Digital Fortress

1998 | Dan Brown

ONLY THE TRUTH WILL SAVE YOU NOW. ENTER PASS-KEY __________

Just finished the first book in Dan Brown’s collection. It was brilliant. And there were a couple of paragraphs which I really liked.

Pushing through the center of the floor like the tip of a colossal torpedo was the machine for which the dome had been built. Its sleek black contour arched twenty-three feet in the air before pluging back into the floor below. Curved and smooth, it was as if an enormous killer whale had been frozen midbreach in a frigid sea.

This was TRANSLTR, the single most expensive piece of computing equipment in the world – a machine the NSA swore did not exist.

Like an iceberg, the machine hid 90 percent of its mass and power deep beneath the surface, its secret was locked in a ceramic silo that went six stories straight down – a rocketile hull surrounded by a winding maze of catwalks, cables, and hissing exhaust from a freon cooling system. The power generators at the bottom drone in a perpetual low-frequency hum that gave the acoustic in Crypto a dead, ghostlike quality

In the year since Susan’s arrival at the NSA, Strathmore had skyrocketed from head of Crypto Development to second-in-command of the entire NSA. Now only one man outranked Commander Strathmore there – Director Leland Fontaine, the mythical overlord of the Puzzle Palace – never seen, occasionally heardm and eternally feared. He and Strathmore seldom saw eye to eye, and they met, it was like the clash of titans. Fontaine was giant among giants, but Strathmore didn’t seem to care. He argued his ideas to the director with all the restraint of an impassioned boxer. Not even the President of the United States dared challenge Fontaine the way Strathmore did. One needed political immunity to do that – or, in Strathmore’s case, political indifference.

I wonder if the translated version has the altered version of the decrypted code on the last page?

128-10-93-85-10-128-98-112-6-6-25-126-39-1-68-78