He paused again. Webb took that as a cue. “Jimmy, I’ll pay you a thousand pounds for a successful penetration.”
The man’s bloodshot eyes widened, and alarm flickered over his face. “You’re intae somethin heavy here.”
Webb nodded. In the confines of the taxi, a sour, unwashed smell was quickly building up.
“It’s your business why ye want in, I guess. Okay let me think.” The man was silent for a minute. Webb looked out at the congealed traffic. Then Judge Dredd was saying, “These high security places sometimes have a soft underbelly. They rely on outside systems like suppliers, research labs, civilian phone networks and so on. Somebody in Argentina tunnelled into Los Alamos via a legitimate university connection. It might be worth a try. But even when you get the password file you still have another problem.”
Webb waited.
“The passwords are encrypted. So you have to run a cracker on it.”
“You mean a decryption package?”
A pained expression crossed the Judge’s face. “You cannae decrypt a password once it’s encoded, not in Unix. It’s a oneway system. However what you can do is run a dictionary file. What this does is apply the encryption routine to thousands of words, crap like Fred and Barney high on the list. You end up with millions of possibilities for thousands of words. It compares this encrypted output with the encrypted passwords in the file. When it finds a match, bingo, ye’ve got the password.”
The taxi had cleared Central London and was moving briskly; signs for Hounslow, Staines and the airport were appearing at intervals. The taxi was reeking of unwashed body.
Webb knew that with his next words he would be in grave breach of the Official Secrets Act; but he saw no alternative. “Jimmy, it’s important that you keep quiet about this. I have to know the source of messages going in to a place called Eagle Peak Observatory in Arizona. There’s a telescope in Tenerife. It can be controlled remotely through an intermediate node and I can give you the PIN numbers to do it. When I operate it from Arizona I see signals which look as if they come from the Tenerife telescope. I need to know whether they really do. I suspect they don’t.”
Webb pulled a fat brown envelope from his backpack, keeping it out of sight of the driver’s rear view. The man stared incredulously at it.
Jimmy asked, “Where is this intermediate node?”
“The Physics Department, Keble Road, Oxford University.”
“And where does the military come intae it?”
“I suspect the signals really originate from the Sandia Laboratory.”
“You don’t mean yon Teraflop?”
“I do. Can’t you do it?”
“In thirty-six hours? It’s a megachallenge, no question.”
Webb slipped the envelope over. Judge Dredd riffled the banknotes as if he couldn’t believe it, and slipped it into a pocket. The smell was turning into a stench and Webb wondered when Judge Dredd had last had a bath.
“But it might be done. I’ll no be able to penetrate the whole Teraflop Box, yon iron’s too big for that. But with root access I could install a packet sniffer at some network switch. A desktop PC will do. You just sit quietly watching the data and biding your time. Like a crocodile watching the comings and goings on a river bank. If you keep seeing the same sequence of signals near the start of a message you might be on to a password. Then you pounce. Once you’re in, you get out before anyone even notices. But you hide away a few lines of code that lets you get in the back door again whenever you feel like it.”
“Jimmy, I don’t care how you do it, so long as it’s done surreptitiously,” said Webb.
“This is a big job, ye appreciate. If I cannae hack it in time I might get the Angels of Doom on to it. Surreptitious-like. They say their latest SATAN scripts will find holes in almost anything.”
Webb scribbled down a set of numbers. “I’ll call you at midnight tomorrow. I’ll see you get the other half within a week.”
At the airport, Judge Dredd directed the taxi back home without stepping out, and Webb made his way through the crowds to Terminal One, gulping fresh air and feeling like Klaus Fuchs.
Shortly after Webb’s Jumbo had hauled itself into the air, an unknown, but clearly disguised, man entered the secure London office of Spink & Son wheeling a tartan shopping trolley and carrying a brown paper bag filled with breakfast rolls and tins of beans. He made a purchase extraordinary even by the standards of that office, paying a fortune in cash in return for gold coins. In the main he bought the “old” sovereigns, with 0.2354 of a Troy ounce of pure gold. These he weighed in heaps of ten on his own scales, before loading them into the trolley. He then placed the rolls and beans on top of the coins, and wheeled the trolley out on to the street, towards some destination unknown. The transaction took up much of the afternoon. Also that afternoon, Albemarle, Samuel and other coin dealers in the London area likewise found heavy runs on the Krugerrand, the maple leaf, the US Eagle and the Britannia.
And in Zurich and London, the world centres for the exchange of gold, the price of the yellow metal moved imperceptibly upwards. It was the merest nudge, barely detectable above the random tremors of the global market.
The huge aircraft started the big haul and dwindled to a tiny flying insect skimming just above the Atlantic. Webb travelled first class. And while the sun stood still in the sky outside, and air of lethal coldness hurtled past inches from his head, he dined six miles high on smoked salmon and champagne, and he watched Loren and Mastroianni in love, and he worried.
While the tiny insect skimmed over the water, gold kept drifting up; still a whisper all but lost in noise. The exchanges in Hong Kong and Singapore had closed for the night; but clever men and women in London and New York, people who spent their days alert for tiny fluctuations in the jagged curves on their monitor screens, had noticed the trend on their monitors; they worried too, but about different things. But then these markets too closed, and waited for the Earth to turn, for the sun to rise and pierce the Tokyo smog.
There was a thunderstorm over Newfoundland and congestion in the air over JFK, and the turbulence played with the huge aircraft like a cat with a mouse. At each bump Webb, in a state of terror, peered backwards into the dark; he could just make out the engine trying to shake itself loose from the flapping wing. He tried not to weep with relief when the Jumbo landed smoothly and taxied off the runway. A tired lady with a bright floral display in her lapel kept saying “Welcome to New York” to the ragged passengers pouring into Customs & Immigration. Webb sat worn out on a plastic seat while world travellers were whisked in limousines to Manhattan or took the helicopter, still flying in this weather, to East 60th Street.
An hour passed before a tall Indian appeared, black hair sweeping down his shoulders. “Mister Fish? Mexico bound? Would you follow me, please?”
Almost past caring, he followed the Indian on to a walkway and into the dark New York night. The air was bitter outside the terminal and snow was fluttering down.
“I’m Free Spirit,” said the man, ushering Webb into a Cadillac. “It don’t mean free liquor either, it’s my tribal name and I’m proud of it.”
“Right on,” Webb said.