Stoll punched off even as the pictures were scanning onto his monitor. The first photograph showed the terrain as it really was: no troops, no artillery, no tanks. The second photograph had them edging into the frame. Everything from the grain to the shadows looked authentic.
'If it's a fake, it's a damn good one,' Katzen said.
'Maybe not. Look here.'
Stoll hit F1/Shift, then went to the magnify option. The screen returned with a cursor, and he moved it over the windshield of a jeep at the top of the screen. He pressed Enter, and the windshield filled the monitor.
'Get a load of that.'
Katzen looked, squinted, then exhaled loudly. 'No way.'
'Way,' said Stoll, smiling for the first time in hours. He grabbed his mouse, hit the button on top, and rolled the cursor across the windshield, drawing a fine yellow line around the reflection of an oak tree. 'No trees in the neighborhood, Phil. This image was lifted from another photo or it was shot somewhere else and inserted, digitally.' Leaving the photo on document one, he switched screens to document two and asked the computer to search the NRO files for a matching shot. Two minutes and twelve seconds later, the photograph was on the screen.
'Unbelievable,' Katzen said.
The technical data on the photograph appeared in a sidebar: it was taken 275 days before in the woods near the Supung Reservoir near the Manchuria/North Korea border.
'Someone went through our photo files,' Stoll said, 'selected all the images they wanted, and created a new program.'
'And loaded it in.001 seconds,' Katzen said.
'No. The loading was what the shutdown was all about. Or at least, what seemed like a shutdown to us.'
'I don't follow.'
'While we thought the computers were off-line, someone, somehow, used the twenty seconds to dump this photo and every successive photo into the system. It took.001 seconds to kick in, and now, like a recording, those prefabricated images are being played back to us every.8955 seconds.'
'This is too goddamn fantastic—'
'But the fact remains that we— the NRO, DOD, and the CIA— are all closed systems. No one could get to any of us over the phone lines. To download that much data, someone would have to have been sitting somewhere in Op-Center popping in diskettes.'
'Who? The security videos turned up nothing.'
Stoll snickered. 'What makes you think you can trust them? We've got someone screwing with our satellites. A camcorder isn't going to be much of a challenge.'
'Christ, I didn't think of that.'
'But you're right. I don't think this was done on premises. It would mean that someone here's a bad penny, and whatever I think of Bob Herbert personally, he's one very careful cashier.'
'I like that.'
'Thanks.' Stoll went back to document one and looked at the windshield. 'So what've we got? Somewhere in this system is a rogue program, and on it are photographs that the NRO satellites haven't even taken yet— photographs that they will appear to take every.8955 seconds. That's the bad news. The good news is, if we can get to that program, we can drop-kick it, restore our space eyes, and prove that someone's out to stir up big trouble in Korea.'
'How can you do that if you don't know where the file is or what it's called?'
Stoll saved the blowup and exited the file, then went to Directory. He selected Library and waited while the massive list loaded.
'The photos the infiltrator used were taken before there even was an Op-Center, so this obviously took a long time to write. It's a big one. Now, it had to have come in on the coattails of some other file or we would have spotted it when we sterilize incoming software. That means the host file has to be seriously bloated.'
'So we look at the file of, say, traffic light patterns in Pyongyang, and if it's thirty megabytes fat we probably have our rogue program.'
'That's the drill.'
'But where do we start looking? Whoever wrote the program had access to surveillance photos of North Korea— which would make it someone at Op-Center, the NRO, the Pentagon, or ROK.'
'No one at Op-Center or the NRO stands to gain by mobilization up and down the peninsula,' Stoll said. 'Either way, it's business as usual. Which leaves us with DOD and ROK.' Stoll began running a search through the Library listing, counting the number of diskettes from each source. In order to obtain diskettes he wanted, it would be necessary to star each file and E-mail his request to Op-Center's archives; the diskettes would then be copied, hand-delivered, signed for, and erased upon their return.
'Shit,' Katzen said as the number grew. 'We've got about two hundred diskettes from DOD and forty-odd from ROK. It'll take days to go through them all.'
After thinking for a moment, Stoll highlighted the entire ROK file.
'Starting with the shorter one?'
'No,' said Stoll, 'the safer one.' He tapped the Star button, then Send. 'If Bob Herbert ever found out I suspected our guys first, he'd kick my ass.'
Katzen clapped a hand on his shoulder and rose. 'I'll go bring Paul up to speed, but, Matty, I need you to do me a favor.'
'Name it.'
'Tell Paul that I spotted the oak.'
'Okay, but why?'
'Because if our Director ever finds out that his Environmental Officer couldn't see a tree two feet in front of him, he'll kick my ass.'
'Done deal,' Stoll said as he sat back, folded his arms, and waited for the disks to be delivered.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The highways leading from Seoul to the DMZ were still crowded with military traffic, and Hwan had told his driver Cho to stick to the back roads. They followed Kim Chong's directions, a fine drizzle falling as the car headed north from the city. Cho switched on the defroster and it breathed smoothly; Hwan wished his own insides were as well tuned.
As he sat in the backseat beside Kim, Hwan wondered if this was a good idea— ignoring the fact that for the time being, it was the only idea. Cooperating with Kim went against everything he'd been trained and raised to believe: he was going to trust a North Korean spy about matters pertaining to DPRK security. As he sat next to the young woman who gazed silently from her own window, he began having serious doubts about what he was doing. He wasn't afraid that she would try to lead him into an ambush or a nest of North Korean vipers. Hwan had made a point of sitting with his coat open, so she could see the.38 in his shoulder holster. If anything happened, she'd get a part of it. But Kim had surrendered to Bae rather than take a bullet. She wanted to live.
He was concerned that she might mislead him— it was possible, despite her apparent sincerity— and he would help set his nation's military up for a fall. He was even worried that she might not mislead him. If everything worked out, if her information were accurate and a conflict was averted, he could still be accused of collusion with the enemy. Whatever good might come of this would be outweighed by the shame of being charged with treason.
He resisted the urge to talk to her, to try to find out more about her. He didn't dare show weakness or doubt, or she might try to take advantage of it. Hwan's driver Cho apparently had no such concerns as he kept glancing into the rearview mirror. Beneath the sharp brown edge of his snap-brim hat, there was concern in Cho's eyes. Each time Kim gave them a new direction they headed farther into isolation, deeper into the hills of the northeast, and with every turn Cho would fire a glance toward the radio set in the bottom of the dashboard, pointing with his eyes,
