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　Susan's heart skipped. Had she heard correctly? Suddenly this did sound like Greg Hale. Was it possible? If Hale had known about Strathmore's plan to release a tainted version of Digital Fortress, he could wait until the whole world was using it and then drop his bombshell--complete with proof!

　Susan imagined the headlines: Cryptographer Greg Hale unveils secret U.S. plan to control global information!

　Was it Skipjack all over? Uncovering an NSA back door again would make Greg Hale famous beyond his wildest dreams. It would also sink the NSA. She suddenly found herself wondering if maybe Hale was telling the truth. No! she decided. Of course not!

　Hale continued to plead. "I aborted your tracer because I thought you were looking for me! I thought you suspected Strathmore was being snooped! I didn't want you to find the leak and trace it back to me!"

　It was plausible but unlikely. "Then why'd you kill Chartrukian?" Susan snapped.

　"I didn't!" Hale screamed over the noise. "Strathmore was the one who pushed him! I saw the whole thing from downstairs! Chartrukian was about to call the Sys-Secs and ruin Strathmore's plans for the back door!"

　Hale's good, Susan thought. He's got an angle for everything.

　"Let me go!" Hale begged. "I didn't do anything!"

　"Didn't do anything?" Susan shouted, wondering what was taking Strathmore so long. "You and Tankado were holding the NSA hostage. At least until you double-crossed him. Tell me," she pressed, "did Tankado really die of a heart attack, or did you have one of your buddies take him out?"

　"You're so blind!" Hale yelled. "Can't you see I'm not involved? Untie me! Before Security gets here!"

　"Security's not coming," she snapped flatly.

　Hale turned white. "What?"

　"Strathmore faked the phone call."

　Hale's eyes went wide. He seemed momentarily paralyzed. Then he began writhing fiercely. "Strathmore'll kill me! I know he will! I know too much!"

　"Easy, Greg."

　The sirens blared as Hale yelled out, "But I'm innocent!"

　"You're lying! And I have proof!" Susan strode around the ring of terminals. "Remember that tracer you aborted?" she asked, arriving at her own terminal. "I sent it again! Shall we see if it's back yet?"

　Sure enough, on Susan's screen, a blinking icon alerted her that her tracer had returned. She palmed her mouse and opened the message. This data will seal Hale's fate, she thought. Hale is North Dakota. The databox opened. Hale is--

　Susan stopped. The tracer materialized, and Susan stood in stunned silence. There had to be some mistake; the tracer had fingered someone else--a most unlikely person.

　Susan steadied herself on the terminal and reread the databox before her. It was the same information Strathmore said he'd received when he ran the tracer! Susan had figured Strathmore had made a mistake, but she knew she'd configured the tracer perfectly.

　And yet the information on the screen was unthinkable:

　NDAKOTA = ET@DOSHISHA.EDU

　"ET?" Susan demanded, her head swimming. "Ensei Tankado is North Dakota?"

　It was inconceivable. If the data was correct, Tankado and his partner were the same person. Susan's thoughts were suddenly disconnected. She wished the blaring horn would stop. Why doesn't Strathmore turn that damn thing off?

　Hale twisted on the floor, straining to see Susan. "What does it say? Tell me!"

　Susan blocked out Hale and the chaos around her. Ensei Tankado is North Dakota....

　She reshuffled the pieces trying to make them fit. If Tankado was North Dakota, then he was sending E-mail to himself... which meant North Dakota didn't exist. Tankado's partner was a hoax.

　North Dakota is a ghost, she said to herself. Smoke and mirrors.

　The ploy was a brilliant one. Apparently Strathmore had been watching only one side of a tennis match. Since the ball kept coming back, he assumed there was someone on the other side of the net. But Tankado had been playing against a wall. He had been proclaiming the virtues of Digital Fortress in E-mail he'd sent to himself. He had written letters, sent them to an anonymous remailer, and a few hours later, the remailer had sent them right back to him.

　Now, Susan realized, it was all so obvious. Tankado had wanted the commander to snoop him... he'd wanted him to read the E-mail. Ensei Tankado had created an imaginary insurance policy without ever having to trust another soul with his pass-key. Of course, to make the whole farce seem authentic, Tankado had used a secret account... just secret enough to allay any suspicions that the whole thing was a setup. Tankado was his own partner. North Dakota did not exist. Ensei Tankado was a one-man show.

　A one-man show.

　A terrifying thought gripped Susan. Tankado could have used his fake correspondence to convince Strathmore of just about anything.

　She remembered her first reaction when Strathmore told her about the unbreakable algorithm. She'd sworn it was impossible. The unsettling potential of the situation settled hard in Susan's stomach. What proof did they actually have that Tankado had really created Digital Fortress? Only a lot of hype in his E-mail. And of course... TRANSLTR. The computer had been locked in an endless loop for almost twenty hours. Susan knew, however, that there were other programs that could keep TRANSLTR busy that long, programs far easier to create than an unbreakable algorithm.

　Viruses.

　The chill swept across her body.

　But how could a virus get into TRANSLTR?

　Like a voice from the grave, Phil Chartrukian gave the answer. Strathmore bypassed Gauntlet!

　In a sickening revelation, Susan grasped the truth. Strathmore had downloaded Tankado's Digital Fortress file and tried to send it into TRANSLTR to break it. But Gauntlet had rejected the file because it contained dangerous mutation strings. Normally Strathmore would have been concerned, but he had seen Tankado's E-mail--Mutation strings are the trick! Convinced Digital Fortress was safe to load, Strathmore bypassed Gauntlet's filters and sent the file into TRANSLTR.

　Susan could barely speak. "There is no Digital Fortress," she choked as the sirens blared on. Slowly, weakly, she leaned against her terminal. Tankado had gone fishing for fools... and the NSA had taken the bait.

　Then, from upstairs, came a long cry of anguish. It was Strathmore.

　CHAPTER?86

　Trevor Strathmore was hunched at his desk when Susan arrived breathless at his door. His head was down, his sweaty head glistening in the light of his monitor. The horns on the sublevels blared.

　Susan raced over to his desk. "Commander?"

　Strathmore didn't move.

　"Commander! We've got to shut down TRANSLTR! We've got a--"

　"He got us," Strathmore said without looking up. "Tankado fooled us all..."

　She could tell by the tone of his voice he understood. All of Tankado's hype about the unbreakable algorithm... auctioning off the pass-key--it was all an act, a charade. Tankado had tricked the NSA into snooping his mail, tricked them into believing he had a partner, and tricked them into downloading a very dangerous file.

　"The mutation strings--" Strathmore faltered.

　"I know."

　The commander looked up slowly. "The file I downloaded off the Internet... it was a..."

　Susan tried to stay calm. All the pieces in the game had shifted. There had never been any unbreakable algorithm--never any Digital Fortress. The file Tankado had posted on the Internet was an encrypted virus, probably sealed with some generic, mass-market encryption algorithm, strong enough to keep everyone out of harm's way--everyone except the NSA. TRANSLTR had cracked the protective seal and released the virus.

　"The mutation strings," the commander croaked. "Tankado said they were just part of the algorithm." Strathmore collapsed back onto his desk.

　Susan understood the commander's pain. He had been completely taken in. Tankado had never intended to let any computer company buy his algorithm. There was no algorithm. The whole thing was a charade. Digital Fortress was a ghost, a farce, a piece of bait created to tempt the NSA. Every move Strathmore had made, Tankado had been behind the scenes, pulling the strings.

　"I bypassed Gauntlet." The commander groaned.

　"You didn't know."

　Strathmore pounded his fist on his desk. "I should have known! His screen name, for Christ's sake! NDAKOTA! Look at it!"

　"What do you mean?"

　"He's laughing at us! It's a goddamn anagram!"

　Susan puzzled a moment. NDAKOTA is an anagram? She pictured the letters and began reshuffling them in her mind. Ndakota... Kadotan... Oktadan... Tandoka... Her knees went weak. Strathmore was right. It was as plain as day. How could they have missed it? North Dakota wasn't a reference to the U.S. state at all--it was Tankado rubbing salt in the wound! He'd even sent the NSA a warning, a blatant clue that he himself was NDAKOTA. The letters spelled TANKADO. But the best code-breakers in the world had missed it, just as he had planned.

　"Tankado was mocking us," Strathmore said.

　"You've got to abort TRANSLTR," Susan declared.

　Strathmore stared blankly at the wall.

　"Commander. Shut it down! God only knows what's going on in there!"

　"I tried," Strathmore whispered, sounding as faint as she'd ever heard him.

　"What do you mean you tried?"

　Strathmore rotated his screen toward her. His monitor had dimmed to a strange shade of maroon. At the bottom, the dialogue box showed numerous attempts to shut down TRANSLTR. They were all followed by the same response:

　SORRY. UNABLE TO ABORT.

　SORRY. UNABLE TO ABORT.

　SORRY. UNABLE TO ABORT.

　Susan felt a chill. Unable to abort? But why? She feared she already knew the answer. So this is Tankado's revenge? Destroying TRANSLTR! For years Ensei Tankado had wanted the world to know about TRANSLTR, but no one had believed him. So he'd decided to destroy the great beast himself. He'd fought to the death for what he believed--the individual's right to privacy.

　Downstairs the sirens blared.

　"We've got to kill all power," Susan demanded. "Now!"

　Susan knew that if they hurried, they could save the great parallel processing machine. Every computer in the world--from Radio Shack PCs to NASA's satellite control systems--had a built-in fail-safe for situations like this. It wasn't a glamorous fix, but it always worked. It was known as "pulling the plug."

　By shutting off the remaining power in Crypto, they could force TRANSLTR to shut down. They could remove the virus later. It would be a simple matter of reformatting TRANSLTR's hard drives. Reformatting would completely erase the computer's memory--data, programming, virus, everything. In most cases, reformatting resulted in the loss of thousands of files, sometimes years of work. But TRANSLTR was different--it could be reformatted with virtually no loss at all. Parallel processing machines were designed to think, not to remember. Nothing was actually stored inside TRANSLTR. Once it broke a code, it sent the results to the NSA's main databank in order to--

　Susan froze. In a stark instant of realization, she brought her hand to her mouth and muffled a scream. "The main databank!"

　Strathmore stared into the darkness, his voice disembodied. He'd apparently already made this realization. "Yes, Susan. The main databank...."

　Susan nodded blankly. Tankado used TRANSLTR to put a virus in our main databank.

　Strathmore motioned sickly to his monitor. Susan returned her gaze to the screen in front of her and looked beneath the dialogue box. Across the bottom of the screen were the words:

　TELL THE WORLD ABOUT TRANSLTR

　ONLY THE TRUTH WILL SAVE YOU NOW...

　Susan felt cold. The nation's most classified information was stored at the NSA: military communication protocols, SIGINT confirmation codes, identities of foreign spies, blueprints for advanced weaponry, digitized documents, trade agreements--the list was unending.

　"Tankado wouldn't dare!" she declared. "Corrupting a country's classified records?" Susan couldn't believe even Ensei Tankado would dare attack the NSA databank. She stared at his message.

　ONLY THE TRUTH WILL SAVE YOU NOW

　"The truth?" she asked. "The truth about what?"

　Strathmore was breathing heavily. "TRANSLTR," he croaked. "The truth about TRANSLTR."

　Susan nodded. It made perfect sense. Tankado was forcing the NSA to tell the world about TRANSLTR. It was blackmail after all. He was giving the NSA a choice--either tell the world about TRANSLTR or lose your databank. She stared in awe at the text before her. At the bottom of the screen, a single line was blinked menacingly.

　ENTER PASS-KEY

　Staring at the pulsating words, Susan understood--the virus, the pass-key, Tankado's ring, the ingenious blackmail plot. The pass-key had nothing to do with unlocking an algorithm; it was an antidote. The pass-key stopped the virus. Susan had read a lot about viruses like this--deadly programs that included a built-in cure, a secret key that could be used to deactivate them. Tankado never planned to destroy the NSA databank--he just wanted us go public with TRANSLTR! Then he would give us the pass-key, so we could stop the virus!

　It was now clear to Susan that Tankado's plan had gone terribly wrong. He had not planned on dying. He'd planned on sitting in a Spanish bar and listening to the CNN press conference about America's top-secret code-breaking computer. Then he'd planned on calling Strathmore, reading the pass-key off the ring, and saving the databank in the nick of time. After a good laugh, he'd disappear into oblivion, an EFF hero.

　Susan pounded her fist on the desk. "We need that ring! It's the only pass-key!" She now understood--there was no North Dakota, no second pass-key. Even if the NSA went public with TRANSLTR, Tankado was no longer around to save the day.

　Strathmore was silent.

　The situation was more serious than Susan had ever imagined. The most shocking thing of all was that Tankado had allowed it to go this far. He had obviously known what would happen if the NSA didn't get the ring--and yet, in his final seconds of life, he'd given the ring away. He had deliberately tried to keep it from them. Then again, Susan realized, what could she expect Tankado to do--save the ring for them, when he thought the NSA had killed him?