official cover, something associated with the Department of Defense.
As we walked back up to my father's house, we discussed computers and Romano's contracts. I learned that Romano mostly worked as a subcontractor under big defense contractors, but that Peter was also always applying for a type of contract called an SBIR or Small Business Innovation Research to develop their technology.
My father didn't have any beer in the house because he didn't drink. He did show me a nice beer glass that he had gotten during a trip to Germany. He traveled frequently on business when I was a kid, and I supposed he probably still did. I drank some water before heading to bed.
The next morning, I put on the nice clothes that my mother got me for Christmas and a tie that I already had, and walked to my father's office to interview with Peter Romano.
"Hi, James, how are you. I'm glad that you were able to come meet with us today," Peter said.
"Hi, nice to see you," I replied.
"Let me just outline where the company stands before we get into the details. You remember Romano Associates Inc., your father used to work there?"
"Yeah, how could I forget?"
"Well, the board of directors decided that they don't need me anymore, so I took some of my own money and started this company, Romano Automation. Under our agreement with RAI, your father will officially come to work for us shortly, although he is coming in on nights and weekends now. Two of my kids, Geoff and Luke are still at RAI. I don't know when they will come join us. My son Tim is our Chief Financial Officer. We have eight people working for us right now."
"It must be exciting to start a new company," I said.
"Yes, very exciting. Right now we have a big contract for the Seawolf submarine. We have lots of schematics in Orcad and we need them written in VHDL so that we can run them through WSTA, that's the Weapons Systems Testability Analyzer. That's where you come in. You and Jane will write the VHDL for these schematics, and Thurston, our applications engineer, will inspect them and run them through WSTA." He pronounced WSTA, "wusta."
That sounded mindbogglingly boring in spite of Peter's enthusiasm. "I am a computer programmer," I said.
"Sure, there will be plenty of opportunity to program computers just like your father. But this is the contract that we have, and as a small company we have to take what we can get."
"Okay." I said.
"So your father says that you were a grad student at Cornell."
"I was taking grad classes at Cornell."
"What classes did you take?"
"Advanced Algorithms and Numerical Analysis."
"And you graduated from Clarkson?"
"Yes. I studied math and computer science."
"Your father is a mathematician. We need more men like him. He's a genius."
"Thanks."
"We are hoping that you will turn out to be another George." George was my father's name.
"I hope so too," I said. I wasn't sure how I felt about living in my father's shadow.
"Okay, you're a professional, so I'll treat you like one." That sounded promising. "I'm going to start you out at twenty thousand per year. Then after six months I will raise you to thirty, and then after a year I will raise you to forty. How does that sound?"
It was big money to a farm hand, I knew. People up by the farm were happy to work for five dollars an hour and this was twice that. But twenty thousand didn't seem like a lot for white collar work. I would be staying with my father, though, so I wouldn't be spending the money on housing. That made a big difference. "Agreed," I said and shook Peter's hand.
"Let me introduce you to some of the people around here. Tim! This is George's son, James. We just hired him, he will be working the Seawolf project. He is a fresh out."
"Hi James," Tim said.
"Thurston, come here. This is George's son, James. He's a fresh out and we're hiring him. He will work with you on the Seawolf project."
"Nice to meet you." He didn't seem to mean it.
"James, this is Geoff's fiancee Jane, you will be working with her. Her father used to be your father's officemate." Jane was blond and pretty. I decided that I would like working with her.
Soon we were finished with the introductions and I asked the obvious question. "When do I start?"
"That's a very good question. When do you want to get him on payroll Tim?"
"How about February; February seems good," Tim replied.
"Okay, you'll start on February 3. We'll see you then."
So there it was. I had a job, another job I mean. I still had my job as a CIA agent, but nobody knew about that. No one even knew that I spoke Russian. I was sure that it would have come as a big shock to my mother who spent years learning Indonesian at Cornell. Of course there wasn't anyone around to speak Russian to.
I called my mother and told her that I had a job. "Very good," she said. "When do you start?"
"February 3," I said.
"And you will stay with your father?"
"Yes," I said.
"You better tell Grandma."
I called my grandmother. "I have a job," I said.
"What is he paying you? He better be paying you right," she said.
"He made a generous offer."
"And where will you be living?" she asked.
"I will stay with my father," I answered.
"Well, if that's what you want to do I guess that you will do it. When does this job start?"
"February 3."
"You can't leave February 3. I have stuff that needs to be done then."
"That is when the job starts, Grandma."
"We will discuss this when you get back."
I didn't know what Grandma's problem was. Surely she didn't think that I was going to stay on the farm with my fancy education. That would be absurd. She was always trying to control and manipulate people that way, though. I wished that she would be happy for me that I got a job and could start a career doing what I liked, programming computers.
My father took me to lunch at Arthurs. I had another one of their giant hamburgers. I got it well done, but it was still juicy. They obviously knew the secret to cooking a good hamburger. I ate the entire hamburger and all of my fries. Then we walked up the hill to his house and I packed up my stuff and headed up to the farm.
Chapter 19: Open Problems
I had a few weeks before I had to go to New Jersey to start my new job. My grandmother kept on telling me that I couldn't leave then, and I kept on ignoring her. It was getting so that I didn't want to be in the house with her. With that in mind, I drove up to Clarkson to meet with Professor Jones about the paper that we were working on.
The semester hadn't started yet and it seemed as though we had the Science Center to ourselves. I wanted to get as much accomplished on this trip as possible because it would be a lot harder to travel up there from New Jersey, eight hours instead of four each way. It was still morning when I got there and I found Professor Jones's office door open.
"Good morning," I said.
"Good morning. You are earlier than I expected," Professor Jones replied.
"I had a good trip, except for this patch of black ice that I hit near Watertown. I was going fifty-five and---"
"You had an accident?"
"Yeah, the road bended, but the ice slick kept me going straight. I ran into the snow bank. Someone on a tractor saw it happen and pulled me out. No big deal."
"I hope that you have a safer trip home," Professor Jones said.
"Don't worry, I know where the black ice---" I said.
"Is your car okay?"
"Yeah. It's a lucky thing that I have the grill guard and the headlight guards. They make it harder to damage my Bronco."
"Okay, let's get to work then. I wrote a proof for that issue that you brought up where the adversary keeps track of the factors and makes his own bogus---" he said.
"Great. I think that was our big outstanding issue with this paper."
"Would you like to look at the proof? I emailed it to you but I know that you've been unable to pick up email."
"Yeah, let me see," I said.
And soon we were hard at work on our paper. People reading a scientific paper can't imagine how much work goes into it. Every sentence says something important. They are intended to be read completely and thoroughly, but all too often they are skimmed or big sections are skipped. I wondered how many goofs in the scientific literature were the result of people skimming their references. I knew that we would be lucky if anyone ever did anything but skim our paper. It still had to be perfect to get past the referees.
Potsdam was in deep frost at minus ten degrees and I didn't want to go outside to get lunch or anything else. I figured that I should be used to it after going to college there, and that I should be ready for winters like that in Russia. After we had worked for a while, I suggested that two open problems might be related.
"I would be surprised if that were the case," Professor Jones said.
"Let me think about it. Maybe I can come up with an algorithm relating them," I said. My intuition suggested that they should be related. I put this on the background of my mind to think about.
We discussed my new job at Romano Automation. "So what sort of business is this?" Professor Jones asked.
"It is a defense contractor," I said. "They do testability and diagnostics for weapons systems."
"A defense contractor," he said. "I don't like that."
"It's a job," I said. "And jobs are hard to come by these days."
"Do they have Internet?"
"No, they don't. I will encourage them to get it, but I think that they are running on a shoestring budget. The defense draw down and---"
"Yes, the end of the Cold War is rough on defense," Professor Jones said. He seemed a little impatient.
"They have some Unix machines, so at least I will get daily email through UUCP as soon as I figure out how to configure that and get a UUCP account somewhere."
"Send me a note with your new email address when you get that running."
"Don't worry, I will."
It was late afternoon when we were finished and my car was ice cold. I started it up and left it running in the parking lot to warm up while I waited in the Science Center.
A janitor saw me waiting there. "Hey, how's it going? My name's Bob."
"I'm Jim," I said. "Jim Washburn."
"You know, I used to be in the Marines and there is a big Marine base down in Maryland called Fort Meade. Except that there aren't hardly any Marines there at all. It's all office buildings for a secret agency that breaks codes. Have you heard of NSA?"
I nodded.
He continued, "So I have a friend there and it is great working there, because you can just say take of this guy, and they take care of him---"
"It was nice meeting you. I think my car's warm now."
"Take it easy. You should check out the NSA."
I went out to my car and the temperature gauge was up to the eighth way mark, meaning that there was a little heat. I turned the heat and the fan all the way up and scraped a little frost off my windows. Then I headed back to the farm.
The drive through the Adirondacks was treacherous, and made harder by the logging trucks which block you going up the hill until you pass them and then push you at terrifying speeds going down the hill. I wasn't sure how fast they could stop with all of those trees loaded on them and I didn't want to find out. These were not good roads to travel on in January.
When I got home, my grandmother asked me how my meeting went.
"It went well. We resolved some problems with our paper," I said.
"I am afraid that he is taking advantage of you," she said.
"No, I get credit for all the work I do. He told me that professors do take advantage of students at some elite schools such as MIT, though."
"He went to MIT?"
"Yeah, for undergrad."
"You should have applied to MIT when you graduated from high school."
"A little late now, I think," I said.
"What's this job that you have with Romano pay?"
"We've been over this. He is going to start me at twenty, then raise me up to forty over a year or so."
"You know that he always promises your father raises and doesn't deliver them," she said.
"This is the job that I have. So I am happy with it. Why can't you be happy with it?"
"I just don't want people to take advantage of you," she said.
"Listen, I'm going to go down to the bowling alley to see who is around," I said. I wanted to get away from her.
"Okay, but be back in time for supper," she said.
##
Down at the bowling alley, I found Mitch and Charlie sitting at the bar. Mitch was unkempt as always with wild, druggie eyes. He smiled at me. Charlie had brown hair down to his collar. He was dressed in flannel and blue jeans and had a cold, hard look to him. He was the cousin of a girl in my class in high school. I was sure that he dealt drugs.
I took a stool next to Mitch. "I got a new job down in New Jersey," I said.
"Doing what?" Mitch asked.
"Programming computers."
"How much does it pay?" Charlie asked. I could see the wheels turning in his head.
"Enough," I said. "It pays enough."
"Is that what you went to college for? To program computers?" Mitch asked.
"Yeah, I studied math and computer science."
"I think that its great that you went to college. Are you going to come back and visit at all?" Mitch wanted to know.
"Yeah, I will be back occasionally."
Ray brought me my beer. "So you're going to New Jersey," he said.
"Yeah. I've got a job down there."
"Have you been there before?"
"That's where my parents live."
"We were all wondering where you came from, when you showed up in high school."
My high school yearbook divided the class into Natives and Imports with group pictures of each. That was typical of the way people around there thought. You could have moved there when you were just a little kid, but you are forever an import to them.
"Have you seen Cheryl around?" I asked Ray.
"Haven't seen anything of her. She must be on break from school now."
"Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I guess that she doesn't want to come hang out with us anymore," I said.
"Her father bowls on Wednesday nights, it used to be she'd come hang out with him some, but not now. We don't see anything of her now," Ray seemed as agitated about her not being around as I was.
"Oh well, don't worry about it. She dumped me anyway. I guess that she must have found somebody better at Buffalo."
"Or maybe she is just really busy. I didn't go to college, but I know that it is a lot of work. Takes a lot of your time," Ray said.
"Most of us just go to work," Mitch said.
Chapter 20: Hissy Fit
Soon the beginning of February arrived and I packed some clothes and stuff to take with me to my father's house. I didn't pack the big stuff, like my stereo, only what I would need. My father's house wasn't big and I didn't want to bring anything unnecessary. It was February 1, a Saturday, and I started bringing my stuff to my car.
"What are you doing?" my grandmother asked.
"Packing."
"No, you can't go to New Jersey now."
"You don't understand, I have a job. It starts Monday. I have to leave now."
"I need you around here. Kevin Horsefelt is bringing a load of hay on Monday and I need you to unload it."
"You will have to find someone else to unload it, as I will be in New Jersey," I said.
She started screaming and crying. "You can't go to New Jersey. You can't go live with your father. I forbid you."
"I'm sorry, but that is what I am going to do."
"No. You aren't ready. I will tell you when it is time for you to go to New Jersey. At least not for a few more days!"
"I made an agreement to start work on Monday, so I have to go."
She cried and yelled and screamed. I didn't understand how she thought that would change the simple fact that I was supposed to start a job on Monday. What did she think I was going to do? Stay and live with her on the farm forever? That would be insane. It was time to leave and that was what I was doing.
"I shook hands with Peter," I said. "I said that I would be there Monday morning. So I have to pack my car." I hadn't planned on leaving until Sunday, but it looked like my plans were going to have to change.
"Just wait a week, then you can go to New Jersey," she said.
"I have to start work on Monday, Grandma."
She got in a rage and screamed, "If you leave now, don't ever come back. Do you hear that? Don't ever set foot in this house again!"
It didn't seem likely that she would send me off with a cup of coffee and a bacon sandwich, so I got in my Bronco and left. I stopped at the Stewarts in Fort Plain to get some coffee and a stale danish, and then I got on the Thruway at Canajoharie. It was a long drive, six and a half hours to my father's and I wondered if there was a shortcut through the Catskills that I could take in the future.
I listened to some of my mix tapes on the tape player in my dashboard. Six and a half hours is a long way to drive and I had left earlier than I had planned. I was excited about my new job and I didn't understand why my grandmother wasn't excited as well. All my life, growing up first with my parents in New Jersey, and then in high school on the farm with my grandmother, I had talked about computers, and how to program them.
I had written C programs on the computer that my mother had bought me when I was a teenager, a Tandy 2000 with a 16-bit 80186 processor and a ten megabyte hard disk. I had a library of computer books, which I had studied with an intensity that surprised even my father. When I was sixteen, I had a summer internship with the New York Academy of Sciences writing programs in 8085 assembler code at the ICL plant in Utica. Now I was a man and I had a job programming computers. How could Grandma not understand?
When I pulled in front of my father's two-bedroom house in Sparta, he was surprised to see me. "I thought that you weren't coming until tomorrow," he said.
"Yes, I was, but my grandmother had a meltdown and I thought that I better leave right away."
"Let's get you unpacked and then we'll go to Kroghs and you can tell me about it."
He showed me the bedroom that I would sleep in, across from his bedroom with the bathroom in between. We unloaded my stuff and brought it into my bedroom. Then we locked up my car and walked down the hill to the plaza.
"You must be tired from the drive," he said.
"Tired and hungry," I said.
"How did you come? Did you take 81 south from Syracuse?"
"No, I took the Thruway to Route 17 to I-80," I said.
"I think 81 is faster."
I knew that my mother took I-81 when she went up to Potsdam when I was in college. You had to cut through the corner of Pennsylvania to take that route. "I'd like to find a route through the Catskills," I said.
"I don't think any roads go that way."
"You wouldn't believe the shortcuts I found through the Adirondacks going up to Clarkson. I cut half an hour off of my trip." Half an hour might have been an exaggeration.
"Well, no one is stopping you from trying. I have some maps," he said.
We reached the Plaza. "Thank you for taking me to get something to eat," I said. "I'm starving."
"That's fine," he said. "I need to eat, as well."
We went into Kroghs and my father told the maitre d' that we needed a table for two. It was dark in Krogh's with lights against the dark wood walls and at first I could hardly see where we were going. The maitre d' led us to a table and we sat down.
I looked at the menu. "Are we going to get an appetizer?" I asked.
"Yes, go ahead and order an appetizer. We'll share or I won't have any, but you go ahead."
The waiter came around and asked us if we wanted drinks. I ordered a Sam Adams beer, a special treat, and they had it on tap. My father ordered an ice tea. For an appetizer I ordered nachos. Their nachos came with beans and meat on top, the way that I liked them.
"So, tell me about your grandmother's meltdown," my father said.
"She forbid me to come to New Jersey and she forbid me to work for Peter, and she told me that if I left to never go back," I said.
"She is used to getting her way," my father said. "She used to always get her way because she was pretty."
"She also manipulates people," I said. "I don't like that."
"I don't either," my father said. "She destroyed my marriage."
I was quiet for a while after that. I knew that it was true, but I was surprised to hear my father talking about it. Grandma hated all of her daughters' husbands and had wrecked more than one marriage. The waiter brought my beer. I took a drink, it was sweeter and hoppier than the stuff that I usually drank. I preferred it to the point that I would have drunk no beer but Sam Adams if I could have afforded it.
"Anyway, I may take her up on that," I said. "Not going back, I mean." Grandma had miscalculated with that threat. Instead of making me fear abandonment, she had awakened my poetic fantasy about leaving the farm and never going back.
The waiter took our order. My father ordered the chicken and I ordered the salmon. I loved seafood. It was hard to get fresh seafood at the farm, and my grandmother and aunt didn't eat seafood anyway. There was one seafood dish that my grandmother cooked for me on rare special occasions, but mostly the food up there was beef and potatoes. I didn't like potatoes unless they were french fries, which my grandmother never cooked, or home fries which she did.
"You should visit my parents," my father said. "They would be happy to see you and wouldn't yell and scream at you."
I wasn't close with those grandparents. I had driven right by their exit on the Thruway without even thinking about it. Their family was dysfunctional in its own way. My father's youngest brother, Uncle Mark, lived there, or near there, and he had been a drug dealer. His daughter, Alison, had been adopted by my grandparents when she was little and she did not get along with Uncle Mark at all. She was about my age. My father had another younger brother who had been in the Navy and was working for a defense contractor up in Massachusetts
"I guess that we can do that some day. We have plenty of time," I said, hoping that he would forget.
"Don't worry about your fight with your grandmother," he said. "You did the right thing. Peter would have been disappointed if you hadn't turned up for work on Monday."
"Yes," I said. "We shook hands."
My nachos were getting cold, so I tried to take some with my fingers, but it made a mess. I shrugged, and ate them with my fork. The plate of nachos was big enough to be a meal all by themselves. "Have some nachos, Dad," I said. "I can't eat all of this and my dinner."
"What you don't eat we'll bring home in a doggy bag," my father said. "Don't worry about it."
"Grandma would have a fit if I ordered all this food and didn't eat it," I said. "If we even went out to eat, that is. I don't think that she has taken me out to eat since the eighties."
Part 2: The Agent
Chapter 21: Automation
My first day at work was busy. First, Peter showed me how to answer the phones, I was to say, "Romano Automation; this is James." He also showed me how to make coffee. The coffee machine was in a room with a water cooler. We had a coffee service bring us pre-measured bags of ground coffee to dump in the coffee maker and a water service brought us five gallon bottles of Poland Spring water, trucked from a spring in Maine. I liked the bottled water better than the city tap water with its chlorine.
Thurston showed me how to write VHDL models based on schematics in Orcad. I knew that I could automate that process and resolved to reverse-engineer the Orcad data files so that I could translate them to VHDL. I looked at them and found them to be in a LISP-like language. Piece of cake.
Peter took Dad and I to breakfast at a deli in the Plaza with a breakfast counter. I ordered bacon sandwiches, I don't like eggs, and we talked about Romano Automation.
"So we will be busy with the Seawolf submarine for a while," Peter said.
"Not so long," I replied.
"What do you mean?"
"I can write a translator that converts the Orcad files into VHDL automatically. It should only take a few weeks."
"That's wonderful," Peter enthused. "We could sell that to the Navy."
"It's no big deal," I said.
"Why didn't any of our other engineers say that? Huh, George?"
"I didn't think of the possibility," my father said. "We don't even know how Orcad stores the schematics."
"Your son says that it's no big deal. Don't you James?"
"Yeah. The Orcad files are in a language called EDIF for Electronic Data Interchange Format. It is like LISP, which is easy to parse. It shouldn't be too difficult."
"See that George?" Peter said.
"Well, let's see what he comes up with," my father said. "I'm busy with the automated diagnostics."
"I just hope that James doesn't automate us out of business," Peter said.
I ate my bacon sandwich. It wasn't like the ones I got on the farm. For one thing the bacon was too thin. The bacon at the farm was thick cut from the slaughterhouse. Also the bread was toasted too much. It should just be warm. Living in New Jersey was going to require me to make a few adjustments.
When we went back to work, Jane introduced me to her little dog Toto which she kept in her office.
"Toto, meet James," she said.
Toto came up and sniffed my foot. I bent down and pet Toto. He seemed to be a quiet, calm dog. "Hi Toto," I said.
"Toto and I work in here," Jane said. "If there is anything you need, you know where to find us."
"Okay, I'll keep that in mind."
I went back to the office that I shared with my father and started reverse engineering EDIF. Most of the information in the schematic was extraneous and I could ignore. I just wanted to extract the connectivity information. There were two challenges that I saw. One was setting the direction of the signal. That had to be massaged. The other was that EDIF was a net-based language while VHDL was a component-based language. That meant that I needed to read the entire schematic into an intermediate representation, then twist it to output the VHDL. It wasn't a trivial job, but it wasn't a huge software engineering project, either. It just required that some brains be applied to it.
I saved what I was doing and made models for a few schematics. It was work that needed to be done and it also gave me a feel for what the translator should do. When I was done with that, it was time for lunch.
Peter took the entire office out to lunch at Arthurs. He called it a business meeting. Everything was a business meeting with Peter because Peter always talked business. He told his secretary, Pammy, to mind the shop and we walked down the sidewalk to Arthurs where we took a big table.
Peter talked about the marketing end of things. Contracts that he was pursuing, products that we were developing, trips that he was going on, people that he was meeting with. I already knew that Peter always carried his passport in his briefcase, although most of his travel was to boring places like Dayton, Ohio; Huntsville, Alabama; and Newport News, Virginia. My father also traveled, but less frequently.
After a while, Peter asked Thurston for a report on the Seawolf project. "The Seawolf project is going on schedule," Thurston said. "With the additional manpower, it should last another six months."
"James is going to write a translator that will automate the whole thing," Peter said. "It will only take a few weeks."
"Well, I will have to see the translator before I adjust my schedule," Thurston said. "If it is so easy to write a translator, why didn't George write one alread---"
"It's not so easy," my father said. He sounded angry. "I've been busy with the diagnostics, working under the gun. It's nice that we have James on board to help with the software---"
"In the meantime, we need James to work on making VHDL models---" Thurston said.
"Whoa, whoa, guys," Peter said. "James will have plenty of time to do everything that he needs to do, isn't that right James?"
"Yeah, I guess so," I said. I really didn't have a good idea of how much time anything would take.
"Don't say that you guess so," Peter said. "We need definite answers from you." The gist of that comment was something drill instructors said, although they were less polite.
Our food arrived. I waited until everyone was served before biting into my hamburger, but I was hungry. I loved the giant hamburgers at Arthurs, made with high quality meat and cooked perfectly. I munched on my hamburger while Thurston and my father argued over new topics. While they argued, Peter just sat and listened. I ate my entire hamburger, all of my french fries, and some pickles as well.
After lunch, I went to the lab in the back. There I found a computer running SCO Unix. The root password was on a piece of paper taped to the monitor so I created an account for myself. I dialed into the network at Clarkson and sent an email to UUNET with my credit card number asking for an account. I also said that I wanted to register the domain "romano.com."
I hung up as soon as I was done because it was a long-distance phone call. Then I started reading the man pages on the Unix-to-Unix Communication Protocol, UUCP, and writing configuration files to get my email on a daily basis once my UUNET account was active. It took me a few hours.
When I got back to my desk, my father asked me where I'd been.
"I was just setting up email with UUCP on the SCO Unix machine," I said.
"Oh, so we will have Internet like the big defense contractors?" he asked.
"Well, we will get one email delivery per day. If you want to get email, set up an account for yourself on that machine."
"I'll have to look at that, although there is no one that I email with."
"That's okay." I took my empty coffee cup and went to get some coffee. There was always fresh coffee in the coffee room.
Soon it was five o'clock, but I didn't go home. I started writing a simple EDIF parser in C++ which ignored the attributes that I considered extraneous and kept just the connectivity information. When I was a kid, my father would often go into the office before I got up in the morning, and come home after I went to bed at night. I understood why. There were no computers at home.
"You've got to watch out for Thurston, he's a troublemaker," my father said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"He'll stab you in the back and try to make you look bad. They were happy to be rid of him at the old company."
I was still trying to catch up with the Byzantine politics of the old company as well as the new company. "I guess that I will be careful of him," I said.
"We need him because he is our applications engineer, but sometimes I think that he makes more trouble than he is worth."
"Can't we get a new applications engineer?" I asked.
"It would take a while for Peter to find one and for us to train him. So we're stuck with Thurston."
In other words, Peter wanted to keep Thurston even though, as had become obvious during lunch, he fought with my father like cats and dogs. I figured that the less I got involved in that feud, the better off I would be. There was clearly more than technical issues at play there.
My father and I locked up the building at eight o'clock and went to Krogh's for dinner. Chastened from my last experience there, I just ordered the nachos for dinner and a beer. I raised my beer glass, "To my first day on the job," I said. My father touched his ice tea glass to it and we drank.
The nachos were plenty of food, particularly after the big lunch at Arthurs. After we ate, we walked home in the dark.
Chapter 22: The Algorithm
As I worked on my EDIF to VHDL translator, named simply edif2vhdl, I had cryptography on the back of my mind. Specifically, I had the relationship between the two problems that I discussed with Professor Jones on the back burner. One morning, as I was carrying a full cup of coffee back to my desk, I thought of an algorithm that related the two problems. As soon as I sat down, I wrote the algorithm down.
"I just solved a big crypto problem," I told my father.
"Really, what was that?"
"I came up with an algorithm to relate two hard problems," then I spent ten minutes explaining the problems that the algorithm related.
I wanted to show the algorithm to Professor Jones, but it was full of Greek letters and exponents, so it wasn't convenient to email. I took out a fax header sheet and filled in Professor Jones's information, taking his fax number from his business card, and put the algorithm, which was short but clever, in the comments box.
I took it to the fax machine in the conference room and, as I was dialing in the fax number for the math and computer science department, a woman in my earpiece said, "Fax it to us, as well. Our fax number is---"
"Wait a second," I said softly. "Wait until this fax goes through."
When the fax machine spit out the transmission report, I put the cover sheet back in the feeder and said, "Okay, now."
The woman in my earpiece read me a fax number which I dialed as she talked. When she was done, I pressed send and faxed my algorithm to CIA headquarters. I stapled the transmission reports to the fax sheet and brought them back to my desk to file.
I called Professor Jones at Clarkson. "Hi, Professor Jones, it's me, Jim."
"Hi Jim. What can I do for you?"
"I just faxed you an algorithm relating those two problems that we were talking about."
"Okay, I will have to go find out how to retrieve faxes. Thank you. I will look at it."
"Okay, talk to you later."
I figured that it would be a while before Professor Jones got around to analyzing my algorithm, but it wasn't long at all before the intercom sounded and Pammy said, "James, there is a phone call for you on line 1."
I picked up line 1 and it was Professor Jones. "I have your fax and I am trying to understand your algorithm. Could you explain it to me?"
I explained the underlying idea to him for five minutes. "Hmmm. That is clever," he said. "I'm not sure, but I think that this could be important." I hoped that it wasn't too important, that sort of thing could ruin my CIA career.
"Thanks," I said.
"What do you want to do with this?" he asked.
"I thought that maybe we could write a paper for Crypto."
"You want to collaborate? That's good. Okay, I will start writing it. I'll also show your algorithm to some people to see what they think of it."
"Okay, thanks," I said.
I was feeling good about the reception my algorithm got from Professor Jones, and told my father, "Professor Jones thinks that my algorithm might be important."
"Oh, that's good. I don't know enough about it to know whether it would be important," he said.
"You are a mathematician," I pointed out.
"Yes, but this is not the sort of math that I studied. Also, these problems weren't studied when I was in grad school. Let me see it though."
I showed him my algorithm and he said, "That is pretty clever."
I figured that a copy of my fax was probably coming off a fax machine at Fort Meade, where the NSA is headquartered, by then. That was what CIA did with cryptography that they came across. I wondered if they would find any national security applications for it or just add it to the list of theorems that I imagined they kept in a secret book like the Pythagorean Cult.
Soon Peter popped his head into our office. "We are going for lunch at Arthurs, do you guys want to come?"
"Sure," I said.
"One sec," my father said. Peter disappeared.
"I like a boss that feeds you," I commented.
"That is one of the nice things about working for Peter," my father said.
We found the table where Peter and his other employees were seated and we took our seats. "How is everybody doing?" Peter asked.
We all said "good."
"What is everybody working on?"
"I just developed a new algorithm that we are going to publish at Crypto," I said.
"That's good, that's good. Getting our name out there. How is your translator coming?"
"It's getting there. I finished the data capture and now I am working on twisting the data and putting it out as VHDL," I said.
"George, how is his translator coming?"
"How he said it is. I've been busy with my stuff."
"Okay, because if he is busy making crypto algorithms, that could affect the schedule for his translator."
"I didn't spend a lot of time on it," I said. "It just popped into my head while I was getting coffee."
##
A couple of weeks went by. Professor Jones called. "I'm going to Sandia to give a talk on your algorithm."
"Oh, good. That's exciting."
"Yes. Keith Walker, who is a cryptographer there, invited me. It'll be in a couple of weeks."
I didn't know what the Department of Energy wanted with my algorithm, but I wasn't complaining. That was some good beans to have a national lab invite a talk about my work. I wondered if the NSA had anything to do with it.
After work, I went to Kroghs to get some dinner. I sat up at the bar and ordered a beer and a plate of nachos. A man came in, wearing a tee shirt with a reproduction of an old World War II poster that showed a sinking battleship and said, "Loose Lips Sink Ships." He sat down next to me.
"So what do you do?" he asked.
"I'm a computer programmer," I said.
"What else do you do?"
"Sometimes, when there isn't anyone else at the office, I answer the phones."
"I mean, what do you do when you aren't programming computers?"
"I do a little cryptography," I said.
"Why don't you let the NSA do that for you?" he asked.
"Uh, maybe because when they do it, they don't tell us what they come up with," I said.
He got up and left. I sipped my beer and ate my nachos, thinking about the exchange. It seemed as though the NSA was reaching out to me, in a dark, spooky sort of way. They didn't know that I was CIA anymore than CIA knew how to break codes. Those secrets, the identity of CIA agents and cryptanalytic algorithms, were the crown jewels of their respective intelligence agencies and they didn't share them with each other.
I figured that it was a routine brush between a civilian cryptographer and the NSA, like the one that occurred last time I had visited Professor Jones, and shrugged it off. I didn't know much about the intricate dance done between NSA and civilian cryptographers, so I was open to interpreting any interaction with NSA as part of that protocol.
I knew that NSA had gotten basic information from my military and high school records when I started doing cryptography. Among that information would be my IQ, which was in the mid-to-high 150s. That alone might be enough reason for them to try to recruit me. This seemed aggressive, though.
After I ate my nachos and drank my beer, I walked out of Kroghs to find my father locking up the front door of the office. I joined him.
"What do you think of the NSA?" I asked.
"I don't know anything about them. Why?"
"I think that maybe they want me to go work for them."
"If you worked for the NSA you would be tightly controlled. If you stay here with us, you will have a lot of freedom," he said.
That seemed like a reasonable statement to me, even if it was self-interested. Professor Jones had been suggesting that I go to Crypto conferences held in Santa Barbara every August, and I decided that maybe I would go and find out what they were all about.
As we walked up the hill, I told my father that Professor Jones would be presenting my algorithm at Sandia.
"That's pretty good, having your algorithm presented at Sandia. Is there any reason that you aren't going?"
"I've never given an academic talk in my life," I said. "I don't think that I would want to start with a high-stakes talk at a national lab. Let Professor Jones do it, he knows what he is doing."
"Okay, as long as you're okay with that," my father said. "Peter wants you to get a security clearance. He has a security clearance form for you to fill out."
I couldn't fill out a security clearance form. The questions and explanations on it would blow my cover. But I didn't worry about it. Jane was the facility security officer. My security clearance paperwork would be sent to her by CIA and she wouldn't know where it came from. No one would question my Top Secret clearance, other people in the company that had clearance only had Secret.
Chapter 23: Translator
I was at the point on my translator where it was outputting VHDL and Thurston was looking at the output and telling me what was wrong. Peter took Dad and I out to breakfast at the deli. Before we left, Thurston said, "It's Friday, so Peter needs to eat breakfast three times."
At breakfast, Peter said, "I hear that you almost finished the translator."
"Yes," I said. "Just shaking the final bugs out of it."
"That's wonderful, James. I think that is wonderful. This is a new technology, isn't that right, George?"
"I guess so. It certainly speeds up schematic capture."
"I want you two to work on this new technology. I'm getting an SBIR to develop it."
"Okay," I said, munching on a bacon sandwich.
"But first, I have a question for you. Do you want to do cryptography?" Peter asked.
"Uh, yeah. I guess---" I said.
"Because there is another company, a big defense contractor, that would hire you. They don't care what you learned in school, they will teach you everything that you need to know."
I imagined myself in a big windowless room full of faceless people in black suits and white dress shirts, which was how I dressed when dealing with customers. "Uh, no, thanks. I would rather stay here."
"I thought that you would, I just had to ask," Peter said.
When we got back, Thurston popped his head in my office. "Those last VHDL models, they are perfect."
"Okay, I guess that we will start trying to feed the VHDL models to WSTA now," I said. WSTA, pronounced wusta, was the Weapons Systems Testability Analyzer that we had to run all the schematics through.
Thurston chose some representative Orcad models and I ran them through my translator, putting the resulting VHDL code on a three-and-a-half inch disk. He took the disk to the lab in back to transfer it to the MicroVAX and run it through WSTA.
I looked over some generated models to see if I saw anything wrong with them, and they all looked good. After about fifteen minutes, Thurston came back. "They all went through WSTA," he said.
I marked the EDIF to VHDL translator as version 1.0, recompiled it, and put the binary on a disk for Thurston to use on the Orcad models. "You're all set," I said.
My father overheard and said, "You finished the translator?"
"Yes," I said, smiling.
"Peter will be happy to hear that."
"Yeah, I'll go tell him," I said.
I went into the conference room and knocked on the door to Peter's office, which was open. Peter was dictating a letter to a handheld dictating machine. He let go of the record button. "James, yes, come in."
"I released the translator to Thurston. He's using it to translate the Orcad models into VHDL."
"Very good," Peter said. "That'll save the Navy a bundle. Of course that's a bundle that they were going to pay us. I'm going to sell your technology all over the military."
"It was nothing, really," I said.
"You did good. Now ask your father what you should work on now."
After I left Peter's office, I went to the lab and signed on to the SCO Unix machine. I had an email about a new operating system, BSD 4.4, which was a full Berkeley Unix system under a BSD license. It came on 20 3.5 inch disks for the source code which I would have to download somewhere with Internet access. I decided to do that on my next trip to Clarkson. I already had my eye on an unused lab machine to install it on.
I went back to my office. "What should I work on now?" I asked.
"We are going to replace WSTA," my father said. "So I need a tool that inputs VHDL and outputs a connectivity matrix."
"VHDL is a big language," I said. "We are only using a small part of it. In order to parse it, I will need a complete grammar for it."
"Figure out what you need to do that. Take as long as you need."
"The first thing that I will need is yacc for DOS." Yacc stood for "Yet Another Compiler Compiler" and came with Unix. There was an open source version called Bison, which also ran on Unix systems.
"Okay, where do you get that?"
"I dunno. Maybe I can compile Bison with Borland C. But that still doesn't solve the grammar problem."
"Well, look into it," my father said. "This will be our data capture tool."
So, I sat and thought about it, thumbing through catalogs of developer software that vendors sent us. I decided that the first step to take would be to order a copy of the VHDL standard. I went to see Pammy.
"Pammy, could we order an IEEE document? I think that it is called the VHDL Language Reference Manual."
"Okay, what's this for?"
"This is for new software development," I said.
"Okay." She made a note on a piece of paper.
I had just sat down again and started something on my computer, when Peter came into our office. "We are going to go to lunch at Arthurs," he said.
I saved what I was doing and went down to Arthurs. Peter was already there with Thurston. I sat down.
"Thurston tells me that your translator is working beautifully," Peter said.
"Thanks."
My father came in and sat down next to me.
"So what are you working on now?" Peter asked.
"My father asked me to write a data capture tool for VHDL so that we don't have to rely on WSTA," I said.
"Is this what we need George?" he asked.
"Yes. This is our next step in developing our technology," my father said.
"How long do you think it will take you?" Peter asked.
"I still haven't found the tools to parse VHDL," I said. "Writing the grammar might be the hardest part. I'm not sure. I need yacc for DOS."
"Grammar, yacc, what language are you speaking?" Peter asked.
"Yacc is a tool on Unix," my father said. "James needs it for DOS."
"And where are you going to find that?" Peter asked.
"First, I am going to try to compile Bison with Borland C. If that doesn't work---"
"Wait, what's Bison?" Peter asked.
"It's the GNU version of yacc," I said, pronouncing GNU, ga-nu.
"I don't know why I talk to you," he said. "You speak Unix. George, in plain English, what is the issue here?" I wondered if Peter had heard about my fluency in Russian.
"This could be a really large piece of software because VHDL is a big language with lots of features and James is trying to find the tools to make it manageable."
"Okay, that makes sense. James, if you need to buy any tools, just let me and Tim know."
"Okay," I said, grabbing a pickle from the bowl of pickles that Arthurs served when we sat down.
"Got that Tim? We need to buy James whatever tools he needs to write this data-capture program."
"I got it," Tim said.
"I already ordered the VHDL standard from IEEE," I said.
"Did you do that through Pammy? Because we are members of IEEE," Peter said.
"Yes, I did," I said.
"Very good," Peter said.
Our food arrived. Peter discussed business with other employees while I ate my hamburger. I really liked the hamburgers at Arthurs.
After lunch, we went back up to the office. Before I could head into my office, Peter told me to come in the conference room because he wanted to talk to me.
##
"You're a spy," he said.
For a moment I panicked. Then I settled down, he was probably asked to tell me that. I decided to see what he knew.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
He paused for a long, long, moment. Then he said, "You're a spy from academia come to find out what we are doing in industry."
In other words, he didn't have any idea. "Okay," I said. "Whatever."
"Just remember that," he said.
"How could I forget?" I asked.
"People worry that you do forget. That's all."
I went back to my office. "What did Peter want to talk to you about?" my father asked.
"Nothing important. He just wanted to remind me of something," I said.
I picked up the software developer catalog and started flipping through it again. A lot of the tools looked useful, but they were expensive. I knew that as a small company we couldn't afford fancy development tools. Finally, at the back of the catalog, I saw something that looked promising. Yacc for DOS. Not only did it run on DOS, but it came with four disks full of grammars. I didn't know if VHDL was in there or not, but I could hope.
"I found it!" I said.
"What did you find?" my father asked.
"Yacc for DOS. And it comes with grammars, too."
"Does it come with the grammar you need?"
"I don't know. I guess I won't until it arrives, but at least I will be able to generate a parser."
"Okay, so why don't you order it?"
"Let me check with Tim," I said.
I brought the catalog to Tim and said, "This is what I need."
"How much is it?" he asked.
"Two hundred dollars."
"Just put it on your credit card and submit an expense report when you get the receipt."
I didn't like that. Romano was slow paying expense reports. "Isn't there some way that we could put it on the corporate American Express card?"
"Just put it on your credit card. We'll reimburse you."
Chapter 24: Professor Jones
It was early April and the snow was mostly gone from Sparta. I must not have had enough of winter, though, because I was at Clarkson for a weekend, where it was still below freezing. Professor Jones would put me up for the night at his house along the St. Lawrence River so that we could work on our two papers, the one for Eurocrypt and the paper introducing my algorithm to the world.
Professor Jones had sent me two papers that Keith Walker with the Department of Energy had sent him after his talk. The first paper was a 1984 tech report from the Technion Institute in Israel which attempted to relate a different problem from the one I was trying to relate to the problem I wanted to reduce it to. It had nothing to do with my algorithm and had nothing as elegant or efficient in it.
The second paper was a survey of the problem that I was trying to reduce the first problem to by Keith Walker and it claimed that the other paper invented my algorithm first. I knew this to be bullshit because I studied both papers. I imagined that Professor Jones had as well and I wanted to see if he knew the reason that a government official was trying to prevent publication of my algorithm. The Agency didn't have a clue.
In Professor Jones's office, he was telling me about the forthcoming movie Sneakers. "If it is ready, they will screen it at Crypto. I am told that it is about different government agencies stealing secrets from each other."
That sounded too much like my reality. "That sounds interesting. Maybe I will come to Crypto."
"I strongly suggest that you do. There are people there that I would like you to meet."
"You say it is in Santa Barbara? Where do I get information about it?" I asked.
"I will forward you the Call for Participation when it comes out and you can go from there."
It was early afternoon and I was feeling hungry. "Is there someplace that we can get some lunch?" I asked.
"Oh yes, we have a new student center where we can eat. Come with me and I will show you."
He locked up his office and we went a little ways across campus to a brand new building that had just been a pile of dirt when I graduated. "This is the new Student Center," he said.
We walked in and to the right was a door. "That is the new hockey rink," he said. He opened the door and it was a hockey rink with thousands of seats around it. "It's much safer than the old one, people aren't so close to the ice," he said.
"So people don't get in so many fights in the crowd?" I asked. I remembered when I was an undergrad and students were getting trashed before the game and then coming back with bruises and black eyes.
"Exactly. Do you see the scoreboard?"
"That's huge. How much did it cost?" I asked.
"Pepsi donated it. Now Coke products are banned on campus."
"That sucks," I said.
We left the hockey rink and went to a big food court. "Get whatever type of food you want, it's on me," Professor Jones said.
"Thanks," I said. "I appreciate that."
I got some pizza at the new incarnation of Itza Pizza. When I was an undergrad, Itza Pizza had been in the basement of an administrative building and delivered pizza all over campus. You could call them up and read them the numbers on your student ID and they would charge it to your meal plan. They delivered a lot of midnight pizzas to the druggie element.
"Does Itza Pizza still deliver?" I asked Professor Jones as we waited on line at the register.
"I don't know," he said. "I didn't know that they ever delivered."
When we sat down, Professor Jones said, "I've got an NSA grant now. It's enough to support my research and a graduate student."
I knew what he was getting at but I couldn't go back to Clarkson. If I had been in doubt of that before the attack at the pond, I wasn't now. All the druggies in the North Country knew who I was and some of them had violent intentions toward me. The frat boys that attacked me were among the least dangerous of the people that I had busted. I would be found in the alley behind Congdon Hall with a shiv between my ribs.
Seeing that I wasn't answering, Professor Jones asked, "How much are they paying you at your defense job?"
"Not much," I said. "But I am supposed to get a raise after six months and a second raise after the first year."
"That surprises me. I would think that someone like you would be paid well."
"It's a small company without much financial backing," I said.
"What is it that you guys do again?"
"Automatic testing and diagnostics. The diagnostic reasoner that we have under development is going to be a big product. I do translation and data capture."
I took a sip of my Dr Pepper.
"So it has nothing to do with cryptography."
"No, but interestingly enough, Peter---my boss---told me that there was a big defense contractor that wanted me to go do cryptography for them. He said that they would teach me everything that they wanted me to know."
"Are you going to?"
"No, it sounds too controlled," I said.
##
After lunch, we got to work. Professor Jones was on his SPARCstation and I was looking over his shoulder as he edited the paper on my algorithm. The two papers that Keith Walker had sent us were on a table behind me. I knew that Professor Jones was waiting for an opportunity to tell me that we couldn't publish the paper because of Dr. Walker's survey, but I was hoping that by keeping the pressure on he would give me some piece of information that would make it all make sense.
It was dark out when he suggested that I look at the papers again. I started picking up the typewritten 1984 paper and he said, "No, look at the survey. It's easier to read."
I flipped through it to the page where Dr. Walker wrongly attributed my algorithm. I didn't want to argue that we should publish the paper, the NSA was making it clear that they didn't want me to, and we were all on the same side. Professor Jones wasn't being forthcoming at all as to why we shouldn't publish it. I began to feel that he actually didn't know.
"This looks like my algorithm," I said.
"Then it has been published before," Professor Jones said. "Let's go home now."
That was quick. He didn't even ask to look at it. He had clearly been waiting for me to make that `discovery'. I sighed and followed him out the door, stopping and waiting for him to lock his office.
I followed him home in my Bronco. He had an old, small rice burner which I imagined was awful on the icy roads of Potsdam, NY. When we got to his house, his wife, Linda, was waiting. "Did you get the paper all squared away?" she asked.
"The paper we are submitting to Eurocrypt is just about done. The other paper we aren't submitting."
Linda didn't seem surprised at the news. "Dinner will be ready shortly," she said.
"Let me take Jim around and show him the house while we wait," Professor Jones said.
He took me down to the basement where there was a puddle of water by the furnace. "The basement floods when the river is high," he said. "Usually in the spring."
"Your house is by the river?" I asked.
"You can't see it now, because it is dark, but I have a thousand feet of river frontage."
I imagined that the blackflies must be awful in the summer but instead said, "That's nice. Riverfront property is expensive some places."
We went back upstairs. "I like your furniture," I said.
"It's just stuff that we accumulated through grad school," Professor Jones said.
We sat down to dinner. Linda had cooked a nice meal and we ate. I told Professor Jones and Linda a bit about myself and Professor Jones revealed some information about his grad school years. It was late and I was tired, so I stifled a yawn.
"Honey, why don't you show him where he will sleep," Linda said.
Professor Jones took me to a room with a queen-sized bed in it. "How is this?" he asked.
The bed was made up and there was a big bookshelf facing it. "It looks fine," I said. I was interested to see what books were on the bookshelf, but it wasn't the right moment. We went back into the kitchen.
"How do you like living in Potsdam?" I asked. "It must be quite different from New Haven."
"It wasn't that much of a shock," Professor Jones said. "I did a post doc up in Canada before I came here."
"What is a post doc?" I asked. "I have heard that term before."
"A post doc is a job for a year or two after you get your Ph.D. You use it to get some research or teaching experience before you try to land a tenure-track faculty position."
"So it's like temp work for Ph.D.s," I said.
"Not exactly, it is like a degree beyond the Ph.D., but there is no degree associated with it."
"I can't imagine spending that long in school," I said.
"It's not so bad. You get paid, both in grad school and during a post doc. It's not like being an undergraduate."
"I guess that I better go to bed now," I said, stretching. "Good night."
"Good night," Professor Jones said. "If you need anything let us know."
I went in the bedroom and checked out the books. Then I went to bed.
Chapter 25: 386BSD
When I was done with Professor Jones Sunday morning, I went to a computer lab on campus with a box of fifty 3.5 inch disks to download 386BSD. I would need twenty disks for the source, twenty disks for the binaries, and maybe five disks would be bad. Since it was Sunday, there weren't a lot of people in the lab, just a proctor and a grad student so I found a machine and got to work.
Forty disks held about sixty megabytes of data. You might not think that is much, but back in those days downloading sixty megabytes over the Internet was a big deal that took several hours. In fact, in college we used to sing, "Fifteen megs over the net, another day older and deeper in debt," when downloading stuff. Well, I did anyway. Then writing the data out to forty disks was another big production.
It wasn't until late afternoon that I got on the road back to Sparta. I had hoped to be there in time to try to install it that day, but I wasn't going to be home until late. Even taking I-81 to I-80, it was still a six hour trip. When I got home, the house was dark and my father was asleep. There wasn't any place open to get a bite to eat, so I had a beer and went to bed.
The next morning, it was late when I got into the office with my box of disks. I got myself a cup of coffee and went into the lab to install 386BSD on the spare lab machine. First I booted off of the boot disk and did some configuration, then it prompted me to insert each disk in turn. This took a couple of boring hours but when I was done, I was pleased to reboot it and have it come up with a login prompt.
X-Windows wasn't available for 386BSD yet, so it could only be used in text mode. That meant no graphical user interfaces. On the bright side, it had virtual terminals that you could switch with a combination of the control, alt, and function keys. My thought was that if the software I developed compiled and ran under 386BSD as well as Borland C++, then it should be portable enough to compile and run anywhere. 386BSD came with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) which included C and C++. GNU had compilers targeting just about every machine out there. That made it useful to port my programs to the GCC C++ compiler, so that it would run everywhere.
The first thing that I tried to do was compile edif2vhdl on 386BSD. It didn't compile. There were a lot of errors and warnings. Rather than try to port edif2vhdl, I marked down in my engineering notebook that I would make sure the next version was compatible. Then I started compiling modules for my VHDL capture tool under 386BSD. I wanted this to be portable before I released it. I was soon absorbed in my work.
I was also working on another piece of software that was meant to work with the VHDL capture tool called the Matrix Editor. The Matrix Editor was intended to let Thurston inspect and even modify the connectivity matrices generated by the VHDL capture tool. For both pieces of software I had made a common class library to store the matrix to disk, and to input parts of the matrix from disk. Machines those days didn't have enough memory to store the whole connectivity matrix so most of it was kept on disk and brought in as needed. This is called caching. The class library was also being used by my father for his automated diagnostics tool.
That afternoon, Peter wanted to see the Matrix Editor. I brought it up on my computer at my desk with Peter and my father looking on and demonstrated how it worked. It used the Borland ObjectVision class library for the user interface and it was pretty slick. I showed how you could move around the matrix and even change matrix entries. It always showed the name of the part and wire for the rows and columns.
"No, no, no, this isn't what I want at all," Peter said.
"This is what we need to make everything work," I said.
"What I had in mind was something that told you whether something is testable," he said.
"I think that would be a completely different tool."
Then my father jumped in. "What I wanted him to do with this tool was to provide visibility into the data files that he is generating. We absolutely have to have that in order to write the software. Besides, you can't automatically determine if something is testable. It depends on the tests."
"We can't show this to customers, they won't know what it means," Peter said.
"This tool is for Thurston to use to inspect the connectivity matrix. We don't have to let the customer see it," Dad said.
Peter and my father continued to argue, and I was forgotten. It was dark out and I wanted to go eat dinner. "Maybe we could leave this as it is and develop another tool later on that does what Peter wants," I suggested.
They ignored me and kept on arguing. I shrugged and continued to play with my matrix editor. I thought that it was neat. It was still under development so I could add some features, but what Peter wanted was a whole different tool.
Finally they got done arguing and my father asked me if I wanted to get some dinner. I did, so we went to Kroghs and got a table.
I ordered the nachos as a meal and a beer. My father said, "Peter doesn't understand what we're trying to do with the matrix editor."
"Yes, we'll have to develop another tool that does what he wants," I replied.
"That won't be for a while, we have a lot under development now. Also, what he wants is a much bigger piece of software than the matrix editor and we would have to have a way of entering information about the tests."
"Yeah, I know," I said.
"So how did your trip to Clarkson go?"
"We aren't publishing the paper with my algorithm. The other paper is just about ready to submit."
"You better tell Peter, he was asking about your paper."
"I also downloaded 386BSD while I was up there and I have installed it on a machine in the lab."
"Oh, okay. I take it that 386BSD is a Berkeley Unix." BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution and started as a set of patches to AT&T Unix to support networking.
"It's BSD 4.4 which doesn't require an AT&T license. It is a complete operating system. You remember the BSD 4.3 patches to Unix? Well this is a complete Unix replacement."
"Okay, what are we going to do with it?"
"I am planning to use it for compatibility testing. I want all of my software, except the Matrix Editor of course, to be able to run on BSD."
"That is a good idea. What Unix systems do you have in mind that we would want to run on?"
"I was thinking that we want to target SunOS. Most serious engineering work is done on Sun computers these days."
"SunOS is a BSD operating system?"
"It is Unix with BSD 4.3 and X-windows. Yeah."
"Maybe we should get a Sun machine."
"They are pretty expensive," I said. "Ten thousand dollars or so."
"That is expensive," my father said. "Maybe we will get one as part of a contract. We are starting to do some work with IBM Federal Systems Division and they promised us an RS6000."
"Those things are supposed to be little supercomputers," I said. "They donated several hundred of them to Clarkson. They run AIX which is IBM's version of Unix."
"Is that BSD?" my father asked.
"No, I think that they folded all the networking into the System V extensions."
"You have your work cut out."
After dinner we walked home, talking about work. When we got there we were both tired and went to bed.
The next morning, I got in at about ten o'clock.
"What happened with your papers?" Peter asked.
"The Eurocrypt submission is almost ready, the other one we aren't publishing."
"Do you have a draft of it?"
"Yeah," I said.
"Well make a copy of it for me. We'll put it in your personnel file."
I couldn't imagine why he would want a draft of a paper that we weren't going to publish in my personnel file, but I went in my office and got out the folder and made a copy for Peter.
When I brought it in to Peter, he looked through it and said, "Pammy, put this in James's personnel file."
"Okay," she said.
"That way we can keep track of the work that you do," Peter said.
"Okay," I said. "Do you want a copy of the Eurocrypt submission too?"
"Not now. Bring it to me when it's done and ready to publish."
I went to the coffee room scratching my head. I didn't understand why a highly technical paper like that would be kept in my personnel file. But there were a lot of things that I didn't understand about Peter.
Chapter 26: Call for Participation
One night, I had dinner with my father. "Kevin is dropping out of Clarkson and he is going to come work with us," he said. Kevin was my sister's fiance.
"Wait, where is he going to stay?" I asked.
"He's going to stay with us."
I didn't like that. My father's house only had two bedrooms. "Don't you think that it will be a little crowded?"
"It might when your cousin Allison comes," he said.
"What do you mean when Allison comes?" I asked.
"She is going to stay with us for the summer."
"What is she going to do?"
"I don't know. She's got a job somewhere."
"Where is everybody going to sleep?"
"The couch, a futon in the living room. We'll be okay."
I didn't think that it was okay. I sipped my beer and thought about it. Then I said, "I got an email from Professor Jones with the Call for Participation for Crypto '92. Do you think that I can put it on expense report?"
"Sure you can put it on expense report, but don't expect them to pay it. They don't pay half the stuff that Peter thinks is legitimate no less something that he thinks is a distraction."
I sighed. Crypto was going to be expensive with air fare to Santa Barbara, conference fees, fees for staying in the dorms. I had enough credit on my Discover card, though. I had gotten the Discover card when I was a senior in college and they kept on raising my credit limit. Maybe I could collect money to pay it back from the Agency.
The next day, I read through the Call for Participation and the associated forms. I printed the forms out on the laser printer in the lab and took them into the room with the Xerox machine. I sat down at the electric typewriter and filled them in. Then I faxed them to the number on the forms.
I went into Tim's office. "Tim, I need airplane tickets to Santa Barbara for a conference."
"Use our travel agent." He told me the phone number, which I wrote down. I went back to my office and called the travel agent. I told her that I had to be in Santa Barbara and gave her the dates. She said that she would get tickets for me. I told her that I needed a rental car for the Thursday the conference got out until my flight back on Sunday, and she said that she would book one of those too.
My father looked up from his desk. "So you're going to Santa Barbara?"
"Yeah, for Crypto, like I told you."
"Did Peter say that he would pay the expense reports?"
"He said to fill them out, he didn't say whether he would pay them."
"Don't expect him to."
I shrugged. At least I was getting the time off to go. No one had tried to argue that I couldn't go to California that week. Peter came through our office talking with a customer, "---really important to the the NSA. I was like, `back to work guys.'"
"Hi," I said.
"Hi James," Peter replied. Then he turned to the customer and said, "Don't listen to him, he speaks Unix."
I looked into my monitor. I had been busy that morning getting registered for Crypto and hadn't gotten any work done. I started coding a subroutine, wondering why Peter kept on saying that I spoke Unix.
I changed course and called Professor Jones. "I registered for Crypto," I said.
"Good, I will see you there."
"They said that I could put it on expense report."
"Even better."
"But they haven't paid a single expense report that I submitted since I got here," I said.
"Well, I hope that works out for you. See you at Crypto."
Peter popped his head in our office, "We are having a bunch of submarine captains coming for a presentation tomorrow, so everybody wear suits."
"Okay," I said. I had a black Brooks Brothers suit that I had bought after starting work. I thought that I looked pretty sharp in it.
The next day, I drove to work so as not to get my suit dirty or sweaty. I parked in front of Arthurs. When I got to the office, I was told to go to the big conference room downstairs.
When I walked into the room, the first thing I noticed were five guys in black suits with military haircuts. Those must have been the submarine captains. One nudged another looking at me. The other looked up at me and then said to the first one, "He's not so hot." It was clear that they both recognized me from somewhere.
Then a full day of presentations began. Most of the presentations were given by Peter and my father. They were about the diagnostic reasoner my father had under development, and the Seawolf project, and other technical issues. Peter introduced me as the guy who invented the EDIF to VHDL translator that had saved them so much time and money. He said that I was a genius and I could feel the blood rushing to my ears. They turned red when that happened.
I didn't have to give a presentation. I didn't think that Peter trusted me to give one, but that was okay with me. I wasn't so happy about having to sit in the conference room all day, but that was what Peter wanted and he was the boss. We couldn't buy them lunch, because they weren't allowed to accept gifts from contractors, but we went to Arthurs on separate checks.
At the end of the day, after the military people left, Peter came in our office and said, "Good job, guys."
"Thanks," my father said. "I think that I need to make more view graphs."
View graphs were what my father called slides. He made them on the computer and printed them onto transparencies with a color printer. There weren't color laser printers in those days, so printing the transparencies was an ordeal with the inkjet printer they kept for the purpose.
I knew that those guys we had given our presentations to weren't submarine captains. I knew a lot about the Navy, after all my new official cover was Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and submarine captains are busy guys. The idea that five of them would come to a tiny defense contractor in western New Jersey for presentations on something as ancillary as diagnostics was risible. You probably couldn't get five of them into a room to learn about a major new weapons system.
I was sure that Peter knew that. He had been an officer in the Army in a previous life. He probably knew who they were and what they wanted, but figured that while they were here he would try to sell them some diagnostics. That was one of the things that made him a marketing genius.
I went to the front part of the office suite and found a UPS box addressed to me. I brought it back to my office and opened it. It was my new five-disc CD changer that I had bought with my credit card rewards program. I set it up by my computer and decided to make a trip to the mall to buy CDs and headphones.
"What's that?" my father asked.
"It's a CD changer," I said.
"Can you hook it up to the computer?"
"If I had a sound card, I could," I said.
"Let's hear it play something."
"I can't. I don't have an amplifier, or speakers, or even a set of headphones. No CDs, either, just records. I will have to go to the mall."
"Okay. When you get it working, show it to me."
Just then his computer started screaming. We were used to this happening by now when he ran his software. It was a thermal alarm indicating that the CPU was about to catch fire. The cheap computers we had were not designed for long periods of heavy computation.
"Maybe you should port your software to the RS6000 that we are getting," I said. "That would crunch your numbers for you without melting the processor."
"When we get it, I will certainly look into that," he said. The word "certainly" usually meant the opposite with him.
"Let's go get dinner," I said.
We locked up the office and went to Kroghs. After we ordered, I said, "You don't really think that all of those people will fit in your house, do you?"
"Sure, we have plenty of room," he said.
"Your house is tiny," I said. "Everyone will be on top of one another."
"We don't spend much time at home, anyway."
I gave a disgusted snort and took a drink of my beer. "I don't like this. And what is Kevin going to do for us? He didn't even graduate from college."
"I'm sure that Peter will find something that he can do."
"His major wasn't math or computer science, either."
"What was his major?"
"Some sort of engineering."
"Peter is an engineer," my father pointed out.
"An electrical engineer," I said. "Kevin isn't."
"We'll work all that out this summer."
Our food arrived. I focused on my nachos, not wanting to argue with my father. My father loved to argue, but I hated any sort of disagreement. I considered explaining to him why the men we had entertained that day could not possibly be submarine captains, but thought better of it. That would just be another argument and my head already hurt from the argument over all those people coming for the summer.
Chapter 27: Mitch
I hadn't been up to the farm since I had left on February first. It was the beginning of May and I missed the green hills. I decided to go up there for the weekend. I didn't call my grandmother to tell her I was coming, I decided that I would let it be a surprise. On Friday afternoon I drove up there.
I wanted to find a passage through the Catskills rather than go all the way east to the Thruway and back, so I started driving north, following my compass.
At first the roads were fine. They were big, wide, paved roads with a 55 mph speed limit. When I got into the foothills of the Catskills, the roads became narrower. Soon I was in the Catskills following a one-lane road without lines. This was fine with me, but I couldn't go very fast.
The road meandered and I was worried that it wouldn't get me through, but eventually it came out on the north side and I got onto main roads. I had known that there had to be a direct route.
When I pulled into the driveway at the farm, the dog came barking at my car. As I got out, she jumped on me and I pet her as I got my duffel bag out of the back. "Down girl," I said. "Easy girl." I missed having a dog around.
I went into the house. Last time I had been in that house I had been told never to set foot in there again. "I was wondering when you would come up and visit us," my grandmother said. "How is the job? Is Peter treating you alright?"
"Yes, everything is going well. I wrote some software that saved the Navy a ton of money," I said.
"Bobby Sue, look who's here," she called.
Aunt Bobby Sue came down. "Oh hi. I didn't know you were coming."
"I took the direct way through the Catskills," I said.
"I didn't know there was a direct way through the Catskills," my grandmother said.
We talked for a while, then my grandmother had to go to bed to get up and milk the cows in the morning, it was well past dark. I went out and started driving up our dirt road. I saw Mitch's pickup truck pulled into the field along side the road, hidden by state forest. He was shining a spotlight on some deer on the other side of the field. It is common practice, and illegal, for poachers to shine a spotlight in a deer's eyes to stun it so that it doesn't run away while he shoots it.
I pulled up behind him, got out and went to his truck. "Jacking deer?" I asked.
"No, just spotting them," he said. He had a deer rifle in the gun rack in his pickup. "Why don't you hop in?"
I got in the passenger's seat of his pickup truck. "I heard that you're into drugs," he said.
"Yeah, a little," I said.
"I don't have any weed with me, otherwise I'd share," he said.
"That's okay," I said.
"Do you remember when you were just a little teenybopper and you were biking up 168 and I picked you up and gave you a ride?"
"Yeah, I remember that." I said. He had been helpful to me when I was a teenager, giving me rides, pulling out my tractor, that sort of thing.
"Now I guess that you are all grown up," he said.
"I guess so."
"I remember when you and your friends used to party at the pond. Do you still do that?"
"I live in New Jersey, now," I said.
"Oh, that's right, you were telling us that you have a job down there. How is that going?"
"It's going okay. I'm saving my pennies."
"Do you have a girlfriend?"
"No," I said. "I thought that I was in love with Cheryl but it turned out to just be gas."
"Because I like to get blowjobs. Last week a girl nicked me with her teeth. Later another girl noticed and asked me about it. I didn't know what to tell her."
"Love bites," I said. I wondered if I should tell the Soviet joke comparing speech in Russia to oral sex. One slip of the tongue and you get it in the ass.
"My birthday is coming up," he said. "and I have some cocaine for it. It's really expensive, but I wanted to treat myself for my birthday." He pulled a sandwich bag with a white powder in it out of his pocket. It was unusual for a druggie to show someone his cocaine because the penalties for possessing it are serious and the cops have a zero-tolerance policy.
"Uh, I'm not into coke," I said. One doesn't mess with something as addictive as cocaine even for undercover work. Also, I knew what he wanted in return and I wasn't into that either.
I got out of his pickup truck and went back to my Bronco. As I drove away I heard a bang as he bagged his deer. I wondered if a trooper would be there in time to bust him for the coke on his way home, or if they would have to try to get him the next day.
I wanted to get his buddy Charlie, too, but I would have to bide my time until he slipped up. At least this trip was productive. Anything that happened for the rest of the weekend was pure gravy.
I went down to the bowling alley. "Hey," said Ray. "Long time, no see."
"I've been down in New Jersey," I said.
"Oh, that's right. How is the job going?"
"It's going well. Working for a defense contractor."
"What can I get for you?"
I ordered a Heineken. He got out a cold bottle and a small glass. I listened to people talk in the bowling alley. There was always the chance that I would hear someone make a drug deal or confess to a felony. I stayed for two beers and left with an unopened beer.
When I went back home on the dirt road, all was quiet. I pulled into the field and looked up at stars while drinking the beer. You really couldn't beat the stars up here, I thought. Not much light or air pollution to spoil them. Down at my mother's house near the George Washington Bridge, you couldn't see any stars. If you were lucky down there you might see Venus, but that was about it. When I moved up to the farm at the age of fourteen, the first thing that struck me was the starry night sky.
After I finished my beer, I drove the rest of the way home down the steep hill. I pulled in front of the garage and went up to the attic and crawled in bed.
The next morning, my grandmother cooked me bacon sandwiches and home fries. Home fries were one of the few ways that I liked potatoes. She cooked them with bell peppers and onions to add flavor. We all sat around the kitchen table, eating, drinking coffee, and talking. I guessed that she had forgotten about banning me from her house.
After breakfast, I sat on the swing in the front lawn and watched the cows in the pasture. The summer before I became a senior in high school, I went on a date with a girl named Jennifer. Jennifer was a few months older than me, so she could drive at night and I couldn't. She had picked me up in front of the house and commented on the swings. She had said, "I'm going to tell my father that we need swings in our front yard." I wondered what had become of Jennifer. Her father had left town when she graduated and no one had heard anything from her.
When night time came, I went to the bowling alley again. I sat up at the bar and asked Ray, "What's new."
"Mitch was busted for cocaine," he said.
I acted surprised. "How did that happen?"
"He was pulled over by the state police. They found a deer he poached in the back of his truck, so they searched him and found coke in his pocket. Some pot, as well."
"I guess that it doesn't really come as a surprise to anybody that he was into drugs," I said. I was surprised that he had lied about not having pot.
"No, that's no surprise. Him and Charlie."
"I'll be interested to hear what happens," I said.
"So will everybody. Boy, I wonder if it is going to be like last summer with all the drug busts." Ray said.
I shrugged. "I didn't hear about so many drug busts last summer."
"Brad was busted for growing pot in his backyard, didn't you hear?"
"I thought that he and Scarlet split up." I said.
"No, he went to prison. He's out now, though, and working construction."
"Oh wow. I guess that's why the store closed." I said.
"Yeah, that and the baby."
That night I went home by the pond, looking for illicit teenage beer parties. There was no one up there, though. I drank a beer lying on the lawn in front of the pond, looking at the stars. I wondered how long it would take for the locals to figure out that I was a narc. After I finished the beer, I went to the bottom of the road, drove past Cheryl's house checking out the cars in the driveway and onto our dirt road, pulling in front of the garage.
The next morning, I drove back to New Jersey, trying to retrace the route that I had taken to get up to the farm. It was difficult as the forks in roads and turns look different coming at them from the other direction, but I managed. When I got home, my father asked me how my trip was.
"It was good," I said. "Productive, too."
"Productive in what way?" he asked.
"You know, patching things up with my grandmother, finding out what's happening in the village, that sort of thing."
Chapter 28: Housing Blues
My cousin Allison and my sister's fiance Kevin moved into my father's house at the end of the spring semester as promised. The place was a madhouse with the TV blaring, people sleeping on the couch, no room to turn around. One evening I said, "That's enough, I can't take it. I'm leaving." I don't know if anyone heard me over the television.
I packed my duffel bag and left. I wasn't sure where I was going so I headed up to High Point State Park. I had some camping gear in my car, so I paid the ranger $15 and pitched a tent at a campsite. It was a nice campsite in the forest with a couple of ruts to drive there in. It was by a creek. I bedded down for the night and decided to stay there a while.
In the morning, I drove to work early so that I could use the shower at the office without anyone bothering me. When my father came in, he asked, "Where did you go last night?"
"I couldn't take the circus. I am camping at High Point."
"You mean like that time in Boy Scouts?" he asked.
When I was twelve, my father had joined my Boy Scout troop for a camping trip at High Point State Park in the dead of winter. High Point State Park is so named because it has the highest elevation in New Jersey and is thus the coldest place in the state.
I had a good time on the camping trip, but my father was always cold. He had big moon boots and a fancy winter parka, but he found the whole thing rather uncomfortable. Since we were Boy Scouts, we didn't camp at one of the convenient camping spots that are reachable by car, we camped deep in the woods and carried our stuff in. He didn't like that, either.
That was the last Boy Scout camping trip that he came on with us. I guess that he didn't think that High Point was a suitable destination in the winter.
"No, it's summer," I said. "And I have my car by my campsite."
We left it at that and worked on our separate computers. I had some debugging to do, and I needed to concentrate on the code. Borland C++ had some fancy debugging tools, but I often found bugs by poring over the code in the area where I thought that the bug was occurring.
I camped at High Point for a week, showering at the office and eating at a rustic restaurant by the park. Then I woke up to find a black bear in my campsite. It was huge. It must have weighed five hundred pounds, and it was close enough that I could spit on it. It smelled like a wet dog. I stayed still, hoping that it would leave. I didn't have any food, so there was nothing to draw it. It sniffed around my stuff for a while and then left. I packed my stuff up and decided to find someplace indoors to live.
At work that morning, I decided to make my future brother-in-law useful by asking him to write some code for me. I needed a data structure called a red-black tree to make my software more efficient. Red-black trees were taught in my algorithms elective in college and I had the textbook.
"Kevin, I have a job for you," I said.
"Okay."
"I need a class library for red-black trees."
"What are red-black trees?"
"It's all explained here," I said, handing him the book with the place marked.
"Okay."
"I also made a header file to show you what the interface should look like," I handed him a disk.
"Okay, I'll look at it."
I figured that ought to keep him out of trouble for a while and went back to my debugging. I wasn't anxious to go home that afternoon because I didn't have anyplace to go.
When it got to be early evening, I decided that I better leave while it was still light as I needed to find a place to sleep. I headed in the direction of High Point going up 23 until I came across a cheap motel next to a bar named the Pack It Inn. I pulled into the motel and went to the office.
"How much does a room cost?"
"By the night or by the week?" the manager asked.
"By the week."
"By the week it costs $20 a night."
"Okay, I'd like a room by the week."
We settled the transaction with cash and he gave me the key to a room. When I went in, I found a bed, a TV, a bathroom, and a kitchenette. I set my duffel bag on the bed and went to check out the Pack It Inn.
When I went into the Pack It Inn, the first thing that I noticed was all the peanut shells on the floor. There were bowls of peanuts in their shells on the bar and the patrons dropped the shells beneath their feet. I took a seat at the bar and ordered a Budweiser draft.
The place was slow and the bartender was chatty. "I don't think I've seen you before," he said.
"I am staying next door."
"Do you have a job?" he asked. I suspected that some of the people staying next door didn't.
"Yeah, I'm a computer programmer in Sparta."
"That must be some good money," the barman said.
"Not so good as you might think."
The bar had potential. It was the sort of dive where I could learn about drug deals and other criminal activity without much effort. I also didn't have to worry about driving after drinking there. It seemed like a good set up.
"Is there anything to eat besides peanuts?" I asked the bartender.
"We make some really good onion rings," he said.
"I'll try that."
The bartender cut up an onion on the bar and breaded the long, thin rings. Then he deep fried it in a vat behind the bar. He gave me a plate of onion rings. "That will be $5," he said and I paid.
He was right, the onion rings were really good. It wasn't a meal, but it was a satisfying snack. They didn't seem to serve any other hot food, so I filled up on onion rings and peanuts, eavesdropping on other people in the bar.
##
I was arguing with my father a lot at work. It seemed that having a full house wasn't good for his disposition, either. Besides, he liked to argue. Peter called me into the conference room. "I hear that you are fighting with your father," he said.
"We just disagree on some things," I replied.
"You know, we have a lot of respect for your father. He is a genius and has lots of experience."
"Yes, I know," I said.
"So why don't you guys try to get along."
I went back to my office. "Peter wants us to get along," I told my father.
"I didn't notice that we were not getting along," he replied.
I sighed. I wasn't going to argue over whether we were getting along. It was obvious to everybody in the office that we weren't. Sharing an office might have been too close quarters. I decided to work in the lab more.
I went back to the lab and found Kevin working hard on the red-black-tree class library. I hadn't been sure when I gave him the assignment whether he could do it without any computer science training, but now I was beginning to develop some confidence.
Around noontime my father and Peter went out to lunch together. Jane came into my office. She stood behind my chair and rubbed her breasts against my back. "I hear that you moved out of your father's house," she said.
"Yes. I camped out for a while and now I'm staying in a motel."
"We need to find you an apartment," she said, still rubbing her breasts against my back.
"Yeah, I should go to the realtor across the street."
"Put on some better clothes," she said. "You want them to take you seriously."
"I also need to make more money," I said.
I thought of all the unpleasantness that could ensue from getting into a relationship with my boss's son's fiancee and decided not to respond to her come on. Soon, she went back to her office and I heard her little dog Toto bark a couple of times.
When my father returned to the office, he didn't say anything. He just went to work on his computer. I didn't know what he had talked to Peter about, and he didn't seem interested in enlightening me. For his part, Peter had gone straight to his office without poking his head in to say hi. I could hear him dictating a letter to the Army through the hallway.
He spent a lot of time dictating letters and marketing material, then marking them up and dictating additional material when he got the typed version back from Pammy. Pammy did the work on a word processor so we weren't totally in the dark ages. Peter didn't have a computer in his office.
Chapter 29: House Guest
The RS6000 arrived on the back of a truck. The truck driver wheeled it onto a hydraulic lift, and then slowly lowered it to the ground. He put the 55 pound CPU on a hand cart and pulled it up the stairs to the lab. Then he brought up the monitor. I hooked it up as soon as everything was there and turned it on. It came up with a login prompt. I typed "root" and it came up password. I went to Thurston, who was working with IBM, and told him that we needed the root password. He said that he would call.
The user "root" is the superuser who can edit all files on the system, including the ones that contain account information and encrypted passwords. The root password is required to administer a Unix system.
I turned the key on the CPU to maintenance mode and played with the configurations. Thurston came and said, "The guy whose office it was taken from is the only one with the password and he is on vacation for three weeks."
"So how will we use the RS6000?" I asked.
"I guess that you will just have to wait." he said.
"Nonsense," I said, finding a way to break out of the maintenance program and get a root shell. "I just broke in."
I deleted the root password, turned the key back to run mode and rebooted the system. When it came up, I was able to log in as root and start making accounts for people.
Peter came in the lab and invited me out for breakfast. "He eats more breakfasts in a day than anyone I have ever heard of," Thurston commented.
At the deli, we took a table. "James, your father tells me that you moved out of his house," Peter said.
"Yes," I said.
"I set things up so that he could have a nice relationship with you. Then he had to be an asshole and have all these crazy people move in, driving you out."
"Yeah, basically," I said.
"Where are you staying now?"
"I'm staying in a motel on 23. Its not very nice."
"How much are they charging you?"
"Twenty dollars a day."
"That's six hundred a month," he said. "You could get a nice apartment for six hundred a month."
"I didn't know that."
"Why don't you stay with me while we find a place for you," he said.
I thought that was generous. "Sure," I said. "Thank you."
##
Peter had a condo in Great Gorge Village. It was one of the older, bigger condos with two floors separated by a spiral staircase. After he got me a parking sticker, Peter showed me the upper level where there was a bed and a bathroom. He took a toilet brush and some thick bleach and said, "Every week you need to pour a little of this in the toilet and swirl it around like this."
"Yeah, I got it," I said.
"Okay. If you need anything, just let me know."
"Thanks again," I said.
"Don't mention it."
He went downstairs. The second floor only covered half the condo, so I could see into his living room through the railing and watch him watch television. He put it on to CNN and watched some news. Then he called up to me, "Hey James."
"Yeah," I said.
"The news is so depressing. What they need is a channel where they only tell good news. A good news channel."
That sounded like a religious channel to me, but I said, "Yeah, that would be nice."
Peter's condo was immaculate, as one would expect given his personality. Everything had its place. I decided that I better keep my stuff neat or Peter would get angry. I had learned how to fold my clothes and make my bed in boot camp, so I folded my clothes and made my bed.
In August my mother came out to meet with Peter. "We've got to find James a place to live," Peter told her.
"What do you mean? Where is he living now?"
"He's staying with me. His father drove him out with all those crazy people."
"Okay," she said.
"He should buy a condo here at Great Gorge Village. I talked to a real estate agent, he is going to show us one this afternoon."
I guessed that meant that Peter didn't want me to stay at his condo for any longer than necessary. I could understand that, but I didn't know how I was going to pay for a condo without dipping into my CIA account. "I don't have a lot of money," I said.
"His father will help him with the down payment," Peter said to my mother. "And I will give him a raise when he buys it."
That afternoon we looked at a condo. It was a lot smaller than Peter's, but it had two stories. The loft part didn't have a bathroom or a bedroom, though and there was one bedroom and one bathroom on the main floor. Peter had told me that they wanted $72K for it and to offer $69K.
After we looked at it, the real estate agent asked if I had any questions. "How much does the owner want for it?" I asked.
"$72K."
"I'll give him $67K."
"Sold," the real estate agent said. I realized that I could have gotten it even cheaper.
I wanted to move in right away, but I knew that it takes some time to close on a house. First I needed to get a mortgage. My mother would help with that, she had relationships with a lot of banks as an attorney.
After we were done with the condo, we went to the restaurant at the Spa, a big resort building in the complex.
"Your son is a genius," Peter told my mother. "He writes software that his father didn't know was possible."
"I'm glad to hear that he's doing well," my mother said.
"Someday he's going to be a captain of industry," Peter said.
I could feel my ears burning and knew that meant that they had turned bright red. When I was in high school, the girls liked to make me blush because they thought it was cute when my ears turned red.
"So when did you move out of your father's house?" my mother asked.
"A couple of weeks ago," I said. "First I camped out for a while, then I moved into a motel and now I am staying with Peter."
"What does your father say about this?"
"Nothing. He still has tight quarters with Kevin and Allison," I said.
I took a sip of my Sam Adams. The Spa had an excellent restaurant and I wanted to enjoy it. I examined the menu and decided to try the salmon. A waiter came and took our order.
"James is also doing work in cryptography," Peter said, emphasizing the middle syllable in cryptography. "A big defense contractor wanted him to go do cryptography for them, isn't that right, James?"
"Yeah, we are writing a paper for Eurocrypt."
"Where is Eurocrypt?" my mother asked.
"Next year it is in Norway," I said.
"Oh, I'll go to Norway with you," she said.
"First we have to get our paper accepted. Then I would need to find the money to go to Norway."
"Let me know when you are going to Norway," my mother said.
The last thing I wanted to do was travel with my mother. If I went to Norway, I would be committing espionage and I didn't need her running around taking pictures of fjords. I didn't have a mission in Norway that I knew of, so I probably wouldn't be going anyway.
"James wrote an EDIF translator that automated our whole Seawolf contract," Peter told my mother.
"I have no idea what that means," she said.
"It means that instead of people sitting around writing VHDL models by hand, we just run them through the computer."
"That sounds useful," she said.
"It saved the Navy a lot of money and now we are going to sell it to the Army, too. Thurston is using it up at IBM Federal Systems division on an Air Force contract---"
"---along with my VHDL to matrix tool," I said.
"Yes, he also wrote a tool that captures VHDL models and puts them into a form for his father's diagnostic reasoner."
"I'm glad to hear that he is being useful," my mother said.
"He's very useful. The only problem is that I don't understand anything that he says. He speaks Unix."
"Talk so that Peter can understand you, honey," my mother said.
I decided to change the subject. "I am flying to Santa Barbara in a couple of weeks for Crypto."
"Oh, yeah, did I tell you that he was invited to a cryptography conference?" Peter said. "It's too bad that we don't do cryptography."
"What airline are you flying with?" my mother asked.
"American. I take a jet to Los Angeles and then a smaller plane from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara."
"Smaller? How much smaller?" my mother asked.
"I don't know. They said that it was a prop plane."
"I hate prop planes," she said.
"That is the type of plane that flies from LAX to SBA," I said.
"You should have booked Continental," my mother said. "Newark is a Continental hub."
"The prop plane is with American Eagle," I said. "It's a package deal."
Chapter 30: Russian Code
I needed to get some clothes before going to Crypto. I drove down to the mall and went in The Gap. I bought two casual shirts with buttons and collars. I went into a men's clothing store and bought two white dress shirts. That exhausted the money that I was willing to spend, so I went back to Peter's condo and started packing.
In Los Angeles, white policemen had been videotaped beating a black man by the name of Rodney King. They had been acquitted by a jury in April and the city had erupted in rioting and racial violence. Rioters controlled Los Angeles for six days, then National Guard troops moved in and took control of the city. After Crypto, I was going to drive through L.A. and take a look at some of the neighborhoods where there had been rioting.
When the time came for my flight on Sunday morning, I drove to the airport and parked my car in long-term parking. I went to the ticket agent, waited on a long line, checked my bags, and got my boarding pass. Security was not as onerous those days, but you couldn't pre-board on your computer at home, so it was a wash. I went through security and waited at the gate for my flight.
On board the plane, I had a window seat. I liked to look out the window when I was flying even it meant a little inconvenience crawling over people when I had to use the men's room. On the bright side, I could sleep without anyone crawling over me. The guy who sat next to me on the plane was chatty and wanted to talk about cryptography. This struck me as suspicious so I mostly kept my mouth shut.
When I got to Los Angeles, I couldn't find the gate for my connecting flight. I went to the counter at my arriving gate.
"Could you tell me where I can find Gate 35?" I asked.
He pointed to a door leading outside and said, "Right there."
"Are you sure? That door is alarmed."
"Yeah, just wait there and someone will be by shortly."
I waited by the door and, sure enough, a man came in through it and asked me where I was going. "American Eagle, Gate 35" I said.
"Right this way." He led me out the door and onto a bus. We drove around the airport picking people up at different gates. Then we drove out into the middle of the tarmac. We drove for what seemed like miles before we came to a building surrounded by small aircraft. The building said American Eagle. We went in the building and found gates.
I checked in at the gate and they said that they were overbooked and asked if I would accept $300 to take a bus to Santa Barbara. I said that sounded good and they put me on the list. They must have forgotten about the list, though, because half an hour later they boarded me on a little propeller plane that held about a dozen people and we were flying over the Pacific Ocean.
The prop plane was so noisy that I couldn't hear myself think. I knew that it would have given my mother a heart attack, but I was more adventurous. We flew for about forty-five minutes before setting down at Santa Barbara Airport, known by its airport code SBA.
We deplaned and walked across the tarmac to the airport buildings. They unloaded our luggage and threw it in a bin where I picked up my suitcase. Not sure how to get to the university, I hired a taxi to take me, telling him the name of the dorm where I would be staying.
Twenty dollars later, I was at Anacopa Hall. A student manned the front desk. "How did you get here from the airport?" she asked.
"I took a taxi."
"You didn't need to do that. You were supposed to call us when you reached the airport and we would have sent a free shuttle to pick you up."
"I'll remember that," I said.
She took my name and found my room key and a card that I had to sign. I put my suitcase in my room and headed to the formal lounge where registration for the conference was starting.
A middle-aged academic crossed my name off a list and gave me a folder with a program, a map, a pad of paper, and a pen. She gave me a spiral-bound "pre-proceeding" of papers that would be published at the conference and a Crypto '92 tee shirt. I took all of my loot back to my room and looked at the program to see where I should go.
There was a reception in the formal lounge of the other dorm being used by the conference, so I went there and found a big room full of professors with the biggest mound of jumbo shrimp I ever saw along with all sorts of food set out in a buffet. I went to the open bar and got a Sam Adams.
I spotted three conference participants wearing name tags that had "National Security Agency" as the organization. One of them pointed at me and said, "That's him. What do you think he wants?"
Another man rubbed his fingers together to suggest money and the third, a woman, made a gesture with her fist and tongue to suggest fellatio. I decided that the NSA spooks were not nearly as uptight as I had been led to believe by Professor Jones.
I was meditating on this when Professor Jones came up to me and said softly in my ear, "I heard something about you breaking the Russian code." I thought that was a odd thing to say, since I didn't know anything about breaking codes. I turned to ask him what he meant, but he was gone. Breaking the Russian code would be a big deal because that would allow the NSA to listen in on Russian military and diplomatic communications. I was sure that they had an office building full of people working on it. If the NSA broke it and the Russians found out, they would change their code and the NSA would be back to square one.
I nearly walked into a famous cryptographer named Nick Gordon. "So you are Jim Washburn," he said.
"Yeah," I replied.
"Pleased to meet you, where are you from?" he said. My head swam.
"I'm from upstate New York but I live in New Jersey now."
"What do you do?"
"I'm with a small defense contractor."
Satisfied with the information Nick went to the bar to get some more wine. A woman said, "Nick is really tight with the NSA. He's even been to the Agency."
I made a note that Nick would be someone to watch. For some reason he already seemed somewhat friendly with me. I sat down at a table and made conversation with the other people sitting there, which included a man who worked in the German defense ministry and a man who worked for the Danish government.
The German asked the Dane a question about cryptography, and the Dane replied, "As if I would ever help someone from the German defense ministry." I couldn't believe that World War II animosities were still being played out two generations later.
I sought out Professor Jones. He was sitting at a table with some other mathematicians of about the same age and I sat down in an empty chair. "Hi, I made it to Crypto," I said.
"I see that. Are you getting to meet people?"
"Yes, I already met Nick Gordon."
"Very good. Let me introduce you to some of the people at this table."
"This is my student Jim Washburn," he said. Then he introduced each of the people that he was sitting with. I was glad that everyone wore name tags because I wouldn't have remembered their names without them.
As conferences go, Crypto was small. It had maybe two or three hundred attendees. But to me it was huge. I had never been in a room with so many professors in my life. And there weren't just professors. There were spooks from the NSA and many European countries, industrial scientists and engineers, and even long-haired hippies from the Internet Freedom Front. I wanted to find out more about them.
I ate salmon that I had gotten from the buffet while I tried to absorb everything going on around me. I was still startled by the way the NSA had introduced themselves to me. I wondered if this was part of some program that they had to control civilian cryptography.
I was making use of the open bar and didn't know how many beers I had had as UCSB students cleared my empty bottles away along with my empty plates as soon as I was finished with them. I knew that I had had a lot of suds and shrimp and salmon, though.
I found Nick Gordon at a table with lots of little bottles of wine. "You collect those?" I asked.
"I need them for later when we meet in one of the dorm lounges," he said.
I got the feeling that that was where a lot of the real work at the conference got done. I didn't think that I could crash it though, that was for professors with doctorates in cryptography. I wasn't even a grad student.
At ten o'clock they closed the bar and I stumbled back to my room. When I got there, I went over the program. There was breakfast at eight o'clock followed by technical sessions all day. Then another reception the next night out on the lawn.
A woman in my earpiece started asking me questions. "What did Professor Jones mean about you breaking the Russian code?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Did you break the Russian code?"
"I think that I would know if I did."
Chapter 31: NSA
The next morning, I staggered into the cafeteria for breakfast. I sat across a table from Professor Jones while eating sausage and bacon, sipping coffee and orange juice. I was not fully awake and I must have been staring, possibly dozing with my eyes open, because Professor Jones said, "You are staring relentlessly."
I blinked my eyes and apologized. I took a gulp of my coffee, but it was hot and I had a hard time swallowing it. A high school leadership conference was sharing the cafeteria with us. The teenagers were a stark contrast to the college professors and grad students. There was no danger of getting them mixed up.
Someone with a movie or television camera came into the cafeteria and filmed us. "Is the NSA making a videotape of us?" I asked.
"I wouldn't put it past them," Professor Jones replied.
"That reminds me, I don't see Sneakers on the program."
"It isn't ready yet."
"And what is this talk by the Internet Freedom Front?" I asked. "That doesn't sound technical."
"A lot of people are concerned about upcoming NSA proposals to regulate cryptography, so we want to hear what they have to say."
I didn't like the idea of a group of hippies coming to a conference and subverting scientists, although cryptography was as political as mathematics can get. The initial idea behind public-key cryptography was to defeat government eavesdropping, including court-ordered wiretaps. I knew that it would become critical to computer security when digital communications infrastructures got bigger, but that wasn't the reason that it was invented.
One aspect of cryptography that was being debated was the new digital cellphone encryption standard. There was a huge problem with people illegally modifying their radio scanners to scan the analog cellphone frequencies and eavesdrop on cellphone calls. The phone companies wanted to prevent this sort of thing in the new digital cellphones that they would be offering in the near future, so they developed an encryption standard for the phones. This standard was secret, so there was no `public' comment, meaning analysis by scientists, but it was alleged that it was weak. The Internet Freedom Front would be talking about this as well as other topics.
After breakfast, we walked across the big campus to the auditorium where the sessions would be held. The walk took about fifteen minutes, but wasn't bad in the cool of the morning. UCSB students were serving coffee and orange juice outside the auditorium. I went in and took a seat near the back. I read some of the papers in the pre-proceedings and then looked up to find a television or movie camera set up in the aisle, pointed back at me.
I thought that was odd, but my thoughts were distracted when someone sat down next to me and started chatting. "What are these lectures about?" he asked.
"Cryptography," I replied.
"What's that?"
"Secret codes and stuff."
He left and I went back to reading the pre-proceedings. Soon the talks started and I listened to the presentations. PowerPoint had not been invented yet and computer projectors were big, expensive things, so people gave their talks using transparencies that they had printed on laser printers from LaTeX files. Without a lot of flashy graphics to distract the audience, the talks were clear and informative.
In between sessions, they served snacks and drinks outside the auditorium. There were booksellers set up in the atrium and I couldn't believe some of the books that were offered for sale. There were lots of scientific and mathematics texts, but one bookseller specialized in books on the intelligence business. Some of the books were reprints of World War II intelligence manuals. I bought a series on breaking classical ciphers.
Lunch was again held in the cafeteria. I sat with Professor Jones. He said, "The hardest thing about these conferences is not the technical material, it is the social part."
"I agree," I said. People at the conference had competing interests and beliefs and it would be easy to give offense. It didn't help that most of them were introverts like me.
I decided to skip some of the afternoon sessions and take a nap. The sun was hot and I didn't want to walk back to the auditorium. There was only so much technical information that I could process in a day. I went back to my room to find the bed made and a fresh towel hanging from the door. I opened the window and lay down.
I woke up a couple of hours later and went to the main lounge in the dorm. There was a television tuned to CNN showing the Republican National Convention. I didn't watch much television and hadn't been paying much attention to the election, but I found this interesting. There were a couple of other conference participants who had come back early watching it as well.
##
That evening there was a reception on the lawn between the dorm and the cliff that went down to the beach. The bar had opened but the food was not yet being served when I met Bruce Anderson of the NSA. Bruce was gray and balding, with a round belly and a distinctive voice. He talked in soundbites.
"It's good to finally meet you," he told me.
We made chit chat for a while, then he got to some things on his mind.
"Those people are criminals. Why do you hang out with them?" he asked me.
"Which people?"
"You know which people."
I did, too. The people that I put in jail. I was surprised that the NSA didn't know that I was a federal agent. My official cover came up if you looked me up on any cop computer. Of course, the NSA aren't cops, so they don't have access to law enforcement databases, but I figured that they had good enough relationships with cops to get that sort of information.
I didn't want to hang out with him so much, though, as being seen with intelligence agency officials was bad for my cover. One had to assume that the Russians had someone at the conference and the last thing I wanted was a picture of me with an intelligence official making its way to Moscow Central.
Escaping was hard. For some reason, among the two hundred people at the conference, most with doctorates in mathematics or computer science, he was interested in me. It didn't make sense. As far as he knew, I was just a computer programmer in New Jersey.
I stood on the edge of the lawn and stared out at the ocean. Nick Gordon passed by. "Are you enjoying the ocean?" he asked.
"I've never really seen the ocean before." I replied.
"You're from New Jersey and you've never seen the ocean? I'm not buying that."
"Western New Jersey," I said.
I had been to the shore a few times as a kid, before I moved to the farm when I was fourteen, but that was a distant childhood memory. The reality of standing here and watching the waves come in felt new to me.
A man with hair down to the small of his back joined me. "Are you coming to our talk tomorrow?"
"You're with the Internet Freedom Front, aren't you?" I said.
"Yes. We're going to talk about wiretaps, cryptography, and cellphones."
"The digital cellphone encryption standard is secret," I said. "How do you know that it is weak?"
"We obtained a copy of it. I can send it to you if you want to look at it."
That sounded like espionage. "What's your email address?" I asked.
He gave me his card. I intended to verify that they really stole the document. "I'll send you an email with my address to send the document to," I said.
"Sure thing," he replied.
The next day there was a free afternoon. I played volleyball barefoot with some professors. While going for the ball, I jammed my toe in the sand, ripping off the toenail on my big toe. Pain flashed through my foot and my toe started throbbing with bright white pain. I hopped back into the dorm on one foot, bleeding all over the place, and put my foot in the sink and ran cold water over it. It still hurt, but at least it was clean.
I hopped to the front desk and asked them if they had a band aid. They did, and I bandaged my toe as best as I could. I went back into my room and put socks on and lay on the bed for a while, trying to ignore the throbbing pain where my toenail had been. In some countries, they pull off your toenails as a form of torture. I could see why that would be effective.
The rump session would be that night, and that was known to last until two o'clock in the morning, so I decided to rest up for it. The rump session was five-minute informal talks on research in progress, politics, or anything else that wasn't suitable for the technical sessions. There was a whole mythology built around Crypto rump sessions so I wanted to see the reality of it.
Chapter 32: Los Angeles
The night after the rump session was the beach barbecue on Goleta City Beach. We had chicken and beef tritips with beer and margaritas served on the beach. As the barbecue wound down, a British man said, "Let's go find an institute of higher learning."
"You mean UCSB?" I asked.
"I mean a bar," he said.
A group of about a dozen of us walked into Goleta and found a small bar to drink at. The bartender must have been surprised to have people from a half-dozen different countries wearing cryptography tee shirts walk into his establishment. We drank beers and talked late into the night, and then I walked back to the dorm. It was a long walk, but the night air was comfortable and I didn't mind.
The conference got out after lunch on Thursday. I rented a car and headed south on Highway 101 towards Los Angeles. I had an address in San Bernardino to check out. One of my Mormon cousins was on mission there. I drove a couple of hours before I got stuck in traffic. The traffic got worse as I got into Los Angeles, but once I was near where the riots were, I got off the freeway and drove through the neighborhoods. If the NSA had a tail on me, I lost them there. That was fine with me.
I drove between identical low apartment buildings, one after the other. There was hardly a person to be seen on the street. The National Guard troops were long since gone, but their shadows hung over the neighborhoods. I stopped for a stop sign and it occurred to me that four big guys could probably pick up the subcompact rental car and walk away with it.
Mile after mile of low-rent neighborhoods went by, and then I went by a policeman standing by the side of the road waving to cars and I was in an expensive beach district lined with mansions. No wonder everybody was nervous during the riots even though they didn't live in neighborhoods where the rioting took place.
I found a freeway and got on it, heading east to San Bernardino. Soon I was out in the desert, driving fast. I reached San Bernardino at nightfall. I looked for a hotel. There weren't any to be found. "I guess that no one wants to visit San Bernardino," I thought. I looked up the address for my cousin, but the building didn't exist. Eventually I found a seedy, run-down motel and checked in.
The manager was chatty, taking my cash and asking me questions.
"Where do you live?" he wanted to know.
"New Jersey."
"What brings you to San Bernardino?"
"I was looking up my cousin who is a Mormon missionary."
"Did you find him?"
"No."
"So you came all the way out to California and didn't see your cousin?"
"I also went to a cryptography conference in Santa Barbara."
When I got into my room it was a tiny, run-down little hole in the wall. I left my suitcase in there and went to find something to do. I came across a bar near the motel. I went in and sat down at the bar, ordering a beer. The guy next to me started talking to me.
"Don't order a beer, boy, mixed drinks is what classy people order."
"I don't like mixed drinks," I said.
"You probably chose the wrong person to sit down next to," the bartender told me, "he'll talk your ear off."
That was fine with me, because I wanted to know about San Bernardino. Down at the other end of the bar, I could hear the waitress talking to a regular. "I don't know who he is, but his badge is the wrong color, if you get what I mean."
I had never heard that expression before, but it sounded like she made me as a cop. I had gotten my hair cut short for Crypto and I suppose I might have had that look to me. It probably had more to do with xenophobia.
I sat and listened to the guy talk until it was pretty late, then I headed back to the motel to sleep. In the morning, the owner of the motel was chatty again.
"I hope that you found the room alright. People rent rooms here and just trash them."
"It was fine."
"I hope that you didn't mind the burn in the carpet. Someone dropped their crack pipe."
"No, really, it's fine."
After talking with the owner for twenty minutes, I left San Bernardino heading back into the desert toward Los Angeles. This time I didn't hit so much traffic in Los Angeles and I was back in Santa Barbara by early afternoon. I returned the rental car and took a cab to the downtown area.
I found a cheap hotel near the beach called the Hotel California. I liked the Eagles song, so I thought that I would give the hotel a try. In the lobby I discovered that some people rented rooms by the week. I paid for my room in cash and went upstairs. I found that I had to share a bathroom, but that was fine with me. The rent was right.
There was a little bar by the beach that I liked. They had good beer and a nice atmosphere. I hung out there and absorbed the atmosphere before heading inland to find something else to do. I found a big nightclub so I went in. The music was deafening as I sat at a big bar and ordered a beer. A man came in and started berating me.
"---I was a SEAL and I had a partner in Los Angeles and they killed him in cold blood. If you run away again I'm going to stomp you and kick you like this and this and this." He was stomping and kicking the floor almost like a dance. The other patrons ignored him. I thought that he was crazy.
Now I knew that the NSA was following me. That, I thought, had to be expensive. I was a federal agent, why didn't they just give the money to me and I could tell them where I went? That seemed like the most reasonable thing for them to do. I decided to start using my training to identify NSA agents in my various undercover holes. It couldn't be any different than recognizing KGB agents in Russia. I was trained to perform my missions under surveillance without giving myself away. I just never expected it to matter stateside.
Finally he finished his little rant and left. I finished drinking my beer and found that they had a breathalyzer machine that told you your blood alcohol level for a dollar. I put a dollar in and blew in it. It came up .02. I could drive. It didn't matter, though, because I was walking.
I went back to the bar by the beach. I was never really into big, loud nightclubs. I sat at a table with a young woman that I met and drank beers and margaritas with her all night. She was from Los Angeles and was in Santa Barbara on holiday.
The next morning, I got up and went to the beach. I lay in my bathing suit on the white sand, trying to keep the sun out of my eyes. Soon I got bored. Beaches weren't really my thing. I decided to walk around Santa Barbara and see what there was to see.
I found a shopping district. It was a big pedestrian mall where you could buy clothing and trinkets. I wasn't really into clothing and trinkets, but I forced myself to walk through all of its myriad passageways to kill time. I found a Thai restaurant and had some lunch. Nice hot pa-nang chicken. Pa-nang was my favorite Thai curry.
In the afternoon, I went to the bar by the beach again. It wasn't so much that I wanted to drink, I just wanted someplace to hang out and meet women. I nursed my beer. Tourists came in and danced on the small stage in the back. I liked Santa Barbara. I chatted up the bartender, a young woman with the blond hair that is ubiquitous in California.
"So are you from Santa Barbara?" I asked.
"No, I moved here five years ago," she said.
"Where are you from?"
"Los Angeles," she said.
"Why did you come here?"
"I came here on vacation and I liked it so much that I never left."
That was my kind of story. "I would like to do that," I said. "But I'm afraid that I wouldn't find a job."
"Plenty of jobs in the tourist industry."
I would have liked to, but I was too uptight for that sort of thing. I took a drink of my beer and reflected that I would have to get on a plane the next day to go back home to my workaday job programming computers. Programming computers seemed like more fun than bartending. I wasn't sure if it was more lucrative, though. I looked forward to the raise I would get when I bought my condo.
Part 3: The Journey
Chapter 33: The Army
On Monday morning I was back at work, a little tanner and a little better educated than when I left. "Welcome back," Peter said. "You need to give a presentation to the Army Advanced Technology Office tomorrow about your VHDL capture tool."
"Tomorrow? That doesn't give me time to prepare."
"Get your father to show you how to make view graphs."
My father gave me some software for making slides and I figured it out myself. It doesn't require a Ph.D. in computer science, after all. I put in snippets of VHDL code and the matrices that they generate. Then I put in examples of connectivity matrices being transformed to fault-symptom matrices. A nice little presentation.
After I got the first draft of my presentation done, I gave it to my father to look at while I went across the street to the pizza place to get some lunch. When I came back with my pizza, my father started giving me his comments.
"I don't think that the customer will understand---," he said.
"Hold on a second, I'm eating."
"Okay, let me know when you are done."
I ate my pizza. It was hot and burned the roof of my mouth. I didn't know how my father could handle all the pizza smell without going and getting himself something to eat. After I finished my lunch, I said, "Okay, tell me now."
"I think what you really need to do is use some clip art and graphics to make your point," my father said.
"Clip art and graphics? Ewww."
"That is what makes it look like a nice, professional presentation. Try it."
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to think up ways to use clip art and graphics to get my points across. I added a few slides with graphics on them, but mostly I didn't have the right type of imagination for that sort of thing. I showed my slides to my father.
"They're better, but they still could use some work. It's late now, though."
I drove back to Great Gorge Village stopping at a pizzeria on the way to get a meatball parm hero. When I got back to Peter's condo, I lay down and fell asleep.
The next morning, I put on my black Brooks Brothers suit for the Army people and drove back to the office. Our visitors were led by an electrical engineering Ph.D. named Dr. Yang. She was small with a heavy Chinese accent. There were also some engineers and a program manager in the delegation.
Peter was showing them around the office. "---and this is George and James. James speaks Unix, but we asked him to give a presentation that we can understand. George here invented the whole diagnostician concept. He writes the software for the reasoner. And back here---" they went on to the lab.
A little while later, Peter popped his head in and said, "Okay, grab your view graphs and come downstairs."
We went to the big conference room downstairs and took seats. Soon we got started. Peter gave a presentation with slides that my father had made for him. His charm and charisma were on full display and I hoped that they were working on our customers as I needed my paychecks.
Then his marketing assistant gave her presentation. It was more technical, but still concentrated on slick slides. I had seen it all before, but some of the promises for future versions of the product alarmed me. Then my father gave his talk on the diagnostic reasoner. It was a good presentation, with technical details spoon fed so that a nontechnical person could understand them. It was too bad that he didn't finish his Ph.D. and become a professor.
Then it was my turn. I put my deck of slides next to the projector and explained what it was that my software did. Then I started working through the examples I had made, slowly and patiently so that everybody could understand how my software worked. This was, I imagined, what teaching a class of college freshmen was like. Now that Peter trusted me to give a talk, I didn't want to blow it.
After the presentations, my father and I went back to our office. "How do you think that I did?" I asked.
"You did fine. Maybe a little more detail than they wanted."
"Thanks," I said. "I will work on that."
We all went to lunch at Arthurs, the government people and Romano people on separate checks. The Army Advanced Technology Office was out of Huntsville, Alabama, so they had made quite a trip to see us. I thought that boded well for our SBIR. Over lunch Peter answered questions about Romano.
"Yes, we are a family company. My sons Geoff and Luke will be joining us shortly, they are already working nights and weekends. Geoff will write the Diagnostic Profiler."
"How long have you been in business?" Dr. Yang asked.
"About a year and a half. I started it with half a million of my own money."
I sat quietly and ate my hamburger. Peter was the master at handling customers, I was like a bull in a china shop. I wasn't even sure why I was invited to this luncheon.
"James also does cryptography," Peter said, emphasizing the middle syllable. "Isn't that right James?"
"Yes. I am writing a paper with Professor Jones up at Clarkson."
"James just got back from a cryptography conference yesterday morning, and I told him that he had to make some slides to show you guys. He did a good job, didn't he?"
They all nodded. I was uncomfortable being the center of attention like that. Marketing was a tricky art that I knew little about. I supposed that was meant to explain why my slides were incomprehensible or something.
I was surprised to find that the Army was interested in my cryptography. "What is your paper about?" Dr. Yang asked.
"It is about a new type of cryptographic primitive that can replace group signatures in some applications." I said. "Basically a commutative hash function---"
Peter jumped in with "Yes, they are going to submit it to Eurocrypt," he emphasized Euro. "We say that's fine as long as it doesn't interfere with his work here."
After lunch, Peter and my father demonstrated the software for the Army in the lab. I sat in the office trying to focus on programming in my suit. The air conditioner in the window wasn't particularly effective and I was hot. My jacket hung on the chair behind me. I had the door closed to keep the cool air in.
Jane came into our office, closing the door behind her. "It's not that cool in here," she said. "You should come to my office, my a/c keeps it much nicer."
"I'm fine," I said. I didn't want to get dog hairs on my suit.
"I feel sorry for you guys. Men have to buy such expensive business clothes. Women can get away with a lot less."
That may have been the case, but I was sure that in aggregate any woman would outspend me in clothes by several multiples.
"You are the facility security officer, I have a question for you," I said.
"Okay, shoot."
"Someone is going to send me a secret document, what should I do with it?"
"Give it to me and I will file it," she said. "Who is sending you this document?"
"The Internet Freedom Front."
"How did they get a secret document?"
"They stole it. How else?"
"And why are they sending it to you?"
"I wanted to get a look at it."
"Okay, after you read it, just give it to me and I will file it with the classified material."
Jane went back to her office. I figured that we would use her as a cut out to deliver the document to the FBI after the IFF sent it to me. The document wasn't classified material, but it was a telephone consortium trade secret, which is also protected by law. I wondered what sort of scandal the cellphone encryption document was going to cause.
Peter, my father, and the Army people came in our office. "Do you have any questions for James?" Peter asked.
"Not that I can think of," Dr. Yang said. "If I think of something later, I'll call him."
"Great!" Peter said. "You can call anyone here anytime you want."
"We will," Dr. Yang said. "But now, I think that we need to get back to our hotel and hold a meeting among ourselves."
"Okay," Peter said. "Thanks for coming up here and listening to our talks."
"Thank you for taking the time to explain everything to us," Dr. Yang said.
After Dr. Yang and her engineers left, I decided to call it a day. "I'll see you at home," I told Peter.
"Okay, I'll see you there. Good job on the presentation."
"Thanks. I was a little nervous."
"Don't worry, you did a great job. We'll have you give presentations again, just like your father."
"Okay, thanks."
"Oh, by the way, next week I need you to come with us up to Binghamton to visit IBM Federal Systems Division. Wear your suit."
"Okay, hasn't Thurston been going there a lot?"
"Yeah, but they want to talk to the engineers."
"I guess that Thurston can't answer their questions then." I wanted to get a little dig in on Thurston.
"You have a degree that people can use. Thurston has an M.B.A. I don't ask Thurston to M.B.A. something."
Chapter 34: IBM
The document from IFF came in. It was titled "Digital Cellular Telephony Encryption Standard." I gave it to Jane and the FBI was to pick it up from her. They would conduct the investigation from there. If my testimony was needed in court, they would use the recording of the conversation I had at Crypto '92.
"I gave your social security number to IBM," Jane told me. "They have you on the list to go in."
"Thanks," I said. "I am going straight up there tomorrow morning."
The next morning, we all drove up to Binghamton, New York to visit IBM Federal Systems Division. I went up by myself in my Bronco. I stopped at the gatehouse and gave them my name and showed them my driver's license. They looked me up on their list and told me what building to go to and where to park. I parked where they told me and went in the windowless building.
A guard at the front gate wanted my name and ID again, so I gave them to him. He checked his list and returned my ID to me with a badge that had my name and the words "Escort Required" on it. I took a seat. Soon a man came out of a locked door and asked me, "Are you James?"
"Yes," I said.
"Come with me."
He punched a code into the locked door and led me down a long corridor. There were doors with buttons to punch codes in on either side of the hallway. We went past many of those and turned a few corners before we got to the correct one. He punched some digits in and opened the door. I stepped in. It was a big lab where six people worked. There were computers and thick, locked filing cabinets along the walls. There was a bubblegum light on the ceiling turning its red beam.
"What's the bubblegum light for?" I asked.
"That means that there are visitors in the room," he said.
"Pretty dramatic."
Peter, Thurston, and my father were already there. "This used to be the B-2 room," Peter said. "They did avionics in here."
"Pretty cool," I said. "So I guess this is an Air Force contract."
"Yeah," Peter said. "IBM is working with the Air Force using our stuff."
"What does James do?" the man asked.
"James writes translators and data capture. Tell him about your VHDL data capture tool."
"It reads VHDL and puts out a connectivity matrix and a fault-symptom matrix for the reasoner," I said.
"How many klocs is it?" the man asked, pronouncing klocs as kay-locks.
"What is a kloc?" I asked.
"A thousand lines of code. K for kilo."
"Oh, I don't know. It is divided up into different files."
"IBM always measures programs in klocs," my father said.
"I guess so," I said. "It doesn't really make sense with modern programming languages, though."
"It goes back to the days when they wrote everything in assembler," my father said.
"You keep classified material in those filing cabinets?" I asked.
"Those are safes. Yes, we have all of our classified material locked in them while you are here."
I couldn't imagine working in a room like this. I would go out of my skull. This resembled what I imagined working for the big cryptography contractor to be like. "What do you do if you have to use the men's room?" I asked.
"You have to go?" the man asked.
"Yeah. I've been driving all morning."
He told another IBMer, "I'll be right back," and took me back out into the maze of hallways to a door marked "Men" and waited for me outside the door. As I relieved myself I was grateful that he didn't need to escort me inside the men's room.
When we got back, there was a big technical discussion of our software going on. I tried to keep quiet, but people kept on directing questions at me. Peter kept on interjecting to make people's explanations "more understandable." Then one of the IBMers said, "Let's get some lunch."
They escorted us to a cafeteria. The food didn't look particularly appetizing, but I was hungry. I had some sort of chicken with fries and a Dr Pepper. It felt good to have some food in my belly.
We went back to the secure room and looked at issues that they were having with our software. Problems parsing some weird VHDL they were feeding it, that sort of thing. I took notes and hoped that they wouldn't get confiscated from me on the way out. We kept ourselves busy.
I said, "It will be a lot easier to make the required changes if you give me test cases to run through."
"Uh, I think we might have some unclassified VHDL that we can give you," an IBMer said. "Come with me."
We navigated the maze of corridors until we got to an office area with cubicles. He went to some cabinets and got out a box of disks, writing his name, job number, and what he had taken on a sheet of paper on top of the cabinets. "You guys track office supplies?" I asked.
"Yeah. That way they get charged to the right contract."
"I thought keeping track of time was bad enough," I said. "We just build office supplies into our overhead."
He went in a cubicle and copied a few VHDL files onto disks. He handed me the disks which I put in the inside pocket of my suit. "Thanks. I will work on this as soon as I get back," I said.
"Don't worry, we have a work around," he said.
"Okay, thanks."
"Oh, it's three o'clock, I have to go home now."
"You go home at three?" I asked.
"Flex hours. I work from seven to three so I can watch my kids after school."
I had never heard of an engineer only working eight hours a day, but I guessed that was what they did at big companies like IBM. "Okay, could you take me back to the B-2 room?"
"Yeah, of course. Come with me."
We navigated the maze again, and I wondered if we would find a piece of cheese at the end. I rejoined Peter, Thurston, and my father.
"Did you get everything that you need?" Thurston asked.
"Yeah. I'm all set."
It was a long drive back to New Jersey and when I finally walked into Peter's condo it was dark outside. I took my notes and disks out of my pockets and put them by my bed to take to work the next morning, then I hung up my suit for the next time I needed to deal with customers.
The woman in my earpiece told me that they had gotten the cellphone encryption document from Jane. I thanked her and she said that I would be going to Russia in about a year. With that in mind I went to bed.
I slept late the next day and didn't get into the office until eleven. My jeans and tee shirt were a sharp contrast to the black Brooks Brothers suit that I had worn the day before. I immediately started working on the problems that IBM had encountered with my software. A few changes to the yacc file and a little coding in the lexical analyzer were all that it took and then I was running the test cases that IBM had given me.
I spent more time testing than I did debugging, which isn't unusual in software maintenance. Finally, at the end of the day, I bumped the version number up by a minor revision and put the new tool on a disk to give to Thurston, who was still at IBM.
"I took care of the changes for IBM," I told my father.
"That was quick."
"They weren't big changes. Just a little yacc hacking."
"Do you want to go get some dinner?" he asked.
"Sure." I was always up for free food.
We locked up the building and went to Kroghs. We sat down and my father said, "I haven't really talked to you since you got back from Crypto."
"We've talked."
"How was Crypto?"
"It was good. Good food, free beer, what more can a man ask for?"
"Did you find out anything interesting?"
I thought about Professor Jones's mysterious comment about me breaking the Russian code. "No," I said. "Not really."
"Did you meet interesting people?"
"Yeah, I met an NSA spook. His name is Bruce Anderson."
"What did he have to say?"
"Not much, really. He just wanted to talk to me. I think that he wanted to hear what I had to say, as strange as that may sound."
"There must be a reason," my father replied.
The waiter came and took our order. I took a drink of my beer.
"Sam Adams makes a good beer," I said.
I didn't tell my father about the NSA following me, or the strange incident at the beginning of the reception or Professor Jones's comment because that was all locked into a compartment in my head that I kept intelligence information in, and I only discussed things that I stored there with the Agency.
"So are you going back next year?" my father asked.
I thought about this for a few moments. Crypto was expensive and time-consuming. But I was intrigued by Crypto '92 and had collected a lot of intelligence from the foreign spooks and mathematicians. I probably would be going back just before heading off to Russia.
"Yes, I think so," I said. "I need to keep up with the latest results in cryptography."
Chapter 35: Missed Payroll
I was to close on my condo on Wednesday, my 23rd birthday. I wasn't going to the closing myself, my mother would be representing me. I packed my stuff up at Peter's condo to move to my condo on the other side of the complex. My condo was an upstairs corner unit, making it one of the two most valuable condos in the building. The mortgage would be $500 a month and I would be getting a raise to $30K a year starting with the paycheck that I was to get on the day that I closed. I was counting on that money for some of the closing fees.
On Tuesday I couldn't contain my excitement. I smiled as I worked on my programs at my computer. Tim seemed to be anxious and depressed, though. He was walking around the conference room with a gallows face. I asked him what was bothering him, but he didn't answer me. I went back to work.
When I got in on Wednesday morning, there was no paycheck. "We couldn't make payroll," Tim explained. "Maybe next week."
I couldn't believe it. "What do you mean you couldn't make payroll? I was counting on that money for my closing."
"Just what I said. We don't have any money to make payroll with."
"Why didn't you tell us before? I mean, you had to cancel the direct deposit, right?"
"I was hoping that we would get some money in, but we didn't. By the way, happy birthday."
I called my mother. "Romano missed payroll today," I said.
"Oh no! Do you have money to cover the closing costs?"
"No," I said. I had money in my CIA account, but I couldn't access it.
"Don't worry, I'll take care of it."
After work, I moved into my condo. I had a cot that I used for a bed, and a table that I got from my mother to eat on and a chair, but that was it for furniture. I thought that a couch would be nice, but they were expensive and my employer wasn't making payroll.
Moving isn't difficult when you don't have any stuff. I was in my condo for all of ten minutes before I started getting bored. I didn't have a TV, so I turned on my stereo to the classic rock station and opened a beer. That wasn't too exciting but it kept me sane until bedtime. I figured that I should learn to deal with boredom in case the Russians lock me in a gulag.
The next day I checked out an establishment half a mile from the complex called The George Inn. They had a restaurant area and a big bar with live music on weekends. A man with sandy brown hair sat next to me at the bar. He seemed suspicious to me.
"I think that the NSA has a public relations problem," I said. "I think that they should get a TV program where they show their day-to-day adventures."
"I work for the NSA and you know what I think of that," he said.
NSA agents were much easier to identify than Russian secret police. I took note of what he looked like. It would be handy to know where I could find the NSA if I needed them. I decided that was enough work for the day, so I went home to read the book that I had picked up at the bookstore in Sparta earlier: Neuromancer by William Gibson.
It would be trite to say that a book changed my life, but Neuromancer had a huge impact on me. I had always been a science fiction fan, my favorite author was Heinlein, but Neuromancer was a new type of science fiction and it changed my way of looking at networks and computing. I liked this new vision of `cyberspace,' a term coined in the book. It blended my love of espionage with my love of computers.
When I came home on Friday afternoon, a German Shepard puppy followed me into my condo. It was chilly out, so I decided to let the puppy stay with me until its owner got home. I saw a woman named Lisa come out of a downstairs apartment, walking her dog. I caught up with her. "A German Shepard puppy followed me home. Do you know who she belongs to?"
"She is from apartment H. They moved out in the middle of the night."
"And they just left their puppy out in the cold?"
"Yeah, I guess so," she said. "They should be shot."
Leaving the puppy in my house, I drove to the nearest supermarket, five miles away, to get some dog food and a leash. When I came back I fed the puppy and took her for a walk.
I hadn't planned on adopting a dog, but now I had one. I always enjoyed playing with the dogs on the farm, so I didn't mind so much. I would have to make arrangements for someone to care for her while I was in Russia, though.
The puppy slept with me on the little cot. She didn't curl up on the foot of the bed like a well-behaved dog, she stretched out next to me as if she was my wife. When she thought that it was time for me to get up, she pushed me out of the bed. "Great," I thought. "I have an alarm dog."
Each day, I had to rush home from work to walk her. Getting home from work in the early evening rather than the late night resulted in me having a lot of time with nothing much to do, so I read books and hung out at the George Inn. I became friendly with the bartender.
I overheard a lot of stuff at the George Inn, mostly drug deals, but a few other things as well. I always paid cash and didn't tell anyone my last name. One night I came in to find the bartender distraught because she had been fined $1,500 for serving a minor.
"He was part of the band," she said. "I thought that he was 21."
I doubted the latter part of that, since even I could see that he wasn't 21. She was full of the injustice of it all. I sympathized, even though I was responsible for the fine. "I guess that you have to proof everybody," I said.
"Yeah," she said. "I guess so. Your next beer is on me."
"You get some interesting people here," I said.
"Yeah, Howard Stern came here once."
"That must have been cool," I said.
"Not really. He came with this entourage and they behaved terribly."
"What sort of things did they do?"
"Well for one thing, they liked to lock themselves in the bathroom and do drugs, hard drugs."
"You mean like heroin?"
"Cocaine. Maybe heroin, too, for all I know."
I thought that my friends at DEA might be able to get some use out of that information. It didn't take a genius to realize that Howard Stern was the sort to surround himself with cokeheads, but hard intelligence beats out educated speculation any day.
There was a ski lift next to Great Gorge Village that you could ski to from your condo. On the other side of the ski slope was a water park, to attract the summertime crowds. These attractions brought a never ending parade of people from New York City to our complex where they rented condos for a weekend or a week. They also rented rooms at the old Playboy Club that Hugh Hefner built when he thought that gambling was going to be legalized throughout New Jersey rather than just in Atlantic City.
The water, I soon found out, was expensive. Lisa told me that when they built the condos, water was free because the developer owned the water company. Then he pleaded guilty in some sort of corruption case and had to sell the water company because a convicted felon cannot own a public utility in the state of New Jersey. She told me where the reservoir was and I checked it out on my way to work the next morning. It didn't look as clean as I would like it to be and it was a considerable distance from the complex.
They didn't deliver mail to the condos. I had to go to the McAffee post office about half a mile away to rent a mailbox to get my bills in. Once every few days, I had to stop at the post office and collect my mail, most of which I did not want.
As the weeks went by, my puppy got bigger. I named her Edif. She was skinny, in spite of eating a prodigious amount of dog food. The only type of dog food that she would eat was Iams. She was also smart and somewhat passive aggressive. I didn't have a lot of trouble housebreaking her, except when she soiled the carpet to make me angry. I hoped that she would outgrow that.
She liked to run and when she got loose there was no catching her. I clocked her at thirty miles per hour following her with my car. When she got tired, she always came back. She liked meatballs and beer. I would come home on a Friday evening with a meatball parm sandwich for dinner that I would share with her and then I would pour a can of Budweiser in a stainless steel bowl for her to drink while I had a Sam Adams or three. She liked the Budweiser and she liked being drunk, but she didn't care much for the hangover.
Chapter 36: Jeep Wrangler
I started having trouble with my Bronco II. The engine was running rough and it was all I could do to keep it from stalling. It sounded like it was missing on at least two cylinders, so I thought that maybe I should trade it in for a new vehicle.
"I need a new car," I told Tim.
"What's wrong with the one you have?"
"It is about dead. I'm thinking that maybe I'd like a Jeep."
"Go to the Chrysler dealership on 23 and tell them I sent you," Tim said. "Tell them that you work here."
I went to the Chrysler dealership on 23. "I'm interested in a new Jeep," I said to the salesman. "I work at Romano and Tim told me to come here."
"What sort of Jeep are you looking for?"
"One of those," I said pointing at a green Jeep Wrangler. "With the big engine and stick shift."
"That one has a six-cylinder engine, manual transmission, and a soft top. It goes for $17,000."
"Does it have four-wheel drive?" I asked.
"It sure does."
"That's what I want. I have a trade in."
"Let me look at your trade in," he said.
We went outside and looked at the Bronco II. After he looked it over, he said, "I'll give you $5,000 for it."
"Sounds good," I said. "Can I lease the Jeep?"
"We'll have to look at your credit and your income," he said. "Come inside."
I filled out a credit application and he did whatever it is that car dealers do with those. He came back out and said, "You don't qualify for a lease, but I will give you a five-year loan with the option to turn the car in after three years instead of paying the additional two years."
"How much per month?" I asked.
"$350."
I thought that was a lot, but I agreed to it. He told me to come back in two days so that they could get the Jeep ready. I went home, trying to keep my Bronco from stalling.
I told Tim that I bought a Jeep Wrangler. "Did you tell them that I sent you?" he asked.
"Yeah, I told him."
"Good. We like to keep good relationships with other businesses."
I had been under the impression that it would get me a better deal, but I didn't say anything. Instead I went into the office with the Xerox machine and the typewriter and found a Manhattan phone book. Out of curiosity, I looked up Jennifer in it and to my surprise found her listed. I wrote down the phone number and put it in my pocket to call her later, after I got home from work.
The next day I went to the dealership to pick up my new Jeep. A mechanic took my Bronco II into the garage gunning the engine to keep it from stalling. My new Jeep had a temporary license plate taped to the windshield since the back window was plastic on the so-called ragtop.
As I drove home, I was impressed with the power of the six-cylinder engine in the light open-body design. This was a real pocket rocket. I pulled into the condo management office.
"I'm a condo owner and I just got a new car, so I need a new parking sticker," I said.
"Sure thing, just fill this out," she gave me a form.
I filled it out. "I don't know my license plate number yet, I still have a temporary," I said.
"Just leave it blank and fill it in when you get your license plate."
I gave her the form and she gave me a small red and white sticker to put on my front bumper. The guard at the gate would see the sticker and open the gate without me having to unzip my window.
When I got home, Edif was happy to see me. "Good girl," I said, clipping the leash to her collar. "Let's go for a walk."
After I walked her I thought about what I would say to Jennifer when I called her. It was wintertime, so I thought that it would be a good idea to go to a Broadway show. But not just any Broadway show. For one thing, I didn't want to take her to show that I considered gay. There were a lot of those. Mostly, however, I wanted to take her to see one with literary merit.
I had read Aristotle's Poetics in English Lit and he said that in a good play, the protagonist should die in the end or otherwise be destroyed by a device of his own making. That narrowed the candidates down considerably. I had picked up a copy of the New York Times on my way home and looked through the ads for Broadway. A show called Miss Saigon looked promising.
I called Jennifer up. "Hello," she said.
"Hi Jennifer. It's Jim Washburn."
"Oh hi, Jim. How's it going?" She sounded happy to hear from me.
"Pretty good. I found your name in the phone book so I thought that I would give you a call."
"Oh wow, so you are in Manhattan too?"
"No, I'm in western New Jersey, but we have a Manhattan phone book at work."
"What are you doing these days?"
"I'm working as a computer programmer. How about you?"
"I'm an administrative assistant, but I don't know how much longer I am going to stay in New York."
I took a deep breath. "So, would you like to go see Miss Saigon on Broadway sometime?"
"Sure, that would be great."
We had a date. My next call was to Ticketmaster to buy a package of dinner and the show for $80 a person. Then I called Jennifer back to tell her the date and time. All set.
##
That weekend I took Edif and my Jeep up to the farm to show them to my grandmother and aunt. Looking at my Jeep, Aunt Bobby Sue said, "Your Uncle Gordon will be really jealous if he sees that. He'll be the same color as the paint."
"Yeah, I know," I said. "He was always talking about how great Jeeps were when I was a kid. I don't know why he doesn't buy one."
"He just buys old, used pickup trucks," she said. "He's too cheap to get a nice car."
Soon it was dark and Grandma needed to go to bed so I went down to the bowling alley. I was sitting up at the bar when I heard a familiar voice say, "Hey Jim!"
"Scott!" I said. "What brings you up here?"
"I'm just passing through," he said. "I'm going to Syracuse to go to mortuary school."
"What do you learn in mortuary school?" I asked.
"How to shave dead people."
"You shave dead people?"
"It's the closest shave you'll ever get."
"I think that I'll wait on that one," I said.
"What have you been doing?"
"I've got a job in New Jersey. I just bought a condo, adopted a puppy, and bought a Jeep Wrangler. Remember how that Jeep turned on its side and just got a dent on its hood? That really impressed me," I said.
"Yeah, I remember that night. That guy was drunk off his ass."
"Yeah, he sure was. What have you been up to?"
"Well, since the last time you saw me, I went to live with my father on Long Island, and I was working there for a while but now I am in Syracuse."
"Did you get your GED?"
"Yep. Sure did."
"Whatever happened to that girl, uh, Cindy?" I asked.
"I don't know. I haven't heard from her."
"I guess that we would have heard from the police if she ran away again."
"Yeah, probably," he said.
We talked and drank all night. When I got home I let myself in quietly and went up to the attic to sleep.
##
The next morning, I introduced my grandmother to my dog, who had slept in the barn. Since Edif was an indoor dog, she didn't like that so much. It wasn't cold in the barn, but it wasn't warm either. She liked to sleep under blankets. I decided that I better take my puppy home that day as I didn't want to subject her to another night in the barn. As much as she liked to play in the snow, she needed a warm place to sleep.
My grandmother cooked me bacon sandwiches and home fries for breakfast. I had really missed her breakfasts. I may not care for her other meals, but she knew how to cook breakfast. I decided to tell her about Jennifer.
"Jennifer is living in Manhattan," I said.
"You know Jennifer was just using you." Grandma hated all of my girlfriends.
"I'm going on a date with her next week."
"Okay, where are you going?"
"To see a Broadway show, Miss Saigon."
"That sounds expensive."
"I can afford it," I said. I wasn't sure that was true, but I had already paid for dinner and the show if putting it on your credit card is paying for it. I took a bite of my bacon sandwich while I considered this.
"Okay, just be careful you don't let her walk all over you."
"Don't worry, Grandma."
"What's her father doing these days?"
"Last I heard he was principal of a high school in Watertown."
Chapter 37: Jennifer
The night that I was to go on my date with Jennifer, I walked and fed Edif before putting on my black Brooks Brothers suit so as to minimize the amount of dog hair. I drove to Manhattan, crossing the George Washington Bridge and taking the only major road through Central Park to her East Side apartment. I found a legal place on the street to park and looked for her building.
I buzzed her apartment from the row of buttons in the lobby of the building. A few minutes later she opened the door to a stairway and came out. I took in her hourglass figure, blonde hair, and blue eyes. She was dressed for the theater and looked stunning. "Hi Jim," she said.
"Jennifer---Hi, you look great," I said.
"What time is the show?"
"Curtain time is 8pm, so we have time to eat dinner."
"Great, let's go."
"My car is parked---"
"You won't find parking near Broadway. I'll get us a cab."
We went outside and Jennifer flagged down a cab. I thought that he was going to run her over, but he stopped and we got in. I gave the cabbie the address of the restaurant. After some driving at speeds unsafe for conditions and near-misses with other traffic, he let us off on Broadway and I paid his exorbitant fare. I hoped that he would use it to buy new shock absorbers.
We went in the restaurant and I gave my name. The maitre d' said, "Ah, you have reservations, right this way." She showed us to a cramped table for two set so close to other tables that I wasn't sure that I could get in. I was still skinny, so I slid between the two tables with my stomach sucked in and sat down. Jennifer took the other seat.
I decided to try out some of my repertoire of old, moth-eaten jokes on the chance that Jennifer hadn't heard some of them yet.
I rubbed my clean-shaven chin and said, "Did you know that a Russian discovered the electric razor?"
"Really? I didn't know that."
"Yes, Boris Povonski discovered it in the dumpster behind the American embassy."
The joke worked better in Russian, but it got a giggle out of Jennifer. "That's funny," she said.
"Back in the Stalin era, you would get five years in the gulag for telling that joke in Russia."
"Really? They put people in jail for telling jokes?"
"Oh yeah. That reminds me of another one. A man arrives in the gulag and the other prisoners start questioning him. `How long are you in here for?' they ask. `Twenty years,' he said. `What did you do?' `Nothing, I am completely innocent.' `You lie,' they said. `Innocent people only get five years.'"
She smiled. "So what do you do these days? You said that you live in New Jersey."
"Yes, I just bought a condo in western New Jersey. I work at a defense contractor out there programming computers."
"That sounds interesting," she said.
"Not really. I also do some cryptography research with my professor up at Clarkson."
"What is cryptography?"
"Cryptography is secret codes and stuff," I said. "There is a movie about it coming out, it's called Sneakers."
"I think that already came out. Maybe I will have to wait until the home video comes out."
"I guess so. I was meaning to see it. They were going to screen it for us at Crypto but it wasn't ready."
"What is Crypto?"
"It's a conference that is held in Santa Barbara every August. I went this year. It was pretty interesting."
"It must be nice to be so smart that you get invited to a cryptography conference."
Jennifer was a sharp cookie herself and she admired intelligence. We had had a rather intense rivalry in high school which our mutual attraction only added fire to.
"Tell me what you've been doing," I said. "You said that you are thinking of leaving Manhattan."
"Yeah, there are a lot of jobs in San Jose," she said. "The Silicon Valley. You ought to go out there too. The climate is wonderful."
"Your mother lives out there, right?" I asked.
"Yeah. My mother and my sister. I'm not really making ends meet in Manhattan, my father helps out with the money situation but I would like to be more stable."
"I'm not having such an easy time making ends meet myself," I said. "My employer has missed payroll a few times."
"So why do you stay there? There are lots of jobs for computer programmers in the Silicon Valley."
I wanted to change the subject. "Why do all cop cars in Czechoslovakia have two cops in them?"
"I have no idea," she said.
"One can read, one can write."
She giggled. "That's funny."
"Why do cop cars in Romania have three cops in them?"
"I'll bite, why?"
"One can read, one can write, and one has to keep an eye on the two dangerous intellectuals."
She laughed. "Not anymore," she said.
"No, the Iron Curtain is no more, thank God."
"Where did you get these jokes?"
"They are jokes that people tell in Russia and Eastern Europe," I said. "Of course they are illegal there---or were until recently."
"What is this show that we are going to see about?"
"It's a tragedy about Vietnam," I said.
"I guess that everything about Vietnam is a tragedy."
"Yeah. The war we lost."
Our food came. It was okay, but I had expected better. The portions were tiny and it only took me a couple of minutes to eat it. Jennifer spent longer on hers. I looked around the crowded restaurant and decided that they did this sort of business because of their location, not their food.
"It is almost curtain time," I said.
"Okay, I'm finished."
The waiter came around and said, "Your meal is all paid for, but you may leave a gratuity on the table."
I left a ten dollar bill and carefully slid out of my cramped seat. We went to the theater and I picked up our tickets at the window. Our seats weren't too bad and we sat down and waited for the curtain to be raised.
##
When the curtain went down on the closing scene and the lights came on, Jennifer was crying. "That was really sad," she said. "It ruined my mascara."
I wasn't sure whether that was good or bad, so I didn't reply. When we went outside, there were scores of people trying to flag down taxis and we had to wait a while. Jennifer gave the cabbie her address and we went on another terrifying ride through Manhattan. It didn't seem to scare Jennifer, though.
I walked Jennifer to her door and then found my Jeep. I wasn't sure how to get back to the George Washington Bridge, but I was sure that I could figure it out. I got through Central Park okay, but then got lost trying to get on the Henry Hudson. I was driving down a street trying to figure out which way to go when red flashing lights illuminated my car. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw that I was being pulled over.
I pulled over and got my wallet out of my breast pocket before the cops came to the car. I didn't want to do it in front of the cop because he might think that I was going for a weapon. I unzipped my window. One policeman stood outside my passenger's window with his gun drawn and the other outside my driver's window. "I need your license, your registration, and do you have license plates?" the cop asked.
I gave him my license and the mess of paperwork that served as New Jersey's temporary registration. "My temporary license plate is in my windshield," I said. "They couldn't put it in the back window because it's plastic."
They took my paperwork back to the police car to radio in. A few minutes later, they brought it all back and said, "You're all set. Good night."
"Could you tell me how to get on the George Washington Bridge?" I asked.
It turned out that I wasn't very far from the entrance. The cop gave me directions and then bid me good night again.
I got home late and Edif was mad at me. While I had been gone, she had trashed the whole house. Not a thing was left where I had left it. I didn't know how she had managed some of the damage that she had done. I took her for a walk and changed out of my suit, brushing the dog hair off it and hanging it in my closet.
I straightened my condo up as best as I could and scolded Edif before going to bed. I was glad to have a girlfriend, but wasn't sure that my dog was going to get along with her. Edif stretched out next to me on the little cot.
Morning came too soon. I would have slept in, but Edif pushed me out of the bed. I had never seen a dog with such a regular schedule. I sighed and decided that she wanted to make sure that I went to work and earned money to buy her dog food. I wondered what would become of my puppy and my girlfriend when I went to Russia in the fall.
Chapter 38: Valentines Day
In 1993, Valentine's Day fell on a Sunday. Late that morning I found a place to park near Jennifer's house. A man on the corner was selling roses so I bought some. I could hear Fool in the Rain by Led Zepplin coming from a nearby apartment. I found her building and buzzed her apartment.
After a few minutes, she let me in, took the roses, and invited me upstairs. "My roommates moved out, so I have the place to myself," she said. "Of course that leaves me with the rent."
Her third-floor, walk-up apartment was enormous. I could see how three women could live in it. "Are you looking for new roommates?" I asked.
"No, I am going to break the lease and move to California."
I didn't want to hear that. "Maybe you just need a smaller apartment," I said.
"Let's get some lunch, I'm starving. What sort of food do you want?"
"How about some Thai food," I said.
"Sure, there's a Thai place near here. I've never had Thai food, I'd like to try it."
We went downstairs and out into the street. "This way," she said, leading me toward the corner. I walked a few blocks with her until we came to a Thai restaurant. We went in and were seated. The place was pretty full.
She looked at her menu. "What are you going to have?"
"I'm going to have the chicken pa'nang," I said.
"I'll have the same thing."
"I don't think that you'll like it. It is pretty hot."
"I'll try it," she said. "If you like it, I'm sure that I can eat it."
The waiter took our order. I decided to try another old joke on her.
"In Russia, a man's wife sent him to the butcher to get some meat. He waited on line for two hours, then the shop announced that they were out of meat and told everyone to go home---"
"Wait, they run out of meat in Russia?" Jennifer asked.
"They run out of lots of things, meat, vegetables, toilet paper, but not vodka. If they can't get vodka at the liquor store they make it in their bathtubs---"
"Okay, go on."
"So he throws a fit with all of his pent up frustration at the shortages. `This is worse than under the czars!' he yells. A man in a trench coat comes up to him and says, `Comrade, you must be careful how you speak. You know what they do with troublemakers.'" I made a gesture of a gun being fired with my hand.
"Wow," Jennifer says.
"I'm not finished yet," I said. "So he goes home empty handed and his wife says, `They are out of meat again?' `Worse', he says, `they are out of bullets.'"
Jennifer laughed. "I'll have to try that one at work," she said.
The waiter brought us our food. I dished the chicken and curry over rice and Jennifer did the same. She took a bite and I could tell by her face that she didn't like it. I ate up my pa'nang, but she only half-pretended to eat hers. As I paid the check I asked her, "What do you want to do now?"
"Let's see a movie. Groundhog Day just opened. I'd like to see that."
We walked to a movie theater and, sure enough, Groundhog Day was playing. I bought our tickets and we waited for the next showing. I didn't understand why she would want to leave Manhattan. It is neat being able to walk to anything you might want to do, any time of day or night. In California people have to drive everywhere and from what I remembered, she didn't like to drive. I figured that I couldn't object too strenuously as I was going to Russia in less than eight months.
The movie was really good. I was sure that the guy who wrote it must have had a degree in philosophy, given all the schools of thought visited in it. Jennifer said, "That's the sort of thing I like, light romantic comedies."
"That was more than a light romantic comedy," I said. "That was really deep."
After the movie, we walked back to her apartment. "It must be nice to be able to walk anywhere that you want to go," I said.
"It gets old after a while."
I didn't think that it would grow old on me, but I didn't say anything. There was an awkward moment when we got back to her building, then I found my Jeep and drove back to New Jersey.
When I got home, Edif was happy to see me. I couldn't tell if she had trashed my condo again because I hadn't finished cleaning up from the last time. She must have smelled Jennifer on me because she sniffed me and barked a few times. I took Edif for a walk and got her some fresh water. Then I called Jennifer and thanked her for the date.
The next morning I had an email from Professor Jones telling me that our paper was accepted to Eurocrypt and inviting me to give a talk at Clarkson. I called him to make arrangements. "An invited talk section is a really nice thing to have on your resume," he said. I made a note to add a bullet point about the Clarkson talk to the resume that Romano kept to show customers.
He wanted to know if I would be able to go to Eurocrypt. "I don't know," I said.
"Because if you can make it, you should give the talk." I choked on that. I wasn't ready to give a talk on cryptography to an auditorium full of people with doctorates.
"What if they ask questions that I can't answer?"
"You are the expert on this. Just say, `You are a buffoon.'"
I didn't think that that would work. I had noticed at Crypto that the moderator had a question or two for each speaker and that it was obvious when the speaker couldn't answer them. "I don't have money to go to Europe right now," I said. "I'll let you know if I can make it."
I went and found Peter and told him that my paper was accepted and that I was invited to give a talk at Clarkson. "That is wonderful," Peter said. "Be sure to put that on your resume."
"Way ahead of you," I said.
"Can I see the paper?"
"Sure. I'll run off a copy on the laser printer."
I went back to my desk and printed a copy of the paper. We had compiled the paper to Postscript format using LaTeX and our laser printer spoke Postscript. Otherwise I would have been out of luck. Postscript was the lingua franca of laser printers, although HP had its own PCL language that it was trying to push. Postscript was a complete enough language that it was possible to program in it. In college I had written some Postscript programs as part of my job with the computing center. I had heard of people solving the Towers of Hanoi problem with it. When I had worked for the computer center as an undergraduate, I killed a job that was clearly tying up the printer in the main undergraduate lab with computation. It turned out to be a professor's job, but I was backed up by my boss.
After picking up the paper from the printer and giving it to Peter, I went back to my desk and found a copy of EE Times that had come in the mail for me. There was an article in it explaining the NSA's proposal to ban civilian cryptography except for a government-approved cipher embedded in a tamper-proof chip called Clipper. To enable wiretaps, each chip's master key would be kept in a government database, called key escrow, and would be available to government agents with a warrant. In the stream of data flowing between chips, there would be a law enforcement access field, called a LEAF, every so often. The LEAF would contain a copy of the session key encrypted with the master key for that chip. The receiving chip would refuse to decrypt without the LEAF.
It was a terrible idea, I thought. First of all, the key-escrow system would invite all sorts of abuses and it was likely that the system would be corrupted to allow intelligence officials to get keys surreptitiously. Another problem was practical. A server or mainframe might have hundreds of encrypted conversations, called sessions, going simultaneously and under this scheme it would need a chip for each session. The code used in Clipper was a secret NSA cipher called Skipjack.
Skipjack was said to be a strong cipher. They made a big deal out of the chip being tamperproof to keep anyone from finding out an important part of the cipher known as the S-boxes, but there were two problems with this. One was that if the S-boxes were secret, scientists couldn't do security testing on them to gain confidence that Skipjack was, in fact, secure. The second problem is that there is no such thing as a tamperproof chip. With the right scientific equipment it would be possible to read the S-boxes off the chip, destroying it in the process. Our enemies would have a strong cipher and we would be stuck with key escrow.
An interesting piece of information that I got from the article was that the NSA had its own chip foundry that they could make the chips at. Foundries were expensive, sometimes costing more than a billion dollars, and had to be retooled or shut down after only a few years of use as new technologies made it possible to fit more transistors on a chip. I had always assumed that the NSA got whatever chips they needed from semiconductor manufacturers like the rest of us. I couldn't help but be impressed.
The article also mentioned that the NSA was having the Commerce Department deny export licenses for any software that contained cryptography that used a key of more than forty bits. Commercially available computers could search all the possible keys in a forty-bit keyspace and break those ciphers. Cryptography was listed in export regulations as a munition of war. The author believed that the NSA was trying to control domestic software with the export restrictions, not just exported software.
A man named Phillip Zimmerman had written a program a couple of years earlier known as PGP for Pretty Good Privacy. He had published the source code as a book using an OCR font and the book was scanned in in Europe and compiled for overseas use. Now Zimmerman was under investigation for exporting munitions without a license.
Chapter 39: Invited Talk
The time came for Jennifer to move out of her apartment. She had asked me to help her move her stuff to her father's house in Watertown, halfway between Utica and Potsdam, so I parked as close as I could to her apartment, which wasn't close at all, and buzzed her.
"Hi, come in. Thanks for helping me."
"It's no problem," I said. "I have to go up that way anyway to give a talk at Clarkson."
"What is your talk about?"
"Cryptography---our Eurocrypt paper."
She had a pile of stuff in her living room, so I started carrying the stuff to the car and packing it in the back. It was a lot of stuff to carry in a Jeep Wrangler, but it didn't seem like much stuff for someone who was moving. "I've been sending stuff to my mother in California by UPS," she explained.
When her apartment was empty, we got in my Jeep and I started it up. "I think that the best way to go is across the GWB and to take 17 up in New Jersey and get on the Thruway up there," I said.
"Whatever you think is best," she said. "I don't know how to drive around here."
I drove her over the big, gray bridge and up 17. Cat Stevens was singing on the radio. I couldn't have imagined back then that one day a jet airliner would be denied entry to the U.S. because Cat Stevens was on board. I guess it really is a Wild World. Jennifer had her eyes closed to avoid seeing New Jersey traffic.
Once on the Thruway, I went seventy miles an hour to Utica. Even at those speeds it was five hours before I got off the Thruway at Exit 32 and started heading north to Watertown. It took another two hours to get to her father's house, with her giving me directions once we were nearby.
I pulled into the driveway of her father's house and she knocked on the door. Her brother let us in, holding a giant Rottweiler by it's collar. The dog was bigger than the young man. It made Edif look puny. Once we were in the house, I was shaking hands with her father and her brother took the dog upstairs. "Don't let it eat you," Jennifer called after him. He came back down and started unloading the car.
We talked over dinner and then I slept on the couch in the living room. I had forgotten my pajamas so I slept in my underwear. I was awakened the next morning when the giant dog leaped on me. I petted it and pushed it off me then went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and shave.
I put on my black Brooks Brothers suit for my talk at Clarkson. Jennifer called down the stairs, "Are you decent?"
"Yeah," I called back.
She came down. "You're dressy."
"I'm dressed for my talk at Clarkson," I said.
"I hope that they like it."
Jennifer's father had to head out to work. I had a little coffee before I headed up to Clarkson for my talk. "Good luck at Clarkson," Jennifer called to me as I left.
"Thanks. Send me your new phone number."
"Don't worry, I will."
I drove off and got on Route 11 to go up to Clarkson. It took a couple of hours before I reached Canton, ten miles from Potsdam. There were two colleges in Canton: St. Lawrence University and Canton Ag and Tech, and two colleges in Potsdam: Clarkson University and Potsdam State. It seemed like the only industries in the North Country were colleges and prisons.
On the road from Canton to Potsdam, there was a road block. I wondered if it was related to the truck bomb that had gone off in the parking garage of the World Trade Center a few days earlier. A trooper checked my stickers and then poked his head in my window. "What's your name and where are you going?" he asked.
"Jim Washburn. I'm going to Clarkson University to give a talk on cryptography," I said.
He waved me by. I could see that they had a few vehicles that they hadn't let through the road block, probably for expired registrations or inspections. It is not unusual for people carrying contraband or otherwise involved in illegal activity to also let their inspections and registrations lapse.
When I got to Professor Jones's office, I told him, "I know I'm early, but I would be even earlier if I hadn't gotten stopped at a security roadblock between Canton and Potsdam."
"A security roadblock? I find that troubling."
"Maybe they were trying to keep the World Trade Center bombers from escaping to Canada, I don't know." I had a bad feeling that it was associated with my visit to the North Country. The troopers didn't want any drug traffickers to carry out their threats against me.
We had lunch at the new student center and then it was time for my talk. We went to a classroom and I recognized a CIA officer I had worked with in the audience. Professor Jones introduced me and then I talked.
I explained the problem that we were trying to solve, and showed the math that we were using on the blackboard. It seemed like I hadn't talked nearly long enough, so I kept on babbling away about our system at a hundred words per minute until I ran out things to say. I had no idea how long I had talked for, but I thought that it wasn't nearly long enough. The audience applauded me.
"How did I do?" I asked Professor Jones.
"You did fine," he said.
"I don't think that I talked long enough."
"You went for about half an hour. That's fine."
"Thanks." I said.
"We have a room for you at the Clarkson Inn, when you are ready to check in. Lodging for the night and breakfast are being picked up by the department."
"Great! Thanks."
I went to the Clarkson Inn. "Hi, I'm Jim Washburn and I'm a guest of the Math and Computer Science Department."
They found me on their list. "Yes, we've been expecting you." They gave me keys and told me where to find my room.
As soon as I got into my room, I changed out of my suit. I hung it up carefully and pulled on blue jeans and a tee shirt. Then I lay down for a while before dinner.
For dinner, I went up to the Student Center. It wasn't fine cuisine, but it was okay, better than the stuff that they fed us when I was an undergrad. I went back to the Clarkson Inn and decided what to do next. The Clarkson Inn is downtown, so it is within walking distance of all the bars and clubs that students from Clarkson and Potsdam State hang out at. I had never gone to any of them, as that seemed too expensive when I was an undergrad. I decided to check them out.
I walked to one that had caught my eye when I was a student. It had a tiki motif and I wanted to see what it looked like on the inside. I went in. It was a total dump. I couldn't believe it, because it looked nice on the outside. It was full of kids, too, college students who didn't have enough to do.
I got a beer from the bar and sat down at a table with a couple of sorority sisters. "Hi," one of them said. "What's your name?"
"Jim," I replied.
"Do you go to college here?"
"I graduated from Clarkson. I am back in town to give a talk," I said.
"What are you talking about?"
"Cryptography."
"Whatever that is," the girl said.
It occurred to me that the kids in there drinking on fake IDs weren't on the Dean's List. That was alright, though. I talked to the girls for a little while, but soon I got tired. I had had a long day. For a moment I thought that maybe I would stay late and take one of the girls home with me, but then I decided that would be inappropriate. I walked back to the Clarkson Inn.
The next morning, the Clarkson Inn fed me breakfast. I got food while they quietly kept track of what I took. I had some bacon and a pastry with coffee and orange juice. Then I went back to my room and packed up my stuff and put it in my Jeep, making a separate trip for my suit. I went to the front desk and signed the check which would be paid for with Professor Jones's grant.
It took me seven hours to get back to my mother's house, taking I-81 south to I-80 east, to pick up my dog. I seatbelted her in the passengers seat and then got on I-80 west to go back out to my condo. It was dark when I got home, and after walking and feeding Edif, I went straight to bed.
Chapter 40: Unemployed
Payroll was unreliable at Romano. It was making it difficult to get my bills paid on time, but the first check that went out was always my mortgage. One day in the early summer, Peter called me into his office.
"Jim, we don't have enough money to pay you."
"What do you mean?"
"This is what we are going to do. We want you to keep working for us, but instead of being on payroll, we want you to collect unemployment."
It was all I could do not to laugh in his face. What disturbed me, though, was that my father would have gone along with that scheme.
"Isn't that abusing the unemployment system?"
"No, we pay into the unemployment insurance, so now we are going to use it."
"So what you are saying is that you are laying me off."
"Only temporarily until we get some more work in. And we want you to keep working."
I looked up the unemployment office in the telephone book and drove there. I stood in a long line before I got to the desk, where they had me fill out a form. They asked me a few questions and then I was done. My first check would be in the mail that week.
On the bright side, I would know when my checks were coming so that I could pay my bills and the Agency would subsidize the checks and make sure that they didn't call me in to prove that I was looking for work. My new official cover was as an FBI Special Agent and I was expected to earn those checks. Edif was happy when I came home early.
I went down to the George Inn and took a seat at the bar. "You're here early," the bartender observed. It was late afternoon.
"I just got laid off," I said. "My boss doesn't want me to look for a new job, but I'm going to anyway."
She poured me a Budweiser. "This one's on me," she said.
"He wants me to come into the office and work as if I still have a job. Have you ever heard of something that ridiculous?"
"That's crazy," she said. "Are you going to do it?"
"Well, I'll go in a couple of times a week to check my email and stuff, but I am not going to sit there for ten hours a day as if they were paying me."
"I don't blame you."
"Maybe I'll get him to let me bring a computer home. It can get pretty boring sitting at home alone. Good books are hard to find," I said.
"You could watch television."
"I don't have a TV."
"Yeah, I could see how that could be boring," she said.
The next day, I went back to the office and asked Peter if I could bring a computer home with me. "Sure," he said. "If you want to work at home that is just fine."
"I also need a desk to put it on and a chair."
I went back home with a computer, a folding table that said "Property of the U.S. Government" on the bottom of it, and a folding chair. I set the table and chair up in the loft of my condo, dragging them up the spiral staircase. I set the computer up on the table and plugged it into the phone jack up there. Now I could dial into the SCO system and pick up my email from home.
I called Professor Jones and told him about my employment situation. "I met someone at Eurocrypt who is looking for a cryptographer," he said. "I'll give him your name."
I got a job interview in Connecticut for that position. I drove out there, dropping my dog off at my mother's, taking the George Washington Bridge and the Cross-Bronx Expressway to New Haven, where I followed the directions that they had mailed me. I interviewed all day with computer scientists and even a physicist. I thought that it was going pretty well until I got to the manager's office.
The manager said, "The question is, what are we looking for? A world-class scientist or a graduate student?"
It didn't sound promising, but I held onto hope as I spent the night in New Haven on their dime and then drove back to New Jersey in the hot sun. Jeeps with ragtops don't have a/c, it wouldn't make sense, and it was the hottest day of the year. They had promised that they would call and let me know. I had the manager's business card. It didn't really matter, what I had learned at the interview was useful to the Agency and I was headed for Russia soon anyway.
I did okay on the unemployment. It was about the same as my take-home pay, but wasn't taxed, so I came out alright. I started getting my bills caught up and thought that it wouldn't be so bad. At least those checks turned up every other week. That was better than I could say about payroll at Romano.
I took advantage of my free time to scour the bars and dives in the area for drug dealers and other low lives. I looked for prostitution in the go-go bar, drug dealing at the Pack-It-Inn and the George Inn, organized crime at The Spa. There are plenty of crooks in New Jersey to keep a cop busy.
One Friday night I was at the Spa. They had a band and it was crowded. The guy next to me was half drunk and really talkative. I already figured him for a mobster.
"My wife is throwing me out of the house," he said.
"That's too bad. Where are you going to stay?"
"I don't know. I have plenty of money from my `business' but I just need a room."
"I see," I said.
"Where do you live?"
"I have a condo here."
"Do you need a roommate? I'll pay half of your mortgage."
Not a chance, but I wanted him to keep on talking. "I'm listening."
"It'll be great. I'll bring go-go girls home at night, you can share them. You don't mind go-go girls do you?"
I actually thought that they were disease-carrying pests, but said, "Yeah, go-go girls are cool."
Soon he was telling me all about his drug and prostitute-filled personal life. This is like fishing in a barrel, I thought to myself.
Another night I was sitting at the George Inn when a man sat down next to me and asked, "What would you do for a line this big?"
"A line of what?" I asked.
"Blow."
That was all I needed, really, but I kept him talking for a while. I bet he was surprised when the police searched him later that night. When I went to bed that night and Edif jumped over me to take her place on the bed, I said to her, "You know, they say that he who lays down with dogs wakes up with fleas."
I also started following a new Usenet newsgroup called talk.politics.crypto. It was full of people outraged about the key-escrow proposal and was dominated by the IFF. I don't like Internet discussions because they are filled with people who think that they are experts on submarines as a consequence of reading The Hunt for Red October, but it was a source of news. I hadn't followed up on what the FBI did with the stolen document that I got from IFF, but it certainly hadn't crippled the organization. In fact the Clipper chip was the best thing that could have happened to them. They were interviewed in newspapers and magazines and, I suspected, television. They claimed to lead the fight against key escrow.
I knew how to deal with radicals. I had had some success infiltrating the Libertarian Party while I was in college and got on their e-mail discussion lists. The IFF's position on key-escrow and Clipper was, in fact, mainstream. The problem was that they hoped to parlay the popularity of that fight into support for a digital anarchism that most people were not ready to embrace.
I liked to go around telling people that President Bush never would have advanced a fascist proposal like key-escrow, this was Clinton's doing. One scientist asked me if it was like the way that "only Nixon can go to China." I sensed a huge gulf between us in our perceptions of the Democratic Party. Where she trusted them, I was suspicious that the Democrats wanted to bring everything under government control.
At Peter's urging, I tried to bring in a contract for test equipment that I would be the manager of. Marketing and sales isn't my strong point though, and I had no success. Sometimes I stopped by the office and looked at the Commerce Business Daily fax of government grants and programs being bid on and even prepared a proposal for the National Science Foundation, but it didn't get anywhere.
Since I was going to Russia at the end of the summer, I didn't worry about trying to find a job. I decided to concentrate on seeing and enjoying the States over the summer before heading to the artic reaches of the former Soviet Union. I would drive across country to Crypto '93 and back, taking two different routes. One doesn't really appreciate his country until he knows that he is leaving it. Jennifer agreed to drive down to Santa Barbara from her mother's house in San Jose after the conference to spend a weekend with me, so that was something to look forward to.
Chapter 41: Road Trip
I had my mail forwarded to my mother's house before I left. I brought my dog there as well and convinced my mother to make a sun bonnet for my Jeep. They sold thick canvas bonnets called bikini tops, but I wanted one made of denim. We went to the fabric store and I picked out the denim, then she sewed straps on it which I used to tie it in place. My plan was to drive all the way to California and back with the top down. I didn't have much choice since the piece of metal where the front of the top inserts above the windshield was slightly bent and the top blew off it above seventy miles an hour. The speed limit for most of the trip would be 75.
I loaded up my Jeep with camping gear and clothes and other stuff that I would need on my cross-country odyssey. My mother promised to deposit my unemployment checks in my bank account, so I was good to go. I got on I-80 in Teaneck, New Jersey and headed west. It didn't take too long to get to Pennsylvania, and I aimed to make Ohio before nightfall. Once I crossed the Ohio state line, I pulled over at a rest stop and attempted to cook a steak that I had brought with me on one of the barbecue grills that the state had set there.
My steak came out on the rare side, but that was okay because I was hungry. After eating, I put the windows in my Jeep and put the drivers seat back to sleep for the night. That wasn't the most comfortable way to sleep, so I was back on the road bright and early the next morning with a cup of coffee and a sausage muffin from McDonalds to sustain me.
When I reached Indiana, the color of the pavement changed from black to red. I-80 was a toll road in Indiana, but fortunately it wasn't too much or too far. In Illinois I went over the Mississippi, which was flooded. I started seeing a lot of drowned crops of corn. It was like my great-grandfather used to say, "Not enough rain will scare you to death, but too much will put you out of business."
Iowa was flat and wet. Alongside the road was nothing but stunted corn in big lakes. I had heard something about flooding in the Midwest on CNN at my mother's house, now I was seeing it. It amazed me that no matter how bad the conditions were for raising crops, the United States always had plenty of food to eat and export. The Soviet Union, from the minute that they started forced collectivization, was unable to produce enough food to feed its citizens. This was in spite of having the fertile cropland of the Ukraine to work with. At least under the czars there was enough to eat except under unusual circumstances such as World War I.
I pulled off the highway for the night in Nebraska. I got dinner at a little diner just off the highway. I slept in my car again and was beginning to get aches and pains from being in the drivers seat so much. I got back on the road first thing in the morning and drove to Lincoln, where I wanted to check out University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A well-known cryptographer taught there and it was a place that I might have considered if I had decided to go to graduate school.
The campus was vast but quiet. I found a campus map and went to the computer science building. It was a big building on a big campus that boasted twenty-five thousand students. I walked around campus in the vicinity of the computer science building, to see what else there was. Then I got back in my Jeep, found a place to get a bite to eat, and got back on the highway.
I stopped for the night again in Wyoming at a rest stop on a mountain. It was chilly and windy. I put the windows in and got my blue tarp out and tied it over my rollbars to provide protection from the wind. I had a blanket, but I was still chilly and didn't sleep well. When I did sleep, I slept late and the sun was already high by the time that I got back on the road.
Wyoming was beautiful and desolate. I pulled off the interstate when I saw a sign that said, "Next gas 200 miles," and filled up my tank. There were dry grasslands fenced off from the road with occasional entrances with grates that cattle couldn't cross. The landscape was beautiful rolling hills. Ranches had their own exits. This seemed like someplace that I could live, if only there was more water.
At the Wyoming-Utah line there were four state police cars from each state, checking out the traffic entering their respective jurisdictions. It reminded me of the border between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where the Massachusetts police went into New Hampshire to ticket people buying liquor at the state liquor stores to bring back to Massachusetts where it is heavily taxed, and New Hampshire police ticketed the Massachusetts police for loitering and trespassing.
When I reached Salt Lake City, I got off I-80 and headed south on I-15 to Provo, Utah. Two of my cousins were living there. Jacob was a student at Brigham Young University and in Air Force ROTC, and I didn't know what Molly was doing as she had graduated from college. My mother had visited Utah and came back with stories about not being able to get coffee or wine. I didn't need booze on my road trip, but coffee was a must. If I didn't drink coffee in the morning I would get terrible headaches. I usually could rely on Molly to introduce me to some left-wing radicals, but I guess that she hadn't found any in Provo, Utah.
Jacob and Molly insisted on taking me back up to Salt Lake City to go sightseeing. We saw the Mormon temple, which looked like it had been built to resist a siege, some other Mormon sites and Molly wanted me to watch a movie with them. I figured that it was either left-wing propaganda or Mormon proselytizing, and I didn't want to watch either.
"I don't like movies," I said. "What's it about, anyway?"
"It is about the Mormon pilgrims who came to Utah to escape religious persecution," Molly said.
"In other words it is proselytizing," I said.
"It is not proselytizing."
"Listen, you know we really should go back so that I can rest up and get on the road in the morning."
"Sure, right after we see the movie."
I could see that I wasn't going to get out of watching the movie. The fact that it was free made me sure that I didn't want to see it. I went in the theater with my cousins and soon the movie started. It was propaganda. Pure, Mormon propaganda. When the movie was finally over and we left, a young man in a suit introduced himself and started giving me the hard sell to convert to Mormonism. My cousins weren't any help, as Molly was also urging me to convert. Whatever Molly was into, she was a zealot. She reminded me of my sister in that respect.
There wasn't a chance that I would become Mormon and I resented them trying to get me to do something that I didn't want to. I considered pretending to go along to learn more about the Mormons, but I didn't have the time. On the drive back to Provo, Jacob told me that I should check out the job opportunities in Utah. "What job opportunities?" I asked.
"There's lots of high-tech companies. For instance, did you know that Wordperfect is in Utah?"
I took note of it as a company that I would never send my resume to. I used Wordperfect for my word processing, but that didn't mean that I would be willing to live in Utah to work for them.
I spent the night with my cousins, getting my first shower since leaving New Jersey, and had some decent meals. I found that I could, in fact, get coffee at the convenience store not minding the disapproving looks that people gave me while I poured and paid for it.
I left in the morning clean, refreshed, and ready to take on the highway again. I took the windows out of my doors so that I could enjoy the open breeze better. Who needs air conditioning when he has the top down?
For most of the trip I had been able to tune in a radio station. There had been a stretch in Wyoming where I hadn't been able to. It seemed like every hour I heard the song Runaway Train by Soul Asylum. I adopted it as the theme song for my trip. It seemed much nicer than the other song that was played incessantly, Twilight Zone by Golden Earring.
I continued south on I-15 only to run into a dust storm. Visibility was bad and I followed a truck's tail lights. Dust came whipping through my Jeep getting in my eyes, nose, mouth, hair, ears, in my shirt, and even in my pants. It was awful. So much for the shower I had just taken.
The dust storm subsided near the Arizona border. I went through the corner of Arizona in the blink of an eye, and entered Nevada. I decided to stop for the night before entering Las Vegas. I stopped at a giant truck stop that advertised showers. I took a shower and, once the dust was off me, slept in my Jeep for the night. I planned to earn a little cash playing blackjack in Las Vegas and I needed to be rested to concentrate on remembering the cards and computing the oddments.
Chapter 42: Crypto '93
It was morning when I pulled into Las Vegas. I found a place to park in a parking lot next to a police station. I got out of my Jeep and walked to the strip, going in the first casino. I played blackjack. The details are boring, because I was keeping track of cards and computing oddments, but I left when I was up $50. I thought that as long as I didn't get greedy, I would fly under the radar. I went to the next casino and won $50 there. By the time I was ready to leave the third casino, they were on to me. I fled ahead of security. Casinos hate mathematicians.
That left me out in the hot, midday, Las Vegas sun. I saw someone who looked like a man of the street walking down the sidewalk. "Excuse me," I said. "I don't remember where I parked my car. Have you seen a green Jeep Wrangler with a denim top?" I had used this successfully in the slums of Pittsburgh, where a street gang offered to steal me a new car.
"No," he said. "But I will help you look."
We started walking down the street together. "Where are you from?" he asked.
"New Jersey," I said.
"Are you in trouble with the law?" he asked.
"I'm out on bail," I said. I could see the machinery going in his head.
"Where are you headed to?"
"Santa Barbara, do you want to come?"
"I'd love to, but I can't. That would be great though, to just drop everything and go to Santa Barbara."
We continued walking and encountered a meter maid. "Hey," he said. "Have you seen a green Jeep Wrangler with a denim top?"
The meter maid said, "What's the license number on that?"
I told her. "I'll keep an eye out for it."
We walked in the hot sun. "I have a friend, a woman, and she's a prostitute, so if you want me to hook you up with her, I can do that," he said.
"That's okay," I said.
"Do you need some weed? 'Cause I can get that too."
"I just need my car."
We walked for an hour and a half in the hot sun with him telling me about all the people and places that no tourist ever heard of before I said that I needed a drink of water. We went into a tavern where I sat up at the bar and ordered a glass of water. The guy ordered a beer.
The bar was air conditioned and I would have liked to stay there, but after we consumed the water and beer, we went back into the streets of Las Vegas. We went by a liquor store and the man went in, coming out with something that he was drinking from a paper bag.
We walked and talked and baked in the hot sun. I was learning all sorts of things about the Las Vegas underground. He described himself as a desert rat, and that term stuck with me. At the end of three hours, we came upon the parking lot where I had parked my Jeep. It was conveniently near the police station and a cop was watching us.
After we said goodbye, I started driving away and the cops grabbed the desert rat. I headed out of Las Vegas through the desert to California. It took me six hours to reach Santa Barbara and it was dark outside.
I pulled into the parking lot of Anacopa Hall and went in, telling the clerk that I wanted to register for a room for Crypto '93. I couldn't help but think of a story a math professor had told me about a famous mathematician who arrived in an airport with no luggage, no identification, and no money. The math department of the university where he was to give a talk picked him up from the police station.
"Registration is tomorrow afternoon. I'll give you your room now and you pay the bill when you register," the student manning the desk said. Because the flights from Los Angeles came in every hour, day or night, they were set up for late arrivals.
I signed the card and the bill and took the keys. I found my room and used one of the communal showers in the men's room. The water barely spit out and it took a long time for me to get clean and wash my hair. UCSB was miserly with the little bit of salty potable water that they had. They used recycled water for the sprinklers. Grateful to have a real bed, I went in my room and lay down.
The next morning, Sunday, I got up late, aware that registration wasn't until 5pm and the first reception would be after that. Breakfast was being offered in the cafeteria so I went there, planning to fill myself up with enough bacon and sausage to last me until the reception.
I had a whole day to kill. There was a computer lab where I could check email on my Clarkson email account, but not my Romano email, and there was a lounge with a television where I could watch CNN or play ping pong with other cryptographers who arrived early.
In the early afternoon, I went back to my room to take a nap. The cross-country drive had exhausted me and it was good to have a room and a bed and access to a shower, however inadequate it might be.
When I woke up, I went out to the main desk to see what time it was, as I hadn't brought a clock. I still had an hour and a half to go before registration. I was hungry and bored. I went outside and took the steps down to the beach. I hung out there for a while, but I still didn't get the attraction of beaches.
When it was time to register, I explained my situation to one of the people at the tables set up for registration. It turned out that they were set up for walk-in registrations, but renting a room as well was unusual. I wrote them a check, drawn on the unemployment check that had been deposited on Friday. They accepted it and gave me my conference materials and my name tag.
I took the conference materials back to my room to look through later, and went to the reception where I started pigging out on shrimp. Bruce Anderson spotted me and said, "It's good to see you back." I just smiled. I planned to tell him what I thought of key escrow later. The indoor reception was too crowded to have a serious discussion with him.
I ran across Nick Gordon. "Maybe I should bring up key escrow in the business meeting on Thursday," I said brightly.
"Maybe we should string you up by the neck," Nick said.
Not wishing to be lynched I detached myself from that conversation and looked for Professor Jones. I found him getting chocolate-covered strawberries from a table.
"Hi, glad to see you," I said.
"It's good to see you, too. I heard about you card counting in Las Vegas."
I wasn't sure what card counting was, but the blackjack dealer had used the same words, so I decided to play the probabilities. "Yeah, I was in Vegas yesterday."
"I heard that you drove out here, that's a long trip."
"Yeah, I was pretty exhausted when I pulled into Santa Barbara last night, but now I am rested and ready for the conference."
"Did you find a job yet?"
"No, but I think that Romano is going to hire me back soon."
"Good luck with that. Crypto is a good place to meet someone who can give you a job."
"Plenty of jobs with the NSA," a woman said. Her name tag said she was with the Department of Energy.
"Did I hear that you were looking for a job?" a man asked. "Because I own a company that writes software for the NSA."
"Really?" I asked.
"Yes. We don't usually know what the software is for, although we all have Top Secret clearances. We're based in Utah and most of our programmers are Mormon. It makes it easier to get security clearances that way."
"I don't think that I want to live in Utah," I said.
"Yeah, it can be a rough for someone who isn't LDS," he said.
He wasn't kidding. In my tour of Salt Lake City, I had noticed that the state government and Latter Day Saints offices were together. They probably even shared office space. Utah is more open since the Olympics were held there, but in 1993 it was the only theocracy in the United States.
"I don't think that I would be able to stand not being able to have a beer or a cup of coffee whenever I wanted one," I said. "Also, I wouldn't want to be excluded from society because I'm not Mormon."
"It's not as bad as all that. If you change your mind, just send me your resume," he said.
Chapter 43: Bruce Anderson
For lunch on Monday, we shared the cafeteria with the high school leadership students. A group of them, six girls and two boys, sat at the table behind me. I overheard a snippet of their conversation.
"When were you circumcised?" a girl asked one of the boys.
"I'm not," the boy responded.
"If you want to go out with Monica you have to get circumcised," she said.
"Yeah," Monica said, "'cause I am really afraid of smegma."
I wondered what they were teaching in the California public schools that a sixteen-year-old girl would know what smegma was. "I don't have that," the boy said.
Bruce Anderson and a guy from Motorola sat down at my table. The key-escrow proposal had started when Motorola planned a civilian encrypted phone product. "---now the Agency is saying that I need to have an secure phone in my car," Bruce was saying. His Agency was different from my Agency.
"We can set you up with one of those," the Motorola rep said. It was rumored that Motorola did a lot of business with the NSA.
"I can't wait for this conference to be over so that I can climb those mountains," Bruce said, jabbing his thumb in a general easterly direction. There were some mountains just inland from the Santa Barbara area. It surprised me that Bruce would be a mountain climber because his belly was round. Not fat, but much bigger than mine.
I looked at him. He seemed to be the NSA spook in charge of dealing with me and possibly all other civilian cryptographers. I knew that his title at the NSA was technical director, which I took to be a mid-level management position, and he paid close attention to the papers at the technical sessions. A lot of people watched his reactions to decide whether a paper was interesting or not.
As if reading my mind, he said, "I don't know what people think I am. I'm just a mathematician."
I snorted. Just a mathematician, indeed. If that were the case, then I was just a computer programmer. I decided to engage him in conversation.
"I don't think that key escrow is a good idea," I said. "It smacks of fascism."
"The administration proposal---" he started.
"I don't like this administration," I said. "I don't trust the Democrats."
"It's too bad my friend with Department of Justice isn't here, he would tell you why we need it."
I stifled a laugh. He didn't know that I worked for the Department of Justice and that I had researched the issue and found that not a single court-ordered wiretap had been thwarted by cryptography. His friend from Department of Justice must have been smoking the evidence.
I finished eating and returned my tray. Outside I ran into a French man who worked for a French telecommunications company. "I understand that you are looking for a job," he said.
"Yeah, I'm on the job market."
"There is an opening for a cryptographer with my company, but you would have to move to Washington D.C. How does that sound?"
"I'm listening."
Instead of telling me about the job, he started telling me about France. I actually found this interesting. They didn't discuss the political organization of France in my French classes in high school.
Soon it was time for the afternoon session, and I headed to the auditorium. I ran across Bruce Anderson on the way and told him quietly, "What you should do is choose a code that you have already broken, then tell people not to use it. They will all adopt it and you will be set."
"We don't have the clout," he said.
"Think about it," I replied.
I sat in the back for the afternoon sessions. The leading lights of cryptography sat in the front. Famous cryptographers, NSA spooks, other funding agencies. They asked questions or visibly reacted to the talks or otherwise made a public spectacle of themselves. I preferred to sit in the back and not be noticed.
After a few talks, I stifled a yawn. I had seen the talks that I was interested in for that afternoon and I didn't want to make a spectacle of myself by snoring. I quietly left the auditorium and went back to my room to lie down. There would be a reception that night and I wanted to be ready.
Before I reached my room, I ran across the Frenchman again. He wanted to know how I was finding the talks.
"There are so many, that I have to pick the ones that I really want to hear and make sure that I hear them. The rest I may or may not attend," I said. "Otherwise there is technical overload."
"If you work for us, we will send you to all the conferences. Any conference that you want to attend."
"That sounds pretty sweet," I said.
"Yes, and we will pay you ninety thousand U.S. dollars per year."
That was three times what I was making with Romano. "That's not bad pay," I allowed. I was suspicious of this whole pitch. It seemed like the Frenchman was stalking me, talking to me when I was alone. I suspected that he was an intelligence agent. "Keep him talking," the woman in my earpiece urged.
"Our problem," he said, "is that the NSA is eavesdropping on our communications from their base in England. This is giving American companies a competitive advantage."
That was an interesting allegation. "What do you plan to do about it?" I asked.
"First, we are going to legalize cryptography." Cryptography was illegal in France without a license.
"And we are going to ban it," I said.
He laughed. "Ironic, isn't it?"
I wondered if the NSA's key-escrow proposal was intended to get the French to use the Clipper chip. Because it was clear that they weren't going to. This was an opportunity to get a spy into the French government, if the Agency wanted to do that. The problem was that I didn't speak French. Sure I had taken a few years of high school French and could read and write and say and understand simple French sentences, but I was not proficient in it. I had put my time into becoming fluent in Russian and still continued to do exercises to eliminate my American accent. I couldn't turn around and become fluent in French overnight.
I went in my room and lay down. The southern California sun had worn me out. I could see the ocean out my window and I lay on my side watching the waves come in. Soon I was asleep.
I woke up in time for the reception on the lawn. I stretched and headed out to the front desk to look at the clock. The reception would be starting soon. I popped into the lounge and watched CNN. They were still talking about the flooding in the Midwest, although things were drying out now. It was idle talk to fill up a 24-hour news cycle, as there would be plenty of grain. There always was, not like in the Soviet Union where communism had brought about seventy years of bad harvests. The farmers wanted federal assistance for their lost crops.
At the reception I sat at a table of Europeans. I knew that cryptography was already illegal in most of their countries so I was interested to hear their perspectives. I was surprised to learn that Europe was headed in the opposite direction of the United States with plans to legalize cryptography throughout the newly formed European Union. There were a lot of allegations of interception of their commercial traffic by the NSA. What did the NSA think would happen if we were saddled with weak cryptography? Couldn't spy satellites intercept our traffic?
I confronted Bruce Anderson again. "I heard that no legal wiretaps were thwarted by cryptography," I said.
"Crypto is coming," he replied. "We need to get ahead of it."
"It is about time it came," I replied. "Computer hackers and high tech thieves are taking advantage of our unsecured communications systems and computers to steal money and secrets."
"They won't be able to break Clipper," he said. "Clipper has 80-bit keys and is exportable."
I went to get some more beer and a plate of salmon. When I had it, I sat down at a different table. A couple of scientists had brought their school-aged children. "I was a monkey, a thief, and a soldier," one of the children said.
That evoked thoughts in me about all the different roles I played as a spy before I realized that she was talking about a school play. Another woman scientist was talking to her mother. "I don't understand why they make all those clothes in those fancy stores that don't fit anyone."
"I think that they are trying to sell a certain body type."
"My husband says, `It's awful that they don't make clothes that fit you. I guess that they don't want your business.'" The woman was not fat. I guessed that she was going to the wrong clothing stores.
The sprinkler system would turn on at ten o'clock, so I grabbed the last Sam Adams from the bar, which was closing down, and brought it back to my room.
Chapter 44: The Swallow
At lunch on Tuesday I sat at a big table with the French spook at one end and Bruce Anderson and his entourage at the other. The French spook had finally gotten to the nub of the job offer: "As it turns out, you will have to work in Paris."
I said loudly in Bruce's direction, "This guy wants me to move to France."
Bruce looked at me and didn't say anything. I was interested to know how the NSA felt about me going abroad as I planned to go to Russia as soon as I got back East.
There were no afternoon sessions that day. It was the free afternoon that they have in every Crypto conference. A lot of people went into Santa Barbara or to the beach, but I just hung out at the dorm watching CNN and people playing ping pong.
I was in the lounge alone watching CNN when a big bear of a man whose name tag said he was with GCHQ came in. GCHQ stands for General Communications Headquarters and is the British counterpart to NSA. He started talking to me in a deep voice with a British accent.
"You don't want to leave the United States," he said. "There are a lot of freedoms and benefits that you get from living in America that you won't get elsewhere. I always love to travel to America because it is the only place in the world where you can get a hamburger and a beer for five dollars."
I was tempted to ask where I could get a hamburger and a beer for five dollars, other than the bowling alley in Van Hornesville, New York, but I bit my tongue. "So just stay in the United States." he said. "I don't know the reason that certain people are red-lined for funding, but it is important."
Having spoken his piece, he left. I had heard that the NSA and GCHQ cooperated a lot, but this was surprising. I never expected a lecture from British intelligence.
That night was the Rump session. Beer and wine would be served and people would give five minute talks. If they hadn't yielded the podium when their time was up the moderator would ring a cowbell. I took a seat in the back, near the beer.
They didn't have Sam Adams that night, so I drank Anchor Steam instead. I liked Anchor Steam, which was made in San Francisco and was not available back East. I sucked quite a few of them down before the IFF gave their presentation.
The IFF had used the Freedom of Information Act to get some really sensitive documents. They had them made into transparencies and they were showing them to us. They put up a memo from a Deputy Secretary of Defense proposing tight controls on civilian cryptographers. Since the NSA had been following me, I thought that it was safe to assume that I was one of the people that they wanted to tightly control.
I got up and ran outside where I found Bruce Anderson. "You can't do this!" I yelled. "You can't do this!"
He was just starting to ask what he can't do when a woman with her name written on her name tag in long hand came up to me. All the other conference participants had their names printed on their name tags by a laser printer. "Would you like to go someplace and talk about the NSA?" she asked.
I thought to myself that that might be the opportunity to get some of my questions answered about what was going on. I went with her and she led me to a big sports utility vehicle. You didn't see so many of those on the roads back in 1993.
She drove me to an condominium complex and led me into the living room of a condo. There was a big television and a small refrigerator in the entertainment center and a couch facing it. We sat down on the couch and I was just thinking of something to say when I realized that she had taken her shirt off.
I reached to touch her and next thing I knew she was on her knees in front of me. She had pulled down my shorts and had her hands on my bare behind. She started giving me a blowjob. I had never been sure of the exact mechanics of that sexual favor, but now I knew.
I wondered if this was like the honey trap where KGB agents film Americans in sexually compromising positions hoping to blackmail them later. Agents who did what she was doing were called "swallows" and I was able to see the exact etymology of the word. She kept it up for ten, maybe fifteen minutes before she spit me out and started manipulating me with her hand. Finally I was done and she went off into another room and I pulled my pants up.
I heard a buzzing like that of an electric razor, and I thought that she was probably brushing her teeth with an electric toothbrush. What the heck had just happened? I wondered. I had heard of people having sexual encounters with total strangers, but I never thought that it would happen to me.
She came out and started talking. "If you fuck with the NSA, they will destroy your reputation, your business, you work for a defense contractor, right?" I nodded. "They will destroy you. They will do it through threats, lies, and intimidation."
If what she just did was meant to be intimidating, she failed. "What is it that they want?" I asked.
"Forty bit keys," she said.
"In other words, you have no idea what this is all about."
"It's a matter of national security," she said.
"I see. Which way do I go to get back to the dorm?"
"I'll drive you. That's the least we can do for you."
We went back out to her SUV and she drove me back to Anacopa Hall. As she drove away, I read the license plate number to my earpiece.
"Interesting," the woman in my earpiece said. "It is registered to the National Security Agency."
"Are we going to bust her?" I asked.
"Did she do anything illegal?"
I thought about it for a couple of minutes. "No, I guess not." I went back to my room through the empty hallways of the dorm and went to bed.
I was late to breakfast the next morning, but got there in time to see the swallow eating with Bruce Anderson. I guessed that they wanted to make it clear that she was with their agency. I shrugged and got myself some sausage, bacon, and a waffle to eat as well as some coffee and orange juice to drink. My head hurt from overconsumption the previous evening.
I was beginning to wonder what sort of unholy relationship the NSA had with civilian cryptographers. Even by that logic, though, the resources that they spent on me didn't make sense. I was just a computer programmer, not even a graduate student. I didn't even write cryptography software. It was not plausible that they were spending that much money on everyone who writes a paper or shows up at a cryptography conference.
That night was the beach barbecue. It was a long walk along the ocean to Goleta Beach and the sand made it hard walking. When I got there I was rewarded with a cold beer. The chefs had their own little room set up on the beach where they were grilling the chicken and beef. A buffet table was set up but the food hadn't been put out yet.
I sat at a table in the shade and talked with people. Phillip Zimmerman complained that the conference didn't talk enough about implementation. I was just about to explain to him that this was a scientific conference, if he wanted to talk about programming there were conferences for that, when I saw that the food was ready.
I got a quarter of a chicken and a couple of pieces of beef and brought them back to a table. I realized that I needed napkins, so I went ten feet to grab some and when I turned around, seagulls were flying off with my dinner. I put the now empty plate in the trash and got on line for the food again.
I ate a few plates of food and drank plenty of beer. If the conference lasted all year round, I wouldn't be so skinny anymore. When it was nearly dark, I decided to head back to the dorm.
There was a parking lot that I had to pass through on the way to the trail that connected UCSB with Goleta Beach. In the parking lot, Bruce Anderson was waiting in a car. "Do you want a ride?" he asked.
"No," I said, and I kept on walking.
When I got back to the dorm the second event for the evening, known as "Crypto Cafe," was in full swing. There was no beer at this event, just cookies and coffee. I could see that Nick Gordon had already disappeared into one of the small dorm lounges with some booze and cryptographers to carry on the secret business of the conference.
I nibbled on some cookies and then went to bed. It was my last night at UCSB. The next afternoon I would check into the Hotel California and meet with Jennifer for a weekend in Santa Barbara.
In the morning there was breakfast followed by technical sessions. I attended all the talks and went to lunch. After lunch there was an International Association for Cryptology Research business meeting. IACR sponsored these conferences. I was interested in the meeting because of the possibility that the association would take a stance on key escrow. I was disappointed because there wasn't even any discussion of it.
Checkout was after the business meeting. As everybody was leaving the dorm, I asked Nick Gordon if he knew where I could buy another Crypto '93 coffee mug, as I wanted to give one to Jennifer.
"You can have mine," he said.
"How much?" I asked.
"Five dollars."
I gave him a five dollar bill and he gave me his coffee mug. I put it in my bag where I could find it to give to Jennifer.
Chapter 45: Santa Barbara
On Friday I was at the Hotel California waiting for Jennifer. I wasn't expecting Jennifer right away, so I lay down on the bed with the door open and closed my eyes. I wasn't asleep when Jennifer and her sister Stacy came in. Jennifer said, "Is he alive?" I opened my eyes.
"Hi," I said. "How was your trip down from San Jose?"
"We met a guy and smoked some crack," Jennifer said.
I doubted that. "We saw a movie," she continued.
I wondered if she'd seen Sneakers, or possibly a video made during the Rump Session. I was sure that if it was one of those, I would hear about it. "I'm glad you made it," I said.
"That must be really good for your ego," Stacy said to Jennifer. "To have a guy that invites you to just come down and meet him in Santa Barbara for the weekend."
I was sure that Jennifer had offers from all sorts of guys. Especially in the Silicon Valley where there was a shortage of women. "Let's go and check out Santa Barbara," I said.
"Okay," Jennifer said. "You lead the way, you know this town better than us. I want to find someplace to eat."
I led them inland. We went in the pedestrian mall and by the Thai restaurant. "Do you want to eat here?" I asked.
Jennifer said "No," and then put her finger in her mouth to express her culinary opinion. We went on and eventually stopped at a Mexican place.
I ordered chicken fajitas and we talked about the conference. "I have a Crypto '93 coffee mug for you," I said. "It was owned by the famous cryptographer Nick Gordon."
"Oh, I'll put that on my desk at work and people will think that I am really smart," Jennifer said.
"There were a lot of intelligent people at the conference," I said, using the word intelligent instead of smart to suggest a connection with intelligence agencies.
"I'm sure there were," Jennifer said. "It must be nice to be invited there."
Stacy said, "Jennifer said that you tell jokes. I'd like to hear one."
"Okay," I said. "A man on the train in Romania said, `Don't jostle me, I am the manager of a butcher shop.' `I recognize this man,' another passenger said. `He is a famous university professor but lately he suffers from delusions of grandeur.'"
The girls didn't laugh. "Could you say that again?" Stacy asked. "Never mind."
"I'll try to remember a better one," I said. "Sorry."
"It's okay, it's just that we are eating our food," Jennifer said.
"Okay, here goes. In the Soviet Union, the secretary-general asked the agriculture minister how the harvest was. "The grain is piled to the feet of God," the minister said. `This is a communist country,' the secretary-general said, `We don't have a god.' `That's okay,' the minister said. `There is no grain.'"
"Hmmm," Stacy said. "Let me hear another one."
"A Communist Party official dies and gets his choice of capitalist hell or socialist hell. He checks out capitalist hell first, since usually capitalist things are better. There is no one standing on line. He asked what they do to you there. The demon says, `First we cut you up with sharp knives, then we boil you in oil, then we put you under hot coals.' Disturbed, he goes to see socialist hell. There is a long line of people waiting there. He asks someone, `What do they do to you here?' `First they cut you up with sharp knives, then they boil you in oil, then they put you under hot coals.' `Why is the line so long?' he asks. `Well, sometimes they are out of knives, sometimes they are out of oil, and sometimes they are out of coal.'"
That produced a little laughter from Jennifer. "I don't get it," Stacy said.
"They always had shortages in the Soviet Union," Jennifer said.
"Oh, I see."
"Okay, here is another one," I said. "A Communist Party official dies and is given his choice of Heaven or Hell. First he visits Heaven and sees serene people playing the harp and lounging on clouds. Then he visits Hell and it is a wild nightclub scene with people dancing to music and drinking vodka. He returns and Saint Peter asks, `Which will it be?' `Hell,' he said. He returns to Hell where he is shackled and imprisoned up to his waist in molten sulfur. `This isn't what you showed me,' he complained. A demon replied, `That was the propaganda, this is the reality.'"
"Oh, I think I heard that joke, except with a senator and the campaign instead of propaganda," Jennifer said.
"One probably came from the other," I said.
The check came and I paid it with a twenty dollar bill. "Who wants to go to a hip-hop club?" I asked.
"I'm not that brave," Jennifer said.
"Okay, I know a nice little bar near the hotel. How does that sound."
"Is it near the beach?"
"Yes it is," I said.
We walked toward the beach talking and fooling around. We got to the bar and went in. They had music playing and it was pretty lively for a Thursday night. We sat down at a table and ordered drinks. When the drinks came, I paid for them, preferring not to run a tab. "Let's dance," I said to Jennifer. We got up and danced to the music for a little while.
As we were leaving the dance floor, another couple said, "Let's change partners," so I went to dance with the woman and the man danced with Jennifer. Stacy waited for us at the table.
The woman danced really close and even rubbed her breasts on my chest. I was stimulated, but horrified. That sort of behavior wouldn't have flown in the little school that Jennifer and I came from. It must have shown on my face, because we broke up dancing and she went to her man and said quietly, "He knows everything. He knows the little game that I am playing."
As an FBI agent, I was interested. It sounded like these were grifters, or the girl was a worker. I tried to get more details, but the couple left the bar. I sat with Jennifer and Stacy drinking beer. The cool ocean air was coming in, making the bar pleasant. It was late at night and I was getting tired. "Maybe we should head to bed soon," I said.
"Okay," Jennifer replied.
We walked back to the hotel and before we split up to go to our separate rooms, I said, "Give me a hug."
Jennifer hugged me but she was all stiff and tense, like she didn't want to hug me at all. Then we went to our rooms and went to bed.
On Saturday morning, Jennifer, Stacy, and I got breakfast. Nothing fancy, I had some sausage and potatoes, the girls had different forms of eggs. "How do you like San Jose?" I asked.
"I love it," Jennifer said. "The climate is beautiful and there are lots of jobs at high tech companies. You should move out there."
"I am going to be doing some travel," I said. "But maybe when I am done with that."
"Travel? Where?"
"Just some business travel."
"You mean for that guy who tells you to work while collecting unemployment? Forget about him. He's got you trapped in East Bumfuck, New Jersey. You need to get out of there."
"All in good time, Jenn. I do own a condo there. I have a dog to take care of, too."
We explored Santa Barbara and visited the beach on Saturday. We found the bar packed with people Saturday night, but we were already pretty drunk and decided to turn in early.
On Sunday morning, it was time to check out of the Hotel California. As we were leaving the hotel, I asked Jennifer for a hug again. This time she was yielding and soft. Much nicer, I thought. We went out in the parking lot and I showed her my Jeep with the denim bonnet.
We didn't need to get on the road right away, so we had brunch at a little Mexican cafe. I ordered a burrito. Runaway Train came over the radio. "Who sings this?" I asked.
"Soul Asylum," Jennifer said.
"Thanks. I really like this song."
"It's a Billboard hit," Stacy said. "Everybody likes it."
"I heard it on the radio a lot on the way out here," I said. "I adopted it as the theme song for my trip."
"'Cause every trip needs a theme song," Jennifer said.
"Not every trip does, but this one did. I'm going to take it easy on the way back. I'm not going to push it and I'll stay in motels where they are available."
"Where did you stay on the way out here?"
"In my car."
Chapter 46: Homeward Bound
I didn't have a fixed date for getting back East so there was no rush. It wasn't like I had a job to go back to. I took I-40, which runs along the old Route 66. I stopped at the Grand Canyon to do a little sightseeing. It seemed like something that I had to do since I was going past it.
I walked along the canyon taking in the extraordinary views. The bottom of the canyon was a mile away. It boggled my mind. I sat on the edge of the canyon with my feet hanging into the abyss. The NSA must not have liked that, because one of them said, "Should we just plant cocaine on him now?" I was tempted to run him in for impersonating a police officer. I suppose that sitting like that is dangerous, but I did dangerous things all the time as a federal agent, so it didn't bother me. I wished that I had brought a camera. I decided that it didn't matter because there are all sorts of professional pictures of the Grand Canyon available in coffee table books at Barnes and Noble.
After exploring the Grand Canyon all afternoon, I rented a room in a nearby motel. It had a shower and a bed, which was all that I needed. I slept the sleep of the tired, which is to say that I slept pretty well, and I got back on the road in the morning. There was a lot to see in Arizona.
I drove on to the Painted Desert. I spent a long time exploring the park. I was fascinated by the excavation of an old Indian village. The Painted Desert was pretty and I wanted to camp there. There were no signs indicating whether and where I could camp. I went in the ranger station and found a ranger. "Can I camp in the desert?"
"Yes, but you have to go at least a mile from the road."
I carried my gear, including a few gallons of water, a mile across the desert floor in the relentless late afternoon sun. I climbed a plateau and set up camp, all hot and dehydrated. I drank some of the warm water that I had brought with me, filled into my bottles from the water fountain at the ranger station.
I spread my blue tarp out on the ground and made my camp on top of it. I knew that it gets chilly in the desert at night, so I had my blanket. Then I waited for nightfall while taking in the amazing scenery. The desert was layered in different shades of red. It was what I imagined Mars to be like when reading science fiction books as a kid.
I slept on the ground on top of the tarp. The stars were amazing. As many stars as there are in the Adirondacks, there were even more here, possibly because of lower humidity and a wider horizon. I lay awake gazing at the stars and wishing that I could bring them home with me. I wondered what the stars looked like in Russia. I would find out soon, I thought.
When morning came, I struck camp, hauling all of my stuff back to the road and stowing it in my Jeep. I drove off though an Indian reservation, listening to NPR. "---and CIA operations in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Santa Barbara, California---" a woman was saying. I pushed the button to find another station. I wondered if it was some sort of Agency joke.
I arrived at Fort Sill in Oklahoma in time for the weekend. My host was an Army captain that I had been friends with all my life and his wife. When I got there, I said, "The spooks were following me."
"Why would black people be following you?" his wife asked.
"They aren't black people, for the most part. They are with NSA."
"Oh my God, do you think that they will find you here?" she asked.
"Now that you have scared my wife, why don't you tell us about your trip," Captain Smith said.
We sat in the backyard drinking beers and talked about it. I helped him put a fence post in to divide his yard from his neighbor's yard, and we compared cars. He had a Ford Mustang GT the exact same color as my Jeep. He suggested that we trade cars for a while and I was tempted. I decided that it would be too hard to trade back. "Let's go see the base," he said.
He took me on a tour of the base. We were driving by a fence in some ruts from the Army trucks when suddenly he said, "That's the side of the sign that you never want to see!"
"What does the sign say?" I asked.
"Artillery range."
"Oh my God," I said, looking up for incoming artillery.
"Don't look up, look down," he said. "Look for unexploded munitions."
We drove in the ruts along the fence, looking for a way out of the artillery range. Eventually we came to a fishing pond with a couple of pickup trucks parked by it. I decided that the trail in the artillery range couldn't be all that dangerous. We turned around and headed back toward where we came in. Eventually we found the open gate that had let us into the artillery range in the first place.
I spent the night at their house, with Captain Smith's wife barricading the doors and windows before bed. They showed me the guest bedroom and I was asleep as soon as I lay down. It had been a long trip from California and I was still only halfway across the country. I had seen so many tumbleweeds and cacti that I didn't care if I never saw another one. I slept deeply, awakened only once by a disturbance between Captain Smith and his wife.
In the morning, I got on the road again, still taking my time, still using the motels that lined Route 66. It started raining and I discovered that my denim bonnet wasn't waterproof. The rain fell on it and soaked through, with a stream of water pouring through it onto the center console. I gritted my teeth and drove on, listening to Runaway Train on the radio. I was beginning to wish that they would find some new music. Each night I pulled into a motel, wet and miserable, to rent a room. I didn't make good time.
After a few days the rain stopped, but the water had done its damage to the bonnet. The weakened straps ripped and the bonnet flew off onto the highway, leaving me in the hot sun. There wasn't much that I could do about it, putting the top up at these speeds was a bad idea. I grinned and bore it, driving on as fast as I could, the wind keeping me cool.
When I pulled into Nashville I was disappointed. My first impression of the city was that the telephone poles were crooked and the streets were dirty. I checked into a hotel with a bar that hosts country music bands. I wasn't really into country music, but when in Nashville, do as the Tennesseeans. I sat at the bar and ordered a beer.
A couple of men sat at the bar. They discussed their secret organization. "I'm a captain," one said. "No, I'm a captain, you're a major." I wondered if I had happened upon some Klan-like organization. No one had heard of militia groups yet, or I would have suspected that.
A whole gaggle of country-star wannabes were lined up to sing that night. Apparently there was some small-time producer in the audience, so they were hoping that it would be their big chance. They sang their songs for us and I thought that some of them were pretty good. I didn't know whether they wrote the songs themselves or if they were covering bigger acts, but it didn't really matter to me. They were all backed up by the house band.
When I reached North Carolina, I learned that I had to check on conditions in the Smokey Mountains before trying to head up to Raleigh, where my uncle lived. They were said to be fine, so I headed up into the mountains. Soon there was fog as thick as pea soup. I slowed to a crawl, following the dim taillights of the car in front of me. It took me hours longer than I had anticipated.
I hadn't seen my uncle's house before. It was beautiful. "I wish that I had a house like this," I commented.
"Maybe when you get older you will be able to afford one," he said.
I already had a significant amount of money in my retirement account, but I didn't tell him that. I expected to collect six figures in spendable cash for my Russian trip, as well. Enough to pay off my mortgage, my car loan, and my credit cards. I just nodded, "Yes, maybe someday."
My aunt cooked a nice dinner and they put me up for the night. The tension from driving in the fog had me excited and I had trouble getting to sleep. When I did sleep, though, it was a deep, dreamless, restful sleep. I woke in the morning refreshed and ready to get on the road again.
I drove north from Raleigh, heading toward Washington D.C. where I planned to do some sightseeing. My thought was to lose my NSA tail in the subway and then check out the Smithsonian and get a tour of the FBI building. I didn't want to spend the night there, though, because hotels in D.C. were expensive.
Chapter 47: Washington D.C.
During the morning rush hour I parked at a Park and Ride in Virginia and took the train into the Washington D.C. subway, known as the Metro. Once in the Metro system, I walked down a staircase and found a train about to leave full of passengers. I jumped on it just as its doors closed, losing any tail that I might have had. It is much easier to lose a tail on foot in an urban area than in a car. The more you practice, the easier it becomes.
I rode the Metro a few stations before I got out and started working the train system to get where I wanted to go, which was the Smithsonian. Once there, I toured the Air and Space Museum. I loved the airplanes and space capsules on display. I had been to an air museum near Ottawa in Canada with my Air Force ROTC unit in college. After we had looked at all the airplanes, the bus dropped us off in downtown Ottawa, where the drinking age was 19. I "found" a bar that a lot of Canadian civil servants frequented and drank beer there, listening for intelligence. Darts whizzed past my ear.
"Sorry mate," the thrower said. "Maybe that's not the best place to sit."
When at last I rejoined my unit at a Pizza Hut, head buzzing with alcohol, we drove back to the States, worn out from our adventures.
This time I was more serious about the airplanes. Eventually I got tired of them and went to the other museum where the FBI had set up a computer system that you could put your thumb on and get a printout of your name and address. I put my thumb on it and got my printout. Under the section marked codes, it said "2?" I wasn't sure what that meant, but figured it had something to do with my cover job as an FBI special agent.
Someone said, `What would they do if someone who was wanted came in here and put his thumb on it?"
His companion said, "I guess that they would secure the building until they apprehended him." I had figured the FBI would have people watching their exhibit.
My next stop was the J. Edgar Hoover Building. I didn't want any pictures of me to be taken anywhere near that building, so I took some measures to ensure that I wasn't being followed. Then I stood in line for the tour.
As I stood in the courtyard, waiting for the tour to begin, I saw someone in one of the FBI offices peek out at us through the blinds, just like in the movies.
The tour guide took us through the exhibits, explaining each one to us. I found the drug paraphernalia exhibit interesting because there were all sorts of things that they said they confiscated from drug dealers that I had never seen a drug dealer use. Most notably I saw a big, elaborate pair of balancing scales that looked like it should be on a law firm's logo. I had watched a drug dealer at Clarkson measure out marijuana into separate baggies for sale and he had only used cheap postal scales. I had imagined that you would need something more precise for cocaine, but when Chris was arrested they found that he was selling that too. I guess that is why that particular piece of evidence made it into the exhibit. It was unusual. I wondered if the drug dealer had stolen it from a university lab.
After the FBI tour, I was hungry so I stopped at the nearby Hard Rock Cafe. I sat up at the bar and ordered beer and a hamburger, which came out to fifteen dollars before the tip. A man sat down next to me and said with a British accent, "What have you been up to today?"
"I went to the Smithsonian," I said. "They had an FBI display where I gave it my thumbprint and it gave me this." I took the piece of paper from the FBI exhibit out of my back pocket, unfolded it, and showed it to him.
"Good boy!" he exclaimed, looking at my vital statistics. He gave me back the piece of paper, which I folded and put back in my back pocket.
"You can't get a hamburger and a beer for five dollars in this place," I said.
"I should say not. But in your neck of the woods, as you Yanks say, you can."
After I finished lunch, which was not worth the money, I took the train back to my Jeep and drove north onto the Beltway, then off the Beltway into Maryland. I headed north on I-95 until I came to the exit for Fort George G. Meade. I got off there and drove until I found the base. Fort Meade is where the NSA is headquartered. I drove around the outside of the base looking at it and then found a hotel. I rented a room for the night and looked up the NSA in the room's phone book.
They were listed. I dialed the number. "NSA" the woman on the other end said.
"I'd like to talk to Bruce Anderson," I said.
"Do you have his extension?"
"No," I said. I had his phone number in the Crypto attendee list in the Jeep.
"We can't connect you for security reasons. What is your name?"
"James Washburn."
There was a pause and some clicking on a computer keyboard. "Where are you?" she said, a little concern showing in her voice.
"Maryland." I replied and then hung up.
It must have been amateur hour in Virginia that they didn't stake my Jeep out until I went to retrieve it. They had traced the call by now and they would be tailing me again when I left. I took the elevator downstairs and two men in suits got in as I got out. One said, "Hey, that's him," but the elevator doors closed before they could react. I got in my Jeep, found a nice little restaurant, and had dinner.
After dinner, I had some beers at the hotel bar before going to bed. It had been a long day and I fell asleep at once, not waking until the morning light was in my face.
I drove up to Baltimore where I planned to check out some tourist attractions around the water, use the ATM, buy gas, and get back on the road to drive straight through to Teaneck, where I would get off for my mother's house.
After enjoying the tourist attractions and the seafood, I went to find an ATM. That was easy, there were ATMs all over the place. I put my ATM card in one and tried to withdraw a hundred dollars. I got a strange error message. I knew that I had a few hundred dollars in my account, so I tried a different bank's ATM, and got another, different error message.
Now I was beginning to freak out, because I had no money and no gas, I was in Baltimore, and it was getting dark out. I called the bank on a payphone.
"Yes, my ATM card doesn't seem to be working---"
"Yes, we are merging with another bank and our ATM network is down." The woman on the phone sounded like she was 12 hours into an eight hour shift.
This sounded bad, as it was Labor Day weekend. "When will it be working?"
"By the time business opens on Tuesday morning."
"But today is Saturday and I am stranded in Baltimore with no gas and no money."
"We're sorry for the inconvenience."
"You're sorry for the inconvenience? Maybe you could let me talk to someone technical. I'm a computer programmer."
"Sure, we'll put you on with ATM operations."
I was on hold for a while and I had to put another handful of quarters in. Eventually my call was picked up by ATM operations.
"What seems to be the problem with the ATM system?" I asked.
"We are migrating our system to the other bank's computers."
"Can't you keep it live while you do that?"
"Sorry, no. We are having some problems with the different software systems the two banks use."
It was no use. I wasn't getting any money out of the ATM, and I was almost out of quarters.
I called my mother collect. "The ATM system is down and I am stranded in Baltimore with no gas and no money," I said.
"Is there someplace that you can spend the night?" It was dark.
"Not without money."
"Is it safe where you are?"
"Not really, but it would be pointless to rob me."
"I'll wire you some money, find a store that does Western Union."
"Okay, I'll look." I hung up and headed farther into the city. I walked through progressively worse neighborhoods for a while before I came across a store with a Western Union sign. I went in.
"Can I get a Western Union transfer in here?"
"Yes, you can," the Indian man said.
I went out and used the nearest payphone, giving my mother the store's information. "I'll send you $200," she said. I went back into the store to wait for my Western Union transfer. When it came through, I navigated the dark city until I found my Jeep, got gas, and headed up I-95 to New Jersey.
It was the early hours of the morning when I got off at the Teaneck exit and drove to my mother's house. I used my key to get in, but found that she was waiting up for me. Edif was excited to see me, wriggling her whole body as I pet her.
Chapter 48: Russia
When I got back to my condo with Edif, I called my father to tell him that I had returned.
"How was your trip?" he asked.
"It was fine. Nothing exciting happened," I said.
"Peter wants to have breakfast with you."
"Tell him that I will be in on Tuesday morning."
I spent the rest of Labor Day weekend unpacking and washing my clothes. Since it was the end of summer, I put the top up on my Jeep. There was nowhere in New Jersey or New York that it was legal to drive seventy, so it would stay up. I was sad that summer was over, but it had been a pretty good one. Almost as good as the previous summer on the farm.
On Tuesday morning, I got up and went in to Romano. "James!" Peter said. "How was your trip, tell me all about it, but first let's go get breakfast."
Peter and I went to the deli, where I ordered bacon sandwiches and home fries. Neither were the way that my grandmother cooked them, but one had to make allowances.
"We have decided to sell our products and test equipment in Russia," Peter said.
I nodded. The Russians didn't have any money.
"And I want you to be our representative," he said. "I will give you $250K to spend six months in Russia. That is a lot of money for a young person starting out. You could do a lot with it." I sipped my coffee.
"I'm not sure," I said, "I have to check with the NSA." I figured the Agency would call Fort Meade and say "It's a matter of national security," and that would solve that.
"Check with anyone that you need to and let me know."
After breakfast, we went back to the office. I checked talk.politics.crypto on USENET with the SCO machine to catch up with the news. Everyone was abuzz, the NSA had withdrawn the key-escrow proposal after a scientist they funded found a way to spoof the Law Enforcement Access Field so that the chip worked but the escrowed keys couldn't decrypt it. That wasn't a hard problem to fix; all you needed to do was increase the size of the checksum in the LEAF. But I was sure that the issue was just a way for NSA to save face.
That night I went down to the George Inn to find the man that I had identified as an NSA agent. He was there. I sat down next to him in the dimly lit bar and said, "I was just offered a quarter million dollars to go to Russia for six months."
"Are you going to take it?" he asked.
My beer arrived. I took a sip. "Yes, I think so."
"Let's go outside so that I can break your legs," he said.
That was threatening a federal agent, but I wasn't going to bust him. I drank my beer and went home, happy to sleep in my own cot with my dog. After Edif pushed me out of bed in the morning, I went back to Sparta. Peter invited me to breakfast again.
"Did you check with the NSA to make sure that you can go to Russia?" he asked.
"Yes. They are fine with it."
"Are you sure? I got a call from them this morning."
"What did they say?"
"I gave them someone else's phone number, don't worry about it."
I didn't worry about it. I guessed that they knew that I was CIA by now. That probably caused some heads to explode at Fort Meade. After breakfast I went back to the office and sat alone in the lab in back.
"We got a call from NSA," the woman in my earpiece said.
"Did you tell them that it is a matter of national security?" I asked.
"They told us that it is a matter of national security."
"What do you mean?"
"You aren't going to Russia."
"What do you mean I'm not going to Russia. I have been preparing to work in Russia since I was eighteen years old."
"You didn't tell us that you broke the Russian code."
"I couldn't have broken the Russian code. I would have known if I broke the Russian code." Breaking the Russian code would be historic.
"The NSA said that the algorithm you developed broke the Russian code. It is dangerous to the national security for you to go to Russia."
"So what am I going to do now?"
My father came into the lab, "Talking to yourself?"
"I was just muttering," I said.
"You will work domestic assignments," the woman in my earpiece said.
I logged onto the BSD machine and looked to see if anything had been changed while I was away. Nope, everything was the way I left it. Part of me found that disturbing because it meant that other people weren't trying to port their software to it. I went back to my office and sat down.
For five years I had done everything with the idea of going to Russia in my mind. Now I was to work in the States. I also had been counting on the money from missions overseas to pay off my mortgage, my car, and my credit cards. I had borrowed more on my credit cards than I would have if I was not expecting a pile of cash to pay them off with. What a mess.
I drove back to my condo in a sour mood. No trip to Russia, no money to pay my bills, no job. I was out of luck all over. I took Edif for a walk and then sat in the living room petting her. At least I wouldn't have to leave my puppy behind. I looked at her. She wasn't a puppy anymore. She was a big dog. Too big for my condo, but it was the best that I could do.
The phone rang. "Hi James," Peter said. "Let's have breakfast tomorrow."
"Okay," I said. He was going to tell me the Russian trip was canceled.
When I arrived at work the next morning, Peter was ready to go get breakfast. We sat in the deli drinking coffee while we waited for our food.
"How was your trip to Santa Barbara?" Peter asked.
"It was okay. Nothing exciting happened. There was a lot of driving."
"Did you meet up with your girlfriend, uh, Jennifer?"
"Yeah. We had a nice weekend in Santa Barbara."
"Good, good. The Russian trip is canceled."
"Yeah, I figured," I said.
"But I have some good news, we are going to hire you back."
"That's great!" I said. "When do I start?"
"We will pay you $40K per year. That is what I promised you, isn't it?"
"Yes, that is what you promised me," I said.
"Okay, you will go on payroll Monday, so start keeping time sheets next week."
"I sure will."
"And don't forget to tell unemployment that we hired you back."
"Don't worry, I won't."
We ate our breakfast and talked business. When we were done, I went back to my office and found my father. "Peter is bringing me back on," I said.
"Oh, that's great."
"For $40K."
"Even better."
"He was going to send me to Russia but he changed his mind."
"Say what?"
"It's a long story," I said.
"What were you going to do in Russia?"
"Sell test equipment."
"Are you disappointed?" my father asked.
"Yes, but the process of getting there is more important than where you actually go."
"Sounds like it is the journey that is important, not the destination," my father said.
"Yeah, that's what I mean."