Turing's Delirium Read Online Free PDF

bed with his metallic hum. Ramírez-Graham has gotten used to the noise—although at first he had to stop himself from throwing the dog out the window or shutting him up by piercing his heart with a screwdriver.
    The image he has of Kandinsky is his own, because there are no photos of him. Surely, though, Kandinsky is pale and malnourished from countless hours locked in his room in front of a computer monitor and is incapable of having an adult conversation with a woman.
    Will this be the end of Ramírez-Graham? The president is not at all pleased with the way he is handling the case and wants answers immediately. The vice president is trying to buy time and defends him, but he could withdraw his support at any moment—after all, he is a politician.
    Ramírez-Graham scribbles numbers and algorithmic formulas on the edge of the papers he is reviewing, a thankless labyrinth of codes. He thought that some underlying structure might emerge, the forgotten fingerprint that would allow the criminal to be caught, but studying the various crime scenes is getting him nowhere. Those kids in the Resistance are professional when it comes to their work. Kandinsky has surrounded himself with capable people. The ironies of fate: a year ago Ramírez-Graham arrived in Río Fugitivo with the arrogance of his past as a National Security Agency expert who was too good for the job as savior of Bolivia's Black Chamber, and now a Third World hacker has him in checkmate.
    It's not the fault of the codes, but his own. He never should have accepted a bureaucratic job that would remove him from daily practice with the theory of numbers, with the algorithms of cryptology.
    Ramírez-Graham's dad, an immigrant from the rural highlands outside Cochabamba, had married a woman from Kansas who taught math at a public school. He had established himself in Arlington by managing a Latin American restaurant and hadn't even bothered to register his son's birth with the Bolivian consulate. Six weeks after Ramírez-Graham was born, the Social Security card that made him part of the great American family had arrived in the mail. It had been so difficult for his dad to obtain residency that he was amazed when his son, simply for having been born on American soil, was considered a citizen of that country.
    Ramírez-Graham learned Spanish at home and spoke it very well, except for his somewhat deficient use of the subjunctive and his pronunciation of I and r—undeniably English-speaking traits. Growing up, he had visited Bolivia several times; he loved the social life there, the multitude of relatives, and the never-ending fiestas. It was perfect for vacations, but he never would have thought of living there. Never. Not until he met the vice president at a reception at the Bolivian embassy in Washington, given in honor of the community's distinguished young Bolivians. Ramírez-Graham had been invited because of his notable work as an expert on cryptographic security systems for the NSA. His work was supposedly secret and had remained so for the first few years, until a new boss, who wanted to improve relations with the media and make the NSA more transparent, made certain things public. Unsurprisingly, it was a resounding failure—the NSA was so secret that the funding it received annually was hidden within the nation's general budget.
    At the reception, the vice president had come straight out and asked Ramírez-Graham if he would be interested in taking charge of the Black Chamber. He had to stifle his laughter. The Black Chamber was the name given to European intelligence agencies two or three centuries ago. The name spoke of a desire for modernity but perhaps indiscreetly revealed how backward the Bolivians were. However, he was surprised by the offer. Without knowing anything about the Black Chamber's annual budget or its equipment, but suspecting that they were infinitely inferior to the NSA's, he asked himself whether it was