NEMOD, a small boutique outfit outside San Francisco."
Apparently, he and Tim had already talked about me, because he glanced in my direction and mentioned, "I'll spare you the technical details, except to make a few points."
I informed him, "My hands are registered weapons. A very few points."
Everybody chuckled. I'm a lot of fun at these things.
Samuel continued, "NEMOD creates and handles secure accounts for customer groups. You pay them a fairly stiff monthly fee, certify the individual members of your transmission group or cell, and they send you encoding and decoding software, which you upload on your computer. The messages are routed through NEMOD's proprietary servers directly between correspondents. It's fairly foolproof."
Bian commented, "It's a closed system, right?"
He nodded. "That's why it's fortunate you got that laptop. There's really no other way to detect and read these e-mails." He looked at me and hypothesized, "Whoever owned that computer, maybe he had a background in counterintelligence."
No maybes about it, buster. But Phyllis quickly cut off that line of inquiry and informed me, "NEMOD does mostly private-sector work--as a matter of interest, it has legally binding confidentiality agreements with its clients. But after the CEO and I had a brief and amicable discussion, he became reasonable."
Samuel must've overheard their conversation, because he laughed. He noted, "After Phyllis busted his . . . well, after she talked with him, we e-mailed NEMOD the files, and they promptly decoded and e-mailed back the transcripts."
In a sign of impatience that I shared, Bian reached across the conference table and asked, "May we see these?"
He nodded, and we both ended up with a large stack of messages, all written in English, some short, others long and fairly wordy.
As I thumbed through the tops of the pages, it seemed like all of them were back-and-forth stuff between two parties, labeled Crusader One and Crusader Two.
Bian, also perusing her stack, mentioned, "The headers, the two subjects, they appear to think of themselves--or maybe they relate to each other--as conspirators involving Iraq."
Samuel replied, "That would seem to be correct."
I read through the first few missives. They opened with warm salutations, a little friendly banter and gossip, then segued into the more substantive material. The style of writing was informal and the tone suggested correspondents who were well acquainted, even chummy. A lot of Arab names and Iraqi organizations were cited, which looked to me like alphabet soup.
I turned to Bian. "Do you recognize any of these people?"
"Yes, a lot are familiar. Mostly senior Iraqi political or religious figures."
At this point, Phyllis turned to Tim, John, and Samuel. "I'm sure you three can find something better to do."
Tim, John, and Samuel did not seem to mind, and they gathered their stuff and departed, without the door hitting them in the ass. Actually, she'd done them a favor, a big one, and I think they knew it. If they were subpoenaed later, they could honestly say they left before we got into the real muck. Sean Drummond would've followed them if I had a brain in my head. But I was curious. And we all know where that gets you.
I continued to read. The messages sent by Crusader One to Crusader Two, judging by the language and vernacular, were authored by a native-speaking American--presumably Cliff Daniels.
Crusader Two's English was decent and showed a good command of vocabulary, though he occasionally confused his verb tenses--the land mine of all languages--or he switched his verbs with his nouns, and he polluted a few fairly common idiomatic expressions.
Ergo, Crusader Two wasn't a native speaker; he was someone for whom English was a second language.
I saw no dates on the messages, and no subject headings. Based on the themes and contents, however, the first thirty or so messages seemed to reference the same general time frame.
The initial messages from Crusader One kept Crusader Two abreast on events and moods inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the State Department, and occasionally within the White House. Certain figures were mentioned and discussed by name, a few of whom were famous and I recognized. The two names cited most frequently I definitely recognized: Hirschfield and Tigerman.
These particular references were usually in the form of relayed requests or orders from Tigerman and/or Hirschfield--for information, for insights, or imparting special instructions to Crusader Two. For example, one relayed an instruction from Hirschfield ordering Crusader Two to meet with two officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, and to put them into contact with various Shia authorities in