The Kill List by Frederick Forsyth

Author:Frederick Forsyth [Forsyth, Frederick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Thrillers, Fiction, Suspense, General
ISBN: 9781101621745
Google: R4U9nCqaAGIC
Amazon: 0399165274
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2013-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

9

There was indeed a code in the messages from Dardari in London and the Troll in Kismayo and it was broken. The two men communicated apparently in clear because both GCHQ in England and Fort Meade in Maryland are suspicious of transmissions that are clearly in code.

So vast is the commercial and industrial traffic flying through cyberspace that not everything can be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. So both centers of interception tend to prioritize the evidently suspicious. Somalia being a highly suspect place, only the harmless-looking would be studied but not subjected to the top-of-the-list decryption tests. So far the London/Kismayo traffic had got away with it. That ended.

The traffic purported to be between the head of a large foodstuffs manufacturer based in London and his manager in a location producing raw materials. The traffic out of London appeared to be queries concerning local availability of fruits, vegetables and spices, all locally grown, and their prices. The traffic out of Kismayo seemed to be the manager’s replies.

The code’s key was in the lists of prices. Cheltenham and Ariel got it about the same time. There were discrepancies. Sometimes the prices were too high, sometimes too low. They did not match the real prices on the world markets for those products at that time of year. Some of the figures were genuine, others unrealistic. In the latter category, the figures were letters, the letters made words and the words made messages.

The months of exchanges between a fashionable town house in London’s West End and a warehouse in Kismayo proved that Mustafa Dardari was the Preacher’s outside man. He was both financier and informer. He advised and warned.

He subscribed to technical publications dealing intensively with the West’s counterterrorism thinking. He studied the work of think tanks on the subject, taking technical papers from the Royal United Services Institute and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and their U.S. equivalents.

His e-mails to his friend revealed he frequented, at a social level, the tables of those who might have a senior civil servant, military or security figure as their guest. In short, he was a spy. He was also, behind the urbane, westernized façade a Salafist and Jihadist extremist like his boyhood friend in Somalia.

Ariel spotted something else. There were single-letter typing errors in the texts, but they were not random. Very few nonprofessionals can type long passages without occasionally hitting the wrong key and creating a one-letter typo. In journalism and publishing, the correction of these is what copy editors are for. But so long as the meaning is clear, many amateurs do not bother.

The Troll bothered, but Dardari did not. Because his typos were deliberate. They occurred only once or twice per send, but their appearance was rhythmic, not always in the same place but always in sequence with the ones in the previous message. Ariel deduced they were “tells”—small signs which, if they were not there, would warn the reader the sender was under duress or the computer was being operated by an enemy.

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