Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [39]
As tech-saavy as Jack liked to think himself, Sequoia’s capacity was mind-boggling. Faster than the world’s top five hundred supercomputers combined, Sequoia could perform twenty quadrillion mathematical processes per second, a statistic that could be grasped only by reductive comparison: If each of the 6.7 billion people on earth was armed with a calculator and worked together on a calculation twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, it would take more than three centuries to do what Sequoia will do in one hour. On the downside, Sequoia wasn’t quite ready for prime time; at last report it was being housed in ninety-six refrigerators covering more than three thousand square feet.
As big as a good-sized two-story house, Jack thought. Then: Wonder if they’re giving tours?
Bell now asked, “So what tells you this is important?”
“Why encrypt a birth announcement?” Ryan replied. “And we cracked it on their in-house key. Okay, maybe bad guys have kids in their families, but no name on the mother, the father, or the kid. It’s too clinical.”
“True,” Bell replied.
“One more thing: There’s a new addressee on the distribution list, and he’s using a different ISP. Might be worth a look. Maybe he’s not as careful with his backstops and financials as the others.”
So far all of their “French Connection” e-mails had come from cloaked Internet service providers or fire-and-forget e-mail accounts with nothing but a ghost at the other end, and since all originated from overseas providers, The Campus had little way of prying back the floorboard. If the French were in the loop, they’d simply walk into the Internet service provider and pull up his account information. They’d at least get his credit card number, and from that they’d get the address the credit card bill goes to every month, unless it was a falsely backstopped card, but even then they’d be able to launch a tracking operation and try to start gathering pieces. Back to the jigsaw theory: A lot of little pieces end up painting a big picture. With luck.
“Might take some hacking, but we might be able to grab enough to start a line on this guy.”
“Worth a try,” Bell agreed. “Run with it.”
For his part, the birth announcement had come as a happy surprise to Ibrahim. Hidden within the seemingly innocuous language were three messages: His part of Lotus was moving to the next phase, communication protocols were changing, and a courier was en route.
It was late afternoon in Paris, and the city bustled with rush-hour traffic. The weather was pleasant. Tourists were coming back—from America, to the commercial pleasure and philosophical discontent of Parisians, to taste the food and wine, and see what sights there were. So many came by train from London now, but you couldn’t tell from their clothing. The taxi drivers hustled their fares around, giving informal lessons on pronunciation along the way and grumbling at the size of their tips—at least Americans understood about tipping, while most Europeans did not.
Ibrahim Salih al-Adel was fully acclimated. His French was sufficiently perfect that Parisians had trouble fixing his accent, and he walked about like any other local, not gawping about like a monkey in the zoo. It was, oddly, the women who most offended him. So proudly they pranced about in their fashionable clothes, often with lovely and expensive leather bags dangling from their hands but usually with comfortable walking shoes, because people walked here more often than they rode. The better to parade their pride, he thought.
He’d had a routine day at work, mostly selling movie videos and DVDs, mainly of American films dubbed in French or with subtitles—which allowed his business clients to try out the English skills they’d learned in school. (Much as the French disdained America, a movie was a movie, and the French loved the cinema more than most nationalities.)
So tomorrow he would begin assembling the team and