added to his personally compiled list? Bradley asked himself. Unquestionably, he concluded. Heâd read somewhere that knowledge was power, and he was going to emerge from all this with more power than anyone suspected.
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5
Jack Irvine got his cell alert halfway between Washington and the National Security Agencyâs 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. âWe followed it back through the cutout chainâall the way to Hydarnes.â
Irvine said, âWeâre in business!â
âWhatâs the significance of the domain name?â
âHydarnes was a legendary Persian warrior; for Persia now read Iran .â
âWhat ever happened to Hamid?â asked Singleton, remembering the domain name of Irvineâs first darknet interception.
âOne day he just wasnât there anymore.â
Under Marian Lowellâs supervision, the thirty-six-hour occupation of their assigned office following Irvineâs 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 teamâMarianâs marked by a vase of red bud rosesâtopped 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, âWhere are the others?â
âShabâs taking a trial algorithm run. Akram is on the Dual EC DRBG generator, trying a random-numbers search.â
âSo itâs a different encryption?â anticipated Irvine, turning back to Singleton.
âEverythingâs different. Islamabadâs no longer in the loop. Initial Halal routing this time was an encrypted text to Sanaâa. From Yemen the link went through darknet cutouts to a Facebook account in Baghdad.â Singleton paused. âAnd from Baghdad weâve lost it.â
âNo forwarding link?â
Singleton shook his head. âWeâre obviously embedded now in the Baghdad account, but thereâs been no onward activity. We only know itâs for al Aswamy because it originated from Vevak.â
âWhat about al Aswamyâs Facebook account at this end?â
Marian gestured towards the computer on her desk. âIâve had your botnet open from the start. Nothing.â
Irvine finally went to his desk, but sat on its corner, not the chair. âThe different routing is an obvious precaution, after the Anacostia ambush. I always expected it would start from Tehran: that weâd follow from there to any new account al Aswamy set up.â
âYou want coffee?â invited Marian from a Cona setup Irvine hadnât seen in the filing-cabinet corner of the room. Sheâd already poured two mugs and held the pot over the third.
Irvine nodded acceptance as Singleton said, âMaybe we blindsided ourselves. They could have switched to something else, human couriers or flash drives, for instance, like bin Laden used from Abbottabad.â
By we the man meant you, Irvine knew, taking the coffee from Marian. âI