Gideon's Sword Read Free Page A

three Linux clients. For what Gideon was doing, the computers didn’t need to be fast; they just had to be thorough—and reliable. The only brand-new and relatively expensive piece of equipment in the alcove was a high-performance broadband satellite router.
    Above the rack was a small, exquisite pencil sketch by Winslow Homer of rocks on the Maine coast. It was the one remaining artifact from his previous profession: the one he simply hadn’t had the heart to sell.
    Pulling back a ratty office chair on an octopus of wheels, he seated himself at the small wooden desk, kicked his feet up, dragged a keyboard into his lap, and began typing. A screen popped up with a summary of the search results, informing him he had not been in attendance for six days.
    He drilled through to the results window. Immediately he saw that there had been a hit.
    He stared at the screen. Over the years, he’d refined and improved his search engine, and it had been almost a year since the last false positive.
    Dropping his feet to the floor, heart suddenly hammering in his chest, he hunched over the desk, banging furiously at the keys. The hit was in a table of contents released to the National Security Archives at George Washington University. The actual archival material remained classified, but the table of contents had been released as part of a large, ongoing declassification of Cold War documents under Executive Order 12958.
    The hit was his father’s name: L. Melvin Crew. And the title of the archived, still-classified document was A Critique of the Thresher Discrete Logarithm Encryption Standard EVP-4: A Theoretical Back-Door Cryptanalysis Attack Strategy Using a Group of φ-Torsion Points of an Elliptic Curve in Characteristic φ.
    “Mother of God,” Gideon murmured as he stared at the screen. No false positive this time.
    For years, he’d been hoping for something. But this looked like more than something. It might be the brass ring.
    It seemed incredible, unbelievable: could this be the very memo his father had written criticizing Thresher, the memo that General Tucker had supposedly destroyed?
    There was only one way to find out.

4
    M idnight. Gideon Crew slouched down the street, hands in his pockets, baseball cap turned backward, filthy shirt untucked beneath a greasy trench coat, baggy pants hanging halfway down his ass, thinking how lucky he was that today was trash day in suburban Brookland, Washington, DC.
    He turned the corner of Kearny Street and passed the house: a shabby bungalow with an overgrown lawn surrounded by a white picket fence only partially painted. And, of course, a lovely overflowing trash can sat at the end of the walkway, a fearful stench of rotting shrimp hovering in the muggy air. He paused at the can, looking about furtively. Then he dove in with one hand, digging deep, groping among the garbage as he went. His hand encountered something that felt like french fries and he pulled up a handful, confirmed they were fries, tossed them back.
    He saw a flash of movement. A scrawny, one-eyed cat came slinking out from a hedge.
    “Hungry, partner?”
    The cat made a low meow and crept over, tail twitching warily. Gideon offered it a fry. It sniffed at it suspiciously, ate it, then meowed again, louder.
    Gideon tossed the cat a small handful. “That’s all, kiddo. Any idea how bad trans-fatty acids are for you?”
    The cat settled down to nosh.
    Gideon dove in again, stirring the garbage with his arm, this time turning up a wad of discarded papers. Quickly sorting through them, he saw they were some little child’s math homework—straight A’s, he noted with approval. Why were they thrown away? Should be framed.
    He pushed them back in, dug out a chicken drumstick, and set it aside for the cat. He reached in again, both hands this time, wriggling downward, encountering something slimy, fumbling deeper, his fingers working through various semi-solid things before encountering more papers. Grasping them and