THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller (22 page)

Chapter 19

Sunday, January 30 – 2:27 PM

There was an eerie, almost palpable silence in the corridor, shattered only by the jingling of keys. Decker stood outside the metal apartment door and waited for the landlord to let him in. No one had entered the apartment since the time of the sealing. Strands of solar yellow POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS tape still hung across the door. Decker removed the plastic cobwebs with a single sweep of the hand. “Thanks,” he said to the landlord, stepping forward. “I’ll lock up when I’m finished.”

He flipped on the light and made his way into the living room, past the dingy off-white nubby sofa, the wicker coffee table with the broken leg, across the well-worn carpeting, to the little wooden table with the Dell PC. He didn’t waste any time. He curled into the seat like a question mark and turned on the computer.

Recent news stories had brought the theft of the HEU in Kazakhstan to the world’s attention. In New York, that irrepressible hack Gallagher of WKXY-TV had done a good job scaring half the city to death. Citizen and union groups demonstrated daily outside of City Hall, and each morning saw another truckload of irate letters delivered to His Honor, Mayor Greenberg. There had been four myocardial infarctions, dozens of asthma attacks, and an elderly couple in Queens had taken their own lives in the face of the impending radioactive doom. The Manhattan DA was looking into pressing charges against Gallagher and WKXY-TV but the case was dubious at best. The First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press was hard to bridle even in this time of heightened vigilance.

Decker waited for the machine to boot up.

One good thing had come out of the El Aqrab Affair, as it soon came to be known: The nation’s alert status had increased from Yellow to Orange. Armed with a new sense of urgency, Decker’s boss, SAC Jerry Johnson, submitted a request to re-search the apartment in Queens under the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. A FISA panel of judges convened in secret and issued the search warrant. It did not have to be displayed. The raid could be done in secret, night or day. And this time, the PC hard disk was in play.

Decker linked up his portable burn unit to the computer and copied the files from the hard disk. The process took only a few seconds. There wasn’t a whole lot on the PC; he could have used a memory stick. With a loud sigh, Decker got up, packed his gear into his gym bag, and left the apartment.

As soon as he got back to FBI headquarters, Decker stopped by the Computer Lab on the third floor and downloaded a copy of the hard disk for analysis. Then he walked the four flights back to his department.

No one greeted him as he entered the bullpen. Other agents occupied the desks around him. But they were off in their own worlds, on the telephone, or with their eyes glued to their PC screens, typing reports.

Decker sat down at his desk and started pouring through his e- and snail-mail: new HR protocols; a retirement party for some guy in Accounting named Trumbel; an irritating set of questions about his expense report from SAC Johnson; a joke from Tony Bartolo . . . Decker froze. He looked at the name again:
Anthony Bartolo
. And he saw the body gradually unfurl, with that puzzled look upon his face
.
Decker couldn’t stand it any longer. He pulled the CD burner from his gym bag and linked it to his own PC.

It took him only a few minutes to transfer the data to his Compaq and run a recovery program, unscrambling the FAT. It looked like one of the suspects – probably Mohammed bin Basra – had erased some of the files just before bolting from the apartment: a pair of .doc file letters that seemed innocuous enough; a host of Quicken files tracking an account worth thirteen thousand dollars – nothing appeared to be coded; some PDF files of speeches by an Imam in Brooklyn; and, finally, four different wallpapers, with different arabesque designs and Arabic calligraphy, which he reviewed with PhotoShop.

The first turned out to be the same design that he had seen at the apartment in Queens, the one Professor Hassan had called
masjid
, the Individual prayer. He translated the Arabic script that ran along the
qibla
and confirmed that it was from the
Al-Takwir
, Sura 81. Except that only a part of the text had been used in the design – the words, “ . . . ten-month pregnant she-camels are discarded as a means of transportation . . . ” and then, “ . . . when hell is stoked up.” He remembered what Hassan had said the phrases meant to Muslim clerics:
Real trains and other high-speed means of transportation have supplanted camel trains
. And the reference to hell:
Could be volcanoes like Mt. St. Helens and Etna. But many clerics believe it refers to nuclear power and the bomb.
Then it hit him. Trains and bombs! The HEU stolen by Gulzhan Baqrah had been transported on a train. Could these strange quotes be harbingers of things to come, some planned but yet unexecuted crime? The date of the file was older than the theft itself – by several weeks. But what did the number
540,000
mean?

With mounting excitement, Decker examined the other wallpaper files. He had never seen the second one before. The illustration looked similar to the one he’d discovered in Moussa’s locker, similar – with a
qibla
line and
minbar
– but not identical. Could it represent the second prayer Hassan had called the
jami’ masjid
, used in the Congregational mosque on Fridays? He tried to translate the calligraphy but only a few words were discernable: “How many a deserted well.
”
And then, perpendicular to the transversal axis, “Hell is the rendezvous.” He couldn’t make out the rest, except for another number:
205,200
. The calligraphy was simply too ornate. He made a note of the translation and moved on.

The third wallpaper seemed identical to the illustration he’d found in Moussa’s locker, the third prayer Hassan had referred to as
musalla
or
idgah
, the Community mosque used during the festivals of
‘Id al-Fitr
and
‘Id al-Adha
. But, once again, he could only decipher a solitary phrase, no matter how hard he tried: “Death will overtake you . . . ” And the number
54,000
.
I must be missing something
, he thought.

The fourth and final wallpaper was simply a collection of arabesque designs. No calligraphy, no abstract symbols broke the rhythm of the wave-like lines, the sweep of foliation, the endless repetitions. No. Wait! There. He peered more closely at the image. Those tiny curves and lines and dots – right at the center – surrounding the number
0
. The words were like an island in a whirling arabesque sea. He translated them. “On the ocean like mountains.” That was it. Nothing else. Just that single phrase. It was so frustrating. He needed a break.

Decker closed the files one by one. Then he stretched for a moment, started to stand and . . . stopped. He looked down at the PC screen, at the folder containing the files. Wait a minute. Something was wrong. Most wallpaper images had JPG or BMP extensions. These were all TIF files. But even more bizarre was their size. All four files were huge, ten to twenty Megs apiece. He checked the wallpaper images from his own PC. They were all in a
Wallpaper
directory in the
Web
folder under
WINNT
. But most of the JPGs were less than one hundred KB. He then converted one of the ordinary JPG wallpaper files into a TIF file. The file expanded by a factor of less than twenty. This just didn’t make any sense. The TIF wallpaper files should have been around two Megs apiece, not ten to twenty. Then he remembered Professor Hassan’s question: “Was there anything behind the files? Hidden architecture.” Isn’t that what he had called it? What better place to hide something than in plain view, on wallpaper! It reminded him of the elaborate tattoos of the
Nuestra Familia
prison gangs that he’d once been required to decipher in Chicago. They featured clandestine messages as well, a kind of epidermal, hidden architecture.

Decker right-clicked the file of the first wallpaper image, the
masjid
or Individual prayer, and tried to view it as a non-graphics file, first as a standard text file – with a TXT extension – and then as a standard ASCII file, to see if it made sense. Garbage! Indecipherable nonsense! Then he remembered that ASCII was a Western file format, designed to represent Western alphabetical characters. The equivalent for Arabic, Chinese and other non-Western languages was a UTF-8 or UTF-16 file format. He tried both and the output still didn’t make sense. Given the size of the file, he stuck with the UTF-16.

Of course, the answer could have been some algorithm or formula that isolated a discrete part of the file – like ciphers used in correspondence, where only every X letter or word was important. But Decker didn’t know the X. With a controlled breath, he let himself fall into the pattern, “reclining in chaos,” as his
sensei
Master Yamaguchi used to say.

Decker spiraled downward through the numbers, drifted, until – as if someone were tapping him gently on the shoulder as he slept – it suddenly became clear. He remembered what Professor Hassan had said about the proportions in Arabic architecture derived from the perfect square – the “Golden Ratio,” as Pythagoras had called it. The
Phi
. One to the square root of two.

Decker opened his eyes and wrote a simple program to run the ratio against the file. In this way, he could isolate which active or live points on each line contained data that could be interpreted not as image information, but as UTF-16 text data. He couldn’t believe it. It still didn’t make any sense. Normally, when he got this feeling and fell into a pattern, he floated up out of the depths with a solution – like snatching a coin from the bottom of a pool. He was just about to give up again when he remembered the obvious.

Arabic didn’t read from left to right. He had been running the program against the scan lines from the top left to the right, and then down a line. He ran the program again, this time from the top right left, then down again, and so forth.

The Arabic fell to order. He’d been right! The formula was based on
Phi
, a constant in Islamic architecture.

He read the title of the file:
Terrorism Incident Annex
. Cold fingers clamped his heart. He read through the first paragraph. It listed a series of Signatory Agencies, from the Department of Defense (DOD) to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Below the list of agencies was the Introduction:
Presidential Decision Directive 39 (PDD-39), U.S. Policy on Counterterrorism, establishes policy to reduce the Nation’s vulnerability to terrorism, deter and respond to terrorism, and strengthen capabilities to detect, prevent, defeat, and manage the consequences of terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). PDD-39 states that the United States will have the ability to respond rapidly and decisively to terrorism directed against Americans wherever it occurs, arrest or defeat the perpetrators using all appropriate instruments against the sponsoring organizations and governments, and provide recovery relief to victims, as permitted by law . . .

He continued to scroll down through the converted file. It was approximately twenty pages long, and included detailed plans on how to evacuate New York in the event of an emergency.

Decker ran the second file through the same process. This was the smallest of the four; it popped up in a second – a sketch, an illustration, built using plain text characters. His blood congealed. He knew exactly what this was: a “gun” type nuclear device, a WMD, annotated with instructions on how to set it off.

With shaking hands, he ran the third file through the program. This was the largest of the four, just shy of twenty Megs. It seemed to take forever for the code to process, although Decker knew it was only seconds. His pulse quickened. The file began to coalesce.

It was another illustration, some kind of architectural drawing featuring structural supports and wiring. His eyes settled at the top of the PC screen. He knew this building. He saw it every day, from the corner near the subway station where he took the train to work.

The Empire State Building!

Decker processed the fourth and final file. It popped up in a second – raw data of some kind, column after column, row after row. He scrolled up and noticed a paragraph of text, once again in Arabic. It pertained to something called the “Inundation Phase” of a tsunami. Perhaps, he thought, the kind of tidal wave created by a nuclear explosion . . . in the Empire State Building . . . on the island of Manhattan!

Decker took a slow, deep breath through his nose and let the air run down into his lungs, like rainwater falling through the downspout of his spine. He felt it settle in his stomach, collect within the reservoir of his
chi
, and then evaporate again. It rose up through his chest like some great cloud and slowly, slowly, slipped between his lips. Decker breathed again. It was a standard Kung Fu exercise. His heart rate slowed. Then he looked up and waved at Johnson and Warhaftig, who were standing less than twenty feet away in front of Johnson’s office.

“Excuse me,” he said. “SAC Johnson?” He ignored him. “Sir?” he said a little louder. Warhaftig glanced over but immediately turned back. They appeared to be arguing about something. “SAC Johnson, sir!” Decker said, his voice so loud now that everyone in the bullpen stopped, and turned and stared.

“What do you want?” Johnson shouted back. He was clearly annoyed.

“I think you’d better take a look at this.”

Just then, the phone rang on Decker’s desk. He picked up the receiver. It was the Computer Lab. They’d run a recovery program against the hard disk – as he had – but come up empty. Decker thanked the analyst and hung up.

When Warhaftig and Johnson approached his desk, he told them what he had discovered, displaying the hidden files on his computer. Warhaftig grew excited, but Johnson continued to scowl.