Analog SFF, April 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “And you bought this story?"

  Pamela bit her lower lip. “Maybe a little, at first. I mean this guy was convincing—straight out of Central Casting. Reggie was enthusiastic about writing it all up in book form."

  “So you began working on The Voynich Verdict."

  “Well, I began logging time on weekends at the Beinecke, studying the original text and the huge store of studies on it that Dietrich and his staff had collected. The mystery of it was completely fascinating. Reggie worked closely with me on most of that. We began to get serous as a couple for a while, but I ... well, I learned about his UFO friends and this CIAAP group, and I heard enough to get suspicious."

  “So you learned that Reggie was working on a hidden agenda."

  She nodded pensively. “Yeah. Mr. Sanko, have you ever heard of the white salmon gambit?"

  I shook my head.

  “Well, the story goes: there was once this canning company that packed up a load of perfectly good white salmon. There really is white salmon, although today you don't see it much outside of the Pacific Northwest. Well, nobody wanted it because everyone was used to buying pink salmon. A smart marketing man solved the problem with an advertising slogan: ‘Guaranteed Not to Turn Pink in the Can.'” Pamela blinked her green eyes. “People—most people—don't believe in UFOs. That's the pink salmon we're all used to. Now suppose the alien contacts—some of them—are real, and the aliens don't want their presence known. What better way to cover their trail than to associate themselves with a crazy group like a flying saucer society? That's the white salmon. And the slogan is: if CIAAP says something, everybody knows it can't be right."

  “And you believe Reggie is creating a smoke screen for little green men coming and going from somewhere out among the stars?"

  She blushed a little. “I've overheard enough to believe that something like that is going on. I think only a small core of CIAAP members seem to be in on the conspiracy. The rest of the society are genuine saucer-heads. And another thing—that book we wrote—I once overheard it referred to as a ‘cover’ for something, some future operation."

  I knitted my brows. “If you know all this, why are you going along with it?"

  She smiled. “To expose it, Mr. Sanko. For the same reason I said ‘yes’ to Reggie's marriage proposal. My third book is going to be a solo effort and it's going to blow the lid off this thing, whatever it is."

  She amazed me. Money does this to people sometimes—it makes them believe they are invulnerable. “So you're stringing Reggie along to gather information?"

  She shrugged. “We're using each other. He needed the prestige of my first book to sell The Voynich Verdict."

  * * * *

  Pamela was meeting Reggie for dinner after the book signing, but she agreed to come to the Plaza lobby at 11 p.m. to talk further. In the meantime, I retrieved the rental Merc and drove into Jersey for a talk with Quick Jerry.

  It was a small print shop that had once been a local grocery—you could tell from the painted-over sign. He had a long counter with several PCs and a color Xerox; there was studio camera equipment and an offset lithograph in back.

  “Steganography, yeah, I heard that term.” Quick Jerry squinted little beady eyes at me and rubbed the five o'clock shadow on his jaw. “Invisible ink was the original idea. You, know, lemon juice or something that doesn't show until you warm the paper or expose it to chemicals. The government's still got some classified invisible inks. Some of them are used on the new bills they're printing. But there's a lot more to it than that."

  “So what's it worth to you to give me an accelerated course?” I peeled a fifty out of my billfold.

  “Put your money away, Sanko. I figure you done for me.” Quick Jerry locked the front door and flipped the “Open” sign to “Closed."

  “The idea is to hide a message right out in the open where nobody expects there to be no message.” Jerry pulled out a bottle and glasses and poured us both two fingers of bourbon. “Ever hear of Herodotus? The Greek historian? Well, anyway, somewhere he claimed that the plans for a revolt against the Persian occupation of Ionia were tattooed on the shaved head of a slave. Re-grown hair covered the message and re-shaving him revealed the plans. That's the idea, anyway.” Jerry gulped his drink and thought for a moment. “During World War II, German spies liked to use microdots—like the period at the end of a sentence in some innocent-looking letter—only it's got Allied ship movements or something on the dot, visible under a microscope."

  He was getting cranked to the subject. I grabbed a chair and tasted the undiluted liquor. It was rough stuff, but I noted that Quick Jerry had nearly drained his glass.

  “Of course there's low tech ways to hide a message—they call it the payload—in the cover-text."

  “Cover-text?"

  “Yeah, the cover. Could be a laundry list or a page in a diary. The payload could be in the shape of the pen strokes or in the way certain letters of the alphabet are formed. Or it could be something simple like the third letter in each italicized word in a long document. There's lots of low tech options."

  I risked another pull on the liquor and grimaced at the sear to my esophagus. “So what about high-tech options?” I asked.

  “Oh, well now, there's lots of ways to hide stuff in computer files. Ever hear of digital watermarking?"

  I shook my head.

  “It's just like the watermarks on treasury bills and it was invented for the same purpose: as a way of proving something is genuine or identifying its legitimate owner. Another purpose is what they call digital fingerprinting. You buy something like a downloaded movie and they watermark your name on it so that if you try to make illegal copies, they know who done it."

  I didn't quite get it and told him so. “How do you watermark a computer file?"

  Jerry refilled his glass and I let him put a splash in mine. “First of all, there's two kinds: visible and invisible. Like in steganography, you don't want anybody but your accomplice to know it's there. You can do this with text and music files, but mostly it's graphics.” He took a swallow and looked for recognition on my face. “See, with steganography you want the payload to be hard to detect, so you bury it in the least significant digits of the graphics bitmap."

  I gave my throat another trauma with a swallow. “When did you become a computer geek?” I said. “Slow down for us old-timers who still count with their toes."

  “Okay,” he said, “say we've got a graphics image with 8 bits representing the value of each red, green, and blue pixel.” He grabbed a sheet of paper and the pencil stub that he kept behind his right ear. “Say the red pixel value at some location is 11101110—that'd be one of 28 possible values. Now I can use that last digit for my payload because you're not going to visually tell the difference from 11101111. We do the same for every red, blue, and green pixel in the file, and we've embedded the payload in what they call the noise floor of the graphic, and nobody's the wiser."

  “So how does your buddy, your confederate, read out the payload?"

  Jerry rubbed his stubble. “Well, if you had the original image you could just take the difference of the two files, or you can apply a logical operation that removes all but the last couple of bits from the graphics file. That would give you a dark, probably black, screen. Then you brighten the image, say a hundred-fold, and the payload should be visible."

  “How easy is this watermarking or message hiding to do?"

  Quick Jerry spread ink-stained palms. “Piece of cake now. There's commercial software that'll do it. In fact,” he lowered his voice, “I got some. It makes visible watermarks, but I've been fooling with it to add the no-show kind. See, the trick is to work with big files. It's easier to hide stuff on a twenty-acre farm than in a pocketbook. So high definition pictures are best—say twelve or fifteen kilobytes. Nowadays most graphics files are compressed. Ever hear of JPEG?"

  I shook my head again.

  “Joint Photographic Experts Group. A JPEG compression will save a lot
of space on a computer, so you can get a pretty decent looking picture in about two kilobytes. Naturally it's harder to hide a payload in two kilobytes than in fifteen, but its tried pretty often. Say you got a black and white text payload hidden in a JPEG color image. An expert in steganalysis—and the Feds have got a lot of them—would be tipped off by distortion artifacts caused by the compression of the high contrast letter edges in the payload."

  An idea had dawned on me. I drained my glass and coughed. “That modified software you've got—can it be used to read out any payload?"

  * * * *

  Back in my room at the Plaza I loaded Quick Jerry's DVD into the laptop and got on the internet. It only took a minute or so to find the Beinecke Library website and to locate the Voynich Manuscript. All 234 pages were there in high-res files. I had to download one file at a time and apply the “Read Watermark” algorithm.

  The first fifty-eight pages gave me blank screens. I was getting sleepy and bored. Outside the room's balcony doors evening was settling on Central Park and I was on my third Heineken. The next file showed a grotesque plant, like a nightmarish sunflower, accompanied by a half-page of Voynich glyphs. This time when I clicked on the “Read Watermark” button what looked like a blueprint appeared. I had finally hit pay dirt. Suddenly, I was wide-awake. I used the “Zoom” button to pick out some details. It was clearly some kind of chemical manufacturing plant. I saved the image.

  This was going to be a long haul, so I ordered dinner and a pot of black coffee from room service and began plugging away at the rest of the Voynich files.

  It took a long time to slog through it all, but I located five payloads at random places throughout the 234 pages. All were diagrams of chemical plants from various locations throughout the United States. Nothing in the cover-image seemed to be a clue that a particular page contained a payload.

  Then The Voynich Verdict caught my attention where I had tossed it on the nightstand. I picked up the copy old man Roderick had given me and started thumbing through it. There were about twenty illustrations of Voynich manuscript pages, including the five that held payloads. A confederate would only have to check those twenty instead of the entire Voynich record. And if Dietrich—and I assumed it was him—periodically changed the payloads, he could pick a different subset out of the twenty each time to avoid anyone stumbling over the pattern.

  I was finishing the last dregs of the coffee and starting to feel the jitters of a caffeinated hangover as I looked through the Manhattan phone directory for the number of the local FBI office. I was just reaching for the phone when it rang.

  It was Pamela and her voice sounded tense. “Mr. Sanko, I came a little early. I'm in the lobby downstairs."

  “Is something the matter?"

  “I ... I'm not sure,” she said. “Reggie got a call during dinner. It sounds like you were followed today."

  “I'll be right down.” I hung up and quickly dialed Quick Jerry's number. There was no answer.

  * * * *

  Pamela was sitting in an avocado green upholstered chair that contrasted nicely with her burgundy dress. She was fidgeting nervously with her pearl necklace. I sat down on the matching ottoman and looked into her green eyes. She was agitated, I could see. “What's going on?” I said, forcing a relaxed tone I didn't really feel.

  She shook her head and bit a corner of her lower lip but remained silent, looking down. She glanced up at me, then quickly looked away. I scanned around the lobby. “Were you followed?"

  This normally articulate young woman seemed at a loss for words. I noticed a cocktail lounge off of the main lobby and shepherded her over there and into a leather booth. “Pamela,” I said, trying to settle us both down, “You've got to tell me what you know. I've found some nasty stuff that your boy and his friends have been up to!"

  Pamela opened her mouth. I thought it was to speak, but the sharp pain in my neck cancelled the idea. She narrowed her brows at me, then looked away.

  I spun around and a tall, bald man who looked vaguely familiar was standing behind my right shoulder. The leather booth started to sway a little. Pamela was biting her lower lip and Reggie materialized from the gathering fog, looming over us. “You haven't met Dr. Dietrich and Mr. De Comines, have you?” he said. I looked back and the short, fat, white-haired guy had joined the party. “Gentlemen,” Reggie said, “may I introduce Mr. Roscoe—or is it Mr. Sanko? I'm terrible with names.” Reggie slipped into the booth next to Pamela and gave me a toothy grin. “I must confess you've made yourself a bit of a nuisance."

  “Who are you working for, Marsh?” I was trying to focus on his blurring image.

  “Why, myself, Mr. Sanko. I'm just a struggling small business owner with a small staff.” And he indicated the two Mutt and Jeff types.

  I blinked at the blurring row of bottles behind the bar. The room was starting to spin. I'd been suckered by Pamela. Was she a willing accomplice? “Those chemical plant blueprints,” I spat out, “who are they for? Some fun group that would like to arrange a series of national disasters?” Dimly, I realized my voice was weak and slurred.

  Reggie adopted a mock confidential tone. “Actually, Mr. Sanko, we are just middle-men in the communications business."

  “Mitt'l men?"

  “I really think you've had too much to drink tonight,” Reggie said. “Perhaps a brisk walk in the park will clear your head. Gentlemen, I'll need your help. Wait here for us, Pamela. Have a glass of wine, you look distraught."

  They lifted me by the shoulders and walked me, rubber-legged, out of the lounge and across the lobby.

  I saw Reggie shake his head at a questioning look from the uniformed doorman. “Too much,” he said and indicated drink with a thumb tipped to his mouth. The doorman smiled.

  We crossed the street somehow and suddenly we were immersed in the dim verdure of Central Park. Whatever they were using on me made the lampposts shimmer, but I was keeping the blackness away, probably with the help of that pot of hotel coffee.

  “Who are your clients, Reggie? North Korea? Al Qaeda?” It was my voice but it sounded strange and far away.

  “Mr. Sanko, you're getting much too loud. I'm afraid we're going to have to seek some privacy.” With that we turned off the asphalted path to a narrow trail that led off into dark undergrowth.

  “Your loony fringer background ... and that crazy linkage ... to the Voynich were just enough to put it all beyond ... ‘spicion."

  “You are very discerning, Mr. Sanko,” I heard Reggie say, very close to my left ear. “It is unfortunate that you didn't take our little hint to stop meddling....” I sensed that he was reaching for something—a syringe or a gun.

  I swung back both elbows with everything I had left and felt them connect. Then I was running at full tilt through a phantasmagoric blackness. Branches and tree limbs like claws swiped at me as I wove through a barren stand of trees and bushes. Suddenly I saw the dim outline of a wall of some sort and somehow scrambled up and over it. My head was spinning. I hugged my knees, my back against the stones. My breath was so loud I was afraid they could hear it.

  Pounding feet approached on the far side of the wall. “He's here somewhere,” someone said. I fought back a wave of vertigo and nausea. There was a close metallic snap, like someone releasing the safety on a handgun. I was frozen in place. This might be it, I thought. One, two, three—you're gone, Sanko—bang!

  Then: “Police officer! Drop the gun!"

  * * * *

  They got Reggie and Dietrich dead to rights. De Comines had slithered back to the asphalt, but a second prowl car picked him up when he started running. Pamela had called 911 from the lobby of the Plaza. Apparently, Reggie had placed too much confidence in his purported charm. Quick Jerry was okay, I discovered. He had called the cops too, after a visit from the trio.

  It turned out that De Comines was the contact man for a mole in the security division of the Chemical Manufacturers Association. He provided Professor Dietrich with the confidential blueprints. They
included details of in-place security systems of chemical plants in high population areas that used and produced some pretty nasty stuff. The FBI and Homeland Security were involved now and Reggie and his little team had a dance card that was full.

  I phoned Pamela's old man and gave him the whole story. He barked at me a couple of times because I was wasting his time with details. When I told him the wedding was off and Reggie was under indictment, it sounded like he wanted to kiss me over the phone. He offered me a nice bonus and, while he was in the mood, I got him to agree to have a check mailed to Quick Jerry for “training expenses."

  * * * *

  It was the next afternoon. Pamela had agreed to meet me at the little coffee shop a block and half from the Plaza.

  “I was worried about Quick Jerry,” I said, stirring a cup of Mocha Java. “When they roughed him up, he was forced to tell them about the doctored watermark program that he gave me. When they left, he phoned the police. He must really have gone legit."

  Pamela took a dainty bite of a croissant. “I think you had your doubts about me,” she said.

  I shrugged. “We were both lucky that your boy Reggie didn't."

  “Reggie was one of those men who need to believe that they're irresistible."