Blood Of Angels (23 page)

'Sounds good.'

'All right. This is what I know. We got a whole wing of people at Langley whose job it is to comb the ether, keeping an eye out for evidence of the terrorist mind. As you know. A few months ago one of these people is fiddling around in downtime and starts looking into email spam. Now. You remember when it started that some of that crap would turn up with bizarre words in the title or body?'

'To fox spam-filtering software.'

'Right — that was everyone's assumption. You load your spam with random words so that junk filters working on statistical assumptions are misled into thinking it's a genuine communication: because spam typically contains words like "sex" and "Viagra" and "loan", and not words like "bison", "strawberry" or "hobbledehoy". But here's the thing. This assistant, she's called Ramona, she started collating all the examples she can find, literally tens of millions, and running stat. analyses on them. She's not expecting anything, just killing time.'

'I can imagine,' I said. 'I had a job like hers once.'

'The initial pass doesn't show much — pretty random distribution of words. So then she starts breaking them into sub-words too, just in case — units of meaning. So out of "house-sitter" you get "house" and "sitter", and "sidewalk" you get "walk" and "side". And suddenly things start to spike a little.'

He watched me carefully as he said: 'Two of the biggest peaks come on the words "Straw" and "Men".

You could have read my reaction from across the street on a dark night. I actually dropped my cigarette.

He nodded. 'This is my point. They're not the only ones — there's a hundred fifty or so that seem to have some kind of significance — but they're right near the top.'

'So what…' I stopped talking. I couldn't really work out what the implications of this might be. 'Christ.'

'Right. Actually nobody would have cared about those words except I remembered Bobby coming to me with an enquiry about the phrase "the Straw Men" months before, and I thought, well, that's weird. We downloaded copies of all the popular bulk emailers and random word generators, pulled their code apart, and couldn't determine any reason why these words should come up more often than any others. It began to look as if someone was putting them there on purpose. So I got thinking a little harder about spam. Some of it's no-brainer. You've got Nigerians with their "I have a bazillion dollars and I've chosen
you
to help me", a straightforward scam preying on the clinically stupid. There's your online Viagra merchants and loan sharks — pumping out cold calls and not caring if you even live in the right country, because it costs them nothing. But then there are other kinds, and the one that got me thinking was one you don't actually see any more: "Britney Spears Nude". It had always struck me, did anyone in the world
believe
that? Did they actually think, despite her being — at the time — a world-renowned virgin, that there'd
really
be nude pictures of her available on the net, for just five bucks ninety-nine? And if not, then what was this communication actually about? Anyway, so Ramona and I did a cull of spam — normal-looking ones, not random-word stuff — and started looking at them properly. Actually we chucked them all in a computer, to see what it could find.'

'Which was?'

'Nothing at first. An index of what the unscrupulous try to sell to the desperate. Things to make your dick hard. Pictures of women with unfeasibly large breasts. Degrees for people who can't spell. Sex, sex, sex. But then Ramona had a brainwave, booked time on the cryptography mainframe and threw it all in there. Still nothing significant for days and days, and I'm beginning to think the "straw men" thing is just a coincidence. Finally three weeks ago we got a hit.' He slugged back most of the rest of his beer. 'It looked like a straightforward spam for prescription drugs. But… you know about book codes, right?'.

I nodded. 'Each word or letter stands for a word or letter in the same position in a known book. First word in first line might be first word of first chapter, third word in fifth line would be the third word of the fifth chapter, and so on.'

'Right, with a thousand variations. Completely blown once someone knows what the book in question is, but simple to use and hard to break without a tip. So once all the spam had been through the standard crypto attacks with nothing shaking, it was thrown across into software where the computer looks for grammatical constructions based on a few hundred thousand books it has stored. I was looking through the results one night, and I found a single sentence that leapt out.'

'What was it?'

'It said: Tomorrow is not the straw men, but rejoice.'

I shrugged. 'Okay, you got the Straw Men in there. But it doesn't sound like it means anything.'

'It wouldn't. Unless you knew this piece of spam only went out once, on a single day, when it was simultaneously delivered to millions of addresses all over the world. That was in the late afternoon of September 10, 2001.'

I stared at him.

'Right,' he said. 'These people knew what was going to happen. They knew the Twin Towers were going down, and they didn't try to stop it. They spread the word that it wasn't them, but they approved.'

'Holy Christ.'

'Everyone assumes spam is just spam, but one in a million isn't. If you know your communications are going to be of interest to the security forces, then what you most want to
avoid
is any sense of secrecy. So instead of sending a message to a particular person, you send what appears to be a non-message to a vast number of people. All the intended recipient or recipients need is (a) to be on the spamming list, and (b) to know the code. Everyone else throws it away. He or she gets the message. And even if we get lucky and break the code and realize there's a message there, it's hard to demonstrate it's a communication because it was sent out to so many people at once. Worst thing is, even if we find one saying "the assassination of the agreed head of state goes ahead on Wednesday at four o'clock",
we're no better off.
It doesn't lead us to anyone. How are we going to check the millions of addresses who got the mail, half of which will be one-shot accounts on Hotmail? It's impossible to find out who it was really sent to, who the genuine target was.'

'So they can send messages in plain sight, to whoever they like, and the recipients are protected and completely anonymous.'

'You got it. It's a fucking
nightmare.
All of the emails have been bounced around the net, of course — best we can do is suspect some of the more recent originated in Southern California, perhaps LA or in the Valley somewhere. So this is the point where I begin to get twitchy and start trying to get ahold of Bobby. There's evidently a communication system in place that's too fast-moving to get on top of — especially when we're entering the situation late and desperately trying to play catch-up.'

'What situation? Catch-up on what?'

Unger flagged a couple more beers. 'That's what we still don't know. It's why I'll fly down to see someone like you at the drop of a hat. The codes keep changing. We had some lucky hits for a while, but there's no way you can cross-check against every book in the world, and vowel/phenome analysis won't get you far. For the last two weeks we've been able to make no sense of anything at all, which suggests they know we're looking. Which might also mean they have a person or persons within the Agency, which I don't even want to think about.'

'Think about it,' I said. 'A friend of mine in the FBI got suspended after she started pushing too hard in the right direction. And a week ago someone who should be in jail was sprung right out of an armoured vehicle in California. These people are very seriously connected.'

'So who
are
they? What do you know about them?'

'My parents died a year ago,' I said. 'Up in Montana. It looked like a road accident. I was there for the funeral and I found something that got me looking at the situation a little harder. I found a videotape my father had made which mentioned a group called the Straw Men. Bobby only got involved because I called him for a lead on somewhere local I could get the tape ripped onto DVD. That should have been the end of his participation.'

'He never did know when to stop.'

'He did some digging and found there was no record of my birth in my home town. Cut a long story short, we wound up discovering I'd been unofficially adopted after my father killed a man who attacked my mother. He didn't mean to kill him, I don't think, but he was one of a bunch of strange people holed up in the woods and that's the way it panned out. We were that guy's kids.'

'We?'

'I had a brother too.'

'That you didn't know about? Have you met up?'

'Kind of. He's one of the Straw Men, and he's the guy who escaped from prison. He's a serial killer. He also abducts people for others to murder for kicks. He has a theory that mankind was infected by a virus tens of thousands of years ago. It made us more sociable, enabled modern society to coalesce by obscuring some of our natural enmity towards our fellow man. We started living closer together, began farming, developed the modern world. They don't like it. They want the planet back the way it was.'

Unger was staring at me.

'There's worse. We found evidence the Straw Men were behind the shootings at the school in Evanston, Maine last year — and probably other events as well, going back some years. If the Oklahoma bombing hadn't been nailed elsewhere, I'd say that was their kind of operation too. They have no limits. None at all.'

Unger sat still for a moment, and then reached across the table and took one of my cigarettes. I'm not even sure he was aware what he was doing, at first. He lit it, and then looked at me.

'Okay,' he said, quietly. 'Well, here's the other thing. Before the codes flatlined we were starting to get one phrase appearing consistently. We discovered it in a couple of major spam messages, and one night we found the phrase recorded on the phone systems of companies in thirty cities across the United States.'

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper on which one sentence had been printed.

THE DAY OF ANGELS.

'Mean anything to you?'

'No,' I said, feeling very cold across the back of my neck. 'But it does not sound good.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

We traded what little information we had back and forth for a little while longer, but when Unger pointed at my glass again I shook my head.

'Got to get back,' I said. 'Going to be driving slowly as it is.'

'I was hoping to debrief you properly.'

'Not tonight. There's a friend I have to talk to.'

'Does she know about this too?'

'How did you know it was a she?'

Unger held his hands up innocently. 'Your tone of voice.'

'Yes she does.'

'Could I talk to her too?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'I'd have to ask her.'

'Okay.' He got a pen out and scribbled an address on the piece of paper on the table between us. 'Here's where I am tonight. The Days Inn, it's about five blocks, uh, east of here. Room 211. Assume I'll be there until around nine thirty tomorrow morning. You got my number, let me know. If you can come talk to me, I'll stay as late as you need. Is there anyone else I should know about?'

'No,' I said.

'It would be really good to talk to you both,' he said, and for once there was no trace of what seemed to be a habitual half-smile on his face. 'I have a bad feeling about homeland security. I think something dark is on the way, and this would be a terrible time for the Agency to drop the ball. We got murdered for it last time.'

'Iraq was hardly the Company's finest hour.'

He shook his head irritably. 'We did okay. The fuck-ups were PR spins, trailer trash out of control. Sure, it looked gross but that kind of thing has always happened — only difference is now we got digital cameras so we can share with the folks at home. The army was doing good in other places. The Company too. But the press don't know about that stuff. They're not supposed to. It's a
secret.
But the bottom line is 9/11 happened and it shouldn't have and the intelligence for Iraq II was group-thought a little too imaginatively and so someone had to take the fall — when the dust had settled and we'd done what we wanted anyway. Never mind that army's counter-intelligence was cut to nothing back in the early nineties. There weren't a hundred Arabic speakers left in the whole place. They weren't ready for the new world disorder. Nobody was. It's not nukes and battalions we've got to worry about now. It's armies you can fit in a car. Terrorism isn't James Bond or Tom Clancy. Even al-Qaeda is looking old school these days — now it's just some guy with a bomb. He walks the same roads as us. He thinks the same thoughts. But he's got a bomb. Only hope you have is through operatives who can work one to one, get inside an individual's head. Find out if he's a farmer or a fanatic. Find out where they're going to strike next. And that's
exactly
what they cut back — people like Bobby, though admittedly he couldn't speak foreign tongues to save his fucking life. Sorry, bad choice of words. But the point is they cut off our cocks and then wonder why we can't piss any more and it's a
lot
easier shafting the CIA than some raghead they can't even fucking find.'

'That
you
can't find,' I said. I wanted to leave. And if you're trying to convince me the Company deserve a Peace Prize then you're talking to the wrong guy. I worked for you people, remember. There's plenty of morally subnormal men working there and we in general have done a lot of dumb things over a long period of time. Why do you think everyone hates us so much?'

'Beats me,' he said. 'I swear to God, we mean well.'

'Can do better,' I said. And here's one thing you should know. The real bad guys are already inside the gates. They may even have been here before we were.'

'What do you mean?'

'I'll talk to my friend,' I said, standing up. 'Maybe I'll see you tomorrow.'

'I hope so. Don't worry — I'll stay right here until you're good and gone. But if what you say is true, one of these days you're going to have to trust someone — otherwise your life is one long arc out into darkness.'