The Intercept

by Dick Wolf

  The phone was answered on the second ring. “Ze condor flies at midnight,” said Fisk in a hammy German accent.

  “Caller ID comes up as ‘Germany,’ ” said Krina Gersten. “I half expected to hear the chancellor’s voice.”

  “Everything sounds a little dirtier when spoken with a German accent, don’t you think?”

  “You’ve been working hard, I can tell.”

  One Friday evening more than six months earlier, after a long noncourtship of flirtation and denial, the inevitable had happened. They returned late from a day of interviewing baggage handlers at JFK about a missing shipment of magnetic relays, the type that were ideally suited for delayed bomb fuses. They came back together on the Long Island Rail Road from Jamaica in order to avoid the rush hour traffic in a cab. Not much happened on the commute back: each was tired, recharging on the long ride when they switched to a crowded subway car. They got out at Grand Central, since each of them lived on the East Side of Manhattan. It was only as they clicked along the black-and-white tiles on their way through the vast train station that Fisk slowed and raised his eyebrows to her, suggesting a detour with just a look.

  They closed the Oyster Bar after two bottles of Australian Riesling, dozens of oysters, a pair of thick crab cakes, and previously untold life stories. Then they found a waiting taxi outside as though it had been part of the plan all along. They held hands in the back of the cab, Gersten resting her head against Fisk’s shoulder, riding in buzzed silence to Fisk’s two-bedroom co-op in Sutton Place.

  Inside the apartment door, once it finally closed and it seemed that conversation was again permitted, Gersten said, looking around, “Family money?”

  “Yes,” Fisk said. “And the money I make from being an international gigolo.”

  She nodded, smiling. “Who’s making the bigger mistake here?” she asked, kicking her shoes to the side and leaning against the wall. “It’s me, right? Always the woman.”

  “Don’t say that. I don’t want you to do anything you’re going to regret.”

  She looked at him with one eye almost closed, as though viewing him through a surveyor’s instrument. “Exactly what you should say at this moment.”

  “Don’t profile a profiler,” said Fisk, shedding his jacket and spilling change on the kitchen counter. “I do have ulterior motives, however.”

  “When did you know?” she asked.

  “Know what?”

  She pointed her finger back and forth between them. “This.”

  “When?” He opened his refrigerator, bending down to look. He pulled out two bottles of Amstel Light and went to the cupboard for crackers, something solid, anything. “Hard to say. But I know this. I lock into that first moment we met like it was yesterday. Your hair was still choppy.”

  “You liked that.”

  She was right behind him now. He straightened and turned. The co-op apartment kitchen was typically cramped. Gersten seemed shorter than he was used to, and then he remembered that she had kicked off her shoes. That started to get him hard. “I think there was something in that moment. But then we both knew it was a bad idea, and so went about wasting months and months pretending to be professionals.”

  “Pretending,” she said, licking a bit of lingering oyster sand off her lip.

  Fisk showed her the Amstels but she shook her head.

  “Bathroom,” she said.

  He pointed.

  She went.

  He put down the bottles and waited.

  She returned. He feared that the spell was broken, that she was going to beg off now, having had that conversation in the mirror. She would make plans for tomorrow, then back out via text, avoid him at work Monday morning, always avert her gaze whenever she saw him, and pretend that this night had never happened.

  She stood at the kitchen entrance, unfazed by the fact that he hadn’t moved an inch while she was gone.

  “Mouthwash,” she said.

  He thought about that one. “I’m probably out,” said Fisk.

  “Oh, well,” she said.

  She didn’t move. Neither did he. Good sign.

  “You know, I’m pretty good at keeping secrets,” Fisk told her. “Kind of what I do for a living.”

  “Really?” she said, with an exaggerated searching glance at his ceiling. She was terribly attractive when she was unsteady. Probably because so much of their job demanded absolute steadiness. It was nice and dangerous and sexy to see her off-kilter. “That’s funny.” She pushed a hair away from her eye. “Me too.”

  “Covert operations,” he said.

  She winked, then pressed her forefinger to the side of her nose. “Exactly.”

  He gave the enterprise some thought.

  “Operation Friday Night Friction,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Too crass. Who do you think I am?”

  He thought some more. “Operation Class Not Crass.”

  “Better. Getting warmer.” She shifted her weight from one stocking foot to the other. “This is such a sweet mix of wrong-right.”

  He nodded. “Sour and sweet.”

  “It’s good right here. The threshold. I want to hold on to this moment.”

  “Not me,” he said.

  “I want to know things about you,” she said. “This is just part of it for me.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Me too.” And then, because he didn’t feel like he had convinced her, he added, “The fact is that I would say just about anything right now to keep this night going—full confession. But just reminding you, underlining it, so you know—this didn’t start tonight, for me. And because of that, it won’t end tonight. No matter what happens.”

  She nodded, taking his words to heart. “We intersect, but don’t disappear—deal?”

  He puzzled over her words as she leaned her shoulder against the doorway. “Fucking profound,” he said. “Where’d you get that from? That’s good.”

  She said, “Are we going to stay here, or do you maybe have a bedroom?”

  “I have a bedroom,” he said.

  In they went. Everything else disappeared. It was quiet and they were serious. They were locked in on each other.

  No artificial light in the room, just the city night through the open window blinds. Whispers and slow, careful movements, each one watching the other.

  Intensity built. Caresses became squeezing, rhythm became thrust.

  “Goddamn, Gersten,” said Fisk—as at once she went from supine to straddling him.

  The fucking became frantic, even rough. Her gym-hard body on him, her hair brushing against his face. His hands gripping her hips. Almost like a fight, except that there had to be two winners.

  He watched Gersten’s face in the shadow of the city night. He felt her fingertips chewing into the tops of his shoulders. He watched her lose herself, lose all inhibition, moaning. It ended with the headboard banging into the wall . . . and then silence.

  A siren four floors down on East Fifty-fifth woke him, not the sunlight. He squinted and found her sitting on the floor against the wall near the door, wearing a pair of his gym shorts and a V-neck undershirt, checking her phone. Her hair hung over her eyes and her legs were crossed. A glass of water stood on the floor next to her.

  They were both hungover and elated simultaneously: the sour and the sweet.

  Junk TV became their focus that day, as neither one wanted to be the first to delve into a critical conversation.

  “You have anything today?” Fisk asked her.

  She studied the television, curled up sitting on his sofa now, a throw pillow beneath her bent left leg, chin on her bare knee. “Yeah,” she said, though her eyes didn’t sell it. “Actually there are some things I could do . . .”

  “I wasn’t asking so you’d go,” he told her. “In fact, I was hoping maybe you could stay.”
<
br />   She took her chin off her knee and looked at him. Profiling him for sincerity.

  “Know this,” she said to him, “I swore to myself I’d never get involved with another cop. And I never have. Never.”

  Fisk shrugged. “What makes you think we’re involved?”

  Her eyes narrowed, taking the joke as intended. Fisk noticed the small gold detective’s shield replica, about the size of a nickel, dangling from a plain dog-tag chain around Gersten’s neck.

  “Your father’s?” he asked.

  She nodded, touching it with her forefinger. “His badge number. Four six three two. My mother gave it to me when I graduated from the academy. I take off everything else but this.”

  Fisk tugged the pillow slowly out from beneath her bent leg. “Prove it,” he said.

  “Miss me?” he asked now, many months later, speaking on the secure line from Ramstein Air Base.

  “Intolerably,” she sang, a mix of exaggeration and honesty. “Everything good?”

  “You know the drill. FBI is running it. They still hate me but they need me. And Geeseman’s still two parts asshole, one part haircut.”

  “He’s probably monitoring all comm, FYI,” she told him. Gersten still lived with her mother, but stayed most nights at Sutton Place, even when Fisk was gone. “Wish I was in on it. That is some hot shit, you lucky dog. OBL. I’m walking around picking up trash dropped by snotty NYU Muslim kids again tomorrow.”

  Fisk smiled. “Muslim beards are the new hipster goatee. You fix the faucet?”

  “Nope. Couldn’t get it. Dropped a note to the super.”

  “Lazy,” he said, stifling a yawn.

  “It’s not my sink,” she said, and he could tell she was smiling. “All right, I can hear the exhaustion in your voice, and that you want to get back to it. Find something big, will you, hero?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “When you get home, I’ll properly debrief you.”

  “Ah,” he said, smiling. “Do me one little favor. Say that again in a German accent.”

  Chapter 12

  Fisk pulled on sanitary garb again and moved through the air lock, returning to the bunker and the forensic search. Pearl and Rosofsky had never left, a quad montage of pornographic movies on the screens in front of them. A dizzying exhibition of the twenty-first-century incarnation of the human reproductive imperative, flickering past them at four frames per second.

  “Learning anything, boys?” Fisk asked, watching over Pearl’s shoulder.

  Pearl said, “I got numb to this stuff years ago.”

  “Do you think you’re about ready to try it with a real human woman?”

  “Someday maybe,” joked Pearl, sitting back, arms crossed, his eyes never leaving the skin game before him.

  “Patterns, anything?”

  “Definitely some random movies in here. A pattern, I don’t know. It would take a psychologist to say with authority what the big Laden got off on, and what was sent his way with messages encrypted. But I’m happy to report that sniffing OBL’s underwear ain’t part of my job description.”

  “Just sniffing hard drives.”

  “Exactly.” Pearl pointed off to the right. “Hard copies are on Geeseman’s table. The big beard was definitely using steg for moving info.”

  “Thought so,” said Fisk.

  Steganography means “hidden writing.” An old example from tradecraft would be a message written in lemon juice in between the lines of an innocuous letter; the lemon juice would turn brown when the paper was heated. In the digital age, a computer deconstructs the binary code for an image, translating symbols into complex images. A message may be embedded in such a file by adjusting the color of, say, every one thousandth pixel to correspond to a particular letter in the alphabet, and then transmit it. The alteration of the image is so minuscule as to be invisible to the human eye. If the viewer did not know the message was there, finding it among countless images on a person’s computer was virtually impossible.

  Four years after 9/11, a twenty-five-year-old named Devon Pearl, newly hired by the National Security Agency after being caught hacking into their system, read a terrorist training manual recovered from a Taliban safe house in Afghanistan. It contained a section entitled “Covert Communications and Hiding Secrets Inside Images.”

  Pearl found that no one at NSA was an expert on digital steganography, and so he became one himself. By late 2006, he developed the first practical search engine for ferreting out digital images that contained code anomalies indicating the presence of embedded steganographic messages. Pearl’s sniffer program—he was now on version seven—could fingerwalk through roughly one thousand still images per minute. For video, depending on the level of complexity, it could process five minutes in one. The program spit out a list of corrupt files with even a single pixel out of place. He then ran another program to weed out normally corrupted files—bad transfers—from the systematically manipulated ones.

  It was possible now to encode plain text or mini-programs within images or movies that could crash a hard drive. A potential case of domestic terrorism the year before had turned out to be a rogue church of fundamentalist Christians using steg in gay porn to spike the computers of those the church deemed “sinful.” Members of an Al-Qaeda cell captured earlier that year in Milan were found with the usual array of pornographic downloads on their phones and computers, but also dozens of screen grabs from eBay sites selling diaper bags, used cars, furniture, and Hummel figurines. All part of a complex file-sharing communication network of terrorists who were piggybacking on legitimate Internet sites.

  Pearl’s voice followed Fisk over to Geeseman’s lab table. “There’s not much yet, but after we defog the image, some of it is in plain text. No hard intel yet. But it’s clear that they’ve been busy.”

  Fisk picked up the thin packet of printouts. He flipped through images of New York—no surprise, more than 50 percent of the traffic analysis at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade was Big Apple. The city had become an international terrorist obsession. By comparison, every other potential target in the United States was small potatoes.

  These images were postcard views, though. Commercial photographs. Not handheld surveillance.

  Geeseman walked over, perhaps concerned that Fisk was going to move something out of place on his lab table. “Refreshed after your break?” asked Geeseman.

  Fisk suppressed an eye roll. Geeseman was a closet cigarette smoker who could not last more than two hours at a time inside the bunker. He and Geeseman had a purely professional relationship. Fisk’s rule-breaking reputation in New York had surely preceded him. “I had a quick hot tub and a rubdown, and now I feel like a million bucks.”

  “I see you found the first scans.”

  “Looks like the wonder twins are making progress. What about the others?”

  “Slow and steady. Bonner, Elliott, and Cadogan are up to their ears with fantastic samples, but not much right-away intel. They’re going to spend the rest of the day cataloging for stateside forensics. We’ve got a C-17 picking it all up tomorrow about this time. Going to Dover for distribution to the task force agencies. Most of it’ll end up with Meade and Langley.”

  Fisk shook the New York scans. “And Intel Division.”

  “Of course,” said Geeseman.

  Geeseman moved on, but Fisk remained with the scans, flipping through the last pages. The images were printed six to a page, not unlike mug shots, and Fisk’s eyes went to the flowers. Three different images of sunflowers. He recognized one image of a vase bouquet from a book on his coffee table back home. The other two were similarly post-impressionist and, if not Van Goghs also, dutiful knockoffs.

  But the color copies were somehow duller than the crisp New York cityscapes. As though they were second- or third-generation scans of printed material.

  Fisk called back to Geeseman. “He
y, did OBL keep a garden?”

  “A what?”

  “These pictures of sunflowers here.”

  Geeseman walked back to him to take a look. “He or his wives kept a vegetable patch near the animal pen. Thing was immaculate.”

  “Just vegetables?”

  Geeseman reached for a laptop, quickly shuffling through images of the compound. “See for yourself.”

  Fisk zoomed in. “Immaculate” was the right word. But no decorative flowers in sight.

  Geeseman was already at Pearl’s side. “Flower pictures?”

  “Flower power,” said Pearl, his fingertips clicking over the keyboard, producing on-screen type faster than Fisk could read.

  Image windows opened, one after the other.

  “Lookie here,” said Pearl.

  Rosofsky rose from his chair, peering over the top of the back-to-back monitors. Pulling out his earphones released the tinny noise of human humping.

  “Dammit,” said Pearl, his keystrokes now coming in staccato bursts as the printer whirred to life across the bunker. “Distracted by tits and ass, was I. They always hide their steg in the porn. Fucking sunflowers.”

  Fisk’s eyes danced to each window popping up on the screen. “What are we seeing here?”

  “Okay,” Pearl began, like a lecturer on the first day of Intro to Steganography. “The trick to this thing is that both the sender and the receiver of any kind of code, cipher, or embedded message in an image have to know where to look. They need the combination. Now, OBL and his minions were definitely sending a lot of comm in the porn files, and we may find some seriously good intel there eventually. Or . . .”

  Fisk said, “Or maybe they were clogging up the porn with junk messages, static. Hiding the real message within a mosaic of nonsense ones.”

  Pearl pointed upward as though Fisk had just won an auction. “When you’ve got something special going, you designate a particular category of image, say tug jobs in the case of porn. Or you just start with something innocuous and new. In this case—pictures of sunflowers.”