The Moses Legacy

Chapter 28

Sarit was back in her hotel room in Cairo, waiting for further instructions after sending in her report about what happened at the hospital.

She had prepared the report as a text file and concealed it in a picture, using a technique known as steganography. The idea was based on the fact that a text message consisted of far fewer bytes than a picture. The message was broken down into bits and these bits were distributed over the picture in such a way that their only effect would be to make extremely slight changes to some of the colours of some of the cells. There would be no way that this could be detected by the human eye.

The pictures were purportedly of friends of ‘Siobhan Stewart’ in places like Switzerland and Australia. After embedding the report into the picture, she had logged on to the Internet via the hotel’s broadband, signed in to her social network account and sent it.

Now it was up to Dovi. It was probable that Goliath had failed in his mission, but he was still a threat.

Her phone beeped: New pics uploaded to your wall. She knew what this meant: her controller had some information for her.

She logged on and noticed that ‘Felicity’ – her Canadian friend – had uploaded a new picture. She downloaded the picture and then logged out and disconnected from the Internet. This would make it harder for anyone to see what she was doing, if indeed she was being watched. She then assembled the improvised aluminium foil screen around her laptop, to stop it from being monitored by way of electromagnetic radiation, and then launched the steganography program (itself cleverly disguised) and typed in her password.

Within seconds, this simple operation yielded the text – shown on screen but not saved to disk. Goliath is back at Cairo hotel. He has been ordered to get a sample of Klein’s and Gusack’s clothing and then to kill them. They have booked a flight to Luxor and so has he (following them). He is evidently planning to kill them there, probably in the Valley of the Kings. Follow him and neutralize him.