instead of
Vanessacraig.com
Hoteconomics.com
Littlewonder.at
Jericho rubbed his chin.
You didn’t have to be particularly intelligent to understand what it meant. Three websites were to be exchanged. He wondered how Yoyo had got hold of the data. He asked Diane to open the three pages at the top, one by one, all of which were innocuous and generally accessible pages. friends-of-iceland was a blog. In it, Scots emigrants to Iceland swapped experiences, provided useful tips to new arrivals and those who were thinking of emigrating, and put photographs on the net. en-mediode-la-suiza was also devoted to the charms of living abroad. Produced in Spain, the page provided a great deal of visual material about Switzerland, in the form of 3D films. Jericho looked at some of them. They had been filmed from a plane or helicopter. At a low altitude he flew over Zürich, landscapes of the canton of Uri and picturesque collections of houses and barns that lay scattered along a winding river.
Brainlab.de/Quantengravitationstheorie/Planck/uni-kassel/32241/html, finally, came from Germany and consisted of closely typed lines of text, examining over twelve pages a phenomenon that physics described as ‘quantum foam’. It described what happened if you applied quantum theory and the General Theory of Relativity to the so-called Planck length, which gave you foaming space–time bubbles and at the same time a scientific dilemma, because those bubbles overrode the calculations of General Relativity. The text was remarkable for its lack of paragraphs, and was plainly written for people whose notion of ecstasy involved a blackboard scribbled all over with formulas.
Scotland, Spain, Germany. The joys of Iceland. The beauty of Switzerland. Quantum physics.
Hardly designed to provoke fear and horror.
Curious, he called up the websites that were supposed to be swapped. Vanessa Craig was revealed as a student of agricultural science from Dallas, Texas, who was spending a few months on an exchange programme in Russia. In her online diary she wrote quite unexcitingly about her little university town near Moscow. She was homesick and lovesick and complained of the low temperatures responsible for the innate melancholy of the Russian soul. Behind Hoteconomics, an American website offering up-to-the-minute economy news, was Littlewonder, an Austrian portal for handmade toys, specialising in the needs of pre-school children.
What was all this? What did travel reports, toys, quantum physics, the global economy and the notes of a shivering American have in common?
Nothing.
And that was precisely the quality required by dead letter drops. You walked by, looked at them without suspecting for a moment that they might contain something other than what they actually contained. Yoyo must have found their common properties. Something you couldn’t see, but was still there. Again Jericho opened the Spanish address with the film clips from Switzerland, clicked on the snake symbol and moved it aside.
Nothing happened. As if pulled by elastic bands, it darted back into the empty space of the display.
‘Weird,’ Jericho murmured. ‘I could have sworn—’
That it’s a mask.
A mask to reveal hidden content in the apparently harmless context of the pages. A decoding program. Again he dragged it onto the Spanish website, and again it slipped away.
‘Okay then, friends of Iceland. Let’s see what you have to offer.’
And this time it happened.
The moment he dragged the snake symbol to the blog, an extra window opened. It contained a few apparently unconnected words, but his instinct hadn’t failed him.
Jan in business address: Oranienburger Strasse 50, continues a that he statement coup Donner be There are
‘I knew it! I knew it!’
Jericho clenched his fists. Excited now, he went to work. The snake icon was a key. Anyone who had concealed messages in the pages was using a special algorithm, and the parameters for that algorithm lay in the mask. He opened the page with the essay about quantum foam and repeated the procedure. Further words were added to the fragment:
Jan in Andre runs business address: Oranienburger Strasse 50, 10117 Berlin. continues a grave that he knows all about One way or another statement coup Chinese government implemented of timing and Donner be liquidated. There are
There are? Whatever there were, this stuff here was far more likely to alarm somebody who was the focus of State surveillance! What looked at first glance like sheer Dadaism was really part of a larger message, the text of which had been sent to an unknown number of mailboxes.
Dead letter drops existed wherever states and institutions spied on one another and agents had to avoid being seen together, Jericho thought. During the Cold War they had been the most common form of message transmission. Almost anything at all could be used: rubbish bins, holes in trees, cracks in masonry, public phone books, magazines in waiting rooms, vases and sugar bowls in restaurants, the cisterns in public lavatories. The drop was a place accessible to anyone, where you left something that anybody might see, but which only the initiated recognised as a message. Transmitter and receiver agreed on a period of time, the transmitter deposited what he wanted to pass on – documents, microfilms, demands for cash, journalistically controversial material – left a sign at an agreed place that something was waiting in the drop, and disappeared. A little later the receiver came along, picked up the transmission, left a sign of his own that it had been collected, and also went on his way. The system worked as long as the physical exchange of hardware was involved. Since encrypted messages were now passed on via the internet, they had fallen out of fashion, and were reserved for cases where the information to be passed on could not, with the best will in the world, be transmitted down a fibre-optic cable.
At least that was what people said.
In fact the drop was celebrating an unparallelled renaissance, particularly where electronic encryption was forbidden or if there was a risk that the net police had been given a spare key. The new drops were harmless files and websites that anyone could access. What they contained was unremarkable as long as the content was suited to the transmission of the message. A sentence consisting of twelve words could be broken down into twelve parts and distributed across twelve websites. Word one, The, could appear in the second line of a travel piece, word two in the sixth line of the third paragraph of a specialist scientific article, and where it was absolutely imperative that a word should not appear, it was broken down into individual letters that could be found anywhere.
However, no one could do anything with the files while they weren’t in possession of a key that separated the words or letters from their contexts and combined them to form a new, secret meaning, a mask, like the kind used in former times, when the Bible or the works of Tolstoy were made to reveal the most incredible content simply by placing a sheet of variously perforated cardboard over a particular page. The matter that appeared in the holes produced the message. In the world of the World Wide Web that mask was a program. Parts of such a program had clearly made their way onto Yoyo’s computer, along with an indication that three drops had been replaced by three different ones. Jericho had no idea how many drops were involved overall. It could be dozens, hundreds. Clearly, other addresses were needed for the meaning of the message to be revealed, but Jericho was beginning to understand why Yoyo must have become convinced that she had kicked a hornets’ nest.
Jan in Andre runs business address: Oranienburger Strasse 50, 10117 Berlin.