Déjà Vu: A Technothriller (22 page)

“So. The trail bike. Probably the same bike he used to ride away from the glider.”

“Yes.”

“OK. Back to last night. You said there was an accusation of rape? Subsequently falsified?”

“I came over the radio just as the officer was about to interview Proctor.”

“That is convenient. In Germany we say somebody has ‘cried wolf’.”

“Here too.”

“Who was the woman? Do we have any information about her?”

“No. She wouldn’t give her name. Anyway, she was just a kid. Truscott – the reporting officer – said she looked to be on the wrong side of ten.”

Saskia nodded slowly. Hannah said nothing and Saskia remained silent. Just before they reached the Special Incident Unit, Saskia said to him, “Scottie, if you had heard about this escape from a friend, what would you think? If you heard that this man had been pulled away from a hillside attached to a glider?”

“Me? Och, I’d say it was something out of a cartoon.”

Saskia felt a memory move, like a baby’s kick. “Me too.”

They had arrived.

David had reached the M1 and ridden steadily until Northallerton was far behind him. He had turned off and entered the countryside, a maze of lanes and high hedgerows. The lights of Sheffield coloured the western sky. He located a quiet ditch and rolled the bike to the bottom. He let it tip into the high nettles. He collapsed and lay against it with his head against the muffler for warmth. He opened his visor a fraction but did not remove the helmet. It was nearly 9 p.m. He closed his eyes and awoke eight hours later. The night had stolen his heat, his neck was stiff and he couldn’t look left. Morning mist rolled into the ditch. The sky was grey and close. Small birds sang. He lifted his helmet and shivered.

He defecated in the bushes, crouching and embarrassed though there was nobody for miles. He returned and opened the rucksack. The passport and driver’s licence were still there. Both were cards fitted with smart chips. The passport had an additional wallet with pages for immigration stamps. All the documents were in the name of Mr David Greenspoon. He was a nondescript, average-looking man in every sense. It would be as easy to copy his appearance as it would be difficult to remember it. Greenspoon’s birth date was David’s own, but there was no other biographical information, so David had invented his life story and memorised it.

He dropped the helmet over his head. He felt the warm, spongy interior and a moment of claustrophobia. He made his ears comfortable and tied the strap. He was tired. His eyes watered, though they felt dry, and his kidneys hurt. He pushed the bike up the bank but it was too heavy. They spent thirty seconds in an angry waltz.

“Fuck this,” he shouted. He jumped on, gunned the engine, and rocketed out like a good bunker shot. Birds flew from their nests in protest. They watched him tear down the road. They watched him return twenty minutes later for his rucksack.

Hannah led Saskia through the building. He stopped to talk to the occasional friend. Saskia did her job well. She acted with interest, smiled, ignored the sideways looks at Hannah. The SIU was on the third floor. They passed no uniformed officers. This was a division of the Criminal Investigation Division, who wore no uniforms.

Saskia learned that the hunt for Proctor had been divided into ‘cells’. One cell worked on one problem: a ‘line of enquiry’, in

CID terminology. Cells were forbidden to communicate laterally. This rankled with most officers. It smelled of bureaucracy. It tacitly questioned their loyalty and professionalism. Only nominated officers such as DI Hannah, acting as a liaison between CID and the Continental European FIB, were permitted an overview of the cells. The ‘geographic’ cells were involved in the investigation of the three crime scenes: South Parish Church, the glider landing area at Belford, and Proctor’s hotel at Northallerton. There were also a number of ‘abstract’ cells.

An abstract cell was working on the encrypted transmission that Proctor made prior to his appearance at the hotel. Saskia wanted to check their progress. The office was large and windowless. It was stunningly cold. Two coffee makers babbled away in a corner. Steam boiled from them like dry ice in a bad horror film. Saskia was surprised by their equipment. The computer displays were old CRT boxes. She remembered the state of the art equipment in her office: a voice controlled, social-interface computer with a parallel processing engine. Here, not one piece of equipment was less than fifteen years old. Apart from the coffee machine. Priorities.

Hannah clapped his hands. “Hello, boys and girls.”

The occupants turned in their chairs. One was a short, dark-skinned man with glasses. Another was a rather plump, attractive woman. The last was very tall man with his hair scraped into a ponytail. All of them wore coats. Saskia’s face was blankly benign, but a ponytail would never have been permitted at the FIB.

“Allow me introduce a liaison officer from Brussels –”

“Germany, originally,” she corrected, with a smile.

“ – called Detective Saskia Brandt.”

She raised a hand and waggled the fingers. Nothing happened. Eventually, the man with glasses offered a nod in reverse, as though he was pointing his chin at her. His expression was bovine. Nothing else happened.

“Who is in charge?” asked Saskia. This provoked a response.

“Me, Paul Besson,” said the man who had nodded. The others swivelled back to their consoles.

Hannah and Saskia walked over. She asked tersely, “So, have you decoded the transmission? Give me a report.”

“No we haven’t. It was a standard videophone transmission between here and America, possibly the West coast area or the Mid-West. It ran for about two minutes. There were two people involved.”

Hannah’s eyes were glassy. Saskia guessed that computing was not his forte. But was she an expert? Perhaps, because her next question was natural: “They were encrypted at source?”

“Yes,” said Besson. Abruptly, he became animated. “I know what you’re thinking: that Proctor’s side might have been picked up by a radio hack. They do listen.”

Besson mumbled. She had to remember what he said wait for her understanding to filter through. At length, Saskia said, “I am sure they do.”

“Let’s get some coffee and I’ll tell you about it,” Besson said. He stood up and walked over to one of the babbling machines. Saskia exchanged a glance with Hannah. Yes, his face said, he’s a maverick. Give him time.

Saskia remembered a nice English expression, but she had no opportunity to say it: Time is a luxury we cannot afford.

“Listen, Paul, we really appreciate this effort.”

“Not a problem, DI Hannah.”

They were standing by the machine. Saskia watched Besson make the coffee. He frowned with concentration. He seemed to be running through a mental checklist, picking up objects as they came to mind: cups, sugar, milk. Then she twigged. “You’re not with the police, are you, Paul?”

Besson gave her an owlish stare. “I was. Then I hit some trouble. I’m on a two-day release.”

Hannah put in, “He’s a non-profit hacker.”

“What did you do, Paul?” asked Saskia. He was pouring the coffee and his arm twitched. She wondered if interrupting him at such a crucial time had been a good idea.

“The multi-nationals,” Besson said to Saskia. He whispered it confidentially, as though that told her all she needed to know.

“The multi-nats?” she prompted. Besson nodded and handed her a coffee. He had added milk, but she sipped anyway.

“I diverted about a million dollars of their funds to various charities. African charities.” He added proudly, “I’m African.”

“Good for you,” she said, smiling.

Hannah grunted. It was an ambiguous noise, sarcastic or neutral depending on the listener. Besson thrust a mug of coffee at him so that some of it spilled onto the floor. It was black. “Thank you, Paul.”

“No problem.” Besson slurped the coffee and smacked his lips. He looked around. Then he remembered his report. “I was going to tell you about that transmission. You know anything about cryptography, Agent Brandt?”

“No,” she said.

“Fine.” He dropped his cup on a nearby desk to free his hands. They chopped and patted the air. “We’re talking English, right?”

“Right,” she said.

“In order for you to decode what I’m saying, you need to know the rules of English. By the same token, I need to know them too so that I can encode the message properly.” He made fists and shook them once. “The rules are the key. If they are wrong, then the message may only be partially understood. More likely it won’t be understood at all.”

“Fine so far.”

Besson looked into the distance for inspiration. In the pause, Saskia gave Hannah a little nod. They swapped coffees.

Saskia said, “Proctor’s transmission, Paul. Why is it so problematic?”

“Right,” Hannah interjected, “you can forget that name right now. I mean it.”

Besson folded his arms and giggled. “You did bad.”

Saskia looked defiantly at them both. “I do not agree with your superiors’ policy. And they have no control over my behaviour.”

“I like your attitude, Agent Brandt,” Besson said.

“All the same,” said Hannah, “we’ll keep things on a need-toknow basis where possible.”

Besson’s smile faded. His mind had already returned to his briefing on cryptography. “You see,” he said, “simple secret codes that apply the same rule to each letter, one after the other, are very old, and not so good because they can be easily cracked. The Romans and the Ancient Egyptians used those kinds of schemes, or ‘ciphers’. Because they are regularly applied to the same document, they lead to regularities in the product – the coded transmission. That is, any intercepted message will contain clues about the cipher, even when it appears to be scrambled. Proctor’s transmission doesn’t used that method. We’d have been surprised if it did.” Besson gestured to the other people in the room. “We would have cracked it before now.” He smiled and clicked his fingers. “Do you remember the Enigma code?”

Saskia frowned and looked at Hannah. He shook his head. “No,” she said.

“The Germans used it to encode military transmissions during the Second World War. The cool thing about the Enigma cipher was that it changed itself with each letter of the transmission. The odds against breaking it were 150 million million million to one. But it was cracked.”

“How?” asked Hannah.

“Simple. It was systematic. It was predictable. With modern computers we could break it easily. But if there is no system, then there is a real problem. I have a feeling that Proctor’s code falls into that category. I think it’s a one-time pad. Unbreakable.”

Hannah raked a hand through his grey hair. “Come on, how can it be unbreakable?”

“Easy. Just remove the systematicity.”

“What?” asked Saskia.

“We get rid of the pattern. Without the pattern, the chances of breaking the code are nearly zero. It would be like rolling a million dice and getting a six every time. I mean, really low. Unlike the Enigma code, there is no system behind it. That means it’s unpredictable. With Enigma, if you could work out the starting arrangement of the connecting wires and the position of the rotors on the machine itself, the cipher would be entirely predictable from then on. But the method we’re using here, a one-time pad, has no pattern. The sender has a copy of the huge cipher booklet needed to encode a message, and the receiver has a copy. Once used, they are never used again. Unbreakable.”

Hannah adjusted his tie. “Let’s just hope there was nothing important in the transmission, then.”

Saskia shook her head. “No. I think that message is vitally important.”

Hannah opened his mouth then shut it again. He took her elbow and walked her away from Besson, who looked at his shoes. “Why?” he asked.

“Proctor gets a call moments before he walks into the West Lothian Centre with a bomb. Did he receive instructions? Or was it the last message of a man who expected to die? In either case, we must know the person he was talking to. There is good chance that the second party will have arranged his escape. Perhaps they are waiting for him.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“It feels right.”

“That ‘gut instinct’ of yours?”

“Yes.” She smiled and called Besson over. “You say it is unbreakable. I want you break it. It is critical to the investigation.”

Besson trembled “’Kay,” he said.

They used four computers simultaneously. Though each had a CRT monitor, the computers were not as elderly as Saskia had feared. They had processing chips arranged in parallel so that, as a group, they could perform a huge number of calculations in a fraction of the time. “Of course,” said Besson, “it will take a vast number of calculations to test a single cipher. We just don’t know. Right now the computers are trying random combinations. We could sit here for years.”

“Yes,” Saskia agreed. “You said that the one-time pad would be a large list of numbers.”

“If we were talking about a text message it would be large. But we’re talking about a broadband audio-video transmission: good quality visual image which changes twenty-five frames a second, and two sound tracks. That’s before we even consider the format.”

“Format?”

“Format. If we get it wrong, it would be like mixing up the metric system with imperial. Even if we cracked the cipher, we wouldn’t know it was right.”

“So the list of numbers for the cipher would be very large. What if Proctor used…a telephone book?”

Besson pouted thoughtfully. He shrugged. “That would be a start. But telephone books are systematic and have a limited range of possible numbers. When you limit the range, you limit the complexity, and you make it easier for a cracker.”

Hannah sighed. “Listen, people,” he said. “We’re not talking about Nazi HQ sending out the order to fire torpedoes.”

Saskia nodded and sipped her coffee. “Yes. Good idea. Let us wriggle this through.”

“Hello?” asked Hannah testily.

“I mean, let us work it out by returning to the facts. Firstly, Proctor is not a criminal in the classic sense. I mean, he has a criminal objective but, like most terrorists, he is likely to be politically or otherwise principled.”