Digital Fortress feels like The DaVinci Code all over again

Dan Brown's book Digital Fortress is utterly and totally entertaining. The book will likely keep readers up late into the night, drawing them in and not letting go until the sadly expected and predictable conclusion.

Fortress, released about three years before Brown's best-known work, The DaVinci Code, seems to be Brown's practice for writing the more popular second book. Code is the story of one man who runs around Europe trying to solve an obscure mystery, while Fortress is about a man running around Europe trying to find a password while his friends back in the states try to find out why the password is necessary.

The story surrounds the U.S.'s most secret agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), which reads encrypted e-mails sent from around the globe in order to ensure American safety. To break the encryption algorithms, the NSA has developed a massive (four stories tall) supercomputer named TRANSLTR.

The book's focus is on Susan Fletcher, a code-breaker unexpectedly called in one Saturday to find that ex-NSA programmer Ensei Tankado has written an "unbreakable encryption code" called Digital Fortress. Fletcher's boss, Commander Trevor Strathmore, has obtained a copy of Digital Fortress and has put it into TRANSLTR to test it. When the algorithm appears to be truly unbreakable, the NSA's precious supercomputer is rendered useless, as Digital Fortress threatens to become the worldwide encryption standard when released. This will place the free world in danger of being unable to avoid terrorist attacks through the interception of communications – that is, unless the NSA can figure out how to destroy or tamper with Digital Fortress.

Not so coincidentally, Strathmore dispatches Fletcher's fiancé, David Becker, who is too lucky to be real, to try to find the password for Digital Fortress. Becker ends up on a chase across Europe in an attempt to locate the password. Meanwhile, things back at NSA headquarters look increasingly depressing as Strathmore and Fletcher realize that Tankado is essentially holding the NSA hostage with Digital Fortress in an attempt to force the NSA to release knowledge of TRANSLTR and the privacy intrusions it allows. The entire situation is further complicated by the fact that they are informed of Tankado's death and cannot provide the passkey to stop Digital Fortress.

While Fortress is interesting, all of the characters and events from Code are replicated to a tee. Everything is there from the physically unusual assassin (albino in Code and deaf in Fortress) to a chase across Europe and the extremist antagonists (religiously driven in Code and nationalistically driven in Fortress). Additionally, everyone who feels that civil liberties are important will find themselves frequently frustrated when they realize that they've been cheering for the guys trying to eliminate e-privacy forever. This is Brown's strongest asset through " the ability to draw a reader in and make them want the "good guys" to win, even if the characters are not entirely good.

Even though the book does a fantastic job of getting the reader's attention, the book's ending is highly predictable. The final puzzle that has to be solved is amazingly hard for those in the book to figure out but is painfully simple for anyone who has ever read much about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Solving the puzzle 15 pages before it is discovered in the book ruins the intensity of the final scene, especially since the reader knows what the inevitable outcome will be.

Even with its significant faults, Fortress is certainly enjoyable enough to read at least once. If you liked The DaVinci Code, Digital Fortress is certainly worth borrowing from the library. Just don't bother buying it.