Payback

61

Fifteen hundred cell phone calls had been made from the region where the guerrillas operated in the twelve hours before their communique was released, much more than Robert Gallo would have thought. A first pass through showed that the calls were made almost exclusively by phones registered to businesses in the area, with the remainder apparently ecotourists. Gallo tried coordinating call times with the length of the data set in the communiqué but couldn’t get a match. Or rather, he could match just about anything by adding or subtracting different encryptions and compression schemes.

Up against a brick wall, Gallo took a break. When the team was working on a project like this, a page was set up in a network file as a kind of journal to allow the members to post different results, hints, and frustrations. It was very much like a Web log or “blog,” randomly organized, with large sections of references to data files rather than Web addresses. The idea was to make it a common, open notebook to share information and provoke new ideas and directions — though in practice it often degenerated into a log of rants and complaints: this didn’t work; this was dumb; can you believe how easy (or hard) it was to get this?

Gallo added some comments about his efforts and then began paging through what others had written. Certain members of the team could be counted on for off-the-wall notes, and Johnny Bib often put in mathematical dissertations of little apparent relevance. But today the blog was extremely businesslike and to the point, the notes terse.

Not a good sign, Gallo thought.

Intercepts of electronic signals was the NSA’s raison d’être. There were several minor gathering programs active in Peru, and between them, regional listening posts, and a dedicated satellite network focusing on the Southern Hemisphere, there were plenty of electronic signals to sift through. As Gallo cursored through some of the lists, a single entry jumped out, simply because it was surrounded by white space.

“Sats” meant satellites, and the question was a suggestion by one of the analysts that someone check and see if any Russian observation satellites passed over the region and might have gotten optical data. But the suggestion reminded Gallo that he had been looking only at wireless cells rather than satellite communications networks — a much more likely source, and yet one he hadn’t even thought about.

But maybe Johnny Bib had given it to someone else. Rather than calling around or instant messaging to find out, Gallo typed the term into the search engine slot on the page. The search engine came up empty as it scanned the blog. Then, a few seconds later, it spit out a list of results from SpyNet and two NSA-only databases tracking intercepts. (The two-part search was a default “simple” search procedure, designed to save time when the analysts were helping on a mission.) The entries included a few lines summarizing the reference. The first one stuck out immediately: the Russian embassy in Peru had been queried a week before about the continuing unauthorized use of a Russian military communications network.

Gallo had to get help from one of the librarians, but within twenty minutes he knew everything that mattered about the Russian system, and a half hour after that he was looking at intercepted cables saying that the Russian embassy had been working with two military specialists trying to track the satellite phones down.

They were roughly forty miles from the village where the bomb had been found.

Johnny Bib greeted the news of this with his highest praise:

“Ha!”

Shouted twice, at the top of his lungs.

“The Chinese record all of the Russian transmissions,” Johnny told Gallo. “Break into their system and get a copy Go.”

“Not a problem,” said Gallo. “But, like, the Russians were complaining that they couldn’t figure out the encryptions that were being used on the messages.”

“Fortunately, we’re not the Russians.”