Escape from Baghdad! (21 page)

The paunchiest cop spoke perfect English and had a superb waxed moustache that curled up at the edges. He looked Tommy up and down and gave him a patently false grin.

“My friend,” he said, “how can I help you? We are just humble police enjoying a break. My name is ah… Abu-Abu.”

“You got any of those Indonesian cigarettes?” Tommy asked.

“You want an Indonesian cigarette? My friend, this is Baghdad. We have everything. But I'm not sure.”

“You know, the ones with pot in them?” Tommy clarified.

“Ah, yes, pot, hahaha,” Abu-Abu said. “We have hashish, my friend, but that is for old ladies and pimply boys. For the military, we have something so much better.” He pulled out a packet of pills, red ones, white ones, blue ones with squiggly lines. “Uppers, downers, Iranian ‘bloody' Valium, Lebanani, and these Abu Hajib, enough to stone a donkey. You want to party, we'll hook you up no problem.”

“Ya, a party'd be great,” Tommy said. “See, my squad up there is getting real antsy. We're out of booze and stuff, and they keep wanting to shoot shit up.”

“You have a squad of Marines up there?” Abu-Abu squinted at the building.

“Yup, plus our gunner Ancelloti is out here somewhere foraging.”

“And that's your Humvee?”

“Yup. Black ops, Abu. I don't mind telling you, but keep it hush hush,” Tommy said. “We've got orders from Col. Bradley himself. Airstrikes and everything.”

“My friend, no need for colonels and airstrikes,” Abu-Abu said. “Why don't we have a party? Free, on us. After all, you are guests in our country.”

“Free? That's cool, man, cus' we're out of money.”

“Money? Bah what is money between good friends like us? I will give you money, my friend,” Abu-Abu pulled him into a conspiratorial huddle. “For a little favor. See my men are toiling on the streets, selling these pills in the heat.”

“It is
so
hot here man.”

“What if we kept the pills in your apartment?”

“I do have a quartermaster,” Tommy said proudly.

“Right, right, let's say we keep them there, and then we can sell from your front step there, and maybe your guys can walk around a bit with us sometime, just to show that we're all friends.”

“Yeah man, we're always ready to help the local police, you know?” Tommy said. “Got to serve the people, right?”

“Of course, a joint mission, cross cultural cooperation,” Abu-Abu said. “And don't worry about your problems, Commander Tommy, we're gonna take care of all that. Booze, you said? We got arak, vodka, cough syrup, whatever you want.”

“Yeah and the guys are getting tired of dry rations too. That shit makes you blocked up if you know what I mean.”

“Dry rations? Pfft…” Abu-Abu snapped his finger at the kibbeh chef. “This stall happens to be mine. Or close enough. Kibbeh for everyone! All you can eat, whenever you like, for you and your mates, and a cut from the pill business, of course. Now let's go upstairs and get out of the sun, eh?”

Tommy linked arms with his new friend and beamed. This diplomacy stuff was easy. Hoffy would be so proud when he got back.

19: AL KINDI

“D
O YOU KNOW THAT WE INVENTED CRYPTOGRAPHY
?” D
AGR ASKED
.

“No, nor do I particularly care.”

“Al Kindi. One of the most brilliant minds ever lived. A mathematician of immense power.”

“Do I have to pay for this lecture or is it gratis?”

“Very funny,” Dagr pounded on the table. “The intellectual leaps made during our golden age are unparalleled in the history of mankind, comparable only to the Enlightenment period in Europe, when Newton, Hooke, Leibniz, etc. were at work.”

“Really, Dagr, you're deliberately boring us now.”

“You wanted to know.”

“About the watch, professor, the watch.”

“Ok, here are my conclusions. First, this watch contains a code. Second, it is a mechanical code. By this, I mean that the code is controlled by a machine inside the watch. There are modern equivalents of this, such as the enigma rotor machine used in WWII, to encrypt data.”

“So this thing is at least 60 years old,” Kinza said.

“It should be pre-computer age, certainly,” Dagr said. “Now, it actually might be very much older. I can narrow the range. We'll touch on that later. The oldest it can possibly be is from Al Kindi's time, which is around 850 AD.”

“This ancient mathematician?”

“The father of cryptanalysis, among other things,” Dagr said. “He noticed that languages all use different letters and letter combinations in greater or lesser frequency. For example, in English, the letter ‘E' is used most often, whereas the letter ‘X' is hardly ever used. Ciphers were primitive at that time. People simply replaced one letter with
another or with a number. For example, say in my cipher, the letter ‘E' is replaced with the number ‘9'. Now Al Kindi realized that by counting the frequency of the number ‘9' in a message, he could reasonably guess which letter it represented. This is called frequency analysis and is still one of greatest tools in cryptanalysis. Incidentally, he also invented the study of probability and statistics, although he never gets credit for it.”

“So have you figured out the code yet?”

“It's not that simple,” Dagr said. “Al Kindi himself started making polyalphabetic ciphers to get away from frequency analysis. Essentially, this uses a key or algorithm in the middle, to encrypt the letters. Thus, in this kind of cipher, ‘9' is not always equal to ‘E'. ‘E', in fact, will be represented by different alphanumerics in different parts of the message, depending on the key being used.”

“So the only way to decipher this is to know the key.”

“Not quite,” Dagr said. “The person receiving the message has to know the key as well. Normally, a key has to be something easily transferable. Say I'm using a key that is repeating. If I figured out the length of the key, I'd be able to break down the message into intervals. For example, the first ‘E' and the tenth ‘E' might use the same encryption if my key is nine alphanumerics long. Once I know this, I can start using brute force frequency analysis by simply trying different combinations until I start getting some words out of the gibberish.”

“So what did Al Kindi do?”

“He created algorithms, mathematical functions, so that the key was nonrepeating and as close to random as possible. Essentially, the other person had to know the algorithm. In order to decipher it, he would apply his part of the algorithm to the code and reduce it back to some kind of plain text. The Druze code is probably something along those lines.”

“So can you break it?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Dagr said. “I wouldn't count on it. It could be a one-time pad type of thing too.”

“Do you enjoy annoying us?”

“Er?”

“Talking at length about stuff we have no interest in or idea of.”

“Well if you don't want to know, then fine…” Dagr began to pack up his things, which, as it amounted to a pen and several sheets of paper, did not take much time, whereafter he sat back with an injured air. Then, glancing at his companions, he saw that they were laughing at him, which embarrassed him further.

“Alright, alright, don't sulk.” Kinza held his hands up.

“One-time pad—what is it?” Mikhail asked.

“It's a completely random key for one-time use. The sender and the receiver have it, and that's it. They were used mostly during WWII. Since it's meant to be just used once, it can't really be cracked. If the key is truly random, we won't get anywhere. It's useless. Of course, what I know about cryptanalysis can be fit onto a single piece of paper.”

“You're approaching this wrong,” Kinza said. “Put yourself in
their
shoes. Imagine you're the Grand Druze, or whatever, and you wanted to encrypt a message for your descendents. How would you do it?”

“What the hell is a Grand Druze?” Dagr asked, irritably.

“The Chief. El Presidente. The Grand Turk. The Prince of Persia. Whatever.”

“Who is the message for?”

“Your successors let's say.”

“Hmm. Well obviously I have something to hide. Some kind of advantage I imagine, some secret knowledge or treasure or whatever.”

“Don't forget, Druze are cunning and secretive.”

“You really
are
a bigot.”

“No, I'm just anti religion. All religions. Which includes fucked up ones.”

“Nice. Very PC.”

“PC is the invention of the Great White Satan.”

“Anyways, I'm the Grand Druze. Let's say I've amassed a great treasure, and it's hidden.”

“Persecute. Druze always persecuted,” Mikhail said.

“Right, Mikhail,” Dagr said, “Say the Druze are being persecuted and cannot avail themselves of this treasure. Now, logically, we can narrow down these time periods by looking at their history.”

“Library. We have books.”

“Extremely fortuitous, then, that we are in this
excellent
library,” Dagr said, about to clap Mikhail on the back and staying his hand at the last minute as he realized that poor Mikhail would in no way cherish this physical contact. “Guided by a
most excellent
librarian. As such, perhaps we might find a book on the Druze detailing the vagaries of their fortune. Insofar as I recall, Druze history is rather turbulent in that they enjoyed periods of extravagant power, such as the time of the Fatimid Caliphate, and then the more recent episodes in Syria, when they occupied Damascus.”

“These digressions, while charming…”

“Right, I, the Grand Druze, have some vital information I must pass on. I need to hide it from my persecutors, however, so I have devised a tool that uses both steganography as well as crypotology.”

“What?”

“Steganography is the art of physically hiding the information such as using invisible ink to write a message. In our case, hiding the message in a mechanical watch, which vibrates in a seemingly random sequence over a period of 72
hours
; Even if the watch is lost, it is unlikely a random person will even realize that there is data hidden here.”

“Unless it falls into the hand of a blood-minded mathematician who has a lot of free time.”

“Precisely. Now having hidden the data using steganography, I have further used cryptology to make the data illegible to all third parties, even were they to accidentally stumble onto it.”

“So this information is really valuable then.”

“Well it is valuable to me, as the Grand Druze. It could be something totally useless: like some kind of alchemical rubbish, or some pseudoreligious nonsense,” Dagr said. “Now, I have used this method
to pass on the information to my successors. I know that it gets as far as Fouad Jumblatt, but after that, things are murky.”

“But how are your successors supposed to unlock this code?” Kinza objected. “Where is the key?”

“Someone might have it,” Dagr said, running his hands through his hair. “Or it could be lost. We do not know the state of the Druze in Baghdad. Or even if they are here, which is in doubt.”

“Well, since they've lost the watch, it would follow that the Druze have also lost the key,” Kinza said. “And maybe even knowledge of what the secret is to begin with.”

“We need to know more about the story of this watch. If I can guess what this is about, what kinds of words might be encoded in this message, even what era the encryption is from, I will have a much better chance of breaking it,” Dagr said. “We are almost blind now. I hope that Xervish will be able to improve our vision.”

“Well how old is the watch? You said you had an idea.”

“Look at the thing. What is it exactly?”

“It's a wristwatch, right?” Kinza said. “Earliest wristwatches are around 1920s I'd say. So it's between 1920 and the computer age, then.”

“And that is around when Fouad Jumblatt lived. Or died, rather. He was assassinated in 1920,” Dagr said. “But your hypothesis is wrong. Take a look at the case with the magnifying glass.”

“What am I looking at?”

“Some notches on the surface,” Dagr said. “And look also at the joints where the wrist bands attach to the case.”

“Seems like some kind of wear and tear. Hardly surprising….”

“You're not looking at it right,” Dagr said, irritable. “As I spent the last three days holding this bloody thing in my hand counting vibrations, I came to some hypotheses.”

“Can you just spit it out?”

“It's a hypothesis because I am not sure, which is why I am telling you my reasons. First, this thing is kind of heavy. Too heavy for a wristwatch, almost. Second, it's a little bit bulky. Too bulky for a
wristwatch? Then I started peering at it with the magnifying glasses. What I really needed was a microscope, so I built a makeshift one.”