Mahogany's Dream Page 16

  “What happened in New York?” Brian asked.

  “My whole life changed. The meeting was at the offices of HMC’s American law firm. When I walked into the conference room, I saw more lawyers on one side of the table than I knew existed in the whole world. On the other side it was just Michelle, some lawyer from the firm where Michelle was clerking that summer and me. But that guy was just for show. He just sat by like an ice sculpture while Michelle did all the work.

  Dr. Tsang was videoconferenced into the meeting from Taipei. That was actually the first time I met him. As soon as I sat down, he started hammering me with technical questions. After about twenty minutes of that, he seemed satisfied. He said something in Chinese to one of his lawyers and then clicked off. No ‘goodbye,’ no ‘thanks for coming,’ nothing. He just cut the connection. The lawyer he had spoken to turned to Michelle and said that HMC would accept all of our terms on three conditions: One, I had to come work for HMC; two, all further development of the PPD had to be done in Taiwan; and three, that I had to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese. At that point, I was totally confused, and so was Mr. Ice Sculpture. I was wondering why I would agree to all that just for the chance to go after a grant. But I trusted Michelle, so I let her make the deal. I think I signed my name a thousand times that day.”

  “So what was the deal?” Joyce asked.

  “In a nutshell, the deal was that I would get the patents associated with my algorithms, but only if I agreed to exclusively license the technology to HMC for ninety-nine years. In exchange for the exclusive license, I get an annual license fee and a percentage of all the revenue generated by products based on my patents. Michelle set up a Hong Kong company to hold the patents because that’s one of the few places where Taiwanese contracts are recognized. And she said that basing the company in a certain part of Hong Kong would get the contract denominated in euros, which would take advantage of the falling dollar.”

  “Michelle is good,” Joyce remarked.

  “Damn good,” Reed said.

  “Yeah,” Dyson agreed, “I don’t know where I would be without her.”

  “So that’s how you ended up in Taiwan?” Brian asked.

  “Basically.”

  “That must have been one hell of a license fee.”

  “Not really. The license fee is small. Most of the contract’s value comes from revenue sharing. But that didn’t kick in until we developed a product, which didn’t happen for a few years. In the beginning I survived off of my HMC base salary like everyone else.

  It wasn’t until we developed the first prototype of the PPD that I realized how much money was involved. I remember flying to Seoul to demonstrate it for Samsung. During the meeting, Dr. Tsang balanced the PPD on his fingertip and told the Samsung guys that every book ever written was stored inside it. That wasn’t literally true, but the fact that it was technically possible was what counted. I was dumbfounded when he later told me that Samsung had ordered a million units. We hadn’t even figured out how to mass produce them. I mean, the carbon tubes were only bonding to the Rotoxane DNA in less than fifty percent of the cultures we grew, so I wasn’t sure we could make a thousand, let alone a million. But Dr. Tsang said he had confidence that I could figure it out. Whenever I expressed doubt, he would say, ‘My son can do anything.’ That’s what he called me, his American son. That meant a lot to me and I worked hard for him. Eventually we figured out a way to increase the yield, but we did so under intense pressure. Dr. Tsang would call the lab and say, ‘So and so just ordered half a million units’ or ‘So and so wants two million’.”

  “None of those So and So’s included any American companies,” Walraff commented.

  “That’s true. Actually, that was probably my first indication that Dr. Tsang hoped to use the PPD as a tool of political empowerment for Taiwan.”

  “How so?” Brian asked.

  “One day two head hunters from Microsoft showed up at my flat in Taipei. They offered me a lot of zeros to jump ship to Redmond and build a version of the PPD for them. I told them that I was flattered but there was no need to recruit me because Microsoft could simply license the technology from HMC. They claimed HMC wouldn’t license its technology to any American companies. I told them that that was preposterous, but when I asked Dr. Tsang about it he told me that it was true. He said he refused to do business with any U.S. companies because they wanted to make China and Taiwan the ‘cotton-pickers’ of the international economy. He went on a tirade about it. I was shocked.”

  “So he views China and Taiwan as one and the same?” Brian asked.

  “Not at all. He thought that the PRC used gunboat diplomacy against Taiwan. He used to joke that Hu Jintao had a sign posted over all the Chinese missiles pointed at Taiwan that said, ‘Go ahead Taiwan, make my day’. He hated China for subjugating Taiwan, but not as much as he hated America for allowing it to go on. When President Bush appeared with the Chinese Premiere in The Rose Garden and castigated Taiwan for Shui-ban’s missile referendum, Dr. Tsang got so angry that he picked up a golf club and smashed the plasma screen TV in his office. The whole things made me feel awkward.”

  “Is that why you left HMC?”

  “No, that’s not why. I never planned to stay in Taiwan forever. One day I just decided that if I were going to going to put up with bigotry, I might as well do it in my own country.”

  “Bigotry?” Joyce said, surprised. “Against what? Young millionaires?”

  “The good old fashioned kind,” Dyson said. “Against my skin color.”

  “I like your skin color,” Shelly said a little too flirtatiously. Everyone looked at her. She shrank back, embarrassed.

  “Thanks,” Dyson said, “but a lot of the Taiwanese don’t share your taste. When the Special Projects division where I worked began to get the lion’s share of HMC’s R&D budget, the other operating divisions weren’t happy about it. Sometimes I would come back from lunch and there would be little mementos like lawn jockeys and minstrel dolls at my workstation. The company intranet was filled with email jokes about how the PPD was powered by a ‘pica ninny protein’. It didn’t bother me much in the beginning, but eventually it got tiresome. One time, Michelle came to visit me and I took her to the Nike Research Center in Taipei. I wanted her to take a few pair of sneakers that weren’t yet available in the States back to my brother, Enias. As we were leaving the Center, a little Taiwanese boy pointed at me and started yelling ‘Qiaodan! Qiaodan!’ to his mother.”

  Shelly looked away from him.

  “Do you know what that means in English?” Dyson asked. No one answered. “It means Michael Jordan! Michael Jordan! Instead of being embarrassed, the boy’s mother had the gall to come up to me and ask in broken English if I were a pro basketball player. ‘You NBA?’ she said. I told her in Chinese that I was a research scientist, but she got upset, like she thought I was trying to insult her intelligence. Incidents like that happened to me all the time in Taiwan. To some extent, I couldn’t blame them. Athletes and entertainers are the only images of African-Americans that most people outside the States ever see.

  But the really odd thing was the impact these incidents had on Dr. Tsang. From time to time I would relate some of these experiences to him, and he would become infuriated. If any HMC people were involved, they would be fired on the spot. Of course that only generated more resentment towards me, but I appreciated the sentiment. When I asked him why these incidents affected him so deeply, he told me that a long time ago he had once been the victim of racism himself. He said he sympathized with me.”

  Dyson could see the other people in the room becoming uncomfortable.

  “What about the encryption system?” Walraff asked unemotionally. His expression made it clear that he wasn’t there for the human interest side of the story.

  “What about it?” Dyson asked him.

  “Tell me how it works. And while you’re at it, tell me the real reason why a rinky dink company like HMC would need such a security system.”


  “Do you measure rinky dink in billions?” Dyson asked him.

  “No, I measure it in American blood. Maybe if you weren’t so busy crying us a river you could see that.”

  Joyce intervened. “Gentlemen, please. You can measure your penises after the meeting. Let’s try to stay on track. Dr. Conwell, please continue.”

  “When I told Dr. Tsang that I was planning to return to the States, he asked me to complete one more project, as a personal favor. He was very concerned about HMC’s competitors stealing the algorithms that make the PPD work. He claimed that a Japanese company had already patented the use of the algorithms in Japan as a tactical move. He wanted me to help develop a data encryption system that would prevent the algorithms from being compromised. The PPD production facility in Xiamen was basically standing idle because he didn’t trust the plant managers with the specifications. I reminded him that I’m not a cryptographer, but he said that it was just math and he was sure I could handle it. He said he couldn’t trust any outside consultants with the project. So I agreed to do it. The old man had been good to me and I felt like I owed him at least a good faith effort.

  I thought the project would be pretty straightforward. I’d read about the Krypton-85 system in California and my first idea was to build a similar RNG using a different radioactive source. But that was a big no-no in Taiwan. I found out that China has a longstanding policy that it would interpret any Taiwanese scientific work involving radioactive materials as an act of war. I had to think of something else. I was in my room one day—”

  “And you had a dream,” Jill guessed.

  “No,” Dyson said. “I was in my room listening to music when it struck me: if I just removed the entanglement sorting from the second PPD algorithm, then I could use Heisenberg Uncertainty to build theoretically unbreakable encryption keys.”

  “Must’ve been a hell of a song,” Walraff said.

  “I didn’t come up with the actual system that day, just the conceptual framework. The music inspired me.”

  “And what was the actual system?”

  “The final version of the TCS uses a photon generator on one end to produce photons with random polarities. Like with the PPD, every particular polarity represents a binary digit. On the other end, an interferometer examines the incoming photons. Because of the law of uncertainty, the interferometer changes the polarity of some of the photons the moment it measures them. But it doesn’t measure every photon and the unmeasured ones do not change. Only the person who generated the original set of photons knows which ones should be changed by the interferometer. If someone intercepts the photons along the way, that interception changes the polarity of some of the photons. The problem is that the interception changes the wrong photons, causing the rejection of the encryption key. In other words, the laws of nature make it impossible to intercept the data without being detected.”

  “But how does the photon generator make the polarities random in the first place?” Mulhorn asked.

  “Yeah,” Walraff added. “What’s your random seed?”

  Dyson gave a sly smile. “An Alicia Keys CD set on repeat.”

  “What?” Walraff asked.

  “How?” Mulhorn said. “A musical CD would be completely predictable. It’s just the same frequency pattern over and over.”

  “Not if you combine it with a source of entropy like the thermal noise generated by the CD player’s laser,” Dyson said with satisfaction.

  They were stunned. Walraff’s directorate, operating under the assumption that the HMC system was similar to the other quantum systems they knew about, had spent millions testing every radioactive source they could find in an effort to defeat the system. Now they realized it had all been a waste.

  No one knew what to make of Dyson Conwell. Either he was the most ingenious person they had ever met, or he was telling the best lies they had ever heard.

  “This unbreakable system you developed is being used by a terrorist organization to secure its communications,” Walraff said.

  “I doubt that,” Dyson responded. “The TCS only works within a dedicated fiber optic connection like the one HMC uses to communicate with its PPD production facility. The packets aren’t switchable and you can’t transmit them through the air because sunlight will interfere with the photon polarities and make the system useless. It has a very limited application.”

  “That used to be the case,” Walraff said. “If you encode the photons within a green laser and then use a beam splitter, you’ll generate a Stokes Field that can be transmitted through the air just like any other signal.”

  “Really,” Dyson said, intrigued. “What about spontaneous emission? If the square of the magnetic field is—”

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree,” Walraff said before Dyson could get started with his equations again. “It doesn’t matter how it was done, it only matters that it has been done. So far, we’ve seen this method used to protect nighttime satellite phone calls, but who knows what’s next? For all we know, Al Queda could be using it to plan an attack right now. We’ve got whole departments at the NSA twiddling their fingers because they can’t pick up any chatter. It’s a nightmare scenario. In case you haven’t figured it out by now, that’s why I’m here. That’s why all of us are here. We need to know how to beat the TCS and we need to know now. It’s a matter of national security.”

  Dyson wasn’t convinced. “What makes you think the system you’re referring to is the same one I worked on? And even if it is, why would Dr. Tsang make it available to terrorists?”

  “The answer to your first question is classified,” Walraff said. “And you’ve already answered your second question. Tsang hates us.”

  Brian leaned forward. “You think you know Dr. Tsang, but you don’t. He’s been using you since day one. Everything you achieved at HMC was done under false a pretext. Like it or not, all your toys have ended up in the hands of our enemies. To some people, that makes you our enemy.”

  “Now you’re reaching,” Reed said.

  “And there’s something else,” Brian said, ignoring Reed. “We know that Tsang was planning to have you killed.”

  “Show me proof,” Dyson said evenly.

  “Unfortunately, the proof is classified.”

  “Then as far as I’m concerned,” Dyson said, rising from his chair, “it doesn’t exist. The Chen Tsang that I know is just an old man with a bad ear. He might have some eccentric ideas, but that doesn’t make him any more of a terrorist than people who burn flags. And I’m having a little trouble believing that he wants to have me killed. I made him the richest man in Taiwan. I’ve played with his grandchildren.”

  Walraff stood. “All we want to know is how to beat the TCS. We don’t give a rat’s ass what you believe.”

  “There’s nothing to tell you; the TCS is unbreakable. If someone has figured out how to maintain the integrity of its encryption over non-fiber mediums, then they’ve developed a system that is fundamentally different than the one I’m familiar with. I don’t think I can help you.”

  “You haven’t even tried,” Brian said.

  “And you haven’t given me any reason why I should.”

  Now Brian stood. “At this point, we’re asking for your help, but we have ways to demand it,” he warned.

  Reed leapt from his chair. “I think this is a good place to stop for today. Why don’t you guys chew over the valuable information my client has given you thus far. If you think you’ll need more, then give me a ring and we can discuss it. Agent Lessor, I look forward to receiving a draft of that 302. And Joyce, I hope you always remember that we came here voluntarily and didn’t ask for a thing.”

  “I’m sure you’ll never let me forget it,” she said.

  Everyone began preparing to leave.

  “Wait a minute,” Mulhorn said. “I have one more question.”

  Reed and Dyson paused.

  “It’s about the CD. Which song inspired you?”

  “Karma,” Dyson
said.

  Karma.

  CHAPTER

  43

  Joyce asked Brian and Jill to stay behind for a quick chat.

  She started with Brian. “Just so we’re clear, your job is to investigate and my job is to prosecute. A proffer session is between the U.S. Attorney’s office and a witness. Your attendance was a professional courtesy extended by my office to yours. An investigation is your show, but during any proffer session, I’m in charge. Please don’t embarrass me like that again.”

  “I thought we were all on the same team,” Jill said.

  Joyce’s eyes became daggers. “And you,” she said to Jill, “don’t ever show your face in another one of my proffers. Your class clown routine is not only unprofessional, it’s downright juvenile. Grow up.” She turned to leave, then looked back at Jill. “And the next time you want to go over your boss’s head, call somebody else for advice on how to do it.” Then she walked out and slammed the door.

  “That went well,” Jill quipped.

  Brian was not in the mood for Jill’s sarcasm. “What the hell is your problem, Jill?”

  “Off the record?” she asked.

  “How about off the payroll?” he answered.

  “I’m bored,” she said. “Working in this office is like peeling potatoes. Don’t get me wrong, I never expected to become Agent Scully when I transferred here. But at the same time, I didn’t anticipate rotting away for two years doing background checks on senior citizens. This case is the closest I’ve come to doing what I joined the Bureau for. I know we can break Conwell if we apply a little pressure. But you guys, you’d rather sit in a room and listen to a physics lecture about basketballs in other universes. It’s fucking infuriating.”

  “The Bureau is not here to break people,” he reminded her.