Page 34 of Clive Cussler's Quantum Tempest

“You too, amigo,” the Romanian said as the team pressed forward toward an alien shipwreck on the horizon.

Murph turned his attention to the string of lower- and uppercaseletters, numbers, and mathematical symbols. He instantly recognized it as Base64 encoding. He also knew Base64 was commonly used to represent binary data in the ASCII string format.

A code leading to a code.

Murph bailed out of the game window and pulled up an online calculator. He hardly needed it. He often relied on his own split-second mental calculations for firing solutions when he was the weapons officer. Cabrillo compared him to John Glenn performing trajectory calculations faster than Mercury’s onboard computer.

Murph opened up a new terminal window and began decoding the encrypted text by entering the command:

base64 -d encrypted_file.b64 > decrypted.bin

Moments later, the result he came up with was a long binary data sequence of fifty-three digits and characters. The “Salted_” prefix in this new sequence probably meant the data was encrypted using OpenSSL’s default method. But now he had a problem. He needed a password to decrypt it—and no idea how to find it.

Suddenly, a second message appeared on his screen:

Find the positive integer solution to the equation: 7^x ≡ 1 mod 20

Murphy tugged on his wispy beard, intrigued. Whoever was sending this stuff was no idiot and didn’t think he was one, either. He needed to solve forxin the equation. He popped open his terminal and fired off a quick Python command.

The result was an infinite arithmetic sequence of numbers beginning with 4.

But Murph knew that “infinity” couldn’t be the answer. In fact, just the opposite. In cryptographic puzzles, the shortest viable solution was always the most efficient choice. He noticed the numbers all advanced by a factor of 4.

That was the answer.

He then saved the encrypted data to a file, opened a new terminal window, and used the OpenSSL command-line tool. When it prompted him for a password, he entered “4” and crossed his fingers.

Yes.

Murphy flushed with another dopamine hit. The decryption was a success.

The only problem was that it yielded another coded hexadecimal message:

45 65 72 6F 20 53 61 61 72 69 6E 65 6E

Murphy paused. He was being led down a rabbit hole, exactly the kind of thing a super hacker would do if they wanted to crack into theOregon’s system.

He did a quick gut check and, more important, a mental inventory. There was no way that anything happening in his gaming computer could possibly affect theOregon. Still, it would be smarter to quit this little dance and not take any chances with the intriguing puzzle.

But…he was so close to solving it.

He decided to trust his intuition and press on. Besides, converting hexadecimal to ASCII was child’s play; a mere matter of consulting a table. He pulled one up, threw it onto a spreadsheet, and then converted each hexadecimal pair to its alphabetical equivalent.

The result surprised him:

EERO SAARINEN

Where did he know that name from? His fingers twitched as they hovered over the keyboard. A few simple strokes in a search engine could pull the name up. But that wasn’t any fun.

He rewound his mental computer and could practically hear the high-pitched gibberish of an old audio tape playing backward in his mind. The tumblers finally fell into place.

Eero Saarinen was the Finnish-American architect who designedtwo famous buildings at MIT. One was a chapel, the other was the Kresge Auditorium.

Murph hadn’t thought much about school since he came on board theOregon. He was quite the nerd—a character straight out ofThe Big Bang Theory. But crewing on theOregonhad matured his body and his mind. Intense physical workouts, training in tactics and small arms with the Gundogs, and operating theOregon’s advanced weapons systems had changed him for the better.

Those MIT memories were still sweet. The scene of several intellectual triumphs and a few emotional crashes.

Suddenly, a third message appeared: