The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,16
He was a scientist. He would be diligent. He would try to make his experiments work, and hope that they continued to fail.
The police in their bottle green uniforms were out early. They were suspicious, when they saw a young man on the streets at this hour. He must have been drinking, or whoring, or spying, or some other bad thing. The young man searched in his pocket for a chocolate, to hide the smell on his breath, but the candies were all gone. He slowed his step as a policeman walked toward him and asked for his identification. The policeman had a sneer on his face, thinking he would make an arrest, or at least take a good bribe, until he studied the young man’s papers. They identified him as a special government employee, with special permissions.
Now it was the policeman who was frightened. He made a slight bow and apologized, and then he apologized again. But there was a glint in his eye, as if he suspected that something must be wrong with this special servant of the revolution that he was walking the streets in wrinkled clothes just after dawn on a midsummer morning.
WASHINGTON
Harry Pappas watched the wind rustle the trees outside the old headquarters building. The summer sky was darkening out west, up the Potomac River. The rain would begin soon. He closed his eyes. On summer days like this, he used to take his son Alex out sailing. Harry would leave work early and pick up Alex at home, and they would drive to a marina south of the airport. In July, the thunderstorms would arrive almost every evening. The slack Potomac would begin to churn; the cypress trees by the river would billow and bend. Alex loved it. Even when the bolts of lightning began to spark in the far distance, he would want to continue.
They would race out of the marina on a strong breeze. When the tide was out, the river was so shallow near the shore that they would have to pull up the centerboard to clear the bottom, so that they could barely tack. But in the deeper water of mid-river, with the board down, a strong puff would make the boat heel over so far they would bury the lee rail, with water spilling into the cockpit. Alex would head the boat off the wind even farther, deeper into the puff, hiking out to keep the small boat from flipping over. Harry would hold on tight to the gunwales, inwardly pleased that he had a daredevil for a son.
They would watch the rain move downriver toward them, an advancing sheet of liquid darkness. The air would chill a bit just before it came, and the first bolts of lightning would crack. They would race for the cover of shore and scramble up the riverbank while the rain pelted down and the lightning sliced a jagged line to the water. Sometimes Alex would scream, an animal howl of pure pleasure to be out there with his father amid this raw energy of nature. He was a risk taker, always. But he trusted his father to make sure it wasn’t too crazy a risk—to pull him out of the river before the lightning actually hit. That was the worst of it for Pappas. His son had trusted him.
Pappas opened his eyes. It was a mistake to remember. The only way out was forward. Otherwise he would just give up.
Pappas moved quickly to create the new compartment in which Dr. Ali would live. The first step was to send an answer to the Hotmail account. The Iranian was waiting. He knew how to hide in the entrails of the Internet—how to send a message from a computer and an ISP that bore none of his fingerprints. He knew all of these things, assuming that he existed at all.
Pappas prepared the response message. It was one of several the agency had designed to contact virtual walk-ins. The text was a simple email in the recipient’s native language, in this case Farsi. It said: “We received your message. We wish you a happy and peaceful summer.” If anyone was monitoring the line with a packet sniffer, that’s all they would see. But once the Hotmail account was opened with the proper password, it would display another message, with a set of instructions that told the recipient how to establish encrypted communications through what amounted to a hidden virtual private network.