Afraid of the Dark

Chapter Fifty-three

The hotel suite was quiet, but Jack and Vince were not alone. Jack’s computer was on the desk, the LCD aglow with a live video feed from across the ocean. Chuck Mays was connected by webcam. Jack positioned himself in front of the built-in camera on his laptop so that Chuck could see him back in Miami. Vince sat off to the side in the armchair, close enough to hear Chuck’s voice on the speaker.

“Project Round Up is by far the most important work I’ve ever done,” said Chuck, his mouth moving a second or two behind the words, “even though I’ll never make a dime from it.”

“You’re doing this for free?” said Jack.

“This isn’t about money,” said Chuck.

Jack glanced at Vince, then back at the screen. “Exactly what is it about?”

Chuck paused. He wasn’t happy about it, but Vince had convinced him that the only way to make up for the way he’d treated Jack was to share the details of his prized project.

“It’s about catching criminals on the Internet,” said Chuck.

“Terrorists?”

“Worse.”

It took only a moment for Jack to conjure up images of those newsmagazine shows on television where fifty-year-old men meet teenage girls on the Internet and show up naked at their door only to find a camera crew waiting in the kitchen. “Pedophiles?”

“Even worse,” said Chuck.

“Worse than a pedophile” was a short list in anyone’s universe, but Jack had met and even defended them on death row. Chuck spelled it out:

“We’re talking about the sick bastards who not only savage the endangered runaways you see on the back of milk cartons, but who share their homemade videos over the Internet.”

Jack bristled at the thought. “That’s not at all what I expected Project Round Up to be.”

“You were thinking terrorism, I presume.”

“How else can you explain how Jamal ended up in Gitmo?”

“Let me rephrase your question,” said Chuck, “and you can probably answer it: What do terrorists and pedophiles have in common?”

Vince chimed in. “You mean other than the fact that they should both have their balls dipped in honey and fed to fire ants? Skip the guessing game, Chuck. A little history on Project Round Up might be helpful to Jack.”

“All right, here’s the quick version,” said Chuck. “Two months after the 9/11 attacks, Italian police raided a mosque in Milan and, to their surprise, found computers filled with images of sexually abused children. Five years later, British antiterrorism police focused on a preacher at the East London Mosque who also happened to be a former Mujahideen. They couldn’t get enough to convict him on terrorism charges, but again, police were shocked to find computerized images of hard-core child pornography. Fast-forward another couple of years, again in the U.K. A Nazi sympathizer was convicted on terrorism charges, and police found thirty-nine thousand indecent images of children at his flat in Yorkshire. I could go on, but the question is obvious: Were all these terrorists into the exploitation of children for personal gratification? Or was something else involved?”

“My guess is that the ‘something else’ would be encryption,” said Jack.

“You got it,” said Chuck. “The first reports out of the London Times were about terrorists encoding secret messages in the digital images of child pornography.”

“That seems really stupid,” said Jack, “considering all of the scrutiny it gets from law enforcement. Seems like it would be a much better idea to hide messages in pictures of cookware or something else random and off the radar.”

“Exactly,” said Chuck. “My take was that it wasn’t steganography-terrorists embedding messages in child porn. It was terrorists learning about encryption by studying the way online pedophiles traded files in peer-to-peer networks. That was when it hit me: If terrorists could go to school on these guys, so could I. Project Round Up was born.”

Jack knew about P2P, but something was missing. “I’m still not clear on what your project is,” said Jack.

“Show him,” said Vince.

Chuck nodded readily, as if the initial reluctance to share his work had faded. In fact, he seemed proud of what he was doing, almost eager to be able to demonstrate it. “Keep your eyes on the screen,” he said.

Jack braced himself, fearful that the horrific image of a pedophile’s work might appear. Instead, the image of Chuck’s face blinked off the screen, and it was replaced by a map of south Florida. A red dot appeared over a street on Key Biscayne.

“The dot on the screen marks the address of a convicted sexual predator who traded on the P2P network,” said Chuck.

“That’s less than a mile from my house,” said Jack.

“That’s why I chose it. Kind of brings it home, doesn’t it?”

“He was trading child pornography?” said Jack.

“Not just trading. He created it. What I’m going to show you is the digital version of time-lapsed photography. You’re looking at zero-hour for the launch of one of his video files. The first trade.”

There was a blip on the screen, and the map enlarged from south Florida to the eastern United States. A second dot appeared over Richmond, Virginia.

“Is it that easy to track P2P trades?”

“If you know what you’re looking for. Watch what happens twenty minutes later.”

The map grew again, now showing the entire United States. Jack counted six dots, one as far away as Oregon.

“Two hours later,” said Chuck, and suddenly there were several dozen dots spread across North America. “Four hours,” said Chuck, and the map stretched to the entire Western Hemisphere. Hundreds, maybe thousands of dots from Brazil to Vancouver to Budapest and everywhere in between.

“That’s Project Round Up?”

“No. Project Round Up is the ability to work backward.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at that map,” said Chuck. He continued to advance the timeline-one day, three days, a week-until there were so many dots that virtually every major city on the map was covered in red. “If you didn’t know that the file started in Key Biscayne, could you tell me who created it?”

“No way.”

“Unfortunately, that’s the point where law enforcement-usually undercover agents trading online-gets involved. After the file has been traded around the world. You nail these creeps for possession and trading, but not creation. This is what I want to do. Watch.”

There was another blip on the screen, and the timeline was in reverse-the map shrinking, red dots disappearing. Finally, they were back to the first frame: one red dot over a house on Key Biscayne.

“You can do that?

“I’m almost there. My goal is to be able to work back to the camera that made the video. Like ballistics for a bullet.”

“How does that work?”

The map vanished from the screen, replaced by the image of Chuck’s face. “That’s for me to know and the sick bastards to find out.”

“Is that what Jamal was working on when he disappeared?”

“We were in the very early stages of creating algorithms to unravel trades of encrypted files. Basically he was cataloging the most popular encryption methods used by sexual predators. As I mentioned, some terrorist organizations have essentially borrowed those encryption methods from the pedophiles.”

Jack worked through the implications. “So Jamal was all over the Internet downloading files that were encrypted the same way al-Qaeda files are encrypted.”

“Not necessarily al-Qaeda,” said Chuck, “but yes, known terrorist organizations.”

“Couple that with the fact that he was of Somali descent, his father is a known recruiter for al-Shabaab, and two of his high-school classmates left Minnesota to fight in Somalia, and I can see where he would end up on an antiterrorism watch list.”

“A watch list is one thing,” said Vince. “A secret detention facility in Eastern Europe is another.”

Jack considered it, but he didn’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth. “What are you saying, Vince?”

“I’m saying that we still don’t know for sure that there ever was a secret detention facility in Prague. Even if there was, we don’t know if it was government run.”

“Actually, I’m convinced that it was not government run,” said Jack, though he still did not divulge Andie as his source.

“Hell, if that’s the case, maybe it didn’t even have anything to do with the war on terrorism.”

Jack glanced at Chuck’s image on the screen, and with the slight transmission delay, the import of Vince’s words hit Jack first and then carried across the ocean like a tidal wave.

“I feel stupid for saying this,” said Jack, “but I’ve never actually considered that possibility.”

“Maybe it’s time we did,” said Vince.

There was a flicker on the computer screen. The map reappeared, but this time it was focused on London, and the city was covered with red dots.

“Maybe Shada already has,” said Chuck.