The office buildings are an illusion. The structures represent only part of an extensive complex said to include ten acres of underground operations. The NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the U.S., possibly the world, and the agency’s twenty thousand or so employees include the best cryptologists in the country.
Angela Worth, the assistant librarian at the American Philosophical Society, drove past the NSA complex and turned into the parking lot for the NationalCryptographicMuseum. She had arisen early in the day, called in sick, and driven south from Philadelphia. She found a parking space, grabbed an old briefcase from the passenger seat, and headed for the museum’s front door.
She asked the receptionist in the museum’s lobby if she could see D. Grover Harris. A few minutes later, she was approached by a skinny, mop-headed young man dressed in jeans. He shook Angela’s hand.
“Hi, Angela,” he said with a bashful grin. “Nice of you to come all this way.”
“No problem, Deeg. Thanks for seeing me.”
Angela had met Deeg at a convention of puzzle fans. They had hit it off immediately. They were both geeks. Deeg was pleasant and good-looking, and impossibly bright. And like Angela, he was low on the institutional ladder. He ushered her into his cluttered office and offered her a seat. The space was hardly bigger than a closet, confirming Harris’s bottom status on the agency’s food chain.
Harris settled behind a paper-covered desk that would have been considered a firetrap by any competent inspector. “You sounded pretty excited on the phone. What’s going on?”
Angela unlocked the briefcase. She extracted the Jefferson file copies and handed them over to Harris without comment. He scanned the pages and found the perforated cardboard on the bottom of the stack. He held it to the light and then placed the cardboard over a page.
“This wouldn’t be a cipher grille, would it?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Angela said. “You’re the expert on codes and ciphers.”
“I’m just an aspiring expert who’s been taking courses at the NationalCryptologicSchool.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Angela said. The NSA school trained people from all government departments in the fine points of cryptographic analysis.
“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re the one that picked up on this,” he said. “What can you tell me about it?”
“I think it was misfiled by subject. It should have gone into a Thomas Jefferson file.”
He sat bolt upright in his chair. “Jefferson?”
“Uh-huh. I’m pretty sure the handwriting is his. I’ve compared it to the Declaration, and there’s a small TJ in the lower right hand corner of the cover page.”
He held the page up to his face and let out a soundless whistle. “Jefferson. That would make sense.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Angela said with a sigh of relief. “I was worried that I’d be wasting your time.”
“Hell, no!” Harris shook his head. “Most people don’t know that Jefferson was an accomplished cryptologist. He used ciphers to communicate with James Madison and other government figures. He became proficient at codes and ciphers when he was minister to France.” He rose from his chair. “C’mon. I’ve got something to show you.”
He led the way to the exhibition area and stopped in front of a display case that held a brown wooden cylinder mounted on a spindle. The cylinder was about two inches in diameter and eight inches long and was constructed of a series of disks. The rims of the disks were inscribed with letters.
“This was found in a house near Monticello,” Harris said. “We believe it’s a ‘wheel cipher’ Jefferson invented when he was serving as Washington’s secretary of state. You write your message and rotate the disks to scramble the letters. The person getting the message un-scrambles them with a similar device.”
“Looks like something out of The Da Vinci Code.”
Harris chuckled. “Ol’ Leonardo would have been fascinated by the next evolution of the wheel cipher.”
He dragged her over to another display case containing several machines that looked like big typewriters.
She read the placard. “Enigma cipher machines,” she said with excitement in her eyes. “I’ve heard of them.”
“They were one of the best-kept secrets of World War Two. People would have killed for one of these contraptions. They were basically glorified versions of Jefferson’s wheel cipher. He was far ahead of his day.”
“Too bad we can’t use one of these things to decipher his writing,” Angela said.
“We may not have to,” Harris said.
They returned to Harris’s office, where he plopped behind the desk again. He leaned back in his chair and tented his fingers.
“How did you get into codes and ciphers?” he said.