Orchid Beach (Holly Barker 1)

“Jesus, I just can’t win with you, can I, Rita?”

“No, Harry, you can’t.” She turned to Holly again. “The director himself assigned me to keep Harry as humble as possible. It isn’t easy.”

“All right, I’ve got some news,” Harry said, anxious to change the subject. “I heard from my guy at the NSA again today. They’re monitoring Palmetto Gardens again, and guess what?”

“Okay, what, Harry?” Rita asked.

“The last time they monitored the place all they got was commodity trades. This time, they got exactly the same thing.”

“This is news?” Bill asked.

“No, you don’t understand,” Harry said. “They got exactly the same thing—the same trades.”

“Why would they make the same trades over and over?” Bill asked.

“The trades are on a loop. They’re playing a tape over and over.”

“Sorry,” Bill said, “I still don’t get it. You’re saying that they’ve got this satellite station set up just to play a tape on a loop?”

“That’s what it sounds like, but that’s not all that’s happening,” Harry said. “The NSA processed the transmissions, and they’re getting microbursts between the trades.”

“What’s a microburst?” Jackson asked.

“You know what a microdot is?”

“You mean, when they photograph a page and reduce it to the size of a dot?”

“Exactly. A microburst is the audio equivalent of a microdot. You take a string of words or a message, and you speed it up, I don’t know, a thousand times, or something, and what you get is a microburst of sound. It’s received…wherever it’s received, and it’s slowed down again so the message can be heard.”

“So what are the microbursts saying?”

“We don’t know. They’re encoded.”

“Isn’t that what the NSA does? Break codes?”

“Yeah, but it’s a lot more complex than it used to be. Now that everybody has got computers, codes can be constructed that are much, much more sophisticated than, say, the Enigma codes the Germans used in World War Two. And, of course, they can be changed daily, with a few key

board entries on the computer. The government is trying to limit the development of codes, or to make the encoders include a key that guys like us can use to break them.”

“But Palmetto Gardens isn’t giving us any keys, are they?” Bill asked.

“Right. So it’s going to take time to break down these microbursts and see what they mean. All we’ve got right now is meaningless strings of numbers.”

Holly spoke up. “What are you getting from the bug in Barney’s car?”

“Chitchat, mostly. One good piece of news: Cracker Mosely seems to be scared enough of you not to tell Barney everything you asked him yesterday. Barney questioned him closely, and all he said was that you threatened to call his parole officer if he continued to do security work. Barney has made him a radio operator.”

“That puts Cracker right in the middle of the security office, instead of out in a patrol car, doesn’t it?” she asked.

“That’s right, Holly.”

“So the next step is to pick up Cracker again the first chance we get and really turn him.”

“Good thinking.”

“I can’t have my people pick him up, though. We’ve still got our mole.”

“We’re surveilling both gates,” Harry said. “Anybody sees Cracker—and we’ll give you a photograph—call me, and we’ll get him alone for a few minutes and threaten him beyond his wildest nightmares.”