have special advantage. Otherwise, back to making baby—nine months.”
Reluctantly, Janson supplied him with the public-key sequence for his bank
account—the codes that the bank transmitted upon receipt of information. The
public-key sequence was known to both the bank and the account holder.
Within ten seconds after he typed in the public-key sequence, Berman’s screen
filled with jumbled digits, scrolling down his monitor like the closing credits
of a film. “Numbers meaningless,” he said. “Now we must do pattern recognition.
Look for butterfly.”
“Find butterfly,” Janson stressed.
“Pah!” Berman said. “You, moy droog, are like baked Alaska: sweet and soft
outside, hard and cold inside. Brrr! Brrr!” He clasped his arms around,
pantomiming an arctic chill. But for the next five minutes, Berman studied
sequences of confirmation codes with an intensity that shut out everything else.
At last, he read a series of digits out loud. “Butterfly here—5467-001-0087.
That is butterfly.”
“The numbers mean nothing to me.”
“Same numbers mean everything to me,” said Berman. “Numbers say beautiful blond
women and filthy canals and brown café where you smoke hashish and then more
women, from Eastern Europe, sitting in storefront window like mannequin wearing
pasties.”
Janson blinked. “Amsterdam. You’re saying you’re looking at a transfer code from
Amsterdam.”
“Da!” Herman said. “Amsterdam transfer code—it cycles through too many times to
be accident. Your fairy godmother uses an Amsterdam bank.”
“Can you tell which one?”
“Baked Alaska is what you are,” Berman said reprovingly. “Give him inch, he take
isle! Impossible to get specific account unless … Nyet, impossible.”
“Unless what?”
“Private key?” Berman cringed as if he expected to be slapped for even saying
those words. “Use digits like sardine key, scroll open can. Twist, twist, twist.
Very powerful.” Moving funds in or out of the account required a private key, an
authorizing sequence of digits known only to the account holder; the key would
not appear in any transmission. This separate, ultrasecure digital pathway
protected both the customer and the bank.
“You really expect me to entrust you with the private-key sequence?”
“Nyet,” he said, shrugging.
“Can I trust you with it?”
A booming laugh. “Nyet! What do you take me for! Girl Scout? Private key must be
kept private, from everyone. Hence name. All men mortal. Grigori more mortal
than most.” He looked up at Janson. “Please, keep key to self.” It was an
entreaty.
Janson was silent for a while. Berman liked to say he could resist everything
except temptation. To provide him with the private key would present him with a
tremendous temptation indeed: he could siphon off its contents with a few
keystrokes. Yet at what cost? Berman loved his life here; he knew that to make
an enemy of Janson would jeopardize everything he had, and was. No threats were
necessary to underscore the risks. Didn’t this explain the real source of his
reluctance? He didn’t want the key because he knew he could not allow himself to
give in to temptation—and wanted to avoid the anguish of waking up the next day
and knowing he had left a sizable pile of money on the table.
Now Janson recited a fifteen-digit string and watched Berman type the sequence.
The Russian’s face was sickly and tense; he was obviously wrestling with
himself. Within moments, however, he had succeeded in establishing connections
to dozens of financial institutions, burrowing from within the Bank of Mont
Verde mainframe to retrieve the digital signatures that uniquely identified the
counterparty to every transaction.
Several minutes elapsed, the silence disturbed only by the soft clicking of keys
and the quiet drone of the fans. Then Berman stood up. “Da!” he said. “ING.
Which stands for International Netherlands Group Bank. Which you perhaps once
knew as Nederlandsche Middenstandsbank.”
“What can you tell me about it?”
“Beautiful new central office in Amsterdam. So energy-efficient, nobody can bear
to work there. Second-largest bank in country. And Amsterdam women—the most
beautiful women in the whole world.”
“Grigori,” Janson began.
“You must meet Gretchen. Play around-the-world with Gretchen, I guarantee you’ll
rack up frequent flier miles on your back. Or hers. Gretchen is friend of
Grigori. Friend of all weary travelers. Out calls only, but very reasonable
prices. You tell her you are friend of Grigori. I give you her number. Easier to
remember than wire transfer codes to ING. Ha!”
“I’m not convinced we’ve hit a wall here. If you can identify the bank, can’t
you narrow it even further?”
“Very difficult,” said Grigori, biting cautiously into his scone, as if it might
bite back. In a tone of troubled confession, he said, “Cook not really make
scones. Cook say she makes scones. I know she buy premade from Sainsbury’s. One
day I saw plastic shrink-wrap in the bin, so, so. So bag is out of cat. I not
say anything. Everyone must feel they have victory, or nobody happy.”
“Let’s focus on making me happy. You said getting account info would be
difficult. ‘Difficult’ doesn’t mean impossible. Or is there somebody else you’d
recommend for the job?”
His bearlike host looked injured. “Nothing impossible for Grigori Berman.” He
glanced warily around him, then spooned a generous amount of strawberry jam into
his cup of tea and stirred. “Must not let butler see,” he said in a low voice.
“This Russian way. Mr. French would not understand. It would shock him.”
Janson rolled his eyes. Poor Grigori Berman: a prisoner of his household staff.
“I’m running out of time, I’m afraid,” he said.
With a hangdog look, Berman stood and padded heavily back to the RS/6000
workstation. “This very boring,” he said, like an overgrown child dragged away
from his toys and forced to work on his multiplication tables. Meanwhile, Janson
established a direct connection with the Bank of Mont Verde via his tri-band
PDA.
Fifteen minutes later, Berman, sweating with concentration, suddenly looked up
and turned around. “All done.” He saw the device in Janson’s hand. “You change
private key now?”
Janson pressed a button and did precisely that.
“Thank God!” He sprang to his feet. “Otherwise I break down and do the bad, bad
thing—today, tomorrow, next month, in middle of night while sleepwalking! Who
can say when? To have private key and not put to personal use would be like … ”
He adjusted his trousers.
“Yes, Grigori,” Janson interjected smoothly, “I’ve got the general idea. Now
talk to me. What have we found out about the payer?”
“Is great joke,” Berman said, smiling.
“How do you mean?” Janson demanded, suddenly alert.
“I traced the originating account. Very difficult, even with sardine key.
Required nonreusable back-door codes—burned through valuable property to push
through. Just like American pop song, ‘What I Did for Love,’ da?” He hummed a
few bars as Janson glared. Then he reverted to the matter at hand. “Reversed
asymmetric algorithm. Data-mining software go on hunt for pattern, search out
signal buried in noise. Very difficult … ”
“Grigori, my friend, I don’t need the War and Peace version of this. Cut to the
chase, please.”
Berman shrugged, slightly miffed. “Powerful computer program does digital
equivalent of triathlon competition, Olympic level, no East German steroids to
help, but still identified originating account.”
Janson’s pulse began to race. “You are a wizard.”
“And all a great joke,” Berman repeated.
“What are you saying?”
Berman’s smile grew wider. “Man who pay you to kill Peter Novak? Is Peter
Novak.”
As he arrived with his small convoy at the training camp, Ahmad Tabari felt a
glimmering of relief. Traveling hopefully, he had long known, was overrated.
Despite the many hours he had spent in a meditative trance, it had been a long
journey and felt like one. The Caliph had made his way first by air to Asmara,
in Eritrea. No one would have expected to find the head of the Kagama Liberation
Front there. Then he had taken a highspeed boat north along the Red Sea coast to
land in the Nubian deserts of northern Sudan. A few hours after landing, his
Sudanese guides had taken him on the long and bumpy tracks through the desert,
up to the camp near the Eritrean border. Mecca was only a few hundred kilometers
to the north, Medina only the same distance farther. It pained him to know that
he was as close as he had ever been to the holy places and yet could not walk
where the Prophet, blessings be upon him, had stepped while he was on earth. He
accepted, as always, God’s will, and he drew strength from the righteousness of
his cause. Despite the recent setbacks in the Kenna province, the Caliph was a
leader in the struggle against the corruption of the West, the brutality and
depredation of a global order the West imagined to be “natural.” He prayed that
his every choice, his every act, would move his country closer to the day when
its people would rejoin the ummah, the people of Islam, and he could be their