What are you talking about?
Im talking about you, Maggie. Im talking about this insane way you live. Always travelling to the back end of arsehole, always dodging bullets. Why do you do it, Mags?
I have a feeling youre about to tell me, Liz.
No, I really want to hear it from you. Go on. Tell me.
Liz, Im exhausted. Im in a shitty motel in the middle of nowhere. Im on my own. I hurt everywhere. I just need some help and Ive turned to my sister. Is that too much to ask?
I remember all the bullshit answers, Maggie. Saving the world, all that crap. Making life better for children in war zones, all that Miss World shite. But I dont believe a word of it. Maybe once, when you started. But now its something else.
Maggie could feel two competing emotions thudding through her veins, as if racing to reach her brain or her heart first. She had her money on anger, though sadness was not lagging far behind.
Go on, Dr Liz. Enlighten me.
Youre trying to make up for it, Maggie.
For what?
For, and now Maggie heard the first silent note of hesitation in what had, until then, been an unstoppable flow, for what you dont have. For the husband you dont have, for the boyfriends you dont have, for the-
And what else, Liz? What else am I fucking compensating for? What else dont I have?
But they both knew.
Thats why I reckon you phone me in the middle of the bloody night, Maggie. You want to wreck what I have because youre jealous.
That is NOT TRUE! The sound of her shout echoed around the motel room, making the walls ring. Of course Id love to have what you have a great husband, a lovely boy. But for reasons I cant sodding well be bothered to go into, I dont have that option right now. I do what I do because Im good at it. OK? I dont know how or why, but thats the way it is. All right? Thats the way I am. I tried it the other way writing memos and going to meetings and wearing a fucking suit and doing what youre meant to do but Im no good at it. Not the way Im good at this.
There was silence down the phone, both of them as shocked as each other by what they had just heard. Maggie cracked first, feeling the urge to lighten the atmosphere. So though its been really interesting hearing the views of your therapist, do you think you could ask him to put Liz Costello on the phone? Theres something I need to ask her.
How long since you spoke to Uri?
Liz! Im serious. I wouldnt be calling unless I needed your help. Now will you help me or not?
There was another long pause. Maggie could hear Liz breathing. Slowly she heard the rhythm change, the breaths coming softer now. Then she heard the pop of a bedside light being switched on.
What do you need?
Maggie explained the dead end she had hit: the Freenet software had worked, bringing her to the victorforbes.gov site, but it was a brick wall. She prayed that her sister would fall into her usual patter when resolving one of Maggies computer crises Go to the menu bar, find settings, then tools, click on firing off a series of arcane instructions that would instantly and mysteriously unlock the riddle.
Instead Liz responded with a grunted hmm. In anyone else, you could put that down to sibling fury that had not yet subsided or else to the ungodly hour. But Maggie knew having grown up in a house where the fiercest rows could pass as quickly as a summer storm that it meant only that Liz had been confronted by a technical conundrum.
A series of noises down the phone confirmed that Liz had fired up her computer. If this wakes up Calum, I promise you, I wont speak to you till our mas funeral.
Liz! Dont talk like that.
All right, Im in. Give me the URL again.
What are you doing?
Ive gone to the dark side. Freenet. What was that blokes name, Victor something?
A few keystrokes later and Liz was muttering again. Creepylooking guy. So remind me, what are we doing here?
Maggie explained that she was convinced that Forbes, an internet pioneer, had somehow stashed his blanket online with this defunct and subterranean website the likeliest hiding place.
But theres nothing here, Mags. Just that picture. Its your classic single-page site. Just a flag in the soil. You know, Forbes reserving that domain for himself.
Are you sure? This really is my best shot.
Thats the thing about the darkweb. Its mainly full of crap. Its like that place in the Pacific Ocean where all the plastic garbage ends up. This is probably just some site your man set up and forgot about.
When was all that internet pioneering stuff going on?
Early eighties. And the only people doing it were the American military, some academics and a few beardy-weirdy hippies.
But this picture is more recent than that.
OK, lets say youre right and this is not just some early-days experiment. Its still just a picture. Theres nothing else.
He was in the CIA, Liz. Couldnt he have-
Oh, that is so cool. Actually that is too cool.
What?
Oh, that is genius.
What is? Liz?
Ive read about this, but didnt think anyone did it. But if anyone did it, it would definitely have been him.
What are you talking about?
Maggie could hear a furious hammering of keystrokes down the phone.
When was this guy in the CIA again?
From the eighties till a few years ago.
Perfect. I so bet Im right. Liz Costello, you may never have cracked breastfeeding but you have cracked this motherfucker.
Lizs excitement was infectious. For the first time in days, Maggie felt herself smile properly. The exertion of her facial muscles hurt, sending a streak of pain to the back of her skull, but she didnt care.
Steganography, Maggie. Steganography. She was speaking fast and getting faster. Easily the coolest encryption ever thought of. Instead of a code that everyone knows is a code so they immediately start trying to break it you conceal your information in such a way that no one even suspects theres a message there. Only you and the recipient know. Security through obscurity.
Liz, youve completely lost me.
That program didnt work. Dont worry, theres tons more.
What are you talking about?
What are you talking about?
Youre the one who got the bloody A-levels in Latin and Greek. Have you forgotten?
Every word.
Steganography. Means concealed writing. Its when a message seems to be something else entirely. So you think its a shopping list, but the real message is written between the lines in invisible ink.
But theres nothing written here at all. Its a picture.
No one said it always had to be words. It can be anything. Some Persian tyrant once shaved the head of his most trusted slave, tattooed a message on his scalp, then waited for the hair to grow back and cover it up. Then he sent the slave off to his ally with instructions that, once he got there, he should shave off his hair and show them his head. Job done.
So there are words hidden in this picture?
Thats what I reckon.
How the hell could he have done that?
You dont want to know, Maggie.
Try me.
Basically every pixel in a digital picture is made up of colour values, formed by strings of ones and zeroes. If you change one of those ones to a zero it will be invisible to the naked eye. The picture will still look the same. But all those little ones or zeroes youve changed can contain some extra information, besides the colours for the picture. You just need a program to piece it all together.
Liz had been right: Maggie didnt want to know. So you reckon thats what Forbes did to this picture?
Yep. In the massive data of this picture, therell be a little parcel of hidden data. Just a few tweaks will have been enough. Its not hard. Apparently al-Qaeda use it. You send a holiday snap; guys at the other end run it through a basic program and, bingo, youve got your instructions telling you to blow up the Statue of Liberty.
Maggie winced. This was not the kind of thing to talk about on a phone line, not these days.
So is that what youre doing, running it through a program?
I am.
Can I see?
No. There was a pause. Actually yes. Ill remote access you.
Youll what?
Ill take over your computer and run it from here. Then you can see what Im seeing.
You can do that?
Easily.
Can anybody do that?
Only if you give them all the info youre about to give me.
Methodically, Liz ordered Maggie around her computer telling her to open up System Preferences one moment, then to choose an option from the pull-down Tools menu the next one baffling step after another. As far as Maggie was concerned, the entire process might as well have been black magic. And she couldnt shake the nagging feeling that if Liz Costello, young mum in Dublin, could take control of her computer this easily so could those lurking in the dark who meant her only harm.
There, said Liz at last, invisibly moving the cursor around Maggies screen as if it were possessed by a demon. It was hovering over the photograph of Vic Forbes. Im on. And I think we may be in luck. You said he wanted this picture to be decoded, right?
Yes, eventually.
Thats why hes gone for Mozaiq. Keep it mainstream.
Maggie tried not to snort.
OK, here goes. Liz made a tum-tee-tum sound, the noise a tekkie makes when theyre waiting for a computer to perform a function. Eventually she said, Oh. Its encrypted.
A box, familiar even to Maggie, had appeared in the middle of the screen, like a plaster across the bridge of Forbess nose. It demanded a password.
Let me do this, Liz.
Maggie breathed deep, closed her eyes and then allowed herself a second smile. This was Forbess blanket, the insurance policy he had designed to render futile any attempt to silence him, the mechanism that would ensure his deadliest information would surface whether he was dead or alive. Without hesitation, she typed in the twelve letters that, she felt certain, would unlock the code.
S-T-E-P-H-E-N-B-A-K-E-R
44
Washington, DC, Sunday March 26, 08.41
That you, Senator?
It is.
Honour to be speaking with you, sir. Sorry to be calling you at home on the weekend. Caught you before heading off to church?
You have. Rick Franklin took advantage of the recline mechanism on his chair, surveyed the view he enjoyed from this sixth-floor apartment in the Watergate and marvelled at the absurdity of Washington etiquette. Elected office always ensured formal deference, even from those who so clearly wielded greater power. So the two-bit chief executive of a nothing town would be hailed as Mr Mayor by the anchor of Good Morning America, even though on every measure of influence the genuflector outranked the genuflectee.