Dark Zone

50

“The Eiffel Tower in meters.”

Rubens looked at the number on the small bundle of papers that Johnny Bib and his assistant Tristan Young had brought with them to his office. He had no doubt that Johnny Bib was correct — Johnny was never wrong about a number — but was it significant?

“As you can see on the next page,” continued Johnny, “it is part of a formula regarding the integrity of the structure — and, by implication, how to bring it down.”

Rubens flipped over to the next page as Johnny Bib continued, launching into a discussion of cosines and engineering formulas that Rubens couldn’t decipher. The page he was looking at showed a series of hexadecimal numbers captured from the hard drive of a computer, the remains of a file that had been erased and partially filled with other data. The file had been deleted and then overwritten, but NSA analysts had extracted some of its remains — they were outlined by yellow highlighter — and supplied the missing contents.

Or what they thought were the missing contents. More than 50 percent of the file was gone.

The computer was located in a French library and had apparently been “hijacked” for use, the idea being to eliminate the possibility that any incriminating evidence would be found on a local hard drive. It was an elaborate precaution but not one without its own risks, as the computers targeted could not be secured.

“What’s on the rest of the drive?” Rubens asked.

“That’s my point. My point!” said Johnny Bib. “There are files we can’t access. We need the physical drive.”

Rubens glanced at Tristan. He had an embarrassed, almost guilty look on his face. Whether that was good or bad Rubens couldn’t decide.

“Why can’t we access the rest of the files?” Rubens asked Tristan. “Is it encrypted?”

“No, sir. Physical errors. There are problems with the drive. Part of it is locked off by the control program that runs at boot-up and we can’t access it without catching it just as it boots. And they boot it physically, then connect to the drive. So we pretty much have to be there when it comes up, heh.”

“You can’t override the control program?” asked Rubens. “Delete it and restore it?”

“I can’t without it being obvious that something’s going on,” said Tristan. “We’re not one hundred percent sure we won’t end up corrupting the drive worse. Physically having the drive is really the way to go here.”

“The drive is a sixty-gigabyte drive,” said Johnny Bib. “Only forty-three-point-three-six-seven-eight gigabytes are available. If we have it, worst-case scenario, even if it’s written over, we can examine the flux and reconstruct it.”

Rubens rubbed his forehead. The technique Johnny Bib referred to was a process that got around so-called “scrubber” or “shredding” programs, which overwrote data with specific patterns to obscure it. The technique depended on a series of high-powered electronic microscopes to physically examine the magnetic traces left as data was recorded and rerecorded. It was an extremely powerful if somewhat esoteric technique — and also expensive and time-consuming.

“You’re sure that there’s something there?” said Rubens.

“Not until we see it,” said Tristan. “But the error log noted that the problem occurred at the same date and time the file was first overwritten — they mirror the directory and logs to another computer, where we, heh, found it.”

“You’re sure this malfunction isn’t part of whatever hijacking program they installed?” asked Rubens.

“It’s not part of the program,” said Tristan. “But that is a possibility.”

“If it is, it’s a type we haven’t seen,” said Johnny Bib. “Which would be another reason to retrieve the disk drive.”

“If the bad sectors occurred when the area was scrubbed, they would be easy to retrieve,” said Tristan. “Kind of, heh, the reverse of what was intended.”

“Where is it?” asked Rubens.

“We’re working on the physical location now through trial and error,” said the young man. “It’s somewhere in a district that includes Paris, but there are a lot of libraries to query. We should have it within an hour, maybe a little less.”

“You’re sure there’s no one in the library who knows?” asked Rubens.

“I don’t think so,” said Young. “The whole idea of setting it up this way would be because you’re worried about a physical search of your premises. And besides, the computer that led us here was in a dentist’s office. It seems to have been used by a stolen car ring. First, we started looking at the patterns of when the computer was accessed—”

Rubens put up his hand. “I’m sure I would admire your technique as well as your fortitude, Mr. Young. Well done. But candidly, it’s not relevant at the moment.”

Rubens shifted the papers on his desk and took another printout, this one summarizing the data on the CD-ROM Tommy Karr had obtained. It had information about shaping plastic explosives, apparently from a secret French initiative undertaken a few years before. The files on the CD-ROM were all several years old and did not prove that the explosive was in the hands of terrorists. Nonetheless, the pattern was coming into sharper focus.

At least for Rubens.

“Johnny, would a carload of these explosives be able to destroy the Eiffel Tower? Could this explosive be fit into the equation you reconstructed?”

Johnny Bib blinked at him but didn’t answer.

“That didn’t occur to you?” said Rubens. “You didn’t put these two things together?”

Johnny Bib blinked again.

Was it such an obvious question that the analysts had missed it?

Apparently, yes. Johnny Bib turned without saying anything and left the office.

Young blinked, unsure what to do.

“Find a similar disk drive in France and have it prepared so our ops can swap it,” Rubens told him. “And please, find the library, or wherever this computer is. Call me — no, call the Art Room. I have to leave for the White House within the hour.”