Yousif leaned close over her shoulder. She could smell the coffee on his breath, the musky scent of his body. He was gradually moving his stool forward, crowding her. Bob and Kinky had done that. Gotten in real close, in the office, till they were all but touching her. After asking them a couple of times to back off, and seeing their confused reaction, she’d realized it wasn’t intentional; they were just both ex-submariners. But Yousif had no such excuse. She edged her chair away.
The major said, “It’s our harbor. Manama Harbor.”
“Ey-yup. You want a hard copy of that?”
They said they did. Keys clicked, and the printer started to hum.
“This?”
They studied the next image for a long time before Yousif suggested it might show the layout of the explosives in the dhow.
“So you want that one, right? Printing. Another graphics file … map here, I’d say… how about it? What’s that look like to you?”
Aisha said, “It looks like … Israel?”
“Palestine,” Yousif muttered, correcting her.
Aisha furrowed her brow. This was something she hadn’t expected. In the upper right corner was a scale in kilometers. In the lower right corner, a feathered arrow that after a moment she recognized as showing the prevailing wind direction.
“Print it?” Nimmerich asked, into the sudden puzzled stillness.
Yousif said casually he guessed not. Aisha cocked her head, still trying to figure what this was doing here, but when the FBI man looked at her, she did not object.
He went on. Plowed through more files, muttering to himself, while she tried to work out why a map of Israel might have resided on a hard drive in Bahrain.
Meanwhile Nimmerich came on the.exe file for an e-mail program. “Which means there should be address files and some in and out mailboxes here somewhere, too. I’m glad they didn’t wipe. Then you’ve got to take the drive apart and put it on this special machine that detects like really minute remaining magnetic charges, try to recover data from that… and … uh-oh.”
She said, trying to push away what she’d been thinking, “That doesn’t sound good.”
He pointed at the screen. “I was cruising around while I was talking. … This is Windows Explorer, the attributes window. Look at that.”
“What is it?”
“That’s an encrypted file, guys.”
“Encrypted,” said Yousif, leaning forward to see. Suddenly going tense, as if this was what he’d been waiting for.
“Huh. He’s got encrypted files in nonencrypted folders. Cute.”
So far Nimmerich had seemed relaxed, more so than when he’d been talking to her, but now he went into a focused mode. “Might be harder than I thought. This looks like PGP Disk, or … no, it’s not, but something like it… uh-oh. Seven-digit key.
“What Indian thing?”
“It’s an encryption program that has this extra wrinkle. You bring up the file, it prompts you for a key. If you don’t have that, or the god mode, all you see’s garbage.”
She didn’t like the sound of that. “The what mode?”
“God mode — the master key that gets you into any of the files. Oh, I don’t even want to get into public-key encryption. Factorials and all that crap … but you can understand every file getting its own individual key. As it’s being created.”
“Sure.”
“But only the master administrator has the god key. Him and maybe a deputy, for backup. He can read everybody’s files. They can only read their own.”
“Okay, so this program—”
“Just wait a minute. Regular encryption programs, the file comes up, you don’t put in the right key, you just don’t get in. It just sits and waits. But this one — Shiva. That’s what it’s called. If you don’t put the key in right the first time, type the whole ten digits exactly right, it overwrites everything in the file. Self destructs, like in
Yousif said, “But you have a copy. This whole drive you’re working on is a copy. Right? So do like you did with the other passwords. Try a key, and if it doesn’t work—”
“Make another copy of the drive, and try again.” Nimmerich nodded. “Sure, theoretically. But that’s not a process we can computerize. At least, not here; National Security Agency might be able to do something like that as a virtual machine … but here, it’d be a physical process. A seven-digit key, twenty-nine letters each, it’d take … centuries.”
“Ey-yup. Look, I understand, like you said, this is high priority. But this is solid encryption.”
Yousif muttered to himself. Words she’d never learned at Defense Language School. Then said aloud, “This is a good place to stop.”
“Stop? Why?” Nimmerich’s head snapped around. “Isn’t this why you wanted me?”
“No. Your job was to recover the data.
“Major,” Aisha said warningly
