Incubation
No new cases crossed Johnny’s threshold over the next few days, and activities on other fronts were nondescript. He worked out and found himself doing his tai-chi more slowly, almost as if he had a case. Maybe the fact that he was in the middle of stalking these emails let him believe a case was around him, enveloping him. He was calmer since his mind had something to play with, a toy, an amusement, a worry stone at the least.
And he was worried. Being aware of a plot forming made him hypersensitive to environmental changes. Things were far from normal. News from some of the globe’s more unstable areas seemed to be disappearing, he had realized, and silence was encroaching more each day. This was what worried him. It was as if people in volatile places were holding their collective breath, waiting for something big to happen.
And then another email arrived from his mystery sender. He knew it would. It was part of a stack of patterns intricate enough to force fate.
This message was another rhyming couplet double-substituted in the same way as the others. It took Johnny only a few minutes to decode it this time. The message again sounded like another step had been taken by the protagonists behind it: “Night and day, there to see, soon enough they will be free.” Nothing about chickens, eggs, or France this time, but Johnny figured that bit of stage-setting had occurred in the other communications. The message confirmed that whatever was being tracked consisted of more than one thing. The rhyme was about parts of a day and what sounded like a heist of valuable objects. The action was heating up. It was time to do a little more work on the technical front.
Johnny took the elevator to the parking garage in the basement of his condo tower, jumped into his stylish European convertible, and sped through the pleasant afternoon air toward Boston’s busy wharf, the warm sun glistening on the rippling water, the currents like stains on the surface. He was headed to see Tucker the Technogeek, Tucker the Tigerlily, Tucker the Tenfinger Terror. Tucker the Nicknamed would have some answers.
Tucker Thiesen worked out of his large apartment in a renovated skyscraper near the wharf. It was a rather nondescript locale for a person of such skill and so many monikers. Yet, if Johnny was about projecting an image of style, Tucker was the opposite, and seemed to cultivate an image of not caring about image. In fact, sometimes he was downright annoying, with Johnny’s stylish sheen polished highly and Tucker’s rough pumice threatening to mar its surface if Johnny got too close. But Tucker could do things nobody else could, and knew that his power lay in his skill, not his style. He did freelance operational activities for some of the world’s most secretive clients. He and Johnny had been friends since childhood. Johnny always looked forward to hanging out with Tucker.
Tucker’s apartment was different, Johnny thought as he parked his car. It seemed endless in its inner recesses, and rooms seemed to rotate back and forth at will. Perhaps that was because each time he visited a different door was open, so Johnny was always entering without interference into the room indicated, whichever one Tucker happened to be in.
Tucker had repeatedly reassured Johnny that as a master of surveillance and things covert and dangerous, he was perfectly safe in his seemingly open environment. Years ago, Johnny had donated a hair and a few other personal items to Tucker’s systems, and afterwards he was told he was welcome anytime. He never understood exactly how this form of carte blanche had been accomplished or how it was maintained.
When Johnny found him, Tucker the Tumultuous was in a deep soul-kiss with a device hooked up to his guitar that transformed his voice in synchronization with the guitar strings. The music he was producing was good, but deafening. In fact, Johnny had heard it coming up the elevator, despite the room being buried inside the building and dampened acoustically, the walls pleated with baffles and grilles.
Tucker stopped when he noticed Johnny and spit the mouthpiece out. “How’d I sound?” he yelled as the last bit of reverb hovered in the air.
Johnny knew he had to yell back. Tucker would be wearing earplugs. “Like Frampton, but with bigger words.”
Tucker laughed and swung the guitar deftly down into its stand. “I love it. It frees my mind. It’s a great way to start the afternoon. I get so foggy after lunch.” He pulled his earplugs out as he spoke.
Johnny smiled at his old friend as they shook hands. “And you do love your lunches,” Johnny teased. Tucker the Trucker was portly, as his mother might say, and had always had a robust appetite, even as a kid.
“I do, I do,” Tucker affirmed. “Today was fresh steamers at that ramshackle crab house down the road. Delicious with butter! But what can I do you for?”
“Ah, yes. Well, I have a little curiosity for you,” Johnny stated, looking around at the paraphernalia littering the room. If it was electronic, it was here. “It’s an email thread I’d like you to look at. Have time?”
“I’ll make the time for you. Hey, close the door and follow me,” Tucker said, wending his way through a door behind the amps he’d been using and into an adjoining room, large and brightly lit, its back wall consumed by computer monitors arranged around a workpit in which a single beat-up office chair resided. Moving into the room, it became apparent that this was really two rooms with a wall missing between them. The brightly lit portion housed Tucker’s main computer center, the nexus for his real job, while a more warmly and dimly lit area was filled with comfortable chairs and beautifully decorated walls, one of which supported a large plasma television. The other wall was consumed with a large piece of abstract art, a set of large maroon boxes around a central empty box, all on an background that looked like sand. The inside of each box had intersecting arcs and three lines crossing at various angles. It was a striking piece.
Johnny pried his attention away from the arresting artwork. The unflattering fluorescent lights overhead gave everything in the computer pen a sanitary rinse that left bright surfaces still looking unclean, as if a film of heavy use lay over them. It was a place both alive and depressingly neglected, like a mossy pond in the woods.
“I sent them over to you before I left,” Johnny said, following his friend over toward the computer outpost, its cockpit-like arrangement of computers and monitors created for maximum functionality. With Tucker the Turbo’s flash and skill with machines, he could play three or four computers simultaneously, like a rock keyboard virtuoso.
Tucker closed the door they had just come through and opened the door on the opposite side of the warmly lit portion of the room. The door opened onto the main hallway. This was now his main portal, Johnny concluded. One at a time seemed to be the pattern to the apartment’s exterior door plan. Tucker returned, seated himself with a huff, swiveled the desiccated office chair, and spun toward one of the larger monitors.
“Oh, here they are,” Tucker observed, quickly finding the two messages Johnny had forwarded in the long list of email that had accumulated in the quarter-hour it had taken to drive over. Johnny wondered how his friend found time to do anything else.
He had only forwarded the first two emails, wanting to keep the third to himself so that he didn’t drag his friend deeply into his theories earlier than necessary. Johnny had imposed a story on these, but it might not be the story Tucker would see. Plus, the latest one was even more provocative, and he knew Tucker could decode them given enough time.
Johnny leaned against a desk while his friend went to work.
Tucker studied the messages a bit, and then pronounced his first diagnosis. “Looks like typical weird spam messages from a well-used spammer account. I don’t see anything noteworthy here. Strange domain – miasma.net – but they’re probably just spoofing that. Otherwise, nothing unusual.”
“Well, the domain is probably appropriate, because I think they are trying to hide something behind a fog,” Johnny mused aloud. “What if I told you that the two messages were related, meant to be read by the same people, and used a substitution pattern to hide rhyming couplets. Would you look at them any differently then?”
Tucker studied his friend, taking the information in, and then turned his chair to focus on the emails again. He placed them side by side and hunched forward, his eyes darting between the two, his hand occasionally moving the mouse to scroll up and down.
“If you hadn’t told me they were related, I wouldn’t have seen anything,” Tucker intoned slowly, his cadence speeding up as he spoke. “Now I think I see a couple of things worth noting.”
Johnny felt a surge of excitement, and waited for his friend to go on.
Tucker continued. “I mean, these are minor things, but you’ll probably be able to use the details later. I know these things can matter. So, what I see are strange times that they are sent. There’s an unusual gap in both of them, and it’s the same. See here,” Tucker concluded, pointing toward the top of the lefthand email.
Johnny leaned in, and studied the timestamps. There was a path noted in the header information, when each node received the email and passed it along. Johnny knew this much. Now, he saw what Tucker was pointing out. In the penultimate node for each email, there was a precise 24-hour shift, as if the email had been plucked out of the network and reinserted one day later.
“So, what does it mean?” Johnny inquired. He could see the pattern, but wasn’t certain of the significance.
“Someone is avoiding fingerprints,” Tucker said flatly. “They are taking a typical spam message out of the network, manipulating it, and reinserting it. It’s a great way to disguise their work – keep the hour the same, just change the day. Most surveillance systems would view these as emails that just got hung up somewhere for a day and ignore them. The email looks like it’s from a known spammer, but the content is their own. They get all the benefit of spam without spending years earning the bad reputation and they hide in messages already screened as innocuous. They effectively own an untraceable and free email channel they can use any time.”
There was hectic typing and clicking as Tucker flipped through websites and pages at a manic pace.
“Aha, that’s what I thought,” Tucker announced. “They are likely in the UK.”
Johnny shook his head and gazed at his friend. “How do you get that?”
“Easy, my man, easy,” he gloated. “There’s a pathway of nodes back to the sending node. These emails all seem to traverse the same course, starting in the United States, and then hopping to the Caribbean, and then to various other nodes for more local distribution. Another benefit of the same send time. These people are picking these up at a node in the UK and reinserting them there, and given the local time, they are doing it rather late at night, around midnight in the UK. I’d wager whoever is responsible for sending these along isn’t the brains, but the technical brawn, and likes having simple rules to follow. Some sys-op in the UK paid a pittance to do some grunt technical work.”
Plus, Johnny thought, it added predictability for simple management. He inferred a ringleader even more strongly now, someone he had not detected directly yet.
“OK, Tuck, now I have to show you something else,” Johnny confided. “There’s a third email.”
“Oh, ho, now you tell me!” Tucker exclaimed, raising his beefy arms in feigned shock. “Bring it on!”
Johnny logged into his email account on another computer, and forwarded the third message to Tucker, who immediately popped it open and studied it.
“Do they match?” Johnny asked.
Tucker leaned back and looked askance at Johnny. “They do more than match. There’s another pattern in here.”
“What do you mean?” Johnny asked, his pulse racing. “Another pattern?”
“There’s a countdown going on here, one with some mathematical precision,” Tucker concluded. “Or, a count-up, if you follow me. Look at the days.”
Johnny peered over Tucker’s shoulder, and studied the three panes that were open on the screen now. The first email had been plucked out of circulation on April 30, and sent along on the first of May; the second had been kidnapped on the twenty-second of June and released on the twenty-third; and the most recent was lifted on the fourth of July and dropped on its final path on the fifth. Johnny saw the pattern immediately with a glance at the screens.
“Primes,” he muttered.
“Exactly,” Tucker echoed. “This is just like something out of a sci-fi story, communication with E.T. by flashing primes to show mathematical awareness and consciousness,” Tucker finished in a mock spooky voice.
“Perhaps we’re being invaded by chickens,” Johnny joked, his voice remaining grave. “If the pattern is true, then we have their first email. This is such hokey communication at some level,” he continued. “But then you have the plucking of spam emails from a server before they are served and smart concealment, which is pretty modern and sophisticated, and speaks of access to some significant Internet leverage point. I’m not sure what to make of it yet.”
Tucker was scanning the emails again, and there was a long pause as he studied various elements, the hush of cooling fans from the computers making the room seem far away and secret. Finally, he sat back again, and proclaimed, “Nothing more to see here, folks.”
Tucker and Johnny talked a bit more, catching up a little on mundane affairs. Soon enough, he bid farewell to Tucker the Tantrum, Tucker the Tempest, Tucker the Tamed, Tucker the Nicknamed, and headed back away from the wharf and into the city, mulling over the additional details he now had to play with. He decided that technology had shown him everything it could for now, and that it was time to determine why the poultry motif was being chosen.
He headed for the art museum.
[Copyright © 2009 Andrew Kent]
