The 13th Enumeration

by William Struse

  He took a deep breath. Time to think about something else. He had dusted off his search bot program yesterday, made a few changes to it, and set it loose on the Internet to do its job, searching all open databases for the telltale sign of his encryption code. The initial results were surprising. He had found markers for his code posted on Internet forums all over the world. He hadn’t expected to find his markers on innocuous public forums. Maybe those associated with terrorists, sure, but Hot Rod? He chose one of the first results on the list, on a Hot Rod forum. The encrypted file turned out to be a picture of a half-dressed woman advertising some Russian dating service. Sam copied the picture and dropped the file into one of his encryption analysis programs. Sure enough, he found the encrypted file tag inside the digital information of the picture. Weird.

  Sam took enough of the digital footprint of the picture and added it to his search bot. This time he had the bot search for only that picture, along with any time-dated information it could find. The results showed the picture with the encrypted information was dated to August 12, just over two months ago. The same picture showed up in multiple forums, but none before August 12. Sam signed up on one of the forums, and after making several complimentary comments about the attractive woman, asked the original poster of the picture where he had lifted it from. To his surprise, the guy said he’d gotten it out of the junk mail box of his Google account.

  Sam thanked him and logged off. Opening the junk folder of his own Gmail account, he searched it until he found the August junk mail. There it was: the very same picture on August 11. Copying the picture, he checked the digital information and found the tag.

  Sam quickly wrote a program that would automatically search for and download all picture files in the Google junk mail box. Then he searched all of them for the encryption tags. He found that, since the beginning of the year, encrypted digital information had been added to a specific junk mail picture every week on Thursday. The delivery time varied, but it always came on a Thursday. In many of the pictures, there was more than one of his encryption tags.

  Whoever had figured this system out was pretty clever. The encrypted messages went to millions of people. Everyone with a Google account was receiving them. Kind of hard for the intelligence services to find a pattern there. All the intended recipient had to do was download the picture and drop it into the Anaj encryption software. He didn’t have to go to any open forums or direct e-mails that the intelligence services monitored—just to his very own inbox to download a piece of junk mail.

  Sam chuckled at the thought of telling David that he was receiving the encrypted messages already in his own e-mail account. He bet that whoever came up with this got a good laugh every time he sent them out. Pretty clever, and pretty bold.

  Sam picked up the phone and dialed. “Hello, David, it’s Sam. I’ve got some info on that encryption software you asked me about.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Well . . .” Sam paused for effect. “The software is based on one of my commercially available programs. Anaj is Jana spelled backwards. Jana was the goddess of secrets. Whoever pirated my software is really good. They modified my encryption code but left much of the nonsensitive part of the operating code alone. Lucky for us, they were a little lazy. I left a tracking code in the installation files and some of the other parts of the operating code. It seems they didn’t think to look there. Any file which has used this encrypting program will leave a marker I can find with my search bot. What I have found so far is that someone is sending encrypted files as pictures every Thursday to all Google users. Maybe to Yahoo mail and other online mail accounts too; I didn’t check those. I found several separate tags in many of the pictures. If I had to guess, I would say that whoever is sending these messages is using one digital picture to communicate with multiple parties. Once someone downloads the picture, he enters his own specific encryption key and presto, he gets his message. I must say this is a very clever way to communicate anonymously. Their only mistake was, they did not figure on my tracking code.”

  David was silent for a minute before he replied, processing the information in his typical manner. “That was great work, Sam. It’s a good bet that whoever this is, they’re involved in some kind of criminal activity. Sounds like you’ve found us a trail.”

  “That’s right,” Sam replied. “You won’t have any trouble now finding where these messages originate. Now if you could get Google to let you know who is downloading junk mail pictures off their servers every Thursday, you might be able to narrow the search for the intended recipients.”

  “Thanks again, Sam. I knew if anyone could help, it would be you. I’ll pass along your ideas and see where we get with them.”

  Chapter 26

  Dallas, Texas

  They had finally gone away. The tabloid paparazzi had tracked Zane down shortly after the museum dedication, and for a few days his phone was ringing off the hook and photographers were crawling around in the bushes trying to take pictures. He changed his phone number and moved off campus for a few days until things quieted down. Ironically, it was the demonstration of AES’s technology in Dubai that gave him back his privacy completely. His face had been on the cover of several news magazines the day before. The next day, the fickle reporters from every news program, newspaper, and tabloid were covering the meteoric rise of Aquarius Elemental Solutions and Darius Zarindast.

  Everywhere he went, people were talking excitedly about AES and the new paradigm in the existence of mankind. The news headlines said it all: “Welcome to the Age of Aquarius,” “Mankind’s Savior,” “The Water Man,” “Earth’s New Beginning,” “Darius for the People,” “Environmental Messiah,” “The Trillion-Dollar Man.” Zane had to admit it: he was impressed with what he had heard out of Dubai as well. To give ninety percent of all gross sales to a fund to provide clean water to the impoverished people of the world—if true, that was awesome. If Darius was able to make good on this promise, he would do something for the third world that many wealthy people had paid lip service to but never really seemed to accomplish.

  It was also a stroke of genius to bypass the bankers and Wall Street insiders and go directly to the people with his share offering. That just wasn’t done in this day and age. In a world where the little people were finally fed up with the political-corporate-elitist class which had built a seemingly insurmountable void between rich and poor, a world where the middle class was getting squeezed until they had nothing left to give, Darius Zarindast had come as the man who seemed to understand the anger, frustration, and fear of a world with little hope and much uncertainty. More than new technology and the promise of riches, Darius was offering the world hope. It was no wonder people the planet over were beginning to see him as the answer to their problems.

  Zane understood the feeling. He in some measure felt it too. But as a Christian, he believed no mere man could provide the lasting hope mankind really needed. Only Jesus Christ could offer that.

  Right?

  His mind asked for proof. Proof he was having a hard time finding. His very own research paper on one of the central messianic prophecies of the Scriptures was raising serious questions. It was the one prophecy in the Scriptures which predicted the coming of the Messiah based upon a specific secular starting point—a coming that many claimed was partially fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus. But if this prophecy pointed to Jesus, then it had to be based upon more than the flimsy evidence he had found so far.

  Of course, the finishing blow had been dealt by Darius Zarindast himself, the very man many now considered a messiah in his own right. He had provided the tablet which confirmed what Zane had already found in his own research on Second Temple chronology: namely that Nehemiah and Ezra were contemporaries of Darius Hystaspes. According to current theory, there was no way the seventy weeks prophecy of Daniel 9 could span the five hundred years from the reign of Darius in 520 BC until the time of Jesus Christ. The seventy “weeks,” or what most presumed w
ere four-hundred-and-ninety years, were not nearly enough time. That was the obvious reason most commentators calculated the starting date of the countdown from the reign of Artaxerxes Longimanus, who reigned from 485–423 BC. Now that theory was no longer tenable. So where did that leave his research paper?

  And where did it leave his faith?

  He rubbed his eyes and stood up from his desk. What should he do now? Should he just turn his paper in, citing the evidence he had collected as to why he did not believe the prophecy applied to Jesus Christ? That would be the easy way out, and this was only the first semester. What should he do? He wasn’t a quitter, that was for sure, and as far as he was concerned, he didn’t need any more evidence to disprove the current interpretation. So why not start with a completely clean slate and look for another alternative?

  Zane sat back down and got out a clean piece of notepaper. He was going to look at this prophecy as an equation. He would list the parameters of the equation first.

  This time, instead of taking the known dates of Jesus’s life and working the chronology backwards to fit the desired results, he was going to take one fact at a time within its context and see where the results led.

  Taking the piece of notepaper, Zane pinned it on the wall over his desk. He would take his father’s advice and pursue this wherever the facts might lead. If this prophecy didn’t lead to the Messiah, then so be it. He wouldn’t be afraid of the truth. If his father’s intuition was correct, then this pursuit might lead to something better than the half-baked theories he had read so far.

  Chapter 27

  Jerusalem, Israel

  So the mysterious stranger was Zane Harrison, Rachael thought to herself as she looked at a copy of a tabloid magazine. He was a fourth-year student at a major Bible college in Texas. He had an interest in biblical archeology and volunteered on dig sites in Israel every chance he got. All this she learned from reading the stories on him. Lucky for him, the announcement of Darius Zarindast’s miracle technology had overshadowed his heroism, and the press dropped the story for something much more exciting.

  Well, she had found him. Although she thought it would be proper to thank him in person, she would wait and see what Mr. Harrison would do. She was a little surprised he had not already tried to contact her, other than sending the backpack. Normally young men went out of their way to make her acquaintance. Here was one man to whom she owed a measure of thanks, and he did not seem all that interested in receiving it.

  Rachael did not consider herself overly vain. She knew she was attractive and men noticed her, but this Zane Harrison was something unusual. He’d done what was necessary and that was all. She was grateful, sure, but if she was totally honest, she was also a little disappointed. What kind of young man did something so incredibly brave and heroic and then didn’t stick around to receive the deserved credit? He probably thought of her as some reckless prima donna. Well okay, she had been needlessly reckless, but that was the exception, not the rule. He just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time. She still ought to thank him in person if she could. Maybe she would give him a call or just wait and see what, if anything, came of it. For now, she decided, she would just wait.

  * * *

  In Dubai, Darius Zarindast was thinking about his next steps. The demonstration of his technology had gone better than expected. Most attendees had left that night convinced the technology was real. Several scientific types had asked to stay on for a few days, needing a little more convincing. By seven, the night of the demonstration, every available AES-100 and AES-1000 machine was under contract. Five thousand machines had already been preordered with the required five-percent deposit. Each day after that, dozens more machines were ordered.

  It would take several weeks for the purchasers to make the necessary preparations for the machines to be installed according to exact specifications. AES only provided the elemental separation module. Those who purchased the machines were required to install the necessary pumps, piping, and holding tanks as per the installation blueprints. To facilitate this process, Darius had already sent the mechanical specifications to several large mechanical and fabrication firms. Once they realized the ramifications of this new technology, it would only be weeks before they were prefabricating the necessary equipment in quantity. Once each purchaser had installed the necessary equipment, Darius would send them the elemental separation modules along with a specially trained AES technician.

  In order to prevent theft of the technology, Gavin Matthews had developed a biorhythmic monitoring software that monitored each AES technician 24/7. During the training period at AES headquarters, the normal biorhythm of each technician was monitored for a week under all different emotional states, and a baseline biorhythm was recorded. Each tech sent into the field carried an installation laptop monitoring his biorhythm. If at any time the tech’s biorhythm deviated ten percent outside normal readings, or if the tech’s biorhythm could not be read, the installation computers would go into lockdown. Any attempt to access the computer by anyone at this time would result in the self-destruction of the computer. Only after the tech’s biorhythm returned to a normal baseline could the computer be turned on, and then only after the tech had called in to Dubai headquarters and received a reinitiating code.

  On top of that, each of the elemental separators accompanying the technicians was sent in lockdown mode. Any attempt to open, modify, or connect to the machines by anyone other than the tech—using the specially designed installation computers—resulted in their immediate destruction. Once installed on the support structure provided by the customer, the units were initialized by the technicians. At that point, the machine’s internal diagnostics would be sent continuously back to Dubai. If the input power was lost to the machines, they would go into standby mode for thirty minutes. If power was not restored in that time, they would go into lockdown. Once in lockdown, a technician needed to be dispatched from Dubai to reinitialize the machine.

  Each technician had signed a two-year contract with AES, stipulating they would work 24/7 and remain on the AES campus unless in the field until their contract expired. For this they were each paid one million AES shares. One-hundred-thousand of the shares were available to sell at any time. The balance was held in escrow until the completion of their contract. Needless to say, each tech became extremely dedicated to the company. Future remuneration depended on skill and discretion.

  With the initial influx of cash from the sale of his AQES shares, Darius immediately authorized the construction of the new fabrication facility that Ralph Scholz had designed. He also hired a fleet of fifty private aircraft with a two-year contract to transport his machines and technicians around the world. Once Ralph finished the new factory, Darius would hire another two hundred private aircraft. Dubai International Airport, currently the thirteenth busiest airport in the world, would soon be the first.

  Darius turned on his computer and looked up the current price of AQES. It had been six days since the demonstration of his technology, and the share price of AQES had closed yesterday in New York at $29.53 a share. Today was Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of October. Five more days until chaos descended upon the financial district of New York City. By the end of the week, AQES would likely be trading in the $35–$40 range. He made a note to tell Dylan to tighten the range. When all hell broke loose in New York and the stock market crashed, he wanted AQES to be a bastion of stability. Gold, silver, and the dollar had all suffered severe price losses since his announcement. In this uncertainty, he wanted the world to turn to AQES as a de facto currency. When all other equities were being sold out of fear, he wanted AQES to be perceived as an alternative store of wealth.

  He made another note on his pad to instruct Dylan to sell another two billion shares of AQES over the next three days, if the liquidity could handle it. Darius wanted as much cash on hand as he could get to purchase shares in the major steel producers and fabricators when the market crashed. He also added pipeline manufacturers and ins
tallers to his list. His company was the catalyst for one of the largest infrastructure projects the world had ever seen. To get inexpensive, environmentally friendly water to the world, he was going to need incredible amounts of steel.

  He smiled to himself. The world did not yet grasp the full implications of what Darius intended. Over the next year, AES would need millions of miles of piping to carry their water to the world. He made another note to himself. Tomorrow he would announce that Aquarius Elemental Solutions had perfected the process for removal of iron from seawater. That should really cause a hard hit in the iron ore price. Then, with the events in New York causing further chaos, he would have Dylan buy as many options in the iron ore futures as he could get his hands on. It would be years before AES machines could produce enough iron from seawater to meet world demand, so he had to get his hands on it by traditional means until then.

  Darius had given the go-ahead to Alexandra Riley to begin the necessary steps to put their machines to use in the world’s most needy places. She had already signed contracts with two of the largest industrial fabrication and pipeline firms to begin construction of facilities and necessary infrastructure in ten of the largest third-world cities. Darius had reserved ten percent of all AES machines for use by Alexandra Riley and the Aquarius Fund.

  Once the logistic kinks were worked out, Alexandra Riley planned to have five machines installed a day for the next four months. When production from Ralph’s new facility came online, she intended to increase that to ten machines a day. Alexandra’s dreams were coming true. For the first time, Darius had given her the means to really make a difference in the world. She had literally unlimited funds with which to provide freshwater to every place in the world that needed it. Her only limitation right now was time. If she was to meet his goal of providing freshwater to every impoverished city within one hundred miles of the ocean, she would have to increase her staff by fifty times. Well, she now had the money, and she already had drawn up an organizational chart. With the funds at her disposal, she could attract the best—and she intended to do just that. Alexandra Riley planned to have the Aquarius Fund fully staffed by the time the new factory was operational.