False Witness Page 31

  “You’ll kill me either way,” Hoffman replied.

  “Perhaps,” Xu said. He walked away from the table and came back with a device that looked like a nail gun.

  “Untie one hand so we can roll him on his side,” Xu said to one of the men in the room. He turned back to Hoffman. “You may not know this, Mr. Shealy, but I’m a trained surgeon. And since we last met, you might say I completed a little internship in India. You know what I learned? How much more valuable organs are when they are harvested from a live person than when they are harvested from a corpse.”

  Xu lowered his voice, a smirk playing on his lips. “Would you care to guess one of the most valuable organs one can harvest?”

  Hoffman said nothing, but he knew his trepidation was registering in his eyes.

  “The cornea, Mr. Shealy. Two corneas will bring nearly two hundred thousand. Far better than the heart.”

  Hoffman jerked his head back in repulsion. His mind lingered on the word picture that Xu had so expertly drawn. “So yes, Mr. Shealy, you may have to die anyway. It would be unfortunate to have a person other than us who knows this algorithm.

  “But I assure you, there are some things worse than a quick and painless death.”

  73

  Wellington had beeped his Jetta unlocked and had one hand on the door handle when he heard someone behind him call his name. He almost jumped out of his skin.

  “Sorry,” Stacie said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “It’s okay,” Wellington said. He resisted the urge to grab his heart. “I’m just a little jumpy, that’s all.”

  They stood there for a second, neither speaking. “Do you need a ride?” Wellington asked.

  “Oh no. Thanks. I really followed you over here because . . .” Stacie stopped for a moment. “Actually, if you could give me a lift to my car in the parking garage by the CNN Center, I’ve got something I want to give you.”

  “Okay. Sure. Hop in.”

  Wellington jumped in first and made a clean sweep of the passenger seat—fast-food bags, books, a few stray coins, and pencils all got thrown in the back. As Stacie watched, he grabbed a pair of shoes and an old sweater from the floor and chucked them in the back as well. A few other items he just shoved under the seat. “I’ve been a little busy lately,” he said. “Actually, it always looks this way.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  On the way to the garage, Stacie gave directions and thanked him for his willingness to help. She directed him to the third level of the parking deck and had him pull next to her Honda Accord.

  “Did you get the optional security package?” Wellington asked.

  Stacie looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “What are you talking about?”

  “On your car. You don’t get side air bags without the optional security package.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then be careful. The side-impact rating for that car leaves a lot to be desired.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Stacie stepped out of Wellington’s car and asked him to hang on for a minute. She popped the trunk on the Honda and fished around in the area where the spare tire should be located. A minute or two later, she closed the trunk and hopped back in Wellington’s car with a locked metal box in her hands. She flipped through the combination quickly and removed the padlock.

  With all this mystique, Wellington half expected a glowing light to appear from the box, emitted by the Hope Diamond or maybe the Holy Grail. Instead, the box contained only a single sheet of paper and a thick leather Bible.

  Stacie waited for the overhead console light to go dark before she said anything. “Walter Snead told me that you figured out he had been our lawyer. He said you’re probably the smartest student he’s ever had. He also told me you were more or less a prodigy on solving ciphers and encryptions.”

  Wellington was glad it was dark in the car since he could feel himself blushing.

  “Did he tell you about the encoded algorithm?” Stacie asked.

  At that moment, it finally dawned on Wellington that he might actually be an arm’s length away from the most important math formula in the world. What else would Stacie have in that box?

  “Yeah,” Wellington answered. “Professor Snead said that you were given an encoded algorithm, but the key from Professor Kumari’s friend never arrived.”

  Stacie sighed. “Once we went into the witness protection program, we knew it would be impossible for Kumari’s friend to find us. So we waited a year and then went to India looking for him. Kumari had told Clark, I mean David, that the person he trusted more than anyone would have the key. Since Kumari had wanted the algorithm sold to help the work of the Indian church among the Dalits, we figured his church associates might be a good place to start.”

  As Wellington listened, his leg got the nervous jitters. This could be one of the greatest mathematical breakthroughs of the twenty-first century, and he was sitting next to the person who owned it. Plus, he reminded himself as he quickly checked every mirror, people were willing to kill for the thing.

  “What we found out was so sad. Kumari’s pastor and other members of his church had been kidnapped and never heard from again. There were rumors that they had been tortured. We stayed for more than a week, making friends with church members and helping out in the Dalit school.”

  Stacie hesitated as if unsure about how much she should share. “On the last night we were there, I became a Christian and got baptized by the new pastor of Kumari’s church.”

  “That’s awesome,” Wellington said, momentarily forgetting the danger lurking all around them.

  “I thought you might feel that way,” Stacie mused. She picked up the Bible, holding it with great care. “Later that same night, at our hotel, we got a visit from an older woman in the church. She told us that . . .”

  Stacie stopped midsentence as if she’d heard something. She quickly placed the Bible back in the metal box, closed the lid, and turned to check behind her. “Did you hear anything?” she asked Wellington.

  His heart was about ready to beat out of his chest, he was so scared. He had been hearing mysterious noises all night. “Maybe. Probably. But I might just be imagining it.”

  They both sat there for a moment, scarcely daring to breathe. One minute lapsed into two. Finally Stacie glanced around one more time and decided to continue. “Anyway, this lady came to us in the middle of the night and gave us this Bible.” She pulled it out of the box again and handed it to Wellington. It was thick and well-worn, a version that had both English and Hindi side by side. The book felt weighty, its secrets costing people their lives.

  Stacie explained how the Bible had been passed from Pastor Abhay Prasad to this lady and then ultimately to her and David. It contained a very important key to a project that Kumari was working on, according to the woman. “We’re certain she was referring to the key for the Abacus Algorithm,” Stacie said. “That’s what this other piece of paper is—the encrypted algorithm.”

  “Wow,” Wellington said.

  “The thing is—David and I have been trying to solve the code to this algorithm ever since we got our hands on this Bible. Walter told us we should have you look at it—that if anybody could solve it, you could. But, Wellington, this formula has caused so many people so much pain. And the thought of dragging one more person into it, before we even knew if you could really be trusted . . .”

  Stacie turned in her seat so she was now facing Wellington. He noticed that she had removed her glasses. “But then, in the park, when you prayed for David . . .well, I know this sounds crazy, but it somehow confirmed that I could really trust you.”

  To Wellington, it didn’t sound crazy at all. Overwhelming—yes. But not crazy. In Wellington’s experience, God usually worked in strange and mysterious ways. Crazy was normal in the spiritual realm.

  Stacie pulled the folded sheet of paper out of the box and handed it to Wellington. It was too dark to see what was writt
en on it, and he wasn’t about to turn on the light. He placed the paper carefully inside the front cover of the Bible.

  “It’s D-day,” Stacie said. “I know I’m asking a lot. But if we had an algorithm that wasn’t encrypted and actually worked, it would make things a lot easier—maybe even give us one more bargaining chip if we needed it. Bluffing gets old real fast.”

  Wellington couldn’t believe she was entrusting this to him. He was being asked to decipher the most important algorithm in the world. In about ten hours!

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. Even to his own ears, the response sounded so meager, so trite, for such an important task.

  But Stacie didn’t seem to be offended by it. “You can’t let anybody know you have this,” she said. “Not Isaiah. Not Snead. Not even David.”

  Wellington nodded. He was well aware of the sensitivity of this matter.

  “Guard it with your life,” she added.

  He could have gone all night without hearing that.

  74

  Wellington, who had never done drugs in his life, figured this was what being high must feel like. He barely made it back to his apartment without pulling over to the side of the road so he could study the encrypted algorithm right there. He probably would have, except the chances of an automobile accident increased dramatically when you did such foolish things. Something like one out of every ten accidents, as best he could remember.

  He spread the paper out on his small kitchen table, the Bible on one side and his computer on the other, some mechanical pencils and legal pads there as well. He touched it with the sort of reverence one might reserve for the Dead Sea Scrolls. This was the Abacus Algorithm! Rapid factorization of numbers into prime integers! It would be a formula beautiful in its complexity, majestic in its exploitation of the unbendable rules that governed the distribution of primes. Wellington wished he could have met Professor Kumari himself. What kind of mind could distill such an algorithm?

  Wellington understood, of course, that this was not the first algorithm developed to determine the prime factors of a given number. There were a number of other formulas, varying in complexity and sophistication, but they all had their limitations.

  The elliptic curve method, for example, could find prime factors of a number if the primes were relatively small numbers—twenty to thirty digits or so—but not for the large primes required to break most computer encryption systems. The various “sieves” that had been developed provided some shortcuts and reduced the time required for a method called direct search factorization, which was nothing more than systematically testing every prime number to see if it could be a factor of the number in question. But using even the most sophisticated sieve could still take millions upon millions of computer hours to find the prime factors of a very large number.

  From what he had heard about the Abacus Algorithm, it was so much more. This was a formula, not a sieve, a way to exponentially reduce the time it took to factor numbers. The key to every Internet lock.

  But as he focused on the page in front of him, it just looked like so much gibber jabber. Sure, there were some mathematical concepts that Wellington might expect to see in such a formula, such as the concept of modality, binomial coefficients, and various congruence equations. But the encoding system used by Kumari had reduced the overall equation to gibberish. So many variables or numbers, or even mathematical functions, seemed to be represented by a set of five numbers, as if each set of five numbers, once the code was understood, would generate a single number or a single mathematical function or letter.

  It was mind-boggling stuff. The more he stared at the formula, trying to make sense of the numbers, the more his head ached. Wellington reminded himself that he was dealing with an encryption technique designed by the same man who had solved a mathematical challenge that others considered impossible. And Wellington had only a few hours to decipher it.

  It was not hard to figure out that Kumari had used a five-part encoding system—the formula was absolutely littered with five-number sets. Perhaps every fifth or sixth symbol in Kumari’s formula was encoded this way. Thus, each sequence of numbers—for example, 24-50-42-1-3—had to mean something.

  He began by noting the range of numbers represented in the various sequences. For example, the first number of the sequence always fell within a range from one to sixty-two. The second number ranged from three to one hundred forty-seven. The third number ranged from one to one hundred sixty-nine. But the ranges for the fourth and fifth numbers in the sequence were much smaller. The fourth number contained a range from one to twenty-eight while the fifth number only ranged from one to sixteen.

  Those ranges were telling him something, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what.

  The biggest key of all, however, was not the formula itself. Wellington picked up the leather Bible. An English-Hindi translation, NLT version.

  Wellington leafed through the pages, focusing first on the margin notes and the verses underlined by the pastor. This guy scribbled lots of notes in his Bible, some in English, some in Hindi. Wellington thought about trying to download a program that might help him translate the Hindi notes but realized it would be nearly impossible for him to decipher. Besides, if the pastor knew the Bible would be passed on to an American, Wellington assumed he would not put the key in a language most Americans couldn’t read.

  Instead, Wellington focused on the English notes and the English verses the pastor had underlined. He went through the verses systematically, plugging in different iterations from his number sequences. What if he wrote down all the numbers in the verses the pastor had underlined, put them in order, then cross-referenced them against the code? For instance, maybe the first number to appear in the underlined verses corresponded to the number 1 in Kumari’s encoded algorithm. He started that exercise but after a few minutes realized that many of these underlined verses probably went back several years, predating the algorithm and the code Kumari had put in place. Next, he focused on any numbers the pastor had written in the margins, applying different approaches to them.

  For three hours, Wellington worked his what-ifs and plugged in trial symbols and numbers based on different assumptions regarding underlined verses and margin notes and the strange code Kumari had used. What if this? What if that? Eventually he quit focusing on the Bible and began focusing on the formula itself, applying every decryption trick he had ever learned. Not once did he leave his seat at the table—no breaks, no stretches, just one method after another.

  Hours later, all he had to show for his efforts was a growing headache.

  75

  Friday, April 11

  The SunTrust Bank at the intersection of Fourteenth and Peachtree in downtown Atlanta didn’t open until 10:00 a.m. Hoffman and his captors—Huang Xu and two other members of the Manchurian Triad—arrived five minutes early in a conspicuous black Lincoln Town Car. At Xu’s direction, the driver cruised around the block twice, past the bank building itself, the Peachtree Plaza, and the Sheraton Hotel behind the bank complex.

  Traffic on Peachtree Street, the main artery for Atlanta’s financial district and the upscale businesses of Buckhead, moved at its usual ultraslow pace, the road jammed with cars and SUVs and lane-hogging delivery trucks. Pedestrian traffic was a steady trickle, not New York City by any means, but enough lawyers and bankers and investment gurus to give the area a self-important, urban feel.

  “Park here,” Xu said after the second lap. He pointed to a driveway that looped in front of the Peachtree Plaza, just beyond the entrance to an underground parking garage and adjacent to the bank building. Sitting in the circular drive, the occupants of the car would be able to watch the revolving front doors of the bank and be well positioned for an escape.

  “You’re coming with me,” Huang Xu said, motioning to Hoffman.

  Hoffman took a split second, closed his eyes, and offered a final silent prayer. He got out the back door and waited, like a loyal hunting dog, for Xu to alight from
the front passenger seat. Underneath Hoffman’s bulky shirt he had been wired for obedience. A number of electrodes—two hooked to his nipples, two to the soft tissue on his upper back near his armpits, two near his hips—were strategically positioned to provide a debilitating electrical surge whenever Xu pulled the trigger on the Taser gun he carried in the pocket of his suit coat. It was, Xu boasted, Taser’s newest wireless long-range electric-shock weapon.

  Earlier that morning, to show Hoffman the full extent of the range, Xu had the driver of the Town Car pull over in a deserted parking lot. Xu dragged Hoffman out of the car, removed his blindfold, and made him run—ten yards, twenty yards, thirty. The pain of trying to run with cracked ribs was excruciating, but nothing compared to what happened next.

  Smiling, Xu pulled the trigger on the Taser, bringing Hoffman to his knees, disrupting his neuromuscular system, and sending his muscles into agonizing contractions as the current pulsed through him in two-second cycles for the longest twenty seconds of Hoffman’s life.

  A few minutes later, as Xu put the blindfold back on Hoffman, he drove home his point. “Today, my friend, you are an epileptic. Prone to sudden seizures. Lucky for you, I am a physician and will treat you during your convulsions. That’s the little role-playing that will happen if you try anything stupid. Understand?”

  Hoffman understood. With drool running down his chin and struggling to maintain his balance, Hoffman climbed back into the car. He felt dazed and nauseated for the next ten minutes.

  And terrified much longer than that.

  When they reached the SunTrust building, Xu followed Hoffman through the revolving doors and into the main lobby. A bank of elevators was located on their left, the open glass doors for the SunTrust lobby on their right, a food court and plaza directly ahead.

  They walked into the lobby of the bank and took a seat on the other side of the desk from the customer assistant nearest the door. Xu sat with his back to one of the lobby security cameras, his hand shielding his face from another one. Hoffman sat gingerly, every movement causing sharp pain in his ribs. The nameplate on the lady’s desk said she was Cynthia Lawson. Her face was round and pleasant as she gave Hoffman her best customer-service smile. “How can I help you?”