Free Borderless Deceit by Adrian de Hoog

containers full, heading there via Georgia and Turkey. ETA eleven days from today.”
    For months I had been piecing together this operation’s details. The starting point was happenstance, serendipity, a lucky correlation of people, times and places. I had put a French perfume manufacturer under surveillance. He owned an estate on an island in Georgian Bay. I was also keeping an eye on a Mongolian fireworks designer whose uncle owned hotels in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. The uncle too had a cottage – on that same Georgian Bay island. The two summer residences were in spitting distance from each other. My interest was piqued when a Turkish freight forwarder entered Canada three times over a period of six weeks, declaring each time that he was a tourist, yet only staying two days. This showed up in the routine computer searches of custom entry forms and airline passenger departure data. As always, it generated an anomaly tag. For the Turk’s fourth visit the tag triggered my computer alarm when he boarded a flight at Charles de Gaulle airport for Toronto. By the time he landed I had initiated tracking procedures. A small device was inserted behind the hinge of his suitcase before he collected it from the Toronto airport luggage carousal. From there satellites monitored his movements minutely. He stayed at the Frenchman’s cottage one night and the Mongolian’s the next. As if on cue, as if predictable, in the coming months all three met twice more, in Tbilisi, Georgia. Databases were combed; more contacts came to light. For example, meetings had been arranged by the perfume manufacturer with arms dealers in Paris. Then the Mongolian travelled to Islamabad to meet a small group of Iranians, and then these Iranians journeyed to Istanbul to meet the Turk. A full picture was emerging. I had been with the Frenchman, Mongolian and Turk every inch of the way for more than a year; we were close to the end.
    â€œThe land route through Turkey isn’t fast,” I briefed Hugh-S, “but if the stretch from Erzurum across the border to Tabriz goes smoothly we’ll know there’s complicity by Turkish government officials.”
    Hugh-S was listening with concentrated silence. “Oughtta get a posse ready to ride on out. Can you send me the co-ordinates on the containers and the routing?”
    No problem. Unlike Beausejour I didn’t store my information on network servers. I kept my files on removable storage devices. Two were necessary to get at my information, a double key approach. But even if an outsider acquired both and studied them, the information wouldn’t appear sensitive because I had my own process for hiding things, an approach based less on encryption and more on illusion. One removable device, such as a memory stick, might have files on it containing a series of essays, say, on ornithology, whereas the second device could contain an anthology of First World War poetry (“In Flanders Fields,” for example). Even if both devices fell into the wrong hands, the scrutinizers of my data would think the items were trivial, representing my personal interests. Only if both the essays and the poems were viewed simultaneously by a computer using a complex word and letter filtering program with a unique key would the sensitive information come out. The process could be likened to having two transparencies, one of a landscape, for example, and the other of a crowd scene. When superimposed such transparencies produce a third image if light falls through both. Only I was able to get at that third image which represented my data. So Hugh-S could have the container co-ordinates. But with the Service network down the information would have to be handed over
en clair
, and that was something I would want to do personally.
    He was instantly accommodating. “Sure. Someone’ll skedaddle on up. Guess we gotta bone up on some ancient rules though.” By this Hugh-S meant the