Countdown to Decryption (Japantown Murders)

In a murdered woman’s email, Ted Hara discovers the plan for a terrorist attack.

When Ted hacks into the email of his girlfriend’s best friend, he’s shocked by what he finds—the last email she read moments before she was shot warned of a terrorist plot. But without her password, Ted is unable to open the attached document containing the terrorists’ plans.

The murdered woman, Joy Miyazaki, was the daughter of the congressman from Silicon Valley's Japantown. Although the police believe her murder was a home invasion robbery gone awry, Ted is certain her death is connected to the terrorist warning. But when Ted alerts the police to the evidence he uncovered, they accuse him of murdering Joy and planting the file himself.

With the FBI unable to decrypt the document, Ted enlists the computers of millions of people worldwide to crack the password. While his software churns through billions of passwords in a race against time, searching for the combination that will unlock the file, a pair of Joy’s colleagues seek out Ted at her funeral, whispering that Joy’s boyfriend is connected with the terrorists. But as Ted unravels the truth about this mysterious pair, it sets in motion a fight that could shake the American government to its core while putting Ted’s life in danger.

The clock is ticking. Can Ted decrypt the file before the bombs begin exploding?

DC Palter is an award-winning novelist and entrepreneur who has built and led tech startups for twenty-!ve years. His weekly articles on business strategy and venture capital are followed by tens of thousands of startup founders around the world.

After beginning his career as a research engineer in the defense industry, he escaped to Japan. There he developed a deep appreciation for Japanese culture and became fluent in the language. He is the author of Colloquial Kansai Japanese, a popular guide to the Osaka-Kyoto dialect, and editor of Japonica, a journal of Japanese culture.

He is the two-time winner of the Little Tokyo !ction contest for short stories in both English and Japanese. His stories have been published in literary journals in the U.S. and Japan, while his articles on technology and investing have appeared in over a hundred publications.

DC holds an MFA in creative writing along with degrees in engineering, marketing, and law. Together with his wife, an ikebana artist and tea ceremony teacher, he splits his time between Los Angeles and Kobe, Japan.