Conspiracy

36

While the deep Black operatives were conducting what might be called a point attack on the Vietnamese, Robert Gallo was in charge of a broader effort, one that took place over several battlefields, all of them electronic.

The NSA routinely monitored transmissions from several countries, collecting literally mountains of data every day.

There was so much, in fact, that much of it was never inspected by a human. Even the automated programs that looked for things like key words or “hot” e-mail routes couldn’t inspect every single message.

Once the Deep Black mission was initiated, a team of analysts specifically assigned to Desk Three began culling through the data. Their efforts were still primarily guided by automated programs, which helped them analyze the information in a variety of ways. Not even the most optimistic member of the team expected to find a specific message that said “kill this person.” What they hoped to spot was a sequence of communications that indicated some sort of conspiracy — transfers of money, communications that did not fit an “ordinary” diplomatic pattern, and that sort of thing.

Gallo was assigned to work with those analysts, looking to see if there were systems that were not being tapped and which deserved to be. When the analysts developed a theory that an assassination team might be a private enterprise only partly supported, if at all, by the government, they gave him a list of servers being used by Vietnamese businesses. He began penetrating them, using “bots” or automated programs, in this case similar to viruses, to get the servers to give up information about themselves.

Angela DiGiacomo helped him handle the bots, which had a tendency to get “lost”—though bots were rarely tripped up by security protocols, errors in programming on the host’s end occasionally scuttled them. DiGiacomo was very good at debugging the systems, figuring out where the problems lay, and adapting the programs to work around them without being detected.

She was also extremely attractive. Gallo found himself stealing glances at her breasts as she complained about the inept coding of a Chinese gateway that had been giving her all sorts of hassles.

“What do you think I should do?” Angela asked him.

Gallo felt his palms starting to sweat. What he wanted her to do had nothing to do with work.

“Fix it for them?” he stuttered finally.

She rolled her eyes and went back to work.