Sliver Of Truth

“Man, you are in some serious shit.” I heard admiration in his voice. “You must have done something pretty fucked up in another life to have this much trouble raining down on you again.”

I thought it was a pretty insensitive thing to say and told him as much.

“Sorry,” he said. “You’re right. How’d you slip the NYPD?”

I was taken aback by his question. It really was all over the place. Part of me had been hoping that Agent Sorro was exaggerating or even making it all up, part of some elaborate ruse to cover up a secret investigation into Max’s alive-or-dead status.

“I didn’t realize I was slipping them,” I said defensively. “I thought I was being taken into federal custody.”

He cocked his head and looked at me. “What do you mean?”

I told him the whole story, starting from the day Dylan approached me on the street, ending with my leaving him in Riverside Park. I even told Grant about the text message and my meeting at the Cloisters.

“Man,” he said, shaking his head. “This is bigger than I thought.”

He was enjoying this a little too much. It was annoying me.

“Pretty brave of you to come, considering a number of people I have come in contact with during the last few days are dead or have disappeared,” I said, paying him back for his earlier comment.

“No one’s going to touch me. I’m too high profile,” he said with a casual shrug and uncertainty in his eyes. I thought he might be kidding. Did he really consider himself high profile? I almost laughed but saw he was serious and gave him a knowing nod.

“Of course you are,” I said. He didn’t seem to hear the sarcasm in my voice.

“How did you hear about me? My website?”

“No,” I said. “Jenna Rich told me about you.”

“Oh,” he said, looking embarrassed. I wondered if he’d heard through other sources the not-so-nice things she had to say about him. I felt bad for him suddenly.

“She said you were a computer genius and that you had some interesting theories about Myra Lyall. I looked on your site and thought you might be able to help me.”

He seemed to brighten at this a bit. “Help you how?” he asked, leaning forward with alacrity.

I typed in the URL on my borrowed computer and up popped the red screen.

“I need to know what this website is,” I said. I told him about the streaming video of Covent Garden that I’d seen on Jake’s computer.

He slid in closer to me, pushed his little glasses up toward his eyes, and he smelled not unpleasantly like Krispy Kreme doughnuts. There was something teddy-bearish and appealing about him. He tapped away on the keyboard for a second and two small narrow windows opened. A curser blinked in one of the blank white spaces, waiting for a prompt.

“It’s waiting for a log-in and password,” he said, turning to look at me.

“How did you do that?” I said with grudging admiration.

He blew out arrogant disdain from his nostrils. “This is your basic cloak-and-dagger program. Wannabe spy shit one-oh-one.”

I noticed a sheen of sweat on his forehead and wondered if he was nervous or just hot. He was pretty out of shape, the room was over-warm, and even I’d felt a little breathless after the flight of stairs.

I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s called steganography, deriving from the Greek, meaning ‘covered writing.’ It’s a way to embed messages within other seemingly harmless messages. There’s software, like Noise Storm or Snow, that allows you to replace useless or unused bits of data in regular computer files…like graphics or sound, even video. I just tabbed around until I hit the window where the prompts were hiding.”

I looked at the prompts, my mind already working on what my father’s log-in and password would be. Probably the same as his home computer; he’s nothing if not predictable. I reached for the keyboard.

“Wait. Don’t just make a quick guess. If you enter the wrong thing, you might alert the webmaster of an unauthorized attempt to enter the site. The prompts or the site itself might disappear altogether.”

I just looked at him, withdrew my hand.

“This is not typical of steganographic sites, though,” he said, as if thinking aloud. “I mean, usually it would be masquerading as something else, like a porn site, or even a mystery bookstore. Then messages would be hidden in elements of the site, like I said…images or sound files.”

“Or streaming video,” I said, thinking of Jake’s computer. He nodded.

“Those messages might be encrypted on top of that. There’s a program called Spam Mimic. Say there was a message waiting for you at a site like this. You’d get a message in your in-box that would look like ordinary spam that most people would delete. But you’d know it was an alert to check the site.”

I thought about my father’s computer, all the junk mail there. I wondered if one of those spam messages had been an alert that a message was waiting for him.

Grant went on. “When you click on the link, it leads you to the message site. You get your message and supposedly you have the means to decrypt it.”

“Who would set up this kind of thing?”