Mona

by Dan Sehlberg

  It might seem strange that he was the one to come here with this apparently simple inquiry, and so late at night. But, on the other hand, these matters were sensitive, and he could always claim that the high command didn’t want to involve any unnecessary officials. It was sink or swim. Ahmad and the others would denounce his actions, but he had to take her out. He was tired of just sitting still and waiting. He might as well use that time to be productive.

  Sinon had come past the obligatory security doors and was now waiting for the night security guard to start up his computer. These systems had not been affected at all by the virus; the country’s Intelligence network had no links to the financial structures. The woman in front of him was about forty, and her hair was cut short in a style that irritated him. It was a dull style that made her look like a boy. She was also dressed in pants and a jacket, which made her look even more like a man. He looked at her fingers as they typed on the keyboard. Her nails were painted an ugly green. The woman looked up.

  ‘The person you’re looking for has the highest security level. I can’t release any details without my boss’s approval. Please take a seat, and I’ll try to reach him.’

  He raised his voice.

  ‘But you can see perfectly well who initiated this order. And you know very well who I am. I didn’t drive all the way out to this shithole to stand here and wait. Hurry it up. You have five minutes before I get angry.’

  The woman pursed her lips and picked up a telephone receiver.

  ‘I’m just doing my job. This won’t take long.’

  He went back to one of the benches attached to the wall and sat down. He was looking forward to tomorrow morning’s bike ride, to fresh air and freedom. All he could smell in here was sadness. Were the papers believable enough? What if they decided to call Ehud Peretz? He was risking the whole project by being here. This was minor compared to the big plans. But he had made up his mind. Now he just had to keep playing.

  A door opened at the far end of the hall, and a pale man in his sixties showed up. He looked like Woody Allen, with the same kind of glasses. The man walked to the boy-lady at reception. They spoke for a moment, and Woody studied the papers that Sinon had handed over. Sinon stood up and walked over to them with determined steps.

  ‘Well?’

  The man peered at him through his thick glasses.

  ‘I apologise for the inconvenience. I’m sure that given a position like yours, you appreciate that we take security seriously. Especially in these difficult times.’ He smiled faintly. ‘But everything appears to be in order. Olga will help you retrieve the information you’re looking for. It may not leave the building, however, so if there’s something you need to remember, I recommend that you write it down. It’s an honour to have you here. I hope you find the information you’re looking for.’

  The man gave a sloppy salute, nodded at the woman, and left them. Sinon turned to Olga.

  ‘Can you retrieve the folder containing general information like her CV, background, and family relationships? In addition, I need the Dubai report. And her current contact information, such as telephone number and street address.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can find. Agent 2913 has a very limited profile, and everything is under class-one protection.’

  ‘2913?’

  ‘That’s her duty code. We seldom use names here. To us, she’s Rachel Papo 2913.’

  Tel Aviv, Israel

  Eric returned with a mild headache to the room on the third floor. His mind was whirling. He had never been unfaithful, despite the fighting and the sometimes-deep rift between him and Hanna, and despite their long periods of coldness and distance. Not once. He’d had opportunities — a woman with the team, students. But he hadn’t been interested.

  When he got to his room he sank down on the floor inside the door. He ran his hands through his hair. Nothing had happened. No matter how beautiful and tempting Rachel was, she couldn’t measure up to Hanna. No one could.

  The room was dark and chilly. The air conditioning hummed steadily from somewhere on the ceiling. He sat on the floor for a long time, his mouth full of Sabra liqueur. Finally, he got up and went over to the desk. He grimaced at his headache, started the computer, and then took a cold Sprite from the minibar and sank down on the desk chair. He stared blankly at the screen with its undulating Windows symbol, and then stood up and opened the balcony door wide. The mild night air swept into the room, and he stood still, taking several deep breaths. Then he went back to the desk, where he laid out the wrinkled napkins with the translated code on them. He opened the web browser, typed in the log-in query, and waited anxiously. A message written in Arabic popped up, but he didn’t need to understand what it said to recognise an error message. He switched the order of what he had thought to be the password and username, only to get the same message. He was going to have to write a program that alternated all possible combinations of the information on the napkins. It was possible the information had already been changed, and if that were the case he would never get in. But it was worth a try.

  Eric sipped the soda and started writing code. Half an hour later, the program was finished, and he let it loose on the log-in gate. After working on the unknown firewall for seventeen minutes, the program found a way in. Apparently, the username had been changed, but the password was the same as it had been before. The screen changed colour, turning dark green. He took one of the hotel pens from the desk drawer and added the new username to the napkin. An apparently endless amount of unstructured information was now flowing onto a green background. It was written in English, but despite that he couldn’t interpret the programming code. It seemed to be an eclectic blend of familiar and unfamiliar programming languages. After some time, he could make out whole strings of recognisable elements, like familiar islands in an otherwise foreign sea. Maybe this was Mona. Maybe he was sitting here and looking at the virus’s hitherto-unknown source code — its DNA. He saw functions that had to do with cloning. Further down in the code, he recognised the command that queried databases, and in another spot something that was probably there to hide algorithms from search programs. This was top-level code, and the person who created it must have had a great deal of knowledge and plenty of resources. Maybe this was a cloud-based setup, a shared file that had been stored on the internet to avoid being detected locally and to make it possible for several people to work on the same code at the same time from different locations. Maybe it was a backup of Mona’s primary programming elements.

  Eric had the cold sweats, but he was thrilled despite his headache. As he scrolled through hundreds of screenfulls of code, he found a signature that recurred several times: ‘Salah ad-Din.’ Further down, he also found a web address that seemed to lead to a chat room. Maybe this was where the creators of the virus communicated with one another? He pasted the address into the browser. Outside the balcony, glass bottles fell to the ground, clinking. Someone laughed aloud. A black page with white text popped up on the screen. Lines of Arabic appeared in clusters — they had to be chat entries. The system had supplied the sender’s username under each entry. Although the messages were written in Arabic script, the names were written in Latin letters, probably because they were generated from the log-in information. The first entry, a long one, was signed ‘Kah.’ The next entry, which only contained a few short lines, was signed ‘GW.’ There was another short entry from Kah, and after that there was a message in English. It was signed ‘Zorba’:

  PHASE 3 RECRUITS WILL BE TRANSFERRED TO ISR STRAIGHT AFTER AGREEMENT.

  :ZORBA

  ‘ISR’ could mean Israel. It could also mean thousands of other things. But it could mean Israel. Then there was an entry in Arabic that was signed ‘Salah ad-Din’. Judging by the date, the entry was about a week old. He copied the block of text from Salah ad-Din, and started Google Translate. The program wasn’t the best, but you could usually underst
and what it came up with. The translation appeared immediately:

  M EFFECTIVE TO 96%. PARALLEL TO PHASE 3 CONTINUING MY WORK WITH NADIM. CERTAIN HESITATION ABOUT OPERATIVE SCOPE OF PHASE 3.

  :SALAH AD-DIN

  A short message in Arabic followed. The signature was ‘A’. He turned again to Google Translate:

  KEEP TO YOUR PART. PHASE 3 HAS THE EFFECT NEEDED. WORK ON NADIM IS NOT PRIORITY.

  :A

  This was totally incredible! He was reading archived discussions between the world’s most wanted terrorists.

  It was more than he’d dared to hope for. Who was Zorba? Who was A? Who was Nadim? Phase three? Maybe he would understand more if he read some earlier messages. He scrolled up through countless entries. After he’d read about ten of them, he became more and more certain that Salah ad-Din was Mona’s creator — or at least a person who was closely involved in developing the virus. A seemed to be in command, maybe at the very top. Zorba didn’t show up anywhere else, so maybe he wasn’t important. There were other signatures: ‘Muh’, ‘Dal’, ‘Wrath’, and ‘Sinon’. Eric concentrated on A and Salah ad-Din. A was responsible for phase three. Eric moved back through the entries, and found one that explained phase three:

  S, MILITARY EFFORTS IN PHASE 3 ARE NOT YOUR CONCERN. THE MARTYRS ARE RECRUITED. ACCESSORIES SHIPPED SEPARATELY. YOU HAVE YOURS, I HAVE MINE. THE FIRES THAT WILL BE LIT IN THE DOGS’ CITIES SHALL LIGHT UP THE OVERLY LONG NIGHT AND AGAIN SPREAD WARMTH IN THE LOST LAND.

  :A

  Martyrs. Military efforts. Fires. So the terrorists weren’t going to stop at the virus attack. Were they going to bomb cities in Israel with the help of suicide bombers? Salah ad-Din was engaged only in Nadim, and almost all of his entries seemed to be purely questions about programming. He had to find out what Nadim stood for. Was it a code name for Mona? But wasn’t Mona itself a code name? He kept scrolling. He thought he had figured out the Arabic symbols for Nadim, and he looked for them in entry after entry. There! It was an entry from A again. He copied the line of text and ran it through the translation program:

  NADIM IS NOT NECESSARY SO WHY SO MUCH TIME ON IT? AN AGAINST INFECT WILL NEVER BE GIVEN TO THE INFIDELS.

  :A

  Eric looked at the sentence for a long time. An ‘against infect’? What could ‘against infect’ mean? His head pounded, and he squinted. Suddenly, he understood. He was petrified, his eyes filling with tears. The word ‘against’ had been mistranslated from ‘anti’. And ‘infect’ should be a noun, not a verb: ‘virus.’ An anti-virus. Nadim was Mona’s anti-virus. Eric had been right all along in everything he had done, in everything he had hoped. Salah ad-Din was developing an anti-virus.

  Herzliya, Israel

  They had given him four thick folders, a desk, and a chair. Now he was sitting alone in a cramped room that seemed to be used more as a storeroom than an office. The light was glaringly white, and he could feel the warmth of the light bulb that was hanging right above his head. The only window in the room had been outfitted with bars; outside it was pitch black. Sinon now had the Mossad’s complete file on Rachel Papo — at least the reports that had been kept for posterity. He was convinced that she had carried out a number of assignments that had not been and would never be documented. But these files were thick enough.

  There were a number of pictures as well — Rachel when she was young, in a uniform, and as a student. There were also pictures of her victims. Some were archival photos that depicted living people; others had been taken in the field. In those, the victims were anything but living. Rachel seemed to have a fondness for knives. He couldn’t bring himself to read the details; they only depressed him. He read with great interest about her private life.

  He put his finger on her date of birth and did the maths in his head. She was thirty now. Her mother had been a teacher, originally from Morocco. Her father was a blacksmith with Spanish roots. Her parents had fled Morocco during the Six Day War. She had a younger sister, Tara. Their mother had died in childbirth with Tara, when Rachel was eight years old. One year later, their father had died, too; it had likely been a suicide. Then, after some ups and downs, the children ended up on a kibbutz twenty kilometres north of Haifa. When Rachel was eleven she and Tara went to live with their mother’s older sister and her Russian partner. Here, someone had circled the text in blue ink. The aunt worked as an auditor, and was often away on business. The man owned a small transport business. After a year or so, the man had started to assault the girls. According to what must have been a statement from Rachel herself, he had raped them on a regular basis, most often when their aunt was away. Tara had it the worst. They had also been beaten. To believe Rachel’s story, it had been sheer torture — bicycle tubes and cigarettes, blowtorches, ice-cold water. It seemed the aunt knew nothing of this, or else she didn’t care. The couple had no children of their own. At one point, the abuse was so bad that Tara had to go to the emergency room. The aunt was the one who drove her to the hospital. There, she maintained that the girl had broken her arm and hit her head when she fell off her bike.

  After her time in the hospital, Tara had closed herself off in some sort of autistic state. One week before Rachel’s sixteenth birthday, when the aunt had left for the weekend, Rachel locked their stepfather into his workroom, took Tara, and left the house. The girls went back to the kibbutz in Haifa, which hid them when their aunt came looking for them. Several years later, the kibbutz handed Tara over to a care facility, and Rachel entered the military.

  A yellow Post-it note referred to an item in the Jerusalem Post. Sinon paged through the documents and found a copy of the article, published two years after Rachel had enlisted. The Russian-born owner of a transport business had been murdered in his home, shot in the head at close range. He had been found by his wife when she returned from a business trip. The police had found neither motive nor suspect. According to the article, the victim had been well liked and respected.

  Sinon placed the clip back in the folder, and then started looking for what he’d come for. He found the information on the back of a grey information card: Rachel Papo’s temporary home-address in Tel Aviv. He folded the card and put it in the inner pocket of his jacket. He didn’t care how angry this made Woody Allen. As he was about to put the folders back, his eyes fell on another document. He picked it up and smiled. It was the address of Tara’s care facility.

  Tel Aviv, Israel

  Even though Eric had been reading entries for over two hours, he had only read a fraction of all the messages. He was concentrating on the most current ones. The terrorists were preparing several attacks in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Phase three would be carried out within the next few days. Nadim was Mona’s anti-virus, and Salah ad-Din was working on finishing the code. A only seemed interested in phase three, and stressed time and again that they didn’t need an anti-virus. There was no information about where A or ad-Din were. Eric sat still, looking at the latest entry, which had been written by ad-Din seventeen hours before. Eric was having a hard time gathering his thoughts; he was too tired. Outside the balcony door, it was quiet, save for the chirping of the crickets. What was his next move? He couldn’t sit there hoping that ad-Din’s telephone number would pop up on the screen. He had to enter the conversation himself. If he made a mistake, he would scare them off and destroy the only trail that led to Nadim. But what choice did he have? He created his own account under the username ‘ES’. Should he use Google Translate and write in Arabic? No, because then he wouldn’t have any control over what he was saying. He hesitated for a few seconds, and then sat up straight and typed in a message:

  SALAH AD-DIN, MY NAME IS ERIC SÖDERQVIST. I AM A SWEDISH PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER AND SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND I WOULD LIKE TO HELP YOU. I AM VERY IMPRESSED BY THE MONA CODE, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST A FEW MINOR IMPROVEMENTS IN THE STEALTH CAPACITY. CONSIDER MY PRESENCE IN YOUR CODED CHAT TO BE MY RÉSUMÉ. IT TOOK ME TWO HOURS TO FIND IT AND GET
IN. I HAVEN’T TOLD ANYONE ELSE. I HOPE FOR YOUR PROMPT ANSWER.

  :ES

  Eric leaned back in the chair and waited. Maybe someone else was logged in; maybe not. Maybe they had a push function or an RSS feed that notified them when a new message had been posted. He sat still until his body ached, and he started to nod off. There was no point in waiting; it might be ages before someone answered — if anyone even did answer. He stood up stiffly. The room was dim in the glow from the computer. He pulled off his clothes and lay naked on top of the covers. He thought about the planned attacks. He had to warn someone. He wanted to talk to Jens. Most of all, he wanted to talk to Hanna. She had always been his closest ally, his sounding board, and his best critic. Most of all, he wished he could hear her voice. But he was alone — a shadow on a bed in a hotel room in the Middle East. He leaned over the edge of the bed, pulled out his suitcase, and dug out his toiletry bag. The perfume bottle he had tossed in at the last second had leaked, and now everything smelled like Hanna. He fell asleep with the drenched toiletry bag beside his head.

  Ding.

  It took him a moment to react. He had been deeply asleep, and at first the sound wove its way into his warm dream like an unnatural trespasser. But then he realised that the sound wasn’t part of the dream. He was back in the hotel room, naked, on top of the covers. What had woken him? He sat up, suddenly wide awake. He must have heard a new entry. He stumbled out of bed and crouched before the computer. A few short, white words flickered against the black background:

  DEFINE *MINOR IMPROVEMENTS*

  :SALAH AD-DIN

  Eric sat stock-still, as though his movements might scare away the man on the other side of the net — as though Salah ad-Din could see him sitting there, naked at the keyboard. He had established contact. But what should he do now? His thoughts were going in a hundred different directions. Without taking his eyes from the screen, he cautiously got up and sat in the chair. He had to build up trust. Thank God there was some substance to his claim about the code. He had noticed a sequence of code in what he understood to be the virus’s stealth capacity, a sequence that reminded him of a problem he’d had himself with Mind Surf. A doctoral student on his team had shown him a new way to write the alternating calls, leading to faster, more stable reading. If the calls he’d seen in Mona’s code were as similar to Mind Surf’s as he thought they were, he could use the same fix. He went back to the Mona code and scrolled through page after page, searching for the string he’d seen. There — the code sequence was very similar to Mind Surf’s call, even if they resulted in two completely different functions. He copied the code into his reply and prepared a suggestion for a more effective call. The reply came after only a minute: