The Zero Hour

by Joseph Finder

  Within minutes, the signal was classified and reconstructed. Only then were a couple of interesting things learned about the captured telephone conversation.

  First, the NSA analysts discovered that the signal was digital: it had been converted into a series of zeroes and ones. Digital signals have a great advantage over analog signals in that they are received with maximum clarity.

  Digital signals have another advantage over analog. Once scrambled, they are secure, impenetrable, impossible to be understood by anyone outside a handful of government agencies in the most developed countries.

  Then the NSA analysts discovered a second interesting thing. The captured conversation had been rendered even more secure from eavesdropping by means of a state-of-the-art digital encryption system. It is not uncommon these days for private citizens—particularly in the world of high finance—to make their most sensitive calls on sophisticated, secure telephones that digitally encrypt their voices so that they can’t be bugged, tapped, or otherwise eavesdropped on.

  But the vast majority of suppliers of these secure phones (one of the biggest is Crypto A.G. of Zurich) cooperate with law enforcement by selling their encryption schemes to both the National Security Agency and the British GCHQ (the Government Communications Headquarters, in Cheltenham, England, which is the British counterpart of the NSA). So even most encrypted phone conversations can be listened to by the NSA and GCHQ. International businessmen discussing illegal schemes and drug cartels discussing transactions all tend to speak carelessly over “secure” phones, not realizing that most of them really aren’t secure at all.

  But this particular digitally encrypted format was unknown to either NSA or GCHQ. And that was the third peculiar discovery.

  The scrambled signal was sent immediately to the Cryptanalytic Division at NSA’s Headquarters/Operations Building. There it was run through a Cray supercomputer, which tested the signal against all known encryption schemes. But the Cray came up blank. The signal wouldn’t break. Instead of voices speaking, there was only a bewildering sequence of ones and zeroes that the computer couldn’t comprehend.

  This in itself was extraordinary. The NSA’s computers are programmed with the keys to virtually every known cipher ever invented, every mechanism to encipher that has ever been used. This includes any system ever used by anyone at any time in history, anything ever written about in a technical paper, in a book, even in a novel, any cipher that’s ever been even floated as a hypothesis.

  As long as the computers are fed a large enough sample of the cipher, and the encryption scheme is known to the NSA, they will crack the code. Most digital signals are broken immediately. But after minutes, then hours of churning, the computers were stumped.

  The NSA abhors the existence of any encryption scheme it doesn’t know. To a cryptanalyst, an “unbreakable” encryption is like an impenetrable safe to a master safecracker, an unpickable lock to a master lockpick. It is a challenge, a taunt, a red flag.

  Two cryptanalysts—cryppies, as they’re called within the Fort Meade complex—hunched before a screen and watched with mingled fascination and frustration.

  “Jeez, what’s wrong with this one?” George Frechette said to his officemate, Edwin Chu. “Everything’s processing except this one string. Now what?”

  Edwin Chu adjusted his round horn-rimmed glasses and peered through them for several moments at the flashing numbers on the screen. “We got us a new one.”

  “What do you say we have a look at it?” George suggested. “Play with it a little?”

  “Sure,” Edwin said. “Hey, I’m there.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Professor Bruce Gelman, a small, slender, balding man with a wispy beard, was an assistant professor of computer science at MIT with a national reputation in the field of electronic engineering. According to Ken Alton, he was also a legendary hacker skilled in the intricacies of telephony and one of the founders of the Thinking Machines Corporation.

  He could have been in his thirties or forties; it was impossible to tell. Dressed in a woolen lumberjack shirt over a plaid flannel shirt, he did not look like a typical university professor, but then, computer types rarely did. His office was located in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in a tall, anonymous office building in Kendall Square, Cambridge.

  “I thought you guys were up to speed on this stuff,” he said, sipping coffee from a giant plastic cup. “You’re telling me the FBI labs threw in the towel?”

  “Basically, yes,” Sarah said.

  Gelman rolled his eyes, scratched at his beard, and chuckled. “I see,” he said with exaggerated politeness, leaving no doubt what he thought of the FBI. “Of course, this technician you talked to is right: it’s not exactly easy to restore a tape that’s been erased. That’s true.”

  She removed from her briefcase a black cassette sealed in a plastic evidence bag and marked with a number, took it out of the bag, and handed it to him.

  He gulped some more coffee, set down the cup, and knitted his brow. “We could get lucky,” he said. “Might be an old answering machine. Or just a poorly constructed one.”

  “Why would that help?”

  “Maybe the tape wobbles up and down in the machine, relative to the heads. Possible the tape guides are loose, and the tape wandered up and down some.”

  “That would make it easier?”

  He shot his left hand out for the enormous cup of coffee, and accidentally tipped it over. “Oh, God. Yuck.” Pulling some sheets of pale-blue Kleenex from a plastic dispenser, he mopped up the muddy spill, which coursed over a stack of papers. “Yuck.”

  He retrieved the enormous cup, managing to salvage half the coffee. “You see, that would leave us a stripe of recorded information above or below what’s been recorded over it.”

  “And if the answering machine isn’t old, or the tape guides aren’t loose?”

  “Well,” Gelman said, “tape is three-dimensional, right?” He slurped loudly from the coffee cup, then gingerly set it down. “It has a thickness to it. The front and the back surfaces of the tape are affected differently by the recording process.”

  Sarah didn’t entirely understand what he was driving at, but nodded anyway.

  “So you compare the front and back surfaces of the tape,” he went on, “to see if there are any traces of magnetic information on the back of the tape. Sometimes that works.”

  “And if not?”

  “Well, then there’s an effect called ‘print-through,’ where you find traces on one section of the tape of what’s been recorded on a section right next to it. So there are various places to look for data. I’m surprised your labs didn’t think of this.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “So we can scan the tape and reconstruct it two-dimensionally, using VCR technology.”

  “Can you explain that?”

  He frowned and looked down at the coffee-stained papers arrayed on the desk before him. “So, it’s like this,” Gelman said. “This is a technique I developed for a—another government agency, under contract. Oh, hell, it’s obviously the NSA. Anyways, normally an audio tape is magnetized, negative or positive, on a stripe, okay?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “But on a videotape, the information is laid down differently. It’s recorded on stripes put down at a transverse angle to the tape, in order to fit more information on the same length of tape.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “So when it comes time to play back, a VCR uses a helical-scan playback head to read that information. Meaning the tape head moves at sort of an angle across the tape, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “So if you want to play back a really narrow stripe of leftover information that’s sort of on the edges of a broader band—the vertical information as well as the horizontal—you can use this VCR technology, a similar helical-scan playback device.”

  He paused a moment, and Sarah nodded to encourage him to proceed.

  “So the helical scan goes across the tape, transversely,
moving up through the newly recorded stuff and then over the narrow band of leftover information—the stuff we’re interested in, right? So, at regular intervals, we have these little blips of the stuff we want. The rest is garbage.” Gelman spoke more and more rapidly, with growing enthusiasm. “So, then the question is, how do you sort the wheat from the chaff, you know what I mean? How do you separate out the sound you want from the sound you don’t? Well, what you do is, you write a program to differentiate it out, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Now, I know the distance and the time between the bits of the stripe we’re interested in—the sequence of magnetic impulses, let’s call it. I can calculate it on the basis of the rate at which the playback head is revolving. I know the periodicity. So, I tell the computer what I’m looking for and to pull out any signals of interest. Then we put sort of a digital ‘picture’ of the magnetic information onto a computer, using a specially constructed piece of equipment, a helical-scan tape playback mechanism that converts the analog signal to a digital signal. It’s the same technology as a compact-disc player or a digital audio tape, right? Really, it’s a modified digital compact cassette playback unit that can play back the recovered audio tape as if it were high-density digital tape.”

  “Look,” Sarah broke in at last. “Computer stuff is obviously not my area of expertise, which is why I’m talking to you. You’re saying you may be able to unerase this tape, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How long would it take you?”

  “The process might take a few hours, maybe. But to do it right, a week, probably—”

  “Okay. I’d like to hire your services on a contract basis. Could you have something for me in two or three days?”

  “Three days?” Gelman gasped. “I mean, theoretically, yes, but—”

  “That would be great,” Sarah said. “Thanks.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Baumann awoke with a pounding headache, covered in a cold sweat. The linen bedsheet around him was soaked, as if he’d been doused with gallons of cold water. He drew back the heavy drapes to let in the strong morning sunlight. Looking down at the Avenue des Portugais, then up at the sky, he estimated that it was eight or nine o’clock. He had badly needed the sleep, but there was much to be done today.

  For a few moments he sat on the edge of the bed and massaged his temples to ease the headache. His head spun with the residue of nightmares. He had dreamed he was back in the hole, that black chamber of horrors.

  He had abided the floggings, the “cuts” with a cane while you were strapped, spread-eagled, to the three-legged mare, a prison physician standing dourly by. But the hole, or the “bomb,” as some called it, was the worst place in Pollsmoor, a dank horrific place it had taken all of his strength to endure without cracking. The hole was where they put you to punish you for fighting in the exercise yard, for striking a boer, for no reason at all other than that the chief warder didn’t like your face. Actually, he had spent no more than a month there in all his years at Pollsmoor. It meant solitary confinement, a bare concrete cell, a “punishment regime” of maize porridge and watery broth and more porridge.

  No cigarettes, no newspapers, no letters, no visitors. No radio, no television. No contact with the outside world; no leaving the tiny, fetid, unlighted cell, whose walls began to close in on you. You lived like an animal in a cage rank with your own urine and excrement from the shallow hole in the ground into which you had to relieve yourself.

  Why was he having this dream again? What did it mean? That his subconscious didn’t believe he was out of prison? That his mind understood things on a higher plane: he was still not out of prison?

  He took a long, almost unbearably hot shower. Then he got into one of the hotel’s thick white cotton robes (“Hôtel Raphaël Paris” stitched in gold on the breast), settled into one of the suite’s chaises longues, and began to make telephone calls. As he spoke—his French, slightly British-accented, was impeccable—he idly combed his damp hair straight back.

  * * *

  He’d flown into Orly from Geneva’s Cointrin Airport, on a false passport provided by Dyson’s staff. Travel within the European Economic Community had become remarkably casual since he’d been locked away. No one gave his Swiss passport so much as a passing glance. But however Dyson’s people had procured the passport, he didn’t trust it. If it was forged, was the forgery top-notch? Was the forger an informer for the Swiss authorities? If it was a legitimate passport, what if it had been flagged as missing? If someone in the Swiss government had been paid off, how secure was that transaction?

  Dyson had offered to supply a full set of the documents he’d need—passports, driver’s licenses, credit cards—but he’d politely turned down the offer. Dyson-supplied paper was a sheep’s bell: if he chose, Dyson could keep close tabs on his whereabouts.

  Until he made contact with a professional forger, he needed to create a plausible identity from scratch. Things had gotten more complicated in the last five or six years. Passports were more difficult to forge; you could no longer rent a car with cash. The emergence of worldwide terrorism had spurred the airlines to impose random security checks of checked and carry-on baggage on transatlantic flights. It was a much more suspicious world. Also, he didn’t dare acquire all of his documentation in one place, from one source. He would have to travel to a number of countries in the next few days.

  He had reserved suite 510 at the Raphaël, on Avenue Kléber in the 16th Arrondissement, a luxurious and discreet place. He had never stayed here before (he would never be so careless) but had heard of it from acquaintances. The suite was immense by Parisian standards, with a large sitting room, and cost a fortune, but he was spending Dyson’s money, after all, not his own. And it was important to cultivate the right sort of appearances.

  He had money enough to last for a while, U.S. dollars, Swiss and French francs. The first payment from Dyson had already been transferred from a bank in Panama.

  He needed clothes. All he had were the suit and shoes he’d bought off the rack at Lanvin, on Geneva’s Rue du Rhône. He would have to pick up a selection of shirts from Sulka, a few pairs of shoes from John Lobb, and a couple of conservative businessman’s suits at Cifonelli or Marcel Lassance.

  All of this would have to be done in a matter of hours, for there was even more important business to conduct.

  * * *

  An hour later he was sitting in the spare, inelegant showroom of a microwave-communications firm on the sixth floor of a building on Boulevard de Strasbourg, in the 10th Arrondissement. The company did business with corporations, news organizations, and anyone who required the use of a satellite-linked telephone.

  The company’s director, M. Gilbert Trémaud, treated Baumann with the utmost deference: the British gentleman traveled widely in the Third World and needed an Inmarsat-M- and Comsat-compatible phone.

  “The most compact model I have,” Mr. Trémaud explained in fluent English, “is an MLink-5000, about one-fifth the size of most other portable satellite telephones. With battery, it weighs thirteen kilos. Eighteen inches long, fourteen inches wide, and five inches thick. It’s extremely portable, highly reliable, and glitch-free.” He brought it out of a locked display case. It looked like an aluminum briefcase.

  Baumann popped the clasp. It opened like a book. “The antenna—?”

  “A flat-plate array antenna,” Trémaud said. “The days of the parabolic antenna are over, thankfully. Beam-width is much broader, which means aiming accuracy is much less crucial.”

  “I don’t see it,” Baumann said.

  Trémaud touched the lid. “This is the antenna,” he said, and watched his visitor smile.

  “Very convenient,” Baumann said.

  “Yes, it is,” Trémaud agreed. “You can use it in an apartment or hotel room quite easily. Just sit it on the windowsill, flip the top open, and it’s deployed. The signal-strength meter helps you adjust the angle. The unit will compute the azimuth
for you. Do you know where you’ll be using it?”

  Baumann thought for a moment. “Why do you ask?”

  “There are four satellites in use now. Depending upon where you are, you will transmit via any of the four. If you’re in Moscow, for example, make sure your hotel room faces west. But if you’re, say, in—”

  “How quickly can I get it?”

  “You can buy it today, if you wish. I have three in stock. But you cannot take it with you yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “These units are very strictly controlled. First, you must apply for an identification number, which will serve as your telephone number. The application takes three days at least to go through—”

  “That’s impossible,” Baumann said. “I’m leaving tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Trémaud exclaimed. “But there’s simply no way!”

  “I’ll buy it without an identification number.”

  Trémaud shrugged, spread his palms, and widened his eyes. “If I could do that, sir, I would do so gladly. But I must enter an identification number in the computer next to the serial number of each unit I sell. Otherwise the computer will not release it from inventory.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Baumann said quietly. He took an envelope from his breast pocket and began counting out thousand-franc notes. “I am in a difficult position, because I need to have this immediately. I am prepared to pay you”—he continued to count out the bills—“lavishly … for your attention to this matter. There are ways to circumvent foolish restrictions such as this, are there not?”

  Trémaud watched as Baumann counted out the rest of the cash. Then he pulled the pile toward himself and counted them again. Finally he looked up at Baumann and swallowed hard. His throat was dry.

  “Yes, sir,” he said with a slight nod of his head. “There are ways.”