Cara Black: AL06 - Murder in Montmartre

“Like a satellite,” he said. “And say I had a satellite, the Faraday cage poses a problem.”

“Like a cage for tigers?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” he said.

“Where’s this Faraday cage?”

Saj tied back his dreadlocks with an elastic band. “Far as I know, it’s at the same facility as the parabola satellite dishes. Would have to be to access the feed.” He pointed to his screen. “See, e-mails, land lines, cell-phone conversations, and faxes are beamed in a stream of data. Satellites in a geosynchronous and a polar orbit receive this data, then transmit it back in a continuous sequence of bits, downlinking the raw stream of data to a dish or to antennas on land. This data feed’s piped from the antenna into the Faraday cage for deciphering. Inside the cage, a program picks out key and sensitive words and encrypts them, then sends the encrypted info on, via fiber optics, a protected radio network, or a disc.”

“Why not by e-mail?”

“Not safe, unless you use a cipher and have a key at the other end.”

Plucking words out of the ether, then sorting them and making sense of them. She stood and paced in the room. A suffused weak winter light shrouded the pear tree below in the courtyard.

“Rumor has it Frenchelon processes two million phone calls, faxes, and e-mails worldwide each month,” she said. “Maybe more. It even tracks individual bank accounts. Or so they say.”

Saj nodded. “The genius lies in the Faraday cage’s banks of computers that are programmed to recognize key words.” He rolled his neck from side to side.

“Like addresses, phone numbers surveilled by the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure ; embassies, foreign ministers, multinational corporations, and suspected agents?”

Saj nodded. “The system records and transmits them for analysis. La routine , they call it. What doesn’t turn out to be relevant is thrown into the information garbage can.”

“So Frenchelon transmits encrypted data of these e-mails, faxes, and phone conversations, filtered and sorted by key words, to where?”

He shrugged. “The analysis hub could exist anywhere.”

She leaned forward, deep in thought. His explanation made her determined to get an Inmarsat satellite phone, which would be harder to intercept since it used its own three satellites. She had known about the Central d’Écoute Téléphonique central listening center under Les Invalides where tapped phone lines were monitored by the judiciare and military. But only under authorization by the president at Matignon Palace. Or so the story went. This was far more all-encompassing.

“How would a criminal get into Big Ears?” she asked.

He paused. “Easiest thing would be to get the cipher key, depends how often they change it—once a day, once a week on Thursday, or whatever—tap into the microwaves, and—”

“Sell the feed and the key to the highest bidder,” she said, her eyes lighting up, “like a renegade terrorist group.”

What if Jacques had stumbled onto the cipher key involving the Corsican Separatists? But how would Jacques, a flic in the eighteenth, have access to a high-security agency leak?

Thoughts whirled through her head: Jacques gambled, he moonlighted for Zette—who operated illegal gambling machines in his bar—escorting “VIPs”. Maybe VIPs did slum in Montmartre at Zette’s. Maybe Zette had told her the truth and it was some security dweeb whom Jacques had squired around who had info to share. But why would he spill his guts to Jacques, a flic ? Correction, a bent flic . But selling classified encrypted data to Corsican Separatists was another league altogether, a whole other division. The connection to Jacques remained muddled at best.

She opened the file on her laptop that she’d copied from STIC and combed through Jacques Gagnard’s data. Two minutes later she’d found it. Stupid. She should have checked before. He’d served in the military at Solenzara and been discharged for misconduct. Gambling? It had been six years ago. Selling the missing arms? But those infusions of cash to his bank account were recent.

“What’s going on in that spiky-haired head of yours?”

“Illegal thoughts.” She gave him a big smile. “Finish up the pakoras and show me the Frenchelon sites.”

“Look, I hack and crack, do encryption. What kind of job is this?”

“A big one. Can you highlight the possible hubs in France or, better still, refine the target to the Paris area?”

“Check this out,” Saj said. “Outside Paris, in the suburb of Alluets-le-Roi, the DGSE have a big installation of parabolas and antennas,” Saj said, pulling up an e-mail. “But according to my friend, they handle intercepted communications right here in Paris, too.”

“Where?” Aimée stood up.

“La piscine ,” he said.

“At a pool?”

“That’s what they call it. It’s on Boulevard Mortier, right behind the public pool.” He meant the military caserne in Belleville bordering the Périphérique ring road, a nineteenth-century barracks once, the home of the 104th corps of Le Mâns.

“So, in theory, a data-encryption leak would come from there?”

Saj gave a small smile. “Bound and determined to connect this, eh?”

They were getting closer, she sensed it. Smelled it. Not just smoke, but sparks she could fan into a fire.

“Put it this way,” she said. “What would you do, Saj, if you had skills and access to this encrypted data and a hidden agenda, say, selling military and ministerial documents, plans for Corsica? Or stolen arms?”

“The best plans, the ones that work, are real simple,” he said.

“Simple? So tell me simple.”

An idea formed in her mind as he spoke. Had Jacques known who was furnishing the arms? Or how?

“The ideal? A hardware guy, probably an outside consultant, since the military hasn’t trained enough of them yet. Or maybe he’s part of the team that set up the system, or installed a satellite communication fiber optic line, for example. He knows the hardware since he’s installed it or designed it. He knows the vulnerabilities. One day something fizzes and, doing repairs or system analysis, he realizes this whatever is a back-door access to valuable data. Maybe for only so many hours, or period of time, or maybe he can engineer an open door for an hour once a week. And he sells this stream.”

A genius, Saj was a genius!

“A back door, of course! What about the cipher key?”

“Good point. No one can read the data without the key. That’s the money part, reading it. Say he provides the cipher key for a price, but it’s only good once. They change them constantly.”

If Saj could think like this, chances were someone else had, too.

She handed Saj the printout from Nathalie’s file.

“Like this?”

Saj scanned the printout, gave a low whistle. “Let me work on this. You’ve got a devious little mind, Aimée,” he said, clicking away nonstop.

“As they say, ‘Takes one to know one.’” She picked up her bag. Time to do the footwork. “Call me when you find something.”

AIMÉE TOOK the Metro to station Guy Moquet, named for a seventeen-year-old Communist Résistance fighter. She paused on the platform and saw the copy of his last letter, dated 1943, from prison, behind a glass plaque. Seventeen years old. The lines that stuck in her head were his only worry being that he might have died in vain. What would he think now, if he’d lived?

She tried Cloclo. No answer. She climbed the Metro steps into the bone-chilling air. She bent against the wind climbing rue Lamarck, passed a parking garage, a funeral parlor, a small instrument shop from which a man was carrying a violin case, a shoemaker with miniature porcelain shoes filling his tall window. Reaching Place Froment, she confronted six small streets intersected by a kidney-shaped island facing a café under a red sign reading TABAC. Opposite nestled a motorcycle riding school, a bakery, its glass panels painted with fading belle époque threshing scenes, a hip resto, and a pharmacy with a lighted green neon cross above its window. A bourgeois enclave. Had Conari been wrong? Had she wasted a trip?