And here was “Mr. Hassan” pursing his lips, shaking his head. And Yousif taking his cues from him, saying lightly, “No, no, that won’t be necessary.” Who
Nimmerich said, obviously trying to be helpful in a situation he didn’t understand, “She could help evaluate the files, if I can recover any. If they’ll be in Arabic.”
“We’ll provide any language expertise necessary.”
“Forget it, Major. Nimmerich’s not gonna have any idea what he’s looking at. So without her, no deal,” Diehl said. He got up. “Come on, Arnie, we’re booking you back to D.C.”
Nimmerich looked up, surprised and not pleased. Or, she thought, he didn’t like being called Arnie. Yousif said disapprovingly, “You’re not cooperating, Bob.”
He didn’t look at Hassan when he said this, but Aisha smiled. The senior agent might not know the local language, or the latest technology, but he’d smelled the same rat she had.
“Ridiculous. Of course we’d share everything, Bob.” Yousif motioned like he was smoothing out a rumpled cloth, but he was showing the strain. She had noticed that he gnawed at his mustache when the pressure was on. He kept looking from Diehl to Hassan, as if caught between irreconcilable responsibilities. “Sit down, please. Commander Hooker, talk sense into him. We’re all friends here. We’ve always been open with you, haven’t we? Always shared everything? Well, well… if you want her there, she’s welcome. Aisha? We’ll issue you the appropriate passes and so forth as soon as we break.”
But the Saudi didn’t like it. Aisha didn’t miss how he stayed in his seat as the others rose. The flash of distrust, dislike, maybe even hatred, as their gazes clashed, just for a moment, then turned aside.
The room was on the third floor of the ministry, in a lofty-ceilinged work space that bore all the hallmarks of being hastily converted to its new use, like folding tables and lots of extension cords. Four computers were set up around the walls. Two Pentium Gateways, the Sanyo from the madrassa, and an Apple. The last was the only one with a modem, set up with an encryption program for Nimmerich when he had a question for the guys back at Quantico. A laser printer, too, a hulking cream-colored Hewlett-Packard the size of a small refrigerator.
Nimmerich began by examining the hard drive again, making notes in a fresh spiral notebook. “So how do we proceed?” Yousif asked. He’d attached himself to them, and it didn’t look like he was going to leave.
Nimmerich said, slightly pompously, she thought, pointing to the nearest Pentium, “First I’m going to convert this into a forensic workstation. Then I’ll explain as I go, all right? If you’re interested.”
“I’m interested,” she said. While Yousif sat back, making it plain as he could without saying so that the actual work of recovering the data was beneath him.
“Most girls don’t know much about computers. Or care.”
“I’m probably not like the other girls you know,” she said.
Nimmerich pursed his lips, but didn’t follow that one up. In fact he reddened and buried himself in his work.
Using screwdrivers from a kit in his briefcase, grounding each on a conductive pad, he took off the side panels to access the interior of the computer. He pulled off cables, slid out the hard drive, and replaced it with the evidence hard drive.
He said, not meeting her eyes, “Okay. I’m going to configure the evidence as the master, and this second drive as the slave.” He installed one of the blank, formatted drives he’d brought in the lower bay. “Now we’re gonna copy it to this new drive, make what we call a forensic image. That means everything: active files, deleted files, hidden files, password-protected stuff, everything. Then we’ll take the evidence out and bag it again. Protect it from viruses or data corruption, and any accusation from the defense we added files that weren’t there.”
When he had the machine buttoned up again, he put a 3.5-inch minidisk in the A drive and turned the power on. As it whirred and images flickered across the screen she said, “What was that? A boot disk?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why don’t you boot from the hard drive, like usual?”
“So we don’t accidentally write to the original evidence. I just took a normal boot disk and neutered it — made all the pointers look at the floppy disk, and not the hard drive. That’s also got the SafeBack software, the utility I’m going to use to make the image.”
Aisha kept watching, a little surprised this wasn’t black magic. She was following everything so far.
