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Digital Fortress, a science fiction thriller novel by Dan Brown, was published in 1998 and since then has been translated into several foreign languages.
To avoid public unrest, the common man of course is kept oblivious of the fact that the NSA is using its supercomputer, the TRANSLTR, to pry into their emails, with the objective of maintaining national security. Anxiety starts brewing, when an NSA expellee, devises an ingenious algorithm that is effective in formulating codes that even the TRANSLTR is incapable of decrypting.
Stumped by this new dilemma, Strathmore, commander of NSA, assigns the head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher to translate it. As Susan works on cracking this complicated cipher, Digital Fortress, she discerns the identity of the coder: Ensei Tankado, who strictly disapproves infringing upon people’s private lives! Susan further discovers that Tankado’s design, is to auction the Digital Fortress algorithm on his website and if this isn’t bad enough, ‘NDAKOTA’, his partner would expose it freely to the world, in the event of Tankado’s death. This would be too big a blow for the NSA.
Before enough can be done to crack the code however, news arrives from Seville that Tankado had died of what seemed to be a heart attack. When Commander Strathmore dispatches Susan’s fiancé to salvage the victim’s thumb ring, which he believes holds the key to disclose digital Fortress, Becker arrives to find that Tankado entrusted the ring to someone just before he died. While Becker tries to gather further information, an unknown assassin goes around slaughtering everyone that he has questioned.
The story spins deeper into the labyrinth with a series of events all taking place synchronously; we witness the enigmatic phone conversation between Numakata and NDAKOTA. The book ends by revealing the true identity of NDAKOTA and finally, the secret of Digital Fortress.
The novel is quite fast paced and like all of Dan Brown’s books, has received favorable reviews world over.ISBN - 9780552161251
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Pages : 512
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