Of course there were several files of blueprints, and one file containing Web links. Special events and traffic flows are always important when you are targeting a bridge. Especially when the bridge had defied attack before. This bridge was the Golden Gate Bridge. All of the files were copied onto a CD produced by his \u201cfriends.\u201d<\/p>\n
The final message was a new baseline file. Nedim showed them how to decode the text to know who was supposed to receive it. Then came the question they weren\u2019t supposed to ask. \u201cHow do you choose the decoys?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSome will be email addresses from a spam list I acquired, others will be addresses he has communicated with before,\u201d he responded. There were only five recipients for this base image, so Nedim chose seven decoys to round it out at a dozen.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo the decoys know they are decoys?\u201d asked his cousin.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot the ones from the spam list,\u201d replied Nedim.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the others?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery person receiving this is a good Muslim. They know the Holy Quran.\u201d<\/p>\n
Each base image came with a passage from the Quran that would seem to apply to it when read by the casual reader. The spam list Nedim had obtained was a list of members from various Islamic and Muslim organizations around the world. Some had ties to al-Qaeda, and some did not. They all had, at one time or another, subscribed to a \u201cword of the day\u201d or \u201cprayer of the day\u201d sort of service as many of the infidels did. They would assume this was something sent out by the service and ponder it.<\/p>\n
What the men hadn\u2019t noticed, because they were too busy writing notes, was that Nedim changed a word in the phrase when sending to decoys. Any member receiving the image and finding a word out of place in the passage would simply ignore it. The rest would save the image as a new base image. Any communication they needed to send to this leader would use this new image. Any new instructions coming to them would use this new base image.<\/p>\n
One thing the men did write down was the file name containing email addresses Nedim used for decoys. When they reported next time they would be able to speed up progress immensely on this investigation.<\/p>\n
Finally, after a very long day, Nedim went to bed. One more sunrise, and another day closer to death, he thought.<\/p>\n
Back at headquarters Nedim’s \u201ccousin\u201d was enthusiastically briefing the rest of the team on what they had learned. He turned over the file CD containing the information on the Golden Gate Bridge and informed them of the file name Nedim used to pull some of his decoy names from.<\/p>\n
In all honesty, he thought this would speed up the investigation. Then he heard the man in the suit say, \u201cThis is exactly what I was hoping to avoid. Not only do they hide among the population, now they implicate every Muslim devout enough to have a daily prayer emailed to them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are determined to turn this into a war against all Muslims,\u201d said Hans. They believe that once this gets spun into a war against all Muslims, all Muslims will rally to their cause rather than die at the hands of the infidels.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we know he bought this list,\u201d responded Nedim\u2019s \u201ccousin.\u201d \u201cWe also don\u2019t know who on that list joined simply to hide in the forest,\u201d replied the man in the suit. \u201cThe list itself is of no use to us. We will have to look at each image to find out what it contains and build our tree from there.\u201d Along one wall of the office was now a large marker board. They used a wet erase board rather than the more common dry erase board so information couldn\u2019t accidentally be erased. In the center of it was Nedim. Above him was the beginning of an inverted hierarchy chart and below him the more common image of a regular hierarchy chart. Only a couple of other names had been filled in. These were the names of people arrested whose computer email traced back to Nedim. Each of their email accounts had the forwarding option set and was now forwarding email to people on the team. Nobody wanted al-Qaeda to find out an operative had been compromised by a full-mailbox bounce.<\/p>\n
When it came to the members of the team based locally, only Hans and the man in the suit knew where the other people listed on that board were. They were the first occupants of the first camp built by Hans\u2019 party members. Nothing of interest had been learned by their interrogation thus far, but it was early. Hans knew the interrogators held out hope of squeezing more from them by the simple fact nobody in Hans\u2019 party had told him the second camp had been put into use.<\/p>\n
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\nYou are reading a special promotional version of \u201cInfinite Exposure\u201d containing only the first 18 chapters. This is the first book of the “Earth That Was” trilogy. You can obtain the entire trilogy in EPUB form from here:<\/p>\n