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.