Matt Bugatti is a computer programmer.
That is a terrible understatement, accurate, of course, but woefully insufficient in describing his achievements and his capabilities. He is a genius mathematician who has combined both disciplines to come up with a way to attack 1000+ bit encryption in a matter of eight hours instead of hundreds of years. It is this expertise that makes him so valuable to the NSA which bankrolls the project his employers have gone. That project is a series of computers which could be used to the most densely coded messages.
That the NSA is spying on any and all communication around the world is an established fact. Much of the juiciest and most valuable intelligence to be learned from such intercepts remains locked in the up-to-now near-impossible-to-break encryption. With the phenomenal work of Bugatti, that impossibility is about to become possible.
Unfortunately for Bugatti, NSA is not the only organization interested in his work. The Chinese, to name the top entry on the list of those wanting his algorithms, are out to get their hands on the tech by any means necessary. That danger will through Bugatti into worlds he had never expected to be in and getting out will call for his genius to be used in whole new ways.
This in turn will lead this future college professor to have more and diverse problems thrown his way, again having to deal with things quite outside his 'comfort zone' of computers and code and logic, now to deal with murder and international politics.