Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

There was silence down the phone, both of them as shocked as each other by what they had just heard. Maggie cracked first, feeling the urge to lighten the atmosphere. ‘So though it’s been really interesting hearing the views of your therapist, do you think you could ask him to put Liz Costello on the phone? There’s something I need to ask her.’

‘How long since you spoke to Uri?’

‘Liz! I’m serious. I wouldn’t be calling unless I needed your help. Now will you help me or not?’

There was another long pause. Maggie could hear Liz breathing. Slowly she heard the rhythm change, the breaths coming softer now. Then she heard the pop of a bedside light being switched on.

‘What do you need?’

Maggie explained the dead end she had hit: the Freenet software had worked, bringing her to the victorforbes.gov site, but it was a brick wall. She prayed that her sister would fall into her usual patter when resolving one of Maggie’s computer crises – ‘Go to the menu bar, find settings, then tools, click on…’ – firing off a series of arcane instructions that would instantly and mysteriously unlock the riddle.

Instead Liz responded with a grunted ‘hmm’. In anyone else, you could put that down to sibling fury that had not yet subsided or else to the ungodly hour. But Maggie knew – having grown up in a house where the fiercest rows could pass as quickly as a summer storm – that it meant only that Liz had been confronted by a technical conundrum.

A series of noises down the phone confirmed that Liz had fired up her computer. ‘If this wakes up Calum, I promise you, I won’t speak to you till our ma’s funeral.’

‘Liz! Don’t talk like that.’

‘All right, I’m in. Give me the URL again.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’ve gone to the dark side. Freenet. What was that bloke’s name, Victor something?’

A few keystrokes later and Liz was muttering again. ‘Creepylooking guy. So remind me, what are we doing here?’

Maggie explained that she was convinced that Forbes, an internet pioneer, had somehow stashed his blanket online with this defunct and subterranean website the likeliest hiding place.

‘But there’s nothing here, Mags. Just that picture. It’s your classic single-page site. Just a flag in the soil. You know, Forbes reserving that domain for himself.’

‘Are you sure? This really is my best shot.’

‘That’s the thing about the darkweb. It’s mainly full of crap. It’s like that place in the Pacific Ocean where all the plastic garbage ends up. This is probably just some site your man set up and forgot about.’

‘When was all that internet pioneering stuff going on?’

‘Early eighties. And the only people doing it were the American military, some academics and a few beardy-weirdy hippies.’

‘But this picture is more recent than that.’

‘OK, let’s say you’re right and this is not just some early-days experiment. It’s still just a picture. There’s nothing else.’

‘He was in the CIA, Liz. Couldn’t he have-’

‘Oh, that is so cool. Actually that is too cool.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, that is genius.’

‘What is? Liz?’

‘I’ve read about this, but didn’t think anyone did it. But if anyone did it, it would definitely have been him.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Maggie could hear a furious hammering of keystrokes down the phone.

‘When was this guy in the CIA again?’

‘From the eighties till a few years ago.’

‘Perfect. I so bet I’m right. Liz Costello, you may never have cracked breastfeeding but you have cracked this motherfucker.’

Liz’s excitement was infectious. For the first time in days, Maggie felt herself smile properly. The exertion of her facial muscles hurt, sending a streak of pain to the back of her skull, but she didn’t care.

‘Steganography, Maggie. Steganography.’ She was speaking fast and getting faster. ‘Easily the coolest encryption ever thought of. Instead of a code that everyone knows is a code – so they immediately start trying to break it – you conceal your information in such a way that no one even suspects there’s a message there. Only you and the recipient know. Security through obscurity.’

‘Liz, you’ve completely lost me.’

‘That program didn’t work. Don’t worry, there’s tons more.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’re the one who got the bloody A-levels in Latin and Greek. Have you forgotten?’

‘Every word.’

‘Steganography. Means concealed writing. It’s when a message seems to be something else entirely. So you think it’s a shopping list, but the real message is written between the lines – in invisible ink.’

‘But there’s nothing written here at all. It’s a picture.’

‘No one said it always had to be words. It can be anything. Some Persian tyrant once shaved the head of his most trusted slave, tattooed a message on his scalp, then waited for the hair to grow back and cover it up. Then he sent the slave off to his ally with instructions that, once he got there, he should shave off his hair and show them his head. Job done.’

‘So there are words hidden in this picture?’

‘That’s what I reckon.’

‘How the hell could he have done that?’

‘You don’t want to know, Maggie.’

‘Try me.’

‘Basically every pixel in a digital picture is made up of colour values, formed by strings of ones and zeroes. If you change one of those ones to a zero it will be invisible to the naked eye. The picture will still look the same. But all those little ones or zeroes you’ve changed can contain some extra information, besides the colours for the picture. You just need a program to piece it all together.’

Liz had been right: Maggie didn’t want to know. ‘So you reckon that’s what Forbes did to this picture?’

‘Yep. In the massive data of this picture, there’ll be a little parcel of hidden data. Just a few tweaks will have been enough. It’s not hard. Apparently al-Qaeda use it. You send a holiday snap; guys at the other end run it through a basic program and, bingo, you’ve got your instructions telling you to blow up the Statue of Liberty.’

Maggie winced. This was not the kind of thing to talk about on a phone line, not these days.

‘So is that what you’re doing, running it through a program?’

‘I am.’

‘Can I see?’

‘No.’ There was a pause. ‘Actually yes. I’ll remote access you.’

‘You’ll what?’

‘I’ll take over your computer and run it from here. Then you can see what I’m seeing.’

‘You can do that?’

‘Easily.’

‘Can anybody do that?’

‘Only if you give them all the info you’re about to give me.’

Methodically, Liz ordered Maggie around her computer telling her to open up System Preferences one moment, then to choose an option from the pull-down Tools menu the next – one baffling step after another. As far as Maggie was concerned, the entire process might as well have been black magic. And she couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that if Liz Costello, young mum in Dublin, could take control of her computer this easily so could those lurking in the dark who meant her only harm.

‘There,’ said Liz at last, invisibly moving the cursor around Maggie’s screen as if it were possessed by a demon. It was hovering over the photograph of Vic Forbes. ‘I’m on. And I think we may be in luck. You said he wanted this picture to be decoded, right?’

‘Yes, eventually.’

‘That’s why he’s gone for Mozaiq. Keep it mainstream.’

Maggie tried not to snort.

‘OK, here goes.’ Liz made a tum-tee-tum sound, the noise a tekkie makes when they’re waiting for a computer to perform a function. Eventually she said, ‘Oh. It’s encrypted.’