by Evans, Jon
It was a human skull.
I stood frozen for several long seconds, cupping the skull upside-down in my hand like a soccer ball, staring at its inverted leer. I was surprised, but not appalled. My pulse immediately began to pound, adrenaline flooded my system, but my mind stayed coolly detached, observing with interest my own primal involuntary reaction to the presence of human remains. I told myself that the skull was no threat, it meant nothing to me. It felt clinically clean to the touch, smooth and dry and slightly dusty in my hand. I figured it was years old, maybe decades, some victim of an internecine Albanian squabble.
The loud guitars screaming in my ears were suddenly oppressive. I fumbled for the Discman on my belt and switched it off with my free hand. The fingers of my other hand brushed a discontinuity. I rotated my hand and saw a small and neatly circular hole in the back of the skull.
After a moment I put the skull down and began rummaging through the underbrush, propelled by morbid curiosity. I wanted to unearth the rest of the skeleton, or clothes, jewelry, something that might hint at the victim’s identity, why he or she had been murdered with a single bullet to the back of the brain. There was nothing around the skull. I returned to the bone that had first captured my attention and tried to pull it free from the brush. It shifted but wouldn’t give. I braced my legs and pulled as hard as I could.
And most of a not-fully-decomposed human skeleton rattled out of the brush. Ragged leathery patches of dried skin still hung off its skull and rib cage. Sparse clumps of long desiccated hair dangled from its head. I held it by a shin bone.
Gagging, I released the carcass and leaped back, tripped and fell backwards but kept scrambling away, crablike, heedless of the branches scraping my palms, until I was a good ten feet away. The revulsion was almost overpowering. When I scrambled to my feet, my instincts screamed: run, now, get away!
But I didn’t. Instead I looked at the remains I had just unearthed for a long time, thinking. Then I walked over, crouched down, and examined them as closely as I could without touching it. There was a faint but extremely rancid smell, and I had to fight a wave of nausea. Flies had already begun to buzz around.
I was no forensics expert, but I knew this victim had not died decades ago. More like months. Maybe weeks. The small size and long hair made me think it had been a woman. She too had been killed with a bullet to the back of the brain. Her arms were bound behind her with rusting wire.
I searched the rest of the gulch. There was no need, the implications of what I had found were immedately obvious, but I kept searching all the same. I found a third skull. Then another intact skeleton, this one old enough that there was no hair or skin. Then an even older skull, missing its jawbone. I kept going, breathing hard, my heart thumping, but working slowly and methodically, in some kind of psychotic archaeological frenzy, as if it was vitally important that I unearthed every man and woman who had been murdered and interred in this hidden charnel house.
I found eight human skulls in that gulch, but there were so many bones that at least a dozen bodies must have been disposed of there. Most of the remains were old and much-gnawed, the bones randomly jumbled. I supposed many bones had been carried away by animals. Both intact skeletons had their wrists bound behind their back. All but one of the victims had been killed by a bullet to the back of the head. The odd skull out had been crushed with something so heavy that its top half had broken into triangular fragments, like broken pottery. When I saw that, my nausea rose again and I had to stop and sit down a while, breathing heavily, before I could continue.
Sinisa was responsible. That was obvious. It was not plausible that so many people had been killed over such a wide span of time, so near his headquarters, without Sinisa having given the orders.
Maybe he had his reasons. Maybe these had been Sinisa’s rivals, employees who betrayed him, men who tried to kill him. It was easy to believe that. I wanted to believe that. Because the alternative was that Sinisa, my friendly charismatic CEO, whose lectures on morality and philosophy I found genuinely interesting, was a brutal mass murderer.
A dozen corpses, at least one of them very recent. The mysterious zombies. Months and tens of thousands of dollars, at least, spent on unbreakably secure communications. In our haste to flee from a pack of wolves, Saskia and I had taken refuge in a dragon’s cave. Talena and I should have just put Saskia in the trunk of a car and tried to drive her to Italy ourselves.
Maybe I had just discovered my own grave. Maybe, instead of going to the time and expense of bringing Saskia and me to America, Sinisa would take us on this much shorter journey when my work was done. I didn’t think so, not with the all the hints that Sinisa wanted me to continue to assist him when I returned to California, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility.
I went back to the mansion. There were four guards with machine guns at its wrought-iron gate, and another two visible at the end of the road, new security posted since Dragan’s attack. If that really had been Dragan. I wondered if the guards had orders to prevent Saskia and me from leaving the compound. Probably yes. Probably we were prisoners.
I returned to the glorified closet that was my office and sat down before my computer. I told myself to concentrate on my work. But it took a long time before I could focus on the lines of code that swam in front of me. For the rest of the day, if I wasn’t careful, if I looked at the screen the wrong way, I saw the toothy grin and cavernous eyesockets of the skeleton I had unearthed.
I wanted to write Talena, tell her what I had found, have her call Hallam and get Major Botham to dig into Sinisa’s recent activities, try to find out what was really going on. But my computer was bugged, the keyboard monitor and packet sniffer tracked every word I sent to her, and we were forbidden to leave the compound. There was no way I could get word of my suspicions to anyone else without Sinisa knowing about it. And even if we did, we were long past the point at which anyone could save us if he did decide to betray us. Nobody, not Talena, not Hallam and Lawrence and Steve, not Bond James Bond, could help us now. We were on our own.
* * *
Two days after finding Sinisa’s personal cemetery, just before midnight on the second of May, two days before we were due to depart, I was still working. I had written all the code the system needed, but I still had to test it, then prove to Arwin and Sinisa that it worked. I had run enough tests that I was confident in the system, but I wasn’t certain, and given the newfound possibility that my life was on the line, I intended to keep testing until the last possible minute.
I was running boundary tests, trying zero-length messages, messages that were too long, invalid public keys; situations that should never happen, but “should never happen” is a phrase that makes programmers very wary indeed. I found what I thought was a bug with the way the system handled excessively long messages, in itself just a curious anomaly but one that might lead to a real problem. I spent twenty minutes tracking it to one of the Stegosaurus interface points, and from there into one of Arwin’s many files of C code. I would have asked him about it, but he was sleeping.
I opened the file up and winced. This little program was short but incredibly hard to read, much more confusing than Arwin’s usually-intuitive code. I considered going to bed and asking Arwin about it in the morning, but my bug-hunt blood was up, so I sighed, resigned myself to a long night, and began to trace the convoluted logic of Arwin’s program.
About an hour later I sat bolt upright. What I had found wasn’t a bug. It was brilliant code, obfuscated so thoroughly that no one but an expert programmer could ever understand it. Definitely Arwin’s. I recognized his style.
It was a back door.
In hacker parlance, a “back door” is a security hole built into a system by its creator, usually a hidden password that grants complete access. The Stegosaurus, Arwin’s program that converted a message into a picture hiding an unbreakable coded version of that message, actually had two back doors. One was there by design. Every message that went through the sy
stem was encrypted twice; once with the recipient’s public key, and once, unbeknownst to the user, with Sinisa’s public key, so that Sinisa could read any message anyone sent. Arwin had written that back door for Sinisa, as requested; and then, secretly, he had added one for himself, programmed Stegosaurus to generate a hidden third copy of every message as well, encrypted with his own public key.
It might not indicate any ulterior motives on Arwin’s part. He might have just decided that since he had written the damn system he had the moral right to read everything hidden within. But it was a massive, gaping security hole. Maybe Arwin planned to sell access to Sinisa’s system to the highest bidder. Maybe Arwin was a KGB plant. Since the shootout on the pier, and my gruesome discovery in the forest, no speculation seemed too farfetched. Selling access later on seemed most likely. I liked Arwin, but the idea was entirely in character.
I didn’t even consider telling Sinisa. It seemed very likely that such a report would greatly truncate Arwin’s lifespan. Despite his many flaws, I liked Arwin a lot, and he had arguably saved my life on the pier, as far as I was concerned he had earned himself a return to the USA.
I could do nothing, pretend I had never found anything. But that idea felt very wrong. I had spent a lot of time and effort building this secure system, and the notion of knowingly leaving a gargantuan hole in its defenses offended every engineering instinct I had. And what if Arwin wasn’t working alone? What if he was feeding information to someone else? If so, the most likely recipient was probably Sinisa’s rival, the same one now supporting the Mostar Tigers. By doing nothing I might indirectly aid Dragan.
I could easily disable Arwin’s code. But that didn’t seem like the optimal solution either. I no longer trusted Sinisa any further than I could shot-put a cannonball. God only knew what exactly Stegosaurus might be used for down the road. Anyone, terrorist or pedophile or drug dealer, could use the system Arwin and I had written to elude the watchful eye of authority. Sinisa had said that there was nothing else like it in his business. I had found that odd, it hadn’t been particularly hard to write, but what if it was true? Criminals tended to be pretty ignorant of technology, and good coders had enough lucrative licit opportunities that we didn’t often write products like this. If we were the first, whoever got access to Stegosaurus would want to use it rather than going to the trouble of building their own version from scratch. Even if they already had an encryption infrastructure, they still might want to switch to ours, which was designed for ease of use. What if it caught on? What if Stegosaurus became the de facto industry standard for the criminal underworld, its EBay or Amazon, just as Sinisa had predicted?
A back door might some day be very useful. Maybe someday the world would need to break into Stegosaurus. I didn’t think Sinisa would ever cooperate with the authorities, he was a tough character, but I suspected Arwin would fold under pressure like a Japanese fan.
What I could do, what I did, quickly and easily, with only a few additional lines of C code, was put a little lock on Arwin’s back door. This way, when he tried to use his back door, when he opened a message, only gibberish would emerge. It would look like a bug in his code. Locking Arwin’s back door wasn’t as secure as getting rid of it entirely. He could, to extend the metaphor, quite possibly pick the lock. If he realized that the gibberish was actually a simple substitution cipher, he would be able to break the lock with the computing power of a digital watch. But that probably wouldn’t occur to him.
At the time, it didn’t seem like a big deal. I had more pressing things to worry about. Dragan’s unknown whereabouts and ongoing hunt for my scalp, the nonzero chance that Sinisa intended to take Saskia and I on a one-way walk into the woods rather than to America, the very high probability that our journey to California would be long and hazardous, and what would happen to me and Talena if we ever did make it back, to name a few. Arwin’s back door seemed almost irrelevant.
* * *
“Now you log in,” I explained, “pick a message, and enter your pass phrase to read it.”
“I have to enter my pass phrase every time I wish to read a message?” Sinisa asked, as he followed my instructions. Arwin and I looked tensely over his shoulder, our mental fingers crossed. This was our formal demonstration of Mycroft, and despite the batteries of tests I had run, I was still worried that something might go wrong. Bugs often have a way of hiding until the first demo.
“Afraid so,” I said. “Security thing. Otherwise it would be stored in memory and potentially vulnerable to attack.”
“I see.” He examined the screen. “Yes, that is the correct original message, in full. Excellent. And the site is very simple, I think even my most stupid associates can learn how to use it. You have done well, Paul. And you, Arwin. I am very pleased.”
Arwin visibly relaxed. I probably did too. Mission accomplished: Mycroft was complete, successful, and apparently bug-free. Unless you counted Arwin’s built-in back door.
“I am extremely busy,” Sinisa said, “but this calls for a quick celebratory drink. Come.”
We followed him out to the deck that overlooked the Adriatic, and cracked open three Pilsners and a pack of Marlboros. The sun shone in a cloudless sky and the sea glittered like chrome. We clinked our beers together and drank and smoked as if we were old friends.
“Tomorrow you begin the journey home,” Sinisa said. “But if ever you wish to return here, Paul, Arwin, for a holiday, you will be most welcome. Or to any of my other houses, London or Amsterdam. Mi casa, su casa, as the Spanish say.”
I smiled and thanked him, pretending I was still an enthusiastic supporter of his noble cause, and did not have reason to believe he was a mass murderer. It was hard to reconcile this charismatic, avuncular Sinisa with the heap of human carcasses I had found in the forest.
Maybe he was just a psychopath who had learned to put on a human face. Possible. And if so, Saskia and I probably wouldn’t make it out of Albania. But I didn’t think so. There was nothing actually inconsistent in Sinisa’s behaviour. Magnanimous to his friends, savage to his enemies – history books are full of leaders like that, many of them now revered as heros and liberators, men who made stirring speeches about their noble cause of liberating the world’s suffering peoples, then went out and killed anyone who got in their way, usually doing pretty well for themselves and their bank accounts while they were at it. The history of our species is a history of violence, and the notion that someone who has murdered a dozen people must necessarily be a brute is very Western and very recent.
* * *
At dawn the next day Saskia and I stood for the last time outside the building that had been our home for a month, bags packed with our pathetically few possessions, eyes red with sleeplessness, ready to begin a journey that would hopefully somehow carry us five thousand miles, across an ocean and two continents, undiscovered.
“There they are,” Saskia said.
Sinisa’s decked-out bulletproof Land Rover emerged from his mansion’s driveway and pulled up in front of our house. Sinisa drove, Arwin rode shotgun. No Zoltan, no Zorana, which spoke well of Sinisa’s intentions.
“All right, baby,” Arwin called out to me. “Let’s you and me get the hell out of this shithole.”
Saskia and I got into the back.
“Happiness,” Arwin intoned, “is seeing Albania in your rear-view mirror.”
“Paul,” Sinisa said. “Saskia. I have good news and bad news.”
I went cold.
“I have reason to believe that Dragan and my cordial enemy Mladen have prepared an ambush at the docks, many men, many guns. They plan to kill us all.” As he spoke, the Land Rover drove to the end of his private street, where the road began to descend in switchbacks to the Vlore waterfront.
I swallowed. “That better not be the good news.” Why was Arwin so cheerful?
“No.”
Instead of making the tight left turn onto the first switchback, Sinisa turned to the right, where there was no road at all,
just an uneven slope of dirt and weeds. The Land Rover, a fine specimen of four-wheel-drive engineering, didn’t even slow down.
“Where are we going? What’s the good news?” I asked.
“The good news is that we are not going to the docks. In fact it was never our intention to go to the docks. The good news, Mister Wood, is that we have a surprise for you.”
“What kind of surprise?”
“Today we transcend our situation,” Sinisa said.
I waited for a less Zen explanation, but it did not come. On the other side of the hill, we bounced and jostled down a rocky slope and then suddenly we were on dirt tracks leading east, into mainland Albania.
“I didn’t know there was a road here,” Arwin said.
“Arwin, please, give me some respect,” Sinisa said. He was obviously enjoying himself immensely. “I run a multimillion-dollar criminal organization. Do you really think I would build a home with only one exit?”
“Sinisa,” I said, “please tell me, what the hell is going on?”
“The culmination of a plan of many years.”
“That’s great. That’s just great. Congratulations. Now where the fuck are we going?”
“You will see.”
The dirt became gravel, which became potholed pavement – a regression from gravel, if you ask me – which eventually merged with the smooth southbound highway towards Greece. Sinisa and Arwin refused to answer any questions. I wondered if we were driving to Athens, it was a major international port, maybe a freighter that would take us to America was waiting there for us? But after about half an hour we turned off the main highway and drove past farms for what felt like a long time.
I began to understand when an airplane passed over us, only a few thousand feet above ground.