The new cover design for The Atlas Fracture has landed. A threatening cloud of smoke, a drill rig beset by howling winds, a deep blue sky and an ominous burst of color on the horizon – they all work to suggest deadly happenings in Antarctica as Perry Helion fights a clever team of terrorists determined to unleash environmental disaster.

Designer Shannon Perry, who works from her home in Virginia, executed this design and she did a fantastic job. If you get a chance, let us know what you think of the new direction by email: tim at timqueeney dot com. And sign up for our mailing list (at top right) for the latest info on Perry and his colleagues at DARPA’s Office of Scenario Projection (OSP).

For obvious reasons, spies need to keep their messages secret. This is usually done by encrypting or ciphering a message. One method for encrypting is to use something called a one-time pad, invented by Frank Miller, a banker, CIvil War veteran and amateur cryptographer. Miller cooked up the one-time pad idea behind  back in 1882 as a way to keep telegraph messages secret (Miller was a banker, so there was probably money involved, not state secrets).

A one-time pad is a random crypto-key that is only used once. Both the sender and the recipient have the key, often in the form of a pad of paper. Each sheet on the pad is a different random number key. The two sides must have an agreed upon protocol for how the sheets are used, i.e., on July 9, use sheet #1 and then move on to the next sheet each day (you’ll need a thick pad of crypto sheets!).

You, as a spy, encrypt your message using sheet #1 and then transmit that message to your headquarters. They then use sheet #1 on their duplicate pad to decrypt your message. Both of you tear sheet #1 off the pad and destroy it. The next day, you use sheet #2, which has a different arrangement of random letters or numbers. This is what makes a one-time pad so secure: instead of sending a stream of messages with the same encryption scheme, you change the scheme every day. There is no pattern for code crackers to latch onto.

In my upcoming Perry Helion thriller, The Ceres Plague, Dr. Taylor Crandee is in Federal custody, working on special viral products at a government lab. His compatriots outside the lab send him messages using a freely available one time pad: the daily NY Times crossword puzzle.  For more on how it works, grab The Ceres Plague  later this year.

In the meantime, catch up on Perry Helion’s first battle with Dr. Crandee in Antarctica in The Atlas Fracture. 

“Subplots and conspiracies abound within the coalition, adding to the suspense and intrigue…and the fun. ”

Steve Konkoly, author of Blacked Flagged Vektor, on The Atlas Fracture

I didn’t win the big $550 million Powerball jackpot. So it’s obvious that this thing is fixed. Go back and carefully watch the video of the ball being “selected” and you will see obvious anomalies. Slow it down and watch it in circularly polarized light shifted toward the red end of the spectrum while listening to the Beatles White Album backwards and you can clearly see that the “number” on the visible side of the ball doesn’t match the number on the other side of the ball. Also, check out the wide shot of the “selection” process. If you run the video through a Gaussian filter and bump up the white point adjustment to 11 you see a second “selector” in the shadows to the right.

I, for one, will be filing a class action lawsuit to get my $2 back.