Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  I opened my mouth to tell him that in America the New Economy had died eighteen months ago, rumour had it you could find its tombstone somewhere in Silicon Valley’s eighty million square feet of newly empty office space, but decided not to argue with Sinisa’s increasingly bizarre ideas. No sense talking myself out of my new job before I even found out what it was.

  “At present this industry has an unbelievably inefficient organizational structure. Because our business is illegal, we work in small groups, like revolutionary cells, unable to betray one another, never contacting one another directly. Suppose a fixer in Sri Lanka has thirty people he wishes to convey to the Netherlands, he has to get them by boat to a group in Iran, perhaps, and from there to a group in Turkey, and from there by air to my people in Bosnia, then down here to Vlore, and on one of my fishing boats to the Italian coast, where the mafia picks them up and puts them on a train to Holland, enormously complicated and difficult, so many things that can go wrong, a fragile chain of unreliable gangs, safe houses that move every week, misplaced mobile phones that are the only contact point for the next stage, money stolen or skimmed off, payoffs by all sides to police and border guards, confusion and suspicion whenever the clients are passed from one group to another – it is a horribly, horribly inefficient business, because of a constant lack of information, but this lack of information has been necessary, because of the security risk.”

  “At first I saw no alternative. And then I read a book. A work of surpassing genius. It is called The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein.”

  “I’ve read it,” I said warily.

  “It inspired my new business model. All this model requires is secure communications, and that, Mr. Wood, that we have. Does it surprise you when I tell you that today it is easy to encode information in such a way that, without the right password, all the computers and codebreakers in all the world would have to work for ten thousand years to unlock the hidden message? Does it surprise you that this can be done on the simplest of home computers with a program available for free? And that these unbreakable coded messages can then be hidden in sounds or pictures?”

  I looked at him. The question did not seem to be rhetorical, so after a moment I shook my head. I was surprised, not by what he said, but by the fact he was even mentioning it. I was an expert Internet programmer and this was old and basic information for anyone who was even remotely a techie. It was like Sinisa had just asked a NASA engineer whether he had heard about this amazing thing the Wright Brothers had done.

  “It surprised me,” Sinisa said. “Incidentally you may wish to be careful of shaking your head in Albania, it means ‘yes’ not ‘no’ here. To continue. It surprised me greatly. I had thought this was a dying industry. I had thought technology would make crime a thing of the past by making privacy, secrecy, a thing of the past. When Arwin told me that instead it made true secrecy possible for the first time in history, I began to think. Unbreakable codes. And the Internet, available everywhere. A business where the major problem is lack of information due to fear of discovery. I realized what I need to take the next step, to become a global player. I will build a perfectly secure, perfectly secret Internet communications system, one that all the people, all the organizations I work with, can use. A central communications hub for everyone I work with. There is nothing like what I am doing in this world, believe me. No one else is thinking of this. And with this competitive advantage, simply allowing the fixer in Sri Lanka to talk to everyone up the chain all the way to Italy, to fix schedules and agree payments and discuss problems and make corrections at any time, instead of having meetings in dark alleys with gunmen on both sides because both sides fear being robbed or arrested, or calling the one number each side has and hoping the message goes up the chain without being lost or intercepted by the police or some competitor with a grudge – it will be revolutionary, Mr. Wood, absolutely revolutionary. And we are almost halfway there. Arwin is building me an unbreakable code system. You, Mr. Wood, you will build our web site. And it will change the world.”

  I stared up at Sinisa and tried very hard not to laugh. I succeeded, I kept a straight and serious face, but only barely. At last I understood him. He wasn’t really a criminal overlord at all. At heart he was a self-deluded dot-com CEO, three years behind his time. The only difference was that he was talking about the criminal world instead of the business world, but as he had all but said, sometimes there was a damn fine line.

  His proposed system was not even remotely revolutionary. That Heinlein novel had been written in 1968. The implications of strong crypto had been well understood for decades, and I strongly doubted his would be the first criminal organization to make use of it. But maybe not, what did I know about the criminal underworld? Maybe gangsters were even more hidebound and resistant to change than the most sluggish behemoths of the corporate world, maybe Sinisa’s MBA tactics really were bleeding edge, at least here in the Balkans.

  At any rate if I did build this system it would definitely streamline his business and make it harder for the authorities to catch him. But I didn’t feel bad about that. Sinisa seemed a lot more Robin Hood than Scarface. He wasn’t near as smart as he thought he was, but his heart was in roughly the right place. I was convinced, utterly convinced, that he believed every verging-on-ludicrous word he had spoken.

  * * *

  After the speech Sinisa took me to the office, an overgrown closet on the second floor. There were two slightly obsolete computers and one network hub. Arwin was working on one computer. The other was mine.

  “Arwin will give you all the technical details,” Sinisa explained, and left.

  It really wasn’t so different from the first day of work at my other jobs. First, listen to the CEO give a speech that was supposed to be stirring and morale-building but instead made me wonder whether he had any idea what planet he lived on; then, get the real scoop from my fellow techies.

  “Did he take you up on a high mountain and show you all the countries of the world?” Arwin asked.

  “I didn’t figure you for a Bible quoter.”

  “Only the New Testament. I’m Jewish, it’s heretical. I used to read it to piss my mother off.”

  “Cute,” I said. “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “Build a web site so brain-dead that even goat-fucking retards can use it.”

  “Uh-huh. Any particular kind of web site, or should I use my imagination?”

  “Basically,” Arwin said, “we’re talking the world’s most paranoid chat room.”

  “Doesn’t sound like rocket science,” I said.

  “Thank fuck for that. We’ve only got a month.”

  It was midnight when I got back to our house, the long-dormant technical side of my mind spinning with details, ideas, plans, questions, fragments of code. Whatever the reason, whoever the employer, it was a physical relief to be working again. I was eager for morning to come so I could get up and go to work. And check email. My new office had Internet access, which I had been worried about, and I had sent a brief I-am-okay update to Talena, and cc’d Hallam, Nicole, Lawrence and Steve.

  Sinisa had outfitted our new house with cots, blankets, and a few floor lamps. It was a start. I looked into the bedroom nearest the street. Saskia was already under the sheets, her eyes closed, looking younger than she did when awake, breathing with the soft rhythm of sleep. I was glad of it.

  I went into what was now my room, undressed, and got onto the cot. It squeaked and moved alarmingly on its wheels when I first put my weight on it, but was surprisingly comfortable once I lay down. It was hot but not too hot to sleep. I closed my eyes and wondered where Talena was.

  Chapter 11

  Stegosaurus

  These days total secrecy is both easy and free. All those Hollywood scenes of computers breaking codes and unscrambling secrets? Sneakers and Hackers and Swordfish and so forth? Amusing and utter nonsense. Codes aren’t breakable, secrets can’t be unscrambled, not any more, not if anybody compete
nt did the scrambling.

  Go ahead, do it yourself. Download PGP, stands for Pretty Good Privacy, free software available to anyone with an Internet connection. Pick a password – pass phrase, actually, seven or eight words, it has to be fairly long for the math to work. This is your “private key”. Keep it very secret. Run it through the PGP software to generate your “public key”, called that because you give it away to all and sundry, friends, enemies, post it on the Internet, doesn’t matter. Then anyone who wants to send you a secret message takes the message, takes your public key, plugs both of them into PGP, and out comes a stream of gibberish that can only be deciphered by you with your private key. No one else can ever break the code.

  Let me repeat that. No one else can ever break the code. The combined forces of the entire United States government could work full-time on it for years, and all the mathematicians and supercomputers and National Security Agency cryptography experts in the world still couldn’t put your Humpty Dumpty message together again. There are vague rumblings of quantum computers that might be able to do so, a few decades down the line, but long before that happens, we’ll have unbreakable quantum encryption. The ancient war between codemakers and codebreakers is over. The codebreakers lost.

  It’s kind of a cool thought at first, that Big Brother might watch you, but he can’t read what you wrote. Then it’s a little bit scary, when you start thinking about terrorists, child pornographers, arms dealers, drug smugglers. Or Sinisa Obradovic.

  The only problem with unbreakably coded messages is that they still look like coded messages. But that too is an easy problem to solve, thanks to steganography, “covered writing”, the art of hiding a message. In ancient Greece, they tattooed secrets on a messenger’s head, let his hair grow out, and sent him on his mission. In the eighteenth century, two conspirators might write apparently chatty and meaningless letters to one another, in which one could read the real message by extracting every thirteenth letter. Nowadays, again with free software, you can invisibly hide a message inside a picture, in a snippet of music, even in email that looks like spam.

  Our job, Arwin’s and mine, was to build a secure communications system for Sinisa’s smuggling empire. When I showed up, Arwin was putting the finishing touches on an encryption engine he called Stegosaurus, which first encoded messages, then hid them inside pictures – inevitably some kind of unpleasantly explicit porn shot, Arwin being Arwin – so even if someone intercepted a picture as it was beamed over the Internet, they wouldn’t be able to distinguish a hidden message from garden-variety Internet pornography. My job, in turn, was to build a web site around his Stegosaurus, a site so user-friendly that barely literate criminals everywhere could use it.

  After a couple of days of flailing around for a catchy name I wound up calling the web site Mycroft. Partly a nod to the Heinlein novel that had inspired Sinisa, partly because the image of Sherlock Holmes’s brother riding Arwin’s stegosaurus was freakishly amusing. Us techies are nothing if not whimsical.

  Pretty basic stuff. Suppose Mustafa in Moscow wants to warn Ivan in Istanbul that next week’s shipment will be a day late. He logs into Mycroft, picks Ivan from the list of people he’s permitted to send messages to, and types in his message. My Java program does all the rest; encodes the message, folds two copies of the message into one of Arwin’s porn pictures, and uploads the new picture to Mycroft, looking just as tawdry as before. Ivan, for his part, logs onto the site, finds a new message waiting for him, types in his private key, and out comes Mustafa’s original memo.

  Note: two copies of the message. Only Ivan can decode what is encoded with Ivan’s public key, and Sinisa wanted to be able to look over the virtual shoulder of everyone who used his system. So every message was encoded twice, once for the intended recipient, and once, secretly, for Sinisa himself.

  There were a few bells and whistles. Sinisa wanted the system to occasionally generate random empty messages from one user to another; this prevented a hypothetical observer from drawing conclusions from the sheer fact of a message being sent. And of course they needed secure logins and user admin, fallback plans in case their web site was taken down by a denial-of-service attack or incompetence on the part of the Albanian network host, a heap of other little things…but it was still basically a simple job. Simple, not small. Writing Mycroft from scratch by myself in one month, then testing it to ensure it worked perfectly, was an awful lot of work.

  * * *

  From: balthazarwood@yahoo.com

  To: talenar@lonelyplanet.com

  Subject: the albanian times

  Date: 9 Apr 2003 17:17 GMT

  Well, we’re still here, and here still seems safe. Heck, here is starting to feel downright comfortable.

  When we said goodbye, you said you felt like you wanted to sit down and talk for six days. Me too. Maybe we can talk here? I don’t know, maybe it’s not the right time or place or medium, but maybe it is.

  I want you to know I’m sorry for the way I’ve been for the last year and a half. And I promise, I swear, I will not screw up a second chance.

  I miss you. I love you.

  Paul

  From: talenar@lonelyplanet.com

  To: balthazarwood@yahoo.com

  Subject: Re: the albanian times

  Date: 10 Apr 2003 04:16 GMT

  Hi.

  I miss you too. I spend all day worrying about you two. It’s exhausting. I feel like I’m a World War II widow-in-waiting, like my man’s on the battlefield and all I can do is sit around and hope the telegram doesn’t arrive today. I’ve been biting heads off people at work. Mmm, tasty heads. Today I overheard Lisa telling Julian not to take it personally, she thought I was having “relationship problems”. Hah. If she only knew.

  I mean, it’s not like we weren’t having relationship problems, but now this is all so weird and tense that those seem like they happened a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.

  OK, no. I’m going to leave that in, but it’s not true. Arg. Arg arg arg arg. This is so fucking confusing. I’m all worried and grateful and proud and amazed by what you’re doing, and I wake up every morning wishing you were next to me, and at the same time, Paul, part of me, lots of me, is still angry at you. I’m sorry, I know this is absolutely the wrong time, I know I should just be supportive, but I can’t bring myself to lie and pretend like we’re all roses and honey.

  So, yeah, I’m scared for you and mad at you at the same time. And now it’s like you suddenly turned back from Mr. Hyde into the guy I fell in love with in the first place, and you’re out there being all daring and intrepid and risking your life to save Saskia and I feel horrible about saying anything bad to you at all at a time like this. So I’m angry and confused and guilty and terrified pretty much 24/7 these days. Yep, it’s shaping up to be a real good month, how about you?

  I don’t know what else to say right now.

  Wish you were here. A lot.

  Talena

  * * *

  “Fuck it,” Arwin said late one night that first week, a night when separate bug hunts were proving fruitless and turning our brains into mush. “Let’s go get a beer.”

  I greedily agreed. Finding and fixing hard-to-reproduce errors is the most difficult and frustrating part of programming, and I was eager for a reprieve. We went to Sinisa’s lavish kitchen, liberated two bottles of Tirana Pilsner from his fridge, and went out to the deck that overlooked the harbour. Arwin produced a packet of Marlboro Lights, and we smoked, sipped Albania’s suprisingly drinkable national beer, and watched the moonlight shimmer on the Adriatic.

  My thoughts gravitated from Java code to Talena, and the email she had sent. I didn’t know what to write back. She was right to be angry at me. I had been a shit, especially since we had moved in together, six months earlier.

  We hadn’t decided to live together because everything was wonderful between us and we were eager to take that step, but because I couldn’t afford rent any more and it was that or move back to Canada and
away from her. So for months on end I had woken up, checked the online job boards to see if there was anything new, sent off resumes to anything even vaguely in my line, and then faced another grim day in Talena’s cramped apartment, too poor to leave, too bored to live. Time on my hands and no money to fill it. I sat around all day, reading, watching TV, playing video games, and when she came home we either ignored or snapped at each other, like animals trapped in a cage. I know that there were other options, that plenty of people in similar situations lead full and interesting lives, but I didn’t know how. Living with poverty is a skill. I had spent my whole adult life being independent and overpaid, and I was no good at being poor and needy.

  The worst, the most unbearable thing, had been living off Talena’s paycheque. I knew it was Neanderthal of me but I couldn’t stand being supported by my girlfriend. I couldn’t bear asking her for money, it made my stomach twist with rage and self-loathing, but I had to do it every week. And her employers at Lonely Planet had made cutbacks too, like everyone else in the Bay Area when the depression hit, she wasn’t laid off but she had to work long hours to make up for the people who were let go, so she came home tired and drained and found me unwashed and unshaven, watching empty TV, too lethargic to muster the energy to get up from the couch to greet her, and if she managed to crack open my thin veneer of sloth all she found was rage and frustration and resentment, directed at myself and at the world and much of it, unfairly, at her. I deserved her anger. I had earned it.

  “I can’t wait to get the fuck out of this place,” Arwin said, shattering my reverie.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked after a moment.