The Buck Stops Here (27 page)

“How about you?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m helping out with their big fundraiser this Friday night. I was just double-checking on some of the details while I was in town.”

“You don’t live here in New Orleans?”

“Oh, no,
cher
,” he said. “I got me a little house down in the bayou. You ever been in a swamp?”

“No, but it must be fascinating.”

“You ought to come down,” he said. “I’ll give you the Armand Velette swamp tour extraordinaire.”

“Really?”

“Sure. You ever paddle a canoe,
cher?
”

“A bit,” I said, stifling a smile.

“Good then. You should be able to handle a pirogue,” he said, pronouncing it
pee-row
.

“What’s a pirogue?”

“Kinda like a canoe. You free tomorrow? I gotta go out in the swamp to do some measurements and collect some test samples. You could come wit’ me.”

I couldn’t believe my luck. We set the time, and then he borrowed pen and paper to jot down directions and scribble out a map to his home on the bayou, which he said couldn’t always be located via GPS. Though I had missed my midday opportunity to get over to Fat City Parcel Service, at least I had spent that time getting to know another member of the Cipher Five.

It was nearing two o’clock, so I tucked away the information Armand had written out for me and suggested that we head back to Family HEARTS. We parted once we got there, and Armand gestured toward the spot where I had been mugged.

“When you leave here today,” he said, “you take a taxi, okay? I won’t be around to save you next time.”

“Oh, I’ll be all right,” I said. “I can take care of myself.”

He stepped back and tipped his hat again.

“Now don’t destroy a fellow’s illusions,” he said. “There’s nothin’ I love more than thinkin’ I’m indispensable to a pretty lady.”

Thirty-One

Back inside the Family HEARTS building, I nearly walked into two volunteers who were on their way out. They were the women who had been so giggly with Armand, and as soon as I stepped through the door, they started in on me.

“Did you enjoy lunch with the Bayou Babe?” one of them asked.

“We’re all in love with Armand!” the other one added, rolling her eyes.

I assured them that it was just a friendly meal, that I had other commitments and wasn’t looking to start something up here.

“That’s a shame,” the first one said. “Because the way he was looking at you, I’m sure he had a different idea.”

They said their goodbyes and departed, leaving me to wonder if that was true, if I had somehow led the fellow on. I thought the swamp tour was just a friendly gesture, but if he thought of it as some kind of date, I would need to set him straight right up front.

For now, it was time for my meeting with Beth. I wandered back through the building until I found her in the computer room. Otherwise, the place seemed empty.

We chatted for a few minutes, but she seemed eager to get down to business, so I pulled up a chair and told her I was in her capable hands. She wanted to give me a demonstration of the Family HEARTS computer network, which began with a closer look at their website. It was very impressive, especially the message boards and Listserv archives.

“This is people connecting to people,” she said. “Right here, the heart of our program.”

We scanned some posts on the various loops, and I could see that it was one long ongoing conversation where people asked questions, shared problems, and offered solutions. Much of it was a mix of simple commiseration and encouragement.

“They know they’re not alone,” I said softly, reading one of the notes.

“Which is the point,” Beth replied. “In my own situation, for example, JDMS is so rare that the closest kid I know who has it lives in Mississippi. But with the internet, we can all be right here for each other all the time. It makes a difference, let me tell you.”

She showed me how the network was structured, getting more technical than I would have liked, but I let her keep talking, her excitement building as she went. This was a woman who loved computers. I made notes about all that she showed me, glad that this was yet another area of the Family HEARTS program that seemed well run and effective.

“So what’s your computer background?” I asked finally, putting my notes to one side and hoping to move into the areas of my personal investigation. “Have you always done this sort of thing?”

“Sort of. My training is primarily as a user-interface specialist.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s where you take stuff from techies and make it accessible to normal human beings.”

“Techies aren’t normal?”

“Not the ones I’ve met!” she said, giggling. “You know what I mean. Their heads are off in the clouds somewhere. I used to take the programs they created and add a user-friendly front end.”

“Wow. Did you create any software I would recognize?”

She shrugged.

“Probably not. It was all pretty technical stuff.” She rattled off a few software names, none of which I had heard of.

“My brother and I actually worked together on a program for a while, but it was never released. Not officially, at least.”

Ah. That was where I wanted to go.

“Is that what Phillip was talking about yesterday at lunch? I thought he said there were five of you working together.”

“There were. Tom, me, my husband—well, ex-husband now—Phillip, and Armand, the guy you were just out with. But that was a long time ago, back when the internet was just taking off. We were a bunch of kids, actually, kids who thought they were smarter than they were.”

“What do you mean?”

She exhaled slowly, typing some commands into the computer as she spoke.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter now,” she said finally. “That was eons ago.”

I hesitated, my heart pounding. This was the information that I sought, but it didn’t sound as though she was going to give it to me. I realized she was probably hesitating not because she didn’t want to talk about it, but because it involved past dealings of my own boss, and she might have thought this conversation was inappropriate.

“Tom has told me a little bit about that time in his life,” I said finally. “I know about his skills with cryptography, and I know about the FBI investigation. I’ve just never heard the full story of how everything happened. You know, with your husband and all.”

Beth looked at me skeptically.

“Tom talked about this stuff with you?”

“He trusts me,” I said. “I ran into an article about him that mentioned the FBI investigation, so he had to give me an explanation.”

I didn’t add that I “ran into” that article while digging furiously for information about him! She seemed to digest what I had said.

“I’d love to hear the story from your perspective,” I added.

That seemed to be enough of a request to get her started. She turned in her seat, taking her hands from the keyboard and resting them in her lap.

“You have to understand that Tom is a cryptologic mathematician,” she said softly, echoing what Paul Tyson had told me on the phone. “In the late nineties, he came up with a brilliant theory of secure computer encryption. He didn’t have much money back then, but he took out a business loan and hired the rest of us to take his ideas and implement them into software. His ideas worked, and the program we came up with was great. The problems were in the
implications
of that program.”

I shifted in my seat, forcing my body language to remain casual.

“How so?”

She hesitated for a moment.

“Have you ever heard of the four horsemen of the Infocalypse?”

“The…what?”

“The four horsemen of the Infocalypse: terrorists, organized crime, drug dealers, and pedophiles. Back then, for every hundred people who used cryptology to maintain their privacy or their business security, there might have been one person using encryption to hide an illegal act, especially terrorists, organized crime, drug dealers, and pedophiles. Considering that, the question then becomes, is it worth it? If bad people can use encryption to hide things like terrorist communications, then does that become the price of privacy? It wasn’t until we had our working encryption program that we began to understand a fundamental paradox: How can you get an encryption program into the right hands and keep it out of the hands of criminals? You can’t! Eventually, that was the question that tore our little group of five apart.”

“What happened?” I whispered, hanging on her every word.

She went on to explain that when they finally had the program up and running, Tom began to insist that it couldn’t be released until there was sufficient legislation about the use of cryptography. Apparently, the pros and cons of secure encryption were the subject of serious debate among computer experts, businesses, and the government.

“On the one hand,” Beth explained, “you’ve got your businesses and your civil libertarians pushing for strong encryption. On the other hand are the police and other law enforcement agencies pushing to severely restrict encryption. Tom kept insisting there was a third choice, some sort of compromise, that would allow some leverage to both sides of the debate.”

“Like what?”

She took off her glasses and cleaned them on the hem of her shirt.

“It’s kind of hard to explain. Have you ever heard of key escrow?”

I shook my head.

“Okay, if I want to give someone a secret message, I use a ‘key’ to encode it, then I send them the message, and they use that same key in reverse to decode it. Right?”

“Yes,” I said, remembering that I had watched Tom take a secret code, figure out the key, and then decode it just a few weeks ago.

“Computer encryption works the same way, only there’s a lot more back and forth to it and it gets really complicated. But with key escrow, the keys that code and decode the messages aren’t just known to the sender and the receiver. They’re also given to a third party, who holds them in escrow. No one may see the keys or use them unless the police or the government suspects a crime. Then, kind of like getting a warrant for your house, the cops get a warrant for the keys that are in escrow, they decode your messages, and then the truth is revealed. If the encryption was merely hiding private business, there’s no harm done, but if it was being used to hide something illegal, like drug dealing or kiddie porn, then they have the evidence they need to get a conviction.”

“Sounds fairly straightforward.”

“It has its problems,” she said, “particularly with regard to who holds the key in escrow. Let’s say
I
do. What stops me from using it to spy on the person it belongs to or selling it to someone else so that they can use it? It all boils down to who can trust whom, and who watches the ones who are watching. Argh! It’s like this endless cycle of what-ifs. We never did come up with a good solution.”

“So what happened to the group?”

She returned to her keyboard and began typing again.

“We got mired in the debate. We developed a perfectly usable encryption program, but Tom refused to release it until we could find a way around the question of how to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.”

“Why did he create it in the first place if he wasn’t going to release it?”

She laughed sardonically.

“Some of the others yelled that exact question to him on a number of occasions. We had some serious arguments.”

“And?”

“And Tom admitted that he really hadn’t thought that far ahead. You have to understand that it all began as a head game.”

“A head game?”

“Secure computer encryption was just a mathematical riddle for Tom, a puzzle to solve. He solved it, all right, and then he rounded up a crack team and paid them to implement his solutions. Once we did, however, he understood the bigger picture and realized that he didn’t want to distribute it after all for fear of it ending up in the wrong hands. The finished program was primarily his intellectual property, so without his cooperation, it couldn’t be released. He disbanded the company.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well, by then I was pregnant with the twins, so I was ready to pull out anyway. Tom moved to California and went in a different direction, still computer-related, of course, but nothing to do with this stuff. As you know, he became successful fairly quickly. No surprise there. Tom’s always been outstanding at everything he does.”

“What happened to the other members of the team?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“Phillip took a job in his father’s import-export business. He’s filthy rich now, so no big loss there. Armand gave it up and moved back to the swamps with his family. Now he’s involved with environmental protection.”

“Environmental protection?”

“He works hard to save the swamps, which from what I can tell involves a mixture of politics, lobbying, public education, and science. He even wrote a book about it, which gets him on talk shows sometimes.”

“What about his computer skills?”

“Nowadays he creates computer models for swamp projections. You know, like he can put a part of the swamp up on the screen and show it to you as it is now and then how it’s going to look ten, twenty, fifty years from now, all with or without intervention. Armand was always a genius at creating object-oriented frameworks to implement sophisticated numerical algorithms.”