Blowback

At first, the fatal heart attack suffered by Dr. Abbas in Dubai had seemed an unfortunate but not unusual circumstance. The man was grossly overweight and had long ignored his family’s and colleagues’ pleas to take better care of himself. The brilliant scientist had claimed that his research took all of his time and left him little opportunity for exercise. Then there was Dr. Akbar in Amman, who was just the opposite of Abbas. Akbar broke his neck diving into the pool he swam laps in every day and drowned. After Akbar came Dr. Hafiz in Damascus. He was a relatively robust man in his fifties with no prior history of health complications who suddenly died of an acute asthma attack.

Next came the deaths of Dr. Jafar in Cairo, Dr. Qasim in Tehran, and Dr. Salim in Rabat. Then the terrible hit-and-run accident involving Dr. Ansari in Lahore. Examined individually, there was nothing unusual about these deaths other than they were unfortunate and untimely. But when Emir Tokay took them as a whole, the larger picture was terrifying. Assuming Dr. Bashir in Baghdad, whom he hadn’t been able to get hold of for several days, was dead, Tokay was the last one on the research team still alive.

Tokay’s first reaction was to notify his superiors, but he knew that would be a big mistake. None of the scientists were supposed to know who they were working with. The Islamic Institute for Science and Technology had cloaked the entire project in secrecy and had kept it tightly compartmentalized. The scientists were not allowed to identify themselves to each other and had only communicated via encrypted, untraceable e-mail addresses. They were allowed to share data only-nothing about their personal or professional lives. The system had seemed foolproof, but the institute had overlooked the fundamental trait that made for a good scientist-curiosity.

It was Dr. Bashir who had begun the quest to uncover not only whom he was working with, but what their research was ultimately intended to achieve. Other than that it was to be a great triumph for the Muslim people, not much had been explained to the team. It was a puzzle all of them were quietly eager to solve.

Bashir suspected that at the very least, the institute was filtering their e-mails, searching for key words that would give away any forbidden conversations, and probably was selecting random e-mails to read in their entirety. Either way, his solution required discretion.

Bashir had named one of the white lab rats in his control group Stay-Go. The name, he said in his e-mails, sprang from the way the rat bounced around its cage.

Emir Tokay, the brilliant young Turkish scientist who had been brought to the institute to help coordinate the efforts of the project members, was the first to pick up on Dr. Bashir’s clever code. It was more the tone of Bashir’s e-mails than anything else that made him believe the lead scientist was trying to convey a secondary message to the team. It took Tokay a while to figure what that message was, but through much trial and error he eventually discovered the key lay in what Bashir had named his lab rat. The name Stay-Go was actually a phonetic pronunciation of the word stego, short for steganography. Steganography was taken from Greek and literally translated to “covered writing. “In cryptography it is assumed an enemy may intercept a message but will be unable to decode it, whereas the goal of steganography is to hide messages in otherwise harmless communications in such a way that even if they were intercepted by the enemy, said enemy would never even be aware a secondary message was present. In the digital world of today, practitioners of steganography could hide their messages in a wide array of data formats. Popular file attachments such as. Wav,. Mp3,. bmp,. doc,. Txt,. gif, and. Jpeg were perfect because redundant, or “noisy,” data could be easily removed and replaced with a hidden message. Tokay discovered that was precisely what Dr. Bashir had done.

For three months Bashir had been embedding a simple, repetitive message inside his digital pictures of his white lab rat, Stay-Go: “Who are we and what are we doing? Be cautious with your response. Our e-mails are being watched. Dr. M. Bashir.”

Once he had discovered Bashir’s code, Emir worked feverishly to find a way around the institute’s electronic filtering and monitoring of the team’s communications. Like many organizations, the institute was far more concerned with attacks originating from outside their computer system than from within. Soon, Tokay was confident that he had devised a way for the team to send and receive e-mails without the institute’s knowledge. In time, the scientists began trading clandestine messages on the average of once a week. From what they could tell, the project they were working on was more a game than anything else. No one could understand what practical application their research could possibly have.