Games of State

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Hood's wireless transmission was received by Darrell McCaskey's executive assistant Sharri Jurmain. The FBI Academy graduate E-mailed it to McCaskey's personal computer and to Dr. John Benn of Op-Center's Rapid Information Search Center.

The RI-Search Center was little more than two small, interconnected offices with twenty-two computers run by two full-time operators and overseen by Dr. Benn. A former librarian with the Library of Congress, the British-born bachelor had been an embassy researcher in Qatar for two years when the Arab state declared its independence from Britain in 19? 1. Benn remained there for seven years before moving to Washington to stay with his sister when her diplomat-husband died. Charmed by Washington and by Americans, Benn remained behind after his sister returned to England. He became an American citizen in 1988.

Benn's proud, singular skill, acquired during his otherwise uneventful years in Qatar, was quoting obscure lines of dialogue from English literature. Even with the help of Usenet groups, no one at Op-Center had ever correctly identified a single one of Benn's characterizations.

Benn was taking an early tea and pretending to be Mr.

Boffin from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend when Hood's E-mail request came through. It was heralded by a synthesized electronic voice calling out, "I will arise and go now" from Yeats's The Lake Isle of Innisfree, followed by the identification number of the person making the request.

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more," Benn said with a flourish as they swung to the number one screen. He and his assistants Sylvester Neuman and Alfred Smythe immediately recognized Stoll's "greeting," the:-), his "smiley face" lying on its side. In one of his more paranoid moments, Stoll had arranged with them that if he were ever being forced to transmit data, he would input:-(, a frowning face.

The team went to work efficiently gathering the information.

For a biography of Deputy Foreign Minister Richard Hausen and any information on his father, Smythe went online and executed FTPs— File Transfer Protocols— to acquire data from ECRC Munich, Deutsche Elektronen Synchotron, Gerniart Electro-Synchotron, DKFZ Heidelberg, Gesellschaft fr wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung GmbH, Konrad Zuse Zentrum fr Informationstechnik Konrad Zuse Center, and Comprehensive TeX Archive Network Heidelberg. Neuman used three computers to enter gopherspace on the Internet and accessed information from Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum Hamburg, EUnet Germany, the German Network Information Center, and ZIB, Berlin auf Ufer. With the help of an aide to Matt Stoll, Deputy Assistant Director of Operations Grady Reynolds, they hacked into tax, employment, and education records of the former Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic,

The records of many Germans, especially the former East Germans, existed as hard copy only. However, the educational and financial history of politicial figures would have to have been put on disk for filing with various government commissions. Moreover, many large corporations had scanned their books onto computer. Those, at least, might also be available.

Darrell McCaskey's office, which had dominion over contact with other agencies, put them on-line with the FBI, Interpol, and various German law enforcement agencies: the Bundeskriminalamt or BKA, the German equivalent of the FBI; the Landespolizei; the Bundeszollpolizei or Federal Customs Police; and the Bundespostpolizei, the Federal Postal Police. The Bundeszollpolizei and the Bundespostpolizei often caught up with felons who had managed to slip past the others.

As the two assistants word-searched data and retrieved blocks of information about Hausen, Dr. Benn wrote it up in essential, digestible chunks. Since Hood had requested a phone call, Benn would read it to him. However, the data would also be stored for downloading or hard-copy printout.

Reading the information which came in, and rereading the original request, he wondered if Hood had got things quite right. There seemed to be some confusion about which Hausen had done what during his career.

Nonetheless, Benn continued to work quickly in order to meet the deadline Hood had imposed.