‘Right, Ras al Whatever. It must have reached there from somewhere.’
‘Cairo. It came in from Cairo.’
‘So its flight plan is logged in the Cairo Air Traffic Control archives. Computerized. I’ll have to visit. The good news is I doubt if they will have too many defensive firewalls to protect them.’
‘You need to go to Cairo?’ asked Dexter.
Washington Lee looked at him as if he were mad.
‘Go to Cairo? Why would I go to Cairo?’
‘You said “visit”.’
‘I mean in cyberspace. I can visit the Cairo database from a picnic site in Vermont. Look, why don’t you go home and wait, counsellor? This is not your world.’
Washington Lee rented his motorhome and bought his PC, plus the software he needed for what he had in mind. It was all with cash, despite the raised eyebrows, except the motorhome which needed a driver’s licence, but renting a motorhome does not necessarily mean a hacker is at work. He also bought a power generator, petrol-driven, to give him standard domestic ‘juice’ whenever he needed to plug in and log on.
The first and easiest was to crack the Aruba tailfin registration bank, which operates out of an office in Miami. Rather than use a weekend, where an unauthorized visit would show up on Monday morning, he broke into the archive in a busy working day when the database was answering many questions and his would get lost in the clutter.
Hawker 1000 P4-ZEM had once been VP-BGG and that meant it had been registered somewhere in the British registration zone.
Washington Lee was using a system designed to hide its own identity and location called PGP, standing for ‘Pretty Good Privacy’, which is a system so secure that it is actually illegal. He had set up two keys, public and private. He had to send on the public key because that key can only encrypt; receiving answers would be on his private key, because that one can only decrypt. The advantage from his point of view was that the encryption system, worked out by some patriot who used pure theoretical maths as a hobby, was so impenetrable that it would be unlikely anyone could find out who he was or where he was located. If he kept time online short and location mobile, he should get away with it.
His second line of defence was much more basic: he would communicate by email only through web cafés in the towns he passed through.
Cairo Air Traffic Control revealed that Hawker 1000 P4-ZEM, when it passed through with a refuelling stop in the land of the Pharaohs, came in from the Azores; every time.
The very fact that the line across the world ran from west to east via the mid-Atlantic Portuguese islands to Cairo thence to Ras al-Khaimah indicated P4-ZEM was starting its journey somewhere in the Caribbean basin or South America. It was not proof, but it made sense.
From a lay-by in North Carolina Washington Lee persuaded the Portuguese/Azores air traffic database to admit that P4-ZEM arrived from the west but was based at a private field owned by the Zeta Corporation. That made the line of pursuit via the filed flight plans into an impasse.
The island of Bermuda also operates a system of banking secrecy and corporate confidentiality for the benefit of clients who are prepared to pay top dollar for top security, and it prides itself on being very blue-chip indeed.
The database in Hamilton could not eventually resist the Trojan Horse decoy system fed into it by Washington Lee and conceded the Zeta Corporation was indeed registered and incorporated in the islands. But it could only yield three local nominees as directors, all of unimpeachable respectability. There was no mention of any Zoran Zilic, no Serbian-sounding name.
Back in New York, Cal Dexter, armed with the suggestion from Washington Lee that the Hawker was based somewhere around the Caribbean, had contacted a charter pilot he had once defended when a passenger had become violently airsick and tried to sue on the grounds that the pilot should have picked better weather.
‘Try the FIRs,’ said the pilot. ‘Flight Information Registers. They know who is based in their areas.’
The FIR for the southern Caribbean is in Caracas, Venezuela, and confirmed that Hawker 1000 P4-ZEM was based right there. For a moment Dexter thought he might have been wasting his time on all the other lines of enquiry. It seemed so simple. Ask the local FIR and they tell you.
‘Mind you,’ said his charter pilot friend, ‘it doesn’t have to live there. It’s just registered as being there.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Easy,’ said the pilot. ‘A yacht can have Wilmington, Delaware, all over its stern because it is registered there. But it can spend its whole life chartering in the Bahamas. The hangar this Hawker lives in could be miles from Caracas.’
So Washington Lee proposed the last resort and briefed Dexter. Two days of hard driving brought Lee to the city of Wichita, Kansas. He called Dexter when he was ready.
The vice-president sales took the New York call in his office on the fifth floor of the headquarters building.
‘I am ringing on behalf of the Zeta Corporation of Bermuda,’ said the voice. ‘You recall you sold us a Hawker 1000 tailfin number VP-BGG, you know, the British-owned one, some months back? I’m the new pilot.’
‘I surely do, sir. And who am I speaking with?’
‘Only Mr Zilic is not happy with the internal cabin configuration and would like it made over. Can you offer that facility?’