Free The Intercept by Dick Wolf Page A

out his earphones released the tinny noise of human humping.
    “Dammit,” said Pearl, his keystrokes now coming in staccato bursts as the printer whirred to life across the bunker. “Distracted by tits and ass, was I. They always hide their steg in the porn. Fucking sunflowers.”
    Fisk’s eyes danced to each window popping up on the screen. “What are we seeing here?”
    “Okay,” Pearl began, like a lecturer on the first day of Intro to Steganography. “The trick to this thing is that both the sender and the receiver of any kind of code, cipher, or embedded message in an image have to know where to look. They need the combination. Now, OBL and his minions were definitely sending a lot of comm in the porn files, and we may find some seriously good intel there eventually. Or . . .”
    Fisk said, “Or maybe they were clogging up the porn with junk messages, static. Hiding the real message within a mosaic of nonsense ones.”
    Pearl pointed upward as though Fisk had just won an auction. “When you’ve got something special going, you designate a particular category of image, say tug jobs in the case of porn. Or you just start with something innocuous and new. In this case—pictures of sunflowers.”
    Pearl clicked through a stream of images of sunflower fields, potted sunflowers, sunflowers on bonnets, sunflowers in paintings by Van Gogh and Monet. He was also reading his output underneath.
    “Okay, these messages are embedded but also enciphered. Now, I’m not a cryppie, but I’m going to make an educated guess that this is a virtually unbreakable one-time-pad system. We’ll know more when they crunch the stuff at Meade, but this is sophisticated, random stuff. No doubt there will be several hundred people working on this tomorrow.”
    “No doubt,” said Geeseman, seeing the intel equivalent of dollar signs. “Let’s flash what you have directly to NSA. Right now.”
    “Easy enough,” said Fisk. “They’re regular digital files. Can fly right through the wires and airwaves just like anything else, once I offload them onto a clean drive.”
    “Gimme,” said Geeseman. “I’ll dispatch on the secure link from the comm station.”
    Fisk said, “Hold on, let him finish this. Let’s make sure we give Meade the entire package at once.”
    Pearl was nodding, like a jazz musician riding a particularly sweet groove.
    Geeseman exclaimed, “We’ve got Al-Qaeda by the fucking beard.”
    Fisk focused on the screen. “Anything, any kind of pattern at all. Location, people, methods . . .”
    Pearl said, “I really can’t read the code. But I can see this.”
    He keyed in a command, and the corner of one of the sunflower images blossomed on the screen to ten times its original size. Its provenance was clear. Fisk had been right. “Metropolitan Museum,” it read.
    Pearl said, “The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Don’t think that’s an accident.”
    Now it was Fisk’s turn to nod. “Bring it, fuckers. We’re on to you.”
    “Wait.”
    Fisk looked at the side of Pearl’s head. “What do you mean, wait?”
    Pearl continued to work his keyboard. “Oh, lookie here.”
    “Look at what?”
    Pearl said, “If this really is a one-time pad, somebody over at the NSA owes me a fruit basket.”
    Geeseman said, “Pearl, talk English.”
    “Those cryptanalysts better put me on their Christmas card list forever.” He stopped typing and turned. “Somebody screwed up and embedded one image in the clear.”
    Fisk’s eyes widened. “And with that, they can—”
    “Maybe crack the other messages. It’s a way in, at least. Don’t know if this was from or to bin Laden, but . . .”
    He clicked his mouse and a message appeared in a window on the screen:
    They must be made to believe that we repeat
    ourselves out of a desperation to act.

Chapter 13
    B y teardown time, Fisk was properly exhausted. No other finds topped the sunflower code discovery, currently being pored over stateside. The air