safe, no matter what the government wanted to believe. They did their best. It was a fairly tight system, and whenever a weakness was discovered, computer security experts were on the spot to fix it.
On her home computer, the personal e-mails sorted into one folder. Twenty-seven, which was a lot for her in one day. She frowned. She’d check them in a minute, but first she switched IDs and asked the computer to fetch her Oracle e-mails. Maybe they’d have something to help crack this code.
Oracle was a special computer system developed to track information gathered from FBI, CIA, NSA and military databases, to be then cross-checked and matched. Created in the days before Homeland Security, it had been developed to help avoid disasters like Pearl Harbor and the 1993 Trade Center bombing, events that might have been prevented had key information been shared between agencies.
Kim had been recruited through AA.gov, a Web site connecting Athena Academy grads and students. She assumed Oracle was run by someone within the school network, and she knew there were a handful of operatives in key organizations—such as Kim and her work with the NSA—but all were protected by a cloak of anonymity. No one knew the agents. No one outside of Oracle knew it existed. It worked beyond the map of security in the U.S. government.
After Homeland Security had been created, Oracle had theoretically become obsolete.
Theoretically.
In fact, Oracle had not disbanded because it provided a fail-safe for the other organizations. Although she didn’t know the particulars, she knew Oracle agents were able to get a fix on problems and provide evidence to thwart troublesome activities before the agencies involved were able to act. It was not infallible any more than any other device, but it helped prevent information from slipping between the cracks.
The folder for Oracle mail was labeled simply Delphi. It only received e-mail sporadically, and always from the same place. Tonight, it showed one new message.
Tonight, Kim fervently hoped for some information about Q-group, and she clicked on the folder. The e-mail read:
From: [email protected]
Subject: q’s
1. Intelligence reports Q’rajn definitely tied to Berzhaan. CIA has tracked operatives overseas. FBI reports activity within the United States, links to Berzhaan terrorist community.
2. Two names emerging in connection with current activities: Fathi bin Amin Mansour and Hafiz abu Malik Abd-Humam, both natives of Berzhaan. -Mansour is prodigiously intelligent. Advanced degrees from Oxford in chemical engineering and European history. Mother and two brothers killed in guerilla raids by the Kemini rebels four years ago, for which he holds the West responsible. He is connected to several bombings. His whereabouts are unknown. See attached photograph, taken in London, 2001.
-Abd-Humam is an associate of Mansour’s father, a professor without overt terrorist ties. Appears to be a devoted family man, religious but not overtly so. He has protested Western (particularly U.S.) involvement in Berzhaan politics and has written papers supporting self-determination for his country. His connection is not yet known. There are no known photos at this time.
Delphi
The attached photo showed a man in his early fifties, impeccably dressed in a dark business suit. His face was dominated by large, dark eyes and an intense expression, and Kim imagined that he generally received more than a cursory second glance from most women.
Kim copied the e-mail into a word-processing program, removed all header information and printed a copy. Then she destroyed the e-mail, both through the delete key and a more sophisticated function designed to erase it entirely from the hard drive. If she were investigated or hacked, there would be no trace of Oracle on her computer.
Taking the paper from the printer, she sipped her hot chocolate, thinking. Maybe the names themselves would offer a clue toward the code pattern.
Were there possibilities in the names? Abd-Humam was a common surname, but it had religious overtones: servant of the high-minded. Mansour was a very common name. She scowled, trying to remember. She was fluent in Arabic, as well as Italian, French, and—through a lovely triangle of events the year she was twelve—Navajo. But one didn’t remember everything.
With a pad of paper and a pencil, she scribbled more notes, played with possibilities, fixed the English, then the Arabic letters in her mind. Something for the wheels to spin around as she slept.
She rubbed her eyes wearily. Q’rajn was a very dangerous organization, as they’d proven more than once with all the usual—though no less horrifying—earmarks of fanaticism: suicide bombings and death threats and displays of bravado in villages across the Middle East. They always faded away before they could be captured, though the CIA had been lucky in nabbing a key player last summer. He’d not given up much information, but his background and connections had provided some genuine leads and links to terrorism in Berzhaan.
“Okay, let’s try something else,” she said aloud, and keyed in her code to open the work files, and ran sample lines from several e-mails through a mechanical translator: Arabic to English, English to Arabic. Arabic and English combined, one sentence in one language, the next every other word, the next the first language, just to see what might turn up.
Computers at the NSA were busy running the encrypted material—dozens of intercepted e-mails—through programs of various sorts, checking logarithms and structures and known patterns. It was also checking another series of possibilities that Kim had programmed.
Nothing so far.
She slumped in the chair and picked up a bottle of eyedrops from the desk. Leaning back, she dropped Visine into her dry eyes. The shift in position eased the tight muscles in her neck and she stayed there a minute, her chin pointed at the ceiling. Her eyes were closed. The room was quiet.
The agency was sometimes too crazy for her. At home there were no ringing phones, no jokes between members of the team, no one having a low, fierce argument with a spouse over a cell phone connection.
Around her, Kim heard only the breathing of her computers and above that a respectful female voice reading the headlines on the radio. It was the fourth time she’d heard the news since dinner, so she didn’t pay a lot of attention, but kept one ear open for anything new or notable. With such a blizzard of encoded e-mails, she was uneasy. Something was coming.
The newscaster said, “Fourteen people were killed when a train derailed near Munich this afternoon. A terrorist cell in the Sudan claimed responsibility.”
Kim straightened and growled at the radio, “Bastards.” All the innocents who had been slaughtered by terrorists the past couple of decades disturbed her. It was one of the reasons she’d wanted to work with codes in particular. By breaking them down, there was a chance she could stop violence before it happened.
Arabic and English sentences, written white on a black background, tumbled through her brain. What was she missing? It felt as if the key were just out of reach, just beyond her peripheral vision.
“Look to the middle of things,” said a voice in her memory. It was the voice of her first mentor, Arthur Tsosie, a Navajo who had served the United States as a code breaker in World War II.
Arthur had been stable master at the Athena Academy where Kim had gone as a shy and awkward twelve-year-old. Lonely away from her big family, but also determined not to let on that she wasn’t
