One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [51]
Jennifer sighed again, like she didn’t think I would believe what she had to say, which was smart, because if it was some sort of Indiana Jones bullshit, I wouldn’t.
“My uncle has a theory about the demise of the Mayans. He thinks the Mayan priests created a weapon a long time ago that got out of control. For the last twenty years he’s gone down to Guatemala to find a temple that he thinks will prove his theory.” She saw the skepticism on my face and raised her voice. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. That’s what he’s doing in Guatemala.”
This was getting downright stupid. “So, your uncle believed that the Mayans had invented or found the world’s first WMD? Did he look for crop circles during Christmas break?”
Jennifer’s eyes clouded with a scowl. “I never said anything about WMD. I said a weapon. Many, many respectable scholars believed his theory.”
I chuckled and held up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “WMD stands for weapon of mass destruction. It’s a military term meaning any weapon that can kill a lot of people, like a nuke, or biological weapon. They’re pretty hard to make. I’m not trying to get you mad, but is there a chance that your uncle was doing something besides looking for this temple?”
Jennifer shook her head adamantly. “No. No way. He was obsessed with the temple. He spent all year using every spare minute to research possible new sites. Nobody was paying for the trips anymore, so he had no reason to pretend.”
“Was there anything about this trip that was different from the other trips? Did you talk to him at all?”
“Not really. He didn’t have the money for a satellite phone. The only contact I had with him after he went into the jungle was an e-mail he sent a couple of days ago.”
Jennifer paused a moment as a look of realization crossed her face.
“Actually, I did think it was a little odd, because it came before he was supposed to be out of the jungle. I just figured it meant he hadn’t found anything.”
“What did it say?”
“It was nothing. He had found some local music and sent it to me. He didn’t even say anything about his trip.”
“Let me see it.”
Jennifer pulled up the e-mail. “See, it’s nothing. The music isn’t even that good. It sucks.”
“Did he send you music on every trip? What was special about this music?”
“Nothing, now that you mention it. It was just some local music.”
“Yet he’d been going to the same place for years and just now noticed the local music? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Well, it might not make any sense, but that’s what it is. My uncle is eccentric, so I wouldn’t put it past him. The bottom line is that it’s just a bunch of MP3 music. Nothing more.”
“Pull up the properties of the music. Right-click on it.”
Jennifer did as I asked, showing that the song she clicked on was about ten megabytes.
“Click on the next one.”
It was nine megabytes.
“These files have been altered.”
I was pretty well versed in various terrorist communication methods. I had come across steganography on multiple occasions from the computer equipment my team had confiscated, usually because some analyst with a fifty-pound head deep in a basement found it.
“I think your uncle sent you something hidden in these songs. The average MP3 song is about three to five megabytes. These songs are all twice that size, but not twice the length. I think he hid something in here, and whatever it is, it’s what the man on the phone wants.”
“Are you serious? How do we get it out? What do we do?”
“Whoa. Calm down. It might be nothing more than a bad copy of an MP3. If he got it from some corrupted server in Guatemala it could just have a bunch of extraneous stuff attached, or even some malicious software like a virus or Trojan horse. I’m just saying that steganography is a possibility. He might have embedded some message inside the songs.”
“How can we tell?”
“We can’t, without the program that created it. Whatever is in there will be encrypted and hidden.”
I watched Jennifer deflate again. She said, “So what do we do now? That doesn’t help