The Cloud Collector

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Book: Read The Cloud Collector for Free Online
Authors: Brian Freemantle
added to his personally compiled list? Bradley asked himself. Unquestionably, he concluded. He’d read somewhere that knowledge was power, and he was going to emerge from all this with more power than anyone suspected.

 
    5
    Jack Irvine got his cell alert halfway between Washington and the National Security Agency’s installation at Fort Meade and was momentarily undecided between turning back or continuing. Calculating the next available turnaround intersection to be three miles farther on, he decided Meade was closer and kept driving.
    Burt Singleton was waiting in the foyer of the main building. ‘We followed it back through the cutout chain—all the way to Hydarnes.’
    Irvine said, ‘We’re in business!’
    â€˜What’s the significance of the domain name?’
    â€˜Hydarnes was a legendary Persian warrior; for Persia now read Iran .’
    â€˜What ever happened to Hamid?’ asked Singleton, remembering the domain name of Irvine’s first darknet interception.
    â€˜One day he just wasn’t there anymore.’
    Under Marian Lowell’s supervision, the thirty-six-hour occupation of their assigned office following Irvine’s formation briefing was only obvious from the newness of its furnishings. A wall-mounted selection of clocks showed world-time variations, from which daylight working times could be calculated. The display was above a cabinet-enclosed television, adjacent to another wall of filing cabinets, fax machines, photocopiers, transmission machines, and a separate scanner. A third wall was shelved almost to the ceiling: three racks were already filled with index-arranged mathematic, cipher, and encryption manuals in a range of Asian, Arabic, and Western languages, and another shelf was full of matching indexed dictionaries, idiomatic lexicons, and thesauruses. The only practical furniture was the individual desks for each member of the team—Marian’s marked by a vase of red bud roses—topped by the highest-powered NSA desktop computers, each with even larger mainframe connection capability. One of the fully operational desks, in the centre of the rest, was for Irvine, who ignored it.
    Instead he said to Marian, ‘Where are the others?’
    â€˜Shab’s taking a trial algorithm run. Akram is on the Dual EC DRBG generator, trying a random-numbers search.’
    â€˜So it’s a different encryption?’ anticipated Irvine, turning back to Singleton.
    â€˜Everything’s different. Islamabad’s no longer in the loop. Initial Halal routing this time was an encrypted text to Sana’a. From Yemen the link went through darknet cutouts to a Facebook account in Baghdad.’ Singleton paused. ‘And from Baghdad we’ve lost it.’
    â€˜No forwarding link?’
    Singleton shook his head. ‘We’re obviously embedded now in the Baghdad account, but there’s been no onward activity. We only know it’s for al Aswamy because it originated from Vevak.’
    â€˜What about al Aswamy’s Facebook account at this end?’
    Marian gestured towards the computer on her desk. ‘I’ve had your botnet open from the start. Nothing.’
    Irvine finally went to his desk, but sat on its corner, not the chair. ‘The different routing is an obvious precaution, after the Anacostia ambush. I always expected it would start from Tehran: that we’d follow from there to any new account al Aswamy set up.’
    â€˜You want coffee?’ invited Marian from a Cona setup Irvine hadn’t seen in the filing-cabinet corner of the room. She’d already poured two mugs and held the pot over the third.
    Irvine nodded acceptance as Singleton said, ‘Maybe we blindsided ourselves. They could have switched to something else, human couriers or flash drives, for instance, like bin Laden used from Abbottabad.’
    By we the man meant you, Irvine knew, taking the coffee from Marian. ‘I

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