DECODING LOVE
by
DC DeVane

(An Excerpt of DECODING LOVE from FOR YOUR HEART ONLY
Book Three from the sweet military romance anthology published by Highland Press)

Chapter One     

AQ@3   90Q%G   P:7  7B07
123G   GC?79D54   0A   L+2@
0*LC    G4$0Hd=S    I%   -@A
;&^ V*FK#A    F/P   6JH#

CC Thomas looked at the screen.  Blinked.  Blinked again and promptly spilled coffee in her lap as she jumped up yelling for the head of her section to come see what she had just found.  When the woman didn’t immediately appear, she hit ‘print screen’, snatched up the printout and went looking for her.

#####

NSA crypto maven and now Section Chief, Belle Cleveland, codename Pathfinder, looked up from her phone call to see what the commotion in the outer office was.  Panting in the doorway was her friend and one of her best cryptologists, CC, looking like she was holding a piece of unexploded ordinance.

Belle held up a hand in the universal ‘just a minute’ signal while she began wrapping up her phone call with Director Donnington while simultaneously finishing typing up her report on last night’s operation.  She hit the send button, hibernated her screen, ended the call with the Director, sent the other three calls that were holding into her voicemail and then shifted her attention to deal with whatever situation her friend was bringing to her door.

“You rang?”  Big brown eyes peered through the regulation black, military-style glasses known as BCDs that Belle usually wore at the office. 

“I was going through the batches from last night and this popped up.”  CC handed her the paper and indicated the string of code printed there.  “What do you think?”

“Where did we get it?” Belle asked as she reached out to take the page from CC.

“Off one of the secure taps we’ve had on that contractor geek down in the Department of Energy at Germantown who’s been doing some Homeland Security work for us.  The one who’s been running around like James Bond without his secret decoder ring.”

The hair on the back of Belle’s neck stood up.  CC really knew her stuff and had a reputation for being uncannily accurate.  If she thought it was important, then it was definitely worth looking at.  “Okay.  Run it though all the standard series and let me know what it says.”

“Will do.  I should have something for you before lunch.”  CC was already on her phone calling down to the main computer facility, letting them know what was coming their way shortly as she headed out to get the ball rolling.

Before she had even cleared the door, Belle had already gone back to the reams of paperwork on her desk.  She looked up and took a deep breath and her eyes were drawn to the page with the series of numbers and letters that CC had left behind for her.

She missed being able to just dive into a cipher and wrap her mind around it.  Ever since she accepted the promotion to Section Chief, her life had shifted out of what she loved to do – chewing every last bit of flavor out of a puzzle – to what she hated most in the world:  paperwork, paperwork – and did she mention – paperwork?!?  With a heavy sigh, she pushed her non-descript brown, shoulder-length hair back behind her ears to get it out of the way and picked up the next report.

But her eyes glanced over wistfully at the siren song on her desk.  She picked up the paper, looked at it again, then deliberately laid it on top of one of the ubiquitous puzzle books that she was never without and picked up the report folder again.

Two minutes later the report was on top of the puzzle books and the cipher was in her hand, with a pencil in the other and a clean notepad in front of her.  This is what she lived for, where her passion lay.  The dull, dry, dead-as-dogma reports could wait for a bit.  This was life and fun.  A challenge to spark her interest and engage her mind.

#####

Two hours later, her sensible flats discarded under her desk, her feet tucked up under her in her chair, she blew out a puff of frustration.  Why couldn’t it be one of those public key systems such as RSA and not one of these horribly cryptic symmetrical block ciphers?!?  Whatever else this geek was he actually knew how to encrypt something.  She was impressed. 

She looked up at CC and Sarah on the couch in her office.  Laptops in front of them, code books strewn all over the place, their faces screwed up in concentration.  “Anything?”

“You didn’t hear me scream eureka did you?”  CC reached over for one of the containers of Chinese that they had sent out for so they could keep working on the latest update to the RC6 decryption code-breaker machine that was ‘Her Baby’.  The machine chirped and continued to chew on the new update before burping its acknowledgement of ‘Done Mom’, its voice augmented by the low-key hum of the massive number of parallel decrypting devices slaved to it within the walls of the building.

Sarah looked up at her boss and just shook her head before burrowing down in front of her own computer again.  She thought they might get lucky and find a repeating pattern they could latch onto.  She had just started to research algorithms used in the advanced encryption standard known as AES  - and they definitely wanted to be using the AES standard over the DES standard since that had been cracked by that engineer down in Huntsville - when Jen popped her head around the corner.

“Nope. Nothing.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.  Zero.  Bupkis.  Word from the computer gnomes is that you are looking at a completely random cipher.  Without the key you’re not going to get anywhere.  Schneider said to tell you it’s an ‘Enigma’ and then started up with that hyena laugh of his.  God, he drives me nuts.  Can’t we just shoot him or something?”

Belle was in complete agreement about Schneider, but put on her serious supervisor face – well her almost serious supervisor face – before responding. “No.  He’s a total nerd – in a lot of the not good nerd ways – but he’s the only one in the office who knows how to make a decent pot of coffee.  Leave him alone – at least until we get a new coffeemaker.”

“Ahem,” Sarah drew Belle’s attention to her.  “If Hyena Boy is right and it’s not crackable without the key, where do we go with it now?”

“Well … we can either sit around and wait for someone to drop the key in our laps or we can keep working.” Belle addressed CC, “I think you’re right.  This has the feel of something major.  This is no simple shift and substitute coding.  The sheer complexity and sophistication of it gives me the willies.  This is how the big boys ‘play spy’.”

CC looked up from her Moo Goo Gai Pan and stared off into space for a minute, then put it down and moved the laptop onto the couch.  She got up and went into the other room and  Belle and Sarah could hear shuffling and rustling and the scratch of a pen on paper.  Then she was back.

 “Here.  New York office is supposed to have just gotten in a new hot-shot miracle worker with “the eye”.  Give the newbie a buzz and see if they’re as good as the gossip says.  Code Name Avalon.”