The Pharaoh Key

7

GARZA’S PLACE IN SoHo was a fifth-floor loft in an old industrial building. It would have been a cozy, appealing apartment, Gideon thought, if it wasn’t so bloody neat. Everything, down to a pen sitting on the desk, was lined up in order, clean, polished, and organized. It was all of a piece with Garza’s personality.

The large industrial elevator began creaking its way back down to the lobby. Years ago someone had sprayed FUCK YOU inside the elevator, but the rest of the owners in the building—Garza had explained, irritated—thought it was charming in a chic-gritty sort of way and refused to paint it over. “Drives me crazy to see it every day,” he’d observed.

The apartment itself had brick walls and old arched windows with metal frames looking out over Broome Street. It was a classic one-room downtown loft, a sleek kitchen in one corner with a dining table, a bed in another, a living area in the middle, and a work space up against the row of windows, with a brushed-steel table on which was arranged an array of equipment surrounding a gleaming iMac Pro.

Gideon felt a mounting excitement, and he sensed the same in Garza. The success of their trip to EES left him with a glow of pride. It had taken almost two days of planning and rehearsing, but they’d managed to socially engineer the formidable Glinn with a simple, elegant little mise-en-scène. It had come off without a hitch. No doubt they had left Glinn shaking his head at their pathetic attempt to shake him down, with no idea what their real purpose had been or—more important—that they had succeeded.

“Beer?” Garza asked, heading for the fridge.

“Absolutely.”

Garza slipped two frosty bottles out of the fridge and headed for the worktable, placing each on a coaster and taking a seat. Gideon sat down beside him and picked up his beer.

“Here’s to pretexting the master pretexter,” he said.

They clinked bottles and Gideon took a long pull, taking care to place the bottle back on the coaster.

“All right,” said Garza, “give me the USB stick.”

Gideon handed it over, and Garza inserted it into one of the computer’s ports. After a few seconds, an image of the log file appeared on the display. Garza opened it, then quickly scrolled to the end. The last item read:

Stegano-1

“What kind of attack is that?” Garza asked.

“You’re asking me?” Gideon shrugged.

“Let’s look at the previous strategies logged by the computer.”

They went through the log file from the beginning to the end. The computer had tried hundreds of different attacks, starting with various philological, logosyllabic, and linguistic analyses, based on various dead languages and scripts including Old Persian, Mycenaean Greek, Akkadian, Elamite, Linear A and B, Minoan, hieratic, demotic, and hieroglyphic. None of those attacks worked, even though the time stamps indicated the computer had battered away for weeks, even months, at each one. Finally the program had switched approaches, apparently assuming the Disk was incised not with a normal written language but instead a cipher of some kind. Polyalphabetic and brute-force attacks followed, and then more exotic exploits. None of those had worked, either. Until the last one, labeled Stegano-1.

“Stegano-1,” Gideon repeated, then suddenly gave a cry and smacked his forehead. “What an idiot I am! Stegano—short for steganography!”

“Which is?”

“It’s a form of encryption. Or rather, it isn’t really encryption at all—it refers to a message hidden inside another message or an image. It’s one of the most ancient of all forms of concealment, going back thousands of years.” He paused. “Herodotus, in one of his Histories, recalled a king who sent a secret message to another by shaving the head of the messenger and tattooing the message on his scalp. When the man’s hair had regrown, he delivered the message, with instructions for the messenger’s head to be shaved.”

“Not a lot of time pressure to deliver that message, I guess.”

“I guess not. During World War Two, steganography was used to send messages in pictures, using microdots. It’s even more common today. With computers you can take, say, a photograph of a landscape and hide in it another image, then reveal it by subtracting various data bits from the main image. Or you can hide a message in computer code by writing redundant instructions.”

“But how would steganography apply to the Phaistos Disk?”

Gideon shrugged. “That’s the problem.”

Garza typed a command and pulled up an image of the Disk, and beside it a file showing the glyphs, or images, in a table. “There are two hundred forty-two ‘letters’ in the message, made from forty-five different glyphs. The information encoded in the Disk can’t be very extensive. I mean, how much information could possibly be contained in two hundred forty-two letters?”

“True.”

“And here’s another problem. If the computer couldn’t identify the original language—which apparently it didn’t—then how could it claim to have deciphered the message coded in that original language?”

Gideon thought about that. It seemed logically impossible. If you didn’t know a language, how could you decipher any coded message originating in that language? You had to have the original plaintext to decipher the code.

He let out a long breath. “There’s only one possible answer. It’s not a language at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Phaistos Disk is not a language. It never was. It can’t be. You just proved it.”

“Then what the hell is it?” asked Garza.

“It’s a picture. A drawing. That’s how steganography works.”

“But how could it be a picture? It’s a bunch of tiny unconnected pictures that don’t fit together.”

“You’ve seen pictures made of arrays of letters? This could be like that.”

“I’m not following you,” said Garza.

“Each one of those glyphs,” said Gideon, thinking fast now, “could represent a black dot of a certain size. Arrange them in the correct array and you get a crude picture. That’s steganography in its purest form. Here was a secret message, made to look like it was written in a language—but there’s no language involved at all. Instead a picture is hidden in what appears to be undecipherable or nonsensical text.”

“I see what you’re getting at. Let me think a minute.”

Gideon watched as Garza’s face turned inward. He had seen this before, when the man was solving a complex mathematical or engineering problem in his head.

“Okay. We have two hundred forty-two glyphs—but look again at the image of the Phaistos Disk. The symbols on the Disk are arranged into eighteen groups. So you take two hundred forty-two divided by eighteen, which yields thirteen with remainder of eight.”

“Which means?” asked Gideon.

“We arrange the symbols sequentially in an array of thirteen by eighteen and see what it looks like.” Garza typed furiously, and in a moment the desired array appeared. But it was fuzzy and vague, and Gideon could make out no obvious image in it.

“No problem,” Garza said, undeterred. “Let’s say each symbol stands for a shade of gray scale, going from white to black. We have the data file in hexadecimal code. We simply plug that in, low values to high, with zero zero in hex being white and FF in hex being black, and arrange the rest in graduated shades of gray.”

“But the ancients didn’t understand assembly language!”

“They didn’t need to. We’re just applying modern methods to an old riddle. And don’t forget, steganography was your idea.”

More typing. An image appeared on the screen, crisp and clear this time. It showed three dark lines snaking into the center, creating a roughly triangular section in the middle. Along the edges of the image were two ragged, convoluted lines. Off center, near the meeting point of the three lines, was a geometric array of five dots.

Garza breathed out. “There it is. The translation of the Phaistos Disk.”

“It’s a bunch of squiggles and dots. Still looks like a damn code!”

“Not to me.” Garza stared at the image. “It kind of looks like it might be an image looking down on something.”

“You mean, like a landscape formation?” Gideon took another squint at the image. “You know, with a little imagination that could look like a valley where three canyons came together.”

“In order to view a canyon in such a way, you’d need to be at a great distance above it.”

“A great distance,” muttered Gideon. And then he breathed: “Yes. Like standing on the top of a mountain. I think you’re right. It’s a landscape. Those could be three streams or washes coming together in a valley, and those other squiggles could be the base of mountains on either side.”

“Then what’s that thing with the five dots?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say that was the X marking the spot. It’s an old symbol called a quincunx.”

“The spot of what? Treasure?”

Gideon leaned back. “There’s only one way to find out: go there. We need to figure out where this canyon or valley is.”

Garza snorted. “Sounds like the wild goose chase to end all wild goose chases.”

“Maybe. But that location was important enough to be encoded on the Phaistos Disk and stored in the palace of a Minoan king. So it can’t be just anything. We simply have to find where on the surface of the earth this place is.” He paused. “Have you heard of a search tool called Terrapattern?”

“No.”

“It works with Google Earth. It’s like facial recognition software, but it recognizes landscapes instead. You start with an aerial view of a geological formation or a map, plug it into Terrapattern, and it finds the exact spot on earth.”

“I’m on it.” Garza began typing furiously. He accessed the Internet, found the Terrapattern program, and fed their image into the software. He hit a button.

Gideon squinted at the icon that indicated the program was now running. “It says it could take up to thirty hours.”

“I’m not surprised. The earth is a big damn place. If I understand how this works, it’s got to compare that crude little drawing to the entire surface of the planet, at many different scales.”

“Let’s get dinner. Maybe when we come back it’ll be done.”

When they returned at eleven PM the program had found a match. A Google Earth picture was displayed on the screen, with a small yellow rectangle indicating the selected area. It was a view from about ten thousand feet up of spectacularly rugged desert mountains, riddled with barren washes, deep ravines, plains strewn with giant boulders, and patches of crescent sand dunes. The highlighted area was not a river, but rather a confluence of three dry washes that cut through the mountains, creating an isolated valley with only one point of ingress. A natural fortress.

Gideon squinted at the screen. “Where the hell is that?”

“Says here: Hala’ib Triangle, Eastern Desert, Egypt.”

“Egypt.” Taking the keyboard, Gideon opened a new window on the computer and called up Wikipedia. “The Hala’ib Triangle seems to be a twenty-thousand-square-kilometer region claimed by both Egypt and Sudan. Zero annual rainfall, zero population, zero life, heavily broken country of rugged mountains, sand dunes, and dry washes. It says here that it’s one of the most extreme desert environments in the world.” He stepped back. “Zoom in to the valley.”

Garza complied, creating a split-screen image showing the Phaistos map on one side and the Google Earth image on the other, both at the same scale.

“Could there be a more desolate place on earth?” Gideon asked, staring at the screen.

It took Garza some time to answer. “I doubt it.”