Genocide of One: A Thriller (26 page)

“Nous’s present intellectual ability?”

“Exactly. Judging from the intercepted e-mail sent by Pierce, it’s reasonable to assume
that his increase in brain capacity was limited to the cerebral neocortex.”

“There’s a lot we don’t know about the robustness of brain development,” Gardner said,
and sighed. “Didn’t it say that his forehead was particularly developed?”

“Yes.”

“Since higher-order psychological activity is concentrated in the frontal lobes, it’s
best not to underestimate what he’s capable of.”

“So we should assume the maximum.”

“That would be my advice.”

They ended up using the difference between human intelligence and chimpanzee intelligence
as the standard. Because Nous was three years old, the assumption was that he was
as intelligent as an adult human.

“In that case it’s going to be a well-matched contest,” Gardner said, as if he had
found a worthy chess opponent.

Once the operation was actually up and running, Rubens immediately set out controlling
access to the information related to it. Through the Information Security Oversight
Office, he had the Heisman Report in the National Archives classified as secret. He
then had all websites that mentioned the report erased and ordered the NSA to tamper
with search engines so they wouldn’t pull up the term.

Operation Nemesis started out smoothly, but as preparations went ahead a disquieting
mood settled over the command center. The greatest difficulty facing them was the
selection of the operatives to be sent to the Congo jungle.

Harry Eldridge, assistant secretary of defense and official director of the operation,
relayed the wishes of the White House to Rubens. “Include Warren Garrett, a CIA paramilitary
operative. He’ll monitor the operation on the ground.”

Rubens was surprised. “You want an OGA employee in the operation?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re sure it’s okay?”

Eldridge frowned. “That’s what the higher-ups tell me.”

The reason for this was only given on a need-to-know basis, so Rubens didn’t find
out, though it was clear that the Burns administration wanted to eliminate this Garrett.

For the remaining three operatives Eldridge used his connections with private defense
contractors to come up with a list of likely people. But one after another, these
candidates, who were operating in Iraq, were killed in enemy attacks. Each time, the
list was revised, until finally they came up with a mixed bag of candidates—one former
army Special Forces, one former air force pararescue, and a Japanese who had served
in the French Foreign Legion. The men were technically competent enough, but Rubens
had questions about the disposition of Jonathan Yeager, the former Green Beret. The
background check showed he had a son who was suffering from a chronic disease and
didn’t have much time left to live. In unfortunate cases like this close relatives
often had inner self-destructive urges, and Rubens was afraid that under the strains
of a physically demanding assignment he might fall apart.

Afterward a totally unexpected situation developed regarding the problem of Yeager’s
child. The NSA was the first to give them the information. A computer in Japan had
run a search on the term
Heisman Report.
When Rubens saw the name of the person the NSA identified as initiating the search,
he couldn’t believe his eyes.

Seiji Koga
.

The same scholar who had been on the epidemiology investigation looking into viral
infections among the Mbuti. But why would he be interested in the Heisman Report?
It had to be more than a coincidence. The warning in the Heisman Report was, after
all, the basis for Operation Nemesis and the plan to murder all forty members of the
Kanga band.

In the worst-case scenario, the secret was leaked. They did a follow-up investigation
and found something quite unexpected. At the same time Dr. Koga visited Zaire, in
1996, Nigel Pierce was staying at the Mbuti camp. It was very likely they knew each
other. But there was no proof that they kept in touch after the civil war broke out
and they both returned home.

The CIA and NSA monitored Seiji Koga. NSA intercepted all his communications. Though
they didn’t find anything that confirmed their suspicions, their report to Rubens
did perplex him. It turned out that encrypted e-mails were being sent back and forth
between the eastern Congo and Japan.

When Rubens was told, “We don’t know the sender or recipient, and it’s impossible
to decrypt the messages,” he questioned the NSA liaison. “You can intercept the e-mails
but can’t tell who sent them?”

“Correct. This correspondence uses a unique transmission protocol. They’ve made their
own private communications network.”

“But wouldn’t they still need an IP address? If you check with the Japanese providers
you should be able to find out.”

“Already done. But the person who made the contract with the provider is missing.”

“What do you mean?”

The liaison gave him a report from the Japanese domestic antiterrorism unit, section
3 of the Metropolitan Police Department Public Security Bureau. “The person who made
the contract is someone who had huge debts and disappeared more than ten years ago.
Local police believe someone bought this missing person’s
koseki
—official family record—and, posing as that person, obtained the IP address. Apparently
criminals involved in fraud often buy and sell these
koseki
.”

“The address given in the contract was an apartment in a cheap building in northern
Tokyo, but there was no sign that anyone lived there. The lease for the apartment
was in the same name as the one who contracted with the Internet provider, and it’s
impossible to know who’s really behind it.”

“What about the Congo? Who contracted with the satellite communications service they
used to send the messages?”

“It’s the same Japanese name.”

Rubens considered this. Were these encrypted messages between Seiji Koga and Nigel
Pierce? If so, what was the purpose? “The NSA doesn’t know what the content of the
message is, either?”

“We don’t. The encryption technology is neither RSA nor AES. There’s a high possibility
it’s a one-time pad code.”

Rubens knew what he meant. The unciphered text was encoded, one letter at a time,
using a one-time pad, or key, based on a preset random number sequence. It had been
proven mathematically that this type of encryption was impossible to break. This method
wasn’t often used because of a practical problem—both the sender and receiver needed
to share a common, huge random number sequence beforehand. These days one-time pad
encryption was used only in the hot line linking the United States with Russian presidents.
The computers used for the encrypted messages between the Congo and Japan must already
have the encoding system integrated into them. The random number sequences used to
both encrypt and decrypt the messages must have already been stored in the hard drives.
The only way to break them was to get hold of those random number sequences.

“Can’t you hack into the computers?”

“We tried, but it was no go.”

There are computers the NSA can’t hack into? Rubens was startled to learn this.

“I’d like to add one more task for Operation Guardian,” the liaison said. “I want
them to confiscate Pierce’s computer. Once we extract the random number sequence from
the computer, we can read any message sent on it.”

“Sounds good,” Rubens said, approving the addition to the mission. It didn’t matter
much, for he knew that Operation Guardian was destined to be halted at the last minute.

The operation had already experienced a series of unfortunate setbacks, and he was
beginning to suspect that Nous’s intellect was behind it all. Though at this point
he couldn’t say for sure. The enemy’s methods were ingenious, but a person with the
right background should be able to plan for them.

“To get back to what we were talking about,” the liaison said. “If we have the FBI
mobilize the Japanese police, we can get the contract with the provider canceled.
What should we do?”

Rubens agreed. Unless they eliminated any uncertainties, the mission could spin out
of control. “Do it,” he said.

A few days later Rubens received an update. Soon after they took away the IP address
that had been assigned to the missing person, the coded messages between the Congo
and Japan started up again. They were using an IP address under another name now.
Rubens understood how they’d blown it. Not only had they failed to stop the transmissions,
they’d also alerted their opponent to their presence.

“Should we try again?”

“No; it’ll just be a repeat. Continue intercepting the messages and do your best to
decipher them.”

What could be happening in the Congo and Japan? To grasp the big picture, Rubens initiated
not just SIGINT—signals intelligence—but HUMINT, human intelligence. He ordered the
CIA’s Tokyo office, part of the US embassy, to recruit a local covert operative. He
wanted to know everything there was to know about the background of this virologist,
Seiji Koga. The CIA compiled a list of everyone connected with Dr. Koga, and the NSA
wiretapped all their communications and selected one person who was having an extramarital
affair. Using a carrot-and-stick approach—money as the carrot and proof of the affair
as the stick—they persuaded this individual to cooperate. The code name of the operation
was based on the profession of the operative, Scientist.

But as soon as Scientist set out to investigate, Dr. Koga died suddenly of an aneurysm.
There was no question it was a natural death. The only task left was to confiscate
the computers he left behind. The random number sequence that could decipher the messages
he and Pierce had exchanged should still be in the hard drive.

Right then the Echelon wiretap network had a new catch. Another person was searching
for the term
Heisman Report
online. That person was Seiji Koga’s son, Kento Koga. And this young grad student’s
actions were even more suspect. He’d started searching online for information on the
incurable disease known as pulmonary alveolar epithelial cell sclerosis—none other
than the genetic disease that Jonathan Yeager’s son was suffering from.

The connection between the Congo and Japan that was about to be severed by Dr. Koga’s
death seemed to have been passed down to his son. The intel that the NSA had intercepted
under its GAMMA classification level told this story.

Open the book you dropped a Popsicle on.

This was a message that Seiji Koga sent to his son via an automated program after
his death. Dr. Koga must have anticipated a situation in which the Japanese police
would stop one of the servers and take him into custody. The key to this short instruction
could be found in a book that only this father and son knew about and in the message
no doubt hidden inside it. Dr. Koga had foreseen the risk of electronic eavesdropping
and had resorted to a simple but effective counterespionage method.

What Rubens couldn’t understand were the son’s actions. He’d blithely accessed the
Internet, totally ignoring the possibility that he might be under surveillance by
the NSA. And when Scientist was sent to approach him, the report came back that the
son probably didn’t know anything about his father’s activities while he was still
alive.

Rubens accepted this, which led him to make his second mistake. The goals of the operatives
in Japan now centered on the computers Dr. Koga had left behind, and local police
were sent to confiscate them, but just before they could someone had called Kento’s
phone to warn him. Surprisingly, this was a computer-generated voice sent from a public
phone in New York. So there was someone helping Kento in America as well. The upshot
was that Kento Koga shook off the police and escaped.

At this point Rubens was sure of one thing. Secret information on Operation Nemesis
was being leaked, and some unidentified group linking the three countries—the Congo,
the United States, and Japan—was, for reasons unknown, illegally accessing the intel.
But he still couldn’t fathom the group’s motive. Maybe they wanted to save the lives
of Nigel Pierce and Nous, but they’d done nothing to prevent the attack by the four
mercenaries. Pygmies, with their primitive hunting weapons, were no match for the
firepower of four former elite troops. Even if they were to escape, the Ituri region
was filled with armed insurgents lying in wait. Survival was out of the question.

While all this was going on, Operation Guardian was steadily under way in Africa.
The four operatives had completed their training, infiltrated the war zone in eastern
Congo, and closed in on the area near the Kanga band’s camp.

Despite these security concerns, Rubens believed the operation was still under control.
The plan to assassinate Nous would succeed. Then all that would be left was, at the
last minute, to change part of the strategy so that all the other people would not
be eliminated, too.

And now…

It was 9:00 p.m. EST in the United States, 3:00 a.m. in the Democratic Republic of
the Congo.

Operation Guardian was entering its final phase.

Along with the other six staff members still in the Office of Special Planning, Rubens
was staring at the large screen that covered one wall. On it was a live feed from
the military reconnaissance satellite in orbit over the Congo. The superzoom lens
flattened out the image of the Kanga band camp as though it were a monochrome floor
plan. Infrared sensors picked up body heat from whatever it photographed, and the
objects appeared in gradations of white and black.

Eleven huts were arranged in a U shape. Some of the leaves covering the roofs were
sparse, and the interiors were visible. Because of their body heat, the silhouettes
of the people sleeping inside rose up whitely.

What made the images from this highest-security feed look kind of silly were that
the images of the four Operation Guardian operatives running surveillance on their
targets were on the same screen. There were two each on the north and south sides
of the camp. These bodies, radiating their 98.6-degree heat, had not moved for hours
as they watched the Mbuti. Rubens felt as though he were watching children intent
on a game of hide-and-seek.