Simple Genius

3. Alicia Chadwick’s surname came from John Chadwick whose extensive knowledge of archaic Greek was instrumental as he and Ventris went on to decipher the Linear B tablets. As an interesting side note their findings were made public around the same time that Mt. Everest was first conquered, prompting their discovery to be labeled the “Everest of Greek Archaeology.”

3 Ian Whitfield’s surname came from Whitfield Diffie, who came up with a groundbreaking new type of cipher that used an asymmetric key, instead of a symmetric key. Symmetric merely means that the way one unscrambles the cipher is the same way one scrambles it.

4 Merkle Hayes’s first name came from Ralph Merkle, who worked with Diffie and Stanford professor Martin Hellman on their world-changing work in conceptualizing public cryptography in a way that finally solved the key distribution problem.

5 Len Rivest’s last name came from Ron Rivest, who teamed with Adi Shamir and Leonard Adelman to create RSA, the system of asymmetric public key cryptography that is dominant in the world today.

6 Monk Turing’s last name came from, of course, Alan Turing, whose actual history is set forth in the book. Charles Babbage and Blaise de Vigenère were real people as well, whose discoveries are also chronicled in the novel.

7 The inspiration for Valerie Messaline’s surname (with a slightly different spelling) didn’t come from the world of cryptanalysts. However, students of history may spot the significance. One clue: Unlike RSA,

which is brilliantly asymmetrical, Valerie’s name and character are beautifully symmetrical.

So as they say, what’s in a name? Well, with Simple Genius, a lot!

The history of Camp Peary revealed in the novel is based on the research I was able to do and is factually accurate as well. However, the descriptions of what goes on there in the book are entirely products of my imagination. This was necessary since it’s doubtful any novelist will ever be allowed there to do research. In that vein, anyone who works at Camp Peary who reads the novel, please keep in mind that I just made up what happens at the place; the characters and the dialogue, and nothing in the story is a reflection on you or the work you do for your country. A rogue agent is just that. Known as the “secret place” by some locals, it’s worth a trip down just to drive by Camp Peary. No, you can’t tour the place; the CIA won’t even acknowledge it exists.

The idea for Simple Genius came to me, or at least part of it did, after reading about the Beale Cipher. The Beale Cipher is one of those oxymoronic phenomena-a famous secret. It concerns an enormously complicated code, three pages worth of numbers, and an alleged treasure worth tens of millions of dollars that was supposedly hidden by Mr. Thomas Jefferson Beale in the early 1800s. One page of the cipher has been-at least allegedly-successfully deciphered long ago by a friend of a friend of Mr. Beale’s. The page was decrypted using the American Declaration of Independence as a source of letters corresponding with the numbers on the cipher. For example, the third number in the cipher is 24, which means, you’d look up the 24th word in the Declaration. That word is “another,” so you’d take the first letter of that word, or “a,” and plug it into the ciphertext in order to form words.

The decrypted page tells the general vicinity of the treasure-somewhere in Bedford County, Virginia-as well as the type and amount of the treasure-gold, silver and some jewels-and that it’s buried in stone-lined caves stored in iron pots. Based on today’s precious metals prices the treasure would be worth well over $20 million. It’s impossible to calculate the value of the jewels, really. However, the deciphered message says they were worth $13,000 in 1821, so presumably they’re worth a lot more today.

Easy, you might say. One page broken, two pages to go, put me down for the private jet. Well, here’s the catch. Apparently everyone who is anyone in the cryptanalyst field has tried to decipher the other two pages, using cutting-edge technology and supercomputers, and they’ve all failed. Indeed, it’s estimated that one out of ten of the best cryptanalysts in the world have tried to crack the Beale Cipher and not a single one of them has succeeded. The difficulty is that if the ciphertext is tied to a particular document-e.g., the Declaration of Independence-you need to know which document is the right one. And even in 1820 there were a lot of possibilities. The more obvious ones, like the U.S. Constitution and the Magna Carta, have already been tried.

However, at least one Web site has claimed to have solved the cipher and includes photos of the alleged vault found on the site. The folks running the Web site also claim that the treasure vault was empty when they got to it. Hmm. Maybe, maybe not.