Chapter 58
Aboard the Oregon
Aship-wide alert sounded as the Joby approached the Oregon with Linc and Raven safely on board. They were arriving two hours later than planned, but for good reason.
On their way to the landing zone, the two Gundogs accidentally stumbled onto the Quds Force base they had been originally assigned to locate.
Practically sleepwalking in their fatigue, they almost bumped into an Iranian guard patrolling the perimeter of the training camp.
They ducked out of sight in the nick of time, but were forced to make a long, circuitous detour around the Iranians before heading back toward the landing zone.
Linc recorded the GPS location on his fake Timex before they left the area, allowing them to finally complete their mission.
Stone and Murphy were there to greet them on the hangar deck along with Cabrillo, Max, and Dr. Huxley.
Raven and Linc were utterly exhausted, dehydrated, and stricken with a combination of swollen mosquito bites, fungal infections, and heat rashes. Huxley ordered the two of them immediately to sick bay for hot showers, saline IVs, antibiotics, and observation for the next twenty-four hours.
“I was hoping for breakfast in bed and a foot massage,” Raven joked.
“Breakfast I can arrange,” Huxley said, adding with a wink, “and I can think of a half dozen young crewmen that would eagerly volunteer their toe-rubbing services.”
“Breakfast will be fine,” Raven said as Linc handed over his pack to Stone.
“Got this from Eidolon’s place,” Linc said.
Eric opened it and pulled out a grimy leather wallet and a beat-up Canon point-and-shoot digital camera. He held it up. “Quite an antique.”
“Check out the wallet,” Linc said as he unbuckled his Timex and handed it to Cabrillo. “There’s some cash and probably a fake ID. But there’s also a memory card in there. I think it goes with the camera. Didn’t know if you needed the camera to read it or not.”
“We’ll check it out. Could be interesting.”
“Hope so,” Raven said.
Juan saw the guilt in her eyes. Failing to capture Eidolon alive was still eating her up. He understood the sentiment. He’d feel the same way. If Overholt was right, Eidolon’s intel could have prevented a catastrophe.
Cabrillo hoped whatever baton they had managed to pass along to his brainiac researchers could take them to the finish line, but he didn’t see how that was possible.
Not by a long shot.
★
Eric Stone and Mark Murphy were perched in front of a large computer monitor in the research lab. Though using the same computer, they each had their own wireless keyboards for input.
They had already pored over Eidolon’s measly “pocket litter” Linc had recovered.
The Panamanian driver’s license was easily dismissed as a fake, just as Linc had suspected.
They also examined the dead man’s money under a microscope in search of microdots, hidden text, or numerical codes.
They even looked for nano-fabricated data threads woven in with the paper fibers, but they came up short.
If there was any kind of code or message embedded in any of those bills, they couldn’t find it.
That left the old-school digital memory card.
They pulled the Canon ELPH to see what was on the SD card.
They wanted to use the camera to view the photos on the disk to protect the Oregon’s mainframe computer from any kind of virus attack that might be hidden in it.
They scrounged around and found a Li-ion battery for it, but when they went to power it up they discovered a chunk of bullet shrapnel had smashed the processor—a lucky break for Raven, but a terminal outcome for the Canon.
Now that the camera wasn’t an option, they took other precautions to view the card.
The first thing Murphy did was create a virtual machine on the mainframe. This guaranteed complete isolation of whatever nasty bugs might be on the MicroSD card from infecting the rest of the Oregon’s systems.
“I don’t think that’s enough,” Eric said. “Eidolon’s the devil. We need to chain him down in computer hell.”
“Go for it.”
Stone’s fingers danced across his keyboard as he pulled down a sandbox tool, adding an additional, isolated layer of protection for the virtual machine’s own operating system.
“That’s locking him in a steel box inside of an iron cage,” Murph said.
“Can’t take any chances with a trickster god like him.”
“Shall we proceed?”
“Indubitably.”
Murphy connected a card reader to the computer and Eric inserted the camera’s memory card into it.
“Whaddya think?” Murphy asked. “Time to upload?”
“I’d feel better if we sprinkled some holy water on it.”
“Yeah, me too, but it might start swearing at us in Babylonian. Will you do the honors?”
“My pleasure.” Eric launched his favorite antivirus software to scan the memory card directly while it was still mounted in the reader before uploading the picture files.
While it was running, Murph downloaded image analysis software into the sandbox.
Twelve minutes later, the antivirus software signaled the disk was virus free.
“Looks like we’re good to go,” Eric said. “Your honors.”
Murph uploaded the picture files into the image analysis program. Within moments, one hundred forty-seven thumbnail images appeared on-screen.
Both men held their breath, expecting a system crash or an alarm warning of a viral infection that somehow escaped both the box and the cage they had constructed. But neither happened.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Better safe than stupid.”
“Hit it again.”
Eric ran the antivirus program one more time—just in case there was embedded malware somehow hidden from the first scan.
“All good,” Eric said with a sigh of relief. “Now what?”
“Let’s just do a visual and see what we can see.”
Murphy enlarged the first photo in the lineup, a bright red flower with a prominent stamen.
“That’s it? The big secret? A bunch of nature photos?” Eric said.
“Moving on.” Murph sped through the next one hundred forty-six photos—all flowers in a variety of colors.
Stone didn’t know any more about flower species than Murphy did, so he ran them all through a botanical identification program.
Eidolon had apparently assembled a collection of bromeliads, heliconias, rainforest daisies, violets, hibiscus, passion flowers, wild ginger, and orchids.
“I don’t get it,” Eric said. “Why all the flowers?”
Murphy sat back in his chair, his elbows on the rests and his hands tented as if in prayer.
“Huh.”
“What?”
“All these pics? They’re all different.” Murph pointed at the screen. “Except for these three. He took the same picture of an orchid three times. Why?”
“I dunno. An orchid fetish?”
“Same orchid. Same picture.” Murph leaned forward, squinting. “I mean, the exact same picture. Same angle, same size, same everything.” He tapped a few keystrokes, pulling up the metadata of the three pictures. “See?”
Now Eric leaned forward. “Exact same picture, reproduced three times. Huh.”
“Yeah, ‘huh.’ You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Steganography.”
“Bingo.” Murph’s eyes lit up as he rubbed his hands together. “Time to open the pod bay doors and step through the looking glass.”
“Mixed metaphor alert,” Eric mumbled as Murphy deleted one hundred forty-four images, leaving only the three identical orchid photos.
He then uploaded them into a digital image forensics tool that began a detailed analysis of the three photos, some sixty million pixels in all. The program’s greatest strength was pixel analysis. When it finally finished, it generated a comprehensive forensics report.
The two techs scanned it and both drew the same conclusion. The first and third photos were identical in their entirety. Yet the second photo contained extremely small but numerous changes.
“There’s LSB encoding in the second picture,” Stone said.
“No doubt about it.”
LSB, or Least Significant Bit, encoding was a method of hiding digital data within an image.
Digital cameras didn’t capture photos directly—they stored numbers.
Each pixel in a digital image, representing red, green, or blue, was rendered as an eight-digit binary number.
The final digit—the least significant bit—represented the smallest value.
Changing that digit wouldn’t produce any differences in the picture noticeable to the human eye.
But those tiny modifications could represent a secret code.
Unfortunately, the forensic program couldn’t reveal the actual contents of the embedded code. It basically handed them an unsolved Rubik’s Cube of jumbled colors.
“Steganography. Man, that’s old-school spycraft for sure,” Murph said. “Shoulda guessed it with that steampunk camera of his.”
“Okay, let’s pull down Steghide and see what we’ve got.”
The Steghide program would align the jumbled colors of the unsolved Rubik’s Cube and solve it perfectly, and finally reveal the code.
Eric ran the keyboard, typing in the command:
steghide extract -sf orchid.jpg
Steghide prompted back: “Passkey? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _”
Both men looked at each other, completely flummoxed.
Eidolon had protected his file.
“Now what?” Murph asked.
Eric rechecked Steghide’s prompt and counted the number of underscores—nine, as it turned out. He grinned, and snatched up Eidolon’s phony driver’s license.
The Panamanian license featured several pieces of personal data including Eidolon’s nine-digit e-cédula national identity number. He handed it to Murphy.
“Read that to me.”
As Murphy read out the numbers, Stone keyboarded: “316825265.”
Steghide instantly extracted the LSB data and generated a file:
saladus.message.txt
Murphy opened up the text file. All it showed was a long string of 1’s and 0’s. It reminded Murph of his exchange with Linlin earlier.
“Gotta be an ASCII code.”
“This takes Russian nesting dolls to a whole new level,” Stone said.
“I’ll script something in Python.” Murphy banged out several lines of programming code to convert the binary numbers into human-readable words.
Moments later, Eidolon’s message appeared in plain English.
The two Oregon computer whiz kids stared open-mouthed at the screen like a couple of dorky gargoyles. Murph was the first to break the trance.
“We need to call the Chairman. Now.”