The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1)(44)

“What if the NSA doesn’t break the code first?” asked Jennifer.

“They’re supposed to be the best in the world at that. We’ll just need to hope that the US government isn’t wasting all that money. They will also have one more slight advantage. Anyone else will have had to pick up the e-mail from spying on the net and identify it for analysis. That should put the others a little behind, since the NSA will directly receive the e-mail clue.”

Jennifer shook her head. “The NSA is supposed to have more PhD mathematicians than anyone else and the best code-cracking super computers. How can our encryption stand up to that?”

Heather grinned. “That’s the beauty of it. I’ve been reading up on encryption theory. The best schemes are mathematically based. That’s why all those mathematicians work at the NSA.”

“I feel much better now,” said Jennifer, making Mark chuckle.

“Don’t you see? Even though the encryption methods I could research were not the classified ones, they were produced by some pretty darn good mathematicians. And I can see the solutions, automatically, easily. I don’t even have to think about it.”

“Now you’re freaking me out,” said Mark.

Heather smiled. “And I can do far better.”

A sudden light dawned in Jennifer’s face. “So you come up with an encryption that is difficult, but not impossible to break. Then we encrypt the e-mail message and count on the NSA to crack it first. What about the back trace they’re going to put on our virus?”

Heather shrugged. “We’ll launch the virus from some public place. You’re going to have to come up with a way of countering their trace.”

“I don’t know. The guys hunting us will be the best in the business.”

“Yeah,” said Mark. “They’re going to be on our asses like pigs on shit.”

Jennifer frowned. “Lovely image.”

“We’ll need to be able to see how the back trace is coming,” Heather said.

Jennifer rubbed her chin. “I guess I could have the virus leave a little agent program on each infected computer before it jumps to the next. That little guy’s job would just be to report on his health by posting a code to some public chat site we could monitor.”

Heather’s eyes widened. “What a great idea. I could design an algorithm to generate a unique code for each agent. All it would need to contain would be a unique ID, a time stamp, and the address of the computer it was on.”

Mark rubbed his hands together. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Jen just has to monitor those codes to see when they drop off the net.”

Jennifer nodded. “But the antivirus companies are going to try to kill off our virus.”

“That won’t be a big problem,” said Heather. “We don’t need it to last forever, just long enough to send the clue e-mail.”

“Yes,” said Jennifer. “But as that antivirus starts wiping out our little agents, it will make it hard to tell whether or not they are dying from the trace or just from the antivirus.”

“Actually I think that will help us,” Heather said. “I’ll be able to spot the difference in the patterns.”

Mark stood up. “Problem solved then. Sounds like you two have some work to do.”

“Not yet, buddy boy,” said Heather. “A couple of last details. Our laptops and handheld computers are going to have incriminating data on them. I’ll come up with another encryption algorithm that I think will be unbreakable, and then I need Jen to add that to our virus program.”

A confused look settled on Jennifer’s face. “Add it to our virus? How does that have anything to do with protecting the data on our systems?”

A sly smile settled on Heather’s lips. “Look. It won’t work to just have a program on our machines that encrypts any data we don’t want others to know about. If someone looks on our computers and finds a bunch of data with a super sophisticated encryption scheme, they’ll just want to know where we got the encryption. Game over.”

“Okay?”

“We let the virus encrypt some data on every machine with the unbreakable code. On our machines it will encrypt important stuff. On everyone else’s computer, it’ll just encrypt random garbage.”

Jennifer clapped her hands. “Then if anyone snoops around, it just looks like we got an infection like everyone else.”

“Yes. We’ll just need to make sure we get our computers infected from the Internet after we launch our virus.”

Jennifer closed her eyes. After several seconds she opened them. “I think it’ll work.”

Mark walked over and patted each of them on the back. “That’s it then. You two hop right on it and report in to me with your progress.”

“Not quite,” said Heather with a smile. “I need you to do something for us.”

Mark shook his head. “Why doesn’t that shock me?”

Heather continued. “With your enhanced language skills, do you think you could learn some Russian?”

Mark perked up, looking intrigued. “Russian? That’s a rather odd choice, isn’t it? What have you got up your sleeve?”

“I haven’t got it all worked out yet. Can you just do it?”