Glinn punched off the feed. He turned and rose from the chair. His gray eyes bored into them both. “Not only was this a cruel trick, but it was monumentally stupid—to think you could game me like this. I never expected either of you could stoop so low.”
Garza mustered his self-presence. “All right, so we didn’t succeed. But it’s the principle. You deserved to see that again—as an example of the same kind of hubris that would prompt you to dissolve EES, threatening the livelihood of hundreds of people. And you still owe us. We’re going to get our money, one way or another.”
“If either of you two communicate with me again, I’ll slap you with a restraining order.” Glinn turned to the guards. “Get them out of here.”
Gideon felt himself grasped by the shoulders and propelled toward the exit, along with Garza. A moment later they were out on Little West 12th Street, in the cold afternoon sun.
They walked together in silence as far as Greenwich, turned the corner, and stopped.
“Did you do it?” Garza asked.
“Hell, yes.” Gideon reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny USB stick.
Garza’s face lit up. “I thought maybe you didn’t get the chance. I didn’t see you do anything.”
“Not seeing is the whole point. That’s a magician’s first trick—misdirection. If you control where the audience is looking, you can get away with anything. The video was a perfect foil. When I leaned forward and pointed at the screen, and told Glinn to watch closely, that’s exactly what everyone did—not only Glinn, but the guards as well. As I pointed, I braced my other hand on the console—where the USB ports are—and inserted this USB stick. When the video ended, I straightened up, plucked it out, and palmed it between my fingers—the same method I used to bring it into the room. You said the search program on the stick needed thirty seconds to auto-start, fetch the Phaistos log file, copy it, then redundantly delete the data from the EES system. But I gave it forty, just to be sure.”
“But how did you get it through the metal detector? I freaked when they took away your USB sticks.”
“Decoys.” Gideon laughed. “A mini USB stick doesn’t have enough metal in it to set off a detector.”
Garza grinned and mimicked Glinn’s cool, astringent voice. “To think you could game me!”
They both laughed as they made their way down Greenwich toward Garza’s apartment.
7
GARZA’S PLACE IN SoHo was a fifth-floor loft in an old industrial building. It would have been a cozy, appealing apartment, Gideon thought, if it wasn’t so bloody neat. Everything, down to a pen sitting on the desk, was lined up in order, clean, polished, and organized. It was all of a piece with Garza’s personality.
The large industrial elevator began creaking its way back down to the lobby. Years ago someone had sprayed FUCK YOU inside the elevator, but the rest of the owners in the building—Garza had explained, irritated—thought it was charming in a chic-gritty sort of way and refused to paint it over. “Drives me crazy to see it every day,” he’d observed.
The apartment itself had brick walls and old arched windows with metal frames looking out over Broome Street. It was a classic one-room downtown loft, a sleek kitchen in one corner with a dining table, a bed in another, a living area in the middle, and a work space up against the row of windows, with a brushed-steel table on which was arranged an array of equipment surrounding a gleaming iMac Pro.
Gideon felt a mounting excitement, and he sensed the same in Garza. The success of their trip to EES left him with a glow of pride. It had taken almost two days of planning and rehearsing, but they’d managed to socially engineer the formidable Glinn with a simple, elegant little mise-en-scène. It had come off without a hitch. No doubt they had left Glinn shaking his head at their pathetic attempt to shake him down, with no idea what their real purpose had been or—more important—that they had succeeded.
“Beer?” Garza asked, heading for the fridge.
“Absolutely.”
Garza slipped two frosty bottles out of the fridge and headed for the worktable, placing each on a coaster and taking a seat. Gideon sat down beside him and picked up his beer.
“Here’s to pretexting the master pretexter,” he said.
They clinked bottles and Gideon took a long pull, taking care to place the bottle back on the coaster.
“All right,” said Garza, “give me the USB stick.”
Gideon handed it over, and Garza inserted it into one of the computer’s ports. After a few seconds, an image of the log file appeared on the display. Garza opened it, then quickly scrolled to the end. The last item read:
Stegano-1
“What kind of attack is that?” Garza asked.
“You’re asking me?” Gideon shrugged.
“Let’s look at the previous strategies logged by the computer.”
They went through the log file from the beginning to the end. The computer had tried hundreds of different attacks, starting with various philological, logosyllabic, and linguistic analyses, based on various dead languages and scripts including Old Persian, Mycenaean Greek, Akkadian, Elamite, Linear A and B, Minoan, hieratic, demotic, and hieroglyphic. None of those attacks worked, even though the time stamps indicated the computer had battered away for weeks, even months, at each one. Finally the program had switched approaches, apparently assuming the Disk was incised not with a normal written language but instead a cipher of some kind. Polyalphabetic and brute-force attacks followed, and then more exotic exploits. None of those had worked, either. Until the last one, labeled Stegano-1.
“Stegano-1,” Gideon repeated, then suddenly gave a cry and smacked his forehead. “What an idiot I am! Stegano—short for steganography!”
“Which is?”
“It’s a form of encryption. Or rather, it isn’t really encryption at all—it refers to a message hidden inside another message or an image. It’s one of the most ancient of all forms of concealment, going back thousands of years.” He paused. “Herodotus, in one of his Histories, recalled a king who sent a secret message to another by shaving the head of the messenger and tattooing the message on his scalp. When the man’s hair had regrown, he delivered the message, with instructions for the messenger’s head to be shaved.”
“Not a lot of time pressure to deliver that message, I guess.”
“I guess not. During World War Two, steganography was used to send messages in pictures, using microdots. It’s even more common today. With computers you can take, say, a photograph of a landscape and hide in it another image, then reveal it by subtracting various data bits from the main image. Or you can hide a message in computer code by writing redundant instructions.”
“But how would steganography apply to the Phaistos Disk?”
Gideon shrugged. “That’s the problem.”
Garza typed a command and pulled up an image of the Disk, and beside it a file showing the glyphs, or images, in a table. “There are two hundred forty-two ‘letters’ in the message, made from forty-five different glyphs. The information encoded in the Disk can’t be very extensive. I mean, how much information could possibly be contained in two hundred forty-two letters?”
“True.”
“And here’s another problem. If the computer couldn’t identify the original language—which apparently it didn’t—then how could it claim to have deciphered the message coded in that original language?”
Gideon thought about that. It seemed logically impossible. If you didn’t know a language, how could you decipher any coded message originating in that language? You had to have the original plaintext to decipher the code.