Three hours later, he finished poring over all the geolocation data and communications materials, pondering the nature of the Caliphate’s suspected financial assets and those to whose care they had been entrusted, and puzzling over the travel preferences of its leadership. He was also knowledgeable now regarding the beard styles and tea brands favored by Foobar’s inner circle. There seemed to be no type of information the CIA believed to be devoid of potential significance, and hence, everything made its way into the agency’s infinite databases.
But instead of feeling better informed, he felt as if he had been stampeded by an endless wave of gerbils. How was he to find the right snowflake in the middle of such an avalanche of data?
He picked up another report, this one titled “Key Word Frequency,” to see what words might stand out from the rest.
True to Frank’s request, Keri had applied no filtering or judgment to her searches. All she had done was segregate a given type of data and then rank what she found. In this case, she had determined one of the words used most frequently of late by the management and minions of the Caliphate was “Hellespont.” That word came in at number five this month. He flipped back in the report and saw it had first made the top one hundred words list three years before. Since then it had risen slowly but gradually, before rising dramatically this year and spiking to the top position on a recent date before drifting down again. The great majority of the other words were far less enigmatic, comprising places, objects, words of religious significance, and other everyday usages.
The date of the spike was the date of the New York attack. Finally, he might be on to something.
If so, the challenge would be to figure out what to do with this clue. He couldn’t think of any explanation for the trending of the word other than that it was a code word for the New York attack itself. If that should prove to be the case, he should also be able to spot messages associated with Foobar’s future attacks. But how would he know far enough in advance which word related to an attack and not something else? And beyond that, the knowledge wouldn’t be worth much if the place name Hellespont had simply been randomly selected rather than chosen due to a particular association with the target. If the latter was the case, it might help him spot code words assigned to new attacks in preparation. That might be too much to hope for, but it seemed to be the best lead he had to work with.
So what could the connotation of that word be, assuming there was one? Hellespont sounded vaguely familiar, but he needed to go online to remind himself why. The answer was simple: it was the ancient name for the narrowest part of the waterway that connected the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, also known as the Dardanelles. That seemed hopeful, as there were many historical connotations to that strait. He began to investigate them and soon learned there were too many possibilities to make divining the correct one an easy task.
For starters, the Hellespont was often referred to as the cultural boundary between Asians and Europeans. Was that all there was to it? Or had the word been chosen because the Hellespont was the site of the Gallipoli debacle during the First World War, where Great Britain and its Commonwealth allies suffered an ignominious defeat with appalling casualties at the hands of the Turks? Both possibilities were plausible, but in either case, the connection was too loose to suggest that New York City was the target.
Or did it relate to the doomed lovers, Hero and Leander? Legend had it that Leander swam the Hellespont every night to be with Hero, a priestess of the goddess Aphrodite. According to the legend, one night a storm blew out the temple light that guided him across the dark waters, causing him to drown, after which Hero threw herself from the tower to her death. If so, the connection escaped him completely. So also with the tale of the Golden Fleece, a passage of which held that Helle, the daughter of Athamas, had drowned there.
But then he read of a piece of history that intrigued him: the greatest historical event associated with the Hellespont was its crossing by Xerxes, the emperor of Persia, in the course of his failed attempt to conquer the Greek city-states. In order to reach them, his engineers had constructed a wondrous bridge supported by hundreds of ships anchored side by side—an astonishing feat, given the technology and materials of the day.
But a storm swept the entire enterprise away before his army arrived. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the emperor was so enraged that he ordered his army to punish the waterway by giving it three hundred lashes, branding the swift currents with red-hot irons, and throwing hundreds of shackles in for good measure. After that, he had the bridge rebuilt and marched his great army across. But a violent storm destroyed that floating bridge as well, leaving the remnants of his now-defeated and decimated army stranded on the European side of the waters until the bridge was restored yet again.
That had to be it; Foobar had destroyed the bridges—and tunnels—of his arrogant foes, leaving them stranded. What better code name could there be for a plan to destroy the approaches to Manhattan? It all fit together perfectly.
He shut his laptop with a satisfying click. Now he was getting somewhere. The next step would be to get Keri started on looking for other words that had trended in a similar way in the past and, more importantly, any that were starting to take off now that didn’t have a different reason for doing so.
* * *
12
Who? Me? Oh, Nothing
Frank sat erect in his seat at the weekly Tiger Team meeting, anxious to share the news of his discovery with the rest of the team. But anything that wasn’t on the agenda would have to wait for the “other business” agenda item at the end—assuming there was any time left to get to that item. The most he had been able to do was let Henderson know that he’d like to bring up something at the end of the meeting.
Frank’s tapping fingers beat a tattoo on his thighs while the voices droned on. The main item for discussion was how the planning and execution of the New York attack could have been carried out so effectively without detection. He could tell from Henderson’s intensity in driving the discussion that the CIA and FBI must be taking a heck of a beating from Congress and the administration for failing to detect and prevent that attack. Frank would be the hero of the day when he finally got a chance to tell the team he’d taken the first step toward thwarting Foobar’s next assault.
Or at least a potential hero. Tim and Keri had only had one day so far to pursue his theory, so there hadn’t yet been time to discover any new code words. Still, they had discovered that every other paragraph directly following the one in which Hellespont appeared always had noticeable syntactic dissimilarities from the rest of the text of the communication. This suggested that the code word had two purposes: first, to identify the attack in question and second, to signal when the coded part of a message would begin and how it would proceed. Tim and Keri were now going back through the hundreds of Hellespont messages to analyze what each coded paragraph had in common as a first step toward cracking Foobar’s cryptography. Frank had no idea how long this might take, since there could be additional layers of camouflage to be detected and decrypted before they had the keys they needed to extract the real meanings of the coded messages. But that would be someone else’s job after Frank revealed his discovery.
The team finally reached the last regular agenda item, a presentation by Fermi, the NIST researcher. Despite his impatience to reveal his own discovery, Frank found himself listening with increasing attention as the computer architect described some interesting predictive ideas of his own. Fermi had worked up a program that identified suspicious activity in email traveling to and from U.S. recipients and diverted it to systems that could automatically strip out the flagged text before delivering the edited results to their intended destinations. The really clever part of the program he’d written was that it included an artificial intelligence component able to stitch the remainder of the email back together without leaving obvious holes in its syntax o
r structure. Given sufficient resources, Fermi said he expected he could create a beta system capable of handling heavy email traffic within a few weeks.
How great would that be, Frank thought. If you could intercept all of the Caliphate’s most important communications with its hidden operatives in the U.S., you could combine Fermi’s and Frank’s work to discover and prevent any more attacks from occurring, and the Caliphate’s embedded agents wouldn’t even know it.
The team was clearly impressed with Fermi’s initiative, especially after he was able to handle their questions and criticisms with ease. He finished with a request for a team of appropriately skilled developers who could help him turn his initial work into a usable program.
The chairman had been oddly silent until now. “That’s very impressive, Bill. You’re certainly to be congratulated for your ingenuity and insight. Based on what you’ve told us, I think that your concept has great promise.”
“Thanks. How soon do you think I can get the additional resources?”
“That won’t be a problem. In fact, I’ll stick my neck out and say that I’ll get this staffed within forty-eight hours. Ever since the hit we took in New York, we can get pretty much anything we ask for, and fast.”
“That’s excellent! Perhaps you could talk to the NIST director, too. He’ll also need to make this a priority. I’ll need his backing to expedite the administrative end of bringing the developers on board. We don’t usually have to do anything on a rush basis over at NIST.”
“Of course, you don’t. That’s why we’ll need to handle this inside the Agency instead. We’ve got the security, the space, and the talent out at Langley that can support this right away.”
“Uh, I guess that makes some sense. I’ll have to figure out a way to explain my sudden absence at NIST, since no one other than the director knows I’m involved with this project. But that shouldn’t be too hard.”
“That won’t be necessary. The role you’re playing on this team is far too important to lose you now, as shown by what you’ve just presented. No, we need you to keep doing exactly what you’re doing now. Who knows what breakthrough you’ll come up with next? And I’ll be sure your contribution will be properly acknowledged in our final team report.”
Of course, you will, you toad, thought Frank. You’ll acknowledge it in the last footnote on the last page of the final report you produce two years from now, so long after you’ve claimed all the credit for a breakthrough so soon after the New York attack that no one will ever notice it.
Fermi opened and shut his mouth once before finding his voice again. “But I think we’d make much faster progress if I personally supervised the project. Just turning a summary and some undocumented code over to people with no prior involvement will be terribly inefficient. They might even end up heading down the wrong track.”
“I’m sure that won’t happen, once you write out a detailed report of everything you’ve achieved to date, which I’ll need by close of business tomorrow.”
Frank felt sorry for Fermi. He was now slumped down in his chair with his daybook and Tiger Team materials still perfectly aligned in front of him but his plans in a shambles. His pocket had just been picked under his very own eyes, and he knew there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.
“So that takes us through the formal part of the agenda,” Henderson continued. “I know that there’s something Frank wants to bring up. Does anyone else have any business to bring before the team? Nothing else? Okay, Frank. Over to you.”
Frank made up his mind in an instant. “Thanks, but we ended up covering the same observations I wanted to make during one of the earlier agenda items.”
“So much the better. We’ve all got work to do.”
* * *
“So how long has this been going on?” Sara asked after Frank briefed her by phone on what he had learned.
“It looks like they made the changes to your email setting about two weeks ago.”
“This is terrible.”
“I hate to add insult to injury, but I should point out that the same person may have compromised your personal email account as well. I haven’t done anything to check that out yet.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll feel safer if I change everything immediately.”
“You certainly can, although I haven’t fixed your office email account just yet. Before I did that, I thought we should talk through the costs and benefits of making a change versus leaving things as they are.”
“What possible benefit could there be to let someone continue to cyberstalk me?”
“Well, first of all, if I change the account settings back for your office account, he’ll know that you’re on to him. That would be okay, if the result was that he left for good. But it’s also possible he’ll just hack his way back in again and use a different technique to see what he wants. Then we’d be in a whack-a-mole contest, never knowing for sure when he’s a step ahead of us and grabbing information until we find and plug the latest leak. Or, if all he’s interested in is that report you’re going to release, he could hack the institute’s system instead. If he did that, you’d think you were safe, but in fact, he’d still be doing damage.”
“But I still don’t see the benefit of doing nothing.”
“Sorry—I didn’t mean to imply that you wouldn’t do anything different. I was going to suggest that you set up new personal and work accounts with an unrelated ISP and use them whenever you want to keep things safe. The benefit I had in mind is that a situation might arise where you might want to use the old accounts to leak disinformation to whoever’s trying to undermine RTF’s mission.”
“Okay. I get what you’re saying, but I’m going to have to think about it. Not only is it pretty creepy thinking that someone’s shadowing me, but it would be a pain to dual-track my email. I’d always have to think about when I cared and when I didn’t about who would be reading it, and I might forget and slip up, too. For that matter, I wouldn’t be able to use the new account very often, or the hacker would notice the drop in traffic.”
“All true. So how about this. Just in case your personal account has also been compromised, why don’t you switch that account immediately to an ISP with really strong security, so you don’t have to worry about your personal communications at all. For the office account, we’ll set you up with a second account with a different service provider, and you can use that for sensitive information.”
“I take your point, but I’m still going to have to think this over. My main concern is plugging the leak, and I don’t know whether I’ll ever have a situation where I want to spread disinformation.”
“So let’s talk about that for a minute. You already know that they’re trying to undermine your report before you release it, right?”
“So it seems.”
“And also that you can’t stop those stories from popping up, right? So that’s another whack-a-mole problem, yes?”
“Well, I guess so.”
“But if you change the scenarios in the report and work in new data to confront the FUD issues your opponent is planting, it would make the articles that have already appeared irrelevant.”
“‘FUD’?”
“Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. It’s an acronym for what someone tries to inspire when they play this sort of game. Their goal is to confuse and worry those you’re trying to influence and leave you constantly scrambling to address their criticisms rather than advancing your cause.”
There was silence at the other end of the phone for a while.
“Okay. You’ve given me a lot to process. Give me a day or two, and I’ll get back to you.”
* * *
Sara not only decided to accept Frank’s recommendation, but she rose to the challenge splendidly. She recruited the research institute to fork the current draft of the repo
rt in two directions. The first one, which they would continue to trade back and forth using her old email address, would modify the scenarios slightly to introduce flaws in reasoning and conclusions that her opponent would be certain to exploit. The second version, exchanged using a new email address, would introduce entirely new scenarios that did not incorporate those flaws and would rebut the FUD their opponent was already spreading in the technology media.
* * *
13
My, How You Do Run On
“So, Dad, why don’t you just stay with me? I can sleep on the couch, and you can have my bed.”
“Won’t Tim mind?”
“Please! First of all, that’s none of your business, and second, he doesn’t stay here every night. He’s got his own apartment. If it bothers you, I can just go stay with him when we want to spend the night together.”
“Maybe I should use his apartment instead.”
“Would you please grow up? You’re always bragging about what a rational modern adult you are, and here you are sounding like a jealous ex-husband instead of my father!”
As she expected, that was too weird for even a rational modern adult to deal with.
“Okay, okay, you’re right. I’m sorry. I just don’t want to be in your way.”
“You won’t be in my way.”
“I know. But I’ll feel like I am.”
“So what’s your alternative? Staying in your camper? You’re not allowed to do that on the street, so what does that leave? The Wal-Mart parking lot? That would be too ridiculous even for you.”
The Doodlebug War: a Tale of Fanatics and Romantics (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 3) Page 13
