DC Palter has done it again in Countdown to Decryption. Following close on the heels of his wildly successful debut novel, To Kill a Unicorn (‎Pandamoon Publishing, 2023), Countdown returns readers to San Jose and to the high-octane escapades of our favorite hacker Ted [Teddybear] Haru.

Zipping along the internet highway, buying stolen passwords, and slipping into the depths of the dark web, this riveting cyber thriller has us flying through the pages in pursuit of Bulldozer, Laser-Eye, Grinning Amramson, and other unsavories, all in an effort to solve a murder and vindicate Ted’s tarnished reputation.

Belly-crawling through hidden passageways and commandeering a taco truck may seem a tad outlandish, but in our current world of cyber-piracy and cult-fueled conspiracies, even these oddball antics ring frighteningly real. A taut plot-driven exploit with fully realized characters, Countdown will have you holding your breath, hoping Ted will crack the code before the baddies crack his last rib.

As the novel opens, Ted is in the midst of an important zoom call, hoping to convince a screen full of suits to fund his startup. Before he can get far into his pitch, however, love interest Sumire bursts into his apartment — “as if she already lived” there — and irrespective of everything, buries her face in Ted’s neck full sob.

After the suits exit the zoom call, taking with them Ted’s dreams of venture funding, Ted pieces together the cause of Sumire’s distress. Her best friend, Joy Miyazaki, a human rights lawyer and daughter of the congressman for Silicon Valley’s historic Japantown, has been found dead in her apartment, presumably the victim of a home invasion gone wrong.

Before her body is even cold, the tabloids are spinning all variety of salacious scenarios, claiming Joy was a drug kingpin. Supposedly, she used her connections in Afghanistan to smuggle nefarious goodies into the country in order to support her Democrat daddy and his liberal agenda.

“Her murder was . . . a hit from the gathering forces of Q, the opening shot of The Storm when the swamp rats surrounding her father would be purged by the patriotic forces loyal to the once and future president.” And so it goes.

Countdown may be fiction, but its plot is tangled with “ripped from the headlines” happenings that are chillingly close to home, and surprisingly current. At one point Ted urges an eccentric, Bezos-type gazillionaire to support his cause, threatening: “I’ll explain to Congress how the Russians are using BiteCoin to finance their war with Ukraine…And I’ll convince the SEC you’re as bad as Sam Bankman-Fried.”

Clearly, Ted has to do something to make things right. He can’t let Joy’s enemies get away with tarnishing her name. Sumire beseeches Ted to find something. “Anything suspicious. An argument with a neighbor. BiteCoin transactions. Someone stalking her. You know, stuff like that.”
And that means hacking. Big time.

Not but four months earlier, Sumire had roped Ted into helping her find her brother, who had gone missing. The experience led Ted down some dark cyber byways where he very narrowly escaped death and was threatened with jail time for wire fraud.

The stakes are higher now. If Ted gets caught again, he could lose everything — not that he has much to lose. He is already living on a shoestring. The only thing of value Ted can claim is his relationship with Sumire. He agrees to do whatever he can to keep her happy.

And so, begins Ted’s hellish adventure. He cyber spies, he snoops, he buys passwords, and he manages to gather an amazing amount of information without ever leaving his living room. Hacking into Joy’s computer is relatively easy, after all, most people use the same password for multiple sites. All Ted needed to do was buy a hacked password she used on one site to could gain access to all others.

He hits a wall, though, when he discovers an important file in her email protected by a password shared only between Joy and the sender of the document. Ted has no way to break the code, and the document, he believes, reveals a terrorist plot.

“Joy. You helped me find my brother in Kandahar and now I want to return the favor. Daesh [ISIS] is planning an attack that will kill many innocent people. Their plan is in the attached file. Use the password you gave me to open it. You must warn everyone. It is a matter of life and death.”

When Sumire learns of the terrorist threat, she convinces Ted to share the information with authorities, who promptly bring Ted down to the police station for questioning. Surely he planted the letter on Joy’s computer and is using it to cover his own culpability in her murder. He killed Joy, they speculate, when she spurned his advances.
Fat chance. Ted never even liked Joy. But the police aren’t buying his story. And the more he tries to break the code, the more guilty he appears.

Normally, Ted would fuel his hacking endeavors with alcohol, saké being his liquor of choice. But he’s made a promise to Sumire (and even to himself) to abstain from hooch. He’ll have to make do with coffee.

If there was ever a time I needed to get the brain juices flowing, this was it. But there was no alcohol in the apartment; I’d promised Sumire that. No Johnny hiding above the fridge, no gin floozies cavorting with the cleaning tonics under the sink, not even cheap cooking sake to nip in a pinch. All I had was coffee. To prepare myself, I dispensed with the coffee dispenser and spooned the grounds straight from a k-pod, using the remaining grit on the bottom to draw a line of warpaint under my eyes. Now I was ready.

Much more is at stake than Ted’s reputation and Sumire’s approval. Given the involvement of Joy’s congressman father, now the United States government is up in arms. Bills are flying fast and furious around Washington, D.C., meant to deprive the technology industries of privacy laws. After all, it’s the protected password that prevents the FBI from busting open the document on Joy’s hard drive and thwarting the terrorist plot. Certain special interests, therefore, are capitalizing on Joy’s murder to force through a “New Patriot Act” that would give the government unlimited access to personal data.

Countdown to Decryption moves with lightning speed through the pursuit of truth. Along the way, we delve into bits and bytes and all kinds of cyber secrets but Palter never overwhelms us with the techno-information he clearly knows so well.

We come terrifyingly close to the political divisiveness and lethal prejudice that haunts our current social realities, but Palter keeps us from despair with his devastatingly dry humor. We have the usual cast of one-dimensional, Dick Tracy-type characters: Combover, Flagpin, Bulldozer, and Laser-Eye to provide comic relief, but we also have careful attention to the portrayal of our leading man, Ted, and his love interest, Sumire.

In his acknowledgments, DC Palter notes that the novel initially took shape in 2001, when he was working at a startup “selling computer networking equipment to customers that included the NSA, DISA, and other national security agencies.” Privacy wars were brewing at the time among direct marketers, network companies, law enforcement, and consumer protection groups. Countdown emerged from this experience.

Although it is technically a “sequel” to Unicorn, the novel stands alone. Readers of Unicorn will delight in meeting old familiar characters, such as Mayeda and the king of crypto — Satoshi Nakamoto — and encountering offhand mentions of elephants and such.

But those entering Ted’s story starting with Countdown will not feel left out. In many ways, Countdown is the more mature of the two, offering even more sensitively crafted characters and a more deliberately paced plot.

All this leads one to look forward to the next installment in Ted’s adventures in hacking.

Countdown to Decryption
‎ Pandamoon Publishing; 1st edition (June 19, 2024)
254 pages

About the Author:
DC Palter is a startup founder and CEO, with twenty-five years experience leading tech companies. He’s the editor-in-chief of Japonica, a journal of Japanese culture, and author of Colloquial Kansai Japanese, a guidebook to the Osaka dialect of Japanese. Winner of the Little Tokyo fiction award, his first novel, To Kill a Unicorn, was named Best New Fiction and Best Mystery finalist in the American Fiction Awards. You can read my earlier interview with Palter (about To Kill a Unicorn) here.