Déjà Vu: A Technothriller by Hocking, Ian (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📕

Saskia shook her head. “No. I think that message is vitally important.”

Hannah opened his mouth then shut it again. He took her elbow and walked her away from Besson, who looked at his shoes. “Why?” he asked.

“Proctor gets a call moments before he walks into the West Lothian Centre with a bomb. Did he receive instructions? Or was it the last message of a man who expected to die? In either case, we must know the person he was talking to. There is good chance that the second party will have arranged his escape. Perhaps they are waiting for him.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“It feels right.”

“That ‘gut instinct’ of yours?”

“Yes.” She smiled and called Besson over. “You say it is unbreakable. I want you break it. It is critical to the investigation.”

Besson trembled “’Kay,” he said.

They used four computers simultaneously. Though each had a CRT monitor, the computers were not as elderly as Saskia had feared. They had processing chips arranged in parallel so that, as a group, they could perform a huge number of calculations in a fraction of the time. “Of course,” said Besson, “it will take a vast number of calculations to test a single cipher. We just don’t know. Right now the computers are trying random combinations. We could sit here for years.”

“Yes,” Saskia agreed. “You said that the one-time pad would be a large list of numbers.”

“If we were talking about a text message it would be large. But we’re talking about a broadband audio-video transmission: good quality visual image which changes twenty-five frames a second, and two sound tracks. That’s before we even consider the format.”

“Format?”

“Format. If we get it wrong, it would be like mixing up the metric system with imperial. Even if we cracked the cipher, we wouldn’t know it was right.”

“So the list of numbers for the cipher would be very large. What if Proctor used…a telephone book?”

Besson pouted thoughtfully. He shrugged. “That would be a start. But telephone books are systematic and have a limited range of possible numbers. When you limit the range, you limit the complexity, and you make it easier for a cracker.”

Hannah sighed. “Listen, people,” he said. “We’re not talking about Nazi HQ sending out the order to fire torpedoes.”

Saskia nodded and sipped her coffee. “Yes. Good idea. Let us wriggle this through.”

“Hello?” asked Hannah testily.

“I mean, let us work it out by returning to the facts. Firstly, Proctor is not a criminal in the classic sense. I mean, he has a criminal objective but, like most terrorists, he is likely to be politically or otherwise principled.”

“Some might disagree with you, but go on,” said Hannah.

“Second, he has never sent an encrypted transmission. True?”

“Dunno,” said Besson. “But he could send coded emails pretty easily using an undisclosed email address and check his email from any computer worldwide in complete anonymity. There are probably over a billion email addresses used for that purpose worldwide. And, of course, there’s physical mail.”

“That is correct. Now, let us hypothesise that Proctor did not intend to encrypt this transmission.”

Besson became pensive. Hannah snorted and folded his arms. “Eh?”

“Tell me: who sent the transmission?”

“Who? Proctor.”

“Fine, Scottie. Why do you say that?”

“Well –”

Besson clicked his fingers. “You’re right. We grabbed the transmission on the basis of a surveillance tape of Proctor talking in his car. The timing was verified, we worked out the service provider, then sent a request to acquire the raw data. We don’t know who initiated the call. We know nothing. We just have several gigabytes of scrambled crap that was received and transmitted by Proctor at that time.”

Hannah looked at both of them. “What are you saying? Someone sent a message to Proctor?”

Saskia nodded. “My gut feeling, Scottie, is that Proctor would not have waited until he reached the West Lothian Centre –”

Hannah groaned and pointed at Besson. “And you can forget you heard that, too.”

“Natch.”

“– My point,” Saskia continued, “is that he knew he would be under surveillance. It is a former government installation with a security breach. Why would he encrypt a transmission and then allow people to see clearly that he is making it? This would counteract the goal of encryption: concealment. But if he had made the call on the way to Edinburgh, nobody would know.”

Hannah nodded. “OK, I’ll buy that.”

She paused to work out the likely meaning of his idiom. “You are too kind. So,” she said, raising her voice so that everyone in the room could hear, “we need to determine the names of any individuals, perhaps of a mathematical persuasion, who may have contacted David Proctor, an Oxford professor, at that time of transmission. Full personal details on each.” She pointed at the woman called Charlotte. “You look for family.” She pointed at the tall man with the pony tail. “You check for friends.”

Hannah gave her an approving nod. Saskia smiled. Perhaps Jobanique’s faith had been well-placed after all.

“What shall I do?” asked Besson.

“Keep trying. You may become lucky.”

Saskia stood with Hannah under a huge glass awning at the front of the building. It was raining. Before them, a great lawn spread out either side of a gravel path. It led to some steps, and then down to a road where the traffic was gridlocked. She had no idea what part of Edinburgh they were in. The rain became a downpour.

Hannah broke the silence. “This is September. Monsoon season.”

She nodded. “Do you have a spare cigarette?”

“Aye. Could you not buy your own?”

“No. It would shatter the illusion that I do not smoke.”

He took out a packet of cigarettes and knocked two examples into his hand. He offered one to her. She touched it and –

The lighter.

The feeling that returned: déjà vu.

Where had she seen that lighter?

She saw a long thread, glistening as though it had been oiled. She saw a pair of scissors yawn around the thread and then stop. She felt a deep longing to protect the thread. It was too precious to cut. Once cut,