then the deadbolt. He gave them the wait signal, then slipped through the door. He was back sixty seconds later and waved them in.
The apartment’s interior was a mirror image of the architecture: long and narrow, with cramped hallways, narrow-plank hardwood floors covered in worn carpet runners, and dark baseboards and crown molding. Nayoan wasn’t much on interior decoration, Jack saw: a utilitarian kitchen and bathroom done in checkerboard porcelain tile, and a front room with a sectional sofa, a coffee table, and a thirteen-inch television. Probably didn’t expect to be here for long, Jack thought. Why bother with anything but the necessities? Could that mean something? Might be worth checking how long Nayoan had left on his tour at the embassy.
“Okay, let’s toss it,” Clark ordered. “Everything back in its place when we’re done.”
They clicked on their flashlights and went to work.
Almost immediately Chavez found a Dell laptop on a card-table desk in Nayoan’s bedroom. Jack powered it up and started sifting through the folders and files, the Web browser history, and the e-mail backlog. Clark and Chavez let him work, spending thirty minutes dissecting the apartment room by room, checking the obvious hiding spots first.
“Okay,” Jack said. “No password protection, no key logging software . . . Aside from a standard firewall and an antivirus program, this thing is wide open. Lot of stuff here, but nothing that jumps out. Mostly unclassified embassy business and e-mails—some of it personal. Family and friends back home.”
“Address book?” Clark asked.
“Same there, too. Nothing we’ve seen from URC distribution lists. He cleans his Web browser history almost daily, right down to the temporary files and cookies.”
“‘Cookies’?” Chavez asked.
“Little bits of data websites leave on your computer every time you visit. Pretty standard practice, for the most part.”
“How deep can you dig?” Clark asked.
“Here? Not very. I can copy all his files and folders and mailboxes, but to duplicate his hard drive would take too long.”
“Okay, grab what you can.”
Jack plugged a Western Digital Passport hard drive into the Dell’s FireWire port and started copying files while Clark and Chavez kept hunting. After another forty minutes, Chavez whispered from the kitchen, “Gotcha.”
He came into the bedroom carrying a zip-top sandwich baggie. “False bottom in his utensil drawer.”
Jack took the baggie, looked at it. “Read-write DVD.” He popped open the Dell’s drive bay and slipped the DVD inside. He clicked on the appropriate drive letter, and the window popped up on the screen. “Lotta data here, John. About sixty gigabytes. A lot of them are image files.”
“Pull some up.”
Jack double-clicked a folder open and brought up the pics in thumbnail sizes. “Look familiar?”
“They do indeed,” Clark said.
Jack tapped his index fingernail on three pictures in turn. “For sure those are from URC websites.”
“Where’s there’s smoke ...” Chavez said.
Clark checked his watch. “Copy it. Ding, let’s police it up. Time to get out of here.”
They were back at their hotel, a La Quinta Inn near the airport, an hour later. Jack used a secure FTP—file transfer protocol—to upload some of the images to The Campus’s server, then called Gavin Biery, their info-tech wunderkind, and put him on speakerphone.
“We’ve seen these before,” Biery said. “From the Tripoli flash drive?”
“Right,” Jack said. “We need to know if they’ve got stego embedded.”
“I’m putting the finishing touches on the decryption algorithm; part of the problem is we don’t know what kind of program they used for the encryption—commercial or homemade. According to the Steganography Analysis and Research Center—”
“There’s such a place?” asked Chavez.
“—to date there’s seven hundred twenty-five stego applications out there, and that’s just the commercial stuff. Anybody with halfway decent programming skills could make one up and fit it on a flash drive. Just carry it around, plug it into a computer, and you’re in stego mode.”
“So how do you break it?” This from Clark.
“I put together a two-part process: First check for discrepancies in the file—be it video, or image, or audio. If that finds an anomaly, then the second part of the program starts running the file through the most common encryption methods. It’s a brute-force process, but chances are the URC has its favorite methods. Find that and we can start speeding up the dissection.”
“How long?” Jack asked.
“No idea. I’ll start feeding the monster and get back to you.”
At three a.m. the phone rang. The three of them were awake instantly. “Biery,” Jack said, rubbing his eyes and squinting at the cell phone’s ID screen. He put the call on speakerphone.