Edgar said, “She wasn’t house-sitting. She was breaking and entering. That’s a felony.”
“Yeah, I told her the same thing. Is the coffee fresh?” asked Sean, eyeing the cup in Michelle’s hand. “My brain is mud.”
Edgar gave him a significant look. Sean started to say something but then obviously decided not to even bother.
Michelle said, “He has a Keurig. Take your pick.”
Sean left the room, made his cup of coffee, rejoined them, and perched on the edge of Edgar’s desk.
“So what do we have?”
“A lot of files to go through,” replied Michelle.
“What about the other stuff?” asked Sean. “The IP trail on the email from the blogger’s source?”
“I’ve broken through three of five barriers,” answered Edgar.
“Hey, that’s great.”
Edgar said, “The remaining two are proving hard to crack. The person knows what he’s doing.”
Sean’s excited look faded. “Well, if you can’t crack it, I don’t think anyone can, Edgar.”
“I didn’t say I couldn’t. I just said they were proving difficult.”
Michelle cradled her cup of coffee and pointed at the screen. “But there might be something here.”
Sean squinted at the screen. “What am I looking at?”
“On the surface it’s an invoice for jet fuel,” said Edgar.
“But looks can be deceiving,” added Michelle.
“What do you mean?”
In response Edgar hit a few keys. The page they were looking at turned into a jumble of symbols that made no sense at all.
“I’ve seen that before,” said Sean. “When my computer goes haywire and turns my document to gibberish.”
“It’s simply a failure of the computer to read the document coding properly,” explained Edgar. “And that can happen for any number of reasons, including damage to the file or a problem with your processor. And if you know what you’re doing you can disable your computer’s ability to read the code properly. That’s what I just did. But it’s also something else.”
“What?”
“A code,” said Michelle.
“You mean they hide the code in the gibberish?” said Sean.
“Gold in the trash is a phrase we use in the cyber security field,” noted Edgar. “It’s actually pretty cool because everyone’s had that happen to them. It’s just a software glitch. You don’t think it’s anything more than that.”
“But you obviously saw there was more to it,” said Michelle.
“Well, with the Wall, you pretty much see everything,” said Edgar modestly.
“So what does this code say?” asked Sean.
“It’s a communication to an unknown party, but one I strongly suspect is the same one on the IP trail from the blogger because the exact same barriers have been set up to block access to the source at the other end.”
“But what does it say?” persisted Sean.