Enemy of Mine by Brad Taylor Page B

to know how they’d hacked a legitimate university e-mail address.
    Probably twenty laws broken just by opening the message…
    At breakfast, Jennifer’s face had fallen the minute I had mentioned it, which actually hurt a little, but she knew the priority and knew the physical requirements for collecting the message. I left it up to her to find the area.
    The Taskforce had multiple ways to transmit covert messages, depending on the security of the host country. The easiest method was a simple VPN back to our “company,” but some countries—such as Syria—controlled their Internet and prevented VPNs from working. The next easiest way was an encrypted e-mail, but once again, foreign intelligence services usually owned their Internet, and while they couldn’t read the e-mail, they knew it had been sent. Best case, they knew you were doing something secret and would amp up the scrutiny to find out what that was. For a real businessman, that was no issue, since they were doing what they said they’d be doing. For the Taskforce, it could mean mission failure.
    We’d tried carrying our own satellite equipment for a cut-out. Strictly commercial, off-the-shelf stuff like M3 or Thrane to blend in, which would allow us to have an Internet connection that bypassed the host country. That had worked until a team, traveling as cellular technicians, had had the equipment confiscated at customs. They’d been told that the country in question “had robust Internet,” and thusthe communications gear wasn’t needed. Between the lines they heard, “We don’t want you talking where we can’t listen.”
    The Taskforce realized they needed a no-fail way to get messages out while operating within denied areas, such as Syria. Some fifty-pound head in the communications section had come up with the solution.
    The first Global Positioning Satellite was launched by the U.S. military in 1978. Since then, a broadening constellation of satellites has been continually launching signals to earth in an ever-increasing refinement of geo-location capability. Now, the little GPS receiver you bought at Walmart would triangulate your position to the meter. All over the globe.
    The genius idea was embedding the message traffic into the GPS signal. A customs official would confiscate just about any other piece of communications gear before a GPS, especially if it worked as advertised when checked.
    Ordinary GPS wouldn’t even realize the signal was there, but our special GPS would receive it, decode it, and display it. Since the U.S. government owned the entire technology, it was nothing to get the necessary tech stuff done to make it happen. The only downside was the weakness of every GPS signal, which had a hard time working in dense areas. Embed some data within it, and you really needed to have a wide-open area and some time for the GPS to lock on to the satellite and receive the more complicated signal.
    We were currently in the al-Hamidiyah Souk, which was about as good for getting a GPS signal as being in a coal mine. Crowded on all sides by vendors selling goods ranging from kids’ toys to perfume, it had an old tin roof that blocked everything, including sunlight. I was beginning to think Jennifer was purposely making this hard.
    “Are you sure you know where you’re going? Isn’t there a park or soccer field around that doesn’t require us to go this deep into the city?”
    “Keep your pants on. The Umayyad Mosque is right at the end of the souk.”
    “Mosque? Seriously?”
    She stopped and turned around. “You really didn’t do any studying, did you? This has all been some joke. You knew we weren’t going to get up north.”
    Her expression wasn’t angry. It was resigned, like she’d just realized that all her exertions and studying had been nothing but a pale jest at her expense. It hurt again.
    “Jennifer…I had no idea. I really wanted to do this trip. I know I’ve made fun of the research, but that’s because I thought