cooler. Introductions had already been explained, and he saw that Colonel Johns had hit it off with Mr. Clark.
'Third SOG, eh?'
'That's right, Colonel,' Clark said. 'I never made it into Laos myself, but you guys saved a few of our asses. I've been with the Agency ever since - well, almost,' Clark corrected himself.
'I don't even know where to go. That Navy prick had us destroy all our maps. Zimmer remembers some of the radio freqs, but -'
'I got the freqs,' Clark said.
'Fine, but we still have to find 'em. Even with tanker support, I don't have the legs to do a real search. There's a lot of country down there, and the altitude murders our fuel consumption. What's the opposition like?'
'Lots of people with AKs. Oughta sound familiar.'
PJ grimaced. 'It does. I got three minis. Without any air support...'
'You guessed right: you are the air support. I'd hold on to the miniguns. Okay, the exfiltration sites were agreed upon beforehand?' Clark asked.
'Yeah - a primary and two backups for each team, total of twelve.'
'We have to assume that they are known to the enemy. The job for tonight is finding 'em and getting them somewhere else that we know about and they don't. Then tomorrow night you can fly in for the pickup.'
'And from there out... The FBI guy wants us to land on that little boat. I'm worried about
'I just did,' Larson said as he rejoined the group. '
'Oh, shit,' Colonel Johns observed. 'How fast is she moving?'
'It's going to be close for tomorrow night, but no problem for our flight this evening.'
'What flight is that, now?'
'Larson and I are going to hop down to locate the teams.' Clark pulled a radio out of what had been Murray's bag. 'We fly up and down the valley, talking on these. With luck we'll get contact.'
'You must really believe in luck, son,' Johns said.
O'Day reflected that the life of an FBI agent wasn't always as glamorous as people thought. There was also the little problem that with less than twenty agents on the case he couldn't assign this distasteful task to a junior agent. But the case had enough of those problems. They hadn't even considered getting a search warrant yet, and sneaking into Cutter's quarters without legal authorization - something that the Bureau seldom did anymore - was impossible. Cutter's wife had just gotten back and was bossing her staff of stewards around like a woman to the manor born. On the other hand, the Supreme Court had ruled a few years before that trash-searching didn't require the sanction of a court. That fact enabled Pat O'Day to get the best upper-body workout he'd had in years. Now he could barely raise his arms after having loaded a few tons of malodorous garbage bags into the back of a white- painted trash truck. It might have been one of several cans. The VIP section of Fort Myer was still a military post; even the trash cans had to be set up just so, and in this case, two homes shared each stopping place for the equally well-organized trash contractor. O'Day had marked the bags before loading them into the back of the truck, and as a result, fifteen garbage bags were now sitting in one of the Bureau's many laboratories, though not one that was part of the tourist route, since the FBI shows only its best face to those who tour the Hoover Building, the nice, clean, antiseptic labs. The only good news was that the ventilation system was good, and there were several cans of air freshener around to disguise the smells that got past the technicians' surgical masks. O'Day himself felt as though a squadron of bluebottle flies would follow him for the rest of his life. The search took an hour as the garbage was processed across a white tabletop of imitation marble, about four days' worth of coffee grinds and half-eaten croissants, decomposing meringue, and several diapers - those were from the wrong house: the officer next door to the Cutters had his new granddaughter visiting.
'Bingo,' a technician said. His gloved hand held up a computer disk. Even with the gloves, he held it on opposite corners and dropped it into an extended plastic baggie. O'Day took the bag and walked upstairs to latent prints.
Two senior technicians were working overtime tonight. They'd cheated somewhat, of course. They already had a copy of Admiral Cutter's fingerprints from the central print index - all military personnel are printed as a matter of course upon their enlistment - along with their entire bag of tricks, which included a laser.
'What was it in?' one of them asked.
'On top of some newspapers,' O'Day replied.
'Aha! No extraneous grease, and good insulation against the heat. There may be a chance.' The technician removed the disk from the clear bag and went to work. It took ten minutes, while O'Day paced the room.
'I got a thumbprint with eight points on the front side, and what is probably a smudged ring finger on the back side with one good point and one very marginal one. There is one completely different set, but it's too smudged to identify. It's a different pattern, though, has to be a different person.'
O'Day figured that that was more than he'd had the right to expect under the circumstances. A fingerprint identification ordinarily required ten individual points - the irregularities that constituted the art of fingerprint identification - but that number had always been arbitrary. The inspector was certain that Cutter had handled this computer disk, even if a jury might not be completely sure, if that time ever came. Now it was time to see what was on it, and for that he headed to a different lab.
Since personal computers had entered the marketplace, it was only a matter of time until they were used in criminal enterprises. To investigate such use, the Bureau had its own department, but the most useful people of all were private consultants whose real business was 'hacking,' and for whom computers were marvelous toys and their use the most entertaining of games. To have an important government agency pay them for playing the game was their equivalent of a pro-football career. The one O'Day found waiting for him was one of the champs. He was twenty-five, and still a student at a local community college despite over two hundred hours of credits, the lowest grade for which had been a B +. He had longish red hair and a beard, both of which needed washing. O'Day handed it over.
'This is a code-word case,' he said.
'That's nice,' the consultant said. 'This is a Sony MFD-2DD microfloppy, double-sided, double-density, 135TPI, probably formatted for 800K. What's supposed to be on it?'
'We're not sure, but probably an encipherment algorithm.'
'Ah! Russian communications systems? The Sovs getting sophisticated on us?'
'You don't need to know that,' O'Day pointed out.
'You guys are no fun at all,' the man said as he slid the disk into the drive. The computer to which it was attached was a new Apple Macintosh IIx, each of whose expander slots was occupied by a special circuit board, two of which the technician had personally designed. O'Day had heard that he'd work on an IBM only if someone put a gun to his head.
The programs he used for this task had been designed by other hackers to recover data from damaged disks. The first one was called Rescuedata. The operation was a delicate one. First the read heads mapped each magnetic zone on the disk, copying the data over to the eight-megabyte memory of the IIx and making a permanent copy on the hard drive, plus a floppy-disk copy. That allowed him to eject the original, which O'Day immediately reinserted in the baggie.
'It's been wiped,' the man said next.
'What?'
'It's been wiped, not erased or initialized, but wiped. Probably with a little toy magnet.'
'Shit,' O'Day observed. He knew enough about computers to realize that the magnetically stored data was destroyed by magnetic interference.
'Don't get excited.'
'Huh?'
'If this guy had initialized the disk, we'd be screwed, but he just swiped a magnet around. Some of the data is gone, but some probably isn't. Give me a couple of hours and maybe I can get some of this data back for you - there's a smidge right there. It's in machine language, but I don't recognize the format... looks like a transposition algorithm. I don't know any of that cryppie stuff, sir. Looks fairly complex.' He looked around. 'This is going to take some time.'
